sabbat – A Sacred Life

October 26, 2022October 26, 2022

The Samhain Article

Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d.
Thrice; and once the hedge-pig whin’d.
Harpier cries:–“’tis time, ’tis time.”
Round about the caldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.–
Toad, that under cold stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot!
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,–
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.
Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witch’s mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangl’d babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,–
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingredients of our caldron.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire, burn; and caldron, bubble.

Cool it with a baboon’s blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
Macbeth – William Shakespeare

You just can’t go wrong with the classics, eh, folks?

This post immediately precedes the Grand High Sabbat of Samhain (Northern Hemisphere) when the doors of the worlds lay open, the dead rise, and witches fly.

Samhain is of a Welsh/Gaelic/Celtic origin and thus is pronounced something like Sow – Ween, I’m told.

As my ancestors were Welsh, but I am not, and the Gaelic languages are something I am still working to learn, my English language educated brain tends to see that word as Sam Hain.

I am confident that I am not alone in this, and have jokingly pointed out that this is the full name of one of the Winchester brothers – Sam Hain Winchester. And if it isn’t, the writers of the Supernatural series surely missed a golden opportunity.

In any case, because I was born and raised in the late 20th century in America, I refer to this holiday by it’s crass commercial epithet Halloween. Which saves me considerable embarrassment around those who know how to correctly pronounce Samhain.

In most cases we celebrate this event on October 31st, whilst many of us, and probably a good number of my readers, start actively decorating around mid-August, and truthfully keep a “creepy vibe” going year round.

halloween season — This delightful meme has served as a seasonal love letter between me and my wife as we will invariably post it on each other’s social media. This Halloween is the 33rd anniversary of our first date. As she puts it “Find the Gomez to your Morticia, I did. “

There is Halloween, and there is waiting for Halloween. That is all.

It’s passing strange that as witchcraft has emerged from the shadows into a full blown cultural phenomenon, the Halloween holiday diminishes more and more in the public consciousness. Outside of the dedicated souls such as myself, the witches, and other weirdos, this event has been weakened to an overly restricted children’s party that parents dread and neighbors frequently ignore. Overshadowed by the burgeoning Fat Man and his capitalist orgy of Black Friday Weekend, one has to begin early, search wide, and work hard to get their full Halloween fix.

I am not talking about the various ritual observances. Everyone does that a little differently anyway. The ancients (who may have celebrated on a different day) called it a Cross-Quarter Day. That is, it was roughly halfway between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice. So it was an excuse to have a party. In ancient days, life was miserable, brutish, and short. Having something to look forward to, particularly in cold wet dark northern Europe, made things a little less miserable. In a world without weekends, a festival day was definitely important.

The meaning of, and doings of, these ancient feast and fire parties is really lost to history. Maybe there are bits here and there, but if you are looking for the true and authentic Gaelic experience you may be out of luck. Your tradition may be made up of what the Romans said the Gaelic peoples did, and what the Romans did that got confused and adopted by the members of that culture that survived the Roman conquest. Assimilation goes both ways, of course, so some of those authentic Celto/Gallo/Nordic traditions may have just become Roman traditions that we don’t remember were Celto/Gallo/Nordic.

My Halloween traditions probably do not resemble a Grand High Sabbat. Nor are they typically Celto/Gallo/Nordic or Roman. I carry along a lot of that crass commercial thing.

When I was a kid I loved putting on the costume and going door to door. I loved watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” while I ate too much sugar and bounced around way past my already insomniac bedtime.

When I got older, I loved making really cool costumes and going to Halloween parties with the other teens during that one time of the year I could actually go to parties with the other teens. And I loved watching “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”.

As a young adult out on my own, my wife and I threw outrageous Halloween costume parties that spilled out of our tiny starter home into the street and down the block. I think we had over 300 people at one. Fortunately I had won the local rock radio station’s contest for coolest Halloween party invitation, so they showed up with the a hearse and a coffin full of beer and the cops to provide crowd control and insure a good safe time was had by all. Somewhere in that background, I am sure there was a VCR playing a treasured personal copy of “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown“.

linus — For many of us, Linus Van Pelt was our introduction to alternative views of the universe. This 4 to 5 year old had somehow worked out that Halloween was the really cool holiday we all should be celebrating, and remained faithful to his personal gnosis despite year after year of disappointment, ridicule, and growing evidence to the contrary. Peanuts, often seen as a harmless little kids comic strip, taught lessons on a par with Aesop, and introduced us to personality types in the world that we’d only fully realize as adults. Plus the dog owned a Van Gogh. How cool is that?

*Peanuts is a registered trademark of United Features Syndicate.*

Then the kids came along and I loved getting them dressed up, getting myself dressed up, and going door to door for candy and treats. As they got a little older, we resumed a more subdued holiday party scene, with giant home-made props in the yard (like an Alien hive and a 40′ dragon with Nazguls). This lasted through my youngest’s undergrad years in college. I’m not quite sure what the neighbors made of a 6′ 3″ Abby Schuto accompanied by a 6′ 9″ Professor Dumbledore, but they gave us candy.

Which brought us roughly to COVID and the closing of the world. No more parties. No more trick or treating. Just grim, dark, and deadly.

My youngest was in grad school at NYU when the plague hit. She had the good luck to have experienced one Halloween in Greenwich Village before everything changed. I’d been there myself a quarter century before; a quirk of timing with my then employer. It truly is a one-of-a-kind thing. I hope the scene recovers now that the pandemic seems to be dissipating.

This last year I have more personally felt the touch of death than at any other time in my life. Coming thus to a Sabbat with so many associations with death might seem overwhelming. Yet I am deeply associated with death already. I have symbols of death all over my personal spaces. The skeletons and skulls adorn my rooms to the extent that I use glass ones to store coffee and nuts in my kitchen. I am at home with the rustle of the Reaper’s wings.

And Halloween is my holiday. Excepting my birthday next week, which is a second Halloween.

And I aim to have it back.

So in my workshop right now, are the bones of a Great Pumpkin. I’m not exactly sure where he’s going but I’d truly like to have him somewhat airborne. Linus deserves that. He’s been waiting for almost 60 years now.

You’ve heard of people with skeletons in their closets? Well, I actually have them. And skulls, and swords, and other unusual things. Halloween is the time of year when I can bring out all the odd and wonderful things that I surround myself with and it will be considered ordinary by the neighbors and other banal folks.

As you can see, our cat Amelia has spotted the problem here. This is not a Halloween decoration. Since this one is wearing an elf’s hat, it’s clearly trying to horn in from that other holiday that keeps showing up in the stores earlier and earlier each year. She’s determined he’s going back until at least after the Macy’s Black Friday Eve Parade is over.

He’ll be part of a generally safe but still fun spooky display, maybe more than the adults who shepherd them into my yard. Over in the corner you will find the legs of a giant spider, and the bits and pieces of a few hapless victims.

Kids, even the little kids, seem to love this stuff. They’re into things that are a little creepy and a little kitsch. It’s cool to be a bit spooky, because at second glance, you can see the string holding that thing up.

There’s a part of Halloween that is about that “man behind the curtain” thing. Even for us big kids who are doing our thing with real cauldrons, real spiders, and sometimes real bones. Piercing the veil is about more than just calling the ancestors or drawing down the dark forces for malefic intent. It’s our time to peer beyond the surface of things, and see what strings are holding it up. This gives us perspective on our own roles, and power beyond those who don’t know how it all spins round.

For witches this is not an unusual thing, really. One practiced and adept can cross the hedge at will. Some days it’s hard not to. That’s why some of us talk about it being Halloween all year round in our homes. It certainly is in parts of mine. I keep the doorways of the year open should I need to access them.

This brings about something that I am hearing about more often, and that is that the old European Wheel of The Year with it’s Sabbats and High Sabbats and Grand High Sabbats doesn’t fit a modern industrial global society. That’s true enough. In fairness it may not have actually fit the postwar midcentury society it was introduced into. Arguably, much of the adaptation of these traditions was about “returning to the old ways”.

Well, the old ways had no internet. Nor antibiotics, air travel, electric light, public health, and reliable agricultural production. Regardless of how romantic it may seem at times, that miserable, brutish, and short thing was very real. You would not be reading this on your iPhone if we lived by the old ways. You’d maybe have learned a few things from your mom or an old aunt or the village wise woman, but the access you have to the great breadth of human learning, history, and awareness is unparalleled in our history. This is a transformative time, and because we have nigh-instant, nigh-global communication it is possible for everyone to take part in the transformation. We can all of us cross the hedge.

What we carry with us into that wonderful new world, full of terror and possibility, is what we choose to bring along. Just like when we pierce the veil on Halloween night. Do we honor our ancestors by doing only what they were able to do, or do we honor them by standing on their shoulders, the shoulders of giants, and making a new and bright thing that has never before been dreamt of in earth or in the heavens.

It’s a little something to think about at this time of year when we purge away all the spiritual junk we’ve accumulated since the last Halloween.

I’ll be over here in the workshop with my Peanuts DVD. Enjoy the party. See you next week.

September 21, 2022September 20, 2022

The Equinox

Twice in a solar year, due to a quirk of astral mechanics, the rotational axis of the Earth aligns straight up and down with regard to our path around the sun. These days are called by the old Latin term equinox, because the hours of the night and the day are roughly equal. From thence the spinning top we live on continues to wobble over until one of the solstices, at which point it reverses.

This is handy, as if our poles keeled over further it would result in one half of the planet being constantly exposed to the sun and the other half enduring a perpetual frozen night. If such a cataclysm was gradual enough, species might evolve that could live in the “twilight zone” around the equator, where the oblique rays of sunlight could be similar to northern Alaska in summertime.

Our ancestors seemed keenly aware of this horrible potential. As the days shortened in the northern hemisphere (as they soon will be doing), they conceived great fire festivals, to push back the cold and the dark, and remind the sun through their earthly bonfires, that we were still down here, and still interested.

When enough generations had passed, it became fairly well accepted that the sun was going to come back in the springtime. By modern reckoning, Spring starts on the date of the Vernal Equinox, when the sun transits from Pisces into Aries. This perhaps is an accurate date if you live at the latitude of central Europe, as much human population did in the Neolithic. This was important for settled agrarian societies, that had become dependent on domesticated crops. “Spring” was when it was safe to plant, because the likelihood of damaging winter frosts was over.

But further south in Egypt, the beginning of the agricultural year was the annual flooding of the Nile, which happens about mid-August. The Nile flood is the result of torrential rains down in Africa. The rainy season was presaged to the Egyptian by the rising of the star Sirius in the southeastern sky. This visibility of the Canopus constellation is also occasioned by our wobbly world and it’s eccentricity.

During the period the Nile was in flood, the general populace that were usually engaged in farming were put to work as unskilled labor in various public building projects such as the erection of pyramids, obelisks, and temples, the majority of which were focused on keeping the sun spinning round the Earth in it’s usual happy way. This was an expression of “Ma’at” or “Truth” which has a very different meaning in ancient Egypt than in our present day.

Truth to the Egyptian was cosmic Law. It was the nature of things the way they were ordained, written down in the secret language of hieroglyphs by ibis-headed Tehuti for all eternity. Ma’at is symbolized by a single feather, both in texts and iconography, unless She appears as human goddess with the feather on her head. ¹ Ma’at is perhaps most famously known to Western eyes as the feather on the balance in the Weighing of the Heart ritual from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. This image is the source of our “scales of justice” and related imagery.

To the Egyptian way of thinking, the “Truth” that rested in the heart of the deceased was more about these cosmic rules than whether or not they had prevaricated. There was a long list called “The Negative Confessions” that the dead person was supposed to recite prior to, or during, the weighing of the heart. These were a recitation of wrong things that the deceased hadn’t done.

Again, for the purposes of the ritual, it didn’t matter whether or not the mummy had actually done them, it was important to say that it hadn’t. There’s also a handy little rubric, usually inscribed on a basalt scarab placed over the heart during the wrapping process, that admonishes the heart not to betray them, to keep silent if they had broken the rules. Obviously our modern ideas of Justice and Law differ.

ChichenItzaEquinox — The building called El Castillo at Chichen Itza is an example of astronomically tuned architecture. A temple to the Mayan god Kukulkan, the predecessor of the Aztec Quetzelcoatl or Plumed Serpent, this structure does a magic trick on the Equinox. The corners of the building cast the shadow of an undulating snake along the side of the steps, which moves slowly as the sun travels across the sky. To the ancient people this kind of display was proof of the presence of their deity, and affirmation that he had ordained another year for the world.

For the ancients, though, the doctrine of sympathy meant that the image of a thing was connected to the thing itself. So if you said you weren’t guilty, then you magically became not guilty (I’m certain there are number of persons incarcerated who wish that had worked). It was important to keep the universe in balance. Otherwise the world might flop over and the sandstorms of Set/Sutekh would overwhelm all civilization. Better to build another pyramid or temple to make sure the sun god stays happy.

Or maybe there’s more to it. We first have records of the famed obelisks being used for astronomical purpose by Aristarchus of Samos at the library of Alexandria. It’s entirely possible, given phenomena we can still observe, that the Egyptian temple and funerary architecture were astronomically aligned. This should not surprise us. In the late Stone Age and early Bronze age architecture was one of the few methods of accurately telling time.

Solar, lunar, and astronomical alignments are not a feature of Egyptian culture alone. Stonehenge and similar megalithic sites are fairly well understood as calendars. Mesoamerican pyramids and structures throughout Asia and Africa have solstice “clocks” built into them. Often these take the form of a slot or window, that shines light into a particular niche or area on the day of the winter solstice.

The equinoxes are a consequence of the solstices. If the planet didn’t reach over to the extremes at the beginning of Cancer and Capricorn, it wouldn’t have these crossing points. The equinoxes form a 90 degree angle to the solstices, so the year gets divided into four quarters, which are subdivided into three astrological signs.

As noted, the Vernal Equinox is the beginning of Aries. The Autumnal one, the beginning of Libra. As our trip around the sun is a tad over the 360 days that the Chaldees worked out (and applied to the Zodiac as degrees), these celestial events wander between the 21st to 23rd of March, June, September, and December. If you have an ephemeris handy (you don’t?) you can extrapolate the transit of the Sun into the relevant sign and plot it on your own calendar. There are at least a couple of occult almanacs that will give you the information, and the mundane Farmers’ Almanac will reference them as the beginnings of the seasons.

SmartSelect_20220919_112052_Armillary Sphere — I’ve always been fascinated with astronomical, mathematical, and navigational instruments. A working armillary sphere is rather expensive (don’t even get me started on the cost of the astrolabes). You’ve probably seen “prop” versions at a number of department stores and garden centers, but these are usually fixed pieces of metal that at best might be spun around to point north. These screen shots from the virtual one on my phone show the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice. The slanted band on these showing the month and sign is the apparent path of the sun from the earth. It’s really the earth and us that are slanted, but in the geocentric cosmology of the armillary, we are the fixed point. If you’ve dabbled at all with astrology you know that the Equinox is at the beginning of Libra and that the Solstice signals the start of Capricorn. Alas the more scientifically inclined authors of this app are using a sidereal zodiac, which is based on the positions of the constellations as the actually are, whereas Western Astrology uses a tropical zodiac that places a perfect 90 degree division between the Equinoxes and Solstices. Projected onto the earth the highest and lowest points of the suns travel give us the Tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, Depending on time of year, the sun is more or less directly overhead at midday between these points. Further north or south, and the sun never which actually comes directly overhead.

The quarter points also define the Cardinal signs, one for each element. Aries is fire, of course, and Cancer is water. Libra is the cardinal air sign, and Capricorn, represents earth. The next sign around in each quarter is a Fixed sign, Taurus/Earth; Leo/Fire; Scorpio/Water; and Aquarius/Air. The last sign in each quarter is the Mutable sign, signifying the nature of that sign’s character transitioning back toward the Cardinal. These are Gemini/Air; Virgo/Earth; Sagittarius/Fire; and finally Pisces/Water.

The Cardinal is an emergent energy. It has great force, and may be viewed as archtypical of the elemental nature of the sign. Planets on cardinal points influence powerfully, but sometimes in a raw or brutal way. Subtlety and sophistication may be lacking. This is good to keep in mind when picking times for planetary workings, or elemental based magic.

Magical timing and the use of astrology in ritual, derives from centuries of tradition. Much of it may have passed into Medieval texts with no real understanding of the ancient rationale. There are a number of examples where these correspondences were copied unquestioned into modern ritual manuals, and passed into present day with even less connection to the rudimentary ideas of relating magic to the greater state of the universe.

The approach of “scribe an amulet of bronze with this sigil in the hour of Venus” is, to my mind, far less efficacious, and less personal, than working out how the skies will aid your goal. There are apps aplenty to cast horoscopes and tally the planetary hours (I have several ). If you’re old school, or just want to understand the bones of the thing, you can use a paper ephmeris² to work out when the planets, signs and elements bode well for your venture. If I’m planning something especially complex, I will spot check the software results with paper calculus, and possibly even personal observation (saving pennies for that working astrolabe).

Even if you don’t want to go that extreme, understanding the why of the ritual holidays, whether we call them sabbats, or equinoxes, or the first day of fall, is, to my way of thinking, integral to the idea of a nature-adjacent lifestyle. Nature, after all, includes the sun, moon, stars, galaxies, and all the great big unknowns out there in the sky. ³

sundial — A sun dial seems to be a fairly straightforward gadget. In fact, you can make one by poking a stick in the ground and seeing where the shadow falls. But there’s more to it that that. This little brass number – which I keep in a room with drawn curtains – has a means to tilt the surface based on latitude. I have mine set to around 30 degrees north, roughly the same as the Great Pyramid of Giza. There’s also a compass in the base to determine which way is north (since you are trying to maximize East-West exposure). There are also leveling feet if one is on uneven ground, though there’s not a level bubble, so I’m not sure what use they are. The sun dial has evolved significantly from the stick in the ground. There are some that have a figure-eight still grid laid out, to account for the variances in solar position due to the wobble of the earth’s axis.

I hope this has given you some things to think about when you see these days cycling around on that Witches’ Calendar plaque above the altar. I find the movements of the heavens fascinating, as they do affect how we live down here on earth. These wiggles of the planet give us the seasons, spawn hurricanes, monsoons, and typhoons, and control the hibernation of animals and plants. We are here because of it.

I’ll be back next week with other reflections. Thank you for reading.

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !