Class III: About Rituals
Texas. Morning Glory had pieced together her own
path of “Shamanic Wicca” out of personal experiences
and published materials. I had founded the Church of
All Worlds, and been trained in Italian Strega and
Ceremonial Magick by Deborah Letter in St. Louis, as
well as Ozark “Druidism,” Greek and Egyptian myth
and ritual. The three of us integrated our respective
training into a coherent system, and formed the Coven
of Ithil Duath (“Moon Shadow”) to practice it. That
Winter and the following Spring, Morning Glory and I
refined all these materials and practices into an orga-
nized magickal study course, which we taught at Lane
Community College as “Celtic Shamanism.”
In July of 1977, Morning Glory and I moved to
Coeden Brith (“Speckled Forest”), a 220-acre parcel
on the 5,600-acre NorCalifia homesteading community
called Greenfield Ranch. Coeden Brith was owned by
Alison Harlow. The 55-acre parcel next door had re-
cently been acquired by Gwydion Pendderwen, a
Welsh Bard and co-founder of the Faerie Tradition.
Together we founded the Holy Order of Mother Earth
as a magickal order of land stewardship and ritual.
Other magickal residents of the Ranch included
people with backgrounds in Faerie Tradition, Dianic
Wicca, the New Reformed Order of the Golden Dawn
(NROOGD), Hindu, and Native American practices.
We began meeting and working magick together, and
over the next eight years, through Moon cycles, rites
of passage, seasonal celebrations and daily practice,
we wove all those strands together into a unique tra-
dition that was actually rooted in our own daily and
seasonal lives on the magick land, thus giving rise to
a new magickal path: the HOME Tradition. The course
materials Morning Glory and I had developed for our
classes in Eugene provided a foundation for our de-
veloping Grimoire of Lights and Shadows.
Other members of the Greenfield ranch commu-
nity came to join our HOME Circles, and the tradition
grew. We planted trees and gardens, raised pet deer
and unicorns, sang our songs and told our stories
around the campfire. Babies were born on the land,
blessed in ritual, and raised up in the Circle,
assimilating our customs and traditions
into a new generation. In our growing
magickal community we actually lived
the legendary lives of our ancient
tribal forebears. In 1983, Anodea
Judith founded Lifeways School, cre-
ating a “Magick 101” training program
based on the rituals and materials we
had all developed over the years in
HOME. Many people took these classes
and were trained in the HOME magickal tradi-
tion. Meanwhile, we all moved off the land to other- Introduction to Rituals
—abstracted from “Creating Rituals,”
by Hallie Inglehart (HOME Cooking, 1997)
ITUALS ARE A WAY TO FOCUS AND
acknowledge our energy and
awareness. We all perform ritu-
als throughout the day—some
more conscious than others—
that influence and support our
attitudes and behavior. We get
dressed in the morning, we cel-
ebrate our birthdays, we meet with others, we mark
major events in our lives. The quality that makes “or-
dinary” life a ritual is very subtle. Lighting a candle
and burning incense do not alone make a ritual, but
the state of mind and awareness accompanying or
resulting from an action does. Ritual is a metaphor for
all of conscious living.
Mythology, archaeology, linguistics, art, and his-
tory tell us of the magickal rituals that our ancestors
performed. Caves as wombs of the Earth Mother were
natural sites for birth and rebirth rituals, and the carved
and painted animals and plants, and markings of the
cycles of the moon and seasons still preserved in some
of these caves are vivid reminders of ancient rituals.
In the past, ritual was a comprehensive celebration
and expression of human creativity and cyclic regen-
eration. Many of our arts—theater, poetry, and song—
originally evolved as parts of one ritual-making pro-
cess. As people became more alienated from Nature
and their inner selves, the arts became isolated from
each other and fragmented from their original unifying
spiritual source. We can still feel the spiritual power of
ritual in the best of art, however. The energy of perfor-
mance is very similar to that of ritual: the intense fo-
cus, the channeling of energy, the exchange of energy
between performers and audience.Lesson 2. The HOME Tradition
I have learned my Wizardry from many
teachers and have been initiated into a
number of groups. However, the
magickal tradition with which I am most
closely aligned is the Holy Order of
Mother Earth, or HOME. The roots of
HOME were planted in the Fall of 1976,
when Morning Glory and I arrived in
Eugene, Oregon and met Anna Korn. She
had been trained in a British Tradition of
Dianic Witchcraft (focused on Diana, the Moon
Goddess) by Mark Roberts and Morgan McFarland inCorrected pages 3rd printing.2.p65 7 6/10/2004, 4:02 PM