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I've been thinking about roads the past couple of days. The Minoans were famous for their paved roads, an unusual feature of Bronze Age cities. Archaeologists think they had roads (not all of them paved) running all around the coastline of Crete and crisscrossing the island.
These are Rhea's Roads, since Rhea is the Minoan Earth Mother. It's her soil we walk on, especially on Crete, even if there's pavement on top of it.
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What makes Hedge Witchcraft or Hedge Druidry different from other traditions? Is it just a solitary path, or is there more to it? In this blog we will explore the importance of the hedge in hedge traditions.
Many when they think of Hedge Witchcraft or Hedge Druidry see a solitary tradition. This is true: the path of the Hedge Witch or the Hedge Druid is most definitely a solitary one. But there is more to it than simply being a solitary practitioner. There is a trifecta involved, which includes an ability to work alone, but also an affinity for trance practices and a desire to walk between the worlds. Let’s look at each one in turn.
Recently a kindred member went to Odin. Jan was exceptionally young to die. It was not his legal last name, but among us he went by Odinsson. I asked Odin if he is with him and he is.
In late March, I went to his wake at his favorite pub. There were several prominent local pagans there. There were also many members of his family and community other than just the pagans and heathens. I made several social media posts over the course of the event, starting with the Irish coffee. I remembered when Jan brought his huge fryer to my house for a post ritual feast and made lumpia from his family recipe. I remembered him standing in my kitchen working at the counter and looking up in wonder and delight when I and the folk dance group went by in the hearth room doing a dance where we clapped and turned in unison, and his wife Stephanie joined us and learned some dances. I mentioned some other good times we’d had, and listened to the others tell about their good times. Near the end of the evening, some local pagans and I attempted a rendition of Finnegan’s Wake with some of the words changed, changing it to Odinsson’s Wake.
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We have an exceptionally powerful total solar eclipse occurring in Pisces in a few days. You may be thinking “the eclipse is in Aries!” but it actually is quite literally in the sign of Pisces. Tropical astrology is figurative, whereas sidereal astrology is based on where the constellations actually physically are, their actual size (hint: they definitely are not all a tidy 30°) and accounts for the precession of the equinoxes. Make no mistake, we are in Pisces through-and-through and I should like to make a case for this system and for working with the eclipse in the context of Pisces, not Aries.
Pisces is deep, no pun intended. It is spiritual, mystical, intuitive creative, and of course oh-so-watery. This powerful eclipse then is ideal for divination, enhancing intuitive and magical abilities, but also to banish or end any destructive or unhelpful energies, thoughts, feelings, relationships, etc. If there are any in your life that need extra firepower (or waterpower?), now is the time. Think of it as blasting your obstacles out of the way with the surge of a fire hose.
This is a great time to delve into ourselves, our true, deepest heart, and not the Sun-driven persona that everyone else sees. The Sun yields to the emotional Moon at this time, the Moon which guides and influences us and our actions far more than the Sun does. This is a time for shadow work, for scrying, for personal development and releasing whatever is no longer serving you. Chiron sits very near this eclipse, amplifying the healing energy in particular.
There are special times when it is said that the veil between the worlds is thinner than usual. These three “spirit nights” are Beltane, Midsummer and Samhain. Beltane and Samhain are Celtic festivals that celebrate the start of the summer and winter seasons, as the ancient Celts only had two seasons instead of four. The whole shift occurring in nature at these times was reflected in the lives of those who lived by the seasons. At Beltane, the cattle would be taken to their summer pastures, and driven between two large bonfires, we assume for purification, blessings, and possibly to make any nasty ticks and other bugs drop off either by the smoke or the heat. At Samhain, the cattle returned to their winter fold, and those that couldn’t be kept over winter were slaughtered. Huge feasts celebrated the ancestors and the mighty dead, and care was taken to avert the restless dead or the Sluagh na marbh. At any rate, the lives of those who lived with their cattle were very much changed and shifted during these times of the year.
The summer solstice marks the time of the greatest light, when all nature seems to be reaching its peak. As such, this too was seen as a liminal time, and very much connected to the Fair Folk, or faeries. Not just in Celtic lands, but especially in Germanic and Scandinavian countries Midsummer was a huge festival and celebration. As summer arrives later in these countries, it has a similar feel to the Celtic Beltane. Like at Beltane, here a large pole similar to the Maypole was erected and danced around. Plants were at their highest powers, and so collecting the herbs that you needed was especially important at this time. Midsummer is still one of the biggest celebrations in countries like Sweden, where there is lots of food, singing and games. Though it has been overlaid with Christian mythology the nativity of St John the Baptist, it is still more a giant party than anything else. And why not?
By why are these especially liminal times? Well, when one season switches over to the next, we can often feel like we are in an in-between time.
4, 2, 3, 7.
That's how you offer the lamp to a Hindu god.
Puja, also known as arati, is the major Hindu rite of temple service, in which various items—water, incense, fire, a flower (read: water, air, fire, earth) are presented to the deity indwelling the murti (statue), and then consumed by the worshiper herself.
(There's an entire theology encoded in this ritual, but I'll leave you to suss that for yourself.)
Each item is circled in the air—sunwise, of course—before the deity a certain number of times. That's where the numbers cited above come in.
Why, I asked my friend, head pujari at the local ISCKON center, those particular numbers to those particular parts of the god?
My friend didn't know. He had, in fact, asked the same question of his teacher, who likewise did not know. While in altar training, my friend had asked all around. No one in the community seemed to know.
(This isn't really surprising. Sometimes things become so ingrained in a tradition that it simply never occurs to anyone to ask.)
Sometimes it takes an outsider to see to the heart of a given matter. I'm a ritualist myself, of a different, though related, tradition. So here, for what it's worth, is my best guess as to the meanings:
