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4. Don’t Eat the Incense: Children in Ritual
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>> 89 4 Don’t Eat the Incense Children in Ritual Toddler Tools Erin’s daughter Aisling was not quite two years old when Erin began her solitary practice of Wicca. Raised in a vaguely Protestant home, Erin had been curious about other religions from an early age and had visited a number of different churches as a child, but she found these experiences unfulfilling. What she found in these churches, for the most part, she describes as “hypocrites, manipulators, judgmental people, many unloving ways, women haters, tricksters.”1 Erin tried several other spiritual paths, briefly deciding that she was an atheist before finally joining a Unitarian Universalist church, where she was introduced to contemporary Paganism. Her husband is not Wiccan; Erin says, “I don’t even think he would call himself spiritual,” although she acknowledges his “philosophical” leanings. When Erin’s family moved to a new state, Erin found herself alone with two-year-old Aisling for long hours at a time. Erin had recently become interested in Paganism, and she realized that finding a local group to practice with would be difficult. Determined to pursue her new spiritual path, she drew on the many books she had read and began practicing Wicca at home with her young daughter. She soon found that ritual practice involving standard tools, such as candles or an athame (a ceremonial knife used to direct energy during ritual), was difficult to reconcile with a rambunctious toddler. Erin remembers, 90 > 91 and cookies, the toddler equivalent of cakes and ale. Erin says, “The circle is cast. Naught but love shall enter in, and naught but love shall emerge from within,” and Aisling softly repeats the words after her. Once the circle is cast, Erin and Aisling ground and center by pretending to be trees, visualizing their roots stretching into the earth. They have brought children’s books with earth-centered themes into the circle: The Ox-Cart Man and When the Root Children Wake Up, two of their favorites.2 Aisling sits on Erin’s lap while they read the books together. Aisling rings a bell to mark the different parts of the ritual: casting the circle, meditating, reading, grounding, closing the circle. This breaks the ritual into clear segments—good for holding a small child’s attention—and allows Aisling to actively participate during their ritual. After they finish the books, Erin and Aisling sing and march around the circle to raise energy. Instead of “traditional” or familiar Pagan chants, they sing children’s songs about Mr. Sun and Mommy Moon or, when Aisling was younger, songs from the television show Barney. They ground and center, visualizing tree roots again, and then they eat their cookies and drink the milk. They dismiss the Lord and Lady and the Guardians of the Four Quarters, “extinguishing” the candles by removing the Velcro flames from the cardboard rolls, and Aisling takes a bit of the leftover cookies and milk to the backyard compost pile as an offering for the spirits of nature. * * * The ritual improvisation evident in Erin and Aisling’s ritual “toddler tools” is common among Pagans, but it becomes especially necessary and significant when it arises in the relational spaces of the religious imaginations of parents and children. Erin and Aisling’s ritual circle reflects two important elements of rituals performed within Pagan families: it offers a glimpse into the kind of ritual creativity imagined and practiced by Pagan families, and it illustrates how Pagan understandings of children and childhood shape the creation and experience of these rituals. At the same time, these modified, innovative, childfriendly ritual tools demonstrate a newly Pagan mother’s attempt to rectify the disillusionment of her own childhood religious experiences by providing her daughter with a religious childhood utterly unlike her 92 > 93 if not theatrical, and many (though certainly not all) Pagans expend considerable energy to achieve an ideal ritual ambience. Pagan ritual may be somber or lighthearted, structured or improvised, but even the most free-flowing adult ritual attempts to establish and maintain a deliberate mood. In contrast, rituals that include children—especially rituals in which children are the central participants—tend to produce an environment that can range from hesitant to chaotic. When Erin and Aisling set up their toddler tools for me to observe, they were recreating an earlier ritual experience in an environment that was intended to explain these practices to an outsider rather than to establish sacred space. Nevertheless, my recordings of this event document...