Slithytoves
Oblique Strategist
I am an ace at derailing people's threads with tangents. Apologies all around. For those of us who tend to wander off in another direction, this thread is for you.
Take some small detail from the following personal experience and go somewhere, anywhere, totally different with it. It doesn't have to be anything funny or dramatic. Just a random story from your own life with enough detail for somebody else to grab a thread and pull away.
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The first time I went to a Wiccan ritual, I knew nothing at all about Wicca but was too curious not to take a friend up on an offer to go. We drove out into the middle of nowhere to some forested land owned by the coven's priestess, and hiked in about 500 yards -- in pitch darkness, with a small flashlight -- to a clearing with a blazing fire in the middle. About a dozen people were already there. I ended up standing due east in the circle. It was a dark moon ritual so the priestess was dressed as the Crone, in a heavy black robe with the hood hanging low over her face. I didn't know in advance that circles are cast starting in the east in the tradition I was visiting. Wish I had. Everybody went dead quiet, and the hooded priestess walked over and stood directly in front of me. She raised her athame (ritual dagger) high above her head to do the invocation, just a foot or so from me. Before she could speak, I thought, "Oh, sh*t! Wicthes really do sacrifice people!" I yelped aloud and took off into the woods. My friend and her husband found me after a few minutes, calmed me down and explained everything. Man, was that embarrassing! When I reached a level of initiation where I was running rituals for the group as a stand-in, I made sure all newbies stood smack in the eastern quadrant. We were all in on it. Worked almost every time.![Big Grin :D :D](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png)
Take some small detail from the following personal experience and go somewhere, anywhere, totally different with it. It doesn't have to be anything funny or dramatic. Just a random story from your own life with enough detail for somebody else to grab a thread and pull away.
---------
The first time I went to a Wiccan ritual, I knew nothing at all about Wicca but was too curious not to take a friend up on an offer to go. We drove out into the middle of nowhere to some forested land owned by the coven's priestess, and hiked in about 500 yards -- in pitch darkness, with a small flashlight -- to a clearing with a blazing fire in the middle. About a dozen people were already there. I ended up standing due east in the circle. It was a dark moon ritual so the priestess was dressed as the Crone, in a heavy black robe with the hood hanging low over her face. I didn't know in advance that circles are cast starting in the east in the tradition I was visiting. Wish I had. Everybody went dead quiet, and the hooded priestess walked over and stood directly in front of me. She raised her athame (ritual dagger) high above her head to do the invocation, just a foot or so from me. Before she could speak, I thought, "Oh, sh*t! Wicthes really do sacrifice people!" I yelped aloud and took off into the woods. My friend and her husband found me after a few minutes, calmed me down and explained everything. Man, was that embarrassing! When I reached a level of initiation where I was running rituals for the group as a stand-in, I made sure all newbies stood smack in the eastern quadrant. We were all in on it. Worked almost every time.
![Big Grin :D :D](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png)