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This dazzling spring Flower Moon is an optimal opportunity to strive for the new, to initiate a phase of transformation that will last long after the Full Moon has waxed into darkness. This invocation honors the season, planting seeds of positive change in your life to bloom for years to come. Start by gathering red and green apples, candles of the same colors, and seed corn from a gardening store, along with three stalks of lavender and three long strands of night-blooming jasmine. Leave these offerings on your altar all day.

When the Full Moon of May reaches the highest point in the night sky, light one red and one green candle on your kitchen altar. Wind the jasmine and lavender into a crown for the top of your head, breathing in the lovely scent the flowers produce. Holding an apple in each hand, speak this spell while circling the altar clockwise three times.

A priestess friend of mine once took a class in Writing Your Personal Theology at the local UCC* seminary. Back in those days, if you wanted to expand your pagan academic horizons, that's pretty much what you had to do.

(Today, not so much: thank Goddess for Cherry Hill Seminary.)

As one would expect, some of what she learned was applicable, some wasn't.

“'What's my Christology?'” she laughed, looking over the list of seed-questions that they'd given her. “I don't have one!”

(In Christian thought, Christology is the study of Christ's person and role in spiritual ecology.)**

Me, I'm with her. Still, taking a step back—translating into Pagan, so to speak—I ask myself: Well, who—as I see it—is god of humanity? Who, among all the gods, is most like to us? Who stands between—in the sense of connecting us to—ourselves and the other gods?

For me, a witch of the Tribe of Witches, the answer is clear: this role is filled by Him that we call the Horned.

The other gods are who they are, but he's the animal god. (I would see Him as the collective body of fauna/animal life here on planet Earth.) As animals—as human animals—he's likest to us of all the other gods. Like us, he knows what it is to love, to suffer, to die. The other gods may (or may not) know these things too, but he knows them as an animal—and, in particular, as a human animal—can know them.

That's what makes him ours, ours to us.

That's what makes us his, his to him.

That's what makes him our god, our Horned, of all gods likest us: “like us in animality, like them in divinity.”

This is a story about how I manifested something I truly desired. It's a model of how I manifest things, which you may or may not want to try. It's so simple it sounds like it's not even magic, but it's definitely magical.

Back in the 90s, I had bought myself a set of silverware. Yes, I know, lol, "the sort of person who buys their own silver" haha, not very classy, but I was moving into an apartment in Las Vegas and needed my own things. (I had the money to buy things and and move to Vegas to start a business because my dad had died.) So anyway-- my own things that were better than what I'd had in my college apartment, that is. Now, there was a time when it was assumed that a woman in her 20s starting her household would not need to buy major housewares because she would get them as wedding gifts. For those who still move into their first place when they get married, fine, "you do you" as the young people say these days, but that wasn't me lol. So anyway, I picked out a really beautiful pattern and I loved it and then a few years later, after I had gotten so sick with PCOS that I had had to close my bookstore and was unable to work, I ended up having to sell the silver. I got better eventually, and gradually put my life back together, and went on to have success at other things, but from time to time, I still missed my silver. Silly, I know. What with everything else, what's a few spoons? But I did miss it. For decades. Occasionally.

When the moon is waning, this is your opportunity to release anything that no longer serves in your life. We all need to embrace the winds of change in life, clearing away the old and making room for the new. This charm helps overcome upset and can help release anger and grudges. And isn’t this an important first step to happiness? What you’ll need: a blustery day, access to the outdoors, basil and sage.

Well, it’s not mandatory that you have a hill for this, but you do need an open area outside for happiness spells like this. It does need to be windy. 

I’m stuck. Living in the Toronto Covid “hot spot” is in no way as exciting as it sounds. I’m 24/7 with someone I love dearly, but who perversely insists on being the exact same person day after day. We walk the same streets day after day (masked) and go over the same topics, day after day.

In other areas, I’m plagued by a sense of uselessness and impatience. My group endeavours require slow-moving consensus, all over the eyeball-dessicating Zoom. Every now and then there’s some drama that drags even this virtual action to a standstill.

I want something to happen! 

Art from around the world and across time is one of the aspects of human existence that connects us all. Whether we're looking at mammoths on a cave wall or a framed painting in a museum, we innately understand the urge to express ourselves creatively. It has been a part of us for as long as we've been human.

Art from the ancient world does more than just help us understand the people who lived back then. It can also inspire us to creativity in our own modern lives.

I'm standing on a street corner, waiting for the light to change.

There's not a car moving for blocks in either direction. Back home in the US, I'd just cross the street, light or no light.

But I'm not at home; I'm in Germany, standing with a bunch of local people, waiting for the light to change.

Complicating the matter is the fact that, though I'm not a local, I look like one. Anglo-German on one side, Anglo-Austrian on the other: whatever it means to look German, I do. Here, people on the street automatically address me in German.

I stand and wait with the others.

Growing up as a little gay witch kid in a place where it wasn't safe to be either, I learned about inner freedom early on. Beneath your cloak of invisibility, you can be whoever you want to be.

Still, it's a disconcerting moment. If the SS had come to the door and started asking about the neighbors, what would I have told them?