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A principle of effective ritual-planning from my friend and colleague Robin Grimm: Do the math.

Question: If each participant at your ritual is to have a two-minute personal experience—an encounter with a deity, say—and there are 60 people in attendance, how long will that take?

Answer: Way too f*ckin' long.

The premise of the Medusa Ritual was a good one, addressing a need that goes largely unaddressed by contemporary pagan liturgy.

None of us live up to our values all the time. All of us have things that we'd like to get off our consciences.

So, the premise of the ritual was: you confess your (to use a good old pagan term) sin to Medusa. She turns your sin to stone, it crumbles into dust, and falls off of you.

Unfortunately, the ritualists hadn't done the math.

One hundred people. A maybe five-minute encounter each with Her Snakeyness.

It was excruciating.

A principle of ritual attendance from my friend and colleague Sparky T. Rabbit: Vote with your hooves. When ritual becomes ritual abuse, get out.

Alas, more easily said than done. I really wanted to vote with my hooves—politely, unobtrusively—at a recent Samhain ritual during which we waited interminably while people had their private “word with the Crone.” Irritable with boredom and low blood sugar, I really wanted to head off to the feast tables.

But I was a guest. To have walked away would have been a rejection of those who had so kindly welcomed me to their circle, and the very real community that our shared presence in that circle constituted.

So I didn't do it. More the fool me, maybe.

When the torture that was the Medusa Ritual was finally over, we sat, soul-numb, around the campfire. The definitive word on the experience was spoken by Gandalf, a much-beloved community elder known for his kindness and generosity of spirit.

“What that ritual needed,” he said, “was Three Medusas, no waiting.”

Mistakes are only bad if we fail to learn from them.

Priest

(faces people, chants)

Let all cell phones be turned off now.

People

So mote it be.

Priest

Let all cell phones be turned off now.

People

So mote it be.

Priest

Let all cell phones be turned off now.

People

So mote it be.

Priest

(spoken)

And so we begin.

(chants)

What is the Five that is Eight?

So goes the old witches' riddle, the answer—of course—being, the Fivefold Kiss.

The Fivefold Kiss is a standard trope of Wiccan liturgy which I've always loved for its whole-hearted affirmation of the sanctity of the body, and for its ritual utility.

(Once, when I encountered a goddess in a field—but that's another story for another night—due to my familiarity with the rite, I was not caught at a loss, but knew the proper way in which to venerate her.)

It's worth mentioning that the witch's greeting "Blessed Be" alludes, elliptically, to this rite, as also to the story of the Lady's Descent to the Underworld.

I've long thought the Fivefold Kiss far too good a text to be confined to a single rite, so I've riffed on it here to produce a song or chant for more general use.

All we need now is a tune.

Have you ever tried to bake a cake from scratch? Not terribly difficult, right? But what if you didn’t have a recipe? That’s pretty much what we’re doing over at Ariadne’s Tribe these days. Bear with me here and I’ll do my best not to flog the metaphor too badly.

Reconstructionist traditions like Hellenism and Ásatru rely on written texts from earlier times for a lot of their information. The Hellenists have all the works that have come down to us from the classical writers, many of whom were devoted to the Hellenic deities themselves; the Ásatru folks have the eddas, the sagas and more.