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 Wheat blowing in the wind | Tim Fletcher | Flickr

In all my years of pagan ritual, I've never seen anything like it: a spontaneous act of mass adoration, utterly organic.

Grand Sabbat 2022: the covens of the Midwest Tribe of Witches, gathered before our god.

He Whose Horns Reach Up to Heaven towers on the altar; we his people stand before him. Me, attendant to the god, I stand with the rest, beside the altar, rapt. He fills my eyes, my heart.

Behind me, beside me, I sense, more than see, a ripple of motion. One by one, in the presence of this Mystery, we bow to the ground, a wave of loving adoration, like wind through wheat.

(Talking with others later, I find that no one can remember why it happened, or how it started, only that it did.)

Now, witches in general are not bowers, nor do the rubrics of the ritual require it.

This, though, was no act of humiliation, of ceremonial self-abasement, but rather, paradoxically, an expression of collective pride: natural, unforced, its rightness like the rippling of a field of standing grain before the wind. Before the Mystery of our god, we bow.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

Hindu Red Thread Evil Eye Protection Stunning Bracelet Luck Talisman A –  www.OnlineSikhStore.com

 

“What's with the yarn?”

(Gandalf: that's the name of the buck-goat whose wool I'm wearing around my wrist: hand-sheared, hand-spun, hand-dyed.)

I've stopped to get ice on my way home from the Grand Sabbat of the Midwest Tribe of Witches. One's first time back in non-pagan space after a sojourn in Witchdom is invariably a little disorienting.

(“I'm cowaning out,” I'd joked earlier that afternoon, putting on a shirt for the first time in days. Folks laughed and assured me that I could pass or, at least, probably wouldn't get arrested.)

I tie this knot in Old Hornie's name: aye 'til he fetch thee home again. That's what they say as the thread is tied on. Then you don't take it off again until you get home safely. Leave it on until it falls off of its own accord, they say, and the God of Witches himself will grant you a favor.

People of the Red Thread, we're called. All of us have the Blood that goes back to old times—His blood—witch and non-witch alike. Some of us know it, though, and some of us don't.

Oh, the Sabbat and its weird glories. (That's “weird” in both senses.) Some day we'll die and rejoin that never-ending dance on the Sabbat-Field of the Buck. To some—his beloved children—he gives the unutterable gift of tasting this ecstasy, this state of simultaneous Being/Not-Being, while in life.

How do you explain all that to someone asking what is, after all, nothing but an idle question? As usual, I take the easy way out.

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A few months after the first Sweetwood Grand Sabbat—that's the tribal gathering of the Midwest Tribe of Witches, which takes place when the corn first ripens in the fields, and the berries hang red on the rowans—a long-time tribal member, while at the store one day, ran into some Sabbat first-timers that she'd met that year.

They talked for a while. When it was time, she said—we all get such a charge out of saying this—Well, see you at the Sabbat.

No, they told her, they weren't planning to go back.

Flabbergasted, my friend had to know: Why ever not?

It was too emotionally intense, they told her, and too culturally immersive.

Too emotionally intense, and too culturally immersive.

That's got to be the best bad review that I've ever heard.

It's also a thoughtful and articulate review. As we all know, the Sabbat is not for everyone. For those accustomed to the well-meaning but undemanding eclecticism of your average pagan festival, a crash course in tribal immersion like the Sabbat might well overwhelm.

But for those of us who belong, there's no place else like it. As Jeanne Dibason told the court at her trial in 1620, “The Sabbat is the witch's true Paradise.”

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

How if I told you that there is a place—not Narnia, not Oz, but a real, truly live place—where animals talk?

How if I told you that you could talk—really talk, face-to-face talk—with the Beast-Lord, King of Animals, Himself?

Now, through the spiritual technology of the ancestors, you can.

 

All over the world, people tell stories about talking animals. All over the world, people remember a time when we could speak with the animals. Then, say the stories, something terrible befell, the Great Rupture, and now we no longer can.

It is, perhaps, the most poignant longing-dream of the human heart: to undo that terrible divide between the other animals and ourselves.

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Well, I was wrong.

I just got back from the 2021 Midwest Grand Sabbat, the first post-pandemic theedish (tribal) gathering of the Midwest Tribe of Witches. I had fully expected that, after being bottled up for a year and a half, the Sabbat would be explosive, like a bottle popping its own cork.

So much for my powers of prediction.

I'd expected wild ecstasis, but what I found was something far other. One after another, people laid their heads in the lap of the Horned, some of them (I'm not sure that I wasn't one myself) sobbing.

("I can actually lay my head in my god's lap. Literally," said a friend of mine later, shaking his head, his voice full of wonder. "And he would bend his head over theirs," added another, "cradling them in his antlers." )

After a year of plague, with all its losses, what we wanted was not ecstasy, but emotional catharsis. (I'm guessing that the first Grand Sabbat after the Black Death was probably the same.) Each Grand Sabbat takes on its own individual character in my memory; after a year of tears, I will always remember this year's as the Sabbat of Tears.

So we shed our tears in the lap of our god, of Him who quenched the fires of Hell with his own tears of sorrow for the suffering of his beloved people.

“Come to me, my people, for I love you,” he called to us from the altar.

And come to him we did.

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 Amazon.com: European Paganism (9780415474634): Dowden, Ken: Books

Hey N,

I'm absolutely delighted that you'll be joining us for this year's Midwest Grand Sabbat, and the enthusiasm with which you've taken on the preparations moves me deeply. The Sabbat really is the witch's true paradise, as anyone who has been there can tell you, but there's no denying that what you get out of it is very much proportional to what you put in.

I hope that you're enjoying Dowden's European Paganism. It's so much better than nearly anything else out there: a veritable hoard of pagan/heathen practice. It's definitely one of the Thirteen Books that I'd take to the desert island.

If you really want to understand the inner workings of the Grand Sabbat, pay close attention to Chapter 14. Cowan reviewers have felt that Dowden oversteps the evidence in his claims here, but the truly amazing thing is that he could well be describing our Sabbat—the whole tribe gathering in the tribal territory's central sacred place to enact the terrible sacrifice that renews the life of the people—even though the entire structure of the Grand Sabbat and its "time-stead" were already fully in place well before I had ever read Dowden.

This is one of the things that gives me hope for the future of the whole pagan project. Spontaneously we regenerate old practices and structures, not because they're historical—although they may be—but because they're practical ways to accomplish what we want, inherent in how we—as heathens/pagans, as human beings—do things together. There are large conclusions to be drawn here, and in a matter of weeks we'll be fully immersed in them. Gods, what's better than that?

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 Apple Apples Fruit - Free photo on Pixabay

 

In 1991, Ohio's Lady Lhianna Sidhe worked an act of audacious magic: she conjured a Tribe of Witches into being.

Weary of the entry-level orientation of the pagan festival circuit, and the demographic swamping of experienced practitioners that invariably ensued, she dreamed of an invitational gathering of magical family with deep and long-time commitment to the Craft.

And so it was.

For 13 years in the nineties and early naughts, the mists would part and the Midwest elders of the Craft would meet on the holy isle of Avalon. Friendships, covens, and marriages were made. There was held (O happy Night!) the first Old-Time Witches' Sabbat—the “ecstatic adoration of the embodied Horned Lord”—of modern times. (Shining with firelight, He stood on the altar in all His naked male beauty, constellations wheeling between His antlers....) And indeed, the Midwest Grand Sabbat continues to work its weird, uncanny magic in the world, as it has ever since: the next will take place later this summer.

Witches being witches, along with the serious work—and no festival ever had inspired such a collective sense of momentum as Return to Avalon—much satire also ensued. Here are fragments of a song that some of us would regularly chant, there beyond the mists.

You already know the tune.

 

This is Avalon

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