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An altar is a place of power—your personal power—where you can make magic. It should be an expression of your deepest self, filled with artifacts that hold personal resonance. Allow your altar to be a work in progress that changes with the seasons and reflects your inner cycles.

To create your altar, find a small table and drape it in richly colored, luxurious fabrics—perhaps red satin or a burgundy velvet scarf. Take one red and one pink candle and arrange them around a sweet-smelling incense such as amber, rose, or jasmine. Decorate your altar with tokens that represent love to you: a heart-shaped chunk of ruby glass, potpourri made with rose and amethyst, a photo of your lover. Fridays are the time for spelling love, right before dawn. Before you light your candles, anoint them with a love oil you select from the following pages.

Here, at your magical power source, you can “sanctify your love.” Collect your tools as well as meaningful symbols and erotic iconography, and prepare for the sacred rituals of love.

Supplies:

In Which Our Intrepid Blogger Makes Some Really Bad Puns and Denies Being Anti-Kemetic

Who? Me? Anti-Kemetic? Gods, no. I'm not anti-Kemetic. Seriously, one of my best friends is. Kemetic, that is.

Yes, it's true: I do call him my “effete shaveling.” Hey, he calls me his “vile Asiatic.”

But that's not anti-Kemetism, just what passes for humor in the pagan community.

(Why “vile Asiatic”? Well, because, when the bristles hit the breeze, my sympathies—such as they are—lie with the Hyksos, not the Egyptians. I suppose it's remotely possible that some of my ancestors actually were Hyksos.)

Yes, it's true that I did once describe Kemetic ritual as being “props-intensive,” but that's not anti-Kemetism, either.

Listen, I'll tell you a story.

The Golden Barque of Isis

Say what you will about Odun and the old Sabaean Temple of Chicago back in the 70s—and I've heard the stories, just like everyone else—their craftsmanship was immaculate. They're the ones that made the Golden Barque of Isis: just like the processional shrines that they used to use in ancient Egypt.

When the Sabaeans moved from Chicago to New Orleans, my Kemetic friend Sirius inherited the Golden Barque and he, in turn, brought it to the Return to Avalon festival. The spectacular Barque of Isis procession that he staged there in the 90s was by far one of the most memorable rituals of that festival's entire 13-year run.

I had the honor to be one of the Barque's bearers that day. I'll never forget the sight of the Processional Way, lined with people, all dressed entirely in white. As someone remarked at the time, only Sirius could possibly have turned out so many witches all in white.

Along with the other Barque-bearers, I was kitted out in a white kilt and nemes (= head-cloth: think King Tut). Bare-chested, be-kohled, I looked like something out of C. B. deMille; at least until the moment that we lifted the Barque's carrying poles to our shoulders.

“Um...Sirius...ah...this kilt isn't long enough.”

After a quick reconnoiter, he smiled and patted my shoulder.

In Henry Treece's 1968 novel The Green Man, his brutal, gripping retelling of Hamlet in its original pagan cultural context, Beowulf is—let me avoid anachronism here—a man for men. He even puts the moves on young Hamlet.

(Horse-faced young Hamlet, himself a man for women, isn't having any of it.)

Yes, that Beowulf: Beowulf Grendel's-bane, King of the Geats, hero of the sole surviving Old English epic of the same name.

I'd always thought that Treece was taking some pretty broad literary license with his gay Beowulf, but after a recent intensive immersion in the original text of Beowulf, I've come to think that he may actually be onto something.

There's no evidence that Beowulf—his name means “bee-wolf,” a kenning for “bear”—was a historical character. He appears only in the eponymous epic, and is never mentioned by any historian of the period.

So, was he gay?

Well, here's what we know about him from the epic:

• He never married. (At least, no wife is ever mentioned.)
• He left no children behind him.
• All his loves—and Beowulf, as the poet testifies frequently, lives by his loves—are towards other men.

You do the math.

Myself, I had always assumed that Beowulf's lack of queen and dynastic offspring were to be read as evidence (such as it was) of his non-historical status. This still seems to me the most likely reading of the evidence, such as it is.

That said, it also seems to me that Beowulf (the epic) will unforcedly sustain a gay reading of its central character's character, and personally, I'm good with that. Beowulf the Geat: a man's man, heroic, generous, utterly admirable.

Gods know, we could use a few more larger-than-life gay heroes.

Let's let Professor Tolkien demonstrate.

Take a word from Old English—English as it was spoken 1000 years ago—one that either never existed, or once existed, but didn't survive into modern times: say hol-bytla, “hole-builder.”

Ask yourself: if this word had survived into modern times, and undergone—mutatis mutandis—all the usual sound changes, what would it look like today?

Enter hobbit.

If there is a linguistic term for this process of artificial verbal aging, I for one don't know what it is. Over the years, drawing on the Greek and Latin vocabulary that linguists tend to use to describe matters linguistic, I've coined several names for the process. None were sufficiently utile (or beautiful) to linger even in the memory of the coiner.

(Yes, I could laboriously go back through my notebooks and find them again. I'll spare both you and me the results.)

Recently I asked fellow ledesman (see below) Theodsman Nick Ritter—a better linguist than me, any day of the lunar month—what he would call it.

Anglishing, he promptly fired back.

Anglish is the name given to the conlang (“constructed language”) which asks precisely this question: if the English language had never undergone the type of linguistic imperialism that overtook it after 1066, what would it look like today?

One of the foundational principles of Anglish is the avoidance of Romance/Classical vocabulary whenever possible. Hence, my abortive attempts to coin a Greco-Latin term for this process of linguistic updating, wrong-headed from the beginning.

Thanks, Nick: Anglishing it is.

(“How, then, would one Anglish 'Beowulf'?” I ask him.

Beowulf's people, the Geats, also fell out of memory, as did the hero—whose name means “bee-wolf” (i.e. bear) himself. But Nick, of course, has a ready answer.

Hail and welcome, Bolf the Yeet.)

Old English had two different words that could be translated “tribe” or “people”: théod and léod. Without a detailed study of the words in their original context, it's hard to say what the difference in denotation between the two might have been to the English-speaking ancestors.

With the demise of tribal identity among speakers of English, neither of these words survived into modern times—13th century scholars had to borrow the Latin word for the concept—but, via the wonders of Anglishing, we can say that, had they survived, we would today say thede and lede.

So, what's the difference these days? Easily told: the people writ small, and the people writ large.

Example #1: While regarding themselves primarily as Athenians, Spartans, or Corinthians, ancient Greeks would all have regarded themselves as Hellenes.

Example #2: Speakers of Anishinabe (“Ojibway”) share a larger sense of kinship with other speakers of Algonquin languages, the larger linguistic family that includes Anishinabe and various other related languages.

Example #3: Modern-day Wiccans: Witch by thede, Pagan by lede.

Lest anyone think such linguistic nativism unique to speakers of English, let me hasten to assure you that there's an entire movement out there to revive Gaulish, the extinct language of ancient Gaul.

Make room for love in your life and your home! To prepare for new relationships and to deepen the expression of feeling and intensity of your lovemaking, you have to create a center from which to renew your erotic spirit—your altar. Here, you can concentrate your energy, clarify your intentions, and make wishes come true! If you already have an altar, incorporate some special elements to enhance your sex life. As always, the more you use your altar, the more powerful your spells will be.

Your altar can sit on a low table, a big box, or any flat surface you decorate and dedicate to magic. One friend of mine has her sex altar at the head of her bed. Another Goth girl has hers in a cozy closet complete with a nestlike bed for magical trysts.

A Saga of the Latter-Day Hwicce

Here's the conceit: that modern-day witches derive (at some remove or other) "off of" the old Hwicce tribe (and kingdom) of Anglo-Saxon days. Historical or not, be it admitted, it does make one fine story.

Welcome to the life of a full-time witch and amateur linguist.

Some time back, I'd riffed, along these lines, off of the first line of Beowulf:

Hwaet, wé Seax-Hwicca in [something, begins with S]-dagum...

Lo, we Knife-Witches in [something, begins with S]-days...

I knew that the word that I couldn't remember had to begin with S, because it needed to alliterate with seax: that's how ancient Germanic poetry works, by initial rhyme. But what that word was, I couldn't remember.

(Why “Knife-Witches”? Well, the context required a weapon—“Lo, we Spear-Danes” is how Beowulf begins—and modern witches are preeminently a People of the Knife, which we generally call “athame.” Of course, the old Hwicce were a People of the Knife as well; their kinfolk the Saxons were named precisely for their characteristic knife, the seax. It's also an hommage of sorts to the original Anglo-Saxon witchery of modern times, Uncle Bucky's Seax-Wicca.)*

Seeking the phrase, I search my computer files.

Nada.

Fine. I search my on-line posts on the topic, certain that I've used the phrase as a tantalizing epigraph somewhere or other.

Gornisht.

In increasing desperation, I pick up my little black sketchbook and scan entries on the left-hand side, working (in proper witchly fashion) backwards in time, from the most recent back to the beginning of the volume.

(The left-hand side is where I jot phrases and seed ideas; the right is for longer and more developed thoughts.)

Af klum.

Grinding my teeth, I reverse, scanning entries on the right-hand pages, working from the beginning. It's a slow and difficult process; I keep getting distracted by memorable phrases and ideas that I'd like to expand on.

Finally, about 20 pages in, I give up. “I'm turning in,” I think. “I'll keep going in the morning.”

At that very moment I find what I'm looking for, there at the bottom of the page.

Hwaet, wé Seax-Hwicca in síð-dagum...

Lo, we Knife-Witches in these latter days...

Sometimes the gods speak through meaningful coincidence.

But wait: there's more.