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“So where's all this wisdom of the elders that I'm supposed to have?”

My friend shakes his head and laughs.

“Now I'm an old guy, and young people come to me looking for wisdom; what am I supposed to say? I feel like I don't have any more insight than they do.”

I smile. I've been there myself.

“You do what the elders have always done,” I tell him, reminding him of what he already knows, and what, I'm sure, he's already doing. “You speak out of your own experience. You tell stories. People aren't looking for general principles. They're looking for stories: applied wisdom.”

My friend nods.

“Do what's right,” he says. “Be just. Speak truth.”

“Nothing secret or mysterious about it. Own what you do. Don't be an asshole.”

“And when you screw up, do what you can to make it good, and remember that, sooner or later, everybody screws up, and chances are, you'll make it through anyway.”

We laugh.

“There's your starry wisdom,” I say. “'Consult precedent, and improvise.'”

Take a close look at the controversial Green “Man” on the official invitation to Charlie III's upcoming coronation—the one that has occasioned so much brujaja in the British press.

Note, gentle reader, that it is not in fact a Green Man at all, but rather a Green Cat.

Green Beasts

In fact, the Green Feline is a not infrequent variant in the Leaf Mask motif, which turns up, historically speaking, relatively early in the development of the motif: during the early Romanesque period, in fact.

You can generally distinguish them from Green Men by their cleft lips, and the pointed ears on the tops of their heads. Art historian Tina Negus, attempting accommodation, refers to them as Green Beasts rather than Green Cats, but in fact almost all known examples are readily identifiable as felines rather than some other sort of beast.

So: if you're going to have a Green Beast, why a cat rather than some other sort of animal?

Myself, I suspect two reasons: one historical, one, well...what Nanny Ogg would call persychological.

Cats or Lions?

First off...which are we actually seeing here: Green Lions or Green Cats?

Um...Reply hazy, try again later.

For the time being, let's go with the neutral term, Green Felines. Later on, we'll see why the royal Lion would be the preferable reading.

Practical Cats

To this question, my friend and colleague Frebur Moore suggested a practical answer: that—felines being predators—what we see in the Green Feline is the hidden, stalking beast, peering, as it were, through foliage.

Makes sense. But wait, there's more.

Eyes Front

It's clear that the first foliate masks were human faces. This, I suspect, is yet another reason why Green Beasts tend to be Green Felines.

Felines, being predators, have their eyes on the front of their heads rather than on the sides. This makes their faces more visually similar to human faces and hence, more readily adaptable as stand-ins for the human face than those of animals—herbivores, say—with eyes to the sides of the head instead.

Yet another reason why cats are better than dogs.

But the Real Reason...

It's a chilly Beltane here in Paganistan, but during a precocious run of 80° weather a while back, a friend sent me a photo from the year's first sunning down at Sweetwood Sanctuary.

(And yes, that is the legendary Bull Stone that you see there in medias res.)

I couldn't help myself.

Is that a standing stone between your legs, or are you glad it's Spring? I wrote.

Back came the e-mail with the expected response.

So, you're embarking on your sixth decade. Allow me to tender a friendly rede.

Don't let yourself dry up.

You've reached the age at which a truly disconcerting number of men begin to let themselves shrivel. Some are even glad it's over, happy to be free of—as they see it—the tyranny of need.

Not us.

We're warlocks, unholy priesthood to Him o' the Horns. Like god, like priest. As we serve him, so he serves us. That's the kind of god he is.

Keep those juices flowing, brother. If she's not interested, well...you know what to do, and how to do it.

Yes, it may take a little more love than it used to. Persevere. Make it part of the regimen.

Think of it as a religious obligation. Think of it as an honoring of the god within. Think of it as libation. As you give to him, so he will give to you. But you give as a man gives, and he gives as a god.

I swear to you, it will keep you youthful. This is his promise to us.

“Why do they hate us so much?” a boy growing up Evangelical once asked his father.

(True or not, this is a common belief among Evangelical Christians.)

“Because so many Christians are such jerks,” his father told him.

There are forms of Christianity that I, as a pagan, respect, even admire.

With its intellectual vacuity, utter lack of social conscience, and political triumphalism, Evangelicalism is decidedly not one of them.

Like many gender-non-conforming kids, I grew up socially isolated.

Elementary school wasn't so bad. Having grown up with me, the other kids mostly just accepted me for who I was. Junior high, though, was hellish. There I was the weird kid, the outsider. (There must be easier ways to learn self-reliance.) In high school I finally made some friends among the other egghead creatives. I loved my new friends all the better for understanding the worth of what I'd worked so hard to gain.

Then I lost most of those friends again to the so-called “Jesus Revolution.”

By then, my pagan identity was already fully formed. I could see their so-called “revolution” for what it actually was: a total abrogation of intelligence, an unthinking embrace of the worst kind of reactionary conservatism.

(I was right. My former friends and their co-religionists were precisely the demographic that betrayed us to Reagan and his successors, including Trump.)

Suddenly, the witch-boy was the pariah again. Finally, I decided to end it.

Taking “articulate action” as a thumbnail definition of ritual, let us consider the wedding.

Two people enter separately and leave together.

That says something.

Say “wedding,” and I strongly suspect that most of us envision the standard “church” model: The bride is the star. Groom and assembly wait in place, bride enters in procession. Rites are enacted. Couple leaves together. I've seen the same trope in synagogue weddings, too.

This form marks a union of individuals.

But what if we consider weddings in the older sense: not just as the union of two individuals, but as the union of two families?

What if we rethink the wedding tribally?

Here's what I would envision, then: two—let's keep to two, for now, for simplicity's sake—groups of people converging from opposite directions, one clustered around the bride, the other clustered around the groom.

(For clarity's sake, I'll say “bride” and “groom” here, but the same would pertain for two grooms or two brides.)

They meet in the middle, the rites are enacted, and the party begins.

Let the two be one.

When America's witches gather...who will live, and who will die?

August 1997.

In Paris, Princess Di, newly divorced from the heir to the British throne, is killed in a tragic auto accident.

Meanwhile, in Paganistan...

The Festival

...the local pagan community hosts the annual gathering of the nation's largest organization of Witches and Wiccans. But tensions run high...

The Ritual

...as the Ritual Committee plans a national first: a daring, and shocking, central ritual, the Dance of the Stags.

Two Stags clash in what appears to be a battle for dominance, but ends in a Great Rite. The Three Veils bless the Union as the Stags chase each other off into the words, naked and dripping cream.

The Players

The local council's First Officer, furious that, as she sees it, her beloved Goddess is being sidelined at her own festival, vows not to attend the ritual, while...

the First Stag finds himself increasingly unsure where ritual ends and reality begins, and...

the Young Stag struggles with an unexpected passion, as...

his Partner wrestles with anger at what she herself has helped to create.

Merrymeet 1997. Who will live...and who will die?

“...hottest ritual ever.” (Bruner Soderberg)