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Winding Road Coven

Top: The Winding Road Coven Cone of Power ritual in December 2018. Bottom: The coven’s Facebook page, where members participated in virtual circle events. Photographs by Lauren Pond.
Winding Road Coven is a Wiccan community in central Ohio. When members meet at each other’s homes for study and ritual (also referred to as circle), they typically begin with the Cone of Power, a practice of raising energy for magical purposes, usually through chanting. Participants stand in a circle and link hands, forming the base of an invisible cone, to the top of which energy is believed to flow. “It is about the magic. It is about vibrating and radiating the appropriate waves to attract back the desired effects,” explained Brian Edwards, the Wiccan priest who leads Winding Road. In 2018, the ARSP recorded a Cone of Power ritual that the coven conducted for Yule on the winter solstice – the longest night of the year, when the God of Light is believed both to die and be reborn, and when negativity within the self can also be dispelled and transformed.

As a community whose practices often rely on this kind of interpersonal contact and energy, Winding Road was profoundly impacted by the pandemic and its social distancing requirements. The coven began hosting circle on Zoom, and later, Facebook, but each of these digital platforms posed unique technical problems – and neither was a substitute for in-person ritual, members said. The pandemic also fostered individual creativity and introspection, as well as long-distance magical practices.

We had a conversation with several Winding Road coven members and asked how they had been affected by the emergence of COVID-19. Here is what they had to say.

The text and audio below have been edited for brevity and clarity.
ARSP: Could you speak a little bit about how you experience the Cone of Power?

BRIAN EDWARDS: It’s an opportunity for 100 voices, 10 voices, five voices – however many voices are present to blend seamlessly together and resonate harmonically. It’s not so much about singing; it’s really about the vibration you’re trying to put out. There’s nothing quite like it.

JAMES COLLINSWORTH: You kind of connect with the people in the circle with you. There’s a lot of times we’ll all stop on the same note.

KELLEY ZINKAN: We feel each other. And we know – we feel when the singing stops.

ARSP: What’s the significance of each of the chants?

BRIAN: To be honest with you, learning chants was always something that came from going to public events that other people held. Some of them are traditional. They share their chants with you; you share yours with them. I think what was really important for me when we established Winding Road – I didn’t want anyone following a specific formula, like doing it specific to what I say. They’re contributing their voice to this. The instruction is: However you are moved to speak, speak it.

ARSP: How has the pandemic affected this and your other practices?

JAMES: It was really hard sitting there hunched over my phone trying to have a serious conversation. It just kind of felt very disconnected.

BRIAN: I got the license for Zoom so that I could have multiple people on there. Please forgive me, because I’m not trying to be a jerk, but – I had my priest hat on, and people kept pulling me back to be the IT guy at the office. I’m getting, “Am I on mute? I can’t figure out how to put this access code in!”  I discovered that a lot of people that I thought were tech-savvy were actually Luddites.

BRIAN: The one time I tried to do a Cone of Power with people over Zoom, and could hear them, the lag in between internet services – I just literally was like, well, not going to do that again! Oh yeah, it was complete chaos. And that was the last time we tried to do a Cone of Power over Zoom.

MADISON BENTLEY: I am not a tech witch, by any means. So it didn’t feel like anything. It just kind of felt like I was watching from a distance. Whereas, in the room here now, I can feel everything.

BRIAN: There’s this whole thing with distance magic. If there’s a proper working circuit between the people you’re connecting with, you should be able to pull from them anywhere you are, all over the world. For those people who really know how to connect from a distance, I didn’t expect that it was going to be that much of an issue. But those people that I know who literally love circle and the physicality of circle, and the laughter of circle, and the conversations directly afterward, etc. – I kind of knew this was going to hit people really, really hard.

ARSP: How did the pandemic affect your spiritual experience?

ANDREW HENSEL: I mean, we’ve all had to do almost all distance. It’s like a muscle we knew we had but we had to work out more and more. It can be tiring, distance-sending.

MADISON: I had to do my first solo distance with Andrew, when Luke got into his accident. A very close friend of mine was in a hit-and-run, and unfortunately he didn’t make it. Andrew was good friends with him, too, and the two of us kind of worked together. We joined forces. It did give Luke’s family enough time to get to him.

KELLEY: I’ve learned that I’m a lot stronger than I was. It’s forced you to turn inward and to look at yourself, especially early on during the pandemic when everything was closed down and I was furloughed from work. I didn’t have anything to do. I kept my faith pretty solid. I don’t feel like I wavered at all.

GARY DESALVO: I do a lot of banishing. Making the potion that we make, and bolstering my immune system in that way. We’ve shared that potion with people.

MADISON: Honestly, [the goddess] has always been there for me in my most unworthy moments. She pulled me out of the darkness of my overdoses. All of my evidence to this point suggests I am blessed and highly favored and protected. There was no reason for me to think otherwise or doubt. I am going to be okay; my family is going to be okay. We’re going to make it through this.

JAMES: A lot of people came to me for advice or counseling or somebody just to talk to. I got a lot of people that just requested runes. I didn’t expect it because I was more in self-defense mode once all of this hit. Divination and counseling were probably the biggest surprise.

BRIAN: You never really know how deeply you mean what you say until something provides an opportunity for you to rise to the occasion, and suddenly you have a whole new awareness of yourself that you didn’t actually have before. I learned I have a serious, vested interest in the people I have brought into my life that I feel I am called to guide. And my desire to protect them and keep them safe is pretty all-encompassing.

ARSP: Do you feel like you’re reaching more people?

BRIAN: During this pandemic, I felt catalyzed and I felt like I flew into protect-and-heal mode, but on a much wider scale than I have ever really done before. I actually even felt like a deity was pushing me in that direction. I had an experience that was quite humbling and faith-affirming.
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