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If you work with the Orphic Hymns (herein shortened to OH) often, at some point you will probably run across the idea that the OH might have been recited in order as an all-night vigil.¹ If you have a group of ritual enthusiasts with a tight venn diagram of classics nerds, magical experimentation junkies, and ordeal rite masochists, you might think “YEAH, and let’s do it at the absolute busiest time of the year!”

I have no regrets.

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While we’re all still simmering in the afterglow and taking notes of what effects we’re feeling and contemplating how (or if) we might do things next time, I thought I’d share our process and how we went about this, in case others are interested.

We met up about a month beforehand to talk through our ideas and started getting organized. We aimed to start in the evening after dark because some folks would be coming after work, and decided to space out the hymns so we would be reciting the hymn to Eos at our local time of sunrise.

We decided to read the hymns in Attic Greek simultaneously as the hymn was being read in English, mostly for aesthetic vibes and nerdcore euphoria, but also because there’s a kind of magic that happens during dual-voice overlap, especially where one is in a language that is only barely understood, that creates a trance-induction atmosphere and keeps the talking-brain busy and confused enough to let the magic rise. I love it as a ritual technique and have used it to great effect in many rituals.

We also pulled brief phrases from each hymn to use as a responsive line, something like “Come, with hearts full of joy” for the opening instructional hymn, “Send us nourishing rains” for the Clouds, or “Magnify the sacred light” for Dawn. The reader in English would find a few places to pause and raise their hands in a signal, and we would all (except the person concentrating on reading the Greek) respond with the chosen line, so we could all participate more deeply and personally with each hymn. (These responsive lines sort of make a meta-hymn, which now I want to play with…)

One of the most helpful things we did was we built a spreadsheet to organize our plan and divide the hymns into blocks of time so we could go at a steady pace through the night and take turns in different roles: who would be reading the Greek text, who would be reading the English text, who would be managing the incense/offering/libations (and writing the response phrase on a whiteboard), and who would be on kitchen duty keeping the coffee stocked, the soup and snacks bar refreshed, and remind us all to stay hydrated. Also, setting up the incenses and offerings in neatly labelled bowls on the altar kept things tidy (note: put candleholder on a drip tray from the start of the ritual, not after it begins to melt wax into the myrrh).

As we got into our groove, we would do about 6-7 hymns at the top of the hour, then have about a 30-40 minute break for snacks, refills, bathroom, and smoking for those who do so. So even though we did this on the longest night of the year, it could definitely be accomplished even at midsummer — we could probably do it in a 7 hour stretch with fewer and shorter breaks, but this 13.5 hour potluck-with-ritual- every-hour felt just right for a midwinter social event among friends.

Other things we did that I can recommend:
– Mood music was provided by a huge Spotify playlist of ancient Greek and Roman music, only a very few tracks of which devolved into whale songs, dueling trumpets, or experimental early jazz. Blessed be the Skip Song Button.
– Candles, candles, candles, and mood lighting. (We considered the candles to be the substitution for torches called for in the hymn to Nyx.)
– Good ventilation is necessary, because this is a lot of incense.
– Slow Cookers make having hot food at the snack table possible, safe, and easy to manage.
– Purification rites beforehand were encouraged and left up to each individual’s discretion.
– Most people took the day after off work, which seemed wise.
– While we had wine for ritual libations and to partake in, we were careful to practice moderation because we knew it was going to be a long night.

Things we learned or are contemplating changing if we do it again:
– Taking the day before off work to have more time and less stress for preparation and setup might have been a good idea.
– I had my family Yule the night before, which is also an all-night vigil. I can wholeheartedly recommend getting a full night’s sleep before doing this, though that’s pure speculation on my part, because I did not. LFMF.
– Pre-recording the Greek hymns because that’s a lot of time face-planted in a book struggling to sound out a language I don’t know well enough to really understand.
– Actually check how much of each incense you have in your stash before setup. We did have enough frankincense to get through all the OHs, but we did have a moment of “do we need to run to the store or is this going to work”

And we’re going to meet up after New Year’s to compare notes and aftereffects and talk through other ideas… movement? dancing? games? more ritual framework? outdoors? actual torches? doing this at a different time of year? more breaks? fewer? more participation? making a powerpoint instead of using the whiteboard? making it an annual tradition? horsing around with translations (we used Dunn for the nice facing-page format, I love the clean and literal approach to his translation, and we had 3-4 copies among the group). I have a hunch that we’re going to do this again and that it’s going to develop into a new living tradition for our group.

May you new years be merry and bright with the light of all the Gods!

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1. Fritz Graf, “Serious Singing: The Orphic Hymns as Religious Texts”, Kernos [Online], 22 | 2009, Online since 26 October 2012, connection on 24 December 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/kernos/1784; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/kernos.1784

About the tag: if you’re interested, here’s a look inside the ritual design process and how it went from bare concept to finished ritual in a recent instance. We might do this from time to time to showcase our different thought processes and to highlight that there’s many ways to develop interesting and potent rituals for group work.

The seeds of this ritual started when Jeffrey had noticed some recurring coincidences and “notice this” nudges with the Big Dipper. Audrey had seen a blog post on the Mystic Dream Academy about a Great Bear Lammas rite and how the astrology of Ursa Major ties in to early-August astrological timing. From there we started following internet search rabbit holes and kicking around some ideas about different ways a Great Bear ritual could go. I think I found a face wash company and thought the botanical notes would make a great incense, we discussed sigils and body paint and how Family Constellation work might be raided for tech to be used in a way more witchy context — we were all over the board with the notes but most of us were agreeing that we were getting that little tingle that it was coming together even if we couldn’t see the bigger picture yet.

Over the next few days I started getting ideas and pinged the group to see if they’d be game with me taking point as the primary ritualist for the evening. Audrey and Jeffrey had been in charge for the last few in a row, and Sean wasn’t going to be able to make it, so they let me take the reins.

One of the first things I did was to hop onto Wikipedia and just skimmed the article about the constellation — the names of the stars and their linguistic origins, major stars versus minor stars, history and world associations…

Here were some of my thoughts as I read through the article and thought about ritual design…

The Great Bear is an ancient and vital aid to navigation – it’s a very bright and recognizable constellation that points to the North Star (and to Arcturus, and between those helps a stargazer orient to the rest of the sky) — this makes the constellation a Guide in a very literal sense – it shows the way. It’s an ancient ally of humanity in that sense.

While we have a lot of familiarity with Greco-Roman names in our group, most of these stars have Arabic names which we wouldn’t be familiar with. If the ritual had a point where a chant of “barbarous words” could help us shift our mental and energetic states, perhaps we could recite the names of the 7 main stars, invoking them as Names of the subordinate spirits that serve and act as an intermediary with the Great Bear.

I started to think about the kind of ritual container we wanted to build — did we want to build on a Hellenic style outline, or more Wiccan, or build from scratch? Did we need to cast a formal circle of some kind, and if so, what might that look like? What if… we called upon the Dome of Heaven as the sphere around us for the work? If we did that, what aspects of the elements or quarters could we call upon to serve our goals, which would probably involve creating sigils and drawing them on our body to empower and charge them, if we stuck with the original concept…

Then I thought, okay, what are the Quarters around the Great Bear? Are there constellations roughly corresponding to the cardinal directions around the Great Bear, and are they constellations that were evocative?

To the North is Draco, the Dragon, which we had worked with once or twice in some star and constellation work previously. Draco is an intense and interesting constellation and spirit to work with. To the East is Boötes, the Herdsman or Ploughman — in traditions where the Big Dipper / Great Bear constellation is seen as a Great Plow, Boötes is the ox-herder guiding the plow. To the South is Leo the Lion, and with the sun entering 15* Leo just before this Full Moon ritual, there would be some connections there. And to the West is Auriga, the Charioteer — and Audrey had been getting some “I think this will tie into the Tarot card of the Chariot and I’m not sure how yet” feelings when we’d done our first bit of brainstorming. That coming back up confirmed that this was a good match for the work; these four could definitely work as quarter guardians/watchers/allies.

So now I had our primary Power: Ursa Major, a circle casting, quarters, and I knew in the body of the ritual we were going to make sigils and paint them on our bodies and chant the names of the stars of the constellation to charge them. The overarching intention of the ritual was to develop and empower those sigils, the style was shaping up to have one foot in mainstream Wicca and one foot in intuition, inspiration, and experimentation, the mood looked like it was going to pretty feral and witchy with the body paint and the trance-y chanting, and the theme was constellations and star magic. At this point I felt like I had enough of the map for the territory sketched out that I could focus on some of the details.

So I looked up that face wash again, and the botanical notes definitely looked like they’d be the base of a good incense. I pulled out my tools and ingredients and let my hands and nose and experience take the wheel as I ground resins and herbs: Big Sur forest resins to evoke a primeval forest, mugwort for trance and visionary work of seeking the sigils, dragon’s blood for power, sage and sweetgrass for the land we work on, and sandalwood because it needed more wood and sandalwood powder is my go-to incense base. I blended oils of cedar, juniper, and musk – notes of crackling underbrush in the forest as a large animal passes through, and lime and mint for the clarity and brightness of the stars on a clear night. I blended the oils with the powder, labeled it, and packed my ritual supplies for the evening.

I also printed off a few copies of my rough bullet-point outline and the constellation map for the group for our pre-ritual conspiracy over dinner. “Ritual Conspiracy” is a term I picked up at Diana’s Grove Mystery School, and it’s a term of art for the ritual pre-game explanations – a chance to agree on expectations and boundaries, teach some fundamentals of technique or chant or praxis to make sure everyone is ready for the work, flesh out the bones of the ritual based on the needs of the group in attendance, to bring in all the participants into the ritual co-creation process, so we all breathe together — con + spire — and with our shared breath of communication breathe life into the ritual we are about to experience.

We did our individual preparations, queued up a soundtrack of drums, and our hosts filled a basin of water for us to purify by hand-washing. We cast the circle together, visualizing the great dome of the heavens encircling our space. We called to the constellations surrounding Ursa Major in the quarters, speaking from our hearts as we were moved to with what we associated with the constellation and what we wanted to invoke into the space from that quadrant. We sprinkled the incense on the charcoal and called to the Great Bear, the Big Dipper, the Great Plow, The Wagon, the seven stars dancing over the three leaps of the gazelle, the navigator’s friend, again calling into the circle as we were inspired and letting the organic, immediate, creative energy that was building guide our words and our ideas.

And the Great Bear came.

I can’t speak to everyone’s experience, but for me the Great Bear came as a titanic force, primal, ancient, large, heavy, wild, female?, powerful… and she was watching to see what we would do next.

I led a light trance-y guidance to identify a need and to develop a sigil to manifest it, starting with an invocation to the stars within ourselves and calling on our birthright as children of earth and starry heaven. I filled a mortar with blackberries, honey, powdered green clay, and a pinch of the incense I’d made and began pounding it into a paste. We passed it around in the darkness and all took a turn grinding and crushing this mixture together while we spent some time drawing and refining the sigils.

We drew the sigils on paper, then painted them on ourselves with our fingers dipped into the dark red clotted paste. We sealed the images on the paper with the paste from our hands and gathered ourselves and the papers around the altar (there were only a small handful of us in attendance that night, so I let go of the idea that we might all stand in the positions of the seven major stars). We lit more of the incense and chanted the names of the stars several times until we’d raised enough energy to empower the sigils and fire them off, into our bodies and out into the heavens surrounding us, with the breath of the Great Bear a presence in the room around us.

The air was thick with incense and magic, and the end of the evening is a little blurry for me. I know we thanked all our allies and opened the circle. Some people chose to wash off the remains of the paste right after ritual, some let it dry as long as it wanted to stay on the skin and then rubbed and brushed off the flakes. (The paste was, accidentally, an excellent treatment that left my skin feeling nicer than most fancy spa-style masks or serums.)

The ritual was potent and worth revisiting next August, or whenever we have need to call upon the Great Bear again.