Handfasting and Wedding Rituals: Welcoming Hera's Blessing | Raven Kaldera, Tannin Schwartzstein...

Handfasting and Wedding Rituals: Welcoming Hera's Blessing | Raven Kaldera, Tannin Schwartzstein | Inspirational handfasting resource

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Handfasting and We...

	Handfasting and Wedding Rituals: Welcoming Hera's Blessing Raven Kaldera, Tannin Schwartzstein Llewellyn Publications, 2003 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

For Pagans who are getting married or handfasted and want to create their own meaningful ceremony, this book contains original, never-before-published rites from more than two dozen Pagan traditions. Plus, it grades all rituals as to their level of non-Pagan acceptance. Assemble the wide variety of mix-and-match ritual segments into the perfect wedding. Between them, the authors have handfasted more than one hundred couples.

Ancient Marriage Ideas

Handfasting & Wedding Rituals: Welcoming Hera's BlessingI found the book well written, informative and interesting. I think handfasting is a better idea even for traditional couples. It makes more sense as a way of marriage in our ever changing society. Handfasting gives couples the chance to renew their vows perpetually, if they choose to. Maybe our society can use this concept to help move away from lawyers and judges.

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Inspirational handfasting resource

The authors do a great job of providing vows and rites for a myriad of handfasting ceremonies. Traditional two-person heterosexual unions are covered as well as polyamorous and GLBT unions.

The rites are classified into three levels, each with a varying degree of Pagan involvement with level 3 considered all out Pagan.

Interfaith ceremonies as well as different Pagan traditions are honored such as Faery, Druid, Celtic, Norse, Warrior and more.

The appendices give tips on astrological wedding planning and flower and Pagan symbolism.

Pagan clergy will find this book especially helpful for inspiration with alternative ceremonies.

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lots of info

This was a great base for writing my marriage ceremony. It had some great ideas and readings in it. My handfasting went great with this book's help.

Some Help, Some Harm

If you already know about Pagan religions and handfastings then this is a helpful resource. If you are trying to learn about handfastings, this is not a good place to start. My finacee and I are planning our handfasting- I was formerly Wiccan and now simply practice Pagan spirituality while he is only vaguely familar with Pagan spirituality. I purchased several books from Amazon on handfasting and we each picked one and started reading. This book offers some good ideas on vows, but also includes heavy insuations that handfastings and weddings are pointless and that the marriage day is the "last good day of the relationship." It also talks about the use of handfastings as a "fake" marriage for poly couples and same-sex partnerships. The implacation of these marriages as "fake" was offensive to me and terrified my fiancee as he then thought I was trying to have a "fake" marriage with him. Overall this book gives the general impression of "Hey, marriage sucks, but if you really must then here are some ideas!" If you can overlook this tone then this book certainly has some useful ideas, but in certain situations it can aslo pose as something of a setback. If you're new to handfastings I greatly recommend Passages Handfasting: A Pagan Guide to Commitment Rituals (Passages) instead as a short, interesting and engaging introduction that includes a history of handfasting and some brief yet helpful suggestions and descriptions on dates, color and plant symbolism, choosing your location, making incense and more.

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Interesting

My fiance and I are non-pagan wishing to incorporate this ritual into our ceremony. This is important to note up front, because the level of usefulness of this book does depend on what you're looking for. We were looking for instruction on constructing this ritual in a respecting way for its tradition and respecting who we are as a couple.

To us, there were a couple of useful PAGES in this book. We found a very lovely Level 1 vow that we will use (and that has saved us from searching through countless other books to find our vows or writing them....so that was extremely useful). We also decided to do a very subtle level 1 call to the elements/quarters (poetic). It's beautiful, and very doubtful that anyone will recognize it. We're going to use the Maid of Honor, Best Man, Bride, Groom, and Officiant for this.

We're Unitarian, and because of this, we have at our disposal the whole host of beautiful wedding traditions. We're not 'locked into' any one particular rite. We're going to adapt what we use into our Chalice lighting (a rite that happens at the beginning of each Unitarian service, and we would like at our wedding).

That being said: I was looking for the meanings of the cords rather than the ceremonies for Pagan - Catholic marriage. The authors have clearly put a lot into this work and making a wonderful pagan wedding reference.

But if you're not pagan (or neopagan), much of what they are offering is not going to work in your slightly non-traditional non-pagan wedding ceremony. Understand you'll be using only a few pages of this reference, and be good with that. I will also grant: The pages you use will be VERY valuable to you.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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