It’s Wednesday night at the Free Spirit Gathering (FSG). I’ve finally arrived for real, after showing up for the opening ritual Tuesday and then having to run back to Baltimore to take care of problems at the day job. I’m at the Fire Circle, which I am partly responsible for. There are a few people hanging around but no one is drumming, so no one is dancing.
It turns out that we have been cross-scheduled with a trance possession ritual, which is attracting most of the “power” drummers who are on site this early in the event.
“Well, with no drummers I guess no one’s going to show up for Fire Circle tonight. We can do some more cleanup of the space, rake the sand again,” says one of the people I’m working with. We’re behind on that stuff because a few other of our fire crew also had last-minute day job emergencies.
Screw that. We’ve got fire, we’ve got people, we’re going to have so much frickin’ Fire Circle we’re gonna be smiling out our…er, third eyes. Yeah.
I don’t have my doumbek, so I grab a five gallon bucket and a pair of drumsticks that got left behind and packed away a few years back. I head over to the drummer’s bench, upturn the bucket, and start banging a very simple rhythm on it. Dum dum da da dum. Dum dum da da dum.
Dum dum da da dum. Dum dum da da dum.
One of the teens who is apprenticing comes over to ask me something. “Sorry, I can’t talk and drum. I suck at this,” I tell her while fumbling the rhythm, and laugh.
Dum dum da da dum. Dum dum da da dum.
A young man comes over. “Is anyone doing to drum?”
Dum dum da da dum.
‘Do you….” dum dum “…have a drum?” I ask him. Da da dum.
“Yes, but it’s not here.”
“Then…” dum dum ” …it’s up…” da da “…to you,” dum. Dum dum da da dum.
He walks away up the hill, I’m not sure if he’s leaving or going to get that drum. I keep banging on the bucket for a while, then switch over to noodling on my tin whistle for a bit. When you’ve got a group of beginners, no one wants to be the first. But keep something going, and eventually people will join in.
I hope.
Then coming down the hill I hear the welcome sound of a drum. The young man is returning. Inspired, a few more people grab drums. Not many, but we mange to get up to four or five drummers and a few people dancing around the fire. It’s not big but it is a Fire Circle. Magic is accomplished.
* * *
Friday night. For the past few years we’ve designated Friday as “intentional night” at the Fire Circle, where we turn up the ritual structure knob a little and encourage people to do some intentional magical work, and also try to deliberately pass on the culture we’ve built here. About forty-five minutes before the ritual, I’m told that there’s a big change — the group that was going to explain the operation of the Circle in terms of elemental energies has had to bow out.
Ok. I can pull out one of my usual canned explanations of the Fire Circle Triangle and customize it a bit to fill that space. I start talking to myself as I walk around the circle, planning my presentation at the last moment, figuring out how to segue from quoting Aleister Crowley’s statement that “Every intentional act is a Magical act” into an explanation of the magical technology at hand.
With about ten minutes to go we’ve got the ritual part outlined. The people arrive, are smudged into the circle, we welcome them. As I start to speak, someone steps forward and hands me a large cardboard box. It is full of prayers written on pieces of paper, left from the festival’s Main Ritual; I am being given these to give them to the fire. Of course this wasn’t in the plan either. I cannot help but wonder if this is my Good Lady Eris once again having Her way with me, since I had identified with the archetype of the “Contrary” during that Main Ritual.
But we go with it, we make it work. The fire burns until after 4am, when rain chases us away. Magic is accomplished.
* * * * *
Saturday night. The weather map shows a line of red heavy rain heading our way, with flash flood and severe thunderstorm watches in effect for the area. It arrives in a solid wall during our evening concert — S.J. Tucker and Betsy Tinney, who get double karma bonus points for being troupers and playing unplugged when the nearness of lightning strikes prompts our sound man to shut down, lest something go up in smoke or electrocute a musician. While our Fire Crew can get the fire going even in these conditions, lightning and mud prompt us to make the call: no Fire Circle tonight. But we grab a few candles and put them in the center of the pavilion where the concert has been, and get a drum and dance going around them for a few hours.
One of our attendees is blind. He usually has no problem dancing at our Fire Circle — he can sense the fire and hear the drums and keep himself oriented. But the candles aren’t enough heat for him to sense, and the echos in the roofed pavilion make it hard for him to get a sense of the space. I take his arm and we go around the Circle together for a while. A pair of belly dancers brings a sort of heat that make up for the smallness of the physical flames.
* * * * *
I don’t often use the word “faith”, suggestive as it is of supernatural belief. But I thought a lot these nights of something that a character in J. Michael Straczynski’s SF TV series Babylon 5 said: “Faith manages”. In the show we see the wise woman Delenn act according to this maxim, and it is not a matter of praying to some supernatural power, but of acting with confidence and determination. (In fact, JMS identifies as a atheist, yet he’s given one of the most sympathetic portraits of religion — human and extraterrestrial — in modern pop culture. Pagan atheists, take note)
Or to take another SF motto that we have often cited in putting this event together: “We have done the impossible, and that makes us mighty.”
Faith in our own might, our ability to move a corner of the Universe around a little bit.
With this as a basis, magic is accomplished.
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