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Lady Moon, Lady Moon

Lady Moon, Lady Moon,

shining so bright:

where are the little stars

hiding tonight?

Ask the old owl

that lives in the tree.

Who's that behind you?

One of the more exciting aspects of revivalist spirituality is the discovery of new-to-us deities. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, we do a little happy dance!

In this case, a happy dance is especially appropriate. Allow me to introduce you to a new deity pair: Thumia and Kaulo.

Rainbow Season is my kindred's end of summer ritual. Since summer is monsoon rain season the end of summer is rainbow season. We honor the mermaids in the summer and Heimdall at the end of summer. Heimdall was Tom Newman's patron. I don't know if we're going to keep doing that in future years but we're at least doing it one more time, this year, in honor of Tom. It's also 1 year since he died.

Heimdall is the Guardian of the Rainbow Bridge. The Rainbow Bridge is the path that leads from Asgard to wherever the gods want to go. When the end of the rainbow touches down on Earth (Midgard) it only goes one place, to Asgard. The gods can bring dead people to Asgard via the Bridge if they wish to select specific humans for that honor.

What do you do when you're stuck with a liability?

Gods know, it wouldn't be Harvest Home without a few pumpkin pies—our Equinox feast is basically Witches' Thanksgiving, but with better food and better music—so I opened up a couple of cans of organic pumpkin and set to work.

Ugh.

You'd think that I would know by now: “organic” is no guarantor of anything. The pumpkin looked downright nasty: watery, stringy, brown.

Well, you can only play the hand that you're dealt. I whipped up the eggs with a little brown sugar and added the pumpkin. (It looked a little better once I'd pureed it.) On a whim, I substituted a can of coconut milk for the usual sweetened condensed milk. Taking a page from a friend's playbook, I used Chinese Five Spice powder instead of pumpkin pie spice.

When the pies came out of the oven, I couldn't help but grimace. Pumpkin pies should be an appealing orange-brown color, not greige. To call them “unappetizing” looking would be an understatement.

Next day, I tried a piece for lunch, dreading—in case they weren't good enough to serve to the coven—the prospect of having two whole pies to dispose of.

Much to my relief, it was actually pretty tasty. I even had a second slice, just to make sure.

What do you do when handed a liability? In the Art Magical, we call it Metamorphosis: you transform the liability into an asset.