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“Most painted dick in the Midwest.”

If I never accomplish anything else in this long and varied life of mine, I suspect that I can safely claim that distinction at least with little fear of competition.

Such is the life of a priest of the Horned.

At the Grand Sabbat, the priest wears a mask, a collar of fresh green leaves, and a coat of paint.

The god wears the priest.

Eight days on from Mystery Night, I've just about scrubbed off the last of the god-paint. Well, there's still a little around the edges of the toenails, and my navel (being too ticklish to scrub). Such things are neither lightly taken on, nor easily shed.

Do you know why the god's glans is painted red at the Sabbat? The way I heard it, it's because He's the Opener of the Way.

You don’t need to fix anything,
it is okay to let your feelings feel,
to let your swoops swoop,
to let your not-knowing not-know,
to let your hope soar
and then plummet,
to let your joy be joyful,
to let your tears be hot.

Witnessing,
without fixing.

As part of my ongoing Living the Questions free e-class this year, I offer you this brief audio about Adversity and Normalcy. 

We don't know whether or not the “orgiastic” witch's sabbat of the witch-hunters ever existed anywhere but in their sordid, sex-starved imaginations. But this much we do know: it exists now.

It exists because we made it.

In our day, the Grand Old-Time Witch's Sabbat, with all its blood, grit, and semen, rises again. Those old medieval tropes retrovert very nicely into Pagan, we've found. Anyone who has ever been there can tell you that's it's the real thing.

“Just like the woodcuts,” I was once told, the morning after.

But the Sabbat is not for everyone.

At the Midwest Grand Sabbat just past, a friend was telling me about some folks that she'd spoken with who had attended a previous Sabbat and found it not to their taste.

“Too intense,” they told her. “Too culturally immersive.”

Well, you can't fault their conclusions. Those of us who have been there know full well its unremitting, gut-wrenching emotionality, and the four days of the Sabbat weekend constitute a crash course in deep Witch culture. To those accustomed to the undemanding eclecticism of most pagan festivals, the Real Deal might well seem overwhelming.

For the witch-hunters were right about this much at least: the Sabbat demands everything. The Sabbat demands your soul.

For those of us of the Tribe of Witches, it's a price joyfully paid.

No, the Sabbat is not for everyone. But I couldn't help but grin when I heard my friend's words.

On the last morning of this year's Grand Sabbat gathering, a friend—a priestess of many years' experience—came to me, distraught.

“The campers!” she said. “They have to be moved! They'll ruin the sightlines!”

The campers and caravans were parked on the edge of the meadow through which the Horned departs in the final rite of farewell. We follow him up out of the woods and watch as he walks up the hill and off into the sky.

I could readily understand my friend's concern. The sight of the Antlered disappearing over the horizon is an image of such searing purity and beauty that nothing must interfere with it, nothing.

“Don't worry,” I tell her. “The god will make the campers disappear. You won't even see them.”

And so, indeed, it was.

When the rite was ended, and the tears dried, my friend came to me, wondering.

Grains are goldening, apples and other fruits are ripening, and beehives are thick with honey. The harvest season has come and is rapidly maturing. While Lammas and Lughnasadh have passed in the UK and Ireland, other harvest holidays are still just beginning. Each festival celebrates the culmination of hard work and good luck, and marks the turning of the year, the slow fade of summer into fall, and the gratitude that people still feel for the benevolence of their lands.

Grains, Apples, and Honey

Modern Minoan Paganism's pantheon includes a variety of gods and goddesses with varying attributes. One group I haven't talked much about is the set of deities we call Hands of Great Skill: those whose purview is highly skilled handcrafts of various sorts.

Taking the raw materials of the Earth and transforming them, turning them into something new and different: that's a kind of magic. Rhea's gifts to us - clay and metal ore - are the body of the Earth Mother, offered up to those whose can make blades from rocks and vessels from mud using their hands and the equally magical power of fire.

“So, how was Grand Sabbat this year?” asked my friend.

Funny. I organized the event (Thursday through Monday, with the Sabbat itself on Saturday night), also acting as chief priest and thus, in effect, host of the gathering. At the Sabbat itself, I served as personifying priest.

All of which makes me the least qualified person to tell you how things went.

I've seen inexperienced priests go into a ritual expecting (and sometimes achieving) profound states of spiritual ecstasis. They think that it's all about what they're feeling. If they can manage to get themselves into the zone, presumably the rest of us will groove along with them.

They've got it all wrong.

Of all the people at any given ritual, the one whose experience is the least important is the priest.

So, as to the Sabbat, I can only tell you what other people said.

(Several said, “Best yet.” But, of course, people always say that. Which is the best Grand Sabbat? The one we're at, of course.)

As for the Sabbat itself, as personifying priest, I'm not qualified to judge because (in a sense) I wasn't even there—at least, not in propria persona.

Here's what I can tell you. The Sabbat reembodies the creation of the Tribe of Witches. It doesn't just reenact the Primal Sacrifice out of which the world arose, it makes present the Sacrifice. So it did this year, and did it well.