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In the dream, my old student apartment is decorated for a party. M. is finally graduating!

Oh, M. Through all the years that we shared this very apartment—ever since we worked together in that fancy restaurant downtown—I've been hopelessly in love with him. How many scurrilous poems have I dedicated to him over the years, how many epigrams? He's never seen any of them.

How I used to love watching him flirt his way through life. M. flirted with everyone: men, women, young, old, me included. We all knew that he didn't really mean it, and yet—such was his beauty, such was his art—our lives were made somehow the happier for having had him pass through them.

I, meanwhile, am on fire. My long-awaited book on the Tribe of Witches is finally writing itself. The words are pouring out of me. I can't find enough paper to write on. What I've got so far is written on anything I can find: envelopes, pages from the calendar, ads, anything with a blank back.

A writer friend hands me a stack of old handbills. I scroll the first into the typewriter and begin to type.

Suddenly M. is here, even more handsome than he used to be. How had I never realized before that he was actually Crown Prince of the Tribe of Witches? Or had I secretly known all along?

Ask Boss Warlock

Dear Boss Warlock:

You call yourself a “witch of the Tribe of Witches.” So, in our relationship with the gods, which is primary: the individual or the tribe?

Philosophical in Biloxi

Dear Phil Bill,

Your question is one, not so much of Who, as of How.

The tribe is the spear; the individual is the spearhead.

Across Pagandom, an unexpected trope recurs again and again at the Winter Solstice: the segregation of the sexes.

The Great Dance of the Wheel

The heart of our Midwinter's Eve observance is the Great Dance of the Wheel.

Two concentric circles. Inside, the men, facing out. Outside, around them, the women, facing in.

They dance to the same song: the old, old song that tells the story of the Sun's life, death, and rebirth.

During the verses, the circles revolve in opposite directions, alternating deosil and widdershins.

During the chorus, they dance toward, and then away from one another: four steps in, four step out.

This is the point of the ritual during which—as I expect from all good ritual—I generally experience the oceanic sense of immersion in the greater world around me.

Spear Dance

On Mother Night, the men of the North Country Theodish kindred retreat to the traff, a jerrybuilt outdoor shelter.

There they change, chant around the fire, and prepare to approach the house, where the women are busy with rites of their own, with the Hooden Horse, in the traditional Spear Dance.

After the Dance, the men and women sing back and forth to one another, improvising jesting verses.

Meanwhile, in the Hindu Kush...

Chaumós, the month-long Winter Solstice festival of the Kalasha, the last remaining Indo-European-speaking people to have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity, is marked by a strict period of segregation of the sexes.

The men move out of the houses and sleep in the goat sheds. During the time of greatest sanctity immediately preceding the Solstice, sex is forbidden.

In a state of heightened ritual purity, the men and women dance separately, singing raunchy songs and aiming obscene jests at one another.

Among Pagans Old and New, the Winter Solstice tends to mark the end of the old cycle and the beginning of the new.

“You didn't cast a circle.”

I'm talking with a guest after our Samhain ritual at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. His observation raises interesting procedural—not to mention theological—questions. When you hold a ritual at a holy place, do you really need to cast a circle first?

“We're on an island,” I remind him.

Witches don't always cast circles.

Back when, we didn't need to.

In his 1973 study 'Le nom celtique du canton en Gaule et en Grande-Bretagne,' P. Quentel discusses the Gaulish root *cant- (=Welsh can, Breton can, kant, Irish cét), which means, interestingly, both “territory”, “edge”, and “circle.”

“The notion of 'circle' is linked with that of 'territory'” he writes, “because territory is generally conceived of as a circle” (cited in Rivet 298; translation mine).

Think of that next time you cast a circle.

(Writing on tribal sanctuaries, Ken Dowden makes much the same observation in his indispensable 2000 European Paganism: The Realities of Cult from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, adding that, like Tara in Ireland, the tribal capital is perceived as the heart of the tribe's territory from which all the rest out-radiates, whether or not it is actually geographically central.)

Back in old tribal days, Witches—they called us the Hwicce then—had a tribal territory of our own, in the Cotswolds and Severn basin of what is now England.

Every time we cast a circle, we reestablish that territory, the Kingdom—and sometimes Queendom—of the Witches.

Maybe someday Witches will have a territory of our own again.

eigh  n.  1. the horse as sacred being  2. the rune eoh  3. (liturgical) the steed (personifier) of a god

"The god rides the man as meaning rides the rune."

They say that in the Old Language of the Witches, every word meant three things: something good, something bad, and something to do with a horse.

In those days, of course, we were a Horse People.

We'd been a Horse People since ever we first rode out of the East; indeed, they say that it was we who first tamed them. Put differently, it is to us that the Horned first gave horses, back in the dawn of days.

(So let it never be said, when the young bucks of our tribe ride out horse-reaving, that they are stealing horses. The Horned gave horses to us. Everyone knows that you can't steal what's already yours.)

So important were horses to our world that we named a rune for one: eoh, the great life of the gods, the movement of the cosmos.

New ways came. We settled. From a People of the Horse, we became a People of Cattle. The joke then became “...and something to do with a cow.”

We lost the old word eoh—and much else—but if it had (mutatis mutandis) survived in continuous use, we would today say eigh (rhymes with hay; cp. neigh).

Among us today, as it did to the ancestors, eigh still means “horse,” but a horse in its intrinsic sacrality.

Still it names the horse-rune, eigh.

Also it names the steed of the god, the priest that the Horned rides in ritual: for, as they say, the god rides the man as meaning rides the rune.

An Army of One

The major problem in the US these days in many ways parallels the paradox at the heart of the pagan community: just how does a collectivity of self-centered, radically-individual individualists actually manage to hold itself together?

Alas: without some sense of overarching, shared identity, it usually doesn't.

Reductionisms

With Pride Month now in rearview, I confess myself, frankly, a little sick of flags.

The My-Own-Very-Special-Identity-of-the-Week flags that sprang up all over the neighborhood in the course thereof remind me in many ways of that silly hanky code that someone concocted during the oh-so-cruise-y pre-AIDS 70s, the color and placement of the hank telling the viewer exactly what permutation of sex you were looking for. I'll spare you the specifics.

Never bothered to learn the hank-code myself, just as I've never bothered to learn (or even closely read) the list of the supposed 72 (!) different gender identities either. (Sorry, waste of time and brain-space, both.) Ye gods: no wonder people vote Republican.

Really: just how self-absorbed, privileged, and entitled are we? Meanwhile, in Gaza, children starve to death.

Flags, flags, flags. Me, me, me.

Welcome to the Great Splintering: the Way of Atomization.

Earth-Horse, Moon-Horse

So I've commissioned my own flag.

To the Men of the Tribe

Go to the edge of your favorite clearing in the woods.

There, strip off everything that you weren't born with: clothing, jewelry, devices.

Step as you are into the midst of the clearing.