September has been declared Real Power Month.
Hecate says so - that settles it.
"From time to time, various Pagan bloggers have declared certain months to be devoted to various topics: Pagan Values was a recent one. I'd like to suggest that the Paganii of Blogistan devote September to discussions of : How do we offer real sacraments? Real experience? Raise real cones of real power?"
For me, real power consists of real relationship.
Being an intense introvert, I hardly ever feel that spark of real power in an open, public (or even large private) ritual. Instead, one or two other people in the circle with me is more than enough. Flesh and blood people, that is.
For my connection to the source winds through each relationship I have forged on the planes, or other worlds.
My Spirit Totems connect me with the physical plane and the present, my Ancestors connect me with the etheric and the past, and my Deities with the future and all so-called 'higher' planes out from the etheric.
I myself, a nexus for this web of connections, am both intimately immanent in all worlds and transcendent of them.
Let me come at this from another angle.
I love humanity very much. All of them, even murdering bastards and child rapists. They are the physical representations of the divine consciousness. But I don't love them more than pied crows, black panthers, silver oaks and streptococcus bacteria.
In a large gathering of human beings, I would have to have an established relationship with each individuated soul to feel any real power in the working - and that, given my introversion and habitual avoidance of human relation, is perhaps not so likely to happen in this lifetime of mine.
Wrong? Maybe, but it feels right for me.
My web-connection to the All through my companions between and upon the other worlds is a strong two-way conductor, and it is in this way that I have learnt to offer real sacrament, gain real knowledge and wield real, effective power.
It probably is not so for you - but I would be interested in learning of the many ways that other humans have established their embededness into the workings of real power.
Oh, but this is a huge and complex topic. I'm going to have to come back to it again throughout this Month of Real Power.
Pic: Thre Tree(or Hanged Man) from Joanna Powell Colbert's Gaian Tarot
Well, as someone who consistently pins out at 98 or 100% introverted on those Myers-Briggs tests, I totally hear you. It's been a very long time since I've been in a circle, like nearly ten years now. I don't know that I've ever felt that 'spark of real power', as you call it, while it was happening. I don't know if I'm just concentrating on other things at the time, or that I don't know what I'm looking at. Looking back on things I am always surprised when it turns out to have been more powerful and useful than I would have thought. Perhaps that makes me a bad Witch, I don't know.
ReplyDeleteI don't connect with people easily. I don't know that I could ever come to trust anyone as completely as it sounds like ritual requires, I don't know. It seems to come down to trust for me.
Perhaps I have ambiguous feelings about 'power', too, and that's part of it.
But then it never feels like something out of the ordinary. If I do a reading for someone, for example, they will usually tell me it is startlingly accurate, but it won't feel to me like anything other than making up whatever pops into my head. Perhaps it is my expectations? I will have to think about this some more.
As for non flesh and blood people, yeah, I know a few. I haven't really thought to do any Work with them, though. Or, probably, I have done plenty but again don't recognize it as such.