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A reminder to consecrate and bless your herbs before lighting up to get that extra spiritual boost...
"The Sabbat is the boundless extent of the paradisal body." -_Masks of Misrule_, Nigel Jackson
"The Sabbat," said one, "is the true Paradise" -_Witchcraft Today_, Gerald Gardner
"Jeanne Dibasson, a woman twenty-nine years old, said that the Sabbath was the true Paradise, where there was far more pleasure than can be expressed; that those who went there found the time so short by reason of the pleasure and enjoyment, that they never left it without marvelous regret, so that they looked forward with infinite impatience to the next meeting." -THE WORSHIP OF THE GENERATIVE POWERS-, Thomas Wright (ref. Pierre de Lancre's _Tableau de l'inconstance des mauvais anges et démons_)
Great Goddess whom I love, adore, cherish, and worship, I ache for your touch. In your presence, I am refreshed, renewed, overjoyed, and filled with such rapturous awe. Enfold me. Pour over me. Fill me to the brim with your delight and gladness. How could I look upon you, and my heart not be softened by your infinite compassion, love and beauty?
"Blessed be the Great Goddess without beginning nor end of days. Through all things flow the milk of your breasts. Ever virgin for you are ever new. Known of all for you are all knowing. Eternal first love of all." -Victor Anderson
An important Walpurgis custom of ours has long been the traditional Dressing of the May Bush. This year, though, things have gone a bit differently.
In the past, we would harvest a small branch of blooming Hawthorn on April 30, which we would set before the home and decorate with Clooties. We would ideally ornament the living Matron Whitethorn by our front gate, but we have been discouraged from drawing attention to her unnecessarily, lest we risk attracting the unwelcome. As such, we've used a small switch from the Matron tree each year.
This year, however, we were given leave to harvest a special thorn-broom from her central bole that we've admired for years. We will dry this specimen, following today's celebration, and reuse it every year. What's more, we have been guided in establishing a different form of the May Bush, and so was born the Wishing Bush.
We used keys to represent an array of wishes for the coming year—however small—which we consecrated and tied with colorful loops of charm-knotted cord. These keys were then hung from the Hawthorn and earnest entreaty was given to the Whitethorn Mother, that She might help bring these wishes to fruition. On the next day, the cords will be cut and burned in the smoldering remnants of the Hexennacht Fire—that the Hawhthorn-blessed wishes might be carried on the wind to the powers that be. The keys, in turn, will be cleansed in hallowed waters, for future use.
In the shadows of the forest, the spirits of the dead gather to watch as we honor the ancient rites of Beltane. It's a time of rebirth and renewal, where we celebrate the return of the sun and the awakening of the earth from its winter slumber.
But amidst the beauty of this sacred time, the darkness lingers. For the spirits are not always benevolent, and the magic of the night can bring both blessing and curse.
So as we gather around the Beltane fire, let us remember to honor the spirits of the land, the ancestors who came before us, and the gods who watch over us all. Let us offer our gratitude and our respect, and let us be mindful of the power we wield.
May the spirits guide us and guard us, as we dance beneath the moon and celebrate the beauty and the mystery of this wondrous world. Blessed Beltane to all.
Simen Johan, 1973- Norwegian
Photo
I haven't been here in a long time, but just know that my inbox is always open for questions about:
The Serpent Awakens I can feel the tide changing so swiftly here. The weather is getting warmer, and my allergies are turning my nose into a snot faucet.
In the land I feel a great stirring and rolling: the great serpent in the Land is awake and moving through the roots of trees, causing buds to flower, drawing bees and other insects to pollinate, and causing birds to build nests together. I can feel the Serpent slithering through my body, too, awakening my libido and my creative faculties. My dreams have become vivid and insightful.
I want to take walks in the woods, far away from the prison of my office desk. The sun is so beautifully bright, the air is cool with the wind (the last remnants of the spirit host riding through the air), and the clouds make wonderful shapes that make me laugh. I passed by a river the other day on a drive and already felt the call to strip off my clothes and dive in!
Sabbat Bound
What do witches do at Walpurgisnacht?
Whatever they like, really. I used to put such a separation between my "pagan" practices and my "witch" rites, but now I don't care anymore. I am not trying to please anyone, or impress anyone. Let them be combined! All are welcome at the Sabbat -- there are no witnesses, only participants.
So, put up the Maypole and dance with ribbons! Crown the May Queen and the Summer King! Pour offerings of milk and honey and flowers into great cunts in the ground for the Earth Mother at the base of trees and hills! Go off into the woods with a lover and stain your clothes with fresh grass! Spill seed (and seeds) the make the land fertile with flowers and wild things! Fly forth with the Wild Hunt to help green the land in a furious cavalcade of spirit hosts! How are these things done? Flight to the Sabbat-Mount
When I was younger and writing on this site, not much had been written about how to participate in the Witches' Sabbath. So, we experiment, and tried things out. Some experiments were a success, others not so much -- so we learned.
These days there are so many resources on how to travel to the Sabbat, how to participate, how to bring those visions into your dreams and rituals. And they all follow a similar pattern to what I'm about to share. It doesn't matter that it looks "Cochranite" or "Garynite" or "Wiccaite" or "Artissonite" because those are things that -work-. Why are we constantly trying to reinvent the wheel?
My opinion of the Sabbat is that it is both an oneiric or spectral event, AND a physical event. Some witches have the ability to perform these rites physically, others travel in spirit to attend. And some do both. All are valid: all are the Witches' Sabbath. What follows is how one might participate in Walpurgisnacht.
It is night. The witches are wandering through the forest, a stang or a besom in their hands. They have set up a ritual space ahead of time, and they see in the distance light from four candles to mark out their space. They approach, whispering the old transvection charm as they go: "Tout tout a-tout tout throughout and about".
They enter into the ritual space, circling around while saying a charm for the compass round. They sprinkle water on themselves and upon the circle's edge; they call up the spirits with horn and drum and bell and rattling bones; they call up the Devil and his Faery Dame with a one, two, three, four!
"Open wide the gates of Summer!" They declare triumphantly, and they light the bale fire. They whoop and holler, and dance about, leaping over and through the flames for good luck. Music is played, and old Sabbat songs. "Har har, hou hou, dance ici, dance la, jous ici, jous la! Sabbat, Sabbat, HO HO HO!" They cry.
They sit and feast merrily with the spirits. Upon Wine and fruit and breads they feast.
They leave offerings for the spirits of that place, and return to their homes with a "Rentum tormentum! A boy! Merry meet, and merry part!"
At home, they anoint themselves with flying ointment. They make petitions to the Old One and the Faery Queen to carry them to the Great Sabbath. "Open wide the gates of dream. Carry me to the Sabbat Mount. Familiar spirit, come by to bear me to the Peak." They carry their stangs and brooms to their bed, or hold holy stones, or drink strange teas. They drift into sleep with visions of flight. Some awake in the night, and make more petitions to the Witching Gods before falling back into the spell of flight, watching themselves flying swiftly over villages, over streams, over mountains, to the Grand Sabbat.
The Witches' Sabbat is a physical and a spectral event.
The Witching Gods are strange in that They revealed themselves retroactively.
When we look at historical witches, we have some mentions of some of the beings they interacted with. The Devil, the Queen of Elphame, Diana, Hekate, Janicot, Robin, and other names that crop up (forgive me if I am speaking mainly on British and Scottish witch lore, that's my focus). However, these gods are often not described in the terms we apply to them now.
The Witch Father is described as an initiator, as a lord of life and death, as a dying and rising god, as a god of the hunt and the wilds, of field, and forest, and fen. He has bright and dark aspects. These spirits (the Devil, Janicot, Robin, et cetera) are not described this way.
The Witch Mother is described as a queen of heaven and hell, of land, sea, and sky, as an Earth Mother, and a Star Goddess, as a primordial void from whence all things spring, and to which all things return. A womb, and a tomb. But the Queen of Elphame is not described this way, nor is Diana, or other names spirits. What has happened here? Did people interacting (if they interacted at all) with these spirits experience them as we do now?
I think these spirits evolved, and took on qualities, or took on spirits and became bigger spirits (like cells in a body) because of worship and devoted attention. I think poets who Romanticized the gods, and witches who read those poems and became inspired to call out to them drew strange powers together that seem so vast and ancient (and they are). They were drawn out of the stars, out of bone, out of earth, out of blood, and out of breath.
There are two great forces to which witches are consistently drawn. I think they have grown and evolved over time, sometimes growing in power, and sometimes shrinking. But always they remain.
Easter has NOTHING to do with:
Easter has EVERYTHING to do with:
Nobody stole our shit. Easter was never pagan to begin with. Rabbit was considered “fish” by the medieval Catholic Church so that people could eat it during the 40 days of Lent, and eggs laid during the Lenten fast were hardboiled for preservation and then eaten during the breaking of the fast on Easter Sunday. That’s why we have bunnies and eggs.
Stop conflating Easter with pagan holidays, and get the fuck out of here with that casual anti-semitism.
Thank you and good day.
All of this.
Oh look, it’s my legacy. 😁
Okay, but like Easter is about Easter…
The type of Seder that Jesus would have attended is in no way indicative of what a Passover Seder is to Jews because it was a different type of Judaism at the time.
I agree that Easter was not stolen from pagan traditions, but it is also not based on Jewish ones and it’s important not to conflate “Judeo-Christian” because we’re two separate entities. That’s why Christians holding a Seder is very wrong.
So even though we’re monotheistic, please don’t conflate the two. Especially when you’re discussing distinctions between holidays around the same time, because the resurrection of a savior has nothing to do with my people fleeing slavery.
Okay, I have been seeing this go around in the notes, and witchkeni does make a very important point. In the interest of transparency and also respect for all my Jewish friends and neighbors out there, please allow me to clarify.
The TIMING of Easter is related to Passover, as the Last Supper is widely believed to have been a Passover Seder. (Fully acknowledging that the Biblical canon is describing very different circumstances and traditions to what exists now.) The dates differ somewhat between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches because their holidays align to the Gregorian and Julian calendars respectively. (The shift from Julian to Gregorian affected the timing of certain other holidays as well, but I digress.)
Other than that, Passover and Easter are wholly separate and mean vastly different things to people of different Abrahamic faiths, and it IS very important not to conflate the two.
Deep. Cleansing. Breath.
All right. Since it’s Easter and this is going around again and people are getting spicy in the comments, I’m settling shit on this post once and for all. Cause I’m getting pretty damned sick of being called ignorant and antisemitic (and worse) for pointing out DOCUMENTED HISTORY AND LITURGICAL CANON like I had anything to do with its creation. I was going to make this its’ own post to avoid making this one obnoxiously long but yanno what? My jar of Fucks To Give is fucking empty.
You want the sauce? Here’s the sauce. And then I don’t want to hear another fucking word about it until next year when somebody inevitably digs this up again.
All right. First things first. The word “Easter” or “Ostern” or something like it is only found in English and German-derived languages. In Spanish, it is Pascua. In Italian and Catalan, Pasqua. In French, Pâques. In Greek, Pascha. In Portuguese, Páscoa. I could go on, but suffice it to say that nearly all Romance languages (and many of their derivatives) use some form of a word derived from the Latin Pascha, meaning of or having to do with Passover (Pesach). The two holidays are linguistically and temporally associated. This does not make them the same, but the association MATTERS, because it shows that right from the beginning Christians associated Easter with Passover and not with some random pagan solstice holiday.
“You mean Ostara?”
We’ll get to it.
As for timing, let us turn back the clock to 325 CE and the First Council of Nicaea. Up until this point, Christians had relied on the Jewish calendar to determine the date of Easter, since they associated the holiday with the same timing as Passover. Part of the council’s agenda was to designate a date for Easter which was not dependent on the Jewish calendar but still occurred around the same time. Subsequent councils eventually decided that Easter would take place on the first Sunday after the Paschal Moon, or the first full moon in April. Please note that the word “Paschal” appears in liturgical observances right up to the present day.
So that’s why the timing of Easter and Passover are connected in Church liturgy. Whether it is correct for the Church to associate Easter with Passover in this way according to Jewish religious canon and history is a separate issue. I did not make up this association out of thin air. It exists in history and in language, and if it’s inaccurate for the two to be associated in this way, y'all need to take it up with Rome.
And YES, when modern pagans ignore this in favor of saying Easter was straight-up sourced from pagan traditions and pagan traditions only, that erasure of the Jewish connection with the holiday IS FUCKING DISRESPECTFUL. THAT is where the casual antisemitism comes in, and we ought to be fucking aware of it.
Now as for Ostara….
When Bede wrote in the 8th century that “Eostermonath” must have been named for a Germanic goddess of spring, he was SPECULATING. We do not have sources for this supposition or evidence of the existence of a goddess called Eostre or Ostara before this, only his theory. And as we all know, given enough time, very old things are taken as gospel. So when Jacob Grimm quoted Bede in his own work, 19th-century occultists took it to be true and based their subsequent musings upon that single source.
These days, we have Wicca to thank for the presence of Ostara on the calendar. And it wasn’t even originally part of the Wheel of the Year. After deciding in 1958 that they wanted to celebrate the solstices and equinoxes as well as the quarter days, Gardner’s coven just marked the vernal equinox as the spring solstice and called it a day. Unfortunately, he was working from the now-debunked claims of Edward Williams (also known as Iolo Morganwg) who claimed that druids celebrated festivals on the solstices and equinoxes based on the belief that the druids had built Stonehenge and therefore marked these occasions as sacred. (More on this in Prof. Ronald Hutton’s article, “Modern Pagan Festivals.”)
Moving forward a few years, we come to the infamous Aidan Kelly. In 1974, he took is upon himself to create a new version of the Wheel of the Year with new “historical” names for several holidays. He took his information from Bede’s speculation as well and named the spring equinox festival Ostara. (This is also the point where we get Litha and Mabon, but I digress.) And even Aidan Kelly acknowledges, and I quote, “The Venerable Bede says that (the spring equinox] was sacred to a Saxon Goddess, Ostara or Eostre, from whom we get the name “Easter,” which, almost everywhere else, is called something like ‘Pasch,’ derived, of course, from Pesach.”
So Kelly’s new Wheel was adopted by the Wiccans and their broad influence spread it to the rest of the neopagan community and everyone just took it as gospel. It’s thanks to modern paganism’s penchant for conflating most of ancient European paganism and not doing their homework that we now get this idea of Ostara as an ancient spring celebration of the goddess Eostre, who, as you’ll recall, might not have even existed. And of course, because modern witches love to pick a fight and feed their persecution complexes, that translated directly into the idea that Easter and Ostara were the same holiday and that Christians must have “stolen” it.
And let’s address this “stolen” holiday idea. Yes, pagan peoples were converted, and their traditions were sometimes preserved and adapted to fit new ideas in order to ease the transition. This does NOT mean pagan holidays were just straight-up adopted into the Christian calendar. What even would be the point of saying Christianity was the “true religion” if they just went about like, “Hm, yes, this pagan holiday looks good, let’s just add that to the list like we consider it just as important as our own,” if they considered pagans to be ignorant heathens and their gods to be demons and devils? You can’t have it both ways, people.
If the Church had adopted pagan holidays, THERE WOULD BE RECORDS. We have records for just about every decision the Catholic Church has made with regard to the minutiae of their belief system, to say nothing of the construction of their calendar. Syncretism occurs when two or more cultures exist in the same place for a long enough period of time that their traditions begin to blend together. This has been happening FOREVER. It is not unique to Christianity or even Europe. Pagan cultures syncretized and shared and changed over time as well. The fact that Ostara as we know it today is not an ancient holiday does not make it any less valid or worthy of observance.
The Ishtar thing is a fucking meme and I’m not even going to dignify it with an argument.
In conclusion, and perhaps most goddamn importantly - You Can’t Fucking Steal A Holiday. You can ban it, you can suppress it, you can wipe it from the record, but you can’t steal it. Stealing implies that it’s a commodity or property which is gone and can never be used or observed by the original culture ever again. No one is stopping you from observing, learning about, or celebrating the thoroughly modern holiday of Ostara in whatever way you prefer.
So there it is. Enjoy the sources, enjoy the weather, enjoy your holidays. Now everybody get the fuck off my lawn.
So the book of essays I wrote with Frater Acher inches towards publication at Hadean Press, with a Foreword by the one and only Frater U∴D∴.and fantastic art. Look at that. I told you it was going to have pretty art, didn't I? Reader, I was *not *wrong.
José Sabogal has outdone himself. I'm so honoured that my writings are amongst such august company - a back and forth between Acher and myself. I hope you might enjoy, even in the bits where we disagree. More details from Acher:
I am delighted to give you an update on Craig 'VI’ Slee, José Sabogal and my new book GOÊTIC ATAVISMS. As a small but dedicated goêtic horde, we have been secretly working on this material for 18 months now, and soon it is time to share it with all of you.
The launch of this project will take place in three phases: On April 30th, a brand new online presence will launch at www.goeteia.com. It offers free education, guidance, and input on all things ‘chthonic sorcery,’ as well as the upcoming book. (Check it out to see the countdown... :-)). Then, in early May, the very limited edition of GOÊTIC ATAVISMS will be available. Keep your eyes peeled at our friends at Miskatonic and Courtyard Books for the first 33 copies. And finally, we can all pre-order the standard edition of the book from our great partners at Hadean Press starting May 30th.
Then, at the bindery today I saw the first prototype of the limited fine edition. To be honest, it will be the most radical binding I've seen in a time: You will be able to open the book from both sides and read either my essays or Craig’s. In the centre of the book, where our texts meet, you will find an Overture by none other than Frater U∴D∴. The book is lavishly illustrated with original artworks by José, and with the typesetting and the design of each individual pages, I have worked my heart out during this long winter...
Just like the book, the website is a labour of love and a quite intimate place to share videos and photos of my own goêtic operations. And, of course, lots of useful resources and material for further study.
I am aware that it is rare to undertake projects as uncompromising and radical as this one. So I am grateful to everyone who made this work possible – from the spirits in the caves and on the mountain tops to all the human friends involved. Here's to a goêtic summer ahead of us!
www.goeteia.com
“I pick one of the False Parasol mushrooms next time they fruit. I know the toxin can’t travel through my skin. It must be ingested in order to kill. And yet there’s the citrus sting of adrenaline on my tongue. The prickle of otherness alongside my spine. I gaze into the finely cut gills on the underside of the cap. Poison as it is colloquially used does not feel like the right word to describe this experience. I need a word that encompasses the animacy of this being. It’s mutability and the medicine it transmutes by saying, “Don’t eat me, but acknowledge me. Greet me. Meet me.” Poison feels like a term of ownership. A blanket of anthropocentrism that blinds us to the other characteristics of a being. Poison ivy. Poison oak. Poison hemlock. All it indicates is its toxicity to us – human beings. Poison is a word of possession. A word that can act like a punctation mark. A period that dissuades further interrogation. But poison is slippery. Mycophiles know there are plenty of mushrooms that resist easy classification. Some cultures identify a fungi as poisonous while others find it delicious in small amounts. There are mushrooms you can safely eat…twice. I think of the strange “potions” that were ancient wines: mixtures of psychoactive herbs and fungi and fermented grapes that the apostle Paul notes in one of his epistles have killed several Christians. In The Immortality Key, Brian Muraresku charts how wine and beer were much more powerful substances than our modern variety: just as easily killing you or driving you into a psychedelic state, than providing a safe, velveteen intoxication. The word pharmakon works much better for these potions...
No wonder, in a culture that has shown itself dedicated to immoderation, we have simplified the word poison. When you never honor the dosage of anything – be it monoculture, pesticide, ecocide, development, human narratives - how can you possibly honor the delicate dosage of plants and fungi and more unruly substances?
Poison interrupts the extractive nature of anthropocentrism. I cannot eat you. I cannot know you in the ways that I normally know something.”
- Sophie Strand from What is Poison?
Read the full essay here: https://creatrixmag.com/what-is-poison/
