Hearth & Horn

One of the challenges of sharing roles in a degree-based system is that not everyone can do all the roles. (Right now, we are in 'I am the only person who can do most of the circle cast, and I'm the only one who can teach the teaching things'. And we're not doing a ton else in terms of activities.)

That said, my students volunteered on their own to sort out bringing food for all of us (they alternate who brings the main dish and who brings something supplemental) and they do the dishes after. I just taught them how to do altar set-up, so we may talk about alternating some of that.

(Because I've got limited storage, and we're doing stuff in my bedroom, it may make sense for me to keep doing that, though. Logistics are hard. And so very individual to particular times, places, and people.)

My hope is that as the group acquires more initiates, we'll be able to split things more easily - my ideal would be rotating who plans rituals, for example, and for them to help with teaching future students (maybe alternating classes). But that's also a limited frame thing, because I don't want to run a group that's more than about 5-8 people.

There are some things it's hard to alternate: in our tradition, as I suspect a number of others, there are esoteric portions of the role of HPS and HP (among others) that continue between rituals, and it's a lot trickier to do those if you're swapping up all the time - both because you can't set up some longer-term management and process that works for you as a particular person in the role (on the exoteric side) and also because you lose continuity on the esoteric side, and are constantly trying to pick up threads of energy.

The group I trained in handled it by having people try different ritual roles as part of training, but by having a long-term person assigned to the major ongoing roles in the group (HPS, HP, Handmaiden, Summoner, in our terminology) plus usually one person responsible for Seeker emails and classes who'd get other people to come co-teach with them.

People would rotate through some of those roles (Handmaiden, Summoner, Seeker stuff) based on interest and available time/energy, but the HPS and HP roles were constant, because their energetic connections to the group were part of the esoteric and exoteric 'what makes the group like this'.

Groups that explicitly structure as sharing all the roles from the beginning can and do work, but based on observation, they're a lot harder to get off the ground, and it's really hard to add people to (because people without that background have things they can't take on, at least yet, and integration is hard.)