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Book ClubsBook Group? Women's Rites, Women's Mysteries: Intuitive Ritual Creation by Ruth Barrett
This book was recommended to me a couple of weeks ago by @CompassionateGoddess on a thread started by @Itzpapalotl about goddesses. So I ordered it and as soon as it arrived I couldn't put it down.
I am a rationalist and a believer in science but at the same time I have always been drawn to the elements and nature and always fascinated by pagan festivals and goddess figures.
Anyway, this book is as much a radical feminist treatise on the lost or suppressed rituals for women's passage through life, as it is a book on "witchcraft". However it is a book on witchcraft, or at least a guide to honouring, through ritualised intent and action, the female body and the stages of being a woman.
If you have ever been to a birthday party, celebrated Christmas or Thanksgiving, eaten an Easter egg or attended a baby shower then you have taken part in ritual. But like every cultural expression, these events in their traditional form are washed through with patriarchal values. Reading this book made me realise how much. For example, at a birthday we celebrate the one who was born but the most important person - the one who created and gave birth on that day X years ago - is completely absent. The mother. Why on someone's birthday is the mother who birthed them that day explicitly made a part of the celebration? There are lots of thought-provoking questions like that.
This book helps you re-conceive of the rituals of our lives, the celebrations of the seasons, the honouring of stages of life, in terms of feminism, the female experience and the Goddess who is the creatrix and life energy of the universe (but you can find a lot of meaning in this book without needing to believe in the Goddess etc.)
The book is a thoughtful examination of the patriarchal nature of our rituals and a vision of how they could be reimagined in a feminist light. However the book will also teach you how to create your rituals (which can be purely ritualistic or can be magical spells if you wish).
There are lots of open-ended activities and suggestions, some of which are akin to self-help in terms of well-being and self-care, psychological healing, others will teach you to use symbolism, objects and actions to create ritual that might have magical effect if that is what you seek.
I would love to find other women who would like to work through this book with me. I have read through superficially but now want to go through in depth doing the activities but as a complete beginner it is kind of daunting and I don't quite know where to start!
Thanks for giving us a pause, @Tm. Thanks for reminding us that we don’t have to know it all, and that the important part is doing it.
Doing it: it can be simple.
One of the earliest lessons for me in this I learned from this poem by Elsa Gidlow, a lesbian poet, and some kind of witch. Each day, she lights her fire. And each year, she lights the solstice fire from the coals of the old one.
Chains Of Fires
Each dawn, kneeling before my hearth, Placing stick, crossing stick On dry eucalyptus bark Now the larger boughs, the log (With thanks to the tree for its life) Touching the match, waiting for creeping flame. I know myself linked by chains of fire To every woman who has kept a hearth
In the resinous smoke I smell hut and castle and cave, Mansion and hovel. See in the shifting flame my mother And grandmothers out over the world Time through, back to the Paleolithic In rock shelters where flint struck first sparks (Sparks aeons later alive on my hearth) I see mothers , grandmothers back to beginnings, Huddled beside holes in the earth of igloo, tipi, cabin, Guarding the magic no other being has learned, Awed, reverent, before the sacred fire Sharing live coals with the tribe.
For no one owns or can own fire, it ]ends itself. Every hearth-keeper has known this. Hearth-less, lighting one candle in the dark We know it today. Fire lends itself, Serving our life Serving fire.
At Winter solstice, kindling new fire With sparks of the old From black coals of the old, Seeing them glow again, Shuddering with the mystery, We know the terror of rebirth.
Thank you for the above reminders and for sharing that beautiful and powerful poem. Both are simply divine, and I got some goosebumps from the poem!