Читать книгу Wicca: A comprehensive guide to the Old Religion in the modern world - Vivianne Crowley, Vivianne Crowley - Страница 11

4

The Circle of Being

The rites of Wicca

In Wicca, we contact the Divine through ritual and through the enactment of ancient myths which express eternal truths about human beings and the universe we inhabit. Some Witches worship alone, but those who belong to a coven will generally meet for the eight sabbats, the major seasonal festivals, and also at the 13 Full Moon esbats. Some covens, and particularly those which emphasize training, will meet more frequently.

Where possible, Witches like to perform their rites outside, close to the world of Nature; for it is in the Goddess and God’s creation that it is easiest to feel their presence. Outside working is not always practical. Climate and the fact that not all covens have access to private land mean that often Witches will create a temple in their houses in which to honour the Gods. For those who do not have the luxury of spare space, then a room will be cleared for each rite.

What takes place in a Wiccan rite? The main function of the rites is to worship the Gods. A second function is to perform magic. Divination and spells for healing and to help people with their life problems are an integral part of the work of a Witch. Magical working takes place principally at esbats. These are seen as the most appropriate time to ask the Gods for their help. The sabbats emphasize not so much receiving, but giving back. They are acts of thanksgiving to the Gods who give us life and being. The sabbats take place at eight roughly-equidistant points around what is often called the Wheel of the Year.

The wheel of the year

The rites, and in particular the sabbats, are also celebrations. Sabbats frequently end with a feast which takes place in the sacred circle which has been made for the rite. This is not considered to be separate from the rite, but an integral part of it. We eat and drink of the bounty of the Goddess and God to celebrate and honour what they have provided for us. In Wicca, this is considered pleasing to the Gods; for we are taught that our Gods love us and are pleased when we are happy.

The idea of worshipping Gods through ritual can seem strange to us in the modern world. For our ancestors, ritual functioned to mark the transitions between different life stages. Birth, sexual maturation, marriage, giving birth, kingship, war and death were all marked by rites of passage. These rites contained powerful symbols which helped us to understand the meaning of each part of life’s journey. We were taught that each stage of the life cycle was but part of the Spiral Dance of life and death, of which we and all Nature are a part. Our griefs, pains and sorrows were transient. Like the ever-changing wheel of the seasons, they would pass, transmute; death would become life once more. Thus we were taught courage, endurance, and to look with objectivity on our own individual concerns, which were part of the greater whole. Myth and ritual touch on our deeper inherited levels of consciousness. This is why so many people entering Wicca feel that they have been Witches before. Somehow, they know instinctively the form of the rites and, in entering the Wiccan circle, they feel that they have come home.

The world of the circle

Whether indoors or outdoors, the rites of Wicca always take place within a sacred and consecrated space called the circle. However, a Wiccan circle is not necessarily exactly circular. Outside, natural wooded clearings do not grow to such convenient shapes and, when working Wiccan rites indoors, the priestess will often cast the circle around the perimeter of the whole room so that the physical barriers of the walls and the psychic barrier of the circle coincide. Traditionally, the circle was nine feet in radius and one of the uses of the nine-foot cord in Wicca is to mark out the circumference of the circle. The nine-foot radius is a comfortable size for a coven of thirteen, but a circle can be made to any size that is appropriate for the group.

The Wiccan circle differs from that of ritual magic. Readers of occult novels will be familiar with the preparations of the white magician. Considerable effort is expended in marking out a chalk circle on the floor of a room from which every speck of dust has been removed. The magician draws strange symbols around the circle and sometimes a barrier of salt is poured along the edge. Some Witches do create a physical barrier when they cast their circles. Alex Sanders had a portable wooden circle painted with esoteric symbols that could be neatly folded into quarters for easy transportation, but this was not used for the majority of rites. Sometimes Witches who cannot keep a separate room for a temple will paint a ritual circle on their floorboards and then cover this with a carpet when not in use. When working ritual outside, some Witches will draw a physical circle in the earth, but the usual custom is to draw the circle not upon the ground, but in the air. The circle is not a physical one, but a mental one.

Why do Witches work within a circle? The circle is an archetypal symbol of wholeness that has been used for millennia as a sacred place of healing and refuge. In Wicca, the circle is said to exist between the worlds. It is poised between the world of men and the realms of the Mighty Ones, between humankind and the Gods, between the astral world and the physical, between the psychological and the spiritual, in a space where those who are in the physical body can meet with non-physical forces in a safe and harmonious way. It is like a clearing in the jungle of everyday life where we can rest from its clamour and demands. The circle is a place of peace where our sometimes warring conscious and unconscious minds can meet and work in harmony. By entering the sacred precincts of the circle, we are not only clearing a physical space (if we have to clear the living room of furniture), we are also clearing a space in our own minds. This is a space where something can happen and the disorganization of our psyches can be made whole.

The altar

Within the circle will be an altar. This is placed either in the north of the circle or at the centre facing north. Certain directions have always been considered more sacred than others. In Islam, which functions without an altar, this is not a set direction, but instead prayer is oriented to a sacred place, Mecca, the birthplace of the Prophet. In Christianity, the sacred direction is east, the direction of the rising sun.

In Wicca, the north is traditionally considered to be the home of the Gods and the most sacred direction. This is a reflection of the influence on Wicca of our European ancestors. The Pole Star in the north was considered particularly sacred in the mythology of Norse and German peoples. It was also the direction of the Spiral Castle of the Celtic Goddess Arianrhod, Caer Arianrhod, where the dead heroes of the Celts went to dwell. The north is also the direction through which the Sun passes at night and the point at which the Moon’s influence is strongest in relation to the Sun. The north therefore represents the deepest part of the unconscious mind. The differences in altar orientation between Wicca and Christianity reflect their Dionysian and Apollonian leanings: the religion of the night versus the religion of the day, of unconscious versus conscious.¹ The north is not necessarily used in the Southern hemisphere. In the Southern hemisphere, the Sun is in the north at Noon and in the south at midnight. A good case can therefore be made for placing the altar to the south, oriented towards the Southern pole.

Regardless of whether we use north or south, having the altar on the north/south axis is significant in that it aligns the circle with the Earth’s magnetic currents. Traditionally, this has been considered important both in magic and in another important human activity – sleep! In the Northern hemisphere, in order to align the electro-magnetic field of the body with that of the Earth, traditionally we are told to always sleep with our heads to the north and our feet to the south. Mediums often used to sit with their backs to the north when giving clairvoyance in much the same way that a Wiccan Priestess will stand with her back to the north when the power of the Goddess is invoked upon her.

The quarters and the Elements

The four cardinal directions of the circle – East, South, West and North – are associated with the four Elements of Air, Fire, Water and Earth. In the Northern hemisphere Air is placed to the East, Fire to the South, Water to the West, and Earth to the North. In addition, there is a fifth Element which cannot be perceived by the physical senses. This is called Ether (sometimes spelt Aether or Aethyr), Akasha or Spirit. Ether is associated with the centre of the circle.

The Wiccan circle

The Elements can be thought of as energy in different states which has molecules vibrating at different speeds. In esoteric teaching, the physical universe is seen as being composed of energy in four different forms. Energy at its densest and slowest, where molecules are locked together to form solid shapes, is Earth. Water is less dense. It is fluid and can form solid shapes only when held by a container. Energy that has sufficient form to be seen, but not form enough to be grasped or held in a fixed shape, is Fire. Air is energy that is formless; where the molecules move so quickly that they cannot be seen by the eyes except through Air’s effects on other objects, such as the wind blowing through the trees. In the world around us, Air corresponds to the sky and wind, Fire to the Sun, Water to the sea, and Earth to the land.

The fifth Element, Ether, verges on the physical and forms force fields around physical objects. Although Ether is so fast-moving that it cannot be seen by the physical eye, we begin to perceive these force fields or etheric counterparts of physical objects when we develop etheric sensitivity through Wicca, magic and other forms of psychic development. What people perceive as the aura is part of the force field of the human body that permeates the physical body and extends a little beyond it. This force field as a whole is called the etheric body.

Life can exist on many levels other than the physical. The Elements are not physically alive. They do not have the attributes of physical life – bodies that metabolise and reproduce. Like all things in physical existence, however, the Elements have etheric counterparts. These are Elementals, which are alive and conscious on the etheric plane. The Elementals can be thought of as non-physical beings on a different path of evolution from that of humanity. They are more specialized in their functions and are thus in some ways more limited, but they are also immensely powerful. Elementals will allow us to communicate with them, but they must be treated with respect.

Elementals congregate around their naturally occurring element on the physical plane. Human beings have always been aware of these naturally occurring Elementals. In deep caves, we feel that unseen eyes watch us. When we touch standing stones and certain rocks, we sense that they are tingling with some kind of life force. Sometimes the wind appears to be a living thing with a will of its own. Different languages have given them different names, but pools, wells, rivers and the sea have always been thought of as inhabited by water nymphs, mermaids and undines. The magical tradition names the four groups of Elementals:

Air	Sylphs
Fire	Salamanders
Water	Undines
Earth	Gnomes

People tend to think of the Elementals as humanoid. A glance at art will show women with long flowing hair like strands of waterweed inhabiting rivers and small men with gnarled features inhabiting the Earth. Elementals were endowed with forms appropriate to their nature. These images are not formed in an arbitrary way. Human consciousness works in a similar way in all times and cultures and the forms in which the Elementals have been depicted over the ages are very similar. These symbols can be very helpful. Contact with Elementals causes an appropriate symbol to be stimulated in the psyche. We then perceive the force as the symbol. This is an act of passive clairvoyance. Stimulating the symbol by deliberately visualizing it will cause the process to happen in the opposite direction and will bring us into contact with the force behind it. This is an act of active magic and it is in this way that in ritual we invoke the Elements at the quarters. It is important, however, to make a distinction between the entity and the image with which the human mind clothes it. Elementals are not really lovely ladies with fishes’ tails. However, these are useful symbols that express to our minds the essence of the Elementals’ nature.

Preparing the circle

Humans have always believed in the Otherworld, the Land of Faery, a spiritual realm that is neither of Heaven nor Earth, but lies somewhere between. This is the world of the traveller who falls asleep and find himself lured by a beautiful maiden to a land where the years pass like days and no one ever grows old; a land beyond the bounds of time. This is the realm of the Wiccan circle; a sacred space not ruled by clock time or by linear thought, but by the timeless truths of the myths and dreams of the human psyche. No watch or clock may be brought into the circle and a distinctive feature of Wiccan rites is a strange acceleration of time: what seems like one hour is really three or four or five.

When people first enter Wicca, they may find it difficult to create this sacred space. There is no border crossing through which we can pass and find ourselves automatically in the Land of Faery. To enter, we must make an inner journey via the actions of casting the circle. How can we make this journey?

If we are performing ritual outside, this is relatively easy. The process of journeying to the working site; of preparing it; gathering wood for the fire; watching the sunset disappear behind the trees; listening to the evening song of the birds; all these turn our minds away from the concerns of the mundane world to remind us of more important things – the world of Nature, the ever-burgeoning life force of which we are a part.

Indoors, this switching off can be more difficult, but one of the skills Wicca teaches us is concentration. It is the ability to focus on one idea and to exclude all others that enables us to prepare ourselves for the circle. As the symbols of the circle become integrated into our psyche, they precipitate a change of consciousness without any conscious intervention on our part. As one priestess said to me, ‘As soon as I hear the swishing of the broom, stillness ripples through my mind. The outside world just fades away.’

Preparing ourselves – the chakras

The simple preparation of sweeping the circle is traditionally our only preparation for entering the rite. However, for working our own rites indoors, we have adopted a technique that originated far away from the misty hills of Herne’s Britain. This is the Eastern technique of opening the chakras. To some, the idea of using the chakra system may seem alien, but to borrow from the East is not a new development in Wicca. Wicca owes much to the ancient Mystery schools of the Mediterranean and Near East, which themselves were cross-fertilized by ideas from the East. Nor is the idea of energy centres in the body an exclusively Eastern concept. The Celtic God Cernunnos is depicted on the Gundestrup Cauldron sitting in a meditative position reminiscent of the Buddha while holding a snake, an image often used to depict energy rising up the spinal column from the base of the spine chakra. Witches have always worked with these energy centres or chakras, but it was in the East that the terminology and mapping of the energy systems was most developed. It is to the East, therefore, that we turn when we want to explain what Witches are doing with their bodily energies. We readily use the chakra system to help people understand and gain the control over these energies that is necessary in Wicca.

There are seven major chakras in the body which are known by their traditional Sanskrit names and also by more mundane names. The first, the muladhara (root support) chakra, is at the base of the spine; the second is the sacral or svadisthana (sweetness) chakra which rules the belly area below the navel; the third is the manipura (lustrous jewel) chakra at the solar plexus below the breast bone; the fourth is the chakra at the centre of the breast bone which is known as the heart chakra, the anahata (unstruck); the fifth is the throat chakra, the visuddi (purify); the sixth is the third eye, the ajna (knowing) chakra at the centre of the forehead; and the seventh is the crown chakra, the sahasrara (thousandfold), at the top of the head.

Clairvoyantly the chakras are seen as pulsating or spinning circles of light that follow the colours of the spectrum. The base of the spine chakra is seen as a pulsating circle of red light; the sacral chakra is orange; the solar plexus is yellow; the heart chakra is emerald green; the throat chakra is bright blue; the third eye is violet; and the crown chakra is seen as a pulsating circle of brilliant white light.²

The chakras

Opening the chakras

In a group, the technique of opening the chakras can be carried out by each person individually, or one person can talk the rest of the group through the process. In the beginning, it is best if someone whose clairvoyance is developed acts as group leader. She or he can then talk the group through the exercise while checking that everyone has opened each chakra before moving on. Chakras can be opened either from the crown chakra down or from the base of the spine chakra up. Initially, most people find it easier to work from the base up and it is this upward-flowing energy that is needed for circle casting and spells.

1. To open the chakras, first visualize a round circle of pulsating red light at the base of the spine. Visualize this getting larger and larger until it covers the whole of the lower spine. Now imagine that you are drawing a current of energy into the chakra so that it grows warm and begins to glow and pulsate with red energy and light.

2. Draw more and more energy into your base of spine chakra as though it is a tank being filled with red light. Then, as the flow of energy comes into your body, allow it to coil round and round inside you like a snake. Allow the snake of energy to rise, still spiralling until it reaches the level of your belly.

3. Visualize the snake spiralling round and round at the level of your belly. As it does so, visualize your sacral chakra in the centre of your belly beginning to glow with spinning orange light. Allow the orange circle to grow larger and larger, spinning with energy.

4. Draw more energy in from the base of the spine. Bring it up, past your sacral to the level of the solar plexus chakra. Concentrate now on the base of the spine again. Renew the energy in your base of spine chakra by drawing in more energy from outside, until the red glow at the base of the spine begins to spin faster and faster and to grow wider and wider.

5. Draw more energy up the spine and into the sacral chakra so that this too spins faster and grows wider, glowing with a bright orange light. Then allow the snake of energy to rise up through the centre of your body to the level of the solar plexus. Here it begins to activate the solar plexus chakra that starts to glow with a golden yellow light.

6. Go back down to the base of the spine and draw more energy up the centre of the body and into the solar plexus chakra. Allow it to open wider and wider. Allow the chakra to spin faster and faster until there is a golden spinning sun at the solar plexus.

7. Go back to the base of the spine again. Draw more energy in and up the spine, past the sacral chakra, past the solar plexus, up to the centre of the breast bone, where there is a small green fiery glow which is the heart chakra. Let the energy you have drawn up feed the fiery glow, so that it begins to spin faster and faster, and grow wider and wider, until it covers the whole of your chest with a green glowing light.

8. Go back to the base of the spine again and draw energy up through the spine, past the heart chakra to the throat, where there is a small blue glow. Allow the energy to stream into the throat and to spin the chakra faster and faster until there is a pulsating blue centre at the throat.

9. Go back to the base of the spine again to renew your energy. Draw energy in through the base of spine chakra, up through the sacral chakra, through the solar plexus, through the heart chakra, to the throat. Then go back to the base of the spine again. Draw a current of energy right up through the body, up past the throat and into the third eye at the centre of the forehead. Allow this energy to merge with the violet spot at the third eye and to spin the third eye energy faster and faster until there is a spiralling violet centre in the middle of the forehead.

10. Go back to the base of the spine. Draw more energy into the body and up past the sacral chakra, past the solar plexus, past the heart, past the throat and into the third eye. Allow the violet glow to spin faster and faster. Then allow the current of energy to shoot up through the head and out of the crown. Allow the energy to cascade down the body, bathing it in light, and flowing down to the feet in a white stream.

11. Go back to the base of the spine. Draw up more energy right up through the body, past the sacral chakra, past the solar plexus, past the heart, past the throat, past the third eye and out again through the crown chakra and down the body to the feet. Repeat this for as long as you wish.

When we first do the exercise, most people have some chakras that are difficult to open. These vary between individuals, but often the throat and sacral chakras present problems. For those who have problems with the sacral chakra, try opening the chakras in the reverse order – from the crown chakra down. There will then be a build up of energy before the sacral chakra is reached which will make it easier to open. For those who have problems with the throat chakra, singing a few notes or sounds just before starting can be a help.

Closing the chakras

If we have opened the chakras, we must also close them. If we are doing this in preparation for a ritual, then the chakras will be closed at the end of the rite. Closing the chakras can be done much more quickly than opening them. One of the easiest ways is to imagine each chakra as a stained glass window of the appropriate colour.

1. Starting at the top, the crown chakra, draw a fountain of white light down the outside of your whole body. Let it flow over the third eye, completing closing the violet light as though a white shutter is being drawn over it.

2. Then draw more white light down from the crown past the third eye to the throat chakra, and then over the throat, shutting the chakra.

3. Draw more light from the crown down and over the heart chakra.

4. Now draw more white light down over the top of the head, over the third eye, over the throat, over the heart chakra and down over the solar plexus chakra.