Izzy wizzy, let's get busy.

After my post last week asking for suggestions for interesting things to do over the weekend I received a slew of fascinating invitations. After thinking about it and deciding that I really rather fancied a day in the country somewhere rural, I took rssefuirosu’s suggestion and headed to the Green Tara Pagan and New-Age festival down in Devon.
“But David!”, I hear you cry. “Why would you go to a pagan gathering? You’re the least New-Agey person I’ve ever met in my life. Why, the words ‘Gaia’ and ‘Moon Goddess’ bring you out in a rash, and I hear you once killed a man simply because he owned a huge floppy jester’s hat and a digeridoo.”
Well, I reply. Those things may be true, but I’m never adverse to going off and having a bit of an adventure – doing something different to the norm – and, hey! It might even be fun. And so it was that I found myself at midnight on Saturday night, standing next a bonfire beneath the full moon with a group of witches, wondering precisely what I was doing there and who I thought I was kidding.

After doing some research into how to behave at Pagan gatherings, I arrived at the festival mid-afternoon on Saturday after enduring over four hours on public transport to get there. As I strolled across the field to the event, I happened across an animated conversation as to what the correct collective noun for witches was. Happy to help, I chipped in. “A burning”, I said, thereby committing my first faux pas of the weekend.
It turned out I’d arrived just in time to see the Geshe Lama Ahbay Rinpoche– a genuine Tibetan Lama, the 4th incarnation thereof, especially flown in for the occasion – performing a ritual blessing ceremony and, as this isn’t the sort of thing you see every day unless you live in Tibet, I sat down to watch. It was a long ceremony, and some people might have called it dull but I was immediately entranced. In a windy and muddy field in the middle of nowhere (as I had no real idea where I was) I was watching part of a tradition stretching back thousands of years. The Lama chanted, threw rice about and spent a heck of a lot of time just smiling and looking like he was having the best fun possible. I was deeply impressed. When you’re so at one with the universe that chanting in a muddy field in Dorset is the best fun possible it’s clear that you know something that everyone else is missing out on. The only fly in my ointment during this was the small crowd of hippy-types with expensive cameras buzzing around him filming and photographing every second of the ritual and I started to feel irritated by this; rather than treating this holy chap with any sort of respect they instead seemed to regard him as some sort of performance - doing a kind of clever trick, perhaps - for their entertainment. In reaction I put on my very best concentration face and watched with rapt attention, and occasionally grinned back at him whenever he gave me a smile. Eventually he finished his ritual and gave me a blessing (and a biscuit, which I was confused by because it was apparently both a biscuit and a representation of the entire cosmos – and besides which it was only a Rich Tea and I didn’t have anything to dunk it in). I was so won over by this that I decided to learn more about becoming enlightened and so wandered over to the Zen noticeboard only to find there was nothing on it.

Thwarted, I turned my attention to other forms of relating to the unseen and got chatting to an attractive young couple who’d apparently been trying to cast some sort of spell, sitting cross legged on a table in the middle of the field facing straight into the strong wind that was whipping across the site. “You looked busy”, I said.
“Yeah”, replied one of them. “We were casting a spell to get the wind down. It seems to have worked pretty well.” He looked around with an air of satisfaction and nodded as, behind him, a tent tore free from its moorings and went sailing over a nearby hedge.
I spent the rest of the afternoon strolling about the place and making new acquaintances. As I was obviously the only non-occultist there, I kept my features arranged into an expression of polite interest and tried to project a demeanor of I’m friendly but utterly ignorant of everything you do. Please don’t make a doll of me and burn it..I even bought myself a bar of magic soap (“Made under the full moon”) reasoning that if that doesn’t help me then nothing will.
The thing that I liked most was just how friendly the people I spoke to were. I got asked ‘which tradition’ I followed a lot, and after a certain amount of quick internal expectation-readjustment when I answered “Church of England”, everyone was very welcoming, if a little confused as to why exactly I was there. I received a certain amount of polite proselytising and was assured by various different people that their magic worked, even if everyone elses didn’t. Quite seriously, though, everyone I spoke to all weekend was entirely lovely.

At about 6pm, the heavens opened and the rain came down.
A lot of rain.
Really, lots of it. I looked at the weather yesterday and found that Dorset received half its average June rainfall on Saturday night, and most of it landed on the field I was in. Was I downhearted? No! I had a bottle of Cragganmore to keep me warm and well-disposed to my fellow man. As the evening drew on I recall dancing enthusiastically to a band called the Dolmen, who were really good, fun foot-stomping musicians– rather like the Levellers would be if they stopped whining about politics and concentrated on making music for people to enjoy. I took part in a torchlit drumming procession in the howling, driving rain to a bonfire and watched a ceremony. And then, at about midnight, the rain stopped, the full moon popped out from behind its cloud and I stood and steamed by the flames to dry out. I’m pretty sure I spent the next few hours chatting to people, and I’m fairly confident I had some very enjoyable conversations, but I’d drunk two thirds of a bottle of scotch by that stage and so I can’t be certain. Checking my notebook the next morning, the only addition to it from that stage was a note reading Flying saucers & Global Warming – coincidence??? deeply underlined, so really your guess is a good as mine.

I woke the next morning on the back seat of someone’s car. First I realised that my head hurt, and second I realized that the rest of me did too as the back seat of the car was significantly smaller than me and I was folded up quite small. Outside the sky was blue and the sun was bright, so I got out, found some water and then sunned myself for a few hours until the rest of the camp started stirring.
As my back was feeling rather stiff after my car experience, I went off to find someone to work my back out.
“Ah”, I said. “I wonder if you could sort me out a bit. I seem to have these two huge knots in…”
“Your upper back.” He replied.
I was nonplussed. “How can you tell? Do I have bad posture?”
“No”, he replied. “I can see your soul.”
Now, this isn’t an answer I really care to hear from someone sitting behind me with their hands around my neck, especially when I happen to know they also have a ritual dagger. I tried to make light of it. “I have a soul?”
“Of course.”
“Well, Satan got a bum deal from me there then, didn’t he? Ha ha!”
This sally didn’t work, so I tried another tack. “So, what does my soul look like? Is it a brilliant orb of golden light, blazing forth it’s beneficence over all humanity?”
“Um…no.”
“Ok, is it a horrific monstrosity? Blackened and twisted by years of vile debauchery? Like Richard the Third without the laughs?”
“No.”
“Well, what does it look like then?”
“Ordinary. Same as most everyone elses.”
“You’re telling me that I have a soul just like an ordinary person?”
“Yes.”
“Hmph”, I said, petulantly. “I reckon you’re making it up.”

That said, he did sort my back out good and proper.

And that was about it, really. I had to go in order to struggle back to London despite the best attempts of the public transport authorities to stop me. I think I did pretty well – I didn’t get turned into a frog, I didn’t offend anyone by doing Satanic Goat-Dancing, and I kept a civil tongue in my head when talking to people carrying weapons. I do have to wonder, however, if the hour-long delay just outside Basingstoke was due to someone hexing my train. Let’s face it, it’d be a better excuse than the railways usually use for delays