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(Tribal Territory of the Dobunni)

So, remind me again why I should be concerned about a bunch of boy-boffing, bread-eating Redcrests?

I mean, really, what's with those Romans?

They're so cowardly that they can't have sex with an equal: it has to be someone weaker than them, someone they can overpower. That's what it takes to make their puny little dicks hard. That's why they like boys so much.

I mean, what's with that?

And what's with all that bread they eat, anyway? Bread, bread, bread: it's all they ever eat. No wonder they're so weak.

I mean, really: why can't they eat porridge, like real people do?

Porridge, now, that's real food.

Porridge makes you strong.

Did Halloween originally mean “hallowed evening”?

Did All Hallow's originally mean “all-holy [evening]”?

Was Hallows—used by some as a spellable, pronounceable alternative to the problematic Irish “Samhain”—an old pagan name for the holiday?

No, no, and no.

Hálig (HAH-lee-yeh) was the Old English adjective that meant—and eventually became—“holy”. Substantivized—i.e. made into a noun—this became hálga, a masculine noun denoting a holy person or thing. After Christianization, it became the standard word for a saint: i.e. a holy person. Until 1066, this word—which would become our hallow—was the standard English word meaning “saint.”

(The fact that we now use the French word instead of the native English one tells its own story. The Church has always favored the conqueror over the conquered.)

So Halloween didn't originally mean “hallowed evening”, nor All Hallow's "all-holy", but rather the "Saints' Eve" and "All Saints' [Eve]" respectively.

In effect, they're worn-down forms of old names for a Christian holiday.

Does it matter?

John Alden Jr: What do they want, these terrible witches?

Cotton Mather: The same thing we all want: a country of their own.

(WGH's Salem, 2012)

[There] were so many of them [the witches] that they thought that, if they were able to remain at large for just one more year, they might have raised up a king from among them.

Hans Fründ, Report on Witchcraft in Valais (1475)

What is the Third Kingdom of the Witches?

Easily told.

Kingdom the First: the Celtic Dobunni of the Cotswolds and Severn basin, circa 100 b.c.e.

Kingdom the Second: the Anglo-Saxon Hwicce, their heirs both cultural and genetic.

Kingdom the Third: the eponymous Witches, their latter-day children, now in worldwide diaspora.

What is the Third Kingdom of the Witches?

Easily told.

Us: the Younger Witchery.

eigh  n.  1. the horse as sacred being  2. the rune eoh  3. (liturgical) the steed (personifier) of a god

"The god rides the man as meaning rides the rune."

They say that in the Old Language of the Witches, every word meant three things: something good, something bad, and something to do with a horse.

In those days, of course, we were a Horse People.

We'd been a Horse People since ever we first rode out of the East; indeed, they say that it was we who first tamed them. Put differently, it is to us that the Horned first gave horses, back in the dawn of days.

(So let it never be said, when the young bucks of our tribe ride out horse-reaving, that they are stealing horses. The Horned gave horses to us. Everyone knows that you can't steal what's already yours.)

So important were horses to our world that we named a rune for one: eoh, the great life of the gods, the movement of the cosmos.

New ways came. We settled. From a People of the Horse, we became a People of Cattle. The joke then became “...and something to do with a cow.”

We lost the old word eoh—and much else—but if it had (mutatis mutandis) survived in continuous use, we would today say eigh (rhymes with hay; cp. neigh).

Among us today, as it did to the ancestors, eigh still means “horse,” but a horse in its intrinsic sacrality.

Still it names the horse-rune, eigh.

Also it names the steed of the god, the priest that the Horned rides in ritual: for, as they say, the god rides the man as meaning rides the rune.

An Army of One

The major problem in the US these days in many ways parallels the paradox at the heart of the pagan community: just how does a collectivity of self-centered, radically-individual individualists actually manage to hold itself together?

Alas: without some sense of overarching, shared identity, it usually doesn't.

Reductionisms

With Pride Month now in rearview, I confess myself, frankly, a little sick of flags.

The My-Own-Very-Special-Identity-of-the-Week flags that sprang up all over the neighborhood in the course thereof remind me in many ways of that silly hanky code that someone concocted during the oh-so-cruise-y pre-AIDS 70s, the color and placement of the hank telling the viewer exactly what permutation of sex you were looking for. I'll spare you the specifics.

Never bothered to learn the hank-code myself, just as I've never bothered to learn (or even closely read) the list of the supposed 72 (!) different gender identities either. (Sorry, waste of time and brain-space, both.) Ye gods: no wonder people vote Republican.

Really: just how self-absorbed, privileged, and entitled are we? Meanwhile, in Gaza, children starve to death.

Flags, flags, flags. Me, me, me.

Welcome to the Great Splintering: the Way of Atomization.

Earth-Horse, Moon-Horse

So I've commissioned my own flag.

I was recently astounded to read in Richard Rudgley's 2018 book The Return of Odin that

Today in both American and British pagan circles, practitioners generally divide themselves into three basic groups: Wiccans; Druids, and those who follow some kind of Celtic religion; and Heathens, those who follow Germanic and Norse traditions [231].

Admittedly, the book was originally published in 2006; maybe things were simpler in those days.

Still, if I knew Rudgley well enough to tease him, or if I weren't a Midwesterner, and hence constitutionally incapable of public rudeness, I would really have to suggest that maybe, just maybe, he needs to get out a bit more often.

I don't know about Britain—although I have my doubts—but here in the US, I can assure you from personal experience that pagans come in lots more flavors than Wiccan, Celtic, or Germanic.

Lots more.

So I can't help but find it a jest for the gods that, in fact, I can recognize something of myself in all three of Rudgley's categories.

"In the old language of the Witches, every word has three meanings: something good, something bad, and something to do with a cow."

What is it about animal proteins that makes them so defining?

Like the ancestral Hwicce, the original tribe of Witches, I live in Beef Country. I'd never really realized to just what degree the US is Beef Country—our national dish being (arguably) the hamburger, after all—until I spent some time in Germany.

Germany, of course, is decidedly not Beef Country. When, in her wisdom, the Great Mother gave to each of the peoples their own proper foods, she gave to the Germans swine. Germany is Pork Country, its national dish the sausage.

This culinary fact has both spatial and sociological implications.

Cattle pasture. They eat lots and lots of grass. It takes a certain amount of land to raise a cow.

Swine are a better choice for places were the average joe (or jane) simply doesn't own—or have access to—much land. Fence the pig in a sty, and feed it on your own scraps.

Cattle = more space; swine = less.

Myself a lifelong vegetarian (gods help me, it's been 50 years now), of course, I eat neither pork nor beef, being a whitemeats kind of guy: that's the ancestral term for dairy products.