I just returned from ASWM’s (Association for the Study of Women and Mythology) Annual Conference where I participated in two very powerful rituals. And a good friend of mine who also attended remarked how amazing the experience was and that she had not been in ritual in years.
‘But I thought you did an Equinox celebration?’
‘Yes, but it wasn’t like this.’
That made me start thinking, what is ‘this’? What makes a divinely feminine ritual?
I have had the divine feminine app for well over a decade, and I am surprised at how many women I know doing this work who do not regularly participate in ritual.
It feels ‘essential’.
But I also get it. The farther I have gone on my Path, the more I find myself walking alone.
One day. One day in the future, ‘this’ won’t be so hard to find.
What is ‘this’? What makes divinely feminine ritual?
It is authentic, non-scripted and intuitive. You may start with a script but you don’t stay there. Circles become greater than the sum of their parts. They take on lives and themes of their own. And the women I have known who host powerful Circles flow with this.
They hold the rim. They do not dictate it.
It is participatory and magical.
Annie Finch hosted the first ritual at ASWM on Saturday night. It was an Initiation Ritual where we passed through portals.
At the first portal, we asked what we wanted to let go of, and then the subsequent portals, we let go.
The Circle started with a raucous, rousing song of the Goddess: two sides, the Maidens and the Ancient Mothers adding their voices with random, silly breaks to dig deep, sway, put two fingers on our foreheads and proclaim VULVA POWER.
*Picture of Dr. Carla Ionescu, Artemis Institute, @artemisexpert
It was fun.
Ritual doesn’t have to be fun, but it needs to connect with our Life Force. And when you hit that Rio Abajo Rio, you feel it.
Maybe it’s tears. Maybe it’s anger. Maybe it’s laughter. But somehow some way emotion is involved.
It is sensual. Beautiful altars such as the one in the featured picture. I have known of Lauren Raine’s Goddess masks for years, but this was the first time I got to see them in person. They are even more beautiful in person.
They hold something that cannot be photographed nor recorded. It must be experienced.
And not just sights, but smells and taste and sound. I have been in ritual where we had a ‘communion’ at the end, and as we ingest whatever is shared, we mentally picture ingesting the wisdom of the Circle: it making its way through our body, giving us energy and being absorbed into our very cells.
It is divinatory. And by that, I mean that someone is not telling you what you are getting, but you are looking and listening and figuring it out yourself.
The second ritual I did at the ASWM conference was for the Maternal Gift Economy. That is another article in itself: the Maternal Gift Economy that has always run beneath our Capitalistic Paradigm but is now surfacing in its importance.
We each pulled a card from Vicki Noble’s powerful Motherpeace Round Tarot Deck, and we were not told what each meant instead we each spoke about what it meant to us.
In ritual, we find our unique meanings.
It allows for each of us. In the rituals and in the conference as a whole, I saw conflict, disagreements and drama. They were addressed, resolved as best they could be and let go.
That is a beautiful thing to witness.
I have been honored to see over the years how women who have found the Goddess hold themselves differently. They hold their power in their solar plexus, waves coming in and out, strong in their knowledge of what makes them unique and not caring for the myriad number of ways that they fall short of the Western yardstick of unattainable feminine perfection.
They have wrinkles, gray hair, moustaches, extra fat and tattoos. They give out genuine smiles.
They do ritual.
Do ritual.
