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Record W60734420 · doi:10.3138/jrpc.21.2.004

The Wiccan “Great Rite”— <i>Hieros Gamos</i> in the Modern West

2009· article· en· W60734420 on OpenAlex
Samuel Wagar

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Religion and Popular Culture · 2009
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicReligious Studies and Spiritual Practices
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMysticismRiteRite of passageMAGIC (telescope)Human sexualityPower (physics)SociologyAestheticsGender studiesReligious studiesHistoryTheologyAnthropologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.298
Threshold uncertainty score0.546

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0010.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.019
GPT teacher head0.255
Teacher spread0.236 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it