In all my years of pagan ritual, I've never seen anything like it: a spontaneous act of mass adoration, utterly organic.
Grand Sabbat 2022: the covens of the Midwest Tribe of Witches, gathered before our god.
He Whose Horns Reach Up to Heaven towers on the altar; we his people stand before him. Me, attendant to the god, I stand with the rest, beside the altar, rapt. He fills my eyes, my heart.
Behind me, beside me, I sense, more than see, a ripple of motion. One by one, in the presence of this Mystery, we bow to the ground, a wave of loving adoration, like wind through wheat.
(Talking with others later, I find that no one can remember why it happened, or how it started, only that it did.)
Now, witches in general are not bowers, nor do the rubrics of the ritual require it.
This, though, was no act of humiliation, of ceremonial self-abasement, but rather, paradoxically, an expression of collective pride: natural, unforced, its rightness like the rippling of a field of standing grain before the wind. Before the Mystery of our god, we bow.