Novenas
last updated: 07.i.2005
page status: update work in progress
I’d like to start by pointing out that these rituals are ‘Novenas’ only in the loosest sense: they do have nine verbal sections but ‘place’ and ‘task’ are also important. I now know that there are many such moving meditations in Europe but I first encountered it in a ‘Rosary around Walsingham’, where each of the rosary meditations is linked with a specific location in the village. I like the place greatly and I’d assure both residents and fans that no offence is meant by my mentioning the rosary on this site, it’s just the most easily accessible booklet if anyone wants to see the model from which I worked.
I’ve written four over the years: the first and third will remain unpublished, the first because frankly it wasn’t much cop, the third because it had unexpectedly dangerous side effects and I don’t want to encourage anyone else to try it. But Fiat Monas, which was written as an attempt to work with the Admonishing Lady material, works well and Snow Circle, which was written for a friend, seems to be a useful little thing. However, both of them have sparked some heated debates between Sam and myself, which I’ll summarise here so that you can decide whether you want to read on or just quit at this point.
Sam started by saying that she didn’t understand what was happening. I explained that the blank verses on the left hand side are derived from the original material - either background from Admonishing Lady or, in the case of Snow Circle a basic completion ritual. As with the Walsingham Rosary, each verse is then associated with a specific location. In Admonishing Lady the journey was linear, whereas in Snow Circle it’s - errm, well, you’ve guessed.
The words on the right are culturally determined construals of the combination of verse and place. The walking and some task serve to initiate some level of light trance, which facilitate the construals. Sam pointed out that she found some of the stuff on the right hand side more familiar: unsurprising as Sam herself forms part of my cultural determination.
Sam is particularly unhappy with some of the material which to her comes over as excessively Marian. This is unfortunate since I’m quite attached to it, but in any case I can’t change what happened, just record it faithfully: on the list I said something trite like ‘it isn’t my fault that Christianity nicked the best bits of the pre-existing material’, but I think Sam may suspect that my background is showing through. Actually, this isn’t the case. Although I was brought up in the Christian church, it was a branch of it that gets very uptight at the mention of Marian mysticism. I’ve thought long and hard about what’s happening and the best I can come up with is that since Fiat Monas was the first successful one, the contact with a very feminine entity has bled through into Snow Circle as well.
Movement and task? Well, Snow Circle is a five-mile track and Fiat Monas nine miles (or three hundred or so the second time around, but that’s another story). Long enough to be taxing but short enough not to be dangerous if you take the right precautions (do as I say, not as I do). The ‘task’ for Snow Circle is to take well-water to the first water location and pouring it in, drawing more water from the second water location to carry home. Any tasks would work but this is simple and appropriate.
Sam reckons the words shouldn’t matter and in a very real sense they don’t. For Snow Circle the locations were extremely carefully chosen and virtually any words would work - it’s just that these are coherent and were developed along with the locations. For Fiat Monas the words on the right were my key to the material I was working with. The unpublished one that went wrong was nineteen miles cross-country including an overnight stop. I hadn’t seen the locations in advance and a couple were very unwisely chosen. The words weren’t specific enough to undo the damage of the locations, and the next one was written to be used by someone else, so the words in Snow Circle were specifically written to fail safe, as an insurance policy.
We solved the problem of location before finishing Snow Circle and there are some notes later on how this was done, together with some ideas for refining the technique for my new project, a five-location ‘mystery’ meditation.
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