In The Society of Diana: Witch-flight and the
Mysteries of the Night Queen, Caroline Tully, PhD, follows this shadowed
current from the ancient cult of Diana and the sacred landscape of Nemi through
medieval folklore, ecclesiastical prohibitions, witch-trial testimony, the
mysteries of Aradia, and the re-emergence of magical witchcraft in the modern
world.
Rather than explaining away the strange and supernatural
dimensions of these traditions, Tully places them at the centre of her enquiry.
Witch-flight, dream travel, spirit encounter, shape-shifting, blessing,
healing, cursing, divination, feasting, and passage between worlds emerge as
signs of an ecstatic and experiential witchcraft existing at the unstable
boundary between Pagan memory, folklore, visionary experience, and the
Christian imagination.
Diana stands at the heart of this labyrinth: lunar and
chthonic, huntress and protectress, goddess of wilderness, crossroads, birth,
death, liberation, and sorcery. Around her gather the Night Queen’s many masks
and companions, from Herodias and Aradia to Hecate and the spectral societies
said to roam by night, entering houses, bestowing prosperity, punishing
neglect, and carrying their followers into the Otherworld.
A Practical System of Witch-flight
Central to the book are forty-five
pathworkings, forming a practical initiatory journey
through Spirit, Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Through Diana, Aradia, Herodias,
the Rex Nemorensis, the Golden Bough, Egeria, Holda, Perchta, the Benandanti,
Venusberg, the Watchers, and numerous other figures and mysteries, the
practitioner is invited to cultivate visionary perception, magical agency, and
direct encounter with the powers of the Night Queen.
These workings are not presented as exercises in passive
symbolism, but as methods of approach: ways of entering liminal terrain through
imagination, trance, dream, ritual, and disciplined attention, allowing the
practitioner to discover what waits beyond inherited forms and received
authority.
Three substantial appendices extend the practical work
further: “Moon Rituals”, exploring Drawing Down the Moon and ritual structure;
“Underworld Journey”, a visionary descent through the crossroads into the
underworldly dimension of the Night Queen tradition; and “Rituals to Hecate
Chthonia”, approaching Hecate in her ancient chthonic and liminal character.
Scholarly in foundation yet resolutely
practical in purpose, The Society of Diana opens
a path into a witchcraft of sacred groves and crossroads, nocturnal flight and
Otherworldly encounter, liberation and danger, blessing and curse. It invites
the reader not merely to study the company of the Night Queen, but to approach
its mysteries directly—and discover where the night road leads.
“Erudite yet accessible, this ‘technical
guide-book’ allows the student to build their own creative relationship with
the Night Queen Herself. Instruction is skilfully woven through pathworkings
that offer a pattern for orientating within liminal and Otherworldly spaces and
realities.”
— Shani Oates, Matriarch of the Clan of Tubal
Cain
My story, to you: "An encounter with the Great God Pan among the stars."
ReplyDeleteThis might not be what you would usually be interested in, but it was my introduction to the supernatural, February 6th, 2011, Province of Québec:
After a six-hour long near-death experience (in which I entered a state of indescribable communion with the Great God Pan in his highest cosmic form, looking as if he was made of all of the stars and galaxies in the Universe), my mother told me that the first time she came to visit me at the hospital, right after surgery when I was practically comatose, she clearly heard her sister's voice in the room with us. My aunt was telling her "I'm so sorry, I was so selfish, I'm so sorry..." over and over again. That freaked my mother the hell out, so much so that she was still very deeply disturbed even a year afterwards.
I naturally DIDN'T tell her about my whole experience on the other side, the part where Pan looked at me from the corner of his eye and smiled upon me knowingly, and I then fell into his endlessly spiralling ram's horns, literally made of the fabric of the cosmos, and ended up walking down a spiral staircase made of black stone. Not a proper staircase really, simply steps made of probably onyx, floating above oblivion. After quite some time walking down the onyx steps, I found my aunt completely listless on the stairs (she had violently put an end to her life five years earlier), and she said "I'm more lost than ever, this is the Abyss, I'm more lost than ever". Without thinking, I took her hand and replied "You're not lost anymore, I've found you." She looked up, her eyes full of life again, and that was it, next thing I remember was waking up at the hospital days later.
About a month later, I was at the public library, when I noticed a tall, young, beautiful woman looking at me, smiling. She looked familiar, but I couldn't remember who she was. It suddenly hit me that she obviously was my aunt, looking as she did in my childhood, when she was in her twenties. When I turned around, she literally disappeared. I rationalized it as an unintentional "Orpheus travelling to the Underworld to rescue the soul of a loved one" sort of journey. In this day and age, for heaven's sake. I haven't seen her since. And my life now, from waking to sleep, is devoted to the mysteries of Pan.