Aug 31 2008
Calling Quarters in Ritual with Diverse Attendees
I mentioned earlier that designing ritual for events like Between the Worlds can be challenging because while the majority of the participants are neo-pagan, they are not all wiccan. There are a number of neo-pagan paths that do not use the ritual framework of calling the quarters and invoking the God and Goddess made popular by Wicca. Facilitating rituals for these types of mixed populations can be difficult. I’ve found that as a queer spiritual pracitioner, it makes sense to create a new framework for these types of events.
One part of these new framework that I’ve discovered works well is to replace calling the quarters with something that doesn’t have a particular set meaning in an existing tradition but that all attendees can relate to as queer people. I’ve found that invoking the 6 colors of the rainbow flag makes for an interesting ritual that queer people can easily relate to while remaining agnostic towards any particular pagan path. I invoke the colors and the energies typically associated with those colors. The correspondences I use are:
- RED - Passion, power, strength
- ORANGE - Creativity & sexuality
- YELLOW - Personal Power & Responsibility
- GREEN - Love, the Heart, Compassion
- BLUE - Communication, truth, willingness to speak up
- PURPLE - Manifestation, imagination, activism for change
Where I’ve used this invocation in place of the quarters I’ve found that the resulting ritual was uniquely a queer spiritual ritual and didn’t strongly draw on imagery from any one path. As a result, the attendees where less focuses on how their spiritual practices differ and more focused on their commonality as spiritual queer people. I hope it works for you as well.
