The Ritual Practice
For the Full Moon in Scorpio on May 12
If you'd like to connect directly with the magick of our community web established during the first session of The Gathering Path, you're invited to perform A Web of Wonder. For those who have already performed A Web of Wonder, you can spend a few moments connecting to our community web before performing the ritual below by simply visualizing and feeling your personal web-line joining with the community web - but feel free to add as little or as much ritual to this (breathwork, chanting, candle lighting, etc.) as you like.
I began singing to my remedies as a child, humming and making up on the spot songs for the little jars and bottles full of my handmade potions to help stir up energy. I did it because it felt right and good to do. When I began my formal herbal studies years later, more than one teacher mentioned how not only living plants, but the remedies we made of them liked to be sung to - so I kept at it. Songs and traditions of chanting are abundant in our magickal heritages, as sharing songs and making sounds together are some of our oldest collective human experiences, and song is one of my favorite magickal practices. And it's one that I hope to encourage you to do, too!
The following is more of an invitation than a formal ritual, meant to inspire new or renewed ways of connecting with plants and your community, with a focus on letting yourself experiment with your self-expression as an herbalist, healer or plant person.
The Song of Healing
You will need:
A remedy of your making
A chant of your making or choosing
Optional: A recording of your chosen chant
Settle into your sacred space, grounding and centering in your preferred way. Have your remedy with you, holding it in your hands, and taking nine deep breaths to start to align your energy with the plant spirits present within the remedy. Then begin to address the plants present in your remedy one-by-one, naming them and your need for them. If, for example, you made a jar of Wise Song Herbal Honey you might say:
Sage, Salvia, Crone's Wisdom
I pick your leaves to clear out fire
To bring coolness and relief from pain
May you bring your gifts of healing
Thyme, Thymus, Faery's Wisdom
I pick your leaves to clear out infection
To bring strength and protection from fear
May you bring your gifts of healing
Rose, Rosa, Witch's Wisdom
I pick your petals to clear out confusion
To bring love and clarity on the path
May your bring your gifts of healing
While the above is purposefully formulaic to create a rhythm to your healing petition to the plant spirits, you can speak in a much more open-ended and free flowing way. Speaking to the plants of what we hope they'll bring reminds us of our own need which makes our intentions for healing that much clearer. It's also an old tradition in European practice (but I've seen it in plenty of other traditions as well) to speak to the plants and your healing needs throughout the planting, harvesting, and remedy-making process - I think it's a great tradition to carry on.
Next, we'll be using song to charge up and infuse our remedy with healing energy. As someone who has used songs and chants for decades in my magickal work, I'm very comfortable pulling from my archive of chants when singing over plants, but I also enjoy coming up with songs on the spot, letting my voice carry me into my song-connection with the plants themselves. We live in a time of abundant offerings of chants that can be easily accessed online and sung alongside, too. If you choose this route, I encourage you to find recordings of groups of people singing - with all their unedited and delightful imperfections. You'll find a number of these live studio style recordings through communities like Reclaiming Collective (I've listed examples of chants in the remediation section below).
If I know that I'll be sharing my Wise Song Herbal Honey with my New Moon circle community, I might choose to sing One Spirit by Spiral Rhythm. If this is a deeply personal remedy that only I'll be using, I'll hum a wordless tune until the words come to me. Sometimes I'll incorporate galder-style chants - choosing runes or ogham fews to sing over the remedy. What's important to remember is that it's not about singing intune or coming up with the most beautiful words, but it's about expressing yourself through song as an offering to our plant allies and ourselves. It's about connecting with thousands of years of song, singing for all those times your ancestors couldn't and all the times they could, and singing a path for our descendants.
If you have the opportunity to sing in community, I encourage you to either choose one chant that everyone learns ahead of time to sing together or choose one or more people to guide everyone else through one or more chants. If you are teaching people the chant(s) during the ritual, instead of relying on phone screens or printouts, I encourage you to teach people by singing and have them learn by listening and jumping in. Most chants are simple enough to learn after a few rounds and learning by listening is a great community practice. If the remedy is in a sturdy enough container it can be passed around the circle while singing, otherwise it's best kept in the center where everyone can see it.
So, once you have spoken to each plant ally, naming your need and their healing gifts, it is time to sing! Whatever style of song you’ve chosen, I encourage you to visualize your song in the form of light flowing between you, the remedy, anybody else you might be in ritual with, and/or our community web.
Once you're done singing you can set your remedy under the Full Moon light to charge through the night. I like to light a candle and incense to burn as an additional offering, but follow your heart. You can continue to sing your song to the remedy before you use it or at each Full Moon while you still have it, charging it up with energy every time.
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Remediation: If you are looking for chants to learn, here are a few that you might find useful for your ritual practice with a healing and community focus:
One Spirit by Spiral Rhythm
We Are The Flow by Reclaiming Collective
We Shall Be Known by MaMuse
Spiral Dance - A longer recording showing Starhawk (of Reclaiming Collective) using chants to help direct the energy of a large spiral dance