Creating Circles and Ceremonies: Rituals for All ... - reading...

VI Creating Circles & Ceremonies
only second-generation CAW member to be ordained.
It wasn’t easy, but it was mostly good. My stepping up, stepping into a position of
adulthood made the elders nervous perhaps, or at least led them to recognize the movement
of time. I was 29 when I was finally ordained. I was older than Oberon was when he started
CAW. But I grew up into an existing structure, and we are all products of our environment.
At some point we grew into a multi-generational sense of tribe. Somewhere along the
way the wisdom of age and the wisdom of youth made peace, and we all learned how to learn
from one another. We all claimed our positions as visionaries, dreaming a new age into being.
The people you will read writings from in these pages were, and are, those visionaries:
outlaws, renegades, anarchists, hippies, teachers, dreamers. They are ones who heard the
call of the Divine, and answered that call. Hearts open, eyes wide and wild, and minds
churning, these pioneers took to the path of Spirit, and emerged as both gods and seekers.
I’m the result of a social experiment. I am one piece of proof that this experiment worked.
The revolution of the heart lives on in the lives we build, the rituals we create, the dreams we
live, and the communities we invest in. Generation to generation the vision takes deeper
purchase in the soil. It gestates, seeds, and grows.
And we grow continually closer to the Earth, closer to the gods, closer to living with our
hearts. We are always coming home.
—LaSara WakeRobin Firefox, Beltaine, 2006
Acknowledgements
First off, we’d like to thank everyone who contributed chants, invocations, workings, and rituals to
the original loose-leaf compilation of HOME Cooking (1997) as well as to the present work. There
are too many to list here individually, but each piece is credited.
And thanks also to Meliny Hansen and Wynter Rose, who each spent volunteer days at the Green
Egg office collating the HOME Cooking books.
But most importantly, the genesis of this book, as with its predecessor, emerged organically out of
decades of rituals developed and performed in the context of the Church of All Worlds, and its
subsidiary, the Holy Order of Mother Earth (HOME). These rites especially blossomed into full
manifestation when a number of us came to live and work magick together on the sacred lands of
Coeden Brith, Annwfn, and the encompassing Greenfield Ranch in the Misty Mountains of
Mendocino County, NorCalifia, from the mid-1970s to the present day.
Significant contributors to the evolving HOME liturgy during that formative period include Gwydion
Pendderwen, Anna Korn, Anodea Judith, Eldri Littlewolf, Tom Williams, Avilynn Pwyll, Marylyn
Motherbear, LaSara Firefox, Diane Darling, Sequoia Greenfield, Ayisha Homolka, Aeona Silversong,
Orion Stormcrow, Maerian Morris, Starwhite, Night An’Fey, Wendy Hunter-Roberts, Buffalo
Brownson, and D.J. and Rick Hamouris. All of these are deeply appreciated, and you will find some
of their inspired work within these pages.
We would also like to acknowledge and thank other authors, teachers, mentors, and creative
ritualists whose works have inspired and informed our own. These include Aleister Crowley, Gerald
Gardner, Doreen Valiente, Robert A. Heinlein, Robert H. Rimmer, Frederick MacLauren Adams,
Webster Kitchell, Robert Graves, Deborah Bourbon, Paul Huson, Ed Fitch, Carolyn Clark, Gavin
and Yvonne Frost, Isaac Bonewits, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Bran & Moria Starbuck, Victor
Anderson, Z Budapest, Kenny and Tzipora Klein, Aidan Kelly, Diana Paxson, and Starhawk.
And finally, special extraordinary thanks go to Jack Crispin Cain and Tamar Kaye, who have
devoted over a decade of their lives to being caretakers on Annwfn. Without their dedication to
ensuring the maintenance and survival of Gwydion’s 55-acre legacy, we’d have had no place to hold
many of these rituals, and they might never have come to be.
May you all Never Thirst!
Oberon Zell-Ravenheart 5/1/2006
Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart www.CAW.org