Dance, dance the Spiral. Cast wild eyes above, and let feet pound the earth!
We stand between heaven and the world, between Gods and humans.
Rise up, cast your voice into the night sky, raise your arms and draw down the Moon!
According to legend, Thessalian witches could command the moon to descend from the vault of heaven and command the night to linger over their heads, preventing the onset of day. They rode over the waves of the sea like the reflection of the moon on the water and flew through the night sky, free of their mortal weight.
The Sodality of the Tor understands the Mystery behind these beliefsandlegends.Theclassicalworld saw the moon as a symbol of ecstatic Divinity, the Mystery and magic that dwelt in the night. The moon was otherworldly, but inextricably tied to the mortal experience. “Drawing down” the moon means not literally to pull the moon from the sky, but to draw the essence of the moon into oneself, so its light can reveal the latent divinity within the soul. Thus revealed, the Goddess Within manifests in the flesh of her witch and priestess.
This concept is the Sodality of the Tor’s most sacred Mystery, in which one of their number draws into herself a shard of the Eternal Divine. In this way, the Sodality understand those divine traits that reside within themselves, and foster them accordingly. Their rites shape a Sodality witch’s soul, making it more and more like that presence she communes with during these rites as she walks her path.
The witches of the Sodality teach that the human soul can embrace godhood only when the soul sets aside the conscious mind. They believe the Supernal is not transcendent, grandly beyond the human understanding; rather, it is immanent, found within all things wild and natural. Thus, by casting aside the reservations and fears of the conscious mind, and allowing the unconscious and primal side of the self free reign, the Awakened (and some gifted Sleepers) can touch the divine.
Mages outside of the Sodality sometimes believe its devotees give themselves over to possession. The truth is more subtle. A Sodality mage never actually loses consciousness during these rites, though her experience may be so overwhelming that she does not remember everything that happened. The witch who draws down Divinity is herself, but not — her essential self remains, but has expressed itself as a divine being, in the same way that her essential self is normally expressed as a human being.
Sodality witches usually find that their divine selves are very familiar to them from their own studies in world mythology, and these witches often take shadow names based on the god they see in the moon’s mirror. When one of these witches speaks of “drawing down Artemis” or “aspecting the Morrigan,” they mean letting the qualities attributed to those gods rise in their own personalities. They don’t let a god in; they let a god out.
The Sodality’s prime ceremony is the Rite of Drawing Down, held during full moons. Members of this Legacy may travel quite a distance to take part in this rite; traditionally, the elder who initiated a witch of the Sodality hosts these rituals, and all those she has trained will converge to take part in the ritual. However, the demands of Awakened life sometimes preclude this, and elders will usually welcome any member of the Sodality who is in the area.
Sleepwalkers sometimes attend these gatherings. Most of these people belong to a coven of the witch-cult backed by the Sodality. Some members of the Legacy support or even lead covens of traditionalist witches, whose members lead lives that are not outwardly involved in occultism. Many members of the Sodality recruit members of such covens as Allies, Contacts and Sleepwalker Retainers.
Mages who know the Sodality only by reputation often believe the Legacy recruits only women, since classical and modern pagan thought treats its primary symbol as feminine. Other mages believe the men of the Sodality “draw down the Sun” in a fashion different from the Legacy’s women.
Neither of these misconceptions is true. Though Western occult systems call the moon a feminine symbol, witches (a term applied to both men and women) of the Sodality know that the moon is properly a symbol of ecstatic Divinity, a symbol under which the gods of all Dionysian expressions of religion gather.
Orders
- The Guardians of the Veil and the Mysterium welcome Sodality witches most readily, for the Sodality values the keeping and discovering of secrets.
- Other orders welcome members of the Sodality whose god-selves has some connection to the ideals of that order.
- Gods of crafts and skill, chaos- and trickster-gods often find the Free Council amenable.
- Spiral Walk-ers with martial god-selves might join the Adamantine Arrow
- Spiral Walkers whose god-selves are divine royalty may find the Silver Ladder to their liking
Attainments
- The Spiral Dance
- Drawing down the Moon
- Immanent Divinity
