Imbolc, What Happened.

[badstar]

It started with this two Fridays ago:

http://fuego.livejournal.com/485293.html

After that, I just thought "Okay, no big deal. I attend ritual as a respectful member of the community, I make no offerings, I don't drink from the waters of life. I only do things that are common to every ritual."

So I volunteered to do two things:

1. The invitation. This is beyond "common to ritual". We do it every week. I've heard it at least once a week for over two years now. I can say it in my sleep.

2. Opening the gates. Lemme tell ya, I really like opening the gates. Especially after I was almost knocked on my ass from what we did at Yule (By the way, skye_windsinger, your little bit of choreography was really cool, we'll have to try that again with a bit of practice.)

(By default, gate opening also meant that I would carry one of the chalices around with the waters of life. so...technically, I was doing three things.)

In retrospect, I think I would have been okay had I not been involved with the gate opening. Yes, it's part every ritual, but it's also ritual-specific in dealing with the Gatekeeper for the occasion.

So it was a little weird when at the beginning of the ritual, I started to forget words from the invitation, which I know very well and was reciting to myself only minutes before. But it was okay, those words I forgot, I replaced with other appropriate words. People ad lib the invitation frequently, I've done it myself before. And it was good.

And everything was going okay until Jack was doing his invocation of The Dagda. I realized that the sickles that we use for the gates were not in the center of the santuary. They're usually placed there during setup) Mark ran into get them and was out before Jack finished. And I carried the sickles into the center and Chrissy, Courtney and I placed them in their usual triskele arrangement and the song was sang and we picked them up and I started speaking. I got about one sentence out and was in the middle of the second when I heard quite clearly in my mind "Let's see you recover from this one." And...I couldn't speak. It was like something had paralized my vocal cords The words I was supposed to say were clear in my mind. I opened my mouth again, but I couldn't make them come out. After mayb 30 seconds, I had to give up. I had already screwed it up and I wasn't doing any good holding the ritual up any longer. Once I decided it was best to let them go on without me, my voice came back and I just said "I can't do this." and went inside.

And that's about all there was to that. I was kinda antisocial for a while during revels. I couldn't deal with the noise and chaos, and it was too cold to go outside so I hid upstaris in Matt and Jackie's apartment for a little while. And then I came down again and I was fine, though perhaps very slightly delerious by the time I got home.

Comments

[sherarara.livejournal.com]

I'm always very interested with your posts about religion. As an archaeologist, we don't get a lot of things about modern perceptions of the things that we dig up (like, what the hell did people really think about an omphalos?! Sure, we've got theories . . . ). Certainly, quite a lot of the perceptions out there look at Hellenism as a pseudo-religion, but I love getting the perspective you provide. Completely different, and completely enlightening in a number of ways.

Anyway, yeah. I've probably been giving too much thought to this lately. We've been all over the latest news about the renewal of Greek polytheism in several of my classes these past few weeks. Sorry if I embarrased :)

[fuego.livejournal.com]

Nah, it's cool. I'm not embarassed.

I've been thining I should write more about it...maybe I will.

[leiacat.livejournal.com]

Not being pagan I'm poorly equipped to offer an opinion, but to my eye the message here is pretty unambiguous: it looks to me like you need to have a good long talk with your own pantheon, and figure out how your interactions with other deities and your community should be worked. When something that is normally easy and routine is impossible, there's gotta be a reason for it. Good luck with figuring it out.

[fuego.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the suggestion.

It's my own pantheon that has a problem. It's the Irish pantheon. Why, I'm not sure. I mean...I've always known that I'm not a follower of the Irish gods, but I guess they've decided that they've had enough of me, even as merely a "respectful member of the community" or whatnot.

[leiacat.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's exclusively the Irish, especially considering the cameo appearance by Hestia a couple of weeks ago. But even if it does turn out that the Irish are the ones with the problem, to me it sounds like a sensible idea to talk it over with your own first, see where they stand, and perhaps see if any insight can be gained that way.