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Internet Book of Shadows, (Various Authors), [1999], at sacred-texts.com


 
 
      This article is excerpted from the Rocky Mountain Pagan Journal.
      Each issue of the Rocky Mountain Pagan Journal is published by
      High Plains Arts and Sciences; P.O. Box 620604, Littleton Co., 
      80123, a Colorado Non-Profit Corporation, under a Public Domain
      Copyright, which entitles any person or group of persons to 
      reproduce, in any form whatsoever, any material contained therein
      without restriction, so long as articles are not condensed or 
      abbreviated in any fashion, and credit is given the original
      author.!
 
      THE MEN'S CIRCLE
      (c)1986, by Robin
 
           The Rocky Mountain Men's Group has put in a good deal of
      time the past two or three months working on a Manhood Ritual for
      initiating young males into adulthood. We still don't have a
      complete ritual that we are all satisfied with, but a good start
      has been made.  Some of the approaches taken in creating this
      kind of ritual have drawn upon traditional tribal rites of
      passage.  Some of these tribal manhood rituals include taking the
      young candidate abruptly away from his family to an isolated
      spot, where he must remain for a long period of time, usually
      blindfolded and bound in the dark.  Part of the ritual may
      involve physical pain such as tattooing, circumcision or
      ceremonial infliction of cuts that leave characteristic scars.
      Even leaving out the physical cutting, these rites deliberately
      put the young candidate through frightening, isolating and
      painful experiences. 
 
           No one has seriously proposed any ritual that leaves
      permanent scars on the candidate's body, but even so some feel
      that putting an innocent youngster through a traumatic experience
      is insensitive.  It seems to me that this attitude misses the
      point.  It is not a lack of compassion that is being expressed. 
      There is no single word for it in English, it is a willingness to
      inflict (or at least allow) pain in order to teach a necessary
      lesson that cannot be conveyed in any other way.  As sensitivity
      is usually considered a light feminine quality, so this
      complement is a dark masculine quality.
 
           Is this dark masculine quality desirable - or even ethical? 
      I think it is.  There are elements of it in the Wiccan Initiation
      Rituals and the symbolism of the Scourge.  It partially explains
      some of the Legend of the Descent of the Goddess into the
      Underworld - where the Goddess only learns to love the God after
      being scourged by Him.  "Remember this - that you must suffer in
      order to learn".  Although many people are put off by the dark
      quality of this particular attribute of the Masculine, it is
      important to remember that although not pretty, it is necessary. 
      Perhaps the following story will illustrate this point.
 
 
                                                                              761
 
           A boy around eight or nine years old once found a very large
      caterpillar.  It was dark green, as long and thick as a man's
      finger, and decorated with curious stalky and warty protuberances
      in blue, red, and bright yellow.  Since it was nearly the end of
      summer, he took it home and put it in a large open jar, and kept
      it supplied with leaves of the type he had seen it eating.  After
      a couple of months it began to spin a cocoon about itself.   He
      watched this with fascination, and when the cocoon was complete,
      he put the jar on a shelf of his screened back porch, where it
      remained through the winter.  When the days began to lengthen and
      the weather grew warmer he checked the jar every morning and
      afternoon, waiting for a little miracle of rebirth.  One Saturday
      morning his patience was rewarded.  There was movement within the
      cocoon and a small hole had appeared.  The boy watched in
      fascination as the hole became larger and the reborn creature
      inside struggled to emerge.  The struggle went on for what seemed
      to the boy a long time and he began to feel sorry for the trapped
      insect.  Out of compassion, he ran off and returned with a pair
      of his mother's smallest, finest, scissors.  Carefully he
      enlarged the hole, and then stood back to watch a beautifully
      patterned moth emerge into the light of day.  The moth spread its
      folded wings, moving them gently to dry in the air.  Their tan-
      and-gray markings seemed to the boy to be one of the most
      beautiful things he had ever seen.  When the moth's wings seemed
      dry, he carefully held the jar to the outside of the porch screen
      so that it could crawl out.  He planned to watch it until it flew
      away to find a mate.  The moth crawled onto the screen and
      perched there.  It flapped its wings from time to time but did
      not fly.  When evening came, several male moths came and
      fluttered about the female clinging to the screen, but although
      she seemed to be trying to fly off and join them, she never moved
      from where she was.  She stayed where she was for three or four
      days, and finally died and fell to the ground.  The boy later
      learned that the struggle to emerge from the cocoon is so
      prolonged for moths and butterflies because the long effort
      serves to pump necessary fluids into their wings and strengthen
      them for flight.  By shortening this process, to spare the moth
      pain, he had prevented her wings from fully developing and so she
      could never fly and mate and lay the eggs of the next generation.
      ......Robin
      ......from RMPJ Oct. '86
 
 
                                                                              762
 


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