Panmankey

I really feel the need to do some writing today, and settled on writing a blog entry after debating whether or not one could use wine as a divination tool.  I know the idea sounds preposterous (especially if you are sober, maybe not so much if you are drunk), but I was mulling around some ideas for Dionysian-mass market publisher friendly rituals and that was one of my brainstorms.  "Jason says use red wine for things involving love, white wine for financial questions."  Of course that's all utter-bullshit but I'm sure I could write it in such a way as to sound credible.

I've totally pulled a lazy this summer and have decided to not write any new workshops for a few months.  This summer will all be re-tread things while I work in the previously mentioned rituals for Dionysus, Pan, Shiva, etc.  I love writing ritual, but I find rituals focusing on only one god kind of daunting.  It probably comes from that Wiccan idea of "balance."  I like male and female energy in the room with me, and while there are certainly times where you want more of one than the other, I find it hard to keep both totally out of anything.  I guess I could write rituals with Pan and his girlfriend(s), Dionysus and Ariadne, etc, but then the deity specific ritual starts to feel like any other Contemporary Pagan Ritual.

While I'll sometimes pretend a ritual is all about a particular deity, a closer look at the ritual tends to reveal that that's not usually the case.  The Morrison Ritual has a dose of Aphrodite in it equal to the shot of Dionysus, and the Pan Ritual I did at Convocation in February had three nymphs and only one Pan.  Reading most published books about ritual the bar is set pretty low for deity-specific rituals, you'd think I could come up with something.

I will be writing a new workshop this fall (just in time for Pantheacon/Convocation) about what I call the "Horned God of Britain," that is Cernunnous, The Green Man, and Herne the Hunter.  That "of Britain" part is not entirely true, but it's close, and those three figures interlock nicely, mostly in Great Britain too.  After workshops on Pan, Dionysus, and Kokopelli I thought it was time.  (I will never, ever, write a workshop about Shiva by the way, just far too complicated for me.)  I'm pretty excited about this workshop, but since the source material is extremely limited, it might end up being just 20 minutes (kidding).