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A dead body, hanging from a tree.

When I boarded the school bus that frosty October morning, who could have guessed that what I was about to see would sear itself into my memory forever?

You have heard it said that Samhain marks the End of Harvest.

You have heard it said that Samhain marks the Homecoming of Flocks and Herds from the Summer Pastures.

Hear now as I tell of Samhain's First Beginning.

My school-mate's older brothers hunted.

That's how, when the bus stopped at her house to pick her up that Monday morning, there came to be the gutted carcass of a buck hanging by a rope from the big old maple in the front yard: strung up to bleed out, kept fresh by the autumn cold.

Never before had I felt so viscerally just how similar in weight and size a deer is to a human being.

It was like a crucifixion.

Forget Starhawk and Penczak. Screw Hutton, Halstead, and Posch.

Check out John Ozoga's White Tail Country instead.

It doesn't mention mythology, or the gods. (Not directly, anyway.) It never uses the P-, H-, or W-words, not even once.

But it's still the most pagan book that you'll read all year.

Ozoga's four-season paean to that iconically pagan animal, the white-tailed deer, will teach you the kind of things that the ancestors would have taken for granted, but that few pagans these days—even the hunters among us—know.

Daniel J. Cox's stunning photographs—150 of them—will teach you even more.

Reading about Whitetail society and—one can hardly avoid using the word—culture can't help but give the sense that somehow we're seeing here into our own tribal past (I'm Deer Clan myself, on my father's side) and—realistically—future.

You can be a witch and not know anything about Tarot.

You can be a witch and know nothing about astrology, Qabala, or the Golden Dawn.

But you cannot be a witch and not know your own territory: its seasons, its plants, its animals.

In the dream, the coven has gathered, ready to begin the Rite of Samhain.

Night has fallen. Turning, I see deer on the hillside: first two, then more, then many.

We have visitors, I say.

We watch them watching us. The Deer People have come to witness our sabbat.

As we watch, one by one, the deer take human form.

It is late this year, Spring. A coldness has swept over our land as many are fighting the powers that be, or complying with the powers that be, and those that are fighting the powers that be are being fought against by those who are complying with the powers that be, and perhaps vice versa. We are at war. Unfortunately.

May the warriors for Truth be victorious, win this war.

Witch-folk. We've pretty much always been a People of the Deer.

Sure, we've hunted larger game, and smaller, but down the years it's mostly deer that have kept the cauldron full and the family fed. Back in the old days, “deer” used to mean pretty much any kind of wild animal, did you know that? But now, a deer is...well, a deer. That tells you something about how important they've always been. To our people, deer are the animal par excellence.

Back in old tribal days, when we called ourselves the Dobunni (and later the Hwicce, which is where we get the name “witch” from), we were, admittedly, a People of the Herd, and our god (and our priests) wore bull's horns mostly.

But even then, just to the north lived the Cornovii, People of the Horn, and for them the god wore antlers. They're still fine hunters, the Cornovii, and being such near neighbors, there's been a lot of marrying back and forth down the years. My father's mother's people come from the old Cornovii hunting runs, in fact.

Well, it just makes sense. Unlike bulls, or elk for that matter—not to mention moose—a deer is human-sized, just about the same weight and volume that we are. There's something human about a deer. It's all a matter of scale.

Up here in the North Country, Samhain marks the time of the rut. Just now, the deer that will feed the People in years to come are being bred.

The alchemy of spirit binds the other four elements together. The spark of spirit unites with the elements to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Without spirit, each element would remain inert. However, spirit does more than add spark, it also keeps the elements in balance so that none could harm us. Too much air destroys trees. Too much fire creates a lifeless world. Too much earth will suffocate us. Too much water floods us. In return, the four physical elements balance spirit. Too much spirit makes us insubstantial and ungrounded.

Deer (Red)
With his impressive rack of antlers, the red deer makes an awesome sight. His power and agility makes the red deer, a challenge to hunt. For that reason, the Europeans regarded him the “Lord of the Forest.” For many chieftains and kings, to bring him down was proof of their power. Because of his regal bearing and grandeur, the red deer became a part of European religions. Because of his connection with ancient lives, the red deer brings the old religions alive.

Daddy, why do people put lighted deer in their front yards?

We're headed towards the tail-end of November, and the front yards in my neighborhood are suddenly sprouting deer.

These are not the wild animals, although here within sight of downtown Minneapolis we've got a sizable urban herd. (They mostly live in the wooded Mississippi Valley that runs through the heart of town.) No, these are Yule Deer.

(Up here in Snow Country, if you want to decorate outdoors, you've got to do it early.)

As a pagan, and myself a worshiper of the Deer Man, I find it deeply amusing that one of the foremost symbols of American Christmas: the Secular Holiday should be the Deer.

The connection is pretty tenuous. Presumably these are the reindeer that pull Santa's sleigh. Of course, the Deer of Light that you see in people's yards are clearly not reindeer. You can tell because reindeer have a very distinctive antler configuration. No, the Yule Deer are based—insofar as there's a natural prototype at all—on the American Whitetail, as (after all) they should be.