DANCE, LADY, DANCE, IN THE MOONLIT SKY,
TO THE THREEFOLD NAME WE KNOW THEE BY.
DANCE, LADY, DANCE, BE PART OF ME,
THE WOMAN INSIDE POSSESSED OF THEE.
DANCE, LADY, DANCE, ON THE TURNING EARTH
FOR THE BIRTH THAT IS DEATH AND THE DEATH THAT IS BIRTH.
John repeated this, his dancing and drumming ever more frenzied until, panting loudly, he abruptly stopped – rather like a marionette whose strings have been cut – falling breathlessly onto a pile of adjacent cushions. This marked the end of the ritual.
Anyone with a knowledge of mainstream Wiccan ritual will
recognize that elements of this visualization are taking from the ritual of
Drawing Down the Moon whereby the high priestess of a coven ‘draws
down’ the Goddess into her body in an act of empowering possession. It
often acts as a female counterpoint to the process of Drawing Down the
Sun wherein the Horned God possesses the high priest. These acts conform
to essentialized mythopoetic gender stereotypes of Pagan ritual practice.
The fact that the Goddess possesses the male in John’s ritual as a radical
inversion of these practices is important here. Although John tailored the
ritual for my presence he did say that elements of this lay at the heart of
his solo Goddess rituals. As stated, survey participants consistently
emphasized the importance of possession, and many of these used
modifications of existing Pagan rituals and liturgies to accomplish this.
Although I felt something of an outsider during John’s ritual there was no
doubt in my mind that he was caught up in an ecstatic state of possession.
Discussing the ritual with John he touched upon an issue that was common
with survey respondents: ‘It’s through these rituals that I encounter the
Goddess. The female energies complete me as a person ... Male and female
come together in this sacred encounter ... It’s about re-enchantment really.
Mind, body, spirit ... Of the World.’ This notion that the Goddess completes
the male psyche with ‘female energies’ is crucial to our understanding of
MGM practices.
The Interiorization of Otherness
As the sociological profile of the MGM suggests, practitioners broadly conform to the wider dynamics of other Contemporary Pagan paths. Because of this the MGM shares many features with these spiritualities and
can be theorized in congruent ways. Howard Eilberg-Schwartz has
