Ritual Queen Shokti

Ritual Queen by Shokti

Shokti here, ritual mama of the Albion and

EuroFaeries, Queer Spirit Festival organiser and facilitator of ecstatic full moon drum circles in London since mid 2000s, offering some history and practical tips from my 8 th house Capricorn Moon...

Ritual is deeply programmed into the subconscious patterns of humanity.

Through ritual we can bring ourselves into alignment with the planetary energies.

The movement of the earth round the sun and through the heavens creates a spiral dance—to which we can attune our hearts, minds and bodies.

This is the way to wellness, wholeness and happiness.

AIDS was my gateway to gatekeeping

… the cocoon in which the witch/shaman/priest in me was birthed … in 2000 this butterfly emerged, looking for his tribe....

Accelerated:

I came out aged twenty-one, in the final year of a history degree in the refined but peculiarly repressed atmosphere of Cambridge University in the UK. The genie finally out of the bottle, I rushed to bigger cities chasing joy, sex and love: entering the gay game in the mid 80s as ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ was broadcast on TV by the government, coming out into a gay scene tense with fear. Four years later I was diagnosed HIV+, then for five more years I was still well enough to continue feasting on life’s pleasures—the gay caterpillar, with no other ambition than to dance, to have great sex and to find love. It’s true what they say— the terminal diagnosis inspired me to live life to the full, I was out dancing every weekend, I did find deep passionate love. But aged thirty AIDS was kicking in, and everything changed.

Individual:

I had given up on god and religion in my early teens, and nothing had come along to make me think again until AIDS brought me an Accelerated Individual Discovery of Self. Fortunately, five years of taking LSD at weekends in fantastic underground gay clubs had, it turned out, prepared me well for this shock of the shakti awakening. I called out to God and SHE came to me—opening my mind and heart to the spiritual realms, old mental/emotional structures collapsed—I experienced an ecstatic rush of rebirth lasting months—suddenly my eternal soul was leading the way, and instead of being upset about dying I was more excited to be alive than I had ever been before.

Discovery:

Once I adjusted to the shock of the veils dissolving I dived into a study of philosophy, witchcraft, Taoism, Buddhism, mystical Christianity, Kabbalah etc; started to meditate and make up my own rituals. As my body faded my soul came alive, all fear of death vanished and during the painful journey of suffering that my body endured in the next three years I practised. Learning to open my heart to spirit I discovered the power of devotional spirituality, and studying the teachings of the worlds’ mystics from every race and faith I completely transformed my understanding of life.

Of Self:

Learning the mystical truths at the core of all faiths, I moved to a place of viewing life as one dance—which brought great ecstasies as I returned to the world post-AIDS but left me somewhat ‘empty’, unaware of my place within it. Spirit showed me then that our personalities and relationships are also part of the divine play. After five years in the transformational AIDS cocoon, in the year 2000 I stepped out into the world again, as a fragile, fresh butterfly. The shamanic witch in my soul was awake, but now had to face people (a task easily as daunting as death!) and it was time to find my soul’s friends and my tribe.

I have been finding them ever since. First I met queer pagan witches in the south of England: many of them women working powerful nature and deity magic. I met gentle men at Edward Carpenter Community retreats, then among the Eurofaeries, at gatherings in the Netherlands and Germany I found my tribe of queer magicians, healers, teachers and artists. I came home. At Folleterre I became

known as Shokti Mama the Ritual Queen—it was for this role the Goddess had trained me in my AIDS cocoon, and I was conscious that there would have been many more ritual queens had not AIDS taken them away, but conscious too that those missing guys were actually right by my side. In the UK we have recently revelled in three manifestations of Queer Spirit Festival 2016-19, which brings together 500 queers for magical celebrations in nature over five days—here I get to co-create ritual for hundreds of people, and am left thinking this must be the first time it has been possible for so many of us queer holy folk to gather for such large-scale ceremony in Europe since the Romans took to slaughtering us in the fourth century.

Collective ecstasy was once the regular sacred ritual of the people: calling on and revelling in the spirit of Dionysus, of Attis, Cybele, Diana, Pan— these deities who transgressed gender boundaries and sexual taboos were invoked to bring people into communion with the unseen world and into deeper relationship with each other and their own inner universe. These gods, at whose festivals people of all levels of society were welcome, including servants, slaves and outcasts, and who continued to be celebrated long into the Christian era, were basically queer as fuck. Their holy servants had been women and queers (in general feminine men, sometimes eunuchs) dating back millennia—for, as I found in my mystical transformation, it is through the ‘feminine’ that God comes into the world—spirit enters through our bodies, especially when engaged in ceremony, which in ancient times regularly involved sex and dance and drugs. Gender bending was a frequent feature of collective ritual, it still exists in carnival today, the vestige of this ancient rite.

Celebrations led by the queer devotees of Cybele, Dionysus and other deities broke down barriers of gender, class and sexuality, brought the spirit of freedom—and threatened the growing power of the patriarchal, militarised states. From the late Roman Empire onwards the repression of the natural witches, healers and shamans of humanity has always had a political motive. The cosy relationship between the Christian church and state was a means to control the minds, morality and lives of the people. This required the suppression of the pagan gods, of their rituals of liberation and of the holy priestesses and shamans who led them. By repressing the feminine aspect of the Holy Spirit, religion was twisted into a societal control mechanism.

When Europeans set out to conquer the indigenous tribes of the other continents they continued this dark pursuit—they killed the gender bending shamans, imposed their uptight Christian sexual taboos and banned the collective ecstatic rites that bound the people together. Just as had happened in Europe, the holy ones were eradicated, the drums were silenced, homosex was laden with shame, the connection to spirit cut off.

Our beautiful lovely sexuality is the gateway to spirit. Under all organised religions of the past, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, there has been a separation of carnality, or shall we say of flesh or earth or sex, and spirituality. As far as I am concerned they are all the same thing, and what we need to do as faeries is to tie it all back together again. —Harry Hay

In mind and spirit I journeyed along the Way with guidance from many of the incredible spiritual traditions of the world, but I came home in time to the core pagan practices of the western Celtic culture, seeing in its elemental, seasonal and astrological lore a powerful wisdom tradition that is some kind of balance to the great religions of the east, that synchronises with other indigenous pathways and practices, and contains within it the potential to offer a framework for a global spiritual culture that encourages souls to find liberation, understanding and love from the moment they arrive on the planet. But the rapidly growing modern manifestation of paganism and especially witchcraft, while doing great things to bring the goddess and magic back into the world, is in general lacking in one funda

mental element—pagan and shamanic magic was always very queer.

The Age of Aquarius is the queer age of the zodiac: because of the Aquarian mythology, back in the Middle Ages gay men were known as Ganymedes. The myth teaches about the sacred role that queers play in the human collective. Queer folk have a natural affinity with the stars and planets, and with this wisdom tradition that does not focus on deities and devils, nor on right and wrong. We are playing our role in birthing Aquarian principles in the world, and there is further to go. Aquarius takes us into an age of exploration of the mind and spirit—through collective experiences, the thing we Faeries are conjure so well.

Our job as magical queers today?

To be the bridges, the healers and the gatekeepers to bring this shift of the ages HOME.

London 2005: with lesbian friend Anna I called the Queer Spirit Circle into being, intended as a space for evolving queers to find each other and make ceremony together. Fifteen years later, and aka the Faerie Drum Circle, up to a hundred queers gather regularly in a Victorian community hall or round a garden fire at full moons for an ecstatic evening of drumming, dancing and emotional expression/release. We bring a bit of genderfluid, world-connecting witchery to Vauxhall, once home of the Victorian Pleasure Gardens and now South London’s most famous gay locale. We each bring our own perception and experience of SPIRIT to this melting pot in which the sacred mystery is the focus of celebration and awe, offering acceptance and respect to each other’s unique paths as we summon the powers of the universe to heal us, uplift and manifest through us.

Every trip into ecstasy changes something within.

The Wheel of the Year

There are many ways we can benefit from incorporating ritual into our lives, my main focus is to be a living example of the health benefits that living with awareness of, and ritualistic engagement with, the Wheel of the Year; also of how we can find balance and understanding through knowing our Selves, not only as the Self in all things, but as the interplay of elemental and astral energies that permeate every moment of our existence. Fireearth-air-water is the constant rhythmic flow of the energies of the Self, shining externally through the Sun’s light, and reflecting emotionally in tune with the moon’s monthly journey.

From Aries to Pisces the Sun charts the twelve stages of the soul’s journey through life, death and rebirth—giving us a taste of the complete journey every year. The whole map is there for us, a map without rights and wrongs, without good and evil—a map that was first studied in the very queer Mesopotamian temples of Ishtar, long before the male mind sucked us all into those stifling polarities. Every month the Moon takes the same journey, mapping out the emotional energies affecting the collective energy field, giving us a simple formula to guide us through the ups and downs—every two and a half days the moon shifts element, in the pattern fireearth-air-water. Our ancestors would have always known the phase of the moon, and been aware of how it affected them. New moons are times for intention setting, full moons for expansion and expression, waning moons for contraction and inner work. Every full moon gives us a different polarity to examine in our lives, to understand and work on, a different vibrational field to operate in. At the London Circles we dance ourselves into amazing states of connection, awareness—love. We come back from the ecstatic journey changed, healed in some way. Making ceremony with the moon, and at the equinoxes and solstices, brings our personal energy fields into alignment and harmony with the planet’s own cycles.

Connecting to nature and to each other through the heart is our global Faerie practice. We can then take this further by building the connection of our multidimensional souls in ritual. This builds over time, and by attuning ourselves, mentally and energetically, to the seasonal and cosmic energy streams we not only invoke healing in ourselves, we also each help to bring the collective human consciousness into alignment with the Universal Self.

The Ancestors are on, at and by our side.

When we gather and circle the veils are always thin.

Rediscovering the arts of queer witches and gatekeepers

Entering the places between the worlds

Ritual is about what uniting the without and within

That a new Way of Being may begin.

Our task is to be the rainbow bridge, to remember our roles as the gatekeepers and open the gates the world is shaking, the wheel turns fast—but it’s not too late.