Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Feelings of Initiation

I have done some more soul-searching, between bouts of furious writing, arguments with Odin, and mundane work, and I have come to a conclusion. Inspired by a feeling of...lack and confusion, and a conversation I had with another absolutely lovely witch I met last week, I have decided I need to initiate. I don't have a Wiccan tradition I'm drawn to, but I know that those that emphasis long, drawn-out ritual magick over everything else is not for me. Ritual magick has its place, as does kitchen witchery and gypsy magick, but that place, for me, is not a very big one. I do not wish to be confined to a tradition that that requires me to worship only a specific set of deities, or tells me not to interact with traditionally 'darker' gods like Loki or the rest of the Jotuns, with whom I work almost as closely as I work with Brigid or Artemis.

And yet I still feel the need for that formal initiation, that rite of passage, that is currently lacking in my life. Theoretically, I performed a half-hearted self-initiation when I first found the Craft. I wore long, flowing clothes to school on Mabon (I was a sophomore in high school then), and danced outside during lunch and talked to the gods and the faeries and called it done. Then I neglected my studies and, indeed, my spirituality for six years. This is a new point in my life, a new turn in my path, and I feel the need to acknowledge it.

So, with Mabon coming up once more, I plan on self-initiate into an eclectic pagan tradition. Call it Wiccan, if you like, or call it something else. The name doesn't matter to me. I already know it will incorporate pieces of Buddhism, Wicca, Asatru, Shamanism, and the Faerie Faith. I already know it is what I believe right now and what I have been working on for the last year.

It is simply time to sit down and formalize it, dedicate myself to leading a spiritual life, and give myself a rite of passage I have never had before. It will also be the first full-fledged ritual I design and perform on my own. I would like it to be more formal and more sober than my previous magickal workings (in which I basically did everything off the cuff and laughed a lot, which is good, but not the right tone for this, I believe), and I realize that performing it during/around a harvest festival is not traditional. But it feels right. And that's what the pagan path is all about, isn't it? Finding what's right for us?

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