New Moon Ritual: October 2024
Irene Glasse, a friend and local pagan leader, speaks a lot about how spirit communicates to us using images and metaphors that will make sense to us. The more we read, take in art, or engage with other forms of media, the larger the “vocabulary” spirit has to work with as they shape messages out of sensory memory. All to say, props to whatever spirit was rooting around in there and decided to dig out a scene from the 2004 Spider-Man 2 movie with Tobey Maguire.
Behind the Scenes: New Moon Ritual
Sometimes we forget that social media is a heavily curated space. You generally see the best take, or the result of hours of editing and mixing. When witches or pagans share their experiences they tend to be the most revelatory or transcendent, or the spells that exceeded all expectations. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, mind you, I just think it can set up unrealistic expectations for others, especially folks new to witchcraft or paganism. And, when their own spells, rituals, or experiences don’t work out it can lead to a sense of defeatism.
To that end, I decided no to just skip this month’s New Moon Dream Ritual, but to share that it was a total flop. Some of that is probably due to some formulaic tweaking which did not have the intended results. Before I can talk about what I changed, however, we have to talk about what the ritual is and how it came to be.
New Moon Ritual: August 2024
Imagine reliving a “greatest hits” of the times in your life when you felt most powerless. Sounds great, right? That is how the message of this ritual started. Admittedly, I was buckling up for a long night.
Ritual: “Sunlight Is The Best Disinfectant” Summer Solstice Ritual
As I’m writing this, misinformation and disinformation are flooding social media as part of a coordinated global campaign to undermine democracy and fully rupture any attempt at consensus reality. In the midst of the 2024 general election, one party is helmed by an actual insurrectionist who has a 50/50 shot at reclaiming power and establishing a theocratic autocracy in the United States, all of which is enabled by members of that party spewing outright lies without any meaningful pushback. Every week we seem to uncover yet another example of right-wing billionaires buying votes on the Supreme Court.
The ritual outlined below builds upon this idea and weaves in the energy of the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year, with the goal of dragging these lies and liars into the stark light of the sun. This ritual harnesses the powerful solar energy of this time of the year to shine a spotlight on their corruption. This ritual calls in the purifying flames of the sun to burn away the darkness to expose their machinations.
The Ritual of Pride
Instead of making offers to the land to ensure an abundance of grain we are instead planting seeds of hope to sustain us through the next year. We celebrate our continued survival in the face of systems and ideologies that would seek to erase and destroy us, and mourn those we have lost to violence and oppression. We lift up our dead in prayer, song, dance, sex, and celebration to ensure their stories carry on.
New Moon Ritual: June 2024
I’m writing this morning feeling a mix of restless and well-rested. My jaw hurts from clenching it throughout the night. That’s probably because the message that came through was about fear and anxiety, and some of the way that manifested was through feeling these things very deeply at various points throughout the night.
New Moon Ritual: May 2024
To be honest, I probably should have skipped this month’s ritual. The last few weeks have been incredibly hectic and stressful, and I didn’t even realize until halfway through the day that it was the new moon. But, because of my ADHD, it’s really important to me to maintain a routine so I decided to stick with it.
New Moon Ritual: April 2024
You know that meme about the witch that forgets what day it is and then scrambles to put together their ritual with whatever is laying around the house? That wasn’t quite me for this new moon, but it was close. I totally lost track of time and didn’t realize the new moon coincided with the eclipse. Suffice it to say, this was a very interesting experience.
New Moon Ritual: March 2024
This month’s New Moon Ritual resulted in another very visual, visceral experience similar to the first ritual that resulted in this monthly endeavor. I’m a few days late in posting this because it took a while to figure the words, and even now I’m not entirely sure I’m capturing everything and doing the experience justice. I’m going to provide a brief narrative of what I experienced, followed by a few closing thoughts on what meaning I am finding. That doesn’t mean you’ll walk away from this with the same understandings.
New Moon Ritual: January 2024
Once I stopped getting in my own way, I was able to receive and process the power behind this message. For those of us in marginalized communities, especially those that don’t fit the worldview of the cis white supremacist Christian Nationalism that has roared to power, I think we sometimes forget how one of the most powerful tools of resistance we have in our arsenal is love.