Finding the Language

I want to live in the faith that we're on the verge of something new among men creating erotic ritual community togoether.

It's been building for decades: among Radical Faeries, at queer retreat centres, in groups like the Billies and Gay Spirit Visions. On the rare website like Bateworld that feels like genuine online community. On blogs like this. Sometimes we draw on the resources of existing traditions; sometimes we create new forms and structures more or less from scratch. The emerging variety is wondrous. 

At some point, experimentation starts coalescing into continuity. Repetition creates familiar patterns and confirms expectations. We move toward consensus about what brings us together, what we value, what we reverence. Every time we gather, actions become more familiar. Every time we gather, what they mean to us changes. What they mean to you may be different from what they mean to me. The ritual is the container in which all this can flourish spontaneously--essential, but not an end it itself. 

None of it requires complete agreement. Our sense of belonging is based on things we do together, not necessarily on all of us understanding what we do in the same way.

Ritual is like a language. The objects we use in ritual are like its vocabulary: fire, water, earth; food and drink; bells, candles, incense, ritual garments; images, altars, mandalas. How we use them, what we do with them, follows a grammar that we perfect with practice. Formulas of greeting and beginning, formulas of completion and departure. Rituals of initiation; of membership in community; of gratitude; of mourning; of renunciation; of remembrance.

Before any such language is there to be learned, it has to be made up and then consolidated in the first place. This has always been true, in the case of every spriitual tradition, no matter how ancient, no matter how established. Now, it's emerging among men who feel called to reverence the sacred, transformative power of our erotic pleasure and of our desire for one another. We've been inventing the language for a long time now. We're more than ready to speak it to one another.

The internet has helped us find one another more easily, but the internet is not the magic. The magic is what we do--and did long before the electronic age. The magic is what we do in and with our bodies--together, weaving the webs of connection that transcend the isolation of the false self.