I have seen twilight at mid-afternoon.

I have gazed into the face of Totality.

I have beheld the Black Sun.

By many traditional peoples around the world, eclipses are accounted unchancy and ill-omened events.

(Why not? Seeing them can strike you blind.)

Unsurprisingly, witches see matters differently.

What do witches make of eclipses?

Sabaean archpriest Federico de Arechaga (Ordun), while not himself of the tribe of Witches, certainly knew how to think like one.

He was wont to refer to weddings—all weddings: male-male, female-female, male-female (in this he was far ahead of his time)—as “eclipses.”

For witches, eclipses—those of both Sun and Moon—are considered Great Rites, hieroi gamoi, alchemical weddings of Moon and Sun.

As local priestess Hillary Pell put it, “The Union of the Gods renews the world.”

They bode, we say, coming change.

From Pittsburgh, we drove 72 miles north to Pymatuning.

Swollen with eclipse-pilgrims, the trip—an hour and a half in the going—took four and a half hours in the coming-back.

For three unforgettable hours, differences were laid aside. Rightist, leftist, centrist; Republican, Democrat, Independent; Trumpist, Bidenist, None-of-the-Above-ist: as the great Marriage of the Gods, in all its cosmic glory, unfolded before us, we, too, were one.

Gaze impudently upon this Holy Mystery, unprotected, and the gods will smite you blind.

Fortunate, then, we whose eyes, strengthened by the powerful spells of techno-wizardry, may don our magical seer-stones set in their silver bows, and behold what the ancestors never saw.

Among my own people, I would have fallen down in adoration before the Black Sun.

To those here about me, though, such a gesture would seem an affectation, mere attention-seeking.

Instead, I rise to my feet. For three sacred minutes, I pray as I have rarely prayed in my life.

For three sacred minutes, I pray that, in this time of partisan othering and demonization, we might instead, be united: one through the days to come, as we were one that day. And let us all say: so mote it be.

The union of the gods renews the world.