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!

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.

Happy Fall, Y’all

We’re nearly three hours into the Autumnal Equinox from my Northern Hemisphere vantage point in Chicagoland. Fall Equinox, or Second Harvest, is one of my favorite Sabbats to celebrate. I honor my Holy Powers in this gilded season and watch the foliage of my local treescape transform from green to gold. The dying year is prepared for its final resting place in Winter’s embrace. With every falling leaf, I submit to Divine Mystery and ask for the guidance of my Goddesses and Gods to see me through the season of lengthening shadows, while I remember with thankfulness all the forms of abundance my Holy Powers have bestowed upon me.

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!

Film Review: In Praise of Robert Eggers’ Bold Old Norse Religion-Saturated Spectacle, “The Northman” (2022)

You know that a newly released film has made quite an impact on you when, hours after you’ve left the theater, you obsessively muse upon its indelible imagery and the effect of the moviegoing experience is all you seem capable of discussing with family and friends. In fact, you’re filled with missionary-level zeal in urging people you care about to go see the film as a matter of vital importance.

I had the immense pleasure of seeing Robert Eggers’ The Northman (Focus Features, 2022) yesterday and I’m still very much enthralled by it. I greatly encourage anyone with even the slightest interest in Old Norse Religion–whether that interest is based in academia or in a lived personal spiritual tradition or both–to see this film at once. Let it transport you to 9th century Northern Europe, from the desolate coasts of the Orkney Islands to the lushness of the Dnieper River in Kievan Rus to the majestic valleys of Iceland. Indeed, the overall effect of the film on me was equivalent to an intense 2-hour-plus shamanic journey to a sensational Otherworld brimming with wonder and terror. There are thoughtful and deliberate evocations of Old Norse Deities, chiefly Odin and Freyr, that are sustained in the film and add to the feeling that, if you honor these Gods, you’re partaking of something akin to religious communion just from the very act of watching this movie. But make no mistake, as a member in the audience, viewing this film is not a passive experience. If you’re a Heathen or a Witch or a Pagan, this film will call you to participate at a Soul Level. You will, frankly, be shook.

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!)

Happy Belated World Tarot Day!

Preparations for today’s Super Full Moon Eclipse in Sagittarius got in the way of my celebrating this yesterday, but happy belated World Tarot Day and may all your divinatory readings bring you joyous journeys of self-discovery! I decided, after emerging from my overnight ritual/puja/vigil whose focus was spiritual protection during the eclipse, to do a Tarot reading: 6 cards to detail what the next 6 months have in store for me, post-eclipse. Here are my results.

Sudden Transformation and the Loud and Steady Beats of the Drums of War: The Astrology of the May 26 Full Moon Eclipse in Sagittarius

In evolutionary astrology, when we talk about lunar or solar eclipses, we’re referring to two things: the astronomical event itself (e.g., its specific date and exact time, placement in the heavens with aspects formed to the planets in transit in our solar system) and the energies surrounding the Zodiacal signs associated with the eclipse and how those energies can build up for weeks in advance of the actual event itself and tellingly play themselves out in one’s life for several months afterwards.

The May 26 Super “Flower” Full Moon Eclipse in Sagittarius is intensely Mutable—we have no less than 8 planets occupying Mutable Signs (Sagittarius, Gemini, and Pisces)—and disturbingly dark given its prominent association with the Fixed Star of Antares, the violently throbbing, warmongering “heart” of the constellation of Scorpio.

In Service to Hekate: Dark Moon Deipnon Ritual and Paupers’ Graveyard Cleanup on Earth Day 2020

I love being a morning person. I’m not one to sleep in past 6 a.m., even on the weekends, so I’m up and walking my dog, L’il T-Man, very early in the morning. Our first destination is the paupers’ graveyard near my home. It’s a treat to witness the dawn of a new day from the vantage point of standing in one of the commemorative concrete circles, each of which bears bronze plaques that honor a different demographic group buried on the premises (e.g., John Doe Civil War dead, John and Jane Doe victims of the 1871 Chicago Fire, Cook County Asylum for the Insane patients and their children, etc., over 38,000 total bodies).

And in the past 7 years of living in this far Northwest side Chicago neighborhood, the paupers’ graveyard has been my focal point of clean-up efforts every Earth Day. With today being the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, and it being the Dark of the Moon at the time of this writing (the New Moon at 3° Taurus will occur tonight at 9:25 CDT), I am dedicating my clean-up efforts in a wider context of spiritual service to one of my Patron Deities, the ancient Anatolian-Greek Goddess, Hekate Khthonia (Hekate “From Inside the Earth”).

Replenish Yourself: Gather Sprowl from the Land

In this era of social distancing amidst this pernicious COVID-19 global pandemic in which we find ourselves, focus on how your solitary spiritual practices can not just grow, but thrive. One helpful method of personal spiritual battery replenishment takes its cue from the swelling Traditional Witchcraft current in contemporary Paganism, whose tenets include, among other things, establishing a dynamic relationship with the spirits of your local landscape.