May The Goddess Guard Her. May She Find Her Way To The Summerlands. May Her Friends And Family Know Peace.

A Bottle Full Of Pee

When I was a v new witch, almost all the Llewellyn books that I bought contained a spell for making charms to keep evil from your door. They were almost exactly like the one described below, although I don't remember naval lint:



Take a small heart-shaped piece of leather, a handful of iron nails, eight brass pins, a lock of hair, some nail clippings, a pinch of navel fluff and place them in a bottle. Then add a pint of urine, seal the bottle and bury it by your front door — this is the recipe for warding off a witch’s curse.

The article claims the charm was used to ward off "a witch's curse," but I'm not sure how they know that from the contents. Perhaps the person who assembled these ingredients was a witch, warding off evil?

At any rate, TimesonLine, grow the fuck up and find a different picture. Do you use pictures meant to insult Jews, showing them with big noses and bags full of gold, in articles about ancient Jewish artifacts? Do you show pictures meant to insult Catholics, showing them kissing the pope's ass and drinking too much, in articles about ancient Catholic artifacts?

I found this one here.

They Don't Get To Set The Terms Of The Debate

An interesting point concerning the fallout of this weekend's terrorist act by domestic christofascist terrorists, who shot a doctor on his way into church:

Since Dr. Tiller performed late-term abortions, the terrorists and their media enablers have taken to implying, and, in many cases outright lying about, the "invalid" reasons behind those abortions. Those of us who are not pro-coat-hanger, often respond with heart-wrenching stories about women who wanted a child and found out late in their pregnancy that they were carrying a fetus so severely damaged that it would not be viable after birth. We report how sad the abortion made the woman (and her partner) and believe that we've countered the terrorists' lies.

The danger here is to allow the terrorists to set the terms of the debate. Abortion must be a woman's choice, regardless of her reasons. We can't allow the question to become whether or not the woman had a "good enough" reason for the abortion. And women needn't "pay" for their right to an abortion by being sad about it. For many women, abortion brings a sense of relief, control over their own lives, resolution.

It's also been fascinating to watch the pro-coat-hanger crowd scream that nobody better try to use this recent act of terrorism to "score political points" against them. Dudes. People who waive around gigantic signs of bloody fetuses outside abortion clinics and screech at the women entering them don't get to tell the rest of us about using things to score political points.

Image found here.

My New Name For A Blog

What Jason Said.

Update: And, as a perfect coda: What Medusa Coils Said.

Picture found here.

(Almost) First Of The Month Bazooms Blogging

Ladies! Listen up! Detecting breast cancer early is the key to surviving it! Breast Self Exams (BSEs) can help you to detect breast cancer in its earlier stages. So, on the first of every month, give yourself a breast self-exam. It's easy to do. Here's how. If you prefer to do your BSE at a particular time in your cycle, calendar it now. But, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

And, once a year, get yourself a mammogram. Mammograms cost between $150 and $300. If you have to take a temp job one weekend a year, if you have to sell something on e-Bay, if you have to go cash in all the change in various jars all over the house, if you have to work the holiday season wrapping gifts at Macy's, for the love of the Goddess, please go get a mammogram once a year.

Or: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pays all or some of the cost of breast cancer screening services through its National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program. This program provides mammograms and breast exams by a health professional to low-income, underinsured, and underserved women in all 50 states, six U.S. territories, the District of Columbia, and 14 American Indian/Alaska Native organizations. For more information, contact your state health department or call the Cancer Information Service at 1-800-4-CANCER.

Send me an email after you get your mammogram and I will do an annual free tarot reading for you. Just, please, examine your own breasts once a month and get your sweet, round ass to a mammogram once a year.

I think that I owe several of you readings. If you have a deck, pick three cards and e-mail me at hecatedemetersdatter@hotmail.com. I'll email you back your reading. If you don't have a deck, go to Lunea's tarot listed on the right-hand side in my blog links. Pick three cards from her free, on-line tarot and email me at hecatedemetersdatter@hotmail.com. I'll email you back your reading.

Photo found here.

The Moon Is Always Female By Marge Piercy

The moon is always female and so
am I although often in this vale
of razorblades I have wished I could
put on and take off my sex like a dress
and why not? Do men always wear their sex
always? The priest, the doctor, the teacher
all tell us they come to their professions
neuter as clams and the truth is
when I work I am pure as an angel
tiger and clear is my eye and hot
my brain and silent all the whining
grunting piglets of the appetites.
For we were priests to the goddesses
to whom were fashioned the first altars
of clumsy stone on stone and leaping animal
in the wombdark caves, long before men
put on skirts and masks to scare babies.
For we were healers with herbs and poultices
with our milk and careful fingers
long before they began learning to cut up
the living by making jokes at corpses.
For we were making sounds from our throats
and lips to warn and encourage the helpless
young long before schools were built
to teach boys to obey and be bored and kill.

I wake in a strange slack empty bed
of a motel, shaking like dry leaves
the wind rips loose, and in my head
is bound a girl of twelve whose female
organs all but the numb womb are being
cut from her with a knife. Clitoridectomy,
whatever Latin name you call it, in a quarter
of the world girl children are so maimed
and I think of her and I cannot stop.
And I think of her and I cannot stop.

If you are a woman you feel the knife in the words.
If you are a man, then at age four or else
at twelve you are seized and held down
and your penis is cut off. You are left
your testicles but they are sewed to your
crotch. When your spouse buys you, you
are torn or cut open so that your precious
semen can be siphoned out, but of course
you feel nothing. But pain. But pain.

For the uses of men we have been butchered
and crippled and shut up and carved open
under the moon that swells and shines
and shrinks again into nothingness, pregnant
and then waning toward its little monthly
death. The moon is always female but the sun
is female only in lands where females
are let into the sun to run and climb.

A woman is screaming and I hear her.
A woman is bleeding and I see her
bleeding from the mouth, the womb, the breasts
in a fountain of dark blood of dismal
daily tedious sorrow quite palatable
to the taste of the mighty and taken for granted
that the bread of domesticity be baked
of our flesh, that the hearth be built
of our bones of animals kept for meat and milk,
that we open and lie under and weep.
I want to say over the names of my mothers
like the stones of a path I am climbing
rock by slippery rock into the mists.
Never even at knife point have I wanted
or been willing to be or become a man.
I want only to be myself and free.

I am waiting for the moon to rise. Here
I squat, the whole country with its steel
mills and its coal mines and its prisons
at my back and the continent tilting
up into mountains and torn by shining lakes
all behind me on this scythe of straw,
a sand bar cast on the ocean waves, and I
wait for the moon to rise red and heavy
in my eyes. Chilled, cranky, fearful
in the dark I wait and I am all the time
climbing slippery rocks in a mist while
far below the waves crash in the sea caves;
I am descending a stairway under the groaning
sea while the black waters buffet me
like rockweed to and fro.

I have swum the upper waters leaping
in dolphin's skin for joy equally into the nec-
cessary air and the tumult of the powerful wave.
I am entering the chambers I have visited.
I have floated through them sleeping and sleep-
walking and waking, drowning in passion
festooned with green bladderwrack of misery.
I have wandered these chambers in the rock
where the moon freezes the air and all hair
is black or silver. Now I will tell you
what I have learned lying under the moon
naked as women do: now I will tell you
the changes of the high and lower moon.
Out of necessity's hard stones we suck
what water we can and so we have survived,
women born of women. There is knowing
with the teeth as well as knowing with
the tongue and knowing with the fingertips
as well as knowing with words and with all
the fine flickering hungers of the brain.

When She Is Kind She Is Lavish

Thank you, Judy.

Obama Restaurant Watch

Proving that they do, so, like something other than burgers, President and Mrs. Obama ate dinner last night at Blue Hill.


After dining a little more than two hours at Blue Hill, a West Village restaurant touted by New York magazine as a "seminal Greenmarket haven" that features food grown by chef and owner Dan Barber on his upstate farm, the president and first lady headed to the Belasco Theater to make it in time for "Joe Turner's Come and Gone." The trip out highlights Mrs. Obama's commitment to local, sustainable agriculture. And, showing herself to be a true woman after my own heart, she's reported to have had two martinis with her dinner, while the President drank wine.

No word on what the Obamas ordered, but I'd have had: THIS MORNING'S FARM EGG, MORELS, RAMPS AND PINE NUTS to start, followed by: GRASS FED LAMB, ASPARAGUS, BROCCOLI RABE AND FIDDLEHEAD FERNS. I almost always go for the cheese tray over sweets, and Blue Hill's cheese tray looks lovely, but I'd have finished with: STEAMED ALMOND BREAD, BLUE HILL FARM MILK, MARMALADE AND MARINATED CITRUS just because it sounds so hobbity.


The Republicans, as usual, acted like dicks:

even before the smaller jet left Washington, the there-and-back trip drew criticism from the Republican National Committee. The RNC issued a news release that chastised Obama for saying he understands American's troubles, but then hopping up to New York for "a night on the town."

Noting that General Motors is expected to file for Chapter 11 protection on Monday, the news release said: "Putting on a show: Obamas wing into the city for an evening out while another iconic American company prepares for bankruptcy."

You know, Republicans, most of America thinks that you're mean-spirited assholes. You don't need to keep confirming it. You never minded how many times W flew down to Crawford to "clear brush" coughtieoneoncough. The Obamas are a young couple who apparently enjoy each other's company. No one thinks it's improper for them to have an occasional night out. Lay off the "he ordered orange juice," "he ate mustard," "he took his wife out for dinner so he hates America" bullshit. It isn't working anymore.

Out And About

A number of Pagan artists will be participating in Artomatic in DC this weekend. If you can stand to go inside on a weekend like this, you should check it out. Look especially for Angela Raincatcher and According to Us - A Parabolic Musical - created by Pagan playwrights Charles Butler Neto and Rosanna Tufts, Saturday, June 10, at Artomatic, from 6-9:30 pm.


Image found at Angela's site.

So That's What I've Been Doing Wrong. Winnowing Basket, Not Broom!

It never ends. More here.


I forget where I found this image, but I think it was at this lovely site.

Obama Restaurant Watch

Apparently, the first family really likes Five Guys. Obama made another burger run yesterday, this time to Five Guys at 1500 South Capitol Street, SE. I'm glad he skipped the Dupont Circle one. They had to close down for rat infestation a few weeks ago.

Saturday Poetry Blogging

Moreover, the Moon ---
by Mina Loy

Face of the skies
preside
over our wonder.

Fluorescent
truant of heaven
draw us under.

Silver, circular corpse
your decease
infects us with unendurable ease,

touching nerve-terminals
to thermal icicles

Coercive as coma, frail as bloom
innuendoes of your inverse dawn
suffuse the self;
our every corpuscle become an elf.

Obama Restaurant Watch - VP Edition

OK, I admit that this is cheating. It's Biden, not Obama, but it's still a restaurant and the meal still sounds pretty good: Vice President Joe Biden dropped in unexpectedly on a Denver barbecue restaurant Tuesday after presiding over a town hall meeting on green jobs and the economy.

Patrons of M&D's Cafe east of downtown broke into applause when Biden walked in. The vice president shook hands and posed for photos.

. . .

M&D's owner Mack Shead hovered nearby as waiters brought out plates of barbecued catfish, fried green tomatoes and corn bread and glasses of lemonade.

The M is for Mack and the D is for Daisy. I'd definitely have gone for the fried green tomatoes, but I might have made a whole meal out of appetizers, including fried okra and hot wings.

Countdown to wingnut worries that lemonade is French or something.

Photo found here.

Pagan Deities And Morality

In comments to my post on Pagan Values, nanoboy asks a good question:

I am curious about something. In the Socratic dialogue Euthyphro, Socrates catches Euthyphro in a logical fallacy. Euthyphro is a good guy, as he's acting as a witness against his father who murdered a slave. In discussing the morality of his situation, he must decide whether something is pious (or moral, for our purposes) because the gods approve of it, or whether it is approved by the gods, because it is pious.

He doesn't know in the end and heads off to court. Now, Socrates was a monotheist (a crime in Athens.) However, regardless of the number of gods, any religion needs to grapple with this issue. Did the gods make morality, or do the gods honor morality, because it is constant? I am curious of the response to this question by modern pagans.

You know, a lot of Pagan Godesses/Gods don't really have a lot to do with morality. They generally don't hand down lists of "Thou Shalt Not"s or even "Thou Shalt"s. The Wiccan Rede: "An it harm none, do as thou wilt," doesn't come from any particular deity that I know of. The Charge of the Goddess is sometimes associated with Aradia, but I think of it as a lovely piece of poetry written by Doreen Valiente for Gerald Gardner. Doreen could, though, have been channeling Aradia as much as Moses channeled Jehovah or Joseph Smith channeled Moroni. Crowley's "Love is the law. Love under will," was, according to Crowley, authored by an entity named Aiwass, whom Crowley later referred to as his personal Holy Guardian Angel (or "Higher Self"). Several Egyptian deities speak in Crowley's book. But that's it, as far as I know, at least in terms of generally-recognized explicit Pagan "commandments."

One thing I like about a lot of Pagan deities is that they're imperfect. Zeus runs around on his wife and isn't above trickery to land a young woman in the sack. His wife is jealous and often misdirects her jealousy. Seth killed Osiris. Diana turns Actaeon into a stag to be torn apart by his own hounds simply because he comes upon her bathing and is struck by her beauty. When Persephone is abducted, none of the Goddesses or Gods will tell her mother, Demeter, what happened until Hecate speaks up. And we won't talk about how the Trojan War got started.

I'm going to take moral instruction from this crew? ;)

To me, they neither, to answer nanoboy, make morality nor do they always honor it. What they do is to personify powerful forces and important archetypes. And, they just . . . are. Process theology would argue that they not only "are" but "are becoming," as well, and that makes sense to me. And, there's a point at which The Goddess and I are one, just as there's a point where Baba Yaga is a completely different entity from, say, Quan Yin and I am distinct from both of them.

However, while Gaia never handed down any specific commandments, I don't think that you can know her without accepting certain values, without valuing the Earth and all that She is.

As a devotee of Hecate, I try be willing to speak truth to power, especially if it will defend women. I try to be open to liminal times, spaces, experiences. I try to honor change in myself and others. I try to be aware of the value of those times when nothing is certain, to recognize that good things, as well as bad, can come from chaos. But it's as likely that I'm drawn to Hecate because she personifies those values as it is likely that I value those things because they're sacred to Hecate.

I don't know if this answers nanoboy's question, or not. Do you get your values from the Goddesses/Gods?

Black Calla Lilly

So-called black flowers almost never are truly black. They tend towards deep purple. This was billed as a black calla, but it's really a purpley-claret.

Water

It's not objectively true, but it does seem to me that winter is so much longer than summer. How can we be only weeks away from Litha, when the day and night are even and then, we begin, again, the mad descent into the dark, night growing long and day growing short? This morning, when the rain began around 4:00, I got up and put my nose in the window and smelled it: that earthy, rain smell that is missing here from December through mid April. As I curled back up under the covers in the deliberately-chilled room, I was praying: don't go away. Don't go away too soon, earthy smell.

This afternoon, driving home from work after finishing my pro bono hours, I went past the lovely Potomac River. For the entire length, the scents of honeysuckle and mown grass were like an overwhelming drug and there was low mist on the river and weak light breaking through the grey rain clouds that have turned everything so intensely green that you can't imagine it.

One of the greatest joys of my life is to live near the banks of this lovely river. This weekend, in the mountains, I was near its source and wished it love as both it and I ran, on different courses, back down to the floodplain.

Chas Clifton posts a list of twenty questions. IMHO, all Pagans should be able to answer these questions. The first two are: 1.Trace the water you drink from rainfall to tap. 2. Trace it out of the house and back to a river, aquifer or the sea.

A good summer project.

Pagan Values?

Sia alerts me to the fact that a blogger has declared June to be Blog About Pagan Values Month.

In June the sun is at it’s height in the Northern Hemisphere and nearly hidden from view in the Southern Hemisphere. Midsummer and Yule, festivals of fire and of light.

Let us then use our hearts and minds and words, invoking the fires of inspiration; let us write of the virtues and ethics and morals and values we have found in our Pagan paths, let us share how we carry these precious things forward in our own lives and out into the world.

Hmmm. Why? Because the sun is high? I may have missed something.

One thing I like about Pagans is that we don't proselytize. And, honestly, if you've spent any time among Pagans you know that (1) no two Pagans agree about anything, hell, most of us disagree with our own selves half the time, and (2) there are as few Pagans living the Wiccan Rede or any other form of Pagan Values as there are xians living the command to "Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself." In fact, for a lot of Pagans, their religion consists of buying new-agey stuff in stores that reek of incense instead of buying makeup in the mall. I've known Pagans who are not-nice-people. "Witch wars" describes an actual phenomenon.

But if you put a gun to my head, I'd say that most modern Pagans value the Earth, the body, matter, the connection between all-that-is. (As soon as I'd say that, someone could produce half a dozen examples that disprove what I'd said.) Cock the gun, and I'd say that Pagans tend to value women, women's bodies, the divine feminine, Gaia, the Goddess. Push the barrel a bit into the gentle flesh of my temple, and I'd say that lots of Pagans value ecstatic experience. In fact, for quite a few of what I'd call "festival Pagans," the connection that comes from drumming, fire, dancing, drugs, and sex at the 8 Sabbats IS their experience of Paganism and what they value most about it. And that's v. cool. I'll take that over hating on gays and beating little children in Irish orphanages.

There are, of course, the values of the ancient Pagans, and some modern Pagans look there for guidance. Good start, if one then edits out slavery, human sacrifice, etc.

But, in the end, all that I can say is what I value about Paganism. I value the sacrality of matter, bodies, blood, hymen, placenta, semen, cunt juice, bone, phlem, and shit. I value the thing that happens when I see photosynthesis happening. I value a mythopoetic explanation of the world that complements my scientific understanding of the same. I value the ability to part the veils, the chance to ground daily, the glimpse of what it could be like to live in a world where the king and the land are one. I value flow and fire, the ability to be silent and how the last light over the dark west went while morning at the brown brink eastward springs and the holy ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with, ah! bright wings. I value the Spiral Dance. I value poetry. I value the dark. I value the shadow. I value my willingness to let the infinite touch the buckle of my spine and I value the place where change can happen. I value being in touch with things that scare a lot of people and I value valuing that which many devalue. I value the way that boundaries dissolve at orgasm and I value the way that sun feels on skin. I value the way that a living oyster becomes a part of me when I eat it, thereby melding with dinosaur, Hatshepsut, a woman giving birth in Pompeii, and with Sappho, and the way that I will become part of the soil under the lilac bushes when I die.

What do you value?

Picture here.

Bonus points if you can id the two poems I've quoted.

Obama Restaurant Watch

Turns out, the president loves cripsy-edged pancakes. He and G/Son share a love. It's also cool how he keeps inviting restaurant owners from around the country to show up at the WH and fix food.

President Barack Obama has a craving for Pittsburgh pancakes.
He's invited two local women to the White House for a very special honor.
The president ate at Pamela's Diner in the Strip District during a campaign event last year.
Among many breakfast selections, the thin, crispy-edged pancakes are a favorite.
The co-owners of Pamela's are now on their way to Washington D. C.
President Obama asked if they would cater a pancake breakfast for him and more than 80 veterans this Memorial Day.

Picture of Obama at Pamela's here.

We Are A Sophisticated People

Son and DiL are vacationing in New Orleans:



Meanwhile, I've been exploring "Sculpture Museums" in West Virginia:

Loyalty And Material Support. Any Of Us Can Do That.

/Hat tip to Aquila ka Hecate.

I have a G/Son. I am hoping for a miracle.