Last weekend, the Grove held our Rivros working, which is a rite to Sucellos for the Frost Month. Originally, I’d conceptualized doing “frost giant work” here in the Frost Month, but ended up going with Sucellos, the “Good Striker,” instead of the frost giants. Probably for the best.
This rite has shifted in some interesting ways, though. It’s about setting your boundaries, intended always in the physical sense when I wrote it a decade ago. You take your stones, and strike them into the earth with a hammer to set your space as firmly as possible.
As I was doing the rite this year, being in a recent headspace to be all about consent and all about creating healthy boundaries, I realized that the wording worked really well to set other boundaries as well. And so, the working became more explicitly consent-oriented.
I asked Rev. Avende about the language and how interesting it was to come to the notion that this rite was really all about consent and reinforcing it, and she said, “I thought that was the whole point?”
She’d run the rite the previous year from my script, and it had been plainly obvious to her, even though I had never noticed it before.
Sometimes, your ritual work outpaces your mental processing of its meaning by… well, apparently by about a decade.
The Omens for the Rite:
The omens were interesting. Rev. Avende pulled from the Greek Alphabet Oracle, and these were the tiles pulled:
She interpreted this as an indication that we should tend our roots, and work at those things that make us who we are at our core. From that, we should focus as a Grove on doing the hard, external work that grows out of that knowledge and understanding. As individuals, we should show patience, and do work when the time is right, and when we are prepared.
All told, the rite was good. I hope that you can work along with us using the video above. This was kind of a first-stab at doing a “YouTube Working.” I think it came out alright, and it’s definitely given us ideas on how to do others.
