Dark Moon Commitment

It's the first really raw day of the season, even though we are, still, a few weeks out from the Winter Solstice.

Last night, I tucked G/Son in, and, just as he was falling asleep, he murmured, "Nonna, I hear the wind."

I said, repeating one of my most-used magical incantations, "Yes. It's windy and cold outside. And we're here, inside our snug cottage: safe, and warm, and dry. You're under warm covers and you have on soft pajamas. Safe and warm and dry." I rub his back while I say it, and all that I have goes into hoping that all his winters are thus. [I never claimed high magic; the hedge kind works for me.]

This morning, after I drop G/Son back at his house, I come home and begin to prepare for the Dark Moon. A December Dark Moon: windy, and cold, and raw. The wind is whipping the last several hundred leaves off of the oldest oak. The birds who know me best sit huddled in the now-leafless euonymous shrub by the deck, knowing that I will show up to put out seed. The grey and black squirrels, who are now feeding pregnant bellies, sit on the edge of the cedar fence, waiting for the peanuts that disappear mere minutes after I put them out. My garden is, by now, almost all bones.

And I, bent under how much reading and writing I have to do today for work, take off my coat, put on some ritual items, and begin to prepare a meal for the dark, three-headed Goddess of the Crossroads. And, all of a sudden, I am fully engaged, fully present, fully here, even if what I am here for is "mere" commitment. I take comfort in T. Thorn Coyle's discussion of the fact that:

“Even when you’re just going for maintenance, progress ends up getting made.” I remarked that this seemed true for any practice.

While riding my bike to my next appointment, I pondered this. Why was this true of so many things? Physical health, meditation, writing, dance, job skills…? What was it about maintenance that would end up facilitating growth? My answer was commitment. For all of these, we are making a commitment to ourselves and to our projects. We are stating that something is important enough for effort, and even if we aren’t going full out, we still end up building muscle, so to speak. We end up learning something. We are showing up to ourselves and for ourselves.

. . .

Someone once said, regarding the Pentacle of Autonomy that I write about in Kissing the Limitless, that he wasn’t sure everything began with commitment and then flowed into the rest of the points (honor, truth, strength, and compassion). Didn’t we sometimes start with desire, or something else? Here is one answer: It isn’t that commitment starts every single thing, it is that commitment starts the action of our will. Commitment starts the flow of deepening. It takes what might be a small impulse, or even a daydream, and makes the first step toward channeling this into manifestation. Commitment is the goad to our spirit, and the cheerleader, and the stalwart support. Commitment is the thing that keeps us showing up.

Mighty Mother of All Change! You who stand at the crossroads, You who look in all directions! When I am full of time to come to You and when I am overcome with work, when I am able to spend hours at Your feet and when the world is too much with me, Bright-Coiffed One of Liminal Space, You whom I meet whenever I work for change, Heroic Hecate, all my worship is Yours on this windy, Dark Moon Day.

Picture found here.

Hecate

Lady of the Hounds

Hekate, Lady of Hounds
Dark-haired haunter of the crossroads
Threshold-crosser, Boundary-walker
Protect my home from all evil influences
From those who would wish me harm
And those who would harm me unwittingly
Dark-haired Goddess clad in spidersilk
The wolf and hound at Your side
The dark of the moon belongs to You
Hekate Triformus
Keeper of Keys and Walker of Ways
Let my partake of the secrets of the night
Let me speak with the animals at Your side
And share in Your khthonic wisdom
Let me return home to sleep in my bed once more,
To teach others of You, fierce Goddess
Let me be of Your wold,
Yet remain in mine.

~Amanda Sioux Blake in Bearing Torches; A Devotional Anthology for Hekate by Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Picture found here.

Hymn to Hekate

Swathed in red is Hekate.
Hooded in red is Hekate.
Red-hemmed Artemis, lift aloft your burning torch,
And bring the trumpet of the nocturnal hunt.
The flow of life is in the hands of Hekate,
And her burning light guides the way.
Terror-ridden roar of the bull is the trumpets blast,
And the hounds bay in search of their prey.
The beasts of the woods shudder in their homes,
And a scream fills the night air.
None is safe from the nocturnal hunt,
And Hekate guides the host of souls to their new abode.
The light of Hekate does not flicker,
But illuminates the halls of the dead,
And exalts in the company of fair Persephone.
Bloodied-red Hekate, we leave your monthly feast,
At the site of your throne.
Red-swathed Hekate has all roads lain before her,
And the merciful Goddess greets those unfortunates who share her plate.
The touch of Hekate is merciful, and in her embrace we depart.

~Lykeia in Bearing Torches: A Devotional Anthology for Hekate, pub. by Bibliotheca Alexandrina

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.

Chant to Hecate

Crone woman, stone woman
Claw shell bone woman
Lone woman alone woman
Dark mother star mother
Well river storm mother
Death Mother, Birth Mother
Earth Mother, Earth Mother.

~Leni Hester

Picture of Hecate and Her Jackal at the Crossroads found here.

Saturday Poetry Bloging

Pale Hekate


Pale Hekate has come to the garden
called by our pomegranate offering
beneath the shadowed hedge.
Her hands rake a trail of death,
dying in a spiral
bedded into the earth.

In her wake, the mint sprigs emerge,
luscious and renewed.
Green children offering grace
at the feet of death.

~Jacinta Cross

Picture found here.

I Worship a Goddess of Liminal Spaces

Like This

Spent wonderful time Sunday evening with some of my magical women. Nothing else restores me like that.

Radio-Free Hekate
(written to be read aloud, as a prayer)

Not with your ears. They will lead you astray.
Listen with your feet.
Nestle them naked
down deep into the tangles of the roots and grass,
burrow your toes under the warm soil, investigate,
tune into the right station,
let the ground rise up into your arches, fill up your base
surround your heels with the movement.

Listen with your skin.

Pull the sound up through every muscle in your legs,
the earth is playing you like a harp, you are being strummed,
softly, strongly, an insistent tune,
a pinnacle point of pitch and vibration
as the space where all your strings come together

let this sound, this calling from the earth,
fill up the hollows of your sacrum,
course it's winding way up your backbone,
chime up each rib like a xylophone, catch
and keep the rhythm of your beating heart.


Tha-Bump. Tha-Bump.
Sound growing
and moving
and expanding
exploding into all its potential
as it blasts from your
fingers and mouth and eyes,
through your every cell

the incredible, undeniable,
untamable sound of living
that your ears, alone,
would never understand.

~Victoria Day 2002, reprinted in We'Moon 2010: Reinvent the Wheel We'Moon says that Victoria Day lives in Columbia, MO and is a "priestess, dancer, and activist who creates from her deep connection with the Divine and her belief that it is essentially important to work for peace."

We were planning to discuss a book we'd all read and our daily practice. We got caught up in the book and didn't get to daily practice . (And, come on, that's happened to you, too, right?) A large part of my daily practice is deep grounding. I love how this poem describes that process. How does it work for you?

Picture found here.

Goddess Days, Old & New

It's not only Friday the 13th, it's also August 13th: a day devoted to Hecate, although this may be a modern, rather than ancient, tradition.

There is, however, widespread belief among modern worshippers that [Hecate] has a feast day on August 13 to protect the crops from violent storms.

Wikipedia is perpetuating this belief, citing Leo Ruickbie's "Witchcraft out of the Shadows" (2004). In a side-box he claims that the ancient Greeks observed a feast day on August 13 in which Hecate was propitiated to not send storms to destroy the growing crops. Ruikbie, in turn, cites his source as Diane Stein's "The Goddess Book of Days" (Llewellyn, 1997). Her original calendar was published in 1988 and does not give a primary source.

Various Internet sites claim that this occurred in the House of Storms and Fertility, that it was a Festival to Hecate of the Moon, or that it was part of the Festival of Hecate and Artemis. Mikalson, in The Sacred and Civil Calendar of the Athenian Year lists for Metageitnion 16 that "the sacrifical calendar of the deme Erkhia prescribes sacrifices on this day to Kourotrophos and Artemis Hekate.". Metageitnion is the Attic lunar month that lines up with late July/August. . . . Unfortunately, I cannot find what occurred during the rite (if anything specific at all). Still, this doesn't explain why August 13 was chosen, fixed as it is to the Roman solar year instead of the lunar calendar used by the ancient Greeks.

Also, there is never any mention as to why Hecate would be called to protect crops. According to Brumfield in his book The Attic festivals of Demeter and their Relation to the Agricultural Year (1976), during the time of the year we call August, the grain harvest had been completed and the grape harvest would not have begun until September. August was a lull in the agricultural year and nothing needed to be protected from violent storms.

A few clues come to light when we stop looking for ancient Greek sources. In Rome, The Festival of Torches was held on August 13, called the Nemoralia. In it, woman would walk from the city of Rome carrying torches to a lake sacred to Diana where they would offer their petitions. There was a strong conflation between Artemis and Hecate in Greece, with Hecate taking on a number of Artemis' roles. Diana and Hecate were also conflated some, but typically maintained separate spheres of influence. Still, this seems to be a likely source for fixing the ritual on that particular date.

Additionally, in 1986 a ritual performed on August 14, 1985, was published in Circle Network News which invoked Hecate Chthonia and incorporated a Hecate Supper. A web page by that author claims that a similar ritual incorporating much of the same text was performed at the MoonStone Circle of the Aquarian Tabernacle and published in Panegyria on August 13, 1988. The original date it was performed, August 14, 1985, was a dark moon, which has been a sacred time for Hecate since classical times. The other date, though, perhaps inspired by Stein's recently published Goddess Book of Days, was a waxing gibbous.

None of this explains a connection with storms or harvests, however. This strikes me as a purely Neopagan phenomenon rising out of widespread observance of harvest-type rituals during early August, the most common being the Celtic feast of Lughnasadh. From a theological point of view, perhaps this dark-dressed flashing eyed goddess calling herself Hecate has inspired us to set Her feast day. We are creating new religions, after all.

It's certainly been stormy here in the MidAtlantic the last few days and I'm as happy to celebrate a new tradition as an old one.

For me, the association between Hecate and summer storms makes some sense. We're at a liminal time. Summer's almost past and Autumn's not quite started. Storms bring chaos, change, that liminal unpredictability that can knock over old trees in an instant, flood a familiar roadway, turn an almost ripe crop into mush. And, so, tonight, I will light incense for Hecate, lay out some of her traditional foods, and chant for the crops.

Picture found here.

Invocation

Hecate Invocation (traditional)


Goddess of the cross-roads,
Goddess of Manic-Depression,
Dweller in the deep places of the earth and mind,
Traveller in the land between worlds!
Torch-bearer! Protectress of the very old and the very young;
Protectress of those used and abused;
Healer of those who are torn apart;
She will be there for us when we call on her and at the end.
Grandmother to lost children and to the downtrodden.
Nurse to the suckling infant,
Comfort to the lone man or woman in the darkest night.
She who seeks vengeance for her children who are wronged!
Wanderer and prowler!
Sorceress who lives at the edge of the mind.
Drawer-up of the secret compost from the unused internal well.
She who has no relatives on the earth save for her children.
Without Mother or Sister.
Lady on the brink, both bi-polar and uni-polar!
They call her mad, and it is she who terrifies the disbeliever and the
unworthy!
Bringer of nightmares!
But she it is who sooths the sleepless and disheveled spirit.
Mother of night!
Dark Power of the moon!
Keeper of the shadow!
Walker of the endless highways!
She unites those who follow her as her children; the Hekite.
Bearer of the sacred poppy.
Shape-shifter, Transformer.
Keeper of the hounds of Hel and the three-headed dog Cerebus!
She walks abroad in the hour of the wolf and under the Dark Moon!
Hear my call O Lady and cover us with your starry cloak.
Let the unborn moon seed in my heart this night.
And let her growing light shine upon our intention;
That she be at our full deliverance,
So Mote it be!

~Erhard Hans Josef Lang

Picture found here.

Hymn to Hecate

O nether and nocturnal and infernal
Goddess of the dark, grimly, silently
Munching the dead.
Night. Darkness, broad Chaos, Necessity
Hard to escape are you . . . you're Moira and
Erinys, torment, Justice and Destroyer,
And you keep Kerberos in chains, with scales
Of serpents are you dark, O you with hair
Of serpents, serpent girded, who drink blood
Who bring[s] death and destruction and who feast[s]
On hearts, flesh eater who devour[s] those dead
Untimely, and you who make grief resound . . . .

~Papyri Graecae Magicae, quoted by Tim Ward in Bearing Torches: A Devotional Anthology for Hekate, published by Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

Picture found here.

Evohe Hekate!

Hekate's Devotion

Blessed be the dark maiden
She who was born of the night
goddess trinity
reigning over the underworld, the celestial heavens and the deep earth
hail unto thee
guide of the Elysian fields
keeper of the keys of all the universe
guardian of the crossroads of fate
she who bears the blade that cuts the silver cords of life and death
Goddess of ancient wisdom, mistress of magick
By the serpent who carried the wisdom of the chthonic earth, I pray
by the night mare who runs wild with lunatic prophetic visions, I pray
Evohe Hekate, mother of witches
My goddess, my queen, my beautiful darkness
In thy honour, I burn this sacred flame.

~ Shay Morgan, in Bearing Torches: A Devotional Anthology for Hekate, edited by Sannion & the Editorial Board of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Picture found here.

Friday Poetry Blogging

Invocation of Hecate
By Aleister Crowley

O triple form of darkness! Sombre splendour! Thou moon unseen of men! Thou huntress dread! Thou crowned demon of the crownless dead!

O breasts of blood, too bitter and too tender! Unseen of gentle spring, Let me the offering Bring to thy shrine’s sepulchral glittering!

I slay the swart beast! I bestow the bloom Sown in the dusk, and gathered in the gloom
Under the waning moon, At midnight hardly lightening the East;

And the black lamb from the black ewe’s dead womb I bring, and stir the slow infernal tune
Fit for thy chosen priest.

Here where the band of Ocean breaks the road Black-trodden, deeply-stooping, to the abyss, I shall salute thee with the nameless kiss

Pronounced toward the uttermost abode Of thy supreme desire. I shall illume the fire Whence thy wild stryges shall obey the lyre, Whence thy Lemurs shall gather and spring round,
Girdling me in the sad funereal ground With faces turned back,

My face averted! I shall consummate The awful act of worship, O renowned Fear upon earth, and fear in hell, and black

Fear in the sky beyond Fate!

I hear the whining of thy wolves! I hear The howling of the hounds about thy form, Who comest in the terror of thy storm,

And night falls faster, ere thine eyes appear Glittering through the mist. O face of woman unkissed
Save by the dead whose love is taken ere they wist! Thee, thee I call! O dire one! O divine! I, the sole mortal, seek thy deadly shrine,

Pour the dark stream of blood, A sleepy and reluctant river
Even as thou drawest, with thine eyes on mine, To me across the sense-bewildering flood
That holds my soul for ever!

Picture found here.

Transition Town: I'd Expect To Find It Where Three Crossroads Meet

In Transition 1.0 from Transition Towns on Vimeo.

Liminal

Who can say how one Goddess or God chooses a person or how one person chooses a Goddess or a God? I've long been a devotee of Hecate, and she's confirmed for me that I'm "her girl." I don't think that it's entirely (hah!) a rational process, nor one that can be explained "logically."

But I do know that a huge part of the attraction that I feel for Hecate is due to the fact that she's the Goddess of liminal spaces (crossroads). Wiki says: Liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold"). The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One's sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed - a situation which can lead to new perspectives. In my own limited experience, liminality is necessary for magic (aka, change in accordance with will) to happen. Liminality is not always, or even generally, comfortable. Ambiguity and indeterminacy can feel a lot more scary than good, a lot more uncomfortable than supportive. And, yet, even with my Moon in Taurus, I head like a salmon upstream for that liminality. Like Rumi, who says: I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let's buy it, I run to Hecate, all aware that the security that I've created at great price will likely dissipate at her crossroads.

Who can say how much of it is due to this extreme winter (which was due, at least in part, to global climate change) and how much of it is due to global climate change, but the micro-eco-system here in my tiny bit of Earth in Northern Virginia, is in the middle of a liminal shift. We're about a week-and-a-half to two weeks ahead of where we should "normally" be. This is generally true all over Columbia's district. It's always been the weekend of Beltane when I'm out sweeping strands of oak semen off of my deck, but I'm doing that now, a good two weeks before Beltane. It's generally Beltane when my lilacs bloom, but they'll be in full bloom on Tuesday or Wednesday of next week, and that's only due to a late cold spell; otherwise, they'd bloom this weekend. I could go on and on.

It was the early "gardeners" (generally women), trying to grow food, rather than lilacs, who paid so much attention to the seasons and determined what we gardeners consider "normal." Now, we're gardening in liminal times. Landscape Guy tells me that he no longer believes the "zones" established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture; they've shifted due to global climate change, although admitting that would commit our government to admitting that global climate change is real. He grows things in his yard that "should" only grow down in the Carolinas.

I don't know any other answer than to pay attention. I sit out in my bit of Earth, watch, listen, communicate, and pay attention. I listen to the birds who are courting and nesting a few weeks early, I shift into the v slow attention span of the trees and hear what they are saying, what their roots are doing, the direction in which their new sprouts are growing. I work v hard to be the "witch of this space," which is how I announce myself to the Elements when I cast a circle. If I am to be the witch of this space, then I am the witch of a liminal, shifting, disoriented space. SomeWitch has to do this. It's my job because I live here.

What's your job?

Picture found here.

Hecate

When I read Tarot, I'm a big believer in paying attention to the card that "jumps out." You know, the card that somehow, improbably, falls off the top of the deck after the Querant has carefully cut the deck and dealt the required cards. The card that sticks to the bottom of another card and only shows up when you begin to turn the cards over to read them. That card. Heck, if there's a clearer way for the Universe to say: "OK, now pay attention," I don't know exactly what it is. (Well, I do, but I don't know any other way for the Universe to say this that doesn't generally involve pain, loss, a kick in the pants.)

So, when a book falls off of one of my bookshelves, all unasked, I pay attention to that, as well. It's tricky for books to fall off of my bookshelves, which have glass doors that, you know, tend to prevent "falling off." But when I open a bookshelf to get one book, and another "jumps out," I pay attention. Now, one of the earliest, truest, and most important magics that I ever did, all unknowing, as a young pentacostal catholic who would have been horrified at the term bibliomancy, was to open a book, read the top of the page, and take it to heart. To womb. To life. And that has made all the difference.

I'm not as young as I was, not all all pentacostal or catholic, nor am I at all horrified by any form of divination that does not involve live sacrifice. But I'm still often amazed at what bibliomancy can teach me. Ellen Cannon Reed's The Heart of Wicca, which I haven't opened or thought of in years, hopped merrily off of my bookshelf and onto my floor, open to the section where Ellen discusses the importance to her practice of relationship with divinity, particularly in its more personal and specific forms, and sent me an important message.

And I intend to pay attention.

Hecate, Guardian of the Crossroads

Lend me your dagger to cut away the unnecessary to find my true power
Lend me your rope to hold fast to that which I still need
Lend me your torch to illuminate the shadows
Gift me with the sacred key to unlock the mysteries of life
Show me my choices and give me the insight and strength
to always choose the right path

To which particular deity do you pay attention? Why? What have you lately heard?

Picture found here.

Mary Travers Is Gone And Lots Of Assholes Live On. It Makes No Sense.

There's a tiny bitty speck in that crowd that is the young Hecate, in an Aran sweater, wearing a wooden peace symbol on a leather cord around her neck, marching w her dad and her sister, L. You can see her if you look v hard. It's been a long, long time, and we're not as far along as I had hoped.

Invocation To Hecate

Goddess of the cross-roads,
Goddess of Manic-Depression,
Dweller in the deep places of the earth and mind,
Traveller in the land between worlds!
Torch-bearer! Protectress of the very old and the very young;
Protectress of those used and abused;
Healer of those who are torn apart;
She will be there for us when we call on her and at the end.
Grandmother to lost children and to the downtrodden.
Nurse to the suckling infant,
Comfort to the lone man or woman in the darkest night.
She who seeks vengeance for her children who are wronged!
Wanderer and prowler!
Sorceress who lives at the edge of the mind.
Drawer-up of the secret compost from the unused internal well.
She who has no relatives on the earth save for her children.
Without Mother or Sister.
Lady on the brink, both bi-polar and uni-polar!
They call her mad, and it is she who terrifies the disbeliever and the
unworthy!
Bringer of nightmares!
But she it is who sooths the sleepless and disheveled spirit.
Mother of night!
Dark Power of the moon!
Keeper of the shadow!
Walker of the endless highways!
She unites those who follow her as her children; the Hekite.
Bearer of the sacred poppy.
Shape-shifter, Transformer.
Keeper of the hounds of Hel and the three-headed dog Cerebus!
She walks abroad in the hour of the wolf and under the Dark Moon!
Hear my call O Lady and cover us with your starry cloak.
Let the unborn moon seed in my heart this night.
And let her growing light shine upon our intention;
That she be at our full deliverance,
So Mote it be!

Erhard Hans Josef Lang

Picture found here.