“Astarte, grant addition unto the waiting womb! Astarte, deal derision unto the tedious tomb! Astarte, find fruition for every blushing bloom!” – from “Hymn to Astarte” by Victor B. Neuburg, Swift Wings: Songs in Sussex, 1921.
The very first, and most important, thing to be said about the “Great Rite” in Saxon Wicca is that, technically, there isn’t one.
The Great Rite in Wicca, for those who may not be familiar, is the heiros gamos or “sacred marriage” of the Wiccan God and Goddess enacted by the High Priest and High Priestess of a coven at the Great Sabbats of Samhain and Beltane (the two “doors” into Winter and Summer respectively), that turn the eight-spoked Wheel of the Year. It is also the central rite of the third degree initiation in a “Gardnerian” Wiccan coven. In the 1960s this rite was often an act of actual ritualized sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, although these days, despite the Oaths of Secrecy in many traditions of Witchcraft other than the Saxon tradition, this ritual is commonly said to have been replaced with one that involves placing a consecrated ritual knife in a chalice of wine as a purely symbolic act of sexual intercourse between a male and a female. Not being an initiate of a Wiccan tradition that maintains an Oath of Secrecy, I simply cannot say what other autonomous Wiccan covens may actually do as part of either their degree-oriented initiation rituals or seasonal celebrations.
Sex-Love is a central theme in Saxon Wicca, and as such, there is absolutely no stigma attached to consensual sexual relationships between consenting adults, including same sex adults. That said, sexual relationships of any kind can be abused, and this was something that was all-too-common in 1960s and early ’70s Witchcraft covens (see The Witchcraft Report by Hans Holzer, 1973) and part of the inspiration to Raymond Buckland when founding Saxon Wicca as he did: -without- the Great Rite, -without- an Oath of Secrecy, and -with- the explicit inclusion of same sex lovers.
As it says in the ritual script for the Spring (or “Ostara”, see Wicca for One by Raymond Buckland, 2004) Sabbat in The Tree:
“Of old would we celebrate by together planting the seed, one with another, yet here do we symbolize that act, in veneration of our Lady and our Lord.”
If the “Great Rite” is not then a feature of Saxon Wicca, per se, why then am I writing about it? Because Saxon Wicca, like other traditions of Wicca, is -still- a fertility and reincarnation cult that emphasizes both non-sexual brotherly/sisterly love, -and- sexual love, where these things genuinely exist between free and autonomous individuals.
Like other traditions of Witchcraft, the Seax Wica have their own marriage rite called a Hand-Fasting that exists completely independently from any state-sanctioned legal marriage, as the religion recognizes bonds of romantic love that the state may not. For a very prominent example, when the Seax tradition was founded in 1973 in the United States, this included marriages between two same sex lovers, and it certainly still includes unions between consenting adults, who for whatever personal reasons, do not want their romantic union sanctioned by the state, but who may still desire it to be recognized by the Wiccan Gods and their coven family. This religious emphasis on bonds of love, rather than bonds of church and state, has its origins with Wicca’s founder Gerald Gardner himself, in whose biography it was observed that “bigamy” was practically heredity in the Gardner family!
Regardless of Gerald Gardner’s personal relationships and the practices of his ancestors, the spiritual aspect of the Great Rite, as understood by Raymond Buckland, is relevant to Saxon Wicca, as he understood it to be an expression of Wicca’s life-affirming emphasis on the spiritual dimension of the physical and “the ultimate union with deity”. Within a consciously religious framework, the sacredness of sex and romantic love is something with tremendous practical potential as a deep well of personal healing when one considers Buckland’s comparison of the Wiccan “Great Rite” with the idea of “spiritual wives” or “spiritual husbands” who may visit in dreams to give strength and inspiration (see “The Great Rite, and Ritual Scourging” in Ray Buckland’s Magic Cauldron, 1995). Most importantly for Saxon Wicca however, is simply the idea that sex is itself sacred, and therefore to cause sexual harm to others and to oneself is a very profane thing (see “Witchcraft in the Bedroom” from Wicca for Life by Raymond Buckland, 2001). The conscious recognition that the mystery of human, animal, and plant life comes from sexual union, and that rebirth to a new life is through the agency of the Goddess, is also central to the Wiccan doctrine of Reincarnation.
Lincoln Green 