A Pagan Ritual Prayer Book (3 page)

• Winter snow lies thick
  

  on the frozen ground beneath:
  

   
  

  Hail, Winter Spirits!
  

   
  

  Hail all of you here!
  

   
  

Or I may extend the number of syllables in the last line—5-7-6—or truncate the last line—5-7-4—or combine extended line length and truncated syllable count—5-7- 5-4—or the reverse:

• Winter snow lies thick
  

  on the frozen ground beneath:
  

   
  

  Hail, Winter Spirits!
  

   
  

  Hail in the cold!
  

   
  

A final line with an unexpected number of syllables gives a strong feeling of completion; it sticks out as important. It is marked. The suddenness of the shorter line, for instance, makes the prayer feel complete, concrete. A longer line, on the other hand, may make you feel as if a new line has started but been left unfinished; the connection with the sacred is open. The first is good for a petitionary prayer, and the second is good for a calling or prayer of praise. Try them out and see what emotional response each evokes in you.

Other syllable counts can convey other feelings. Lines of the same length can create peace and contentment:

• Winter snow lies thick
  

  covering the ground.
  

   
  

  Hail, Winter Spirits!
  

   
  

Lengthening or shortening the last line in non-haiku poems—5-5-6 or 6-6-5—can have an effect similar to their effect in haikus:

• Winter snow lies thick
  

  covering the ground.
  

   
  

  Hail, bright Winter Spirits!
  

   
  

Play around with syllable counts, and they may become the unifying principle of your prayer style.

The next level down from syllable count is meter. This is the pattern of long and short syllables, or of accented and unaccented syllables, or of open and closed syllables. These overlap somewhat, with a closed syllable being longer than an open one, and long syllables tending to be accented. (An open syllable is a vowel or one ending with a vowel (V, CV), whereas a closed syllable ends in a consonant (VC, CVC).)

Meter is what drives a poetic line. Does it rush on, or take its time? Does it come smoothly to a stop, or end with a crash?

Meter is a skeleton on which to hang words, which means that the composer is creating order from chaos. This was an important part of ancient religion, so doing it within a prayer makes that prayer into a reflection of one of the goals of religion itself. By composing or speaking structured speech you become a creator of a well-ordered cosmos.

Meter also gives beauty to a prayer. This is in large part due to the response we have to good structure. It may also come from our strong connection to rhythm.

There are a variety of meters, each with a different feel. The famous iambic pentameter, in which each line has five groups of unstressed/stressed combinations of syllables, is a natural meter for English, and is therefore the easiest for us to write and the easiest on our ears. “We wish that you might come to us today.” More exotic meters can make a prayer more marked, but also more difficult to write well, with the danger of the language being a bit stilted. For instance, the trochee, which is made up of an accented syllable followed by an unaccented one (the reverse of iambic), may have been the meter followed by the great Finnish epic, the
Kalevala
, but it is also that of “Hiawatha,” making it hard for those raised on Longfellow to take seriously.

Repetition within a prayer is similar to meter, giving it a structure around which the rest of the prayer turns. Some parts can be repeated and others not, as in a song with verses and choruses. This gives a combination of order and change that may well express the nature of a deity or aspects of the divine reality in which they operate.

Moreover, each time the repeated part is said, it drives itself deeper into our consciousness, each time modified by the nonrepeated part. These modifying words or phrases in a sense fall into the hole dug by the repetition of the other parts. The truth of the repetition is thus manifested in different ways, increasing your understanding of it.

One kind of prayer that uses repetition is a litany, which consists of a call and response. A main celebrant says one thing; this is answered by the others; the main celebrant says something else; the others answer, and so on. The others can repeat what the celebrant has said, or they can say something different, which is then repeated each time they respond:

• Celebrant
  : We pray to the one who knows the runes.
  

  All
  : Odin is he, Odin is wise.
  

   
  

  Celebrant
  : We pray to the one who hears memory's tales.
  

   
  

  All
  : Odin is he, Odin is wise.
  

   
  

  Celebrant
  : We pray to the one who rescued the mead.
  

   
  

  All
  : Odin is he, Odin is wise.
  

   
  

A variation on this is the question-and-answer format:

• Celebrant
  : Who is the one who gives birth to the world?
  

  All
  : The Goddess is she, the mother of all.
  

   
  

  Celebrant
  : Who is the one who comforts the ailing?
  

   
  

  All
  : The Goddess is she, the mother of all.
  

   
  

  Celebrant
  : Who is the one who shines in the nighttime?
  

   
  

  All
  : The Goddess is she, the mother of all.
  

   
  

Finally, we come to word choice. All of the considerations of elevated prose apply here—archaisms, alliterations, and so on. These are more important in poetry than in prose. “Thou” sounds silly outside of the most elevated prose, but can fit in well with certain types of poems.

Word choice can follow a pattern. The best-known is rhyme. This is very common in modern poetry—so much so that many incorrectly see it as poetry's defining characteristic. Rhyme was rare in the ancient world, however. A big reason for this is that many ancient languages are highly inflected. This means that the endings of words changed with their use. For instance, the usual Latin ending for a first-person plural verb (the “we” form) was -
mus
. This makes rhyming so easy and boring that there isn't much point in it. In a sense, the endings don't really rhyme, but rather are identical. It is harder to rhyme in modern English, so English rhymes can be both more subtle and more complex, and therefore more marked and more beautiful.

Rhyme schemes are as varied as meters. The easiest rhyme to construct is couplets—two lines that end in the same sound. These couplets are then “stacked” to make a poem in the form “aabbcc”, etc.:

• Demeter, blesser of women and men,
  

  as was done of old we call you again,
  

   
  

  Holy Queen and Mother of Earth
  

   
  

  bring life, and bring laughter, and birth.
  

   
  

Couplets can become boring in a long prayer, but you can use that to lull the consciousness into an altered state. Couplets can also be used to good effect in litanies, with the response changing each time, but rhyming with the call.

More complicated, but more common, is an “abab” structure, in which the first line rhymes with the third, the second with the fourth, and so on:

• Demeter, blesser of women and men,
  

  Queen and Mother of Earth,
  

   
  

  as was done of old we call you again,
  

   
  

  bring life, and bring laughter, and birth.
  

   
  

More complicated schemes exist. For instance, in addition to end rhymes, in which the last syllable of each line rhymes with the last syllable of other lines, there are internal rhymes, where words inside of each line rhyme with those inside of others. One of the prayers in this book contains both end and internal rhymes:

• With rain, he brings us the greening,
  

  with grain, he brightens our days,
  

   
  

  with might he drives away falseness,
  

   
  

  with right he opens our ways.
  

   
  

Note that I have combined couplets formed by the internal lines with an “abcb” pattern formed by the end rhymes. This sort of poetry is hard to write, which is one reason why out of the hundreds of prayers in this book there is only one like it.

Shakespeare often used rhymes in an interesting way by ending unrhymed soliloquies with the rhymed words. After a number of unrhymed lines, there is a couplet. Take, for instance,
Henry IV
, Part I, Act I, scene 2, where, after twenty unrhymed lines, we find:

One prayer in this book ends in this way:

• Know this, then: averting my eyes I still praise;
  

  I honor with words, though not perhaps my gaze.
  

   
  

Using a couplet in this way can provide a clear ending to a prayer, without having to carry a rhyme scheme through the whole prayer. It can be especially useful in groups, where the couplet can be a good cue that the prayer is over.

Rhyme has the same advantages as meter. It provides structure, beauty, and ease of memorization. It also has the disadvantage of being more difficult to do well. There are many truly bad rhymed prayers out there. The most common danger is to use clichéd rhymes—the moon-Junespoon problem. In other instances, the words don't rhyme exactly: for example, “mine” and “time.” An unrhymed prayer is better than a poorly rhymed one.

Another type of word choice is alliteration, which occurs when two words begin with the same sound: “bright and beautiful,” “great and glorious,” “dewy dawn.” Note that it is the sounds, not the spellings, that create the alliteration: “carefully” alliterates with “kill,” not “celebrate.” In some systems, all vowels alliterate, so that “easy” doesn't alliterate just with “easel,” but with “aisle.”

Alliteration is the basis of Germanic poetry, which is made up of lines that are divided in half by a slight pause:

• Holy in heaven,                        we hail you, Tyr.
  

In each half there are two accented syllables, or “lifts.” The main lift of the line is the first accented syllable in the second half. One or both of the lifts in the first half of the line must alliterate with it, but the second lift in the second half must not. There is more to Germanic poetic rules (see Tolkien, 2009, 45–50), but this will do for now. I bring this up here because it is a very appropriate style for prayers to Germanic deities, and because it is a natural and powerful style for English.

Synonyms help with word choice. One of the glories of English is its large vocabulary, and this can be used to great advantage in prayer. Synonyms can be useful if you want a word of a particular meter, or are looking for a rhyme, or for a word to alliterate. They rarely have exactly the same meaning, however. Their meanings can overlap in some ways and diverge in others. “Cease” implies a complete ending; “halt” is abrupt (Hayakawa, 1968, 593).

Even if the meanings of synonyms are the same, they often differ in level of formality. English has many synonyms in which one word is Germanic in origin—simple, friendly, everyday—and one is from Latin, French, or Greek—longer, formal, marked. Compare “ask” and “request.” Even Germanic words can differ in level of formality; “ask” is a very different word from “beseech.”