Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
Peeing on the Fire Hydrant
“Why don't we invoke a unicorn in each quarter?”
Och na noch. We're at that uncomfortable point in the ritual-planning process at which we've got the central concept in place, which we now need to flesh out into a full ritual.
Time for everyone to pee on the fire hydrant.
Naturally, A wants to invoke a unicorn in each quarter: A loves unicorns. For A, everything is better with unicorns.
Unfortunately, unicorns have nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of the ritual.
We're mammals. By nature, we want to mark our territory.
But there's an overriding issue here. Will a unicorn in each quarter make this a stronger, better ritual?
In the planning of ritual, as in other collective social endeavors, we sometimes, for a short while, need to lay aside our natural desire to leave our scent-mark, for the sake of ritual integrity.
I recently saw George R. R. Martin kvetching about precisely this problem as he commented disapprovingly on what the script-writers have done to his House of the Dragon. “Every writer thinks that they can improve the story,” he observed. “Nine times out of ten, they end up weakening it instead.”
It's the same with ritual. Twelve times out of thirteen, the changes that people want to make are mere scent-marks.
But, of course, there's always that thirteenth time.
In the end, we manage to hammer together a nice, tight script for our ritual with (after some truly impressive collective effort) minimal damage to A's ego.
Sans unicorns, thank Goddess.
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