at allantide: conclusion

v.

This is the day of dead warriors. It’s changed its name so many times.

Before this war and the war before it was the feast of saint martin.

The end of allantide before the rest.

The holy final season of the year that winds out until the first old advent candle.

Sometimes it’s easier to talk to the living that the dead

Pass with me through this field of poppies,

here are those who finally earned the secret of silence

And it does not matter what comes tomorrow if we can stand in today.

I got up in darkness at six in the morning to keep two minutes silence,

and in those moments, shuffling from foot to foot to maintain half waking

balance, I remembered men who never left the war, whose minds were the war

houses, drugs and whores could not make them forget

remembered a man whose wife and his daughter were lost of his war

and the madness of the slaughter and how they aren’t here anymore.

In two minutes remember the forgotten

who did it for you,

who did it for you,

who did it for you.

On these days we are like Mary Magdalene,

gaunt and thin, turning over limbs

of branches, searching through headstones saying,

is this the body of my beloved?

where is my beloved?

I haven’t written to him I haven’t written to him because I gave

myself to him

I haven’t written to him, written to him, because writing cost

money,

and honey I can’t spend myself on those who wouldn’t spend

themselves on me

I lay under you in the dark room

I have myself to you in the sea hut

And now all you have for me is nothing.

The dog is in the kennel

The witch is in the well

I sit upon the sofa

And you sit in your cell

This is not the time to sit here sighing clinging to what wasn’t or

what never was

Eleven days ago we entered through the door of the half living,

with desperate lanterns and hopeful songs, across from us,

in a gate to the west, the dead came one by one,

and we thought we gave to them, and they knew they gave to us,

and now the giving is done, and hand and hand, we walk out of

the North Gate together

Every one has lived

And everyone has gone

And everyone will come again.

at allantide continued

iii.

Something in this cold day reminds me of sunlight in michigan city indiana,

reminds me of marching up and down one half hour to the beach to be

confronted by the silent scream of blue water and nothing to do but

be in its nothing, no distraction from the action of all of those mermaids,

all of their tails flapping, arms waving saying, this bitch is a liar, this bitch is a liar,

don’t trust her round fat ass or her check mark eyebrows,

this bitch is a liar and it was we who would see

that she never come here.

The river is fat and muscled, waves rolling into waves, satin and oil, copper

yellow and brown on allantide.

It flexes its liquid flesh, fuller than its been since springtime, thick and high

the shagwa opens its breast, takes in the sky and sends it back in muted shades,

oak leaves like little starry hands flap to fall on streets making yellow carpets

everywhere they meet,

carpets to milk and cookie the earth and water mud for the older year

turning the new year on the day of old souls as we slip candles into windows

and yellow flames in terra cotta pots lick the black night telling lost souls

to come in.

Old souls come in, kept souls come in, souls forgotten come in,

souls that are dim, all of them who help me here,

dragonish souls come in, grandmother come in,

i’ve got your cigarettes on the altar,

Linda come in, the boy who fell in the river come in.

Sit here and listen to the psalms, now, on the longest night,

remember all the songs.

bible verses from the book of Daniel.

Everything that passed passes through again,

by this spark of burning light I swear,

everything lost is found again.

You were eighteen and just a baby when you fell into

the winter water and like moses or elijah no one knows how

it happened, we thought we’d never find your body.

Just a baby, washed up, a boy under a bridge,

destined for so much, but reckoned for dead.

In this small space I hold the moment of your passing.

It isn’t mine to let go,

my letting goes are yet to come.

iv.

at allantide we arrive at the Eight Gated Castle, and it is the one

that can’t be seen. This is the mountainous mother, twirling and turning,

never seen on peaks or islands, but reached through them,

reached through the rivers and running under earth.

by hidden gates we leave the common world.

this is the Not World, the Un Season.

this is the birth of all of our births.

we want a world without seasons. That’s just a fact.  John for Jesus

and roses for snow.

But we know Christ was born in winter, and came to the frozen world

from the depths of a cave on the very back of a stag

from the house that overlooks the copper colored river she sees a gate

to Annwn, and in it all her forty years twisting out before her.

they untwist in the taste of whiskey on her lips, the smoke of the sacrifice

rising from the tip of her cigarette.

Her breasts are still full.

heavy on her chest they are her pleasure.

All her body is a pleasure and she thinks

It has taken twenty years to learn that

the lover I yearned for was really just

me wanting a distraction from becoming me,

I thought I would do that when he got here,

that he would take care of all those things or

better, that I would take care of him,

that finally I,

who didn’t want to live for myself,

could live for him

and put all of this away, but this life

is my baby and my husband and how do men hear this?

they don’t want to hear this,

my poetry, is the living with the eyes wide open.

Oh, lady who keeps my eyes wide open,

don’t let me drift back to the troubled sleep again,

the place of nightmares                         

let me be here on the edge, no matter what.

                          I can’t ever ask for anything better than that.

at allantide

ii.

I haven’t written to him I haven written to him. Why should I write to him?

No one will write to him why don’t you write to him

To do a thing for a man who does nothing

for you is to be a fool, to do something once for someone lost in the grief

is grace.

After he hollow O is the third morning of Allantide.

When we had forgotten your sacred name and were passing out too

much candy for their little bodies to hold, it was cold and sleet and

dark grey.

Yesterday was a sunlight interruption, an eruption of all the silent

saints and now today we huddle in

the your dark womb making altars to those who were before

put up heaps of peaches and pairs turnips up and down the stairs,

carved with faces and teeth. And I am the lantern of he dead.

And you are the sacred head, and I am not looking for the way

back home,

for the way is here.

You went to England looking for the old country and climbed down Cornwall

looking for the world’s end, picked down shingles to Tintagel to see where

Arthur was born only to remember that your home is further

west than west, and the mound you worship on in Indiana was ancient

when Stonehenge was formed.

You thought ancient was only ancient to white men.

Here on the twisting Shagwa, the serpents in the rivers and the mothers

of the serpents of the water will teach you

I haven’t written to him I haven written to him. Why should I write to him?

No one will write to him why don’t you write to him?

He is still on the island prison, surrounded by grey waves.

Occasionally he can almost see the shore and long to build

A seahut

But, no more…

To do a thing for a man who does nothing

for you is to be a fool, to do something once for someone lost in the grief

is grace.

An act of mercy takes a minute, it travels with the speed of sound, it take

longer to conceive than do, longer to dismiss than to take and change

a corner of the world.

Shake out all the corners, the clean beasts come running while the other

are hidden in space

unclean was the lapwing,

I was the hound that hid all sacred things.

at allantide

i.

I can’t keep doing this I say

Getting up to write this poem and over  half hour later,

after it stopped and started and wouldn’t come on and had to be

reloaded and now I’m finally typing these first words.

It is the first of November, the day of saints after the true night

of spirits, and in the mind of a one time catholic this is the hollow space,

the glass bubble between All Hallows Eve and the Day for dead ones,

and I look at this faithless fool and shake my head and say,

I can’t keep doing this, no I can’ keep doing this,

and when I sip the coffee I know you’re not the only thing that

needs to be put away.

The beginning off things never holds an answer,

and then old men stood on temples and old women sat in front

of smoke, shooting prophecies,

these are only upside down memories,

there is no answer in the beginning, in this half startled waking,

and sunlight on the first real day.

We needed this day to recover ourselves.

We needed today so that tomorrow we can begin to be ourselves.

Right now we are still settled down from being someone else,

 it is too cold to go to the island, too cold to know if it has

disappeared.

This morning is the time of cigarettes and coffee and sunlight

and the royalty of the bathroom,

This is he morning of the new language, and not the old nostalgia,

and not writing of all the things we’ve written a thousand times before.

There was a time when you had to say everything.

Now you only have to say enough.

And now all saints day is upon us, an unorgasmic o, a virgin bubble between

all hallows eve and all souls, reserved for people pure in their sterility,

saints in their hostility who could not love life, give me the red of the leaf

rather than the gold of heaven, make all these days the fine time of souls.

The Geography of Allantide

Today the snow comes and despite many fears, with the snow there is always hope. We are at the end of High Allantide, the Eleventh, the Feast of Martinmas, now called Armistice Day. Allantide refers to several things. It can be used to refer to the Feast of Saint Allan, October 31^st, which can also be translated as the Feast of Saint Hallon or Hallows, so Holy Holy, the holiest feast, Hallowtide. It is called in Cornish,  Kalan Gwav, or first day of winter, and anyone looking can see that there is a similarity in all of these words. So this is the holiest feast which is the feast that celebrates the beginning of wintertime and the final end of summertide. The Thirty First of October is now mostly known as Halloween while Wiccans and druids often call it Samhain, but the focus is on the commencement of winter and the memory of ones mortality as well as honoring those who have passed on. All Saint’s Day and All Souls eventually came to be part of this season, and though it is the first three days that make the Height of a Tide, the Greater Tide is generally eleven or twelve days and so Great Allantide ends on the Eleventh with the Feast of Saint Martin of Tours, Martin the Soldier. His death is celebrated on the (Eve of?)the 8^th and his feast on the 11^th, thus making a closing three days to the tide. Fittingly enough, and probably not by accident, the Feast of the soldier saint was chosen as Armistice Day to commemorate all the war dead, and I keep it as both. It is the the final death commemoration day.

In America, perhaps because we do not like to look at death, or perhaps because we already had Memorial Day, Armistice Day was renamed Veteran’s Day. Our dislike of death is so great that Memorial Day, once called Decoration Day is now the “unofficial beginning of summer” and Veteran’s Day has lost much of its original meaning, so here we will continue to call it Armistice Day.  

This leaves us with Low Allantide. The lowtide is the rest of every season. Though some might extend it to Yule, for me it extends until Thanksgiving and the beginning of Advent. At Hallowmas we entered he Turning Castle from one door and the Dead entered from another. Others bid them goodbye. The witch does not. We always travel in the otherworld. Together we and the dead leave, reunited, through a new door, on a new road to a wintertime conception and a rebirth which we will celebrate at Montol, Christmas, Yule. We are winter wheat, the final harvest has come, and now we turn from commemoration to thanks. For the rest of this time we are focused on the final harvest in the metaphorical as well as on the ground truth, and practice Thanksgiving.  Though a national American holiday with vague Christian origins, the final decision to place Thanksgiving at this time of he year is ancient. Ceres, Saturn and Father Time and the Grim Reaper are one, and they all bear the sickle of Harvest. Thanksgiving is a true feast to me and there will be more to say on this later, but in this house Allantide wraps up at Advent, the end of all things as well as their beginning, where we light the purple candle, and await the Holy Child.

Sacred Prostitution and Sexual Liberation

This article is about sex, and so, in the end, I have refrained from euphemisms or propriety. Sex is messy, sex is sexy. Sex is often pornographic. This will be too.

After a long time of celibacy, not entirely intended, but not worked against, I light the altar a few days after All Hallows. I am lighting the candles, and burning the incense and not simply meditating or praying or praising or praying for. I am raising the chalice. I am working with intent. I am working for sex to come.

Several hours later I have still left the Grindr app on. Normally I would have gone to bed, but this night is full of an unfinished energy. When the man hits me up, I invite him over. I have already had sex with another man a few hours earlier, but at the altar I was calling for more than one experience and my bod longs for more. This is how I consecrate myself as a hierodule, a priest of holy sex, a sacred prostitute.

When the other man has left, my body is exhausted and I am discombobulated. I will still be feeling this tomorrow. There is a different energy to the magic and to the altar than there has been in a long time. I am rooted to the earth and to life in a different way. I am UNAFRAID and un heavenly, uncerebral, of the body, not entirely solitary and in control, but a man of needs who has answered the needs of others.

Years ago, when I was just entering into the world of the Craft I read about a witch or a pagan who said she was a sacred prostitute. This electrified me, made me curious and made me dubious. Did she actually mean she was doing what temple prostitutes did of old? The witch Gemma Gary speaks of consecration as a “walking away” from the norms we have inherited from Christian society, and many of us never really walk away from them. We flirt with sexiness, but are afraid of sex. Revealing pics, innuendo, the occasional half hearted and drunken hook up are the stuff of the new day. In the Craft there is talk of the chalice and the blade, simulated sex in rituals or perhaps sex between chaste couples, but the actual, sober, intentional choice to give one’s self away sexually is rare. To do it in the context of the holy, to assert that in the same way a Christian priest maintains celibacy for the good of the world, and that somehow this has something to do with his work at his altar, your giving your body away has something to do with the work of your altar, is a total walking away from—or at least reversal of—norms.

This is not a way for everyone. There is a lot of substitutional and not-quite work that would be witches do. I heard two girls talk about how if blood was called for in work you should use Kool-Aid instead.  The truth is, if blood is called for, then blood is called for. The actual work is not words of a spell written down in some book. The working will always tell you what it needs, and to offer one’s body in the Great Work is a powerful act. So far, I have no known blood to be called for, but my sexuality has very often been required.

But to talk about sex of any form in the Craft, we need to talk about how we receive sexuality as a society. We are still, more or less, a Christian society with European Christian norms. To say we are Judeo-Christian is not entirely accurate. This is a world where heterosexual marriage or something close to it, is prized, and in that world sexual expression is honed like a missile in the direction of monogamous union. In this paradigm, sexual freedom or experimentation cannot possibly be fostered, or at least it is fostered in the same way as all college freedoms are—at a certain age for a certain time to get them out of your system and propel you toward heteronormativity. No college slut remains a slut, and this was intended.

What people quickly forgot or never knew is that there is really only one way to be sexually liberated, and that is to leave behind old constructs and actually have sex, something that, at the end of the day, is not for everyone. The only way to really know about sex is to have it. The only way to be any good at it is to do it a lot, probably with lots of people. Like any other practice, it will not always be good.

Imagine if you were hungry and realized that human beings should cook and eat and you decided to cook. Imagine if someone told you that ideally you should only cook for and eat with a special person in a special relationship. Imagine if you have never so much as fried an egg, but you saw Martha Stewart make a seven layer cake with her own butter cream frosting and were disappointed that your cooking attempts fell flat of that the first, second and third time. Imagine if you were still upset about how crappy your fried eggs turned out after three tries, and walked out of your kitchen in disgust and shame, and then returned to it when you realized that human beings were eating creatures and you needed to eat and you needed to cook, and you, who never went into the kitchen, didn’t understand your utensils or the way the oven worked, were once against disappointed because you were still expecting cooking to be like something you’d seen on the Food Network.

           

Well, now, this is how we approach sex in his modern world.

Most people are not sexually liberated. Most people are deeply afraid of their bodies, the bodies of others and of feeling too much pleasure. Dressing sexy is not sexual freedom, talking about sex is not sexual freedom, acting out of drunkenness or addiction is not sexual freedom, rainbow flags and marches for gay rights are not sexual freedom. Freely enjoying your body and the body of others and giving yourself to the pleasure and sensuality of sex is sexual freedom. To freely choose to have sex with different people in the sane and sober light of “no I wasn’t abused or have daddy issues” is something we’re not familiar with. To do it as a spiritual call is to walk away from norms.

At Allentide

At Allentide we arrive at the Eight Gates. For once the castle we come to cannot be seen. It is the revolving castle, sometimes called Cair Sidi, but it is not on a promontory or on an island, rather we reach it by traveling under the earth. By hidden gates we the common world and enter Annwn, the Other World, the Spirit World, the Underworld, the Not World, the Reverse Mirror Realm. This is the place we must pass through to come to the Land of Birth.

We want a world without seasons. This is not an accusation. We want a world with no winter, and if religions were simply making up what we preferred to believe as opposed to expressing what on some level we already know, then Christ would be born in the spring, the Holy Child would come amidst the lilies of May. But this has never been the story. Even with Jesus who most signs say was actually born in the spring, as the Son of God, Christ is always born in winter, and the Child on the back of the Roebuck comes with the snow. Dionysus and Zeus are winter children as well, and around their births is the mystery of murder and oppression. For true birth we must pass into Annwn, the place where everything dies and, because Annwn is a mirror, everything is reborn.

The Silver Castle of the South East, the Perilous Castle that is the Domain of the Scarlet Woman, is the place of trial, and in September we felt that trial truly, as  beloved summer died to become autumn and we let go of all of our summertime hopes and began to face the the ending of the year. But now we are at the door of the purely Western Castle, and of the Grey and Silver Woman, the twin sister of the Scarlet Queen. Her Silver Stone Castle is under the earth, and it is always turning so that, when you enter it through one door in one place, you are never entirely sure where you will come out. She is many named, Erishkigal, Persephone, and all of these names are a ruse. Her lord is Aidonais, Dis, Hades, Pluto, Admetus and in the Mabinogion he is Arawn. In Wales his Lady has no name, and this is the truest name for her. She is simply the lovely bride Pwyll does not dare deceive.  Here, in her dreamtime place, which exist beside all things, after all things and before all things, there is a lightheartedness and rejoicing as everything is lost, and all that is lost is restored again. This is the land that where “She changes everything she touches, and everything she touches changes.” Here, the old Horned Oe is about to become the Holy Child. The swollen river is the perfect metaphor not only for the border of the Silver Castle, but the Castle itself. Here we may stand on the bank, holding on for dear life to all that we were or let go and become all that the Mistress will make us. The God Changes, the world changes? Will we? What will we become once we have entered the Turning Castle, or will we refuse to become anything at all?