Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper deals with the core of the Wiccan religion—the small group based practices which define Wicca as an initiatory Mystery religion practiced by clergy. At the centre of Wiccan ritual and theology is an ancient idea—the hieros gamos / sacred marriage. The hieros gamos ritual, called by Wiccans The Great Rite, is a ritual of sexual magic involving intercourse between the Goddess of fertility, embodied by Her Priestess, and Her Consort, present in the Priest. It is an egalitarian erotic mystical path open to both genders and all sexual interests, most often expressed as heterosexual, valuing sexuality and the female body and challenging the sexual power dynamics in Western culture. The paper begins by outlining the theology and history of the Great Rite, Wiccan ritual in general and the Rite, then excerpts from primary documents of Priestesses and Priests reporting on their experiences of the Rite, before concluding. The sacred marriage in Wicca confirms and seals the highest level of religious initiation, third degree, and has the mystical meaning of a loving union with Godhead. Wiccan Initiates are taught the skills needed to enter into and leave mystical states of consciousness. The connection between the Wiccan religion, a feminist-influenced religion, and the practice of sexual ritual is not unexpected. What can hieros gamos be in the modern age? Why is it a central symbol and frequent practice in a modern religion? What does the practice bring to its participants?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".