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In this Land of Ten Thousand Storytellers, Kevin Kling has got to be one of the very best.

Here's a story from his boyhood.

When you're seven years old and growing up in a Norwegian Lutheran town on Minnesota's Iron Range, you know that there are certain things that you just can't do. One of them is to bother Pastor Lindquist—who is, after all, right up there next to the Big Guy—with theological questions.

But one night at the church supper Kevin finds himself sitting next to the pastor's wife, and he figures that she might be close enough to the Source to ask.

“Mrs. Lindquist,” says Kevin, “If Jesus and Buddha got into a fight, who would win?”

“Well, Jesus would win, of course,” says Mrs. Lindquist.

“Well, if Jesus and Allah got into a fight, who would win?” asks Kevin.

“Jesus would win,” says Mrs. Lindquist.

“Well, if Jesus and Odin got into a fight, who would win?” Kevin asks.

There's a long pause.

Title: The Unkindness of Ravens (Trickster's Mark Book One)

Generally when we look for resources on fairies, particularly fairy Queens, we look (rightly) to folklore. There is however another more obscure source that can provide us some information and this is the later ceremonial magic grimoires. These texts are very different in nature and tone¹ than other sources and we must keep that in mind as we look at them but they do give us a glimpse at a particularly English view of fairies from the 16th and 17th centuries. 

For our purposes today we will be looking at the material that addresses female fairies, which interestingly includes the only female beings found in the grimoire material². When we look at the Grimoire material we find two main groupings of beings: Fairy Queens and the so-called Seven Sisters. These are all given names although the names vary in different manuscripts. The Seven Sisters can be bound to teach a person about herbs, nature, and provide a ring of invisibility (Harms, Clark, & Peterson, 2015). The queens can be called on for scrying, manifestation, sex magic, knowledge of nature, truth, and may also provide a ring of invisibility (Brock & Raiswell, 2018; Harm, Clark, & Peterson, 2015). All of the names given, however, are somewhat problematic in that they either can be found nowhere else outside the grimoire material or else they closely resemble common names or words.

Daddy, why do people put lighted deer in their front yards?

We're headed towards the tail-end of November, and the front yards in my neighborhood are suddenly sprouting deer.

These are not the wild animals, although here within sight of downtown Minneapolis we've got a sizable urban herd. (They mostly live in the wooded Mississippi Valley that runs through the heart of town.) No, these are Yule Deer.

(Up here in Snow Country, if you want to decorate outdoors, you've got to do it early.)

As a pagan, and myself a worshiper of the Deer Man, I find it deeply amusing that one of the foremost symbols of American Christmas: the Secular Holiday should be the Deer.

The connection is pretty tenuous. Presumably these are the reindeer that pull Santa's sleigh. Of course, the Deer of Light that you see in people's yards are clearly not reindeer. You can tell because reindeer have a very distinctive antler configuration. No, the Yule Deer are based—insofar as there's a natural prototype at all—on the American Whitetail, as (after all) they should be.

I call to the wild
The soft
The brutal
The power within.

I move with grace
And strength
My blade readied
To pierce the veils
Of the unjust.

I speak my words
I create and I destroy
Each an expression
Of my true nature.

I run in the woods
I fly in the stormy skies
I dive into inescapable waters
I stalk my prey in the stone
Constructs of the civilized.

I am relentless
I am beauty
I am the reflection
Of all that is of the light
And all that coalesces in the darkness.

I am the Divine Feminine
You cannot turn away
You cannot hide from my Truth
Because I am all that you
Aspire to be.

I always feel renewed and empowered at this time of the year. I am a daughter of the cold and wintry world and this is when I come alive and awaken all of my senses to the world around me. This is also the time when I renew my commitment to the Divine Feminine and exploration of HER wild nature. This year, in particular has been difficult for many women given the political agendas and the fear of losing precious legal ground that has seen the sacrifice of many women’s privacy and power in gaining.