The Rollright Ritual - Rollright Stones - Little Rollright, Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire - There's a Book About It on Waymarking.com

William G. Gray 1913–1992, better known to many as Bill Gray, was an English ceremonial magician, Hermetic Qabalist and writer, who published widely on the subject of western esotericism and the occult. Gray founded a magical order known as the Sangreal Sodality.

The Rollright Ritual is a powerful initiatory rite for attuning oneself to a personal and communal path of spiritual growth, presented here with an explanatory text and a discussion of the spiritual lives and practices of the stone circle builders of Great Britain.

The Rollright Stones are located on the contemporary border between the counties of Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, two-and-a-half miles north-northwest of the town of Chipping Norton, and one-and-three-quarters of a mile west of the smaller village at Great Rollright. Though not as grand and well preserved as the Avebury or Stonehenge ritual landscapes, the Rollright monuments possess their own unique atmosphere, and have attracted a wealth of supernatural folklore over the centuries involving witches, fairies, invading 'Danes,' and the famous prophetess Mother Shipton.

Colorful stories swirled around the Rollright stone circle in the 18th and 19th centuries, folklore that included not only fairies and witches but also supernatural events and fertility rituals. For example, some people believed that the king trapped in the King Stone could come to life briefly every night when the church clock of the nearby village chimed the midnight hour.

"William G. Gray is a well established author of many books on Qabalah and ritual magic. He also worked with many practitioners of traditional witchcraft including Doreen Valiente, Pat Crowther and notably Robert Cochrane, in whose remembrance The Rollright Ritual was written.

In the early 1970s the redoubtable old occultist William G. Gray bicycled from his Gloucestershire home to the Rollright stone circle in Oxfordshire on a clear and full-mooned summer night. The visionary experiences he encountered on that night and in other similar visits resulted in the writing of this book, originally published by Helios Books in 1975 and now a classic among pagan and craft traditions. The text of the ritual is given in full, along with a discussion of its pattern and purpose. The Rollright Ritual is a powerful initiatory rite for attuning oneself to a personal and communal path of spiritual growth, presented here with an explanatory text and a discussion of the spiritual lives and practices of the stone circle builders of Great Britain. "Somehow, we ought to get away from ideas that a Standing Stone is only an outworn sign of our past, and see it as an upraised Finger of Fate beckoning us ahead toward our future. The Stone is not merely a memorial of bygone beliefs, but a pointer that should raise our highest hopes of finding faith in all the Life that lies ahead of us."

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ISBN Number: 1908011173 Author(s): William G. Gray

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