Tag: United States

HOW TO COOK A GRIMOIRE

HOW TO COOK A GRIMOIRE

by Catherine Harper

In college, I took a class on Hinduism as an elective. The class tended to be well-taught and informative, and only fleetingly inspiring, but one day there was a discussion of the rituals associated with the preparation and sharing of food. During this discussion, the professor said that the kitchen was the ritual center of the house. His words, about a tradition that I’d only approached academically, started something.

As I listened to the rest of the class, it was as if a half-remembered hearth, empty but for a few embers smoldering in the ashes, was fed by this idea and began to send up flames. I’d halfway known this about kitchens already, but I hadn’t put it into words. I’d been confused by the separation of the living room fireplace from the space where food was prepared, and the cramped, tiny, walled-off kitchens of apartments and rented houses; to my mind, the mantelpiece should be the house altar, even though I spent more time by the oven. I rushed home in delight and convinced my mother, at that time my landlord, to let me paint the stove with knotwork and elemental symbols.

For me, food lore has always paralleled my interests in magic. Of course, when I began my formal magical studies in my teens, witchery, which had plenty of room for kitchen magic, was the low art as far as I was concerned. I would not consciously have associated magic and cooking, though in retrospect those were my formative years in the culinary arts just as they were in those magical. My disregard for cooking mostly speaks of what I thought then of magic. Magic to me was something extraordinary, far removed from the tedious bits of every day life. Magic had everything to do with correspondences and ancient languages, and if around the edges I learned to bake a load of bread and make a decent broth, well, eating was necessary

Nowadays, magic to me is more about my relationship with the universe. I’d rather know the place I am right now than try going elsewhere, although I can’t tell you whether I’ve become more ambitious or less. In my garden, I try to learn the land, and the land becomes fruits and vegetables, cooked in the kitchen to be sweet or savory, which I share with my friends and family as they share with me, and which we all then eat and then make a part of ourselves. And shit. And someday die.

This interwoven relationship began early. When I was a child, it was interest in the medicinal and magical uses of herbs that led me to bring home the starts for my first herb garden, but the herbs themselves, oregano, chives, marjoram and mint, led me back into the kitchen. Around the time I set up my first altar, an arrangement of colored stones around two small cat figures, with a small bowl for offerings (I was in second grade), my mother started to let me spice salad dressings by taste. I opened the bottles of herbs and spices one by one, and rubbed the dried leaves of tarragon and basil between my fingers to release their smell. In those bottles were the elusive scents of faraway places. Even more, there was a mystery. Most people I knew were tied to books, from which they would recite as by rote the uses of the herbs. I wanted even then to know the herbs so intimately as to be able to part ways with the staid formulas of tradition and cook with no guides but smell, taste and my own creativity.

As my magic began to become codified to me, herbs were the earliest point of conscious overlap between that discipline and the culinary arts. Herbs are just really cool, and even as a teenager I could see that. Inspired by fiction, I started learning the names and uses of local plants, because my favorite characters always seemed to know that sort of thing. This left me with the start of a collection of books on wild plants and mushrooms and the occasional satisfaction of getting to say things like “oh, that’s wild chamomile” to schoolmates. Few of whom were impressed.

When I was in my mid-teens, I was introduced to my first herb shop, and I fell in love. Reckless, only partly considered love. I tended to choose herbs more by instinct than sense, half-remembering names like hawthorn, damiana, eyebright and yarrow from spells and folklore, but being just as likely to buy shepherd’s purse because I’d never heard of it, or Irish moss because it sounded interesting. I bought books on herbs, so I could learn the uses of the herbs I’d already gotten. I raided the library and took notes.

Luckily, around that time a black cat, my nascent herb cabinet and I moved out and into a room in a shared house, necessitating that I begin to acquire my own collection of culinary herbs and spices. In that house, I had my next herb garden, and somewhere between picking up a couple of different varieties of rosemary with the rue, learning about the magical properties of culinary herbs, the culinary properties of medicinal herbs and so on, the division in my mind between the esoteric and practical uses of these plants vanished.

Nowadays, having graduated from the 26 pots and planters outside of our last apartment to a place with a bit of land, I have three herb gardens, ranging from the formal circle garden outside the kitchen, to the heatloving front garden, to the isolated battlefield of invasive plants, where even now the soapwort and sweet woodruff are testing each other’s boundaries, while maintaining a somewhat more respectful relationship with the citadel of giant mullein. The collection has become defined mostly by what I use and what will survive our climate, although it tends to expand with the various bits and pieces I trip over that intrigue me. Herbs tend to be tough, easy to grow and in many cases perennial or self-seeding. If you are looking to try a bit of gardening and would like to try eating your own harvests, herbs are one of the best places to begin, and they open a tiny window onto a different kind of life, when food was a local thing and our tables were graced rather more directly with the fruits of our own labors.

A lot of my cooking, rather like a lot of my ritual, is a method by which I seek to connect myself with the world, to weave myself in closer to its past and future, tie myself to the land and the turning of the seasons, to in my own way reach for a connection with the divine and try, quietly, to create something sacred. Quite a lot of it seems to reach back toward the past. A rich past that hangs behind us like a shadow at sunset, longer than we are tall. There is a sense of continuity that I’m looking for in those past years that seem from this vantage point to have moved so quickly and changed so slowly, a contrast and ballast to our own rapidly changing world.

But I do not want to live in the past. Likewise, in my own kitchen, I do not try to recreate the past, but to reach back toward the knowledge it might have given me. This sense of the past has enriched my understanding of food. Limiting my use of ingredients by season or location has given me room to better appreciate each one and to understand their uses instead of being confused by the kaleidoscope of options available. I’ve also found myself motivated to look for ingredients that aren’t currently fashionable, and have discovered a neglected bounty of turnips, leeks, kasha, parsnips, grits, kale and okra, to name a few.

My own mother, a skilled cook who has no particular love of cooking, has teased me for my oxtail soup, a dish so old-fashioned that her mother must never have prepared it. And it is venerable dish, a dish I’d never tasted, and only the echo of a memory of it haunted some back corner of my mind. Yet it is a good winter soup, a soup that cooks for days, warming the cold kitchen and scenting the air. It is a thrifty way of cooking the nourishment out of meat and bones few people now even bother with, mixing them with onions and barley, ingredients cheap and plentiful even in winter, and making something warm and rich that can feed your family, friends and whoever else shows up for dinner. And it is a dish that tugs at my soul. In my mind, the iron pot I cook it in is an alembic, sitting upon the transformative fire in the heart of the kitchen, the heart of the house. And over days, the meat and bones are cooked and purified, and the pale watery broth become golden and rich both in physical and spiritual nourishment. A simple magic at the heart of living.

Other wells of inspiration spring from locations in my imagination rather than from any knowledge of the past. For a few years now, a lady of bees and honey has appeared from time to time in my dreams. I am not certain of her name, and know only fragments of her legends, yet I’ve been gradually learning more of bees and bee lore (to the benefit of my orchards, which were suffering a lack of pollinators). Now, I bake moist honey-colored cakes as part of my tribute to her, joining candles, dried herbs and stalks of ripe wheat.

Similarly, a great wellspring of my cooking is the Mediterranean, perhaps because some of my finest ever experiences of food happened while I was in Turkey. Yet, while I love to recreate what I have eaten, I also cook dishes that seem to come from that land but by some less obvious route, things that entered my skin with the sun, the hills and the dry fertility of the land, so unlike the wet mossy abundance of home. Only a few weeks ago, as the sun became noticeably lower in the sky and everything became tinted with gold, I was seized by a another hunger for something I had never tasted, something that turned out to be figs, eggplant and lamb baked in a sauce of caramelized onions, red wine and pomegranate juice. In some part of my imagination, there are olive groves, a latticework sunshade all grown over with grapevines for eating under in the summer, and in the evenings jasmine flowers release their scent into the air.

Other connections I find in my food are social, ideas growing out of my community. I’m not really that much of a gardener, though I’m trying to be a better one, and on the partially wooded acre we have we can only grow a fraction of our food. What doesn’t come out of our own gardens we buy, and I try to be aware of the buying. I hold a lot to the environmentalist mottoes of local, organic and seasonal, but my reasons go beyond the physical environment. Part of what I’m looking for is a spiritual connection to the food. If I grow the food myself, I have worked with it and the land that it has grown in from its beginnings as seeds. Lacking that, food that is grown locally is at least subject to the rhythms of the land and seasons I live with myself, and food that is grown locally is for the most part seasonal. But even beyond the connection to the land, a lot of what connects me to food spiritually is how it ties people together.

So I try to be aware of the people involved with the food I buy. This is also just a generally good practice, because they know about the food, and often have good ideas. I’ve gotten in the habit of talking with the butchers and produce clerks in the groceries I frequent. When I was first dabbling in the culinary arts, they gave me some of my best recipes. These days, it has become a more even exchange, but always beneficial.

More interesting yet are the produce stands and farmer’s markets that let you get even closer to the growers – and the food’s better, too, once you get used to the ungainly shapes and less polished-looking presentation. My husband complains whenever we go to the farmer’s market together because I have to gossip with everyone before I can buy our food. For me, it doesn’t taste as good without the gossip, and how can I know that this is a really good day for beets, but not such a good day for beans, without it?

And even better than the open markets are places like the garden of my neighbors, from which they sell salad greens, tomatoes, squash, beans and herbs right among the plants themselves. I envy them as gardeners, and pepper them with questions each time I drop by. It isn’t just about information. As food can tie us closer to the land, it also ties us closer to people, in many directions.

Bread is another cooking connection that is partly a social thing for me. I started learning bread with a couple of friends from recipes in a book that I’d borrowed from my mother when I moved out on my own. Bread is a wonderful thing in a large household, because even mediocre bread is superb fresh from the oven, and in a large household it is all eaten up before it has a chance to cool. So when I moved into a shared house, I thought I was a good baker. There were more books, and more of me not following recipes. And because good bakers aren’t that common, and until recently most bread wasn’t that great, while I was in college and making holiday loaves for the neighbors, I also thought I was a good baker.

Then, as I became introduced to really good artisan breads, I started to realize that I could buy bread that tasted better to me than any bread I made. I became despondent, and only baked bread on occasion, usually to dip in soup, even when friends encouraged me to again take up the flour and mixing bowl, and return to my kneading board.

Obviously I was lost without a clue, without more experienced bakers to turn to. But my dear friend, lover and circle mate provided the clue I needed, in the form of a well-chosen book as a birthday present (the book being The Village Baker). Now bread is once again part of the weekly rhythm. The book in question has not so much supplied me with recipes, but it discussed techniques and gave me the skills to let me get the loft and crumb I had been looking for.

For you nonbakers, loft is the amount of air trapped in bubbles in the rising loaf; greater loft means a larger, lighter loaf. Crumb refers to the bread’s texture, the amount of elasticity and springiness in the dough, which makes the bread chewier and less crumbly. Loft and crumb are bound up together, because without enough elasticity in the dough, the bubbles will burst instead of being trapped inside the bread, and your loaf will sink like a pricked tire.

Bread, at its heart, is a food more simple and mystical than a pot of oxtail soup, more deeply felt than haggis to a Scot. The honorific “lady” is derived from a word meaning “maker of bread,” reflecting the respect that task was once given. Stripped away from the frippery we tend to deck our breads in, bread is flour, water, yeast, technique, time and an oven, and usually a bit of salt.

At the beginning of bread, and here I mean its beginning historically rather than the beginning of any particular loaf, there is porridge, a mixture of meal made from soaking grains mixed with boiling water, rather like oatmeal. This is usually how I start my breads now, in part because it seems particularly suited to many of the hand-ground grains I use. Freshground flour acts rather differently than commercial flour. And of course, if you grind it yourself, you are no longer limited to the few flours that are sold commercially, and can make flour from any grain, nut or other suitable substance that strikes your fancy.

Even better, The Village Baker gave me some insight into the ways of wild yeast, and the different methods of courting and maintaining it. After years of thinking that yeast was something that came in small jars or packets, of enriching bread with butter and eggs, it is liberating to know that wild yeast enables you to stop with flour and water. Wild yeast is everywhere, and if you leave porridge sitting out for a few days, stirring occasionally, it will eventually start to bubble, and from there can be mixed with more flour to make a good bread dough. This is, admittedly, easier if you have been doing some brewing or baking in the vicinity recently – there is always yeast around, but it’s nice to have a fair bit of it in the air if you want a good culture. A natural fermentation loaf, one leavened from wild yeast, rises slowly, and is something you make over days, but it rises of its own accord and makes a chewier, more flavorful, better keeping bread than anything made with commercial yeast. The yeast itself is unseen and amazing, something invisible and transformative that changes the material world under your hands

When you begin to make bread regularly, it becomes social in another direction, because if you make it you might as well make several loaves. Even if you are grinding the grain yourself it isn’t much more work to make many than just one, and you’ll have more than you can eat. Especially if you like fresh bread, for then you will make it often. When you get into the rhythm of bread-making, especially a slow bread which you tend to only once a day and do not need to watch too carefully in its risings, the baking itself becomes relatively little work.

But you have the work, then, of giving your excess away. It is a joyous work, but more difficult than you might think, because most people are overly impressed with fresh-baked bread. While the admiration is fun, too much gratitude is a burden for everyone, and people will often not believe that you have more than you can possibly eat. It is also a good practice to collect recipes for bread pudding, bread salads and other uses for stale bread, because you will have stale bread, despite your best efforts.

Sharing food and eating with others is in the most general sense an art. Many different times have had their own rules of hospitality, though when I try to study these rules I sometimes feel as though we have preserved only their shadows. “At these times you must offer food,” the rules say, “and offer it to these people. At these times you may accept, at these times you decline. And having shared food, these are the obligations and relations between you.” One set of rules I learned from my mother, though not always the logic behind them. Another, often contradictory set I learned from an aunt, and stray bits and pieces that are obviously not even part of the same picture from friends, co-workers and other people. I’m not very good at muddling through all these rules and coming up with graceful interpretations in the face of disparate, often conflicting desires.

But the sharing of food with people, feeding people and being fed, is sacred. I am not good at rules, I am not good at following the map through these woods, but sometimes I can feel a path under my feet. When I give people food I have prepared for them – and this is the easy part – in some way I am giving a part of myself; the work and care I put into the food and all the ties that are between me and it are now between me and the person who eats as well. I don’t think I can lie with food, but I can give, and it is an easy sort of giving, for I love to cook and have plenty.

Accepting food is a little harder, although I enjoy eating what friends have made and appreciate their love, skill and kindness. I will not eat the food made by someone who I know bears me ill-will, nor will I accept food from someone whom I dislike nor willingly share a table with either such person. There is an intimacy in eating that needs to be respected, and to sup with an enemy seems to be a kind of lie, to pretend friendship where there is none. To set aside enmity and share a meal well, that is another thing altogether, and it can be a good when we can rise to it.

There are many rituals that have revolve around food in my life, sometimes intentionally and sometimes creeping around the edges. As for many people, candles and the good glasses mark a “nice” dinner at our house, which is distinguished for us more by the ritual surrounding it than the food served. Mushrooms and other wild food are a blessing, and should be shared and enjoyed rather than hoarded when found in any quantity. To me, they’re a signal to take a bit of time for mirth – I often stumble across a patch accidentally while I am rushing to do something else. There they are, glorious morels growing next to the optometrist’s hedge, boletes under a row of birch trees at work, thimble berries along the side of the road. So I try to give the them party they demand, calling over friends to taste this unexpected treat.

The selection of food is also threaded with ritual for me, though it means I spend more time on the road and gathering than I might prefer. I keep my eyes open, waiting for the day that soft ripe peaches, scenting the air and covering my hands with their juices, first come across the mountains to be sold along the roadside, another turning in my private calendar. In a few weeks, my peach trees will bear their first fruit. Later there are apples, then the local winter squash as we sink towards winter.

My favorite foods are those that meet some internal measure of reality. Sometimes these are the foods of the season, other times those of the regions, sometimes the odd-looking of imperfect specimens. I love the fruits and vegetables that still carry their scents with them. I can bury my nose in a basket of zucchini or fresh picked tomatoes and smell a reminder of the plant that bore them and the earth that nurtured them. I like to find my food still with specks of the dirt it lived in upon it.

Foods that pretend to be something other than what they are, on the other hand, need to be treated with caution. Non-fat cream cheese, fake butter or sugar, ice milk that is too heavily stabilized to melt and their ilk often seem to me to feed the body poorly and the spirit hardly at all. I can be pleased and content with a salad of fresh tender greens and vegetables or a succulent sliced pear, but that which pretends to richness it does not deliver seems to mock me with its own illusory nature and remind me mostly of what I am denied.

Beyond the cycle of the seasons, there are other rhythms that will suggest and shape the food on your table if you listen to them. Plain simple food, inexpensive and seasonal without rich things like meat, eggs or butter, is for new moons; eat it quietly, by yourself or with a few others and appreciate its austerity. Full moons, on the other hand, are for feasting on the bounty of the season, whether that bounty is from the orchards and gardens, the well-stocked winter pantry or the fruit stand down the way. A good time for a little richness, intense flavor and variety. A good time for something special, though not something so heavy that will leave you half-asleep early in the evening.

Rain calls for food that is soothing and homey, that makes you glad to be indoors, sun for food that can be packed well and doesn’t need to be cooked, that carries with it the sweetness and bounty that the sun gives us. Snow calls for foods that cook slowly, so that the stove that heats them heats the house, and food cooked over a fire if you have a fire that can be used thusly. Such foods are the easy, quick foods, but they needn’t be complicated or take that much tending, and where would you rather be on a snowy day anyway than within smell’s reach of the kitchen, basking in its warmth?

There is rhythm and ritual, also, in the making of food. I’ll work a long day, and come home to a risen bowl full of bread that needs to be punched down, kneaded and formed into loaves. For me, the making falls into patterns as calming as a warm bath before bed, patterns that spread throughout our house and shape the days of those of us who live within it in ways the physical walls that shelter us do not. Chop this, sauté that, cover the pan and let it simmer, and work on the next dish while it cooks. Quiet work of hands, time and memory. Remembering Kim, the kitchen teacher at my high school, showing me how to chop tomatoes without letting the seeds pour out of them and slide across the cutting board. Ed breaking off a piece of dough small enough for me to knead with my six-year-old hands. The queer almost-memory of someone’s hands placing a red, smoke-stained covered dish into a dark oven. Children near my old job selling green beans from their own garden at a table by the sidewalk.

In the late evenings or early mornings, when I am tired, dozing by the oven waiting for the bread to be done, I can almost see the strands of a web, reaching from me to them and them to me, and from all of us to the land and back, the gardens, the trees of the orchard, the spices and their dreams of distant lands, the ripening squash that knows the turning of the seasons in a way that I cannot. A web of millions of strands, new threads arching and reaching and tying us deeper, closer, back to the earth.

Oxtail Soup+ 1-2 pounds oxtails+ 1 large onion, chopped+ 3 large cloves garlic+ 1 1/2 cup barley+ SaltOptional+ Red wine+ Worcestershire sauce+ Dried mushrooms+ Bay leaf+ Chopped carrot and/or celery

Place the oxtails in a large thick bottomed pot (a thick bottomed pot will make up for a burner that isn’t even or doesn’t go quite low enough – extra water will make up for either, but a thick bottom is best). Cover them with enough water that they can float a little. If they are forced to remain in contact with the bottom of the pan while being cooked, they’ll burn. Bring water to boil, reduce heat to a simmer, cover and cook for about two days.

Check the soup a few times a day, adding water if necessary, and keep the heat on the low side overnight, or if you’ll be gone for more than a few hours. After two days or thereabouts, the broth will turn a rich gold color (this effect can be enhanced by throwing in a small onion, quartered, with the skin still on – remove this onion when you debone the oxtails). Sometime not too long after the broth has darkened, you should debone the oxtails. Be careful – the bones tend to separate into smaller pieces and hide.

About an hour before you want to eat the soup, add your chopped onion and the barley. At this time, you can start thinking about other flavoring ingredients you might want to add. A little red wine and Worcestershire sauce is common. I’ll sometimes throw in some dried wild mushrooms – boletes are particularly nice for this. A bay leaf can be nice (curry leaf isn’t bad either). I usually don’t add more vegetables to this soup because part of what I like is the relative austerity of the dish, but they do give a more complex flavor. Salt and pepper to taste.

After the barley has plumped up (let it get nice and plump; it will thicken the broth), the soup’s ready to eat. Serve with some crusty bread to wipe the bowl clean.

Honey Cake+    1/2 cup honey+    1 egg, beaten+    1/4 cup butter, softened+    1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour+    1 teaspoon baking powder+    1/2 teaspoon baking soda+    1/4 teaspoon salt+    1 cup hot water+    Flavoring, optional

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream together honey and butter. Mix in egg. Slowly mix in dry ingredients, and then bit by bit mix in the hot water until you have a smooth batter. Add flavoring if you wish. (I usually use fiori di sicilia, which is vanilla and citrus – a bit of vanilla extract and lemon zest would probably do nicely. A splash of rosewater or a pinch of cinnamon would also work.)

Pour into a loaf pan, or an eight-inch cake pan, cupcake pans, or what have you. Bake for about half an hour, or until the top is firm when tapped lightly.

Baked Figs and Eggplant+ One large onion+ Several small, or one large, eggplant+ Lamb chops (optional)+ Several fresh figs+ Garlic+ Pomegranate juice+ Red wine+ Olive oil

To make sauce: Caramelize the onion in a bit of olive oil. Do this thoroughly – the onion bits shouldn’t be burnt, but they should be nice and brown, and it will take a while. When the onion is caramelized, add two to four cloves of pressed or minced garlic, half a cup of pomegranate juice (or four tablespoons pomegranate paste and a bit of water), a good glug of wine and salt to taste.

To assemble dish: Preheat oven to 350 degrees. If the eggplant is large, or the skin tough, peel and quarter it. Sear any cut or peeled edges of the eggplant in a frying pan, and likewise sear the lamb chops if lamb chops are being used. Clean and halve the figs. Arrange the eggplant, lamb and figs in a casserole – they can be more than one layer deep, but should fit together as closely as possible. Pour the sauce over the rest of the ingredients, cover and bake for about 45 minutes or until the eggplant is very tender.

BRING HARVEST HOME

BRING HARVEST HOME

by Melanie Fire Salamander

Mabon: the second harvest, of grain and in the Northwest of wine grapes. A good time to think about food, harvested from the fields now. Our lead writer meditates on a whole ritual life built around food, the making of bread, oxtail soup and baked figs and eggplant, and the many connections between cooking and magick. So too do we have another writer’s tale of making communion bread, and discussions likewise of making ritual wine and aphrodisiac liqueur.

Food warms the house as it cooks; food warms the body as we eat. After we gather in our harvest and cook or ferment it, often we share it. Breaking bread together has long been a symbol for truce and the establishment of friendship ties. Catherine Harper considers the sacredness of this act in her lead story. In the Lakota and other Native American traditions, the milestones of life are often denoted by sharing not only food but many or all household goods, in a Giveaway ceremony. Napecinkala writes of this ritual in this issue.

One of my favorite images of this season, driving or walking on an evening just as the last stains of sunset leave the sky, is passing in blue darkness a small house set back among trees. Beyond thinning branches, windows golden with light shine. Behind them, I imagine a family or friends around a fire or a laden table, coming together, cozy against the cold night.

I wish you and your family (of birth or choice) a warm harvest and safety against the coming winter.

Earth Science Pic of the Day for Sept. 16th – Autumn Splendor in Connecticut

Autumn Splendor in Connecticut

September 16, 2011

 
 
The panorama above shows the splendid fall foliage of the Quinnipiac River Valley in south-central Connecticut as viewed in October 2010 from the top of Meriden Mountain (Hubbard Park). Meriden Mountain stands about 900 ft (275 m) above the Quinnipiac River. Maples and oaks ignite the river valley and Hanging Hills in brilliant shades of gold and crimson. The city of Meriden, Connecticut stretches out in the mid-ground.

Photo details: Panorama “stitched” using 10 individual frames with my mini Nikon camera.

Let’s Include All Genders and Sexualities in Our Paganism

Let’s Include All Genders and Sexualities in Our Paganism

article

by Janice Van Cleve

I used to think that paganism was this happy, liberal, fun, exciting adventure, where all the domineering, straight jacketed moralisms of patriarchal religion were out the window. I could probably be forgiven my naiveté, seeing as at the time I was newly arrived into the pagan community. Of course I brushed up against Gardner, Alexander, George and other theorists whose pagan notions retained sexist overtones, but I paid them no attention. After all, paganism is about experience rather than philosophy, right? And so far, my experience in all-women circles was nothing but positive, welcoming, and comfortably feminist.

Then came the skyclad ritual. It was co-ed, and I am a lesbian. I prefer to express my spirituality in woman-only space, but I can occasionally expand my participation to include men as long as they do not impose sexual touch upon me. I had been to a co-ed sky clad ritual before, and that one was okay. This time, however, only after we were already naked in circle, did the priestess announce that this would be a Georgian ritual. We had to get boy, girl, boy, girl and count off in teams for mutual stroking at each of the shrines. This was very different from what I expected, and I was uncomfortable. I would have left then and there except that she did give us a “safe sign” to use if we did not want physical contact. Trusting that the safe sign would be respected, I decided I could stay.

For the most part, it was okay. However, the male priest ignored my safe sign and laid hands and lips on me anyway. I felt violated, and I was very upset. That’s how I was finally forced to confront the issue of gender in my pagan practice.

My initial reaction to the incident was to convey my concerns to the persons in charge. To their credit, they took my concerns seriously and corrected the situation before the next skyclad ritual by allowing people to group in any way they wanted. They realized that the retreat must be inclusive of all sexual orientations, since 20 to 25 percent of the people attending that weekend were gay, lesbian or bisexual.

On a deeper level, however, the trauma of that incident caused me to look at the words and imagery surrounding our neo-pagan practice. How much of our modern pagan experience is limited to the male-female polarity? How much do we assume heterosexuality in our writings or illustrations? Are we ignoring or even marginalizing our lesbian, gay and bisexual sisters and brothers in the way we speak about and act out our paganism?

To start with, I certainly concede that male-female sexual activity, and allusions thereto, are powerful magickal tools. They can and do raise abundant energy. In Dreaming The Dark, Starhawk writes: “Sexuality was a sacrament in the Old Religion; it was (and is) viewed as a powerful force through which the healing, fructifying love of the immanent Goddess was directly known, and could be drawn down to nourish the world, to quicken fertility in human beings and in nature.” Much of Gardnerian magick is based on this notion that physical interaction between male and female is not only desirable, but necessary. Most ritual books, even today, assume a priest and priestess working together to create the magick for which they gathered.

Yet male-female polarity is not the only sexually magickal tool. Sexual energy between two women or two men is equally powerful and effective in pagan practice. Riane Eisler in Sacred Pleasure notes that Isis was served in Egypt by a gay priesthood. Margot Adler in Drawing Down The Moon noted the powerful energy that lesbian women and gay men have brought to the Craft. Ffiona Morgan has given us moving examples of lesbian sexual energy used in pagan ritual in her Goddess Spirituality Book. In an article called “A Sprinkling of Radical Faerie Dust,” Don Kilhefner writes that the dilemma facing gays is “our assimilation into the mainstream versus our enspiritment as a people…. There is a reality to being gay that is radically different from being straight.” Peter Soderberg, in an interview with Margot Adler, said of gays: “There is a lot of queer energy in the men and women most cultures consider magical. It’s practically a requirement for certain kinds of medicine and magic.” He concluded that the pagan movement doesn’t give credit to this, for “there’s a lot of heterosexism in modern neo-pagan culture.”

Kilhefner, Soderberg and others eventually broke away from the mainstream pagan movement to form gender-specific circles. Dianic Wiccans and Radical Faeries became homes for gender specific bonding and magick work. Soon the women’s groups attracted feminists of all sexual orientations who were opposed to assigned patriarchal roles. Radical Faeries attracted men for the same reason. Adler quotes one man: “when he first entered the pagan community, you could not even touch another man. And there were regular polarity checks in circles — you know, boy, girl, boy, girl. There’s been a wonderful loosening and blossoming in the last few years, but there is also much resistance.”

Today, there is a lot less resistance to the energies that lesbians and gays bring to the neo-pagan movement, but there is still a good deal of blossoming yet to accomplish. Removing gender and sexual bias from our pagan practice goes beyond being “politically correct.” It puts into action our belief in the immanence of spirit in all things and in all persons. It acknowledges the equal value of all persons and of their unique expression of life. It takes its authority, not from some headquarters or book, but from the lived experience of our sisters and brothers. It removes from our pagan practice biases that may be burdens to us and barriers to others.

How can we accomplish this? One good place to start is to make no assumptions. Not everybody knows who Gardner or George is, not everybody is heterosexual, and many solitaries or newcomers may not even be aware of common group ritual practices. At the retreat I attended, Sylvan Grove did a workshop prior to their ritual to explain what would be happening. Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica welcomes all to their Gnostic Masses but makes clear in advance that visitors are expected to take communion. These are good examples of groups retaining their traditions and identity but acknowledging the diversity around them.

When we write articles and books, we can avoid assumptions either by acknowledging and including all of our diverse audience or by acknowledging them, but defining our approach up front if we are going to focus on a more narrow segment of them. We can do the same thing in presentations we give in classrooms. In more public settings, as in interfaith gatherings or in pagan gatherings open to all, it would be best to avoid sexual and gender bias altogether.

There is always room for individual groups to follow their own specific traditions, of course. Some groups use only Celtic symbolism while others prefer Native American, Greek or Teutonic. Some groups are just for women or just for men; others may be just for gays or lesbians. As long as none of us assume we have the whole truth or the only truth, and as long as we respect and include pagans who are different from ourselves when outside of our own circles, we will go a long way toward honoring the Goddess and God in all persons.

If we can succeed in doing that, we just may create a paganism that is happy, liberal, fun and an exciting adventure where all the domineering, straitjacketed moralisms truly are out the window.

The Broomstick

The Broomstick

Hands on Harvesting Fun

by Tiger von Pagel

 

The autumnal equinox has a special meaning for those of us who revere the earth and its gifts. This is the season of the harvest, and we can feel it in the cool evening air, smell it in the aroma of woodsmoke and damp soil, taste its crispness in the bite of a freshly picked apple and see its splendor in the russet and gold leaves as they fall from the trees. This time of year, perhaps more than any other, we are reminded of the bounty of the Goddess, and I think a trip made at this season should focus on the source of our daily sustenance. This can be done with a vacation to a working farm. There are hundreds of farms and ranches around the world that are designed to accommodate visitors and overnight guests, but there are especially quite a few located in Ontario, Canada.

The province of Ontario is very dependent on its local farms and does a great deal to promote farming as part of the tourist industry. There is even an organization that is dedicated to farming vacations called Ontario Farm and Country Accomodations. This group provides information on working farms where visitors are invited to stay and assist in daily chores such as feeding animals and picking vegetables. One such farm is Jamka Farm in Prince Edward County. A 100 acre family farm, Jamka Farm still relies on traditional methods for its day to day workings, and guests can experience a truly “hands-on” vacation while collecting eggs for breakfast, milking cows by hand, and feeding the farms flock of sheep. The farm is open year round, and in the spring when “baby season” begins you can be present for the birthing of lambs and hatching of chicks and ducklings. However, many people recommend visiting at harvest time when you can pick vegetables for the evening meal and ward off the night’s chill with a mug of mulled cider by the hearthfire.

Another unique harvest experience can be had at one of the many “U-pick” farms in the area. Places such as Campbells Orchards, also in Prince Edward County, have acres of orchards where you can pick your own apples and pumpkins. Other farms in this area of Ontario include Maple Ridge Farms in Picton, Eagles Rest Farm in Lanark, and Woodrow Farm and Guest Ranch in Balderson. All offer bed and breakfast accomodations and a chance to experience the simple pleasures of harvest season up close and personal.

It isn’t necessary to travel all the way to Ontario for a farm harvest experience. There are a number of farm bed and breakfast establishments right here in the Pacific Northwest. One such farm is the Normandie Farm B & B in Sequim, Washington on the Olympic Peninsula. Promoted as a little piece of French country living right here in Washington State, the Normandie Farm is most noted for its homespun wool. The proprietress is an accomplished spinner and weaver, and she gets her fleece from the sheep that are raised right there at the farm.

You can also spend a day in Bellevue at the Kelsey Creek Farm. Open from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., Kelsey Creek is a fully operating farm (with horses, pigs, chickens and rabbits) and offers free self-guided tours. Also of note here is the Japanese garden that is dedicated to Yao, Bellevue’s sister city in Japan. Another free self-guided farm tour can be had in the Snoqualmie Valley at Carnation Farms. This 900-acre working dairy is open to the public from March to October and is famous as the “Home of the Contented Cows”. This area is also home to a number of “U-pick” farms for your own personal harvest. Most notably are Remlinger U-Pick Farms just south of Carnation, which offers a petting farm and restaurant, and Fall City Farms in Fall City, well known for its garlic and shallots as well as apple orchards and pick your own pumpkin fields. Whether you choose a week long vacation on a farm or an afternoon picking apples, enjoy this magical time of the year that is autumn, and happy travelling always.

Zen and the Art of Berry Harvesting

Zen and the Art of Berry Harvesting

by Amanda Silvers

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I am very warm; it is one of those days where your hair clings to your neck and the sweat beads above your lip. I want something sweet, but not too sweet, and juicy.

Hmmmmmm, I think, about the blackberry bower by the driveway. I think that the berries might be perfect to quench my hunger.

The bush has been very prolific this year, and it is so heavy with ripe berries that they hang down to the ground in places. I think about the berries bowing the branches under their weight, their shiny plump blackness oozing sweetness, and my mouth waters as I walk outside into the sun. I am blinded momentarily by the brightness, and I think about the fact that I left my sunglasses in the house. I am also wearing only shorts and a tank top, not the best attire for blackberry picking! I remember seeing a friend a few days earlier; she was covered with angry red scratches and cuts, from picking blackberries, she said. Oh well, I think to myself, I’ll be careful and just take a few of the more accessible berries.

I approach the bush and the thorns loom, shining sharply; they are all I can see. The thought of the berries is now eclipsed by the terrible threat of injury from the thick branches rimmed with thorns. Not to mention the fact that the berries, so many I can see dozens as I park my car every day, are nowhere to be found now as I stand there next to the bush squinting into the sun.

I stop for a moment as I feel the bush diva pull back its branches and threaten me telepathically with sharp scratches if I so much as try to pick a berry. Then I remember: I have to ask the bush for the berries, and ask it with respect and a small amount of fear for the sharp thorns.

I smile to myself and the berry bush diva as I think to the bush, “Hello there, Mama Berry Bush! How are you doing today? Did you get enough water when I watered you last night?” The bush relaxes a bit, but not completely, as I stand before her with a bowl, smiling at her like a lunatic. I again address the bush psychically, “I was wondering, oh great Berry, you have produced much beautiful fruit this year, would you share it with us humble humans? You know we are unlike you, and unable to produce such sweet and luscious fruit, and we would be honored by your gift.” The berry bramble is practically beaming at me now, and all of a sudden the branches seem to open up, and there is the fruit! Hundreds of beautiful plump shiny blackberries, hanging in hefty clumps of six or ten, along with gorgeous green fuzzy leaves, all on stalks with little, teeny-tiny thorns.

Where did those huge thorns go? I ask the bush as I begin to pick a berry here and one there, and she answers “Oh, those were in your imagination. I just helped you to see the ones I have as several times as big as usual.” I laugh to myself and continue picking and telling the bush diva how lovely the fruit is.

I pop a berry into my mouth, and it bursts in an explosion of pungent tart sweetness. These are the best blackberries I have ever tasted, I tell the bush. Just then, she reveals even more berries, bigger and more lush that the ones before, and all in easy reach as I stand inside the shelter of the branches and continue to pick.

I picked and chatted merrily to the berry diva as I gathered the remarkable fruit. Toward the end, I made sure to thank her for the fine gift. I promised her that I would only prune her lovely branches and not cut her down, as so many people do. She was delighted and promised me more berries whenever I wanted, at least during the next few weeks.

I finally picked all of the ripe berries I could find that day, and I only ended up with one tiny scratch on my arm. It was near the end of my harvest; I was getting a bit greedy, and she had to remind me to not take any berries that were not yet ripe. I wound up with a huge bowl of luscious fruit to share, and with no pain. See, all you have to do is ask nicely!

Reclaiming Our Birthright

Reclaiming Our Birthright

Earth-Magick, Culture and Ritual

by Erik van Lennep

 

“Time is not a line/Leading ever farther from where we are/But fluid dreams and memories/Where ancestors and someday-children/Take us by the hand.” – From “Initiation I,” by Erik van Lennep, 1992

On a warm day in late September, I walked through the Vermont woods to arrive where 16-year old Nathan waited beside a beaver pond. “Are you ready?” I asked, and smiling with nervous excitement, he said he was.

Turning, I led him back into the woods, until we reached a natural gateway formed by two large paper birch trees flanking the path. At this point, I asked Nathan if he was certain he wanted to continue on, and he replied with a sober yes. “Good,” I said, “now take off all of your clothes and hand them to me.” As he did so, I said, “You now are nameless and homeless, and naked as you entered life, you shall remain empty. You have nothing but what you carry within you.”

Having grown up in a rural setting where swimsuits are generally considered superfluous, if not downright annoying, and being a child of the 1970s and ’80s, the requirement he disrobe was hardly as shocking for Nathan as it might have been for an urban youth. It did, however, place him immediately into a nonordinary state of awareness, a prerequisite for powerfully transformative experience. I have also discovered that full exposure of the skin heightens a person’s sensitivity to the surrounding environment: Each nuance of breeze registers upon the skin, and it becomes necessary to slow down and to pay close attention to the act of walking. Textures underfoot become more noticeable, as well as one’s passing through vegetation types, and the movement from sun to shadow. The feel of the surrounding landscape becomes a living presence in a way that simply does not ordinarily register while clothed. The symbolism of being ritually pared down to the basics was not lost upon Nathan either.

We hiked the remaining quarter of a mile to a campsite I had prepared for his coming-of-age ritual. Twice more along the way we stopped, and I again asked if he wanted to return home. After the third time, there would be no turning back. Each time, as he responded with increasing confidence that he wished to proceed, the nature of the walk became more demanding, until the last 100 yards where I led him blindfolded through heavy brush to the clearing where we would spend the next three days and nights.

Coming of age is marked by confusion, particularly within industrialized cultures such as that of the United States. This confusion is why traditional societies have always marked this major life transition with ceremonies and ritual. Ceremony calls attention to the importance of the event, celebrating it with community recognition and support, while ritual weaves the person and event into a fabric of meaning and tradition. Although our industrialized society has attempted to refocus its members on consumerism as a substitute for spirituality, the need for community, ceremony and ritual remains strong.

It was no surprise that Nathan found his sixteenth birthday marked by a sense of profound disappointment. In our society, there are momentous expectations focused around 16-year-olds. They are led to believe that new worlds will open before them, while they themselves feel they have arrived at adulthood. But usually the transition is marked by nothing more than a piece of paper certifying the capability and the right to drive a car, which in many cases the 16-year-old has been driving already. Certainly, a driver’s license heralds a new level of freedom and, we hope, responsibility, but it hardly provides the recognition required to celebrate a major life change. Nathan and I discussed this around the time of his birthday, and I mentioned to him that if he wanted to mark the occasion with something more meaningful, he and I could probably devise something appropriate.

About two months later, I had a series of dreams characterized by intense imagery, which I later realized were pieces of some sort of ritual. It felt as if they were being shown to me for some purpose beyond my own dream work. Subsequently, the images came with increasing frequency and clarity, until by early summer I was “dreaming” pieces of ritual as I hiked in the hills surrounding my village. When I became aware that these visions and dreams collectively represented a coming-of-age ritual, I knew that the ritual was meant for Nathan. I told him what had been happening and that I wanted to offer a ceremony to him as a gift, and he accepted.

In preparation, I showed him a basic breath meditation technique and gave him a series of individualized exercises to combine with the meditation, as well as a list of questions designed to inspire thought about where he fit into his community, his sense of responsibility toward the Earth and his own self-image. For the next 10 weeks, he worked with the exercises and questions he had been given.

Vermont is still one of the most rural of the lower 48 states. Populations of animals once thought to be locally extinct or greatly reduced, such as moose, coyotes and cougars, are actually increasing. However, it is primarily a landscape of small farms and biologically impoverished woodlot and forest regrowth. It hardly could be termed wilderness by today’s exacting standards.

Throughout the reforested hills, one comes across rusted barbed wire, stone walls, old cellar holes and the occasional relic of an old still or plough. A variety of conifers and hardwoods push through the debris of the last three centuries and deposit an ever-deepening carpet of leaves, which softly and slowly shrouds the evidence of abandoned agriculture until iron and steel implements become knit into the forest skeleton of glacial rocks and fallen tree trunks. Despite repeated attempts to reshape the landscape of Vermont to fit some more agriculturally or industrially productive model, the land and weather seem instead to reshape the people who come here. The magick and power of the Earth are very close to the surface.

It was through this landscape that we hiked to another beaver pond. The leaves were beginning to turn the flaming shades that make New England famous but had not yet begun to drop to the ground. For me, autumn is a time when the woods begin to hum with energy, peaking in early November, when the air is crackling with magick. The entire forest smells of summer’s sweet ripening, overlaid by the aroma of countless fungi. Nathan had selected the site for his ceremony, and a few days earlier as part of his “ordeal” carried in water, canvas tarps, a stack of cordwood and a number of melon-sized rocks for a sweat-lodge firepit. The morning we began, I arranged the camp, built a small sweat lodge and a somewhat larger sleeping lodge and screened the site with brush barriers jumbled into place to resemble natural blow-downs.

All of this preparation served to create a site that struck Nathan as new and unfamiliar when I removed his blindfold upon arrival. For the remainder of our stay, despite frosty mornings and one evening of drizzling rain, we were both naked, to continue the sense of being outside ordinary experience. By the end of our stay, we had both become so comfortable that it was equally startling to pull on clothing and cut off much of the contact between inner and outer environments.

Although I had initially described the ceremony we were beginning as a coming of age, I had begun to think of it in the terms of “bringing Nathan through” a transition between realities or worlds. It is difficult to say exactly where the pieces of ritual originated, and to a certain extent it does not matter, and I certainly did not question the process at the time. I worked with my own intuition, subconsciously assembling seemingly disparate pieces into a meaningful pattern. In retrospect, the pieces came from the six years I had known Nathan and his family, from a lifetime spent in the Eastern forests, from a long time study of European and other mythologies and folklore, from my own personal spiritual practices, from years of close work with Indigenous colleagues and friends and no doubt from the world of ancestors and the Earth Herself. I experienced the process as flowing and integrated and highly energizing. I opened myself to the inspiration fully and without question. I had a general sense of the order I wanted to follow, but many of the techniques I used to create transitions or to open doors of awareness occurred quite spontaneously and even astounded me at their effectiveness.

At times during the ritual, we would work at a particular exercise for a while with little result and then decide to move on to something else, as the approach was not working. During the night, I would then dream of a way to free the blocked energy and try the new method upon awakening to find it worked beautifully. By this point, Nathan and I had established such rapport with one another and the process that I would have been disappointed had the answer not come in the night.

The transition from childhood to manhood for Nathan was marked by discussion of responsibility and community, of family and self-image, of sexuality and spirit. The material we used to compose the three-day ritual was based upon universal practices (virtually all peoples on Earth have a sweat tradition somewhere in their history) and upon practices from Nathan’s own ethnic background, as far as he knew it. For some of the European Earth-centered ritual, we reached back to Ice Age symbolism and carried it through to its contemporary expression in the form of antler dances, which have been handed through European folk traditions in an unbroken chain. This unbroken chain is critical, because without cultural relevance ritual remains a superficial and rather alien exercise.

The first evening, Nathan became the fire keeper, and he began to consciously separate himself from his parents and his childhood. Because his parents were divorced, and because he had been having a great deal of trouble communicating with his father for some time, I “fathered” him that night by wrapping his shoulders in a blanket, holding him in my arms and telling him stories about my own childhood and adolescence.

Two days before we entered the woods, Nathan began a fruit and juice fast, and by the day we began, both he and I were on a juice and ginseng tea fast, which we maintained until the last night. The clarity brought about through fasting enabled us both to tune into subtle energies very easily. Working with breath meditation techniques for grounding and centering, I showed Nathan how to consciously pull Earth energy from the bedrock and up through his body and then reground it. Working with the exercises I had given him earlier, he channeled energy directly through his emotions, shifting from emotion to emotion at will. He was able to lean against a large pine and feel the energy coursing up and down beneath the bark, and we played games by passing energy back and forth between our palms.

In another part of my work with Nathan, I discussed sexuality. It seems important in these times of acute social and family dysfunction to prepare young people for the bewildering array of information, on-and-off relationships and poor communication surrounding them, and the intentional, subliminal attempts by Madison Avenue to confuse the areas of sexuality, consumerism, power and need. I wanted to address the fact that Nathan would be involved with others who might use sexuality as a manipulative tool. I explained to him that magick, Earth energy and sexual energy were all the same, and that with practice, a person could flow from one to the other at will. We talked about sex as a gift coming from Mother Earth, and a gift which two people bring together from their own places of joy, to share with one another. Although Nathan was inexperienced and my points were all theoretical for him at the time, I hoped that, later in life when he became sexually active, our conversation would come back to him and help him remain centered.

We talked also about how all life reflects itself in structure and intricacy throughout the levels of form and energy, from the atomic to the galactic. We used examples from Nathan’s upbringing on the land but examined them in the new light of Nature being magick and energy. I pulled back the top layers of leaf mulch to show Nathan the fungal hyphae – the network of white threads that constitute the true body of mushrooms and that serve to knit the forest ecosystem together through mycorhizzal connections between tree roots. We watched the beavers at dusk as they cut saplings down around our camp, and we marked the boundaries of our site by peeing on trees to keep raccoons and their ilk from raiding us.

We alternated between energy exercises and imagery, using dance and body painting to enact conscious transitions between points before and after becoming adult. At one point, Nathan was pulling energy directly from the Earth so quickly that his whole frame vibrated like a taut sail. At another time, I had him oil his entire body copiously and then go wait in the darkened sweat while meditating on his worst fears. Meanwhile I filled my hair with white clay and covered my body with black and red clay to become a monster. I shook the frame of the sweat and demanded he come out and face me. He chased me around and around the campsite while I jeered him for his timidity, and though he caught me several times, his oily body allowed me to slip out of his grasp. (Fear can be very elusive.) Finally, he covered his hands and arms with enough pine needles to wrestle me down and then dragged me into the pond, pushed me under and washed off the clay to unmask his fear and render it harmless.

At the end of our last day, I returned Nathan’s clothing to him and constructed a door-sized hoop of alder and oiled jute cord near the fire. Nathan put back on his clothing, which had been selected to represent portions of his childhood he would be leaving behind, and then stood by the fire. As he took each garment off again, he attached some qualities of his former self which he wished to grow beyond, and then consigned it to the fire. When he felt ready, I lit the hoop and pulled him through the flaming gateway into the adult world. I handed him a new set of clothes, which he decided to lay aside until the hike out, and we broke our fast together as brothers.

From the moment that Nathan stepped out of the woods, where his family and friends awaited him with a welcoming ceremony, he seemed different. He was far more self-assured, and his body language was more confident. His family and friends all commented upon the remarkable difference. For months afterward and even today, where previously he and his friends used to hang out in a fairly random arrangement of bodies and postures, his friends now cluster around him, as if oriented toward the warmth of a campfire. He tells me that he received compliments from a female friend in his high school as being one of the few males in their group who was in touch with his feelings.

On several occasions since that time, I have been with Nathan when he used the techniques he learned during his initiation to deal with an emotionally trying situation. Once when a mutual friend was slowly dying of cancer and we needed to be there for him in strength, I watched Nathan go outside on a bitter December night, ground himself and form a link between the Earth and stars until he was filled with clear energy. He came back inside and poured that energy into our friend, who visibly responded with renewed vigor for the next few hours.

Though for Nathan I was able to create a ritual that worked, there are a few fairly daunting obstacles to creating meaningful wilderness ritual in contemporary America. First, wilderness itself is in short supply, and by strict definition (that is, untouched by obvious human presence or activity) practically nonexistent. Second, for ritual to be meaningful it must not only contain recognizable symbolism that stirs the individual, but also that symbolism must be somehow culturally appropriate in order to have any deep meaning.

In addition, truly powerful ritual is not spontaneously created but must grow over time, as it is layered by repetition and cycles through generations. We are at a profound disadvantage in creating or finding such ritual in the industrialized world, particularly those of us in America who are descended from disjointed immigrant cultures. As if these issues were not sufficiently problematic, members of the dominant culture within industrialized society in the United States, primarily Euro-Americans, tend to carry a set of precepts about reality that create still more barriers between the individual and a rewarding expression of spirituality through ritual. A good place to begin the search for meaning and ceremony is an examination of our own cultural attitudes.

Here are a few attitudes which I have found necessary to revise in order to make room for spiritually fulfilling and Earth-focused ritual:

1. We assume wilderness does not include people. This attitude is a uniquely Western perspective based in large part upon (male) domination of “virginal” lands. It creates a perpetual separation between humanity and the rest of natural life, a system of law that does not recognize aboriginal tenure of wildlands and a philosophy that “improves” land by destroying it. Conversely, when we can see that the majority of human cultures have coexisted with wildlands, that traditional societies practice sustainable management and that the wilderness experienced by European explorers was simply land where other peoples implemented sophisticated wildlife and land management the Europeans did not understand, we can drop the mystique of the great uninhabited wilderness and begin to develop a more nurturing relationship between ourselves and the Earth, wherever we may live. Don’t wait for a trip to the Yukon or the Sierras to get in touch with your spirit. Go out in your yard and sit with the dandelions.

2. We assume that, when creating or recreating Earth-based rituals, it’s acceptable to appropriate bits and pieces from other cultures to assemble something new. This is a very touchy subject. Traditional peoples who have had virtually every other aspect of their lives appropriated as “resources” by industrialized society are tired of being mined for their rituals. At the same time, people who are still spiritually in touch with the Earth wish others would get the message and stop plundering the planet. As heirs to the cultural dismemberment that accompanies industrialization, many of us are aching to fill the spiritual void we feel. When we come into contact with traditions or imagery that suggest a stronger and mystical connection to the Earth, we are attracted and want them for ourselves. Many of us are so disenchanted or appalled by the direction our own society has taken we want to jump ship for a way of life that seems more in tune with our values.

The problem is that no matter how far we may run, we still carry with us most of our Westernized, urbanized, industrialized attitudes. Many such attitudes are problematic, such as the idea that if we see something we like, we can simply take it or buy it. We have also been conditioned to concentrate on the image or surface of what we encounter while ignoring the content, so when we encounter traditional ritual we feel that if we can somehow possess the trappings of ceremony we have the key to the door of spirituality. But spirit comes from within, and the material symbols that a people evolves to use in ritual are just that: symbols. They signify complex concepts that can only be understood by persons raised within the traditions to which they belong. Further, traditional Indigenous spirituality and ceremony are inseparable from culture and geography, since all have coevolved and are mutually reinforcing. In addition, Earth-based spirituality is by its very nature more visceral than conceptual. It cannot be analyzed; it must be felt. No matter how much we want it, no matter how much we are willing to pay, no matter how loudly we protest or how facile our justifications and denial, if it isn’t ours we cannot truly have it.

The idea of unequivocal inaccessibility is one that our cultural biases find extremely difficult to accept. It’s a mind-wrenching concept. Here is another one: In our lifetimes, we may not ever see the creation of ceremony, rituals and traditions that both belong to us and have a power and relevance equal to those of our Indigenous neighbors. However, if we start now our great-grandchildren may share a spiritual groundedness that approaches what we strive for. The lag comes from the time required to repeat and layer ceremony through many seasonal cycles and human generations before it truly roots itself as traditional ritual.

This is not to say that we cannot devise an entire constellation of personally fulfilling and spiritually engaging rituals right now. But which material we choose to work with makes a significant difference between deluding ourselves and disrespecting our neighbors on the one hand, and reconnecting with our own birthrights on the other. In my opinion, when we find ourselves attracted by Indigenous spiritual ways, the healthy attitude is one of inspiration, not emulation.

3. We assume our own, often European, traditions of celebrating the Earth and its cycles are lost in time – in other words, “you can’t go back.” It may come as a surprise to consider that the Western concept of time as linear and irreversible is only a cultural perspective, but so it is. In fact, for many of the very cultures that have attracted attention lately, time runs in cycles, or flows in many directions, or even allows past, present and future to occupy the same space. Certainly for all of our ancestors, time flowed differently than it does today. When we open ourselves to the possibility of time behaving differently than we have been taught, then the traditions of our own ancestry, our birthrights, become immediately more accessible. Certainly unraveling the tangles of lineage may take some work, but any single line will eventually lead back to a point when the people were Indigenous, in tune with the Earth, and when they celebrated their spirituality with meaningful rituals, rituals rightfully our own. It certainly is no greater stretch to rediscover, reclaim or rebuild meaningful cultural and spiritual ties to an ancestor from Friesland, the Czech Republic, Romania or Scotland, or for that matter Lascaux, than it is for a Euro-American to legitimately lead an Ojibwe or Lakota sweat lodge.

The question is really not one of going back in time. It is one of getting back on track.

September 13 – Daily Feast

September 13 – Daily Feast

 

It is good to keep the promises we make to ourselves to enjoy a peaceful hour. How long has it been? How long has it been since we walked on a grassy hillside and watched the shadows hover and move? Walking is good for the legs – but it does wonders for the soul. The autumn season is one of the best times to walk and think. There is a rhythm in the earth that rises into our feet when we walk. In it is the healing and it centers the soul so that the cares of the world cannot get in to destroy peace. And peace has so many side effects. It restores youth and gives perspective to a world-weary mind.

~ The Great Spirit made these mountains and rivers for us, and all this land. ~

BLACKFOOT – CROW, 1850’s

‘A Cherokee Feast of Days, Volume II’ by Joyce Sequichie Hifler

*<<<=-=>>>*<<<=-=>>>*<<<=-=>>>*<<<=-=>>>*

 

Your Daily Number for Sept. 12th: 1

Exercise leadership today, and don’t hesitate to push your ideas and agenda forward. Others will look to you for direction. You’re also likely to meet someone new. Today is a day of progress if you don’t let fear get in the way.

Fast Facts

About the Number 1

Theme: Masculine, Creative, Independent, Aggressive
Astro Association: Mercury
Tarot Association: Magician

A Pagan Hunts the Fruits of Autumn

A Pagan Hunts the Fruits of Autumn

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by Catherine Harper

Sometime in September I wake up and the sky is gray, the day is cool, the bright golden harvest has begun its descent into the quieter late autumn, and even as much as I love the sun, I am relieved. It’s as if the shorter days give me license to stay content inside, writing and cooking, or to cover up outside after I have become a little weary of sun and skin. By the time the weather turns, I am always ready to turn a bit inward. It has been a sunny summer and a good, warm harvest, and now it is time for things to be a bit more muted and for rest.

By Mabon, I should have a cord or two of apple wood stacked for the oven. The bright fruits of summer are finishing in the garden, the winter squash thinking about hardening their shells, the beans and tomatoes coming in. The sunny days are some of the best for hiking and bicycling, cooler weather bringing us out of summer’s languor. But the Indian summer, if we are so lucky as to be granted one, is transitory, a red and gold finale to the light half of the year, and the gray days and rains are waiting.

What is startling about our winters is not so much the amount of rain (well, maybe some years), for all the press that it gets, but the contrast between our mild climate and the dark that descends on us. For all that we see little snow or freezing, the Puget Sound is decidedly north, and through the equinox the length of the days shifts rapidly, swinging toward the winter days, which are barely more than half the length of their long summer counterparts. Add the frequently overcast sky, which lets so little light through, and non-natives who have spent the summer munching cherries and blackberries through our 10 o’clock twilight often find themselves fleeing south.

But the dark time of the year is not without its pleasure, a period of rest and contemplation after the frenetic summer. It is a wonderful time for the pleasures of the table, with maybe even a fire on the heart, or a soup simmering on the back of the stove. People begin to move indoors again; life becomes private. And in the fall many of us go into the woods, alone or in quiet twos and threes, and spend time among the shadowed places, relishing the cool, the dark, the rain, and looking for mushrooms.

Mushrooms have a mixed reputation in this country, especially those vast arrays of species that aren’t the familiar grocery store buttons. Esteemed by foodies, feared or scorned by much of the populace, valued by some for their hallucinogenic properties, most people seem to approach mushrooms with opinions already formed. It should not be a surprise, since so much of our culture we have inherited, with our language, from the English, who are, compared to many of their mushroom-loving European brethren, noted fungiphobes. (Which is not to say the English never partake, but merely they tended to regard the mushrooms with a skepticism quite different from the affection of the French and Eastern Europeans, or the wild adoration of many Russians, to name a few.)

The Pacific Northwest has been greatly blessed by the mushroom gods, and we are a veritable haven for fungi. The woods and wet falls and springs are ideal for mushrooms, and we have one of the larger and most reliable fruitings of anywhere in the country. Even in the city, on lawns, in parks and landscaped patches, we have an unusually rich and diverse community of fungi (though care should always be taken when hunting in landscaped areas so as to avoid contaminants).

It never fails to amaze me how many people simply do not notice this bounty that fruits in our area. Many times, when I first take people hunting they simply don’t see the mushrooms in the grass, on the ground or hiding in the shadows under a rhododendron. And then when they train their eyes to see, it is as if they have glimpsed faerie, and are amazed at this other world, always there, that has suddenly opened up before them. For the mushrooms are not always small or unobtrusive. I have found Agaricus augustuses fully 11 inches across at the cap, as big as dinner plates, or Amanita muscarias only slightly smaller and bright red with white spots hatching next to a college library.

In the woods, the Amanita muscarias, which fade as they age to a salmon pink while retaining their white spots, sometimes come up in rings fully twelve feet in diameter. These are, as it happens, one of the most interesting hallucinogenic mushrooms for shamanic use worldwide, though the amount and type of toxins varies by region, and I wouldn’t recommend playing with our local varieties. Amanitas in general are one of the more perilous families of mushrooms, containing some of the most poisonous specimens found in this region. There is recorded use of amanitas from North America to Siberia, as well as interesting speculation that they were the source of the vedic drug soma.

And, as an interesting footnote regarding hallucinogenic mushrooms, the Psilocybe stuntzii, one of the mushrooms most often hunted for its perception-altering properties, though not as potent as its cousin Psilocybe cyanescens, was originally identified on the University of Washington campus, and is named after the former professor of mycology there, Daniel Stuntz. While, at least as I understand it, these mushrooms were not originally native to this area, they have become quite common around universities, libraries, government buildings and other landscaped areas. And hunter beware: While some people would caution against any consumption — which is, of course, illegal — at least be aware that these sometimes intermingle with deadly Gallerinas, so if you’re not absolutely sure, don’t put it in your mouth. We tend to be rather attached to our livers and don’t function very well or long, without them.

So before I begin describing some of our easier and more rewarding mushrooms to hunt, a few words of caution. First off, while mushrooms are not really any more likely to be poisonous than plants, some are poisonous, mostly of a sort that will give you gastrointestinal distress, and a very few are quite poisonous and can kill you.

The problem with mushrooms is that most people learn at least a little bit of plant identification as children — enough, say, to recognize a holly’s berries and know they will be deleterious to one’s health, whereas blackberries can only enhance it. Many who can recognize red huckleberries, dandelions, wild onions, hazelnuts and other common wild edibles, know not to eat nightshade or water hemlock and have at least a rudimentary idea of what features might be significant in distinguishing one plants from another. Most of us, however, did not grow up with even this basic background in fungi, and so until we have had time to acquaint ourselves with the mycological world and train our eyes to their identifying features, our abilities to reliably tell one mushroom from another are often rather weak. It’s not that mushrooms are inherently more difficult to distinguish, but that as a culture we tend to be less learned in how to go about this. However, until we have had a chance to hone these skills, it is not a good idea to go sampling mushrooms that you believe resemble those found in guides, or even this article. The first rule or foraging is never to eat anything you haven’t positively identified.

This same precaution applies to people who have learned to hunt mushrooms in one area, and then moved to another. While your skills will do you in good stead, make sure you take a while to familiarize yourself with our native mushrooms, both nourishing and otherwise, before you add them to your diet. The most common cause of mushroom poisoning on the west coast is among immigrants who eat certain (sometimes deadly) Amanita species that are not native to their homelands, not being aware of the need to distinguish them from familiar edible species.

If you want to make a more serious study of mushrooms, there are a number of excellent guidebooks — paramount among which are David Arora’s pocket guide All the Rain Promises (perhaps the best introductory text on mushrooms) and the larger and more hard-core Mushrooms Demystified. Even better, the Puget Sound Mycological Society (www.psms.org) holds monthly meetings throughout the fall, winter and spring and is a good place to learn hands-on identification from experienced mushroomers, among other diversions.

I use the word “mushrooms” here to describe any fleshy fungus, edible, umbrella-shaped or otherwise. The popular term “toadstool” has no particular biological meaning, though it is sometimes used, primarily by those who are not fond of mushrooms, to refer to ones they regard with suspicion. All mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of organisms that live either in ground or in wood or another organic substrate (called “mycelia”) or in symbiosis with plant roots (called “mycorrhizia”). The most recognizable mushrooms have the umbrella shape we are accustomed to from the grocery store, consisting of a stem and a cap, the underside of the cap having either gills (as do the more common cultivated varieties) or pores (mushrooms with pores look as if the underside of the cap is made out of a porous, spongy material).

Here are a few of my favorite mushrooms, ones that fruit in profusion this area and that are, if not foolproof at least (to steal a phrase from David Arora) reasonably intelligence-proof. Again, I do not expect this listing to replace a guidebook or trained identification, but I hope it might be a good place to start informal investigations. (If in doubt, if you have found a field of beautiful mushrooms that you can not identify on your own and yet cannot in conscience ignore, drop me a note at tylik@eskimo.com, and I’ll try either to help you or refer you to someone both local and qualified.)

Fairy Ring Mushroom (Marasmius oriedes)

This is one of the most common ring-forming lawn mushrooms, and a great favorite among pagans for its folkloric associations. (Do not, however, assume that all ring-forming lawn mushrooms are edible — many circles of mycelia will fruit along the perimeter, forming rings. Nor does the fairy ring mushroom always form rings.) This mushroom is an opportunist, meaning that it will fruit spring and fall, often several times a season, as long as the conditions are right. (Mostly, it awaits sufficient moisture.) The mushroom world has given us a great variety of hard-to-differentiate “little brown mushrooms” (known as LBMs), many of which most mushroomers do not bother with, but this one is worth knowing, as it is not only common but tasty, with a light, delicate flavor that goes particularly well with lemon and the gentler alliums.

This cream- to buff-colored mushroom stands only two to three inches tall, with a cap usually about one inch across in diameter at maturity. Its gills are straight, evenly spaced, do not fork or split and have light-colored spores. The cap often has a hump in the middle, giving it a bit of the appearance of a hat at maturity. The stem is fibrous and not particularly appetizing. The entire mushroom dries very easily and reconstitutes quickly after being soaked in water. Collecting mushrooms from a circle will encourage the underground mycelia to produce more, just as collecting beans results in more beans, and so can be done without fear of damaging the organism.

Boletes and Cousins

Boletes are plump, fleshy mushrooms with spongy pores on the undersides of their caps rather than gills. This is the clan of the Porcini, one of the most highly prized of all edible mushrooms. The clan breaks down into three families, Boletus, the true boletes; Suillus, the slippery jack; and the Lecinums, a family that includes the birch boletes and other fine edibles.

The basic rule of thumb given for boletes is that they are safe to eat if their pores are yellow or white, and neither the pores nor the stem are red, or stain blue when bruised. However, while this rule of thumb will take you fairly far and is the reason boletes have a reputation for being a safe family, it is not entirely reliable. Better by far to get a proper identification book and key out each mushroom completely.

If the “bolete” you find has a notably slippery or, if drier, sticky surface, it is a slippery jack. (Also, slippery jacks tend to but don’t always have larger pores that are often radially arranged.) Slippery jacks are among our most common boletes, and if they are not among the most prized, the edibles among them can be fine despite their tendency towards sliminess.

If the “bolete” you find does not have a sticky or slippery cap, has closely packed pores and a smooth stem, you have found a true bolete. Not all true boletes are edible, but many of those that are are choice, so it may well be worth your while to properly identify it. However, be warned that we are not the only creatures who like to eat boletes, so keep a close eye our for insect infestations and slug damage. Boletes age quickly and aren’t worth collecting past their prime, though they dry very well if you find yourself in possession of a large quantity.

If your bolete is again without a slippery or sticky cap, but the stem has a dark webbing that looks rather like the cheek of a dark-haired, fair-skinned man who has not shaved for a day or two, it is a Leccinum. While this family is not generally as highly prized as some of the true boletes, some of them are quite tasty and very common in this area, especially growing in association with birch trees. These, too, dry very well, though they rather oddly turn black in the drying process.

Chicken of the Woods

This is a shelf mushroom, rather like the hard, white-bottomed artists’ conks one finds growing off the sides of trees. However, chicken of the woods is one of those mushrooms that is easy to recognize because it looks like nothing else on this earth. Softer than a woody conk, growing in ruffled shelves on the sides of trees and dead wood, chicken of the woods is an amazing day-glow orange on top, and a paler yellow underneath. When young and tender, it can be delectable, having a flavor and texture very similar to that of chicken, though it requires a long cooking. Older specimens tend to be tougher and sour, though this can, at least in part, be remedied through long cooking and careful seasonings. This mushroom is often available during the fall at the Pike Place Market.

As with most mushrooms, even once you have positively identified it you shouldn’t have a large serving if you haven’t eaten it before, because some people have unpleasant reactions even to mushrooms that are generally edible.

Chantrelles

For many, the chantrelle, golden and shaped like the mouth of a trumpet turned upward toward the sky, is the prince of the wild mushrooms. (However, there is another mushroom named “the prince” that is a large, almond-scented relative of the grocery store agaric and not in the least related to the chantrelle.) Chantrelles are forest mushrooms, growing from mycorhizia. They are most easily identified by their thick, veined gills, which stand out as rounded ridges rather than the knife-edges of true gills. In our area, both the white and gold chantrelles are fairly common, though only the gold is hunted in large numbers for the commercial trade. Personally, I like the white at least as well. There are also more fragile black and blue varieties.

Not all native chantrelles are edible, there being a common inedible variety that is feathered across the surface of the cap. If in doubt, e-mail me and I’ll help resolve the problem for only a tithe.

Shaggy Manes

Shaggy manes are another opportunist, and another mushroom commonly found in parks, on lawns and other haphazard locations. These look like tall, white eggs, standing on end, usually in grassy areas or on ground that has been disturbed in the last few years. On closer investigation, you will find these fragile, white mushrooms have hollow stems and a long gilled cap covered with delicate feathery white shags that almost completely hides the stem. As they age, the bottom edge of the cap begins to turn pink, and then dark, and finally dissolves to black liquid. This liquid is essentially the same as giving the shaggy mane’s buff-colored cousins, the inky caps, their name. It is dark brown, and thinned with water does indeed make a fine ink, well-suited to magickal use. In fact, collecting shaggy manes and inky caps for ink might be one of the safest ways to embark on mushroom hunting.

Oyster Mushrooms

These days, many people are familiar with this white to grayish-buff wood-growing mushroom, since it is widely cultivated and available (for a fancy price) from most grocery stores. There are actually a great many varieties of oyster mushrooms, and they are common growing on trees and dead wood throughout this region. These are tender, gilled mushrooms that grow in shelf-like lobes with either no discernible stem or a stem off to one side rather than centered, as is the case with most familiar mushrooms. They fruit spring and fall, as conditions permit. In fact, a distinction is made between “angel wings” and “oyster” mushrooms, the former whiter and more delicate than the latter. However, both cook up well.

Happy mushroom hunting!

A Pagan Hunts the Fruits of Autumn

A Pagan Hunts the Fruits of Autumn

by Catherine Harper

Sometime in September I wake up and the sky is gray, the day is cool, the bright golden harvest has begun its descent into the quieter late autumn, and even as much as I love the sun, I am relieved. It’s as if the shorter days give me license to stay content inside, writing and cooking, or to cover up outside after I have become a little weary of sun and skin. By the time the weather turns, I am always ready to turn a bit inward. It has been a sunny summer and a good, warm harvest, and now it is time for things to be a bit more muted and for rest.

By Mabon, I should have a cord or two of apple wood stacked for the oven. The bright fruits of summer are finishing in the garden, the winter squash thinking about hardening their shells, the beans and tomatoes coming in. The sunny days are some of the best for hiking and bicycling, cooler weather bringing us out of summer’s languor. But the Indian summer, if we are so lucky as to be granted one, is transitory, a red and gold finale to the light half of the year, and the gray days and rains are waiting.

What is startling about our winters is not so much the amount of rain (well, maybe some years), for all the press that it gets, but the contrast between our mild climate and the dark that descends on us. For all that we see little snow or freezing, the Puget Sound is decidedly north, and through the equinox the length of the days shifts rapidly, swinging toward the winter days, which are barely more than half the length of their long summer counterparts. Add the frequently overcast sky, which lets so little light through, and non-natives who have spent the summer munching cherries and blackberries through our 10 o’clock twilight often find themselves fleeing south.

But the dark time of the year is not without its pleasure, a period of rest and contemplation after the frenetic summer. It is a wonderful time for the pleasures of the table, with maybe even a fire on the heart, or a soup simmering on the back of the stove. People begin to move indoors again; life becomes private. And in the fall many of us go into the woods, alone or in quiet twos and threes, and spend time among the shadowed places, relishing the cool, the dark, the rain, and looking for mushrooms.

Mushrooms have a mixed reputation in this country, especially those vast arrays of species that aren’t the familiar grocery store buttons. Esteemed by foodies, feared or scorned by much of the populace, valued by some for their hallucinogenic properties, most people seem to approach mushrooms with opinions already formed. It should not be a surprise, since so much of our culture we have inherited, with our language, from the English, who are, compared to many of their mushroom-loving European brethren, noted fungiphobes. (Which is not to say the English never partake, but merely they tended to regard the mushrooms with a skepticism quite different from the affection of the French and Eastern Europeans, or the wild adoration of many Russians, to name a few.)

The Pacific Northwest has been greatly blessed by the mushroom gods, and we are a veritable haven for fungi. The woods and wet falls and springs are ideal for mushrooms, and we have one of the larger and most reliable fruitings of anywhere in the country. Even in the city, on lawns, in parks and landscaped patches, we have an unusually rich and diverse community of fungi (though care should always be taken when hunting in landscaped areas so as to avoid contaminants).

It never fails to amaze me how many people simply do not notice this bounty that fruits in our area. Many times, when I first take people hunting they simply don’t see the mushrooms in the grass, on the ground or hiding in the shadows under a rhododendron. And then when they train their eyes to see, it is as if they have glimpsed faerie, and are amazed at this other world, always there, that has suddenly opened up before them. For the mushrooms are not always small or unobtrusive. I have found Agaricus augustuses fully 11 inches across at the cap, as big as dinner plates, or Amanita muscarias only slightly smaller and bright red with white spots hatching next to a college library.

In the woods, the Amanita muscarias, which fade as they age to a salmon pink while retaining their white spots, sometimes come up in rings fully twelve feet in diameter. These are, as it happens, one of the most interesting hallucinogenic mushrooms for shamanic use worldwide, though the amount and type of toxins varies by region, and I wouldn’t recommend playing with our local varieties. Amanitas in general are one of the more perilous families of mushrooms, containing some of the most poisonous specimens found in this region. There is recorded use of amanitas from North America to Siberia, as well as interesting speculation that they were the source of the vedic drug soma.

And, as an interesting footnote regarding hallucinogenic mushrooms, the Psilocybe stuntzii, one of the mushrooms most often hunted for its perception-altering properties, though not as potent as its cousin Psilocybe cyanescens, was originally identified on the University of Washington campus, and is named after the former professor of mycology there, Daniel Stuntz. While, at least as I understand it, these mushrooms were not originally native to this area, they have become quite common around universities, libraries, government buildings and other landscaped areas. And hunter beware: While some people would caution against any consumption — which is, of course, illegal — at least be aware that these sometimes intermingle with deadly Gallerinas, so if you’re not absolutely sure, don’t put it in your mouth. We tend to be rather attached to our livers and don’t function very well or long, without them.

So before I begin describing some of our easier and more rewarding mushrooms to hunt, a few words of caution. First off, while mushrooms are not really any more likely to be poisonous than plants, some are poisonous, mostly of a sort that will give you gastrointestinal distress, and a very few are quite poisonous and can kill you.

The problem with mushrooms is that most people learn at least a little bit of plant identification as children — enough, say, to recognize a holly’s berries and know they will be deleterious to one’s health, whereas blackberries can only enhance it. Many who can recognize red huckleberries, dandelions, wild onions, hazelnuts and other common wild edibles, know not to eat nightshade or water hemlock and have at least a rudimentary idea of what features might be significant in distinguishing one plants from another. Most of us, however, did not grow up with even this basic background in fungi, and so until we have had time to acquaint ourselves with the mycological world and train our eyes to their identifying features, our abilities to reliably tell one mushroom from another are often rather weak. It’s not that mushrooms are inherently more difficult to distinguish, but that as a culture we tend to be less learned in how to go about this. However, until we have had a chance to hone these skills, it is not a good idea to go sampling mushrooms that you believe resemble those found in guides, or even this article. The first rule or foraging is never to eat anything you haven’t positively identified.

This same precaution applies to people who have learned to hunt mushrooms in one area, and then moved to another. While your skills will do you in good stead, make sure you take a while to familiarize yourself with our native mushrooms, both nourishing and otherwise, before you add them to your diet. The most common cause of mushroom poisoning on the west coast is among immigrants who eat certain (sometimes deadly) Amanita species that are not native to their homelands, not being aware of the need to distinguish them from familiar edible species.

If you want to make a more serious study of mushrooms, there are a number of excellent guidebooks — paramount among which are David Arora’s pocket guide All the Rain Promises (perhaps the best introductory text on mushrooms) and the larger and more hard-core Mushrooms Demystified. Even better, the Puget Sound Mycological Society (www.psms.org) holds monthly meetings throughout the fall, winter and spring and is a good place to learn hands-on identification from experienced mushroomers, among other diversions.

I use the word “mushrooms” here to describe any fleshy fungus, edible, umbrella-shaped or otherwise. The popular term “toadstool” has no particular biological meaning, though it is sometimes used, primarily by those who are not fond of mushrooms, to refer to ones they regard with suspicion. All mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of organisms that live either in ground or in wood or another organic substrate (called “mycelia”) or in symbiosis with plant roots (called “mycorrhizia”). The most recognizable mushrooms have the umbrella shape we are accustomed to from the grocery store, consisting of a stem and a cap, the underside of the cap having either gills (as do the more common cultivated varieties) or pores (mushrooms with pores look as if the underside of the cap is made out of a porous, spongy material).

Here are a few of my favorite mushrooms, ones that fruit in profusion this area and that are, if not foolproof at least (to steal a phrase from David Arora) reasonably intelligence-proof. Again, I do not expect this listing to replace a guidebook or trained identification, but I hope it might be a good place to start informal investigations. (If in doubt, if you have found a field of beautiful mushrooms that you can not identify on your own and yet cannot in conscience ignore, drop me a note at tylik@eskimo.com, and I’ll try either to help you or refer you to someone both local and qualified.)

Fairy Ring Mushroom (Marasmius oriedes)

This is one of the most common ring-forming lawn mushrooms, and a great favorite among pagans for its folkloric associations. (Do not, however, assume that all ring-forming lawn mushrooms are edible — many circles of mycelia will fruit along the perimeter, forming rings. Nor does the fairy ring mushroom always form rings.) This mushroom is an opportunist, meaning that it will fruit spring and fall, often several times a season, as long as the conditions are right. (Mostly, it awaits sufficient moisture.) The mushroom world has given us a great variety of hard-to-differentiate “little brown mushrooms” (known as LBMs), many of which most mushroomers do not bother with, but this one is worth knowing, as it is not only common but tasty, with a light, delicate flavor that goes particularly well with lemon and the gentler alliums.

This cream- to buff-colored mushroom stands only two to three inches tall, with a cap usually about one inch across in diameter at maturity. Its gills are straight, evenly spaced, do not fork or split and have light-colored spores. The cap often has a hump in the middle, giving it a bit of the appearance of a hat at maturity. The stem is fibrous and not particularly appetizing. The entire mushroom dries very easily and reconstitutes quickly after being soaked in water. Collecting mushrooms from a circle will encourage the underground mycelia to produce more, just as collecting beans results in more beans, and so can be done without fear of damaging the organism.

Boletes and Cousins

Boletes are plump, fleshy mushrooms with spongy pores on the undersides of their caps rather than gills. This is the clan of the Porcini, one of the most highly prized of all edible mushrooms. The clan breaks down into three families, Boletus, the true boletes; Suillus, the slippery jack; and the Lecinums, a family that includes the birch boletes and other fine edibles.

The basic rule of thumb given for boletes is that they are safe to eat if their pores are yellow or white, and neither the pores nor the stem are red, or stain blue when bruised. However, while this rule of thumb will take you fairly far and is the reason boletes have a reputation for being a safe family, it is not entirely reliable. Better by far to get a proper identification book and key out each mushroom completely.

If the “bolete” you find has a notably slippery or, if drier, sticky surface, it is a slippery jack. (Also, slippery jacks tend to but don’t always have larger pores that are often radially arranged.) Slippery jacks are among our most common boletes, and if they are not among the most prized, the edibles among them can be fine despite their tendency towards sliminess.

If the “bolete” you find does not have a sticky or slippery cap, has closely packed pores and a smooth stem, you have found a true bolete. Not all true boletes are edible, but many of those that are are choice, so it may well be worth your while to properly identify it. However, be warned that we are not the only creatures who like to eat boletes, so keep a close eye our for insect infestations and slug damage. Boletes age quickly and aren’t worth collecting past their prime, though they dry very well if you find yourself in possession of a large quantity.

If your bolete is again without a slippery or sticky cap, but the stem has a dark webbing that looks rather like the cheek of a dark-haired, fair-skinned man who has not shaved for a day or two, it is a Leccinum. While this family is not generally as highly prized as some of the true boletes, some of them are quite tasty and very common in this area, especially growing in association with birch trees. These, too, dry very well, though they rather oddly turn black in the drying process.

Chicken of the Woods

This is a shelf mushroom, rather like the hard, white-bottomed artists’ conks one finds growing off the sides of trees. However, chicken of the woods is one of those mushrooms that is easy to recognize because it looks like nothing else on this earth. Softer than a woody conk, growing in ruffled shelves on the sides of trees and dead wood, chicken of the woods is an amazing day-glow orange on top, and a paler yellow underneath. When young and tender, it can be delectable, having a flavor and texture very similar to that of chicken, though it requires a long cooking. Older specimens tend to be tougher and sour, though this can, at least in part, be remedied through long cooking and careful seasonings. This mushroom is often available during the fall at the Pike Place Market.

As with most mushrooms, even once you have positively identified it you shouldn’t have a large serving if you haven’t eaten it before, because some people have unpleasant reactions even to mushrooms that are generally edible.

Chantrelles

For many, the chantrelle, golden and shaped like the mouth of a trumpet turned upward toward the sky, is the prince of the wild mushrooms. (However, there is another mushroom named “the prince” that is a large, almond-scented relative of the grocery store agaric and not in the least related to the chantrelle.) Chantrelles are forest mushrooms, growing from mycorhizia. They are most easily identified by their thick, veined gills, which stand out as rounded ridges rather than the knife-edges of true gills. In our area, both the white and gold chantrelles are fairly common, though only the gold is hunted in large numbers for the commercial trade. Personally, I like the white at least as well. There are also more fragile black and blue varieties.

Not all native chantrelles are edible, there being a common inedible variety that is feathered across the surface of the cap. If in doubt, e-mail me and I’ll help resolve the problem for only a tithe.

Shaggy Manes

Shaggy manes are another opportunist, and another mushroom commonly found in parks, on lawns and other haphazard locations. These look like tall, white eggs, standing on end, usually in grassy areas or on ground that has been disturbed in the last few years. On closer investigation, you will find these fragile, white mushrooms have hollow stems and a long gilled cap covered with delicate feathery white shags that almost completely hides the stem. As they age, the bottom edge of the cap begins to turn pink, and then dark, and finally dissolves to black liquid. This liquid is essentially the same as giving the shaggy mane’s buff-colored cousins, the inky caps, their name. It is dark brown, and thinned with water does indeed make a fine ink, well-suited to magickal use. In fact, collecting shaggy manes and inky caps for ink might be one of the safest ways to embark on mushroom hunting.

Oyster Mushrooms

These days, many people are familiar with this white to grayish-buff wood-growing mushroom, since it is widely cultivated and available (for a fancy price) from most grocery stores. There are actually a great many varieties of oyster mushrooms, and they are common growing on trees and dead wood throughout this region. These are tender, gilled mushrooms that grow in shelf-like lobes with either no discernible stem or a stem off to one side rather than centered, as is the case with most familiar mushrooms. They fruit spring and fall, as conditions permit. In fact, a distinction is made between “angel wings” and “oyster” mushrooms, the former whiter and more delicate than the latter. However, both cook up well.

Happy mushroom hunting!

September 9 – Daily Feast

September 9 – Daily Feast

 

There are ways you have not dreamed existed – until you can see beyond your own limited vision to possibilities of real substance. It takes a certain Mindset to stop believing in shortages and start seeing good things happen. Some people believe they will never see their dreams fulfilled – they accept it. And that acceptance solidifies such beliefs into reality. You have developed a consciousness of ga lu lo gi, the Cherokee’s expression of lack. In the words of the prophet, “Is anything too hard for God?”

~ We are all poor men; and I think others have got all the goods. ~

SATANTA – KIOWA

‘A Cherokee Feast of Days, Volume II’ by Joyce Sequichie Hifler

*<<<=-=>>>*<<<=-=>>>*<<<=-=>>>*<<<=-=>>>*

 

The Top 5 Things Your Local Witch Wants You to Know

The Top 5 Things Your Local Witch Wants You to Know

Author: Holly Risingstar

I am a fairly ordinary woman. I’m in my early thirties; I have a Master’s Degree in Counseling Services; I work with families in crisis. I’ve got two kids, a husband, and family nearby; I love the arts, shopping, beadwork, travel, and photography. I’m addicted to the Grey’s Anatomy and Heroes. I drive a black Honda that has seen better days. I wish gas prices would go down. I’m in desperate need of a haircut.

Oh, and did I mention, I’m a witch?

No, really.

I was born into a nominally Jewish family and had five years’ worth of Hebrew school growing up, but it never felt right to me. I never felt connected, spiritually, to God. By the time I was hitting my teens, I had started to read more and more about the occult, and finally came across Scott Cunningham’s book Wicca: a Guide for the Solitary Practitioner (considered by many to be the best introductory book on Wicca there is). Finally, I Got It. Something inside me knew this was my path, where I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to be doing. I’ve been Wiccan for 17 years now, and I’ve never looked back.

Wicca is an earth-based, non-Judeo-Christian religion. The modern form was created from various pieces of pagan religion by Gerald Gardner in the 1930s, but from there has exploded into a rainbow of traditions, each with its own particular blend of magic, faith, and morals. Wicca is a legally recognized religion in the U.S and you can even have it imprinted on your dog tags in the Armed Forces. It is often cited as being the fastest-growing religion in the country.

When asked to write this piece on Wicca, I considered carefully what I might want to say. Should I launch into a defense of my beliefs? Normalize Wicca with other religions? Simply compare and contrast? Deliver an anecdotal “Day in the Life of a Witch” kind of thing?

I settled on this:

THE TOP FIVE THINGS YOUR LOCAL WITCH WOULD WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT WICCA

1.We are not Satanists.

You heard it here first! Wicca does not subscribe to a Judeo-Christian belief in God; therefore, we don’t believe in a Devil, Hell, or Heaven. Wiccans revere nature and treat the Mother Earth with great respect. Many (though not all) of us believe in some aspect of the Goddess; many also believe in some form of the God, Her consort.

The most common belief system involves the Triple Goddess; a Mother Goddess, symbolized by the moon, who watches over mothers and children, family and all matters pertaining to that phase of a woman’s life; a Maiden Goddess, who reigns over joy, youth, vitality, freedom, and so on; and a Crone Goddess, who holds the secrets of magic and is the Guardian of the Crossroads (in other words, a death-related Goddess. Not one who causes death, mind, but who assists those who are in this stage of existence.)

Often the Goddess has a God consort, symbolized by the Sun, who is her lover and assists her with Creation of all things. Often he is associated with forests, certain animals, and a vast variety of human experiences ranging from sex to war to creativity. One of the great joys of Wicca is the ability to choose which Goddesses and Gods have meaning and connection for you – though they’ve been known to choose the practitioner!

2.We have one law – An It Harm None, So Mote It Be.

Which means don’t harm anyone, including yourself. Sounds fairly simple, right? Not so easy. It’s a tough moral code to live by. We cannot, in good conscience, take revenge, cause harm, or cause another person problems on purpose. No killing, no stealing, respecting other human beings – sound familiar?

3.You probably know one of us.

Wiccans (and pagans of all flavors) are everywhere. We come from all walks of life; nurses, doctors, teachers, lawyers, convenience store clerks, computer programmers, business owners, you name it. We are not necessarily the odd chick down the street with the long hippie skirts and twelve cats. . .ok, well, she might be one of us.

We have our share of hippies, vegans, Goths, and assorted subcultures. But you won’t necessarily know us just looking at us – most people I tell about my religious leanings are surprised. As a co-worker (and devout Christian) recently said to me, “I was so surprised that you are – you know, what you are. I kept saying, “How can Holly be a heathen? She’s so nice!”

4.Yes, we do cast spells.

It’s very similar to praying. Spell casting simply means using rituals to help bring about a desired outcome; no more, no less. A conscientious witch never casts on another human being without that person’s consent and full knowledge, and she won’t do it for money, if she’s the real deal. Witches try never to violate another person’s free will. There are no big flashes like in the movies; I can’t fly, float, or make things disappear (though there’s a shot if I put it on my desk!), and lightning has certainly never flown out of my fingertips.

What I can do is help protect, heal, bring about some occurrences (like employment or good legal results), marry couples and bless children, and things of that nature. I do not hex, curse, or cause harm through magic. It’s not cool with the Goddess.

5.You may have participated in a Wiccan or Pagan tradition.

We have holidays, creation myths, and rituals just like any other religion.

Wiccans generally celebrate eight high holidays: Samhain (pronounced so-when) on October 31st is one of them. That jack o’lantern on your porch? Started out as turnips, decorated to keep away evil spirits. Next comes Yule, the Winter Solstice, on December 21st – and if you have a Christmas tree, know that it started as the use of evergreen to symbolize life and rebirth in Roman and Druidic rituals.

Following are Candlemas on February 2nd, which celebrates the lambing of the ewes and the returning spring; Litha, the spring equinox, on March 21st; Beltane on May 1st, which celebrates life, generativity, and is where the Maypole comes from (you are dancing around a phallus to make the fields fruitful, folks!) Next, the Summer Solstice on June 21st, then Lammas on August 2nd, which celebrates the height of summer.

Lastly we have Mabon, the autumnal equinox, which ends the cycle of growth and prepares us for Samhain and the winter to come. We also celebrate and worship on the night of the full moon; we may also celebrate life events like births, weddings, maturation of our children, and death. In this way we remain close to the cycles of the earth, never forgetting who we are and what is happening in the world around us.

Wicca and Paganism are rapidly becoming mainstreamed. Your local bookstore probably has a decent-sized section on Metaphysical Studies, and you’ll find plenty on the religion there.

We have our own magazines, hundreds of websites, bumper stickers, T-shirts, music, and so on. Being Wiccan or Pagan does not necessarily mean we’re strange; it means that we have a different belief system than the general American public.

If you run across a Wiccan or a Pagan, don’t be afraid to ask us questions. We won’t come to you, but if you ask we’re generally happy to share what we know with others. Most witches are delighted to have a chance to combat the stereotyping and misconceptions the public has of us.

When we part, Wiccans often say, “Blessed Be.” And so I’ll leave you with a Blessed Be – merry met, merry part, and merry meet again.


Footnotes:
Previously published in a Mensa newsletter.

Ethics and Etiquette

Ethics and Etiquette

 

Hello,

I would like to contribute the attached article, written by me, to the IBOS. This article may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, providing that this original copyright notice stays in place at all times.

Thank you,

Morgaine

© Morgaine 2001

 

When we speak of ethics and etiquette in relation to pagansim what are we referring to? Are we speaking of outdated rules and actions that no longer have meaning and we only give lip service to? I don’t believe so. Ethics and etiquette are living, breathing codes of life, shaping our actions in relation to each other, and ourselves. They are a guiding force in the way we live our lives.

Let us first look at ethics. Ethics are defined as –a set of principles; moral philosophy; rules or standards governing the conduct of a person or the members of a profession; human duty; a particular system of principles and rules concerning duty, whether true or false; rules of practice in respect to a single class of human actions; motivation based on ideas of right and wrong; the philosophical study of moral values and rules.

When we begin to speak of ethics, we need to realize that this can be a very touchy subject. We are human after all, and we want to think our ethics are the correct ones. While there are generally accepted community ethics, it is personal ethics that make up who we are. And these are not the same for each person.

Before we begin to discuss in depth community and person ethics let us first look at the Rede, the most common code of conduct among Wiccans.

Bide the Wiccan law ye must, in perfect love and perfect trust;

Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfill;

‘An ye harm none, do as ye will’;

Lest in self-defense it be, ever mind the rule of three;

Follow this with mind and heart;

And merry ye meet and merry ye part.

Every Wiccan knows the Rede. Our passwords into the sacred circle are in here. Our major rule of ethic is here. And the reason for breaking this ethic, as well as the consequences of breaking it foolishly. When we extract the line most popular –An ye harm none, do as ye will’ and begin to dissect it, we have to wonder “Is this an ethic we can every achieve?”

I believe the Rede is a standard of living, like all ethics, and one that is an impossibility to achieve. The goal is to live as closely to the Rede as possible. In the attempt to do this, we begin to analyze our actions. We follow the path of LEAST harm. Thus, we begin to live conscious of our actions, and how they effect the world around us. And here comes the REAL lesson of the Rede. It forces us to have personal responsibility. Once you have acknowledged that the Rede is a goal to work for and not a given situation, and have taken of the blinders that let you go around smug and happy that your religion is so sweet it makes your teeth itch, you can get down to the work of making your life an ethical one. What this involves is considering each decision in the light of the Rede before you decide upon a course of action. You do this by looking at all the possible consequences of that action and whether that will cause harm to any, choosing the path that causes the least harm and, (THIS IS THE KEY) accepting the responsibility for the consequences of your actions whether intentional or unintentional. -Lark, HPS of Tangled Moon Coven.

Wicca, as well as most Pagansim, is a religion and spiritual path of personal responsibility. We strive to live in an aware state. When we do this, we recognize our free will, and the free will of others. If we ignore the lesson of personal responsibility, we fail to realize our true spiritual potential and our true spiritual will.

As we begin our path, we must develop a set of personal ethics, while maintaining a respect for the ethics of the community we are becoming a part of. Some community ethics are very well defined.

-Don’t practice black magick, or follow the left-hand path.

-Don’t attempt to harm another or interfere with their free will.

-Always act in a way that will reflect well upon your path. Never do anything that will bring harm to the Craft.

Since Wicca, and pagansim, are very open paths and for the most part do not seek to make anyone follow ‘ONE RIGHT WAY’, most of the ethics defined by community are concerning harm to others, and harm to the Craft.

But to begin a spiritual path, and to follow it every day of your life, you must develop your own set of personal ethics that define the way you live. No one can tell you what your personal ethics should be. Your teachers, mentors, HPS, HP can all recommend both in word and deed, ethics that work for them. You may be given a ‘Book of the Law’ that governs your group or tradition. If you are a solitary, you may read on the net, or in a book, acceptable codes of conduct, or ideals. But you cannot take someone else’s ethics and make them your own. You must do some soul searching, and decide how you feel about things. Now I am NOT suggesting that you ignore your HPS or HP, or your teachers and mentors. I am suggesting that you should always temper wisdom with personal experience. You must come to a point that you are willing to question what you are taught, to grow in your own self. Through this, your own sense of ethics and morals will come.

Now, here comes the biggie. What do you do when your personal ethics are in direct conflict with accepted community ethics? For example-it has become a phenomenon in the pagan community to love everything white and full of light, and shun everything dark and full of shadow. It has become unacceptable to speak of negative emotions like anger and envy. It has become unacceptable to feel hate towards another person, wish that a murderer would get the death penalty, which that rapist would get castrated by a bunch of angry women. Some of us fondly refer to this a fluffy, bunny Wicca, no offense to anything fluffy, or bunnies. We are taught to love unconditionally because we are all brothers and sisters, connected to each other and every living thing. We are taught that if we experience these emotions, maybe we aren’t all that spiritual, and especially not as much as Miss crystal love and light. We are often looked down upon if we say something like ‘I am so damn mad at my ex husband I could smack him’. The response I myself have heard to such comment is ‘my my, now THAT wasn’t very positive’. Well, guess what. It WASN’T. Now I am not saying that you should indulge in these emotions. They can be deterrents to developing a sound spiritual identity because they are ‘negative’ in the sense that they are base emotions that do not vibrate on the spiritual plane. But they also teach us lessons that can lead to spiritual epiphanies.

Life is a balance between light and dark. Nature is both beautifully creative and frighteningly destructive. Inside of a single human there is light and shadow, and to be totally balanced we must learn to face both, experience both and therefore learn from both. So back to the original question. Let’s say you don’t feel that you are evil if you feel anger at another person or what have you. What do you do when community ethics conflict with your personal ethics? In my opinion, as long as what you are doing does not come into direct conflict with the good of the general community, or does not manipulate or purposefully harm another person, then your personal ethics should come first. You should not do something maliciously to another person. When you do this, you are not only harming yourself, but you are harming that person, AND the whole of the community. It is very important that our community not be sullied, and the reasons are obvious. But beyond this, your personal ethics should prevail.

Do ethics change over time? Do you think that the ethics of our ancestors of 100, 200 or even 1000 or more years ago are the same as what they are now? I believe that ethics are a revolving and ever changing system. Some become outdated, and some we should always keep. For instance, it has only been in the recent resurgence of Pagansim in the last 50-60 years or so that the belief of ‘An ye harm none, do as ye will came about’. In times past, a witch who could not curse, could not heal. Societies have not always believed that you should not harm another person, or that interfering with someone life was a bad thing. The old wise woman of a village was sought out for every reason from fertility, to love, to revenge. It has been in our time only, with the resurgence of beliefs and the discrimination that we face, that we have adopted some of the common ethics we now have. I am NOT saying this is wrong, or that we should go back to the ‘Old Ways’. In a society that we now living in, and the information is available for spiritual purposes, there is no longer a need to seek out the crone of the village and ask her to grant you revenge on your enemy. But this is the perfect example of how ethics change with time. At one time it was ethical for old men to mate with young girls. In our culture, it is no longer ethical. So ethics change, and so they should. Change is the only constant in the universe, and without it, we grow stagnate and our lives become filled with rot and decay. Change blows in new life to help recreate our lives, our beliefs and yes, even out ethics.

The other common code of conduct that we hear of in the Pagan community is ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the Law, love under will.’ This comes from Aleister Crowley, from his book entitled ‘The Book of the Law’. Now knowing some of the things that we do about Crowley, it’s almost humorous to think of him in a discussion of ethics, except to point to what not to do maybe! But, this is a very powerful outlook on developing your own set of personal ethics.

In my understanding ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will’ does not mean you may do as you wish and that is it. It is speaking of your TRUE will, your TRUE purpose in life. And if you are following your true or higher will and purpose you will not come into conflict with another’s will so therefore you do not have to worry about stepping on anyone else’s toes. So you don’t have to worry about harming another, because you are in touch with the divine and you are following your own spiritual path and will, which will not cause harm or conflict with another. Of course, we still have conflicts with people. One way to look at this is as a spiritual lesson for either you or the other person. But if you are seeking to control another or harm another, this is not your true will. This is based upon the belief that every person is an individual, and as an individual you should be true to your own nature or consciousness. You must find your true will and make all of your actions subservient to the one great purpose. This again leads to conscious living.

If ethics are codes of personal and community conduct, then etiquette is a code of social conduct. Etiquette is defined as –the practices and forms prescribed by social convention or by authority; forms of conduct prescribed by polite society; code of correct conduct; also decorum denotes conformity with established standards of manners or behavior; the forms required by good breeding, or prescribed by authority, to be observed in social or official life; observance of the proprieties of rank and occasion; conventional decorum; ceremonial code of polite society; rules governing acceptable behavior.

Just like Emily Post and polite society, we in the Pagan community have behavior that is expected from us in how we interact with that community. In my opinion, etiquette is something sorely lacking in many Pagans. They are not taught certain things about how we interact with each other. This could be because maybe you didn’t have a teacher, or your teacher didn’t know them either. Or it could be because you or those who taught you just didn’t care, it wasn’t important to them. But I feel that etiquette is VERY important. It keeps us civilized, it aids us in how we interact and it shows the outside world that we know how to act.

Beyond the mundane world and it’s social etiquette, lets take a look at some things that are common among Pagan paths, especially the Wiccan path.

  1. You should never touch someone else’s magickal tools and items without their express permission. If you see something you like and want to touch, then ASK. Don’t just hold out your hand for it, or just pick it up. A person leaves an imprint of their energy on what they touch, and they may not want someone else’s energy on their magickal items. This includes athames all the way to stones and jewelery. And do not take offense if you ask and are told no.
  2. The way you live reflects on our whole community. You should always respect others, no matter their path. Inside your own religion thee is a certain higher respect given each other, as Children of the Goddess. This comes from a basic understanding of the hardships of the path, and the process we all go through in some way to evolve. It can be equated to any secret society and it’s initiation process and path of self-discovery. This path is not for everyone, and if you take it seriously, will change your life in ways you could never imagine. Any path that causes growth can be difficult. And we link with others that are going through the same thing we are and take strength from and learn from them.
  3. We endeavor to hold ourselves to a high standard of living our spiritual lives that the mundane world does not. Therefor we support each other, lending a hand when the pitfalls of the world come about.
  4. When someone gives of themselves to teach or guide, we recognize that person’s giving, and respect it. Not all of us are called to teach, and those who are offer a valuable service that should not be taken for granted.
  5. When you are called to teach or guide, you have been given a very serious part to play in your community. You should never abuse it in any way. It also does not mean that you may use it as a way to gain power over, or look down upon any other person. We are all where we should be onour path, and it does not mean a thing that you have 10 or 20 years of service and someone else has 1. We are all equal in the eyes of the Gods. And if you are a teacher, you are held to an even higher state of conduct. You must never involve yourself in anything that could cause harm to your students or to the Craft. You should never do anything that would bring a bad light on us. For instance, you should never become romantically involved with one of your students. You should not condone the use of illegal drugs, or alcohol if the person is not of age. You should not use your position to control your students, or make them dependent on you. The goal is to aid a person on this path. You supply the seed as a teacher. You cannot take them by the hand and learn from them, or be easy on them when you should be honest.
  6. In that same light, those who would be considered an elder in our faith are given a large amount of respect. The wisdom that is gained from following this path for 10, 20 or 30 years is an asset to our community, and we should respect the Elders of the community for what they have learned and what they teach us.
  7. Due to the advent of the internet, there is a phenomenon growing among new seekers that is very disturbing. It involves not understanding the hard work it takes to learn the Old Ways, or the dedication and self sacrifice those who follow, and especially those who teach and guide give to the path. From this lack of understanding, new seekers think they can go to any page on the net, learn what they can and be done with it. It also leads them to think that they can ask for what they want, and someone will just hand it over. For example, I have been asked to send someone a copy of my BOS. This shows me that the person requesting this has no idea of what a BOS is, what it stands for and the process that is gone through to acquire it. This is flat out rude to begin with. This person is wanting their religion hand fed to them. They want to skip the hard work, the dedication, the pitfalls and the trials, and get right to the reward. This is simply not how it’s done. This person wants the secrets and mysteries handed to them on a silver platter, without having to leave the comfort of the computer chair and work for them. This isn’t possible. And I am here to say STOP. Be mindful of what you are asking. You can’t go to the net, read a page or two, then go ask someone for their BOS, or even ask them to teach you. There must be effort on your part. You are not an adept after reading a page, or a book, or even ten books. The mysteries cannot be handed to you on a silver platter and you are a master of the universe. This is what I call lazy Wicca, and through lazy Wicca you will never come to experience the mysteries, because they come through dedication, hard work and a personal dedication to the Gods.
  8. Those who are out of the closet must NEVER give away the secrets of their brothers and sisters. You should never give any personal information. You should never tell the secrets of a coven, who it’s leaders are, who the members are or any other information. We must honor our vows and protect those who for whatever reason have chosen to remain hidden from the eyes of the world.
  9. For those who are out of the closet, your life and your actions must be above reproach in the eyes of the world. As an open pagan, you may be the only one that a non pagan every sees. They will see every Pagan in you. So in all things you must be truthful. You must live with dignity and honor.

In our discussion of ethics and etiquette the point I was trying to impress upon you is this. We have become a society who thinks that we may do as we please, act as we please and there are no consequences. We fight with the Christians. We complain about how they fight amongst themselves. We sneer at them when they point to another of them and say how that person is wrong and they way they practice is wrong. And yet, WE DO THE SAME THING.

When I meet a fellow priestess, I treat her with respect as a person, and doubly so as a priestess, since I know how hard that path can be, to have dedicated your life and your service to the Gods and the Old Ways. If I meet someone who has been walking the path for 20 or 30 years, I respect that person because of the knowledge they have obtained in that time. That is not to say my 10 years is less, or they are ‘more spiritual’ than me. It is saying that this path is not an easy one all the time, and to have lived it every day for that amount of time is deserving of respect. I was taught as a child to respect my elders, and I believe that is still a valid lesson. The elders of this path can teach us things that we have never even thought of. At the same time, as an elder, you should always remember what it was like to take your first stumbling steps on this path, and how you may have longed for some guidance. It is just as wrong to be an elder, and act as if you know everything, or someone who is only 20 or whatever age could never be a spiritual person. We all must remember our ethics and etiquette, and encourage each other every day.

We have forgotten to practice our personal ethics, and have thrown etiquette out the window. We have forgotten Emily Post and Miss Manners, and have went on about our merry little way to fight like cats and dogs, without even offering basic human respect for those with diverging views, and this troubles me. It is a plague that is infecting our community. The Witch Wars continue. We struggle to make our way the right way, even if we don’t realize we are doing this. We forget the very basic teaching that we are all connected, and that all paths are valid, as long as they fulfill our spiritual needs.

Let us remember our ethics. Let us live our lives with honor, treating all of life with respect. Follow your own path, without interference into another’s. Work hard, study hard and receive the blessings of a life well lived.

Wandering Through Faerie Land: Metaphor and the Semantic Landscape

Wandering Through Faerie Land: Metaphor and the Semantic Landscape

Author: Rhys Chisnall
On Midsummer’s Day, the corn stood half grown and green, knee high in Suffolk fields. The bumblebee buzzed as it flew from flower to flower and overhead high above the corn the skylark sang. The midsummer’s sun beat down from high in the clear blue sky as I walked along besides the footpath than ran between the field and the hedgerow. I hadn’t drunk enough water so as I walked I noticed the sleight effects of dehydration. I continued onwards, creeping thorns grasping at my boots, while the stinging nettles failed to penetrate my jeans. The heat of midday, the smell of the corn, the summer flowers, the humming bee, the singing skylark all swirled in my awareness. And then it seemed to me that time stopped; it stood still.

I was in eternity, in faerie land, out of time. The experience and the realisation of timelessness was both beautiful and horrible. Beautiful as there is no ageing and no sting of death. But it was also horrible for nothing reaches its potential in faerie land. The corn never ripens and babies are never born; trapped in between time beautiful and horrible, both and neither.

Then the air moved again and a breeze stirred the corn which began to ripple and sway. I heard the buzzing of the bee again and the skylark continued to sings up high. I was back in time, back in the field. Did I ever really leave it? Had I really been in faerie land? Is it really a real place?

For some people it is, they believe that fairyland is an actual literal place. They may have had experiences similar to mine or more likely have read about it in books on popular Wicca or even in books on mythology. Many of the ‘Celtic’ myths feature stories of fairies, the Sidhe or the Tuatha de Danaan (what fairies are is another story) . How are we to view such things as intelligent people who are interested in a view of the world, which is life-enhancing but still congruent with what we know about reality? There just seems to be no way that faerie land can be a literal place. Remembering as Doreen Valiente reminds us in her book An ABC of Witchcraft that faerie comes from the Old French meaning enchantment, perhaps it could still be saved as a metaphor.

Metaphors are essential to how we use language; linguists tell us that we could not have complex language without them. Simply put they are when we describe something (called the target by linguists) by analogy (the source) . So, for example, we might say that my child is a fairy. The child is the target and the fairy is the source. This does not mean that we believe that our child is literally a fairy rather we are suggesting that she has some fae like qualities. Interestingly we somehow know which fairy qualities to apply to the child, so unless we are on the autistic spectrum we would not think that the child is an immortal with wings or likes to steal babies and put changelings in their place (remember no babies are born in faerie land) . Rather we would assume that the metaphor meant that she was small and cute looking or perhaps cute and full of mischief. So the description of my experience is a metaphor, an analogy. But what is it a metaphor for?

This metaphor is how I would try to communicate what my experience is like and what it means to me. Quite simply, we use metaphors to hint at things we can’t describe directly or in any other way. To understand this we need to look at three types of metaphor although there are in reality many more. The three we are interested in are conceptual metaphors, paralogical (or absolute) metaphors and extended metaphors. My experience falls under the heading of paralogical and extended metaphors but let’s first discuss conceptual metaphors.

Conceptual metaphors are used to illustrate one concept with reference to another. It sounds complicated but you may be surprised to learn that you use conceptual metaphors all the time. Consider for example when we say, “it was the high point of my life”. This is a classic example of a conceptual metaphor. If you think about it unless you were parachuting or bungee jumping you were not literally high up. It is a metaphor that we use to describe how we feel about a particular time in our lives. Another example is “I turned the music down”, after all music noise does not literally have a direction. What is especially interesting about conceptual metaphors is that they are indicative of our subjective view of reality. They illustrate some of the filters through which we perceive the world.

Consider for a moment what we mean by high point. It rests on an assumption that high is something that is good and desirable, while conversely low, as in “it was a low point in my life” we see as bad and something that we intuitively see as undesirable. The American magician and Linguist Patrick Dunn in his book, ‘Magic, Power, Language, Symbol’ (a book well worth reading) suggests that metaphors in general are so ingrained in our though patterns and assumptions that they often fall under the radar to all but linguists. Yet language and thought are fundamental to how we subjectively experience the world.

The underlying metaphors which make up beliefs are so important and taken so literally that Professor Joseph Campbell has lamented, “People are dying for metaphors all over the place”. Conceptual metaphors are worth a great deal of consideration and I recommend keeping your ears open for them and meditating on how they underpin your assumptions of reality. This is a very worthwhile and illuminating exercise.

Without paralogical metaphors the Craft, the occult or religion in general could not operate. Paralogical metaphors are utterances where there is no obvious link between the source and the target. So when we say, “the weather is pants”, you have to be in on the metaphor to understand what is being said. There is no way to infer the link between weather and pants if you were not already in on the expression and understood what it means. It also makes some underlying assumptions on pants suggesting that they are not very nice things. I wonder what assumptions people who use the term, “the dog’s bollocks”, make.

Paralogical metaphors can be seen as being symbols and the study of symbols is called semiotics. The discipline of semiotics includes not just written things like pentagrams and ankhs as symbols, nor even just spoken language, but body language, haircuts and the deliberate arrangement of trees; in fact anything that carries information. Some postmodernists such as the magician Patrick Dunn argue that as everything we perceive and experience is represented by information (via symbols to consciousness) in the brain, so our whole subjective experience is a symbolic representation. There may be an objective world out there, in fact there probably is, but we can never know it directly. We only know it indirectly through our senses that provide us with symbolic a representation filtered through an attention bottleneck based on biology, biases and the symbolic information of our beliefs formed by experiences. We live in our own little reality bubbles, in our own stories and narratives created from our symbolic representations. This is an idea that is finding considerable favour with many modern occultists, mostly because it seems to be backed up from the finding of perceptual, cognitive and discursive psychology.

The most obvious examples of paralogical metaphors in the Craft are tools, symbols, the elements, and the gods. Let us take tools to illustrate what I mean. In the Craft, as in ceremonial magic, there are several symbolic tools, which represent certain things. These are paralogical metaphors because these symbols are not obvious and difficult to infer the target (the concept/experience we are trying to understand) from the source (the tool and metaphorical expression) . There are several tools and symbols used in the Craft. As the Craft is organised into small autonomous covens which tools are used depends upon the Craft tradition and the coven.

In the coven in which I am a member the tools used are the besom, the athame (sword) , the dish, the chalice, and the censer. We also use other symbols such as the stang, the cords, the skull, the hare and others. Like all good symbols these parabolic metaphors have a loose associations, allowing room for individual investment of meaning. Roughly speaking the stang is a metaphor for the Dark Lord (who is himself a metaphor) , raised during the winter months between Halloween and Beltaine, the besom is the union of male and female, the cords for masculinity or femininity depending on the colour and the skull for death. The elemental tools are the athame for will and phallus (a metaphor for masculinity) , the dish for the body, the censer for thought and the cup for both emotions and the mystery of femininity, life and the Lady (again more metaphors for metaphors) . The tools themselves are not important, it is what they are metaphors for, in other words what they represent which is.

This is all very well but you would be justified in asking why bother with this talk of metaphors? The answer is that these metaphors have a semantic content in the mind of the practitioner. In linguistics, semantics means meaning. So in other words the tools and symbols of the Craft hold meaning for the practitioner. These symbols activate the meanings in the mind of the Witch when they are used. For example, if the Witch uses the athame to cast the circle (another paralogical metaphor) then its meaning infers and invokes the will of the Witch. These metaphors are like keys that flip the mind into the state that the metaphor represents, provided they have been invested with their semantic content.

As such the Witch can deliberately buy into and build up these semantic connections. As paralogical metaphors are not obvious, so then associations need to be built and assumptions about reality implicit in the metaphors need to be examined. The witch builds up a semantic landscape, a landscape of meaning and metaphor. It is in this semantic landscape, itself a metaphor, in which the Craft operates. The world of faerie, the world of enchantment.

Occultists, philosophers and scientists have a long history of using metaphorical places in order to better understand difficult concepts and meanings. For example in the Western Mystery Traditions we have the astral and inner planes. The problem with using metaphor, especially in the Occult, is they are often taken as literal, in other words some people believe that the astral and inner planes are real places. Rather they are analogous to the ideas of ‘prime space’ in mathematics, ‘design space’ in evolutionary biology and ‘possible worlds’ in philosophy, though used to understand different concepts.

Prime space is a metaphorical space which helps mathematicians understand how reality would be effected if the mathematical language of the universe was different in some way. It is a useful tool because by understanding what would happen under different conditions it helps mathematicians to get to grips with why the math of the universe behaves the way it does. Likewise with design space, in enables the evolutionary biologist to understand why organisms are the way they are by exploring the way they could be but are not. The ‘possible worlds’ in philosophy allows philosophers to conduct thought experiments, which highlight our intuitions about concepts, and the way the world is. These are metaphors, conceptual tools and so are astral and inner planes. In a sense like myth, they are extended metaphors. They go beyond just one symbol, into many symbols that are analogous to states of mind, complex concepts and help us to understand complex information.

The astral plane is a metaphor for the emotional mind while the inner planes are a metaphor for the deeper levels of the psyche. They describe states of mind where the characters of deities, elementals and other spirits (more metaphors and memeplexes) can communicate with the occultist, or where the unconscious mind can come through, communicating according to Freud and Jung through the language of symbols. Likewise the semantic landscape is not a real place, but rather entering into a state of mind where one is aware of the symbols as metaphors and what they represent. The more one connects with and builds up these metaphors, the richer ones semantic landscape. For example, if you learn the folklore, the medicinal and magical properties of local plants, a walk in the countryside becomes richer in the sense that you will also be taking a walk through a semantic landscape full of meaning and association. Each plant will be a metaphor for various states of minds, various experiences, various connections, enriching your life and being put at your disposal.

You may be tempted to ask the question so what? And that would be a good question to ask. Why bother building up our semantic landscape and considering what assumptions our metaphors make about reality? The answer is as mentioned before, we are as Stewart and Cohen suggests ‘the storytelling ape’. We perceive and communicate our reality as a narrative. This is why Jung’s ideas about archetypes are so powerful even though we know they are not literally embedded in our brains (if you cut open a brain you won’t find a single archetype anywhere) . Rather they are embedded in how we tell stories, including the stories of ourselves. Stories are metaphors, they are full of meaning, which operates on many different levels, but they are not directly the way the world is. If they were then we would have discovered evolution, germ theory, the heliocentric solar system much, much sooner than we did.

By building up our semantic landscape, by taking control of our stories of reality, we can then change them if we wish. And if we are really good at it, and understand other people’s stories, we can change those as well. By understanding that our experience of the world (and entities) is a collection of narratives we can also avoid the obsession and eventual mental breakdown that has afflicted some literally minded dabblers in the occult. When we build up our semantic landscape, when we weave meaning and metaphor it gives us some power over the narrative, though the narrative will always have some control over us.

My experience of wandering through faerie land is a metaphor for an experience. It is a metaphor for the state of mind where I experienced the wonder and horror of eternity. Faerie land is not a real place, there are no literal fairies out there, but the experience nonetheless like many other experiences that many others and I have had was real and very useful. The experience of faerie is the state of mind that we enter into when we cast the magic circle. Putting aside the results of operant conditioning of casting the circle in that after a period of time and experience it automatically puts us into a certain state of mind, the circle becomes the semantic landscape. It is the world of metaphor, representing not only the totality universe but also the state of mind that is out of time and all of time.

The circle represents the whole of time, a metaphor for all the year, the whole of our lives and so, like faerie land, it is a mind state in eternity. We are metaphorically between the world of the physical and the semantic landscape of our narrative minds, wandering through the story, wandering through fairyland. And it is from here, in those states of mind that we can experience and change the stories and encounter the characters of our narratives including our self. It is when we are wandering through faerie land that we meet that grand narrative which we call the Divine.

Cranberry and Cool Weather Kitchen Magick

Cranberry and Cool Weather Kitchen Magick

Author: Kiki’s Cauldron

For many, cranberries become a part of the meal between Samhain and Yule. Prior Samhain, fresh cranberries are harvested from northern bogs and available for many autumn dishes. At Thanksgiving, stuffing is sweetened with a heaping spoonful of delicious cranberry chutney. And at Yule, many enjoy the fragrant smell of cranberry cooking in dessert dishes or in its perfume smell by the hearth with cranberry-scented candles. The cranberry’s deep red color is admirable, exotic, and comforting. It’s unique tale of growth in bog and harvest in water, it’s lavish mythical lore, and even its long list of health benefits make it a berry worthy of examining for magickal qualities.

Cranberry Growth
Cranberries are one of only three berries native to North America (the other two being the blueberry and concord grape) . They grow on low-level vines and flourish in bogs (that is to say: they need acidic peat soil and fresh water to grow) . Cranberries are also a berry of the north, commonly growing in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, and Canada. A smaller variety of the cranberry also grows in Scandinavia. Oftentimes when we see commercials on television with cranberry gardeners knee-high in cranberry-filled water, we assume that the cranberries actually grow in water. However, this is an image of a specific farming technique known as “water harvesting.” In this process, the cranberry vine-filled bogs are flooded with water. Special farming equipment known as watering reels turn and stir the water in the flooded bogs, loosening the berries from the vine. Because the cranberries contain pockets of air inside them, they float to the surface, which then makes it easy to corral and harvest. Cranberries can also be harvested the old fashion way. “Dry harvesting” is the simple method of plucking the berry from the dry vines during the fall.

The Cranberry in History, Lore and Mythology
The bog is the home of the cranberry, but was also sacrificial stomping ground of ancient societies in Northern Europe. Consider all of the archeological findings that have been discovered in bogs from Denmark Scotland, England, Sweden, and Northern Germany: daggers, swords, shields, spears, javelins, drinking vessels, sickles, y-shaped dowsing rods and jewelry have all be recovered from bogs. Also recovered from a bog was the famous Gundestrup Cauldron, a silver cauldron of Celtic origin, which had mythological narratives on it. Even more shockingly, excellently preserved human bodies, which appear to have been victims of sacrifice, have been discovered in bog. It appears that to ancient society, the watery bog was a place of significant importance, where sacrifices and treasures were willingly deposited.

Some researchers and academics have suggested that the bog deposits were offerings for protection, or rituals to bring fertility to the land and well-being to the land’s inhabitants. One cannot avoid the idea of a spooky, dank bog on a cold dark night either. Perhaps it is the fact that the unstable, marshy territory could lead to hazardous falls and injuries. Legend has it that the murky, watery parts of a bog were bottomless, so to step in one meant imminent doom. Hans Christian Andersen shared many stories of the bog, most of which involved witches, elves and fairies. And in English and Welsh folklore, Will-o-the-wisps are said to be glowing lights that would float above the bog. Some believed that they were benevolent fairy or nature spirits that acted as guides to lost travelers; on the other hand, some saw the Will-’o-the-Wisps as ill spirited fairies, dark elves or spirits connected to the devil.

It’s also interesting to note that the cranberry has a special place in the hearts of the Finnish and students and admirers of ancient Lapland mythology. The Kalevala, epic legend of Finland, and reputed inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, is a compiled collection of Finnish oral stories that have been sung by Lapland bards for centuries. In the final passage, or Rune, of The Kalevala, we hear of the tale of a virgin Goddess’ encounter with the cranberry. Described as a beautiful maiden, Marjatta is a Goddess who is chaste, yet connected with her Northland home. While roaming the forests, she hears the singing of the cranberry, which begs her to eat him. Because of her maidenhood, she couldn’t pluck the berry, but instead used a charm to have the berry rise from the vine and into her mouth. After she ate the berry, she was impregnated. (*See endnote) . When her family found out of her pregnancy, they did not believe her story of the cranberry and was shunned. Similar to the story of Christ’s birth, Marjatta gave birth to her sun in a stable in a forest. The heroic god of The Kalevala, Väinämöinen, is summoned to decide the destiny of the baby. When it is told that the child’s father is a cranberry, Väinämöinen sentences the baby to banishment in the forest and seals his death. However, when the baby pleads for his life by pointing out Väinämöinen’s unfair judgement, he is saved. Väinämöinen also recognizes that the son of the cranberry would grow to be his successor: a royal king and mighty ruler.

Some of the American history and lore of cranberries is fascinating as well. Native Americans were very familiar with the cranberry, and used it graciously as food, medicine, and dye. They used the berry to flavor meats, in a poultice to heal wounds and lower inflammation, and as a dye to make deep burgundy rugs. When Dutch and German settlers came to America, they named the berry “Crane Berry.” This name was inspired by the berry’s pink spring blossoms, which were said to resemble the head and bill of a Sandhill Crane.

The Cranberry’s Astounding Health Benefits
There are so many health benefits for cranberries that after seeing how they can help your general health, you may consider keeping cranberry juice, tea or supplements in stock in your kitchen. Cranberries are very effective in the healing and relief of urinary tract infections. Cranberries are chock-full of antioxidants, which could mean that cranberries could have anti-aging qualities. The juice is said to prevent peptic ulcers, while eating the berry is said to cut back dental plaque. Recent research has suggested that cranberry can reduce the development of kidney stones and the risk of cancer and heart disease. Cranberries contain no cholesterol, trace amounts of fat and minimal sodium. They have a hearty amount of Vitamin C and fiber, and historically were taken to sea by mariners who wished to fight scurvy.

Cranberry Recipes
There are countless recipes for cranberries available. If you have not indulged in the tart, yet sweet taste of cranberries, autumn and winter are the seasons to incorporate them into your meals, as they will usually be in stock between September and December. Two websites I highly recommend for recipes are the recipes available at Cape Cod Cranberry Grower’s Association ( http://www.cranberries.org/cranberries/recipes.html) and my favorite kitchen magazine: Cook’s Illustrated ( http://www.cooksillustrated.com/) .

Cranberries can be frozen, so they can last in the freezer for a long period of time. And, they are a “Prepper” and “Homesteader” friendly food, as they can be purchased canned, or be made into a preserve. Keep in mind as well: cranberries were used as a form of barter amongst Native American tribes!

Cranberry’s Magickal Components
Oftentimes, the cranberry’s beautiful red color has associated it with the planet Mars, and as a result, its magickal correspondences are similar to that of Mars. Because of this, cranberry can be used for protection, positive energy, courage, passion, determination, goals, and action. Consider having Cranberry Sauce as part of a protective meal, or drinking cranberry juice or tea while doing magick for anything associated with Mars.

If color were considered as a way of marking the cranberry’s magickal associations, it would be foolish to not highlight the deep, sensual and erotic red color as corresponding to love and lust magick. If you are cooking a meal for a loved one, consider incorporating cranberry into the meal. There is actually cranberry wine available, which fermentors of homemade wines and meads would find easy to brew (see “How to Make Cranberry Wine” for details: http://www.ehow.com/how_2123157_make-cranberry-wine.html) . In Magick Potions: How to Prepare and Use Homemade Incense, Oils, Aphrodisiacs and Much More, Gerina Dunwich supplies a recipe for “Lovers’ Meditation Blend.” In the context of her book, she suggests using this while working with the Lovers Tarot Card. You may also want to sip this tea while performing love magick. Simply add two teaspoons cherry juice to 1-cup hot cranberry tea. Stir it with a cinnamon stick clockwise. There is something incredibly comforting and warming about Cranberry, so to show your love and appreciation for your family and friends, consider adding Cranberry sauce or chutney to a dinner. It will bring a feeling of peace, comfort, warmth, good health and love to those who enjoy it.

Tale of Marjatta reminds us of the nutritional value of the cranberry- so fertile and powerful is the cranberry, that it is the vehicle for immaculate conception. Since it is tied to immaculate conception, and the birth of a child who will replace the old King, it can be linked to rejuvenation, reincarnation, and the themes of Yule and Christmas. Cranberry also has clear links to fertility magick in this context. Spell work aside, the nutritional benefits of the cranberry are worthy enough to be incorporated into a routine diet, as it will aid in overall health and well being.

Finally, it is important to not forget the magick of the bog, the motherland of cranberry. Here, we see cranberry’s tie to the supernatural, mystical, and ancient. In a place where humans and precious objects were sacrificed, there was much value put on the mystical powers of the bog. It is a place where the protection of people and armies, the fertility of land and nature, and the well being of those who visit it, could be determined and sought after through ritual and sacrifice. Perhaps you will include a bowl of cranberries next to your pomegranate on your Samhain altar to show thanks to the supernatural powers of the bog. Or simply, while cooking cranberries during the colder season or enjoying its fragrance in oil or a candle, you can reflect on the mystical, protective, and fertile powers of the deep red berry.

*Please note: Many translators cannot agree on which berry Marjatta actually enjoys in The Kalevala. Translations include cranberry, bilberry, lingonberry, blackberry and strawberry. The original Finnish word used was “punapuola, ” which is indeed a variety of cranberry, though smaller and sweeter than the one grown in Northern America.


Footnotes:
Bonser, Wilfrid. “The Magic Birth ‘Motif’ in The Kalevala.” Man 18 (1918) : 20-22. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2787792.
Chamberlain, A.F. “Notes on the History, Customs, and Beliefs of the Mississagua Indians.” The Journal of American Folklore 1.2 (1888) : 150-160. http://www.jstor.org/stable/533821.
“Cranberry Benefits and Information.” NutraSanus. http://www.nutrasansu.com/cranberry.html.
Cunningham, Scott. Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Wicca in the Kitchen. Llewellyn Publications: St. Paul, Minnesota, 2003.
Dunwich, Gerina. Magick Potions: How To Prepare and Use Homemade Incense, Oil, Aphrodisiacs and More. Citadel Press Books: New York, 1998.
Glob, P.V. Trans. Rupert Bruce-Mitford. The Bog People: Iron-Age Man Preserved. New York Review Books: New York, 1969.
“History of Cranberries.” Cape Cod Cranberry Association. http://www.cranberries.org.
Holland, Eileen. The Spellcaster’s Reference: Magickal Timing for the Wheel of the Year. Weiser Books: San Francisco, 2009.
Kelly, Eaomonn P. “Secrets of the Bog Bodies: The Enigma of the Iron Age Explained.” Archaeology Ireland 20.1: 26-30 (2006) . http://www.jstor.org/stable/20559121.
Meredith, Dianne. “Hazards in the Bog- Real and Imagined.” Geographical Review 92.3: 319-332 (2002) . http://www.jstor.org/stable/4140913.
The Kalevala. Compiled by Elias Lönnrot. Trans. John John Marin Crawford. Project Guttenberg. 31 May 2002. http://www.gutenberg.org/.
“Where do Cranberries Grow?” Ocean Spray Food Service. http://www.oceansprayfoodservice.com.

Daily OM for August 30: Pattern of Pain

Pattern of Pain
Withholding

Emotional pain is at the root of our tendency to withhold, and this causes pain to the people subjected to it.
The most common form of withholding is what we commonly call “the silent treatment,” but withholding encompasses any unwillingness to express your true feelings. It also includes an unwillingness to give support, praise, or positive attention to the people you love. We have all known someone who is impossible to please, and many of us have suddenly found ourselves at the other end of a chilly silence with no explanation. At the same time, many of us will recognize our own tendency to withhold our emotions rather than express them. Most of us have seen both sides of the withholding dilemma. Emotional pain is at the root of our tendency to withhold, and withholding causes pain to the people subjected to it. It is a dysfunctional pattern that creates a breakdown in communication and understanding.

No one deserves to be subjected to withholding. Feeling ignored, disrespected, or shut out, and to not know why, is a terrible feeling. The first thing to remember if this is happening to you is that you are not to blame. You are caught in someone else’s pain pattern. This person does not know how to express feelings in a healthy way probably because this is what they learned when she or he was a child. The second helpful thing to remember is that the withholder is acting out of pain. They are stuck in a habitual mode of response that is self-defeating and alienating to the people they love. Remembering this will help you feel compassion for the person hurting you. However, if you have suffered too long with this pattern, you may need to get some space. Take some time to look at your own patterns and understand why you have taken part in this drama. If you are dealing with people in a family situation, you can step up to the plate to help break the chain of this behavior pattern.

If, on the other hand, it is you that tends to withhold, understand that this is a learned response and it can be unlearned. Find safe places to begin to express all that you’ve been holding back. Begin to make an effort to say what you’re feeling and thinking. Give praise to someone you love. The more you do this, the healthier you and your relationships will become. What was learned over a course of a life cannot be changed overnight—remember, one day at a time.

Censing and Smudging

Censing and Smudging

 
When a circle is cast, it is generally cast then purified and then filled. The process of filling the circle is called Censing or Smudging. This is also the time to invite the Ancestors to come to the circle to be with us. Before the circle is cast, light a small brick of charcoal and place it into a censer or insulated bowl to let it get hot.
 
After the circle is purified, place a small amount of incense onto the charcoal and bless it saying “Blessed be, Child of Fire and Air, that you may make this space sacred.” Carry the censer around the circle slowly, letting the smoke drift around the edges. As you walk, invite the Ancestors to be present in the circle. After people have been brought into the circle, cense each of them as well.
 
Smudging is the same process but uses a bundle of herbs that are burnt slowly rather than loose herbs.