The Telling

Passiontide begins. At tonight’s service we come to an altar draped in red with images removed or covered. We bear the cross with a wreath of red berries and hear the first readings for Sunday. We hear the first hymns that are the songs not of Lent and fasting, but of the Passion, suffering, rejection and dying. Later on in the second service, there is the introit to the Passion

Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly nation; from wicked and deceitful men deliver me, for you are my God and my strength. Send forth your light and your truth; these have led me and brought me to your holy mountain and to your dwelling place.

We come in with the reddish cranberry candle and with the great red shrouded image of the Madonna holding the dead Christ, and then sit down to hear the Passion. At the time that Christ dies, I rise and unveil the painting,  and then kneel and hear the rest of the ancient story.

We will hear the story tomorrow morning as well and then we will hear it the next Sunday, twice. And then we will hear another version of it on Good Friday, also one in the middle of that fateful week called Holy Week. Years ago Passiontide lasted two weeks for everyone. The story of the Passion was heard now, and Palm Sunday’s story the next week. Convenience flattened it all down to one week. Looking at this story over and over again for two weeks, living in the Passion too long, was too much.

This time of year, this time of deep storytelling, I am reminded of a magic I often forget, and that is the magic of the Telling, the transformation and power worked by the preparation to sit down and hear an ancient story, hear what is called a myth. We are so wasteful with our words and what we hear, but the bard believes his own telling and shaping of words, his story creating, his poetry, are a sort of sacred work, and we also believe that the hearing, the sacred silencing and taking time over and over again to hear the old stories, is the holy work too. We light the candles on the altar, the modern memory of when bonfire and altar, congregation and community were one, and we leave the silly mind, and the superficial mind and the so called rational mind behind and offer our whole childlike selves to receive the Telling. Dionysus, Isis, the Passion of Jesus, Adonis, Moses, the many Creationsall the different ways these tales are told, are sacred to us, the tellings which make these specific stories different from any other stories,. And they do not remain the same because these stories are composed of layers, because every story is a conversation inside of itself. Every writer knows that. And we ourselves are conversations, looping contradictions, eyes opening and shutting like cherubim or Argus and so, though the story seem the same, and we seem the same as well, the alchemy is in what comes to us and from us at this particular Telling, what magics might be wrought when we are willing to give ourselves to tales which are not simply pastimes.

Postscript:

I am watching a movie I have watched several times before: Jesus of Nazareth, the old Franco Zefirrelli made for television miniseries with movie production values. As I watch his version of the story of Jesus unfold, as I remember the Passion performed last night, it occurs to me that these stories are like the Lapwing. If you get hung up in them, you miss them. Was it really like this, exactly, whatever that means? I am almost offended by the especially blond haired and blue eyed boy they found to play young Jesus. Did Jews in the first century really live like this? Did Jesus really say those words? How real this all seems. How real was it? But this is the Lapwing. Even for the one who simply asks did any of this happen at all? it is the Lapwing, the sacred Mother who flaps around the holy thing and threatens to take those not intent on contemplation and discovery away from the holy thing by distracting with what does not matter. My experience is Christian and so Jesus means more to me than Adonis or Attis or Dionysus, but even the story of Jesus is something that is not entirely itself, that is a mystery pointing to something I cannot name and cannot explain. Even in unbelief or ante belief or heretical belief, hearing the Telling, being present for it, a glory will be revealed which the story can only hint. We must wait for it. This is the glory of the Telling.

To Be the Witch Continued

                             

Does it work Crudely put we come over and over again to the question, does witchcraft work? And then one has to sound sagacious and a little Socratic and say, “What do you mean by work?”

I used to know someone, ungracious, fearful, unkind, unconscious, always resentful and not terribly courageous, silly actually. He went to a spiral dance at a Unitarian church and came back a witch. He was talking about how magical it was that some old love he had was coming back into town and they were getting together, and it was only a little while later I thought, someone like him would make the worst out of any blessing that came his way. Ungracious by nature, even if he did possess any magic, whatever he worked for, no matter how good it turned out, would look to him like it didn’t work. His perception was so very off and his attitude so bad.

I was describing to someone the mind of a book character who was a witch and I said that one thing that distinguished her in her training was that she was almost hyper rational because she was always observing the world around her, and even examining the fidelity of own mind. Was she looking at things as they were? Was she looking at herself as she was, or was she simply playing a role. I said that, fictionally or in reality, an effective witch would have to be such a person, because how could you really know if you were effecting the world, or how would you really begin to effect the world if, in fact, you couldn’t see the actual world you were in?

For understanding magic we may have to turn to literature again. Ursula K LeGuin’s Earthsea wizards describe working magic as little as possible because each magical working effects a change and you have to see if the change really needs to be made. If you believe in such things and you acknowledge connections you have to understand you don’t really know the full force of setting a thing into motion.

I have referenced Peter S Beagle’s Shmendrick in the The Last Unicorn, the magician who becomes a true wizard when he learns to say to the magic, do as you will, and even George RR Martin’s characters say something to this effect noting that magic is like a sword with no handle.

So, I’ve said the nature of a witch in my tradition is to be first and foremost a priest and a devotee with all that entails. This precludes me from being, at least  purposefully, a magician who is attempting to contact malignant forces or control them, and it also precludes me from being someone who thinks they understand more than they do. As I have said in the past, the true witch is always an apprentice and never master of the Magic, but apprentice to it. When we call up magic, we are calling up the Holy Child and the Holy Child is Adonoy, is Adonis, Cernunnos, Hermes the Psychopomp and Master of Mysteries. We are opening ourselves to being led more than leading.

But I opened up with one question: does it work? And this is an important and constant question. And then I have several literary explanations, but in the end there was one question and it deserves an answer. The answer is the magic is as good as the practice and the practice is as good as the witch, The answer is yes.

To Be the Witch

There are some times when the rites must be practiced again. Tonight I feel like they have more meaning than they ever had before. I remember the first time I went through the first degree and the second degree and the third degree. They were fumbling and odd and yet, after passing through them my life was changed. I remember them being arduous. I don’t believe you can do something only once, not something like initiation. You have to do it again and again, not simply go from novice to knowledge to sage and then sit there again eventually you must start again, remember why you came, go through these services and rites again.

The later half of lent is that time for me. Having passed through the first degree and the second, having moved in circles and lifted candles and worked the tools, lit the candles, knelt at the altars and been anointed, I sit at the altar, legs folded under me. Something has happened. Something has been done. I have made my vows. I have promised to keep secret the magic and mystery save to the proper people in the proper circle. Power has been placed upon me, the power of the tradition, the power of the Goat Footed One placing his hand on my head, my own power, long forgotten, I place upon me again. I feel it. You have been made witch and priestess, having been made witch and priestess, you are made witch and HIGH priestess, the knives, the wants the pentacles, the censor are yours, the summoning of the circles is yours. You are no congregant. You are no bystander. You are no theoretician. You are priestess and witch. Priestess I say because even a female Christian priest is called a priest. Priestess of of the Craft, of the Goddess, is the beloved of the God, and so I am priestess. I am witch. I feel it.

And yet?

What the fuck does it mean?

In a world where we have seen Samantha Stephens sit on a cloud with Endorra and fly to Paris for lunch, where we have seen Harry Potter dodge about on a broom and play Quidditch, what does it mean to assert, I am the witch? In a YouTube world of often shallow or silly or disturbed white people who have a great desire to sell pentagram charms and and call attention to themselves, who display much gullibility and greed and very little skill, power or wisdom, what does it mean to assert, I am the Witch? Once upon a time a witch was what one was called when people saw what you were doing and how you were living and called it witch craft. Now ex boyfriends who wear black and are afraid of he dark  or walking in the woods buy a Wicca book from Barnes and Noble so everyone can see and tell whoever will listen they are witches, so I must always ask myself what is a witch? And as a witch, derwydd, priestess and priest, what is my work?

Once you have moved past the static of this questioning, the answers may not be so difficult. For those of us who are initiated the first question is what is a priestess? What is a priest? For us the word witch is tied in and inseparable from this first question. So much of priesthood as we see it is defined by Christianity and especially Catholicism. The priest here represents the establishment and is empowered by the establishment. The priest here is said to have the power of changing bread and wine into consumable God. When the priest offers rites, they work because he has the power of God. When he forgives he forgives for God.  The priesthood is conditional. You must be male and a certain type of male. You must make it through seminary, be ordained. The priest is the mediator between the people and God.

This tends to be  something many priesthoods have in common. The Bible tells the very odd story that God formed his own religion in the Sinai desert, had Moses make of his brother Aaron a priesthood and of the whole tribe of Levi priests and stipulated how they were to be priests. Many people believe that ancient Israelites would have had many priestly clans to many gods, or many faces of what they would know as God. But some old glory remains in the examples we’ve seen. The holy person does not stand between people and god, but rather is the conduit of God. It is the difference between a shut water gate and the river itself. The holy one is living in the conduit and needing to remember that over and over again. The holy one does not stand for any establishment,  does not uphold the power of males or nations or that which is already in power. The holy one is the alchemist, changing bread and wine into God, changing the very ordinary into the holy, changing what was impossible, by her or his very presence, into what is blazingly apparent. But in most societies, and certainly he ones from which our western world descend, that holy one, when working outside of the bounds of male power and assumed established and approved ways of viewing God, the holy one who works beyond the pale of what makes most people comfortable and is unconcerned with orthodoxy, indeed is heterodox, and often enoughthe holy one who is a woman and not a man is called THE WITCH.   

Mother Sunday and the White Candle of the Equinox

As we light candles and burn the incense I am gathering up the stuffs for what this new week and this particular Sunday is. Laetare Sunday, the Sunday in which we are joyful, in which we remember joy. This is Mothering Sunday, with so many connotations we may come back to. This is the Sunday right after the Equinox. This is the Sunday when the white Springtide candle is lit, this big tall pillar which isn’t burned down and hunched over melted down with old work and old blessings, but new and with only one blessing:, only one consecration offered up since yesterday:

"We kindle fire this day! In the presence of the Holy Ones:

Without malice, without jealousy, without envy.

Without fear of aught beneath the sun.But the High Gods.

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;

Kindle thou in our hearts within,

A flame of love for our neighbor,

To our foes, to our friends, to our kindred all:

To all men on this broad Earth.

O merciful son of Cerridwen, From the lowest thing that liveth

To the name that is highest of all."

This is a new candle, and it isn’t even the one we will burn for the Easter Vigil. I snuff it out after lighting the Golden Lantern. Even as we chant and pray we remember the Golden Lamp is light that burns within, the light given from the very source of light, and we ask that it might increase and light all things. And even as I pray this I see what a mess this house is, the cleaning that never happened. Tonight there is the work of cleaning the soul in silence and as we clean the floor in diligence.

Next week is the beginning of Passiontide so it is fitting that this is Mother Sunday. We need the Mother or Passiontide is nothing. Without her all of this business is just sacrifice. It’s just war, it’s just slaughter, calculated offering of life. It’s just the stiff upper lip. The presence of the Mother at the altar is not only the presence of grace, but the presence of redemptive sorrow, sorrow that goes beyond the self or self pity to embrace the suffering child in this world, the suffering child in you, sorrow and love that sees in the offering of the Holy Child, the offering of my child. The nature of the Passion and the sacrifice is changed. The necessary sacrifice becomes the awful offering of my baby that I do not assent to, the offering I woefully accept. I accept the sorrow, I accept the inability, I offer this pain, not this child. I offer my life in this child’s place. And in the Mother the slaughter and sacfirice on the altar becomes rebirth. The cross becomes matrix, becomes open arms, becomes living tree. The tomb, from which there is no delivery, is made cradle, and life, womb.

Notes from a Sickbed on Saint Patrick's Day

I am sick. There’s no getting around that. And on one of the most important days of the year to me, Saint Patrick’s Day. At the morning service I cannot even smell the incense my nostrils are so blocked, but this is not unusual. The high days of turning are usually the times of sickness. Many an All Hallows or Yule has had me sniffling and at less than my best. Last Friday, before I began to feel awful, the weather was beautiful and warm and there was energy in me, but even as that day came to an end, the sickness was coming and now it’s almost a relief that it’s here.

This year we are in the midst of a pandemic which has businesses shutting down, people worried, towns on lock down. Our school system shut down yesterday, but so many of us were getting ill it was almost a relief. Now I have the chance to just be sick and I think you need to just be sick before you can just get better. The prayers of Saint Patrick become even more urgent today, that we will be delivered from this deathly winter and this new disease, that we will be delivered from the many things that come against us, that spring and the renewing God will show up in force and with great power.

The candles on Patrick’s altar remind us of the story that long ago it was Patrick’s fire that became one with the druid fire, that in times of old the druids lit a fire from Temair that went all over Ireland on Samhain, but that this became the fire of the great candle which burns not only in churches on the eve of Easter, but in women’s gatherings and on my very altar.

It isn’t strange or an exception to the miserable cold that we put on green and drink and feast in the middle of Lent. It isn’t out of place that in sickness we have the Feast of Saint Patrick. This day occurs because it is Lent. It is because the spring is returning, though often haltingly it seems, that we are in the midst of time of change and penitence. And this is the reminder that much as I and others must do with out poor sick bodies in waiting for things to turn, rather than rush in with the violence of haste, we must wait for the miracle of healing that is the gift of God and magic in all the earth. We must rest.

Never Falter

"Ye who take but one step on this path must continue to the end, for this path is beyond life or death."

-Patricia Crowther

As we go into the second year of Lapwing and Hound, one thing that comes to mind is the need to keep being true to the Craft and the dedication to continue walking in the Mystery.  The adept does not stop seeking, does not stop digging deep, does not cease from devotion. The witch does not stop undoing normal ways, and breaking off from assumed norms and yet, most who take up that mantle eventually do. This is why so many of you have nothing to say, have never really practiced the art of having something to say or doing a deep dig. Too many would be witches, content to walk away from the churches they grew up in, content to accept something else, were also content to never dig deeply or search for a new thing. This is why so many descend into endless postings of memes and notes about nothing truly interesting, or selling what little witchy wares they have, planning the same old conventions and gathering they have every year, business witches, witches stuck in some type of made up theology because they have given up their own search for truth because that type of searching is hard.

There is an odd thing I’ve seen which is some occult people mocking Christian faith healers and Pentecostal people. This is strange to me because, once you have embraced the occult, and once you understand that power is everywhere, once you embrace the name witch, you have lost a great deal of the right to be sarcastic and doubting. Recently I heard about something not recent at all, the prayer meetings at the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Leipzig which were held for years in East Germany once a week, and spilled out into the entire community. The power of that prayer is regarded as one of the triggers for the end of the Communist regime there. So many people, gathered together before the Divine presence in resolute hope and love brought about a mighty work.

Once I made a posting called Witches Unite, but the truth is there just are not enough witches for only witches to unite, and like any other movement, when looked at closely, there are some devotees and a large number of congregants (posers, dead weights, semi devout, confused, hangers on) who are not about to do much of the Great Work. Twenty centuries ago, a great revelation yielded Christianity, and such was the spirit of that religion that almost immediately, Christians began to divide from each other one what was the right way to receive this revelation, who was real, who was false. They turned within and built up dogmas, doctrines, right beliefs. It could not be helped. Christianity was spawned from Judaism, a religion which denied the truth in all other religions. But in this age we reach beyond borders. It is not enough for a witch to call to other witches. It is, frankly, too many silly and useless people bearing that name. From now one people of good will who walk on the borderlands and live in the left hand world, who know and work magic and prayer have to come together and recognize each other despite their differences and never minding what they call each other, or how they name the Great Work.

In the next year we continue to veer away from the common way of things and go bone deep into the truth as we can know it, to not camp down on a few assumed points of someone else’s theology, but to remember that God is a Stranger and we are ever walking toward that Mystery. If the mystery is a thing to be solved, then we are in trouble, but if the mystery is to be loved, then we are on a true path, for how can we ever reach the end of knowing or understanding that which we love.

Lent: The Burning Ground of Love

We rise again from ashes,

From the good we’ve failed to do

We rise again from ashes

To create the world anew

If all our world is ashes

Then must our lives be true

An offering of ashes

And offering to you

 from A Wiki of Ice and Fire

This Ash Wednesday song is the most beautiful I know. It reminds me of the Hindu devotee who sings to the Dark One, “My Lord, since you love the burning ground, I have made my heart a dancer on the burning ground.”

We offer you our failures

We offer you attempts

The gifts not fully given

The dreams not fully dreamt

We have offered the best of what we had, best intentions, best education, best foot forward and it has led to very little. After the fatted calf is slain, and after the incense is burned what is left is these ashes, and the very ashes are our offering, the failure and half done things, the half baked things we bring to God because this is all we have. This doneness, the deadness, the something pasts its use and past all hope is, oddly enough, the magical ingredient to make the sacrifice whole and effective.

  

The links between Lent and a time where those who practice magic offer sacrifice is as old as the libel that druids practice human sacrifice on Ash Wednesday. There is a now famous slightly tin foil hat theory about the The Season of Sacrifice, a time between the end of March ending on May Day when dark magicians engineer war and bloodshed around the around the world. And though this may be largely false, note that I am putting a heavy caveat on my denial of this. Note also that, in many cultures, this actually is a time of sacrifice. The Christian Easter and Jewish Passover are both holidays centered around a renewing and redeeming sacrifice that ends one type of old life and begins a new one. Behind and alongside these more known sacrifices are the story of Damuzi’s sacrifice to bring Ishtar back to the other world and the return of Persephone the woman of spring who descended to the dead in winter. There is no mention of the price paid for her return to the earth, but one should note that she is linked to Adonis, Adonai the Lord, and Adonis is another form of Damuzi. In the story of Ishtar and Damuzi, the goddess of love, war and desires, descends to the realm of her sister the Queen of the Dead. She cannot leave that realm until Damuzi takes her place and becomes death’s king. In the tale of Adonis, the Queen of the Dead, Persephone, fights over Adonis with Aphrodite the Goddess of Love and desire. The characters are transplanted from the east to Greece and from serious ritual contemplation to a semi comic story, but there is much about death, life and exchange in this story as in the biblical story of Absalom, forerunner of Christ who hung between earth and heaven, caught in a tree by his hair and was murdered by his own kin when three javelins were driven into him.

And these are not the only tales of sacrifice. From the north we have Baldur slain by mistletoe and Odin offering himself to himself on Yggdrasil and these are just the European tales. Whether we are talking about a Passover lamb, a crucified Jesus or Damuzi snatched to the underworld, the story has a few factors in common. The change of season in the earth mirrors a deeper change within us and within the soul of the land—for it is not that the ancients were concerned with the earth and not with spirit, but rather that they knew the earth was spiritual. Also that, simple blood, simple killing is not adequate. Lambs blood, wine and bread, fasting, are all signs of the sacrifice of the soul needed to renew the soul, the offering to the Gods meant to sustain the God within, reconnect heaven to earth by reconnecting the heaven and earth in ourselves. This Season of Sacrifice, what will your offerings be?

POSTSCRIPT: AN ANNIVERSARY

"Because You love the Burning -ground, I have made a Burning-ground of my heart - That You, Dark One, hunter of the Burning-ground, May dance Your eternal dance."
~ Bengali Hymn~

Today is the conclusion or perhaps fulfillment of one offering in particular. This is the one year anniversary of Lapwing and Hound, also called Sickle and the Axe or Young Tradition. The name has changed, but the journal which focuses on my practice of the Mystery Tradition of 1734 has not. I wanted to make it to a year. I never promised how often I would post or looked for readers. This was my working out of my way, and I hoped that somewhere along that way it would be helpful to others. What will come in the next year I cannot say. There will probably be amendments and deeper dives into what we’ve already done, but there we are, and for the moment there is certainly enough for me or any reader to make he beginning stabs at following the path of the Young Tradition or making a younger one still.

Lent: Stirring the Cauldron

from Patheos: "The Lenten Season" by the Corner Crone

I’m not the first person to write about a Witchly Lent. The link between a regenerative season bridging winter and spring and the season which links Christmas to Easter is too strong as is the link which binds a time like Easter not only to Passover but other festivals that might be regarded as pagan or “witchly”. But anyone who has a witch’s Lent probably grew up Catholic or something close to it, and in keeping Lent you are also looking at things that have been around you your whole life, evaluating them, examining, re examining, picking up and putting down.

            I came to a witch’s Lent slowly, hesitant of its Catholicism. After all, wasn’t that what I was trying to walk away from?But as the Craft and my life become more about walking toward something than walking away from things, this changes. As my life becomes more about being truthful and less about being this thing: a writer, or a Catholic, or a teacher or a witch, lines blur.

It is in the place of blurred lines we can re examine things we’ve gotten used to, or things that long troubled us. I listen to the Church readings and prayers for Lent. Test them for depth, am sometimes surprised at how one note they can be:

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent….

“Lord, great and awesome God,
you who keep your merciful covenant toward those who love you
and observe your commandments!
We have sinned, been wicked and done evil;
we have rebelled and departed from your commandments and your laws.
We have not obeyed your servants the prophets,
who spoke in your name to our kings, our princes,
our fathers, and all the people of the land.
Justice, O Lord, is on your side;
we are shamefaced even to this day…

we, the men of Judah, the residents of Jerusalem,

Be mericul or lord, for we have sinned….

Now, I want to be clear. There are some self indulgent strains of the Craft (or of everything for that matter) which flatten out troubles, ignore that which troubles and concentrate on the pleasant, but I don’t practice this way. Any serious practitioner of anything knows repentance has a place, true enough, but such groveling and self abasement cannot be the only or a healthy facet of the way that we deal with the Divine.  Even as I look at these Lent  passages there are several which are about renewal and about return.  The very word repentance means to turn around. The witch before her cauldron might be reminded not only to turn around, but to “stir around”. In the spiral dance, in the treading of the mill and the tracing of the star we are not only turning for ritual, but turning as the reminder that this earth, so hard and frozen and old and perhaps even bereft of nutrients needs to be stirred up. Our lives are one with the winter earth, settled into one thing, our collective focus dimmed by long stints of looking at the same thing over and over again. We all need to be stirred up, for though as witches we are committed to this change, as frail people change scares us. Here is the first focus of the witch’s Lent.