Anything Other Than Holy

I haven't celebrated Samhain with all the trappings for years now.

The carved pumpkin heads, black and gold candles, myrrh-heavy incense, robes and a cast circle haven't been seen around my place for a good long time.

That doesn't mean that I've forgotten to mark the first day of Winter. Rather, the marking has become almost entirely internal rather than demonstrative for me, and I'm happy with that.

I might be fortunate to be someone with enough intelligence and training to be able to work out for myself when the mid-point between Solstice and Equinox falls, four times a year and hence have less need to display my acknowledgement of the Sun's apparent position in the sky.

Or I might be a person who hasn't much need for the validation of others when marking time.

Or I might be a person whose interior life is just growing richer as I go on whirling on a rock around a big ball of hydrogen fissioning into helium.

Whatever the reason, my withdrawal from external displays of Sabbat hasn't stopped my ancestors gathering around me when the time draws near, or me dreaming of them every night, conversing with generations I have never known while alive,  or inviting them to accompany me throughout my day.

For perhaps that's the point - no day is mundane any longer, and no experience anything other than holy.

Tides

There's nothing quite like the Samhain tide to open your emotions.

It is said that twice a year, at Samhain and Beltane, the veil between the worlds becomes tenuous and crossings from one to the other are more common. But in my case, I reckon it's just that at these times I'm more aware of the existence of the veil, and other worlds, than at more mundane times.

And so I am dreaming, and nightmaring, enough to keep me for the rest of the year, it seems.

My loved ones and ancestors are featuring quite heavily in my dreams - sometimes unrecognisable by their appearance yet completely known for who they are and were to me - old fears are playing themselves out and connections are being rebooted.

Head tipped back into the (finally) winter-blue sky this morning, I watch a fairy crossing above me.

No...not a fairy...a locust, with its rainbow wings whirring. I remember that I am quite averse to locusts on the ground and step out of its flight path quickly.

Music is getting stuck in my mind, so I switch my electronic collection on to shuffle and listen to Joe Walsh, Corvus Corax and Tim Hardin. Ah, the poor heroin-addicted boy who never managed to claw his way out of the poppy's grip before it killed him.

Emotions are raw yet surprisingly manageable in this season of other-worldly connection.

I view a house a friend (and teenage sweetheart) used to live in as a boy - 4 doors down on Arthur Road, long since sold up as the matriarch's health failed.

I reconnect with the Covenant of Hekate, thinking to honour Her Fires again this year, when the Moon is right.

I miss the Gautrain Bus, the drivers of which have been on strike for almost a week now, and don't fancy the stress of driving in a car through Sandton traffic this afternoon - never mind what stress it must be giving Warren to do the actual driving.

I remember my Mom, who, when last seen in the dreamworld was wearing a different face, whose last-incarnation-birthday it is today.

Happy Birthday, Mom. I miss you still.

I'm thinking the tide will be gentler this year, as I get older and possibly more able to handle it. The retrograde motions of both Saturn and Pluto in Capricorn seem to be helping this softer view along. We introspected our immediate daily souls last month with the Mercury backtrack, and now a slightly higher portion of our collective Self will be pondering the tracks and ruts of time and space.

Hopefully. As past the veil we slide together, holding hands, some of us shrieking, some of us crying, some of us looking about in wonder and awe.Tides.

Still Not Halloween

Well, no, and it's still not Halloween in a few days.

It's still Beltane, here in the Southern Hemisphere, but I've just about given up pointing that out to most people.

I've had to conclude that either South Africans of the middle-and-upward classes don't know what season it is, or they're unaware of the significance of the ages-old celebration of the start of Winter.
(Or they just don't care and are just doing shit because the Americans do, and I must say I find this parenthetical reason the most compelling of the three).

So, OK, a quick run-down of what Samhain, also known as Halloween, has meant to humans for thousands of years:

It's the start of the Winter season. The Celts only recognised 2 seasons, Summer and Winter. Summer started on the first week in May and we celebrate that as Beltane in the Northern Hemisphere. The start of Winter was the first week in November, midway between the Solstice and the Equinox.

It marks the beginning of the period of cold and dark, the time by which all harvests were to be safely gathered in and shelters made proof against the gathering loss of sunlight.

At this time, the ancestors and the little folk - those of other realms and dimensions - would take advantage of the liminality of the environment and draw nearer to humans. It thus became necessary for us to devise strategies to keep them from our doors, our stored crops and our livestock.

You can very easily see how the spooky motif and the tradition of Trick-Or-Treating became established out of these mass subconscious workings.

 The problem comes when you try to apply these venerable rituals to the start of Summer. It won't work, and you end up playing the absolute fool across all worlds, dimensions and realms.

Good luck with that, as ever, South Africa.

Pic: May Queen from the Beltane Fire Festival, 2012

Suddenly

It happens every year.

I plan on celebrating Samhain, using the mid-point between the Solstice and Equinox as a base. I buy a Butternut Squash, or a Crown Pumpkin, disembowel it, carve it into a JackoLantern. I grind up resins, roots and oils to make the incense.

After a supper featuring Pork and Pumpkin, I light the JackoLantern, hang the swinging censer outside and light the charcoal, sprinkle the incense, and annoy my neighbours.

That's on the outside: inside a rich conversation with my Ancestors has been going on for a few days.

I'm observing the Moon, how she is fading to New in a few days and I keep the internal conversation going. I fling the arms of Spirit out embracing the dry wind which whistles away all our precious moisture, here in Joburg.

Warren and I trek into Rosebank to stock up on sacred oils from Isis and we get lost among the noisy renovations of The Mall. We smell onions frying from street cafes and hear the tribal dancers gearing up for the morning batch of tourists.

It's the start of Winter. And I seem to neglect that factor every single year. For the morning after I start my Samhain celebrations it is invariably the first frost-nipping, sitting-on-hands-to-warm-them, breath-steaming morning of the year so far.

But I - I have forgot my gloves, my beanie, my Winter-weight coat.

And so I complain - as every year - how suddenly the Winter came on this time.

And all the while, on the inside of Spirit, a bow wave of Ancestors -yours,mine, everybody's - is winging out behind and to the side of me. Weighing lightly but insistently on my earth soul, and reminding me: we are the leading edge in Time of All Those Predecessors.

The Wyrd

Dear Terence McKenna; still making me laugh out loud 14 years after his death.

Oh, and he is so right. The Shaman is the interface between the Culture and the Other, in human societies.

Paraphrasing the Bard:

"OK, you...you can go and be weird. We'll give you a hut on the outskirts of the village and -yes - when we need you we'll call you."

I think that there are more Shamans walking the Earth today than at any point in the past. We are experiencing that concrescence which is a hallmark of a great shift in levels of awakening.

Why, I had an hour-long conversation with a Shaman just yesterday, at work. I very much doubt he calls himself that, but that is the effect. You, you go over there and be weird. We'll call you and use you when - not if - we have need.

And so it is perhaps not such a shock to find groups of Pagans and other minority clusters at seeming war with each other: they are each and all behaving like the Shaman of the village, and being weird. It takes a certain level of weirdness to handle magic at after all.

And we so need our Weird ones at this critical juncture in our species' history.

Samhain 2013

"When the pale white moon is climbing slow,
            Through the stars to the heavens height,
            We hear Thy hooves on the wings of night!
            As black tree branches shake and sigh,
            By joy and terror we know Thee nigh.
            We speak the spell Thy power unlocks,
            At solstice, sabbat and equinox.
            Word of virtue, the veil to rend,
            From primal dawn to the wide world's end!"

Blessed Samhain, or possibly Beltane, to All.

I will be observing this Sabbat on Sunday.

Here is the artist's FB page.

Freedom Day

"I do not deny that I planned sabotage.
I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness nor because I have any love of violence.
I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation and oppression of my people by the whites"
Nelson Mandela
Pic: from Pagan Freedom Day 2004 in Joburg.

Remember Their Names

For the next thirty days the Advocacy Against Witch Hunts will be focusing on a truly distressing facet of humankind : violent domination and suppression of the "other" , whoever and wherever they are perceived to be.

All over Africa, as well as India, Micronesia, the Middle East and parts of the so-called "first world", the poor and marginalised in society are targeted as "witches" and tortured or killed under certain circumstances, which include but are not limited to hard economic times. The Other we blame for all our misfortunes.

Frequently, those targeted are women; probably because women often bear the brunt of poverty in every country on this earth, but also because, well, this is the Patriarchy we've been living in for the last half-dozen millennia after all.

Scapegoating? Sure it is. But giving it a name doesn't excuse it one whit.

Neither does understanding at least some of the mechanisms behind the phenomenon.

This cosmos is, indeed, a work in progress. But that doesn't mean that we can sit back and watch it unfold. We have many things to learn, as we continue to create this living universe, and one of them is the nature of  polarity. 

Our atrocious behaviour towards other living beings whom we are quick to "other" is an object lesson for all of us: one we can learn the most from by becoming engaged with it, recognising the inherent wrongness of it , and trying to address it.

You can do several things:

Sign the petition against witch hunts in South Africa.

"Like" the Facebook advocacy page.

Place a banner on your website or blog.

Join the Pagan Rights Alliance, especially if you are in South Africa.

And, mostly, when the time comes, remember their names.

Beltane Blessings

"Blessed be thy feet, that have brought thee in these ways.

Blessed be thy knees, that shall kneel at the sacred altar.

Blessed be thy womb, without which we would not be.

Blessed be thy breasts, formed in beauty.

Blessed be thy lips, that shall utter the Sacred Names."

..and the mercury hit 35 degrees Celsius today, Beltane in the Southern Hemisphere.

There is still, however, chocolate cake for tea.

Cognitive Dissonance

As we approach the astronomical midpoint between the Spring Equinox and the Summer Solstice (on 7th November this year), we see the signs of Life burgeoning all around us.
Here, South of the Equator, the trees are almost all fully-leafed.
The thunderstorms of the Summer are in full swing on the Highveld.
In my garden, roses are scrabbling at the walls and cascading over the wooden patio frame - white, red, orange and purple - glorious in their profusion and heavenly in their scent.
Honeysuckle has regrown from being viciously cut back last Winter and is now blooming, too, on the North of the ritual space outdoors.
Grass has to be cut once a week, so fast its growth is now.

Everything sings, hollers and shouts of Life: growing, blossoming, increasing. Life yelling unto Life "I'm here!" under a bright, hot, Southern African sun.

Listen to the local energies. They are speaking to you of the upswing of the pendulum, the cresting of the seasonal sine wave. The Summer coming in all its glory.

So tell me - among all this Life, all this growth, all this increase - why in the nether hells would you celebrate the Day of the Dead?

Merry, lusty Beltane everybody South of the Equator.
And Blessed Samahin to you Northern lot!


Pic: Spheres of Light

Hecate Propylaea

In honour of the Full Moon of the Scorpio-Taurus axis, which I always associate strongly with Hecate, I will be burning Myrrh tonight and holding the eastern seaboard of the US in my thoughts.

It seems as if, whenever I've had a moment to rest my mind today, I've looked into it and seen there a picture of unutterable peace and joy: a place I visited once in a dream and have never forgotten.
It was on the edge of the ocean, and the full moon hung over the blue-black-purple waves rolling to shore, casting silver and bright white highlights over all. There was a cove to the north, and a human-built structure on the natural jetty standing with huge doors open wide.

I saw it only once, but I have never forgotten it, or the way it made me feel. So at peace, so full of the beauty of life and night and moon and sea.

And now I am holding this place close to the surface, between the small stresses of the day and the wondering worry about Hurricane Sandy.

May Hecate guard your gates tonight.
May She fill us all with the beauty of moon-sea-night.
May She bear our light into the eye of the storm.
Blessed Be.

Fire Under The Earth

Here in the Southern hemisphere of the world,

The long, slow pulse of Winter is quickening.


The seed which was hidden in the earth sends forth testing tentacles, uncurling.


We draw an icy breath together, and taste flowers, leaves and blades of grass Approaching on the chilly wind.

Pagani.

This is a Wheel.

Kindly add your shoulder to it. Blessed Imbolc.

Though You Have Considered All The Facts

I could not, in a million years, have said it better than Sister Hecate does:

My religion doesn’t shy away from death, from the sacrifices that happen every moment, of every day, in Nature. My religion participates, equally, in the death of the robin and in the satisfaction of the fox, feeding her kits. My religion knows that corn cries out when it is picked and that the sow morns for her slaughtered piglets, just as I rejoice in seeing G/Son well-fed. My religion frightens some people because it does not shy away from what we call “the dark.” I want to be as fully present to the robin, who dies, as I will die, as I am to the fox, who eats, as I do eat.

And also, with Wendell Berry, remember to

Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.

Always.

Pic: From the SquirrelBasket

Pretty Full Weekend

Three days to the thinning of the Veil which is Samhain, Southern Hemisphere time, and the Invitation has been sent.

It is sent continuously from the preceding New Moon, of course.

This year, an image has been forming insistently in my mind whenever I'm sitting at the Ancestor altar:

A line of light runs from me to my two most recent Ancestors, and that forms the image into two halves, at first. Mother side and Father side.
From each of those closest Ancestors run two light lines to their parents (one of whom from each side is sitting in the close-Ancestor-cluster I work with daily), and from each of those, two further parental lines.
And so on.
It fills up at first like a divided brain, in two distinct halves.
But then something interesting starts happening.
Tendrils of light connections cross the Mother-Father divide going both ways - this represents Ancestors who are antecedent on both sides. As will happen of course, if you go back far enough. Small clumps of intensity form, indicating greater or lesser spheres of inbreeding.
Eventually, it resolves itself as looking very like the human brain's neural network.

 Which is not surprising, I suppose. There are functions which govern associations such as these. Like the brain, and like dear Facebook ,or like a country club.Modelled in Maths - yet I was still surprised to see it forming so perfectly in my mind.

The Invitation, as usual, calls all Ancestors who lived well and died well, and those who wish me no harm, to the feast communication night of Samhain, which this year falls on a pretty much full moon, and also the rites of Hecate's Fires on the Taurus-Scorpio Sun-Moon axis this year.

Going to be a pretty full weekend, then.

Brain Neural Network Pic: Scientific American

Vale Persephone

As the Sun makes ingress into Aries, we in the Southern Hemisphere cross the line of mid-autumn.
Below the x-axis now, we're coasting to Yule with a stopover at Samhain. The mornings are fresh and chilly, the days high blue cloudless at their best.
I love this time of year.
Blessed Mabon, Blessed Ostara to you all.

Pic: David Schlosser

The Ways In Which We Hurt Each Other

I’m going to stick my two cents in here concerning the almighty row which appears to have broken out in the US at Pantheocon his year, despite the undeniable facts that I am not American and have never attended this gathering.

Last year, for those of you unaware of what went on, there were a lot of very hurt Pagans left licking their wounds when a ritual billed as Dianic revealed, rather late in the day, that by “women only” the organisers of the ritual meant cis women only. That is, women born with 2 X-chromosomes in every cell, who retained the identity of women. Trans- women were informed, apparently, that this ritual was not for them when they pitched up to attend. This was an old-style Dianic affair which did not admit any but cis-gendered women.

The reprisals on both sides seemed quite hectic.

This year, a similar sort of ritual was offered, with the proviso being made, right at the end of the description that it was for “genetic women only”.

Now, leaving aside the question of whether or not a trans person who was born a woman and had chosen to identify as male would have been welcomed by this wording, this (apparent) attempt to avoid the trauma of last year’s ambiguity has seeded a backlash quite as hectic as the original furore.

Let me attempt to lay my cards on the table here: as a double-X woman encultured in this sick society, I have every reason to believe that safe space for women is sometimes in short supply and is, moreover, often needed. Places where women need not feel threatened, diminished or patronised in any way by men are not common in the male-dominated patriarchy we all live within.

Indeed, male privilege and domination is so basic to the fabric of this culture that it is often unperceived, making it hard for those with deep cultural engraining to understand just why some women would feel, well, not quite in a perfectly safe place in the presence of the dominating class. And this includes women born male physically.

As someone who is deeply aware of how the dominant paradigm often reviles or dismisses the concerns – and even the existence!-of women, non-human animals, plants and the land itself, I realise on an almost visceral level that sometimes, members of the non-dominant species (that’s most of us) have a need to gather in settings which feel non-threatening, especially perhaps for something as baring of the soul as spiritual ritual.

On the other hand, people I esteem and respect highly – among them Thorn Coyle – found it needful to sit, or stand, in silent meditation outside the site of this proposed ritual at Pantheocon the other day. And here I’m in danger of sounding as if I’m contradicting myself, for I fully empathise with those silent protestors, too.

(I would really recommend you go here to read Thorn’s deeply moving take on the affair.)

For who knows, unless they’ve been there themselves, the deep wounds a person who identifies with a gender not of the culturally-approved binary type lives with, all the time? Attacks upon people of trans-, bi-, homo- or just other-sexuality are the order of the day in probably the majority of countries on this planet today. Who can bear the pain of being told you’re not a real woman, man…whatever, because of the way you were born or the way you look or the soul you have taken the time to commune with? This is insupportable viciousness, and very common in this culture.

So were Thorn and companions right to hold silent vigil before the doors to the ritual space? Yes, they were, in my opinion.

And was Z. correct to want to provide a safe space for those not quite comfortable with the dominant gender, however configured, and to clarify that proviso? Yes, again.

Both actions were, as I feel it, correct actions.

Moreover, something which seems to have been missed in all the outrage, however justified, is this: both groups were rightly protesting the deadly presence of the over-culture, which makes insane, makes sick in the soul, and which damages the living - and indeed the no longer living - in so many, many ways.

May the Ancestors take notice, and shower blessings and healing upon all who suffered here.

Pic: Through my front door

Beltane Tide 2011

Welcome to the Beltane-tide. We have it all here - deep red metallic candles, rose-sandalwood-frankincense-woodruff incense, a magnificent declamation from the Stag of Seven Tines and a priestess hobbling around the borders of her land because of a bee sting.

It's only the second time in my life that a Sister has actually had the effrontery to sting me: the first time I was about 10 years old, in England, running barefoot in the garden at Wokingham. The poor Bumble Bee who my enormous foot came down upon had her revenge. On Saturday evening I was dead heading the Thug Rose Number 2 and, although shod in slops, a bee found my foot once more. The pain was, well, excruciating.

Warren applied a thick paste of mustard and a professional crepe bandage after my howling had died down, which drew most of the venom out of the wound. But today it's still red and a bit sore. So I suppose I'll be limping around the Boundaries at twilight, swinging the censer and brandishing the Athame. I only hope all the Sisters have cleared the area beforehand.
In the meantime, the Belfire has been extinguished and relit, the Guardians called to renew their protection of home and family, and yes, the God who Sets the Head Afire with Smoke has proclaimed His presence here.

We continue to tumble into the Summer with all its promise of heat waves, wind-downed trees and blowing up of tolling gantries. And then there's the Beltane Chocolate Cake...

Photo: Bee from the Beltane Ranch. Copyright Joseph Readdy

Beltane's Coming...

RiboNucleic Acid

DeoxyRiboNucleic Acid

Maypole

DNA Maypole

Sculpture by Barry Woods Johnstone

Ostara 2011

"Thee we invoke, O Light of Life;
Be thou a bright flame before us,
Be thou a guiding star above us,
Be thou a smooth path beneath us"

A wonderful Equinox to all - Vernal in the South, Autumnal in the North.
Blessed Be the Balance of the Dark and the Light.

Graph: Found here

Dreaming Death

Death paid me a visit last night, in my dreams.

And Death was a dualistic Being of male and female; brother and sister.

Promising to heal me, Sister Death held me in a long body hug. Brother Death smiled upon me.

And then they took me away in a car.

Perhaps this is the Equinox impinging itself upon my dark and dreaming mind in terms of light and dark, yin and yang, female and male. I don't actually know.

But, as usual by now, there is no fear, no anxiety.

How would I greet my own personal death, should it find me this season? In the same way I greet the Autumnal Equinox, but reversed: arms outspread and Falling Forwards. Into the White Water.