The Lady at the Gate of Dawn

The Merciful Mother

Our Lady at the Gate of Dawn



Remember, O most gracious Lady, 
that never was it known that anyone who fled to thy protection, 
implored thy help, 
or sought thy intercession was left unaided.
Inspired with this confidence, I fly to thee,
O Virgin of virgins, my Mother; 
to thee do I come; 
before thee I stand, 
sinful and sorrowful.

O Mother of the Word Incarnate, 
despise not my petitions, 
but in thy mercy hear and answer me. 
Amen.

The Woman Clothed With the Sun

And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.


Revelation 12.1


Guadalupe, Santa Lucia, the Woman Clothed with the Sun and Beavi the Reindeer Goddess of Lapland are all versions of the brilliant Shining Woman who comes in the midst of December with her healing,

Christ in the Cave: The Alchemy of the Pregnant Earth

 

Today’s Advent image, or concept was the pregnant Earth. As I thought of it the old antiphon that we sang in the monastery, in the very living hills of Kentucky came to me.

℣ Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant justum
(Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the just)

℟ Aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorem

(Let the earth be opened and send forth a Saviour").

The image of incarnation, though it was written eight hundred years before the Christian doctrine, the image of salvation taken by Christians as the image of the origins of the savior. Andrew Rissik in his play Dionysus has the chorus chant that the mystery of that God is heaven being joined to earth. This is the mystery of the Holy Child, of all true magic, all true power, all true and living religion. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus heals the paralytic and we are told the crowds “praised God for putting such power in the hands of men.” By the same token Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man, and this is telling us something we see over and over again in the Christian mystery, which is the Alchemical Mystery, the Dionysian mystery the mystery of the Craft: the true Magic, the True Magic Child, the True Christ does not come strictly from heaven, but from the alchemy, the passion, the yearning of heaven and earth. The rain brings forth the saviour, but so does the dew. Crosses symbolize this juncture and of course so does the World Tree, but the Cave symbolizes this as well, first and last. It is the liminal entrance of the cave where magic is performed, where  Persephone, Demeter, Adonis and Inanna are adored, where Mary Magdalene re-finds Jesus, but also where Ave Maria gives birth to him. The Cave is the door where the Underworld opens to this one and shouts up to the upper ones.

To the Brown Witch and the Witch of the New World

The witch of this world is the witch of THIS world. The American witch cannot simply be aping something from the British Isles. Tied to our land and its many cultures we are digging deeply, for we have many resources, and the practitioner of color cannot live like the white occultists, for often we have more immediate connections to the occult. We did not have the long winter of thou shalt not Protestantism that isolated us from the natural magic of the world. A brown witch often has other magics at hand that the British witches are just rediscovering and -+*British druids hardly know.

The American druid is the druid in this land and this time, not a second rate Irishman or a reconstructionist. This is not a renaissance fair, al though there is nothing wrong with a turkey leg and a fit, firm assed man in tights. We are drawing lessons from all places, as those before us did, for like them we come from all places. The idea of eclecticism only came because were under the spell of Orthodoxy. Christianity, and through Christianity, Judaism taught us that. But of old people were learning from every way. From north south east west, present past and possible future, the witch was weaving her way, the druid was constructing his temple.

So we’re going to need Advent wreaths and Advent candles and Christmas hymns. We may even need baby Jesuses and Crosses. And we’re going to need reindeer, reindeer women and Sun Goddesses. We’re going to need Norse Myths and Greek ones and Mabinogions. We’re going to need Cesar Chavez, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga and Che Guevara, maybe even Fidel Castro too. We're going to need the letters of James Baldwin and Eldridge Cleaver, of Black artists on Negritude, to properly raise up our witch’s temple. We’re going to need the personal gods of our own house with names no one has ever known, and we’re going to need intuition. We’re going to need prophecy and inspiration and our own powerful imaginations. We’re going to need to not be afraid to follow our own way.

Ladies of the Season

There are so many signs of the season and so many people have written extensively on them. I can only do  patch up of them. The truth is, there isn’t a need for me to reinvent the wheel by talking about them all over again, but they are worth talking about. On my Facebook I’e featured, for every day of Advent a person or thing sacred to this season, and maybe here we can begin to go through a few, even if not in order.

            Not in order because I’ve been reading Danielle at GatherVictoria's piece on Doe a Deer, a Female Deer which is on the Reindeer. She points out that Santa’s winter reindeer are actually all females, for not only to female reindeer have horns, but they keep those wonderful cradling seats all year while the males loose theirs and it is they who guide the great sleigh not only of the shaman, but of the Goddess Beavi, the Winter Sun. The Sami, who live in that coldest part of the world are brilliant psychologists in the truest sense of the word and know that winter is the time of depression, isolation, where the wolf insanity is at the door. Offerings to this Goddess remember that she carries healing in her and the reindeer who bear her in their horns carry healing in those antlers.

            Last night I dwelt on the Winter Hag, Le Befana, the Baba Yaga, Frau Holle. Of course, their (Her) time is not only now. Her time is really just approaching. She is all of winter. LeBefana is the other side of the Goddess Strenia as Frau Holle is a face and phase of Freya and the Hag of he alluring Lady. All are faces of the bright Sun Saule or Beavi, for the ancients know that everything, especially the gods,  has more than one face, and even the rough face of a thing can contain beauty, power and blessing.

            But if, at this time, we see the difference faces of Devi, of Goddess, making peace, then there is also the differing face of the Ancestral Woman, our Human Mother. In other societies the link between Ancestress and Divinity is well known, but with us it is a little more covered up. The original mother is the mistakenly  called “sinful” Eve, the Mother of All. Say one of the saint’s liturgies, the Virgin Mary, greeted by the angel Gabriel, “Ave Maria” turns “Eva to Ave.” The luminous Virgin of Hope, the Mother of he new creation, and the old Eve who is said to have brought down a creation we never knew any other way, are the same.

Merry Christmas?!?

Firstly… testing, testing. Timothy Foster, are you out there?

Had to get that out of the way.

Tonight I was smoking, drinking coffee, lighting candles, shopping online and listening to Christmas music. While hearing Once in Royal David’s City, I was put in mind of the old lessons of church, the dour fear of Christmas and joy where we were told that this was Advent and we should be listening to Advent hymns, and concentrating on waiting for Jesus, not joyful celebrating. I remembered he very last church I was a member of, the liberal Episcopal one that was, in its way, much more dour than any Catholic church I’d ever attended. There the pastor who loved for things to revolve around him declared with a smile on his face that helped me to leave organized religion forever, that there would be no Christmas carols till Christmas, no decoration till Christmas. This was Advent.

But there are  few problems with this. One is the problem of theology. The old hymns point to a weighty and glorious mystery, and it is very much a mystery because churches do not approach it until the 25^th of Dccember and then we pack it away with Epiphany. Every Mass celebrates the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, but this suspect and pagan nativity, Christianity has always been uneasy with. The mystery of the Roebuck and Child is allowed in, tentatively, at the end of December, and quickly it is put away.

There is another problem with the winter mystery, and it is that a mystery is a living and eternal thing. Jesus does not only die on Good Friday and he does not only rise on Easter, and the things we are waiting for now, we will cease hoping for on the 25^th. The time to celebrate and rejoice in the mystery of Christmas is now. We cannot wait. There is no time to wait.

So I continue listening to those hymns.

Advent Begins

 

It was some time in early summer that the Witch Craft   sailed away from the common shore with Christianity, the most open western tradition, but as the summer turned to winter and we left 

Extraordinary Time, once again approached that old common shore, the time where we celebrate not only what other people celebrate, but where our altars look surprisingly like Christian altars and what we are doing is not so much the opposite or the extra of Christianity as something like a deeper faith. We pass Michaelmas and then come to Allantide, and now, after Thanksgiving, we sail into Holy Friday and the first Sunday of Lent, welcoming the Virgin, the Child and he Gift Giving Old Man to our altars. The Witch Craft touches familiar shore, and the carols casually sung take on deeper meaning. Red and green and green in the form of evergreen enter the house and we wait for the gifts and blessings of the Small Folk as we make our offerings.

But what is Advent? It is, as Shani Oates writes on her Clan of Tubal Cain page, the beginning of the Tide of Hope, and maybe that is the problem of it, problem in the old sense of the word, problem as riddle and challenge and mystery. At these times of the year when what I do is so close to what I once did, I am listening to an Anglican sermon where the priest is trying to figure out what Advent means. There is the problem of the fact that once Christians expected the emanate return of Jesus, and a return that had nothing to do with babies in mangers or Christmas trees. There is the problem of a hope that the whole world will be changed, its very nature, that God will show his fae and right wrongs and that we know this will not happen by the 25^th of December?

            That is the Christian problem of Advent, but what is he witchly problem? What is the witchly meaning? Decorating the altar, and singing the old tunes, watering an unloved sapling and setting it up in my apartment, I wondered, what is this all about? My heart feels hopeful? But what am I hoping for, and why do we are we suspicious of hope? The writer Ece Temelkuran declares that hope is not strong enough, that what is required is determination, and I think this is what we all fear, that hope is for children, that grown ups do more than hope, or that grown ups are over hope. We act. We are practical. We do not wait. We do not expect. The vague feeling of hope is not enough.

            But what these weeks tell us that this is not true, or rather, that if hope is not enough, then whatever is enough cannot exist without hope. Hope is the ground and beginning place, and of course it is for children, but this why this time of the year is the time of the Holy Child, and why the Virgin Mother invites us all to become that Child.

            Years ago, I said something and my mother asked me, “Who said that?” I said, “Jesus.” She shook her head, put down her cigarette and said, “I’m sorry, but he was wrong.”

            Jesus also said that in order to enter into the Kingdom of God, one must gain the heart of a child.”

            Advent is telling as that sometimes Jesus gets it right.