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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, 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. eight).

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

Still it names the horse-rune, eigh.

Also it names the steed of the god, the priest that the Horned rides in ritual: for 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.

To the Men of the Tribe

Go to the edge of your favorite clearing in the woods.

There, strip off everything that you weren't born with: clothing, jewelry, devices.

Step as you are into the midst of the clearing.