Dark of the Moon, New Beginnings

Dark Moon tonight. New beginnings. Dark of the Moon, plant a seed tonight. Dark of the Moon. What we envision, will come to be in the Full Moon's light.

What new thing are you working on?

What do you envision that will come to be in the Full Moon's light?

My goals for the coming Moon are pretty prosaic: I'm going to add two workouts with weights a week to my now-already-pretty-well-established-daily treadmill walking. (I'm an old woman. Suddenly, that whole weight-training-can-fight-inflamation-and-thus-stave-off-arthritis-stuff (given the pain in my hands from knitting the last couple of cowls) is starting to sound pretty good to me.) If I don't show up this same time next month and tell you that I've done 8 sessions at the gym, well, now that I've made it public, no worries, I'll do it. I'm working, too, on a commitment that I made a while back at an important ritual: I'm going to get out more and do more "fun" stuff, even if it is getting cold and even if I do have a ton of get-ready-for-Winter stuff to do in my garden. (Yes, fun can be very important. Especially if you're the oldest-daughter-super-achiever-type-A-introverted Queen of the To-Do List.) This weekend, I'm debating between this, a trip to one of my favorite places, a browsing (and, OK, a yarn-for-Yule-projects-buying) trip to my favorite yarn store, and listening to Congressional staffers gossip about the new Congress at Hawk & Dove.

What would you do if you had promised to go do something just for fun?

Picture found here.

Dark of the Moon, New Beginnings

Here's this month's Hecate's Deipnon.

Fish, eggs, cheese, onions, and honey. The marigolds are traditional flowers for the upcoming Dia De Los Muertos, as their scent is said to attract the dead back across the veil. (The Goddess may have grown up on wine and ouzo, but, here in Virginia, she prefers rum, as do many of the Spirits of this place). It's traditional to leave this meal for the Goddess at a spot where three roads meet, but I place it for a few minutes on the stone altar in my woodland garden and then on the garden ground. It's always gone in the morning.

"Deipnon" means "meal," but a meal with religions connotations.

In the Homeric Age it was usual to sit at table; and this custom, we are told, was kept up in historical times by the Cretans. Each guest had generally his own table, and an equal share of food was placed before each (hence δαὶς ἐΐση), except when a specially distinguished guest was honoured by getting a larger portion ( Il.vii. 321). What strikes us as peculiar in the Homeric dinners is their religious character. They partake more or less of the nature of a sacrifice, beginning with an offering of part of the meat to the gods, and both beginning and ending with a libation of wine; while the terms for slaughtering animals for a meal (ἱερεύειν, θύειν) and for the slaughtered animals (ἱερήϊα) are borrowed from the language of religious ceremony.

More here.

Some say that you should leave Hecate's Deipnon on a plate that you don't intend to reclaim, but I use this plate each month and use it, as well, on Samhein at the supper for the ancestors. Leaving the plate behind may be related to the connection between Hecate's Deipnon and feeding the poor.

While the offerings were intended for Hekate, they also became a source of food for the poor, as we can see in a play by Aristophanes where Plutus says to Poverty:

"Ask Hecate whether it is better to be rich or starving; she will tell you that the rich send her a meal every month and that the poor make it disappear before it is even served."

This idea has [also] been used . . . in a manner both contemporary and true to tradition:

"I do a food offering for Hecate, which doesn't actually go to Hecate. It goes to the poor. Where I live, there's a food drive for local poor families every Friday, right at the entrance of a big grocery store. I buy some dry food items there, and offer them as 'Hecate's Supper.' The girl scouts always chant 'For Hekate' with me when I drop the food into their collection cart. "

More here.

Hecate has many titles: Endoia (of the wayside), Kleidophorous (key-bearing), Kourotrophos (nurse of children), Soteira (savior), Trivia (from where three roads meet), and, one of my favorites: Khrusosandalaimopotikhthonia (golden-sandalled, Queen-of-the-Underworld who feeds upon blood). Homer called her "bright-coiffed." She is many things to me, but, most of all, she is the one who spoke up and helped Demeter find her raped and abducted daughter when everyone else was trying to be politic. Her allegiance was to women and not with the patriarchy. Hail Hecate! May every Dark Moon, until the end of time, find Daughters of the Earth preparing your Deipnon. May you be happy with our offerings.

A Witch's Daily has lots more wonderful information.

Ahhhh!

We've had almost a full week of rain, which has now stopped, although it's still grey and cold and there's a wild wind that is making impulsive and not-very-gentle love to the branches and leaves. They respond in kind: the sort of sex old lovers have when they don't know for sure when, if ever, they'll see each other again, don't terribly care, but figure, "Hey, this one deserves to be good because of all that went before." (I guess you have to be a certain age to get this.)

One of the things that I love a lot about Autumn is this glorious WRECKEDNESS. The garden that was so orderly this summer is covered by a thin scrim of soggy, blown-about leaves, the trees are going to ruin, although they're going there with a final burst of color. Seed pods are popping before I can collect the seeds in nice, neatly-labeled envelopes (Datura from Front Garden -- Dark Moon -- Oct. 2009) and seeding the damp ground beneath them will-they-nill-they. The acorns that I was going to collect and send to a group that grows young oaks to repopulate MD are too soggy, scattered everywhere. Ghosts of those I've known flit around in broad day, talk to me and demand food and baths in my dreams, call to me across fields of parsley and thyme when they know that my feet are bare. Everything is going to ruin and doing it with a bonny will.

That Mother Earth does this, and does it once a year, every year, is such a gift. It reminds me that even when, like Dorothy Parker, My land is bare of chattering folk; The clouds are low along the ridges, And sweet's the air with curly smoke From all my burning bridges, that's ok. In fact, it's necessary, this blessed dishabille, chaos, going to ruin. Everything we do in Autumn, raking the leaves into neat piles, making warm soup, laying ruby-red fires, knitting vests, and laying out next Spring's garden on grid paper with colored pencils, it's all in a way an attempt to deny what the Mother is teaching us: ruin is lovely, in and of itself. It's this love of ruin that sends me gladly dancing through graveyards, watching the decomposition in my compost bin, heading into dark places inside me that ought to terrify a nice lady. Someone once said that people fear witches because we aren't afraid of the dark places. That's not quite right. At our best, we witches love the dark places, seek them out, co-destroy with nature just as, in Spring, we co-create. Because they're the same, because the one requires the other.

Blessed dark October Moon to you.

Photos by the author, if you copy, please link back. (I tried like hell to kill this rosebush all summer. I ignored it, didn't water it, let the morning glories overtake it. It gently ignored me and then, all unexpected, presented me with these lovely-full-of-vitamins-rose-hips. If she survives the winter, I'm going to be forced to pull her up and throw her in the compost heap w/ full awareness of what I'm doing.)

Dark Moon

Dark of the moon
Plant a seed tonight
Dark of the moon
What we envision
Dark of the moon
Will come to be
Dark of the moon
By the full moonlight

~Wiccan chant

Off to do some dark moon magic with the witches. I occasionally note that the amazing women with whom I work do political magic directly in the shadow of the Capitol and, oddly, that generally results in at least one email saying, "Nuh Unh. If you did that, someone would notice and stop you."

We are far from the only ones. You just don't see us because: (1) you don't expect to and (2) we don't want you to.

But we're all over.

Reya:

Snapshot: Me, at Mt. Vernon, standing next to George Washington's tomb (not the swanky crypt he's in now. I'm talking about the earth-covered small room where he was originally buried). I am dumping a liter of ice cold water on the tomb, while almost shouting, "WAKE UP!! We NEED YOUR GUIDANCE! HEY!!! GEORGE!! WAKE UP!!!!" That was early into the first Bush administration when it became clear just how bad things were going to get.

Snapshot: With cohorts I am conducting rituals of recognition at each of the original Masonic cornerstones of the District, each stone precisely aligned to a cardinal direction. We offered wine and cornmeal, cleaned up the sites, danced around, sang songs, etc. We spent a whole year doing Connect DC. It was very fun.

Snapshot: Along with some of my cohorts I am standing in the rotunda of the Capitol. It is August 17, 2001. Three of us are standing in a triangle around the center of the rotunda, holding pieces of rose quartz. One is holding a sphere, one an egg, and one a long, pyramidal point. We are casting a "Triangle of Stillness" in the midst of the crazy central vortex of the Capitol, beneath the Apotheosis of Washington. (After that day I "saw" the triangle of stillness crystalize into a protective shield. After 9/11, my cohorts and I were convinced that our ritual had somehow protected the Capitol.) Yeah. Magicians tend to be grandiose.

Snapshot: I am standing at a fountain below the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, flinging dozens of marigolds into the water, sobbing, chanting, "Drink! Drink! Drink!!" (I still don't know what that one was about!)

I could go on with the snapshots: a year and a half of rituals at Logan Circle, Dupont Circle, Lafayette Park in front of the White House, at the Washington Monument, the Lincoln, on the American Civil War battlefields, etc. Oh yeah I was a very busy ritualist for a few years.

Connect DC: West of the Capitol

In ur churches, drinking ur wine.

At the Lincoln Memorial: