Snow Circle
last updated: 21.x.2004
page status: update work in progress
Sometime back in the late 1990s, I explicitly expressed my intention never to post ritual material here, but then things began to change. This is intensely personal and subjective material and I needed some fairly good reasons to post them, but such reasons came along and eventually a scrappy set of mismatched pages sort of found themselves cobbled together. Not a good advertisement for ravenfamily.org, so clearly a rethink was required.
Please note that these are emphatically not spells and if you ask anyone on this site for anything like that the most polite response you get is "go away". But, as Geoffrey Ashe wrote of his Grail Ritual in "The Finger and the Moon", I have reason to believe that these are valid rituals.
Back to the story. In terms of development, the whole thing started with sharing some of my research on a few mediæval ‘heretical’ sects. I’m not going to cite the historical material – believe me, you’ll have more fun tracking it down on your own - but when I began to think it would be fun to ‘reverse engineering’ a sex-magic ritual, I also used as a basis some technical research in anthropology and neuroscience:
The development of the rituals themselves is documented in:
Chronologically, one of the ‘novenas’ (using the term quite loosely) followed, but I’ve grouped the pair of them together at the end, for reasons that will become obvious. In between I did a reasonable amount of work in various styles, of which two minimalist items might be useful to someone else:
- the 'Feast Cantrip', which descended from free*lite
- a response to the challenge at the end of the cantrip
And finally we come to the ‘novenas’. While I was preparing for the revamp of this section, I started discussing them on the mailing list. The results were, to say the least, ‘interesting’. So I’ve added some notes based on the feedback. The two here were written for different purposes: one to investigate my research on ‘Admonishing Lady’ and the other for a specific purpose for a friend, although I’ve done it a few times myself:
- a summary of the discussion from the list
- Fiat Monas: A Novena for Admonishing Lady
- some notes on putting one of these things together
- Snow Circle: A Novena for the White Lady"
Those two are actually from a set of four. The first is missing because, frankly, it wasn’t much cop. The third is missing because I still don’t really want to go there again and certainly don’t want to tell anyone else how to be quite that stupid. Just as a warning, one particular piece of stupidity (though unrelated to that particular incident) is documented in:
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