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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in witch-fire
If You Could Live in an All-Pagan World, Would You Do It?

If you could live in an all-pagan world, would you do it?

Of course you would. So would I. Any pagan would.

That's why I love pagan festivals so much. What they offer is the opportunity to live in that ideal pagan world, if only for a little while.

That summer, the festival was only 40 minutes out of town: an easy striking distance, one might think. Well, but I couldn't get the time off work.

I was waiting tables that year at a little jazz club cum restaurant in downtown Minneapolis. At the time, our cobblestone patio was the only outdoor dining venue in the area. We were packed every night. The work was grueling, relentless, nightmarish; only the money made it worthwhile.

Every night was all hands on deck. There was absolutely no way to take time off for a festival, because there was no one to cover for me.

So I decided to commute.

Every morning, I drove out to the festival and immersed myself in the nurturing waters of pagan culture. Then I'd drive back to town and deal with the teeming cowan masses.

“This is going to be the worst,” I thought.

But I was wrong.

There I was, every night, in an aureole of golden festival energy, my witch-fires stoked high. I was golden, I glowed: you could see the light from the next room. The cowans didn't know what hit them. Night after night, tips just rained down onto the tables. In my entire wait career, I'd never made so much money.

It should have been awful, but it wasn't. I danced my way through that week, elegant as hell and utterly unstoppable.

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  • Aline "Macha" O'Brien
    Aline "Macha" O'Brien says #
    Fantastic, Steven! I just got back from the Michigan Pagan Festival, where I was a presenter. A vibrant pan-Pagan scene, lovely
Elemental , My Dear: Harnessing the Power of Fire

I am inspired by the teachings of the brilliant Yoruban priestess, Luisah Teish, who told me she keeps a votive glass candle burning in her fireplace (where safe) at all times to “harness Magic Fire in another way.”  

On the next full moon evening, gather a group around your hearth or build a bonfire on the beach or a beautiful fire in a safety-certified fire ring in a park. Ask everyone to bring a glass votive candle, preferably one of the seven-day candles you find at grocery stores or metaphysical shops. After everyone is comfortably seated around the fire, speak aloud:

...
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The Rite of the Witch-Fire

The Craft is like Fire.

Last weekend the folks from our new daughter-coven came into town for the Rite of the Witch-Fire.

For more than 30 years now, the Fire has burned continuously here at the covenstead.

Now we pass it on.

In the Fire's Presence, we gathered in the temple and kindled from it New Fire. This Fire now burns at our daughter group's new covenstead.

Truly, the Craft is like Fire.

Though you give your Fire away, the giving in no way diminishes you.

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The Care and Feeding of Sacred Fires

When the thede (tribe) of witches foregathers, as we did recently at this year's Midwest Grand Sabbat, we kindle (wood on wood, in the old way) the traditional Fire of Gathering.

The Fire burns continuously throughout the time of assembly. Everyone tends it; offerings are made to it daily. It roars at the very heart of the sabbat itself, and on our final morning together it is ritually extinguished. People take the ashes home with them when they leave.

Anyone who grows up in a traditional culture knows how to behave around a sacred fire—how it differs from a household fire, for instance—and doesn't have to be taught What You Do and What You Don't. For those of us who (alas) did not grow up in such a culture, how then does one impart these rules, the Does and Don'ts of sacred Fires, in a manner that doesn't devolve into learning boring lists of regulations?

Well, my friend and colleague Chris Moore came up with the perfect way to do it: you give people a metaphor.

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  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Ah, hence the "Fire of Witness." Oh, that's resonant, Gerald: thank you.
  • Gerald Home
    Gerald Home says #
    Awesome way to present the Sacred Fire. I was taught that the Sacred Fire is an elder spirit that witnesses what we do.

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The Flame Between the Horns

In Old Craft iconography, the Old Master is sometimes depicted as a horned (or antlered) skull with a flame between its horns. He is thus the Flammifer, the líht-bera, the Lucifer.

The image takes its origin from Continental trials; French witches frequently deposed that the Devil appeared at the sabbat in the form of a He-Goat with a candle burning between his horns. This is how Jeanne Bosdeau saw him at the Puy de Dôme in 1594. The witches would then light their own tapers or torches (as we still do) from the god's fire: the Lord of the Sabbat giving illumination to his people.

The witch-fire is the power of life that burns in each of us. It is said to be threefold: the fire in the head, the fire in the heart, and the fire in the loins.

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