RITES OF PASSAGE: NEOPAGAN RITES

Rites of passage, like most forms of Neopagan ritual, take place within a sacred circle. The basic ritual form of the circle casting illustrates the ways in which deity is in the world, not outside it. While different variations on circle casting exist, most circles are oriented with the four cardinal directions, and the four directions are typically associated with forces of nature: fire, air, water, and earth. Some Neopagans address the "powers" of a particular direction, while others address the "winds." Depending on the ritual, specific gods and goddesses are invoked and invited to be present in the circle or embodied by participants. During the ritual, participants are often led on an "astral journey" in which they visualize another realm of existence, the spirit world, or astral reality. The presence of deities, journeys through other worlds, and shifts of consciousness all contribute to participants' experience of the rite. Because it is designated as a safe and sacred space, the circle facilitates initiations, the passing from one phase of life to another, and the shifting from one type of consciousness to another.

Rites of passage include personal initiations within specific Neopagan traditions. Witchcraft covens and Neopagan ritual groups include initiation rites to mark the passage of members from one stage of learning and skill to another. For instance, Gardnerian Witchcraft, named for Gerald Gardner (1883–1964), includes different degrees that participants can attain through training and study within a coven led by a priest and priestess who offer the initiation when they believe their students are ready. Traditional Witchcraft of this type and other forms of Neopaganism are mystery religions in which secret knowledge is passed through a series of initiations, and the individuals who undergo these initiations are expected to be transformed by them.

Seasonal Rituals

Wiccans, or Witches, are the largest Neopagan tradition, and their Wheel of the Year provides a model for other Neopagan celebrations of seasonal festivals. The Wheel is based on the ever-changing relationship of a goddess and a god as they move through the cycle of the seasons. The goddess has varied meanings for Wiccans and among Neopagans in general. She may be seen as a great goddess who encompasses all of life or as the partner of a god. She is also sometimes seen as having three aspects: maiden, mother, and crone (old woman). The maiden aspect of the goddess is celebrated in the spring, the mother in summer, and the crone in winter. The god plays different roles in different seasons as well. He may be referred to as any of the following: Lord of the Greenwood, Sun King, Corn King, Lord of Life and Death, or Leader of the Wild Hunt. The Wheel that the goddess and god move through includes eight sabbats: Yule or Winter Solstice on December 21, Brigid's Day or Candlemas on February 2, Eostar or Spring Equinox on March 21, Beltane on May 1, Litha or Summer Solstice on June 21, Lammas or Lughnasad on August 1, Mabon or Fall Equinox on September 21, and Samhain or Halloween on November 1.

Rituals for these sabbats are designed to celebrate seasonal changes and at the same time to lead participants through personal changes appropriate to the seasons. Beltane, or May Day, for instance, is a celebration of fertility. Neopagan rituals at this time of year might involve selecting a May queen and king who would be symbolically married. Neopagan marriages, called handfastings, might be performed on Beltane. Such unions are ritualized in a variety of ways for both homosexual and heterosexual lovers. Some are long-term commitments, while others are for "a year and a day," to be renewed at a later time if the participants are willing.

Rituals designed for Samhain, the festival of the dead, might include a ritualized journey through the land of the dead and remembrances of dead loved ones. Many Samhain rituals refer to some version of the "Descent of the Goddess" in which the goddess descends to the land of the dead to restore the god, who has become the lord of death, to a new life. She sleeps with him and creates him anew so that he will be reborn on the Winter Solstice. In Samhain rites, participants may symbolically undergo this passage from life into the land of death. They may also express their grief for dead ones within a collective ritual process. These seasonal rituals affirm Neopaganism's identity as an earth religion and help people align the changes in their lives with the cycles of the natural world.

Rituals to Mark Life Changes

The Wheel of the Year is also paralleled by the life passages of men and women in the community. Creating new rites of passage is at the heart of Neopagan religion, and these rites are a common feature of Neopagan festivals and other gatherings. Rites of passage are an important way that Neopagans celebrate embodied life changes and create religious community. The goal of these rites is not simply to help a person celebrate significant life changes but also to bind the community together. Starhawk, a famous Neopagan writer and activist, discusses rites of passage in her book Truth or Dare (1987), observing that, "Ritual affirms the common patterns, the values, the shared joys, risks, sorrows, and changes that bind a community together.… A living community develops its own rituals to celebrate life passages and ease times of transition, to connect us with the round of the changing seasons and the moon's flux, to anchor us in time" (p. 296). Neopagans have created new rituals and reinvented old ones to draw in their community members around pregnancy and birth, marriage, puberty, and death.

Neopagans design rituals to celebrate life experiences from birth to death. For instance, some Neopagans borrow the Navajo "blessingway" tradition to bless a new baby and welcome him or her into the community. Others call their welcoming rite a wiccaning or saining, which is designed to initiate a child into the community. This ritual may include introducing the child to the deities, giving the community a chance to meet the child and to give gifts and offerings to the child, perhaps even the gift of a personal quality or character trait. But most Neopagans do not see this initiation as determining their child's religious identity, and they are adamant that the child will eventually make his or her own choices. Rituals that mark the end of life and facilitate mourning are similarly diverse and also involve offerings. Sometimes Neopagans set up shrines for the dead in their homes or at nature sanctuaries.

Rites of passage among Neopagans are also directed toward women's and men's specific life changes. The impact of the feminist movement, especially in the United States, has shaped a wide range of women's ritualizing in Witchcraft and other forms of Neopaganism. According to some feminist Neopagans, pregnancy, labor, delivery, and breastfeeding are ways that women embody the goddess in the biological events of their lives. Some feminist Neopagans label their rites of passage "women's mysteries"; the mysteries are seen as physical, emotional, spiritual, and psychic rites of passage that women experience by having been born into a female body. Women's mysteries celebrate the earth's seasonal cycles of birth, death, and regeneration, as well as women's cyclical nature, and they include birth, menstruation, childbirth and lactation, menopause, and death. These women imagine that a society made over by goddess-worshipping Neopagans would sanctify birth and menses. They seek to transform what they see as destructive and disempowering images of body and self by identifying women with goddesses and ancient myths. In this way, female bodies are made sacred, and bodily experience becomes an important aspect of moving from one stage of life to another.

One ritual that some Neopagans have reclaimed is the so-called sacred marriage between a goddess and a god. The sacred marriage that takes place among other kinds of fertility rites on the Neopagan holiday Beltane (May 1) is both marriage and initiation for the man and woman who take part in it by becoming goddess and god. The practice of contemporary "sex magic" includes the sacred marriage, or Great Rite—ritualized intercourse, often between priest and priestess. The Great Rite can take two forms: actual, involving intercourse, or symbolic, in which the union of the male and female principles is symbolized by putting the athame (ritual knife) into the chalice to bless the wine on the ritual altar. The idea behind the Great Rite is that through ritual a woman becomes the goddess and a man becomes the god. Journalist Margot Adler explains this process in her study of Neopaganism, Drawing Down the Moon (1986): "Two people who have drawn down into themselves these archetypal forces, or, if you will, have allowed these forces within them to surface—can have a spiritual and physical union that is truly divine" (p. 110). The actual ritual is sometimes used in traditional Witchcraft initiations and in some handfastings. Because sexuality is seen as a source of spiritual power, Neopagans often include it, both actually and symbolically, in their ritual lives.

Sexual freedom is important to many Neopagans because they believe that sexuality is both natural and sacred, but freedom is translated to mean the right to choose a homosexual relationship, to have multiple lovers, to be celibate, or to commit to a monogamous heterosexual relationship. Some rituals focus on healing or changing aspects of the self that are related to gender and sexuality. Healing from rape and unhealthy sexual relationships is a common focus of ritual work, as are rituals and guided meditations that explore gendered aspects of the self (e.g., men exploring their "feminine side"). Neopagans create theatrical rituals with ancient deities and encourage participants to act out sexual abuse or try on different gender identities. Men wear skirts and gowns for some Neopagan rituals and festivals. All of these rituals are intentionally designed to replace outdated rites and to address the absence of rites of passage and initiatory experiences that Neopagans believe characterizes Western cultures.

Some Neopagans, and especially Neopagan women, have created initiation rites for adolescents. They believe that negative views of the body and sexuality are taught to young children, and particularly to adolescents, and that the way to change this is to celebrate the physical changes that mark the onset of adolescence, such as a girl's first menses. For instance, Starhawk tells the story of how her coven created a ritual to celebrate the first menstruation of a coven member's daughter. It involved a ritual symbolizing the daughter's separation from her mother and ended with each of the women giving the girl a special and personal gift. Starhawk's description of the first menses ritual provides a model for other communities looking for alternative rites of passage for their adolescents.

In Neopaganism, old women, mothers, and adolescent women are each celebrated in unique ways. Many Witches and other Neopagans believe in the "Triple Goddess" of maiden, mother, and crone that originated with the first Neopagans in mid-twentieth-century England. For Neopagans, the Goddess is expansive and encompasses all women's roles. The idea of the Triple Goddess has its origins in the studies of classical Greek and Roman mythology by British scholars Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928) and Sir James Frazer (1854–1941), whose works were consulted by the earliest Neopagans. Through the Triple Goddess, women at all stages of life can identify with a sacred feminine ideal. The revaluing of women's bodies at all stages of life and the identification of the feminine as divine has made possible many of the new rites of passage Neopagans have created. Neopagans redefine the archetypes of maiden, mother, and crone (wise old woman), leaving them open to personal interpretation by the women who look to them for guidance. Cronings, for instance, honor women who have become elders in their communities. During croning rituals, the lifelong achievements of older women are honored, and they are given gifts to symbolize the new stage of life they have entered.

Men's Rites

Rites for women are much more common than rites for men, in part because of the tremendous popularity of images and stories of goddesses and the disproportionate influence of the feminist movement on Neopagan communities. Many Neopagans share the desire to affirm and make positive those aspects of gendered behavior that they believe have been repressed or are seen as evil, such as homosexual relationships, women celebrating their sexuality outside of marriage, and men choosing more traditionally feminine roles. But Neopagans also include men's rituals at their gatherings.

Robert Bly's discussion of gender roles in Iron John (1990) and Sam Keen's men's movement classic, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man (1991), inspired the men's movement of the 1990s and encouraged Neopagans to explore masculinity and celebrate the variety of male gods that men can look to as models. The approaches of Bly and Keen have resulted in many men's events and have also influenced Neopagan gatherings, so that workshops and rituals on men's issues and for men only now coexist with women-centered activities. Pantheacon, a Neopagan convention held in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2003, included sessions on "Mystery and the Masculine: Connecting to the Male Divine" and "Liturgy for Chiron the Centaur as Sage." New Age and Neopagan men have followed feminist strategies in borrowing images of deities from ancient cultures that they believe offer more diverse models for masculinity and allow men to explore their human potential without being subject to rigid male ideals such as the emotionless warrior. Feminists and men's movement leaders both argue that previous patterns of socialization have been oppressive and limiting. All men and women, they say, need to heal old wounds and change certain ways of doing things before they will be free to explore their full potential as human beings. It is through ritual work that these changes take place.

Men's rites have been more slowly accepted than women's rites, and they sometimes receive mixed reactions when they occur at large Neopagan festivals. Sometimes these rites are called "male mysteries" and explore images of the warrior and hunter. Some Neopagan communities design initiations and workshops for men that might include, for example, flint-napping, making coal from plants, fire-starting, and beer-making. In men-only and women-only spaces, Neopagans say they feel free to explore aspects of femininity and masculinity that have been shaped by biology and culture. The ritual work that Neopagans do with gender and sexuality involves mending and strengthening the spiritual aspects of relationships.

Conclusion

Neopagans focus on cyclical changes in nature and in the lives of individuals, but they also see spiritual practice itself as a series of initiatory experiences. Neopagan rituals often involve initiatory journeys of self-exploration to bring about personal growth, healing, and empowerment. They may facilitate healing by externalizing suffering and loss and helping individuals to process painful aspects of their lives within a supportive group setting. Neopagan festivals often include rituals and workshops geared toward inner transformation, such as "Pagan Meditation: The Inner Work of the Old Ways," "Guided Shamanic Journey," and "Metamorphosis: An Approach to Addressing Prenatal Patterns and Means of Change." In some sense, almost all Neopagan rituals are rites of passage in that they involve moving from one phase of life to another. Personal initiation, life passages, and seasonal celebrations share this emphasis. Rites for healing the damage done to sexuality and gender identity and rites that honor and celebrate love relationships, sexual expression, life passages, and bodily experience are all ways that Neopagans incorporate rituals into their lives.

Bibliography

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Sarah M. Pike (2005)