Rites of Passage: Stories, Dreams, and Trance
with Clare, Jennifer, and Marcos
A Six-Week Course
Mondays, May 18-June 29, 2026
6:00-8:30 pm
Nimuë awakened, Mari’s daughter,
From her sleep in the branches of the catkin-willow,
Soon she was aware of what Dobeis had done.
Her beautiful face grew pallid and stern.
Slinging her bow across her slender back,
She strode along the path to the house of Dobeis,
The golden wheels circling giddily about her
And locking together, wheel with wheel,
As a shield to protect the house of Dobeis.
This course offers us an opportunity to explore our dreams and deep imagination, to work through their challenges and discover their gifts, and to emerge from this work renewed and reborn. Our work together will focus on individual, pairs, and group trance; trancing into dream; trance induction and tending; and ritual construction.
Each iteration of this course takes a story as its point of departure. We will be working with “The Story of Nimuë and Dobeis,” a modern myth written by Robert Graves. It tells the tale of the conflict between the Child-God/dess Nimuë and the God of Money, Dobeis. The story is an invitation to exploration: Who are our Child Selves? What is our relation to them? How has capitalism affected our lives? How can we resist it?
Rites is one of the core courses in the Reclaiming tradition. We ask that students have taken our introductory course, Elements of Magic, or have equivalent experience.
Dates and Location
This course will be held on six Mondays from 6:00-8:30 pm over a six-week period. The dates of the individual classes are:
Monday, May 18
Monday, June 1
Monday, June 8
Monday, June 15
Monday, June 22
Monday, June 29
The course will take place in a wheelchair-accessible space in Charles Village. The exact location will be given upon registration.
Cost
The course costs $60-240, sliding scale. No one will be turned away for lack of funds; scholarships and work exchange are available. We try to balance the need to justly compensate teachers for their labor with our commitment to make our work available to people of all economic levels.
Registration
A deposit of $40 is due by May 11. Deposits are refundable until May 15th. Balances are due on May 18th. After that date, no tuition is refundable.
Teachers
Clare is a folk witch, weaver, and poet interested in how symbols resonate and create power. Her magic is spirit-lead, fluid, and lazy. She believes that reading books is speaking to the dead, in divination as deep listening, and dream work is essential. When she is not asleep, she is usually touching yarn, petting a cat, and writing lists in threes. She has been involved in Baltimore Reclaiming in various cells, stems, and flowers since 2015.
Jennifer finds her magic in art making, dancing, cooking, and tending altars for her Ancestors and Gods. She values experience and embodied knowledge over concepts and doctrines, and sees Magic as a living, breathing thing that needs to change and shift to remain vital and effective in our lives. She is an initiate of the Anderson Feri Tradition of Witchcraft, a teaching member of Morningstar Mystery School since its formation in 2008, and currently on the Ritual Planning Cell of Baltimore Reclaiming. Jennifer believes in meeting Nature where you find it (Hint: NOT camping) and that Glam Rock as a cultural movement probably came closest to figuring it all out.
Marcos was born into the Greek community of Detroit in the sixties. In the seventies, he came out as Queer and as a Witch. In the eighties, he became an anarchist and a teacher. He moved to Baltimore near the turn of the millennium, and in the next decades helped found both an urban housing collective and Baltimore Reclaiming. He is an initiate in both the Reclaiming and Feri traditions. He’s currently a member of our community’s Activist and Structure Cells.
Reclaiming is an activist tradition of Neo-Pagan Witchcraft founded by Starhawk, M. Macha Nightmare, Diane Baker, and others in 1979. It is an international movement with roots in feminism, anarchism, direct action, and environmentalism.