Imbolc 2023: A Praise Poem for the Goddess Brigid

If there’s one contemporary Pagan group that does online/Zoom rituals well, it’s Chicago’s own Wild Onion Grove of the ADF, an international Druid group. A lovely Imbolc ritual / devotional to the Celtic Goddess of Smithcraft, Poetry, and Healing—the Goddesss Brigid—just concluded a short while ago this afternoon. An hour prior to the 2 p.m. CST start time, the Lady of Awen came a-knockin’ on my noggin, and the following praise poem spilled out of me—longhand—and onto the pages of my legal writing pad.

I delivered the poem during the ritual as my chief offering to Her. Here it is:

A Blessed Mothers’ Night to All Celebrating!

From Oak & Aconite Coven to all of you, have a blessed Mothers’ Night and a bright and joyful Winter Solstice!

The Morrighan and Hekate: Musings on Some Parallels

The older I get, the more I do believe that time as a construct has less to do with linear development and more to do with a cyclic or spiraling unfoldment: our spiraling life journeys may bring our ever-evolving consciousness once again into contact with influences we thought we had moved “past,” only to discover we’re at a higher octave of the “present” moment meant to present us with a new awareness, one that could not have been possible at the previous turn of the spiral. Make sense?

As a contemporary multi-trad or -Pantheon Polytheist, I find that my relationships with various Deities echo that pattern. Case in point: The Morrighan first soared into my life quite unexpectedly when I was living in Hawaii in 2004. My spiral dance with Her regained new levels of intensity in 2010 and especially in 2014, when my co-ritualist and I were leading a women’s-only 13-moon initiatory experience into cultic worship of various “Dark” Goddesses. After a peak of devotional activity lasting about a year, I perceived The Morrighan’s obsidian wings to be loosening their grip on my selfhood…until this past Samhain, when She ascended on a higher curve of our spiral dance and She has become quite the Omnipresent Divinity for me lately. She’s vocal/eager to communicate, too, as are the frequent sightings of murders of crows on my property, a welcome and astonishing sight all of a sudden after heartbreaking years of a drastic decrease in their population due to West Nile virus.

I’ve been thinking about how the Morrighan’s energy spectrum or whatever inadequate words one can use here appear to be on a parallel wavelength, if you will, with One of the Other Dark Goddesses Whom I have had a longstanding and steady devotional relationship with, One of the Main Powers I pledged lifelong service to at my Fellowship of Isis Priestess Ordination ceremony exactly 10 years ago: Hekate.

Án Mórrígan: My Praise Poem/Ritual Invocation to the Great Irish Goddess of War and Prophecy, Samhain 2022

This is the most spiritually significant time of the year for me, Samhaintide. For many weeks I’ve been pondering the overlap in calendrical calculations of seasonal shifts as well as cultural customs between the ancient Celts and the Slavs. Any Celtic linguist as well as any modern Witch will tell you that the Gaelic Samhain denotes “Summer’s End,” and the time to honor the dead and prepare for the trying season of Winter occurs in early November.

Oak & Aconite Coven May Day 2022 Ritual

This is one of my favorite times of the year! I cheerfully wish those celebrating May Day / Beltane tomorrow in the Northern Hemisphere and All Hallow’s / Samhain in the lands Down Under wonderful festivals! May your Gods and Spirits gladden your hearts and guide you at this powerfully liminal turning o’ the tides (made all the more potent by a Taurus New Moon eclipse!). For me and for my Slavic forebears, early May marks the beginning of Summer (in the Serbian calendar, it’s the fixed date of St. George’s Day, May 6).

It’s a time of honoring the fructifying powers at work in the land; in particular, it’s a time of cultivating right relationship with the Fair Folk / the Fae / the Vile (pronounced VEE-lay) and demonstrating through your ritual actions that you know how to be a courteous and hospitable neighbor to Them. I’m looking forward to doing my solitary Walpurgis Night ritual tonight, where I honor the Lady of Elphame, and I’m giddily looking forward to celebrating May Day tomorrow with my coven that my dear friend Adam and I formed late last summer. After a winter gestational period of figuring out what to call ourselves and detailing our coven’s brand (yes, I have a background in marketing!), the name came quite suddenly last month while meditating on our Divine Patrons, Hekate and Pan: Oak & Aconite Coven!

The Mantle of Brigid: An Imbolc Prayer for Protection

After stirring “in the belly” (what Irish Gaelic “Imbolg” literally means) of a fallow season, we undergo birth pangs to extricate ourselves from winter’s constricting force. Fueled by the Goddess/Saint Brigid’s sacred fires of hearth, head, and heart that warm, inspire, and heal; and cleansed by Her holy waters of renewal, we stand assuredly in Her might.

Let us pray:

Happy Birthday, Nephthys!

It’s very fitting that on this fifth and final of the ancient Egyptian Epagomenal Days (according to my reckoning of the Cairo Calendar), this liminal time between the year that is ending and the one that is beginning, that we celebrate the birth of the Great Goddess Nebet-Het (Nephthys), Wife of Set, Sister to Auset and Ausar, Mother of Anpu (Anubis). She is “the Lady of the House,” i.e., the embalming tent, the mourning kite and funerary goddess, the One Who Welcomes Those Who Enter Amenti.

I truly do believe in my heart that She Wyrdly marked me, to borrow the words of Edgar Allan Poe, “from childhood’s hour.” The parade of funerals in my own blood family starting from my early childhood (and shocking deaths too, I might add, such as my being the first person to surprisingly discover my maternal grandfather’s body after he had hung himself; I was 8 years old at the time) were, in hindsight, an Ordeal Path that ultimately baptized me into Her service. Her eerily-lit Underworld pathways are not for everyone but I look back on none of those profound episodes of loss with self-pity. Nephthys is absolutely my heart’s delight, and the Chief Power to Whom I dedicated myself for lifelong service when I became ordained as a Priestess in the Fellowship of Isis nine years ago. She is also the Patroness of my Death Midwife work.

Invocation of Hekate at First Harvest

My ritual partner and I have been co-creating our ritual for the Sabbat of First Harvest, which we’re commemorating this coming Sunday, August 1. We’re Polytheistic Witches, both fervently devoted to Hekate, and I thought I’d share the Invocation to Hekate I’d written. (The full text of the ritual itself will be published to this blog as well, so stay tuned!)

The Mystery, Majesty, and Moral Ambivalence of the Great God Set

According to the way I reckon the old Cairo Calendar, today is the Third of the Five Epagomenal Days, sacred days set aside as certain Gods’ (the Children of Geb and Nut) birthdays during the liminal period of the old year ending but the new year (Wep Ronpet) not having yet begun. (The New Year in ancient Egypt was calculated by the heliacal rising of the star Sirius, which usually takes place between what we know now as August 1-3.) Day Three of the Epagomenal Days commemorates the birth of my most cherished Kemetic Holy Power: red-hot, ultra-dynamic, take-no-bullshit SET!

Blessed Beltane and Happy Orthodox Easter!

Blessings bright on this beautiful, summery (here in Chicago, we’re looking at bright sunshine and temps in the mid-80s again!) Beltane and Eastern Orthodox Easter Sunday! As my friend Szmeralda observed, “You’ve got double the magic!” in my household as dual-faith observances, begun on Friday, continue.