In Pursuit of Mysteries

Quote of the Day

“Odi profanum vulgus et arceo”

- Horace 65 B.C.

Concentric Circles

Well, we survived our public ritual yesterday. This is something that we really only wind up doing once a year and we usually do it without a huge amount of notice and without a lot of practice. Of course, knowing this, we do ritual work where we don’t need a lot of practice. The core of the group (three of us now) have been doing ritual together for a few years now so we don’t normally trip over each other or anything similar.

I had spent a chunk of the previous evening mixing a CD of the planetary tones. We had source material (I’m not sure what instrument was used to make it) which had each of the planetary tones in series for a bit over a minute each in one track of less than fifteen minutes. This wasn’t very versatile for when you want to use the tones for other things so I used soundforge to pull that track off of the CD, separated out the section for each planet, looped each of individual planetary tones for about 8 1/2 minutes (with some cross-fading to blend it) and then burned each back to their track. The result is CD with each of the planetary tones as its own track for enough time to do a short meditation. We used the Lunar one as the base noise to go with the contemplation instructions in our lunar ritual.

No one freaked and the ritual seemed to be fairly well received. Sarastro did a good job and didn’t go fetal on us. ;-) (Like I said, public ritual isn’t a normal thing for us as a group.)

For God and Country

I’m off soon to go play a minor role that my little lodge, the Citadel of the Ouroboros, is playing at Concentric Circles today. This is a local pagan community event. We did a ritual last year, not terribly complex but with lots of people attending, and got asked back this year. We decided to do something much smaller this time. got suckered into leading it as the senior member of the group (and because I did it last year).

Technically, I can get into the whole event for free but I find that there really isn’t much on the calendar that I am interested in attending. I’ll meander out there eventually.

Our lodge (”citadel”) maintains a small internal website (quite protected, thank you) and I’ve been doing a lot of work on cleaning it up and updating it this week. I’ve let it moulder over the last year to year and a half since we shifted our focus heavily into Ogdoadic work. I should also be putting the Archon rituals that I wrote for the elements up on Ogdoadic.com soon. They are simple invocations of the Archons (the archangels of our tradition) associated with the elements and using the platonic solids as a ritual focus but I like them.