Edward E. Wilson

Pagan Ritual was deeply embedded in the rhythms of their existence, the seasons of a farmer’s life. With festivals directly linked to cycles of nature and the social activities that related to them. The life of a modern city dweller is lived by very different rhythms than the pagan villagers. In many ways the rhythms we participate in are much faster than theirs were. It behooves us as sorcerers to understand the cycles we are subject to and to take them into account when constructing our rituals and practices. We do ourselves a disservice if we perform rituals based on the long forgotten assumption that the either festivals of the wheel of the year are relevant.

Our lives relate much more to the twenty-four hour news cycle, the work day, rush hours, the television season, the two seasons of fashion, and the various overlapping sports seasons. The other thing to take into account are the rhythms of the body, the circadian, ultradian and digestive cycles as well as the timing of various phases of attention and memory.

Only if we start working with these cycles and their interactions do we start to make truly contemporary systems of sorcery. The archaic technologies still hold their value but we need to apply them to our lives as we live them not in terms of a cycle that is irrelevant to our existence.