Born Naked…
I have studied primitive religious and spiritual practices because I figured they would be “truer” to authentic worship and reverence than religious systems that were constructed in more civilized times. The later systems always had injections of politics and were structured to act as a system of control for a populace, rather than a vehicle for discovering deeper meaning.
When I consider rituals and rites, I often look askance at seemingly arbitrary rules. Why does burning sage drive off evil spirits and cleanse rooms? Is there something intrinsically magical in the smoke? I doubt it. How could any particles in our three-dimensional reality have an effect on a spiritual entity, that by definition may or may not even have a physical body?
I’ve often thought the magical properties of items, stones, clothing, practices, etc. exist because they help focus the practitioners’ mind toward a given goal, a given worship. I believe that the mind of the practitioner is what directs intrinsic human energy to perform magic and that agreements with spiritual entities may be in place for them to respond to certain incantations, certain sigils, certain practices not because they intrinsically need these things, but because it serves as a form of currency or a medium through which the energy passes between entity and individual, individual and entity.
Garb
I have had trouble finding practices that mean something to me directly. Maybe it’s the curse of being so eclectic in my thinking that I tend to lose the thread of any given system or path. Since my break with Roman Catholicism and then the failure of my Wiccan group, I have been zealously suspicious of adopting any system wholesale. Instead I tend to deconstruct them.
My altar has been decorated and redecorated several times over, and I fail to really bond with it. I have statues of all kinds, wooden tarot boxes, a wand, a chalice, and an athame. These things have power for me, but my connection with them waxes and wanes; I don’t quite know why.
I have instead turned to looking at clothing as a means of worship. I want to develop specific ritual gear that I can use to guide my mindset into the spiritual mode. This idea came to me while watching, of all things, Ru Paul’s Drag Race. Several of the queens, over successive seasons and in their confessionals, talked about the power of drag and that their drag persona was referenced as another part of themselves beyond their mundane identify. So much so, that the drag persona itself seemed to be the “truer” of the two.
AAt The Eagle, I saw men in BDSM gear: harnesses, pup hoods, rubber singlets, full leather outfits, even furry costumes and these quotes from Drag Race came back to me. The power of what they were wearing was allowing them to express deeply felt parts of their personality, their sexuality, even their spirituality that might otherwise not have found expression.
In Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, by Joseph Campbell, he cities that primitive shamans would use garb and masks to depict a god or entity, to bring that entity to the world and let it be worshiped by other practitioners. He even offered that by wearing certain garb, that a transubstantiation occurred, turning the priest of shaman into the deity itself in the minds of those who witnessed him.
“Moreover, the mask in a primitive festival is revered and experienced as a veritable apparition of the mythical being that it represents — even though everyone knows that a man made the mask and that a man is wearing it. The one wearing it, furthermore is identified with the god during the time of the ritual of which the mask is a part. He does not merely represent the god; he is the god.”
Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell.
I think of drag queens donning their makeup and wigs and becoming the persona they created. I think of Masters wearing their vests, their caps their leather pants and I think of slaves wearing their collars, their metal cuffs, and their chastity devices, and I realize that the garb reinforces the roles of authority they have chosen to occupy.
One of my goals is to live my faith, finding ways every day to engage my spirituality through mindfulness, action, prayer, and appearance. I don’t always succeed because of the daily pressures to conform are both passive and overt, and powerful in both modes.
Either way, I look toward developing an appropriate guise for my worship because I think it will reinforce my practice and my faith. For rituals, it will guide me into a mindset that allows me to channel magic more easily. For invocations, I believe it will provide a level of credibility to the demon or entity I contact and make it more comfortable communicating with me. I just have to find garb that speaks to me and into which I can invest my belief.
