A new article in the LATimes indicates that the spread of xianity throughout Africa, including churches linked with American churches, is a large part of the problem.
The idea of witchcraft is hardly new, but it has taken on new life recently partly because of a rapid growth in evangelical Christianity. Campaigners against the practice say around 15,000 children have been accused in two of Nigeria's 36 states over the past decade and around 1,000 have been murdered. In the past month alone, three Nigerian children accused of witchcraft were killed and another three were set on fire.
. . .
The Nigerian church is a branch of a Californian church by the same name. But the California church says it lost touch with its Nigerian offshoots several years ago. "I had no idea," said church elder Carrie King by phone from Tracy, Calif. "I knew people believed in witchcraft over there but we believe in the power of prayer, not physically harming people."
The Mount Zion Lighthouse — also named by three other families as the accuser of their children — is part of the powerful Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria. The Fellowship's president, Ayo Oritsejafor, said the Fellowship was the fastest-growing religious group in Nigeria, with more than 30 million members.
"We have grown so much in the past few years we cannot keep an eye on everybody," he explained.
. . .
Even churches who didn't use to 'find' child witches are being forced into it by the competition," said Itauma. "They are seen as spiritually powerful because they can detect witchcraft and the parents may even pay them money for an exorcism."
That's what Margaret Eyekang did when her 8-year-old daughter Abigail was accused by a "prophet" from the Apostolic Church, because the girl liked to sleep outside on hot nights — interpreted as meaning she might be flying off to join a coven. A series of exorcisms cost Eyekang eight months' wages, or US$270. The payments bankrupted her.
Neighbors also attacked her daughter.
"They beat her with sticks and asked me why I was bringing them a witch child," she said. A relative offered Eyekang floor space but Abigail was not welcome and had to sleep in the streets.
Members of two other families said pastors from the Apostolic Church had accused their children of witchcraft, but asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.
The Nigeria Apostolic Church refused repeated requests made by phone, e-mail and in person for comment.
. . .
There's a scar above Jane's shy smile: her mother tried to saw off the top of her skull after a pastor denounced her and repeated exorcisms costing a total of $60 didn't cure her of witchcraft. Mary, 15, is just beginning to think about boys and how they will look at the scar tissue on her face caused when her mother doused her in caustic soda. Twelve-year-old Rachel dreamed of being a banker but instead was chained up by her pastor, starved and beaten with sticks repeatedly; her uncle paid him $60 for the exorcism.
Israel's cousin tried to bury him alive, Nwaekwa's father drove a nail through her head, and sweet-tempered Jerry — all knees, elbows and toothy grin — was beaten by his pastor, starved, made to eat cement and then set on fire by his father as his pastor's wife cheered it on.
Hey, xians! Nice religion you got there. Maybe the pope can give another speech on the evils of Paganism or some American tv pastor can blame Wiccans for terrorist attacks or hurricane damage.
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.
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.
The horribly skewed politics of right wing oppression is all the more disgraceful because it is wielded under a banner proclaiming family values. Valuing the family has been the most neglected practice of the administration we just tossed onto history’s dung heap, where it belongs.
The country needs to forge ahead to rebuild our economy, even though the wingnuts continue to bray about tax cuts for the wealthy, their continuing answer to the stagnation caused by…tax cuts to the wealthy. What has been ‘trickled down’ on the kids is a nightmare, made out of what was given to our generation in the form of the acclaimed North American dream. The nuts and bolts of the real economy are always under the threat of ideology that thinks hardships are fine for the working class as long as the wealthiest get all the benefits. The remnant of supply-side delusion is undead and still struggling to climb back out of the grave it dug for this country and its treasures. The ranting you hear from teabagging ideologues is the death rattle that will go on until we can end it with real solutions.
Wherever we turn in the storm of roses, the night is lit up by thorns, and the thunder of leaves, once so quiet within the bushes, rumbling at our heels.
This is just so squicky. I hate everything about it, starting with the "It's us against the world" chestbeating, the "some say" strawperson, and the completely ridiculous assertion that "those some who say" don't get a (completely unexplained) "distinction" between AmeriCA and AmeriCANS. The quick throw-away: Washington may help in times of trouble, is the moment when the carnie's hand distracts you over here so you don't see him remove the coin from under the cup over there. Yeah, "Washington" -- aka all of us AmeriCANS -- have to bail you "free enterprisers" out every time you steal too much and the till gets empty. And that's why we AmeriCANS are going to regulate you.
What a bunch of overwrought hooey. But at least it shows they're scared.
VATICAN CITY - Two bishops from Nigeria asked the Synod of Bishops for Africa to make a clear commitment to educating Catholics about the fact that, while the devil exists, witchcraft does not.
"Suspected witches are abandoned, isolated, discriminated (against) and ostracized from the community," Bishop Augustine Akubeze of Uromi told the synod Oct. 12.
"Sometimes they are taken to the forest and slaughtered or disgraced publicly and murdered."
Witches do not exist and so the accusations are always false, Akubeze said. Even worse, people have been known to accuse someone of being a witch just to settle personal squabbles.
Akubeze said that while witchcraft "lacks any justification in reason, science and common sense," people continue to believe in it.
He called on the synod to make clear the Church's teaching that God is all-powerful and that he sent his Son to save all people from evil.
Bishop Joseph Ekuwem of Uyo, Nigeria, said that across the continent people believe that "witchcraft is an evil force capable of inflicting both spiritual and physical harm on a person."
The superstitions about witchcraft are so pronounced that people see witches as having more power than God, he said.
He urged development of simple versions of the Church's teaching about evil and Jesus' victory over it to be developed for the faithful.
The Church should also develop a new rite of exorcism and appoint an exorcist in each diocese, Ekuwem said.
In 1999 the Vatican published a new Rite of Exorcisms. The 1999 rules reflect the Church's recognition that many symptoms previously associated with possession can now be explained by medical science.
Like my brilliant friend, E, I really love New Orleans. One of the things I love best about it is the food. ( It's possible that the garlic soup at Bayona is, in fact, the single very best thing I've ever eaten.) And you'd really have to wonder about anyone who would visit New Orleans without stopping to eat. So I'm relieved to learn that President Obama made time for gumbo during his trip to the city. Lunch from Dooky Chase was worked into the presidential schedule:
I know he likes gumbo, so there will be gumbo; I know he likes shrimp Creole, so there will be shrimp Creole; I know he likes fried chicken, so there will be chicken.
And, guitar players. I've always been a sucker for guys who play guitars, with those . . . interesting . . . calluses on their fingers. I have. (The music starts at about 3:00)
One can only hope that this news concerning the discovery of a temple to the Goddess Nemesis, who provided retribution against those who succumb to hubris, [and who embodied] vengeful fate, personified as a remorseless goddess will give pause to a few people.
I likely missed some important point, but I never thought -- nor was it ever a key tenant of my religion -- that every person burned for being a witch -- and I neither know nor care about the exact number, but let's just stipulate that the number was, well, far above "too many" ok? -- was "really" a "witch," but I do think that being a woman could get you burned as a witch, especially if you were too smart, too difficult, too unwilling to remarry and make your property some man's property, too willing to ask difficult questions, too able to move between the veils, too lucky, too good at healing the sick in an era when male "doctors" were claiming the role of healer for their own, too sexual, not sexual enough, too big for your britches. And I believe that there was a liminal point when being a believer in the pre-xian religion and being burned as a witch were both awfully well-correlated phenomena. And I've always thought that my identification as a witch was a small way to stand against that evil, that part of what I do by "being" a witch is to take a stand beside those women burned for being too difficult. It's not a lot; it's just what I can do every day. It's just a daily reminder to me of how close I am to, well, to being fired, run out of my neighborhood, beaten, disliked, disbarred, burned. And it's just what has made organic sense to me ever since the day that I learned that those burned were more likely to have vaginas and those lighting the fire were more likely to have penises.
And, in reality, the mythic truth, itself, was far more important to me (sorry, Mr. Hutton) than any specific number of female bodies burned, than the actual truth of some once-upon-a-time-Bachofen-specific-economic-model society based upon the matriarchal clans around which primates evolved into hominids, than some historical village that met specific political measuring points, than some man's nice story about being initiated by a naked woman or what was always his obvious need to be scourged. In reality, I agreed with Monique Wittig when she wrote:
There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that you walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You may have lost all recollection of it, remember...
You say there are not words to describe it, you say it does not exist. but remember, make an effort to remember, or, failing that, invent.
Call me crazy.
I read all those early works and took from them life-changing metaphorical truths and never really cared if the actual numbers were or were not off by a factor of ten. One burned woman was too many in my nutty cosmology. One old man "initiated" by a naked woman scourging him was far less important to me than the chance to honor nature, to recognize the divine feminine, to celebrate on the holidays when my foremothers celebrated, to connect with my landbase as those old women connected with theirs, to see the same cycle in the changing year as they saw, long ago.
I never thought that worship of the ancient gods and Goddesses was transmitted unchanged down from my ancient Scandinavian many-times-great-grandmother to the 1970s, nor from the ancient Picts in my linage directly to Uncle Gerald and then to me, but I do think that I worship the same forces in nature and some of the same gods and Goddesses as did those ancient women and as did many of my genetic and spiritual forebears in old Europe. I doubt that any of them were Dianic witch lawyers who blogged on the world wide web. That doesn't stop me from drawing strength every single day from honoring them whenever I call the powers of Earth.
Kali on a croissant, I don't worship or do magic today the same way that I did twenty years ago, six years ago, a year ago, a few months ago. One of the things that drew me to Paganism and witchcraft was the chance to create my own rituals, to do my own magic based upon the needs of the moment, to engage with a religion and, in fact, with Goddesses, that could grow with me as I grew. And, hey, guess what? The Catholicism that I practiced in 1969, at a Folk Mass, was unlike anything that my Confirmation Saint, Saint Germain, ever knew in 1580. And what that lovely shepherdess knew was a whole lot different from what the first apostles knew in first century Turkey. Yet, oddly, no one, including modern xians, suggests that modern xianity is somehow flawed because xianity has evolved from its first century roots. Well, they were men doing the evolving, so that's ok, no need to call them silly.
I was always willing to see Uncle Gerald, and Aunt Doreen, and everything published by Lewellyn, and all the nonsense that Hecate puts out on her blog as human, and therefore flawed; fleshy, and therefore sacred, portals for myth and truth and magic to enter the modern world and was always willing to regard what they said as I regard creation myths: a way for deeper truths to be discussed and transmitted without getting tangled up in "mundane" facts.
Am I all broke up because some of the people burned in Europe as witches were good xians? Is Paganism useless to me because no one has proven that some societies were "matriarchial enough"? Am I about to abandon witchcraft because it turns out that ceremonial magic has made inroads into my daily practice? Hell, no. I'm the many-times-great-granddaughter of an incredibly mean old broad who crossed much of the frozen ground of Scandanavia with bare feet and bad toenails, shaking a rattling gourd the whole way, calling upon whatever name the Mother Goddess had in that snowy land, and keeping her family warm with incantations and instructions to chew on dried herbs. I spit on your historical correctness. Hand me that gourd full of fermented whatever. Do it now. I'm asking you nicely. The first time.
I live with, now, two giant White Oaks (Quercus alba). They've been here since before America was America. They watched my little bungalow get erected a mere few decades ago. They feed the squirrels, harbor the birds, shade me and my neighbor, have roots that intertwine with mine every day when I do my spiritual practice. They're getting old. I do reiki on them. My neighbor and I pay an organic tree service to feed them. I water them even when I can't really afford to do so. White Oaks are amazing trees; every moment of every day they exude peace and stability and rectitude. How sad it is to lose one.
I am the mother of an only son, an amazingly kind and gentle man who is so strong that he takes away my breath, often, regularly, spectacularly. I am the older sister of two little brothers, and the aunt of three nephews. I am the great-aunt of the world's cutest almost-one-year-old little boy, and I am -- as you may have heard -- a grandmother to my grandson. I held him a few minutes after his birth, looked into his eyes, said and meant "Namaste," and have been madly in love, ever since.
It's a sign of the Goddess' grand sense of humor that she's sent so many little boys into the life of this militant feminist, this Dianic witch, this old woman who would still love, at some point, to nurture a girl-child of my line. Maybe the joke's on the young men.
Today, I was considering the fact that there can be something so incredibly, burningly pure about a little boy's need for certain things. (It may be so for little girls, as well, I just wouldn't know.) Even when they're not the objects that I'd prefer to provide, I've coughed up the cash for them, simply because it was obvious to me that the little boy in question truly needed the object, and by "needed" I mean, "had to have in order to actualize," had to have in order for the universe not to veer off just that much wrong.
When Son was all gangly bones and adolescent longings and full of the need to move on, we did the campus tours, and he set foot on the Earth at Princeton, and he looked at me (a background of wisteria by the gate, as I remember it), and he told me that he needed to go there. I didn't like it. They had all-male eating clubs at the time. From the time that he'd been in my womb, I'd imagined sending him to St. John's in Annapolis for the education that I'd wanted, but couldn't have. But what I liked and wanted and what that nascent young man needed were two different things. Son went to Princeton.
At one point in his childhood, Son wanted a kit that took fingerprints -- a way to catch other people's secrets -- more than he wanted anything. I don't mean that he "wanted" it, I mean that, in order to be and become who he had to be, Son needed it. I was all the way broke at the time. I don't remember what bill I paid late, but I did get him the fingerprint kit with the magnifying glass, and the dusting powder, and the secret chart that explained everything.
G/Son and I have lately been enjoying the whole Redwall series, and G/Son has taken wholeheartedly, in the way that only little boys can take wholeheartedly, to the story of Matthias, the warrior who defends Redwall Abbey against all comers. I introduced him to the series, feeling that a steady diet of Pixar and Batman were somehow not meeting his deeper need for myth and for a hero with whom to identify. For a few weeks now, G/Son has been telling me, in that way that little boys have of telling you, and telling you that this REALLY matters, that he needed a sword and a shield, just like Martin and Matthias, the warriors. I don't like war, I don't like the notion of chopping up other beings with swords, I don't like the societal story that men get their value based upon whom they can kill. I don't know if this deep need for a weapon in all the little boys that I've known is genetic, or cultural, or some interesting brew of both.
But I know true need when I see it.
And I think that it just kills your own soul to see need that raw and to ignore it. I do.
Today, Son and I took G/Son to the Maryland Renaissance Festival and we ate spiced pecans and we drank meade and we listened to fiddles and bagpipes and we bought a wooden sword with a blue handle and a wooden shield with a blue dragon and we got a blue battle axe dripping blood painted on G/Son's forearm and we had, all in all, a perfect Autumn day.
Was I right? Was I wrong? Am I fostering exactly the wrong thing in the next generation? Am I simply giving way to a cultural/biological imperative? I don't know.
I only know that need that certain and that pure should be met.
That the world is better when such needs are filled and filled by one who loves the person who burns inside the flame of that need. When I was leaving this afternoon, Son told G/Son to "say 'thank you' to Nonna for everything," even though G/Son already had. G/Son looked with the eyes of his old soul deep into my old eyes and said:
"Thank you for getting me my sword and my shield."
I said, "You're welcome. I could tell that you needed them."
Then I went to my car and broke down in tears. Sometimes, my life is too wonderful for me to even bear.
I hope that Gus and our other elders can give us advice about little boys. How do we raise them in the 21st Century? What should their Nonnas be telling them? I want a better way to sister, to aunt, to mother, to grandmother our little boys. I just don't know what it is. And I'm not sure it's the sun dance that Gus proposes, but I'm willing to listen to all sorts of advice on this. I'm the one person who needs to know: the person placed in the position of sister, aunt, etc. But I don't know.
I only love and hope and try to provide what's needed. Goddess willing, that's enough.
The NYT has a review of three children's books about Halloween (not Samhein). They all sound wonderful, but I especially love the evocative poetry from Only a Witch Can Fly:
The dark night around you fills withFly, fly, and bright yellow moonlight shines down. Cat, by your side, purrs a gentleBye, bye, and Owl stares up at a star, so far. Your heart tells younowand you walk to the door. Cat arches his back and croons, Soon.
Isn't that JUST how it is on those windy, Fall nights when you stand at the door, watch the clouds skud past the Moon, and simply LONG to hop on a broom and go?
G/Son and I are still really enjoying The Last Wild Witch (which is not really about Halloween or Samhein but about the role of witches in the modern world and about how to use non-violent resistance), but we may have to check out these new books, as well. Maybe with a cup of warm cider and some oatmeal cookies.
Out of the chaos of my doubt And the chaos of my art I turn to you inevitably As the needle to the pole Turns . . . as the cold brain to the soul Turns in its uncertainty;
So I turn and long for you; So I long for you, and turn To the love that through my chaos Burns a truth, And lights my path.
The average American might even be angry if he/she understood the fact that he spends five times as much for procedures as other people do. But Gwen Ifill isn’t going to tell Americans that. . . .
Why? Why do we spend twice as much for drugs? Why do we spend five times more for procedures? In a rational world, this remarkable state of affairs would lead to strings of front-page reports.
But you don’t live in a rational world. You live in the United States, a society which is owned by corporate interests—unlike the other societies in those OECD data.
That ownership is enabled by the dulled sensibilities found in the mainstream and career liberal worlds.
As the Supreme Court weighed a dispute over a religious symbol on public land Wednesday, Justice Antonin Scalia was having difficulty understanding how some people might feel excluded by a cross that was put up as a memorial to soldiers killed in World War I.
"It's erected as a war memorial. I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead," Scalia said of the cross that the Veterans of Foreign Wars built 75 years ago atop an outcropping in the Mojave National Preserve. "What would you have them erect?...Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Muslim half moon and star?"
Peter Eliasberg, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer arguing the case, explained that the cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity and commonly used at Christian grave sites, not that the devoutly Catholic Scalia needed to be told that.
"I have been in Jewish cemeteries," Eliasberg continued. "There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew."
There was mild laughter in the packed courtroom, but not from Scalia.
"I don't think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that's an outrageous conclusion," Scalia said, clearly irritated by the exchange.
No, here, Justice, allow me to explain it to you very simply: Some people feel so strongly that it does NOT honor their dead that they were willing to sue all the way to the Supreme Court. If it truly represented everybody, then some people wouldn't be suing because they find it so offensive. So rather than continuing, in the face of clearly contrary evidence, to insist that everyone is honored by the symbol of a religion that, for example, considers me evil and damned and, thus, could hardly honor my dead, perhaps you could simply look at the evidence standing right in front of you. The fact that it's not offensive to you is irrelevant.
Oh, and, by the way, that conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Muslim half moon and star? Still excludes me. Still offensive. All monotheistic, warmongering, religions. All male deities.
Of course the point of separation of church and state isn't to try and find a religious symbol to put on government land that somehow represents everyone (including atheists). It's to separate government from religion. How about a memorial that is secular, not religious, in nature? Or a secular memorial to peacemakers?
"We were really excited to have the Ghost Hunters team onboard this summer," said Michael Condon, executive director of the museum, in a press release.
Condon wouldn't say if the team found any spooky evidence aboard the ship.
I suppose that, in some ways, we Pagans have a relationship to secular Halloween that parallels xianity's relationship to secular xmas, although we, at least, call our religious holiday by a separate name (Samhein in my tradition) to make the distinction. Still, secular Halloween is "based on" Samhein even a bit more than secular xmas is based on the xian holy day of Christmas, although I'm not about to launch some "poor persecuted me" campaign and bitch about the "war on Samhein" with "The Beloved Dead Are The Reason For the Season" bumperstickers, although, now that I think about it . . . .
I find that many of us, yours truly included, both enjoy some of the witchy and spooky aspects of secular Halloween, while, at the same time, objecting to the sexist and xianist characterizations of witches as evil, ugly, old women and to the commercialization of what is one of our high, high holy days. I have a collection of Halloween witches, added to just this year, that I collect the same way that some African American friends of mine collect Aunt Jemima figurines: I want to reclaim the word witch and to honor even those "ugly" old women who were being marginalized and persecuted as witches, even as the good xians skulked out to the edge of the village on moonless nights to ask for an herbal cure, a charm, a potion. I decorate for the secular holiday, I hand out candy to all the neighborhood kiddies ( dressed in my witchy finery, including the pointed hat), I enjoy the secular emphasis on the places where the veils thin, and I hold within myself as odd and, yet, because it's real, also sacred, the conflict over the strange overlap between my sacred day and the secular and commercial attempts to render that which chills us as somehow safe and silly. At the same time, I've started long -running blog wars with jerks who announce "The Witch Is Dead" when a conservative bites the dust or who call any evil woman a "witch".
He came by this afternoon to plot out the Western crocus bed and said, "Oh, by the way, I found a plant you're going to love for the woodland garden and I ordered you five of them. We can put them in when we put in the crocus. They smell icky, but you're not going to care when you see them."
Have you ever made bread? Ever knocked on the bottom of a hot loaf, searching for the perfect hollow note that will tell you it’s done? Ever bitten into sweet corn in July, a ripe peach in August, acorn squash in September? Ever made a summer fire? Thrown your most beloved God into its burning mouth? Ever danced the ecstatic volta at Sabbat with loved ones and heartfriends? Darlings, I know you have. And I wonder, as I wander, friends friends, I think it’s possible that the vast majority of the time…yes yes yes….these are enough. The meaning is there – grokked in the deep myth, sitting sated and strong in the marrow of our bones. There is no need to ask “what the grain represents” at Harvest. It is itself, the Grain, and that staggering mystery is enough. It is plucked, threshed, ground, mixed with yeast and water and salt and kneaded until it looks like satin, and then, swollen and ripe with pure life, it is thrust into a livid hole of fire, to emerge an alchemical miracle, and effing delicious with butter and blackberry jam. Isn’t that phenomenal? To consider this each year, or every day, is the spiritual devotion of a storied being wed forever to the heart of the Mama. Break the bread and give it to a neighbor. If words are needed, make them a prayer. If singing is required, sing your guts out. If you are so gobsmacked by its profundity that you lie on the fertile ground for an hour, enchanted by the stars and the smell of the fistfuls of frankincense and peasant loaves and apples you gave to the hungry fire until your arms were slack and your skirt empty, and during that hour you feel the weight of the fragile and amazing thing that is your body settle down into the planet’s lap, and you grok Harvest, beloveds, well….you can stick a fork in the season and call it done. And no one had to even ask you what abstract qualities you were metaphorically harvesting, or what the bread meant. The bread sits in your belly, infusing your whole body with its ineffable perfection. The mystery is in the bread. Literally.*
As we move, at an alarming and alluring rate towards Samhein, as I sit by my trees and literally watch the veils grow thin, thinner, thinnest, thin, I wish for each of us the pure Sabbat that Ruby Sara describes. In my humble experience, and, truly, it is humble, I've found that the best preparation that I can do for such a Sabbat is (here's a surprise! not!) to engage in a regular daily practice. For me, that means: sit, ground and center, call the Elements the Goddesses with whom I'm working (right now, Hygeia, and Columbia, and, as always, the Great Three Headed Goddess of Liminal Space Whose Very Being Creates the Possibility of Change -- Breathe, Breathe, Breathe), cast a circle, say the Ha Prayer, do my Iron Pentacle exercise, envision and breathe into change, thank the Goddesses, thank the Elements, open the circle. And, then, do the work. Feed the birds, weed the herb bed, knit the warm sweaters, write the shining brief, encourage the friend, be kind enough to the store clerk (THIS store clerk, the very one that the Goddess has especially chosen to throw this day into your path, THIS one) to elicit a smile and a small warming of the aura, repair the web, exalt in the sunlight or the rainstorm or the icy cold wine. In short, do the privileged work of a witch: put your shoulder to the wheel and help it to turn.
I'm not sure why such regular, and seemingly "mundane", practice leads to those Sabbatical moments in the field that Ruby Sara describes. But I do know that they do.
May it be so for you.
(Many, many thanks to Medusa Coils for noting Ruby Sara's return to the blogosphere.)
*Or, as the Goddess said: And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.
For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire.
The Obamas continue to eat out in Washington, D.C., something that delights residents of the city and foodies everywhere. For their 17th wedding anniversary (congrats to both!) they ate at Blue Duck Tavern, an upscale, contemporary American restaurant at Washington’s Park Hyatt hotel, [that] fits comfortably with Mrs. Obama’s effort to promote fresh food. When the restaurant opened in 2006, it was among the first in the capital to hop on the local sourcing trend, and its menu still cites the origin of the ingredients, most of which come from nearby Pennsylvania. (I'll note that Nora was working on local, organic sourcing long before Blue Duck opened.)
No word on what the couple ordered. There's a lot to choose from at Blue Duck. Everytime I go, I wind up ordering a couple of the vegetable sides and skipping an entree. A meal of Leek and Mushroom Tart with Potato Leek Sauce, made from ingredients from Path Valley, PA and Constant Bliss Agnolloti, with Artichoke, Date, & Hazelnuts from Jasper Hill Farm in VT would make a pretty good meal. If the Obamas were feeling especially celebratory, they could pair the Perrier Jouët, Fleur de Champagne, Brut, Epernay 1999 with almost anything on the menu. Blue Duck is known for its ice cream, but I always seem to wind up ordering the tin of old fashioned sugar cookies.
Thanks again, to the Obamas for actually living in DC, instead of hiding out behind the fortress walls of the WH, the way that the former residents did. DC loves you.
Photo (and another review of Blue Duck) found here.
Our tradition is one of poetry, but it is also one of ecstasy that comes from direct contact with forces of nature and spirit. The truest poetry comes from this well of connection. The Gods move through us and the Elements of Life make up our breath, bones, and blood. The breeze sings through us and the ocean calls the water in our cells.
Simple, seldom and sad We are; Alone on the Halibut Hills Afar, With sweet mad Expressions Of old Strangely beautiful So we're told By the Creatures that Move In the sky And Die On the night when the Dead Trees Prance and Cry.
Sensitive, seldom and sad - Sensitive, seldom and sad -
Simple, seldom and sad Are we When we take our path To the purple sea - With mad, sweet Expressions Of Yore, Strangely beautiful, Yea, and More On the Night of all Nights When the sky Streams by In rags, while the Dead Trees Prance and Cry,
sensitive, seldom and sad - sensitive, seldom and sad.
Llewellyn is bringing out a new book by Scott Cunningham, albeit that Scott passed through the veils in 1993. Llewellyn announced that:
Scott looked through scores of aged texts and studied with every teacher he could find to satisfy an unending curiosity. He yearned to create what he could not find in the existing Wiccan canon: a Book of Shadows based on past traditions, yet forward-looking—a true guidebook for Wiccan practice. He left our world before he could reveal it...or so it was thought.
Recently, one of his heirs discovered a battered manila envelope among Scott's papers. Hidden within it was a lost treasure that, to many of Scott's fans, is more valuable than gold-the manuscript for his long-lost book of shadows.
American Traditionalist Wicca
Llewellyn Publications takes great pride in presenting the most unexpected yet eagerly desired book in the history of Pagan publishing, Cunningham's Book of Shadows. Scott referred to the system that is published here for the first time as "American Traditionalist Wicca"—a melding of traditional Wiccan practice and Scott's own unique and inspired work. If you have followed the wisdom found in any of his previous books, now you can actually practice the system he developed and used in his own religious and spiritual tradition, bringing you closer than ever before to Scott and his teachings.
For many of us, Cunningham's books were an entryway into witchcraft. It will be interesting to see how he reads lo these many years later. One early review bemoans the lack of an index.
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. 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.
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture My myself in the summer heaven, godlike Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs. Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths-and then I lost it. Water came to rebuke the too clear water. One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
You are not a witch because you buy witchy stuff from eBay (much as we all love a bit of witchy stuff). You are not a witch because you wear a pentacle, or get a tattoo, or buy and read books on witchcraft from Amazon.com or from a cute feminist bookstore in your town (much as we all love to read some witchy books). Stop allowing your lust to substitute for a daily practice.
You are not a witch because you wear robes or elven jewelry or because you have black fingernail polish or because you burn incense in your apartment or because you learn to read tarot or palms or tea leaves. Stop allowing your physical image and your fear of death to substitute for a relationship with the divine.
Yes, Younger Child loves all of those things. But Younger Child, alone, cannot make you a witch.
You are not a witch because Lady Something Luna Something Hawk Something Ravensomething Moonglow pronounces you a witch or because you complete some on-line "mystery school" course. You are not a witch because you've been scourged or annointed with oil or because you've said some sacred words. You are not a witch because you've gotten the five-fold kiss. Stop allowing other people to exercise power over.
You can BECOME a witch with no paraphanelia at all, just by going outside under the full, or dark, or quarter or half or three-quarter Moon, or under the sun, or at dawn, or at dusk, or whenever, and saying, with intention, "I am a witch. I am a witch. I am a witch." But in order to BE a witch, you must do more. Otherwise, you, as a witch, will fade, rather quickly, into nothing.
In order to BE a witch, you must help to turn the wheel. You must sit down daily with the Goddess and the gods and develop relationship. How scary is that? You must ground. Also, scary, especially when done daily. You must be present, as a witch, as often and as frequently as possible. Ditto on the scary. You must do the work involved in developing a relationship with the land, the watershed, the trees, the herbs, the wildlife, the rocks -- everything -- in your sacred space. Again, scary. You must change the world with magic, challenge those in power, heal the sick and powerless, provide the imaginal and charged image of the wild woman living at the liminal space between village and wood. You must do what is dangerous, you must see and worship the divine in the mundane, you must be willing to allow magic to creep into the modern world through the temporal port of your own warm human, bloody body. It's all as scary as shit if you actually commit to doing it on a daily basis and not just when you feel like it.
It's neither as easy, nor as "fun!" to be a witch as many modern people imagine. Mostly, to be a witch is work, work, work, not necessarily exciting nor technicolor work, although, Goddess knows, on occassion . . . . To be a witch is to wake up every morning, even the mornings when you need to dash into work, and to do a witch's work of relationship, grounding, physical presence. To be a witch is to stop and turn the wheel, even when a million "mundane" concerns call out to you. To be a witch is not to own stuff nor to read stuff nor to wear stuff nor to go to stuff. Sorry. To be a witch is to commit to work, difficult, repetitive, spiritual work and to do it over, and over, and over and from one season to the next and to the next and to the next.
Joanna Colbert has completed her Gaian Tarot Deck, to be published in 2011. Her final card, available at the link, is a fitting conclusion and summation of the work.
Congratulations, Joanna! I don't buy many tarot decks, because otherwise I could too easily get out of control, but yours (and the Greenwood Tarot) are on my list for sure!
Here's an interesting story about what appears to be a significant discovery of Saxon war booty, much of it made from gold. There's some speculation about whether the person who buried the treasure was Pagan.
Mr Whykes believes the booty belonged to a [P]agan king.
"Some of the items, which might actually be slightly later, would certainly seem to be Christian," he said.
"We've certainly seen crosses, one of which seems to have been deliberately broken and the other seems to have been deliberately folded in on itself, so it may be as simple to say that this is a [P]agan king who's taking religious artefacts and stopping them being religious artefacts." Earlier, the article describes some of the items and notes that: "It's mostly sword fittings, which is quite incredible. There are also strips of gold decorated with garnets, which as yet we haven't been able to identify, strange little gold snakes," he said. Although the article doesn't discuss the possible religious significance of those "strange little gold snakes," I wonder if their presence doesn't also point to, if not the religion of the person who buried the items, at least to Pagan worship among those from whom the items were taken. The snake, of course, is an ancient symbol of the Goddess. Another article reports that: Perhaps the most intriguing question of all raised by the finds concerns religious belief. As well as the three crosses found in Staffordshire, there is a piece of gold bearing a Biblical inscription from the Book of Numbers. This would suggest that Christianity was widespread in seventh-century Britain. However, the evidence at Sutton Hoo appears to point the other way. There, the remains of a huge ship – about 90 feet long – were discovered with an intact treasure chamber at its heart. Although some Christian symbols were discovered at Sutton Hoo, the burial itself was [P]agan. So what was going on? "My own feeling is that this was a period of great intellectual liberty," says Carver. "There was no over-arching authority to tell you what to think. Some people were Christian, some people were [P]agan and you had a considerable amount of interplay between the two." At the least, scholars expect the find to cause new thinking about the period when Christianity was becoming more popular than Paganism.
Leslie Webster, a former British Museum curator and specialist in Anglo-Saxon culture, saw the treasure last week. "It will make historians, literary scholars, archaeologists and art historians," she says, "think again about rising (and failing) kingdoms, the transition from [P]aganism to Christianity, the conduct of battle and the nature of fine metalwork – to name only a few of the many huge issues it raises."
And, there's another interesting element to the story. The items were found by an amateur metal detectorist -- one of those guys who goes around with those beeping metal poles. On the day that he found the items, he invoked ancient spirits to help him find the gold:
Mr Herbert described the day he found the treasure, including a spooky [sic] detail before he set out for his day's detecting.
"I have this phrase that I say sometimes; 'spirits of yesteryear take me where the coins appear', but on that day I changed coins to gold," he said.
"I don't know why I said it that day, but I think somebody was listening and directed me to it... This is what metal detectorists dream of, finding stuff like this. But the vast amount there is is just unbelievable."
Hopefully, the items will end up in a museum and subject to study by archeologists and religious historians.
I'm a woman, a Witch, a mother, a grandmother, an eco-feminist, a gardener, a reader, a writer, and a priestess of the Great Mother Earth. Hecate appears in the
Homeric Ode to Demeter, which tells of Hades who caught Persophone
"up reluctant on his golden car and bare her away lamenting. . . . But no one, either of the deathless gods or of mortal men, heard her voice, nor yet the olive-trees bearing rich fruit: only tenderhearted Hecate, bright-coiffed, the daughter of Persaeus, heard the girl from her cave . . . ."
.jpg)
.jpg&imgrefurl=http://passionateeater.blogspot.com/2008/01/blue-duck-tavern-is-no-lame-duck.html&usg=__3nn2wVaUmgSHjnixCsbYBrrWAoU=&h=336&w=400&sz=129&hl=en&start=3&um=1&tbnid=xfDLMgclco56aM:&tbnh=104&tbnw=124&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dblue%2Bduck%2Btavern%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1){kind=link}
