 |
or Paths |
(the building) |
 |
|
Different paths suit different people. Some people need to work in different ways at different times. Some love working different ways at the same time! Many of our one day sessions can also be done on their own. |
|
IN THIS CYLCH: CIRCLEWORK (homepage) A DIY practical ritual guide, FREE download) * THE BOWL: the art of personal purification or focusing * THE CRAFT overview, FREE download page 2 WEB OF LIFE * page 3 EARTH * page 4 |
|
IN "THE CRAFT": page 1 Introduction, FREE download. * page 2 WEB OF LIFE * page 3 EARTH * page 4 CUSTOMS * page 5 SHARING * page 6 ANCESTORS * page 7 CHILDREN * page 8 LEADERS * page 9 CIRCLE * page 10 DIVINITY. |
THE CRAFT
by Shan Morgain, priestess of the Craft.
page 7
The Craft places family, kin, and especially children at the centre of life.The centre of any kin or family is its children.
With no children there is no need to sustain a strong family network, friendship would be enough. Without children homes can be flimsy easily transient things, on a very basic level.
The Craft is often said to be a ‘fertility cult’ and that is true.
Yet fertility is widely misunderstood as the effort to have more young in humans, animals or plants.
The art of fertility wisdom is not just about increasing, but about getting the right balance.
Survival over long periods of human history has often been about having enough: enough children, enough animals, enough to gather, or enough harvest. But it can also be about not breeding too much so as not to overwhelm food supplies.
Fertility is about spacing birth so each child has enough for its sacred needs. Women everywhere try to limit their births so that their children have the best possible chance of survival, and the best chance of a good life.
It is women who carry and bear the children, and nurse them into strength.
The sacred body we each have was built from the body of a woman, who stripped her own body’s strength to do it.
Birth is agony. Every one of us owes a blood debt for life, to a woman.
Most of us love our mothers, though not all. Yet it is natural to push away from our mothers.
At the right time mothers push us away too! needing their own life power back again. But the link remains, forever, regardless of our individual experience of it.
The weight of the birth debt is hard to bear if we have a difficult connection to our mothers. It may be necessary to honour it rarely, or only through the Earth Mother.
Still the birth debt remains, part of a particular respect for women, by both women and men.
Women are not superior. They are not wonderful bundles of peace and joy! – they can be every bit as aggressive and unpleasant as men, though their aggression is typically slower to rise.
What we honour in respecting women, as women, is their female job in birthing and maintaining life.
A child may have more than two parents of different kinds.
All are honoured in different ways. Families have different patterns and all are sacred in the Web of Life.
Men also maintain life. They can and do serve at birth, and through the long years of caring for children.
Occasionally they substitute for a woman to bring up a child as the core parent.
More generally men serve the Web of Life through the way they cherish the mother of a child. Not always their genetic child, but a child from a woman they vow to and care for as her guardian.
Where we have had the guardian gift of fathering, or a second cherishing, we therefore owe a second debt of honour for it.
Some men have to serve by living separately, yet still giving and cherishing as much as they can. Detached fathers (or detached mothers) are in their own way, as heroic as single mothers.
The Craft typically venerates divine images of Mother Goddess and Guardian God. They represent the nature of woman and man in all the many, many ways of being woman, and being man.
It takes many of us together to bring up a child.
We are all parents, and all of us are children.
|
IN "THE CRAFT": page 1 Introduction, FREE download. * page 2 WEB OF LIFE * page 3 EARTH * page 4 CUSTOMS * page 5 SHARING * page 6 ANCESTORS * page 7 CHILDREN * page 8 LEADERS * page 9 CIRCLE * page 10 DIVINITY. |
