Wicca by Scott Cunningham Read Free Book Online Page B

conscious mind and speak to the deep consciousness, the psychic awareness.Music and dance emotionally involve us in Wiccan rites.
    The thought of dancing, singing, or making music embarrasses some of us. This is a natural outgrowth of our increasingly repressive society. In Wicca, however, dance and music occur before the deities alone. You aren’t performing for a crowd, so don’t worry about missing a note or tripping over your feet. They don’t care, and no one ever need know what you do before the Gods in your rites.
    Even the most unmusically inclined can bang two rocks together, shake a rattle, clap hands, or walk in circles. To this day, some of the most established and effective Wiccan covens utilize a simple circular run around the altar to raise power. So much for fancy ritual choreography.
    Here’s some traditional lore concerning dance,music, and gesture. If you find it appealing, feel free to incorporate it into your Wiccan rituals. But one suggestion: if you find your rites stuffy and unsatisfying, if they don’t create a link with the deities, the problem may be a lack of emotional content. Music and dance can produce true involvement in the ritual and so open your awareness of the Goddess and God. During magic they may produce freer access to energy.
    Music
    Music is simply a re-creation of the sounds of nature. Wind through trees, the roar of the ocean hurling itself against jagged cliffs, pattering rain, the crackling of a lightning-produced fire, the cry of birds, and roars of animals are some of the “instruments” that constitute the music of nature.
    Human beings have long integrated music into religious and magical rituals for its powerful effects. Shamans use a steady drum beat to induce trance, and a drum can be used to control the pace of magical dance. Then too,music has long been celebrated for calming ferocious animals—and humans as well.*
    Music can be a part of Wiccan workings today. You might simply find appropriate pieces, selected from classical, ethnic, folk, or contemporary sources, and play these during rituals. Musically inclined Wiccans can create music before, during, or after the ritual.
    My most satisfying and vivid rituals often involve music. I remember one day I hid a small tape-recorder behind a tree in the Laguna Mountains. Strangely, the music didn’t intrude on the setting of wildflowers, towering pines, and ancient oaks, but heightened my solitary ritual.
    If you have proficiency with an instrument,work it into your rituals. A flute, violin, recorder, guitar, folk harp, and other small instruments can easily be introduced into ritual, as can drums, rattles, bells, or even glasses of water and a knife with which to strike them. Other less portable instruments can be recorded and played back during ritual.
    Such musical interludes can be used directly prior to the rite to set the mood; during, as an offering to the Goddess and God or to rouse energy; and afterward in pure celebration and joy. Some Wiccans compose a song that is in actuality a rite, encompassing everything from the creation of sacred space and invoking the deities to thanking them for their presence.Music magic is truly what you decide to make it.
    Four distinct types of instruments have specific powers. The drum, rattle, xylophone, and all percussion instruments (save for the sistrum) are ruled by the element of earth. Thus, such instruments can be used to invoke fertifity, increase money, find a job, and so on. They can also be used to invoke the Goddess in ritual, or to “drum up” energy to send to the earth.
    The flute, recorder, and all wind instruments are under the dominion of air, the intellectual element, and so can be used to increase mental powers or visualization abilities, to discover ancient wisdom or knowledge, to improve psychic faculties, and to call upon the God.
    Fire rules stringed instruments such as the lyre, harp (full-size or folk), guitar, mandolin, ukelele, and so on. Such