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Geode jewelry can bring you success at work. At my favorite metaphysical five-and-dimes, I have been seeing baby geodes that can easily be glued to a fabric choker band or are already in pre-made pendants. If you are feeling like you are in a slump at work or want to impress the boss, begin wearing a pretty and professional geode necklace and things will be looking up soon! If this style is not for you, just buy a geode, set it on your desk, and look at it while picturing yourself climbing the ladder of success.

In Praise of Arditti's Easter

Set in a fictional North London Anglican parish during Holy Week at the height of the AIDS epidemic,

Michael Arditti's masterful 2008 Easter, while also treating with larger, universal issues—doubt, belief, community, identity, love—is a novel profoundly Christian, with two great pagan moments.

Listen, and I will tell.

The Rites of Pan

Virtually everywhere, there are places where men go to have (mostly) anonymous sex with other men. Look for these places on the edges, in the places-between: parks, truck-stops, forests.

Here are enacted the true Rites of Pan. Here, I am deeply convinced, flows the power that makes the Sun to rise, the Rivers to flow, the Seeds to sprout. Power raised for no ulterior purpose but the raising thereof, is always power given to the Horned.

(A friend who spent some time in Jerusalem once told me, “The only place in Israel where it truly doesn't matter if you're a Jew, a Christian, or a Muslim, is in the parks at night”: a “f*ckocracy,” he called it. Truly, Pan is the Great Leveler.)

If you've never been to one of these places—they're not really my style, either—Arditti will take you there vicariously. Welcome to Hampstead Heath at night.

Oh my, oh my.

Building the New Pagan Vocabulary

The second is a mere single phrase, an expression: but oh, what an expression.

Writes Arditti:

...to move his lips would require a Stonehenge effort.

The Mists of Stonehenge

Of the 10,000 stone circles of Britain, what makes Stonehenge unique?

Easily answered: the lintels.

Of all the stone circles of Britain, only Stonehenge has cap-stones.

What did the Anglo-Saxons, those inveterate incoming barbarians, make of Stonehenge? With one exception, we simply don't have the documentation to know.

We do know what they called it, though, and that name is, in itself, quite the singular (and revealing) datum.

Stonehenge: the name is transparently Anglo-Saxon. Stone + hang: the “hanging stones,” one might say.

As Rudyard Kipling would put it, thereby hangs a tale.

The “Hanging Stones.” Writer after writer has read this to mean “Stone Gallows” or “Place of Hanging.”

Supposedly, the Anglo-Saxons were wont to build their gallows à la Hanged Man card, as two uprights with a cross-piece. (Later gallows, of course, generally took the form of a single standing post with cross-arm and brace.) Thus, to their barbarian eye, Stonehenge resembled a place of mass execution.

We're only a step or two away here from Stonehenge as a temple to Woden, the Anglo-Saxon Odin. If we can trust the Norse evidence (but can we? That's 400 years later, and 1000 miles away), men were hanged as offerings to him: Galgaguð, Snorri calls him, the Gallows God.

Stonehenge, place of mass sacrifice. Just imagine a corpse swinging from every lintel-stone, rope creaking, in the eternal wind of Salisbury Plain.

Really, one has to wonder just how much of this is mist: paganophobia, essentially. You know those wicked heathens and their dreadful human sacrifices.

Myself, I have to wonder of there isn't a simpler explanation of the name by which we still know Stonehenge today. “Hanging Stones”? Well, what's unique about Stonehenge? The lintels. They're the major marvel. How the heck did they get them up there?

When a seeing person has a dream about becoming blind, it’s often a sign that there is something in that person’s life they’re avoiding or refusing to acknowledge. Maybe you are avoiding a friend because you are annoyed with them about something but don’t want or know how to confront them. Perhaps you witnessed something you knew was wrong but did nothing. Blindness may draw your attention to other senses, too, which could mean there is a circumstance you are involved in that is really about more than what meets the eye. Trust your intuitive senses and don’t take everything at face value. When one sense is lost, it can heighten others. For example, you hearing gets better which can open you up to experiencing the world in a new way. Take this dream as an encouragement to start perceiving things in a new way.

48 days from now, on Monday, March 20, 2023, Spring will begin in the Northern Hemisphere at 5:24 p.m. PDT (Paganistani Daylight Time).

If you have not already done so, please begin to save onion skins now, so that by the Equinox you will have amassed sufficient dyestock to dye eggs for your entire household. Remember: every egg dyed brings Spring a little closer.

Non-cooking households may apply to the Ministry of Cultural Affairs for their annual allotment of onion skins. Please apply early, as supplies may be limited.

It is my ritual of Autumn Equinox to bury a small clay doll. She represents part of me that sinks into the deep dark of the winter months. Deep in the underworld, she is nestled under the soil, among sleeping tree roots.

This ritual only started a few years ago as normally I would symbolically bury her in a large black clay cauldron. In 2019 I took her with me while visiting home and on the Island of Eigg I followed a dream and buried her in the soil.

Ænes in mónað, and betra hwonne full sé móna...

The Gidden’s Banns

Whenever ye have need of anything,

once in the month, and better it be when the moon is full,

then shall ye gather in some dernly stead

to give good worship to me, who am Queen of all Witcheries.

There foregather, ye who are fain to dwimmery,

yet have not won its deepest derns:

to these shall I teach such things as are yet unknown.

Ye shall be free from thralldom;

and in token that ye be truly free,

ye shall be naked in your yieldings.

And ye shall dance, sing, feast, make glee, and love,

all in my worthing. For mine is the drunkenness of the soul;

mine also is earthly mirth, for my law

is love unto all beings.

Mine is the dernly door that opens upon Elfhame;

and mine is the vat of the ale of life,

the well of Wyrd, which is the kettle of all fruitfulness.

On earth I give knowledge of life everlasting,

and beyond death: frith, freedom, and friendship

with those who have gone before. Nor do I ask

aught in offering, for behold:

I am the Mother of All Living,

and my love is poured out upon the earth.