consciously performed within MGM.[1] Respondents reported a diversity of rituals within their practices – ranging from simple meditative practices to full scale invocations of goddesses. They shared a common notion of communion with the feminine divine through ideas of possession. Indeed, acts of possession were almost universal among respondents. This is exemplified by a simple ritual working I witnessed during my night at John’s house.
A Ritual
As the shadows began to lengthen in his lounge, John invited me to observe a ritual working in his garden. He ushered me through the French windows into a V-shaped garden formed by the sides of a narrowing valley and bounded by dense woodland and brambles. Set in the apex of the garden, screened from the house by a tangle of ragged privet and Russian vine, stood a roundhouse, about four metres in diameter, reminiscent of an Iron Age hut. A roof of rough thatch and bracken, atop wooden
supports, rested upon a circular wall of rendered breezeblocks to a height of around two and a half metres. John referred repeatedly to this as his ‘pride and joy’ and, as he neared it, explained that he had built this ten summers ago as a ‘temple to the Earth Goddess’. The temple had to be entered on one’s knees, Japanese-style, through a small sliding door, revealing a dark, spacious interior. There was a small circular aperture in the roof set above a wrought iron fire-basket through which a full moon, muted by silver-grey cloud could be glimpsed. Around the hut’s windowless perimeter lay a scatter of large cushions of Moroccan shades and design, a curved bench of driftwood and two Buddhist zafus (meditation cushions) in turquoise velvet. I perched upon one of these as John tended to the fire and produced a drum, rather like a large Irish bodhrán, with a flourish from under the bench. John spoke for a short time about the importance of ritual in his spiritual practices. He explained that his Goddess, befitting his Wiccan roots, was an amalgam of many different, predominantly European, goddesses. His liturgical practices were mostly orthodox Wiccan within a neo-shamanic framework. John bade me to relax with closed eyes and then began a slow double drum beat. A minute in, he began to lead me in a guided visualization in a low yet sonorous voice:
- ↑ About ‘performing gender’, see for example, Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, London: Routledge 1990.
