Open Buddha

So, R and I went to the Black Sun Gathering this weekend.

R had to work on Saturday for a little while and I didn’t want to go up Friday night so we wound up arriving around 3:00 on Saturday afternoon. The site was beautiful, a lake owned by a nudist group about an hour from Seattle. The nudists were out but were sparesely scattered and it was basically a private campground/retreat area for them. Other than the occasional naked older person, the only noted effect of the nudist park aspect was that people tended to be naked when swimming at the lake or half naked otherwise.

The event itself seemed a bit disorganized. This site was, from what I can gather, the backup of the backup site so I think things wound up there at the last minute. There were three “stages” (performance areas) but they were in a line following the road up and around the lake so none of them were within ear shot of one another. I think this had the effect of keeping most people at one of them and not circulating much. There wasn’t a posted schedule and it became clear pretty quickly that the original schedule (which I never saw since I didn’t actually buy a ticket) was completely off.

R and I found a secluded spot and set up camp. We ran into our friends who were doing the organizing for the event, wandered around a while and then had a practice for our ritual, slated for midnight. We checked out the stages and such. Near midnight, we attended the Mystery School ritual done by the Oracle Gathering people (some of whom were also in the ritual that we were doing) and then hurried back for our ritual. Ours, an Invocation of Chronos and of the Four Powers of the Sphinx (I was one of the four powers, as was R), went fairly well though attendence was light from what I could tell. I didn’t have a vantage point to see the audience without staring…

After the ritual, we went to the Black Sun stage, where most of the Goth/Industrial stuff was to be in order to try to see the performer that R had really come to listen to…and we never saw him. I’m not sure, at this moment, if he ever performed but we did see him hanging out earlier in the day. Regardless of this, there was a DJ spinning music, people dancing and we got to hang out with some of our friends and talk.

R and I also got the opportunity to sample some absinthe as well. I spoke to the fellow for a few minutes and mentioned my interest in spagyrics (plant alchemy) and in learning distillation and he went a little into the process of how he produced the absinthe. Between that and asking one of our friends who knew him, it became pretty clear that this guy really knew his stuff and had brewed his drink in all the right ways. I must say that it definitely had an odd taste but I think I could grow to like it. A possible project for when I get distillation equipment set up…

R and I crashed at something like three in the morning, slept into the early morning, got breakfast and wound up leaving the site by 1:30 or 2:00 in the afternoon. It was a fairly relaxing camping trip and it was good to see people and do things. I’m not sure how well the event really went overall though. The raver contingent was out in full force but there were probably a fifth as many goth types, which was disappointing and I only got to see one band perform and I don’t even know who it was!