What Isn’t Ritual

by Gabriel Q

In ritual space we become artists of time and place. We consciously shape an experience to achieve a heightened state where we can read meaning into everything that happens. There is the group dynamic as well as the parallel private experience. In ritual space I have witnessed some marvelous moments when the people, time and place converged into a brilliant ball of light. I came away saying,” it was amazing. What was it?” It’s an unrepeatable moment and just as in meditation, if I grasp at that fleeting bliss, I am unlikely to make it happen again. The practice is to recognize the perfection of this moment and let it go.

Some faeries in ritual delight in instruction and being led, while others feel threatened by any spiritual system imposed on them. This is why the elements are such an institution in faerie ritual culture. Earth, Air, Fire, and Water are big, accessible metaphors. Because I know them through my body, my own life experience, I don’t require the pagan liturgy to work with them. However, having invoked them hundreds of times I’m ready for something more.

At fellow Destiny faerie Endora’s encouragement a few years ago, I went to a Reclaiming Witch Camp in Vermont. I loved it. I recognized a common social and political culture and it was broadly diverse. The people were straight, gay, male, female, other, all ages, multigenerational and multi-racial. And they gathered specifically to practice ritual, all day, all week. We broke into small groups that met daily and were based on what else? The elements! Then there were several grand rituals with all 150 present. These were rituals to really settle into. They went on for hours with original chants, meditations, solo journeys away and back to the group. Rituals sprung from a single myth deconstructed over the week. In our case it was the Russian fairy tale of the Baba Yaga. Through our bodies and imaginations we became all the characters in the story. It went way beyond any singular lesson to connect me with systems of relationships, systems in nature, the universe. Myth and science merging into art and activism.

Witch Camp was a good mirror to reflect on faerie culture and rituals. For instance, I showed up for the first big ritual and I was a little, (ok, a lot) over dressed. People dressed up at Witch Camp but I was playing at full volume. People loved it though. I appreciated then, the faeries’ rites of costume transformation and drag. Another distinction which was really one of style was that Witch Camp is structured more like a school. There were teachers and their thoughtfully led program enabled a more dense and intentional experience. Faerie gatherings on the other hand are kind of misty and between the worlds. Shifting roles and leaderlessness takes some adjusting to, particularly in that I am responsible to interpret meaning as I go. In terms of an ongoing awareness practice, it’s easy to get lost or just hang out. Boundaries of roles, ritual space vs late night cookie baking party are deliberately blurred. Official rituals can be treated like another gathering menu item for faeries to opt into or not. In that structure, rituals are most vital for the people who organize them while providing a kind of spiritual social entertainment for many.

Passive resistance or “askance” behavior toward faerie ritual is pretty common. This is challenging for anyone who innocently offers to lead a ritual. The reasons are many and can include painful personal histories queer people have about family rejection, religious alienation, forced group activity, and, and, and… However an expanded definition of ritual is helpful in understanding these dynamics for faeries. As queer children, spiritual survival skills often develop very privately. Imagine the nine year old faerie boy locking the door to play secret dress up. Gathering together as adults carries both the thrill of breaking out and the conditioned fear and hiding from our past. From that place, committing to go to the gathering is a ritual transformation. Making the actual trip is a ritual journey. The ritual is being there and looking around at the others in the dinner circle. For many people, that is enough. now carry the Destiny story forward. I think I can see it with less attachment to “the old ways” than had I stayed. After ten years of envisioning and struggling, the vital energy at Destiny has moved where it needed to go, into clearing and construction.

A lot of faeries get to a ritual fire at a gathering and are so compressed by their outside life that the most vital part for them is the release of ecstatic, drumming, dancing and laughing and the ambience of intimacy. Also, at Destiny, the New England Faerie Sanctuary, most gatherings are long weekend events and that’s a really short time to dig into deep ritual work to the extent the Reclaiming collective does it.

I hear rituals I participated in my passionate 20’s described in legendary proportions. Maybe they were legendary. Ask my ego. At that time, we were first reacting to AIDS, our loss and our mortality, Ronald Reagan, the pharmaceutical companies. It was fuel for ritual. We were children on fire. We were out and outraged. We were fire and wind. From that, the airy vision of community floated up. Twenty years later, it’s as if we have become parents. Like my own middle age, a new metaphor has crept in. Elder. Steward. Daddy. We bought land and we’re building the house and laying down a home for future faeries who gratify our efforts by magically showing up. We are reproducing! We are practicing service. That’s where the energy is for now. It just is. Welcome to the earth element, all of us.

So, style and circumstance differ with Faeries and Reclaiming, but the core values of earth-based spiritual practice and creative ritual, and empowerment to activism are very much the same. So are a lot of the songs. I felt totally at home. Over all, my experience at Witch Camp enriched my understanding both of myself and the faerie community. I left Witch Camp with a yearning to pursue more in-depth ritual explorations with the faeries. At the same time, I understood the faeries were walking a slightly different path that had everything to do with being queer.

Fast forward, I left the faeries for a while. That’s a story for another day. But after a couple years I meandered back or maybe Destiny meandered back toward me. Having been one of Destiny’s founders, but now cleansed of my old stuck role, I got to meet the people who

If ritual space is a practice to become more fully conscious, then activating my awareness can make anything I do into ritual. Workers singing in the fields know this. Putting my grandmother’s church hat on at my tent has always been as much the ritual as what happens once I slog up to the fire circle. So, mixing sacred earth and water to pour cement for a kitchen floor, installing a “fire” place, opening a meadow to the sky to invoke flowers, grass and birds is magic, is ritual.

Destiny won’t stay so earthbound forever. We’ve done this element thing long enough to know the wheel turns and Destiny moves on, deepening our wisdom as it turns. It was a huge cultural shift for the North East Faeries to become stewards of land and the inevitable growing up has included letting go. Growing up offers new opportunities. If we have become our own parents, then we can become the teachers my generation lost to AIDS, with a stronger foundation, a deeper shared understanding of who we are as queer spirits. Along the way we reinvent and reclaim the art of ritual.