Welcome to the humble beginnings of Black Raven Morris.
Black Raven Morris is a strange creature. We do not dance as a side, we have not, as yet, performed in public, and, due to the disparate locations of our members, are unlikely to do so in the near future. The identities of our members are not available for public consumption, for the way we work means a certain air of mystery aids in our progress. I would like to say we meet in secret, wearing cowled robes and masks, and referring to each other only as "fellow morris man", but that would be fibbing.
Black Raven Morris came about entirely by accident, but the story of how that happened will not make sense unless we explain the basis for our side.
We are a theoretical morris side.
We construct dances, engineering them from hints and clues, using magical dreams and vision quests. We hear of Deity-specific dances that have been lost in time (like tears in rain) and we do our best to reconstruct a facsimile using hints and clues we obtain from a wide variety of sources.
Once a dance has been constructed we try it out on (mostly unsuspecting) morris sides at workshops to see what the effect is. So far it has been most satisfactory.
We started out when one of our members, who is one of Raven's children, was at a talk on the Goddess Holda being given by Jack Gale, at which he described a dance based around the snowflake variety of the Hagall rune. The hexagonal shape of the rune was reminiscent of a dance performed by another morris side, and collaboration was immediately sought with other like-minded individuals over reconstructing a suitable dance for the Goddess Holda. The results of that collaboration were presented by Jack Gale in a following talk on the Goddess, in which he attributed the dance, unprompted, to Black Raven Morris.
How could we refuse a prompt like that?
So, while we may not be the most productive morris side, nor the most visually exciting, we do have certain attributes that no other side can claim. In many senses, we do not really exist. We operate in a shadowy world just this side of consensus reality, and we kind of like it that way.
If you have a dance you wish to reconstruct, if you have seen a dance in a dream, or been sent a vision of a dance, or have heard of a dance that was used to honour a deity and think it might interest us, please contact us and tell us as much as you can. We might be able to do something with it for you.
Contact address: morris@ravenfamily.org