Witches Brew

The Wheel of the Year rolls on. This is Harvest Home, also called Mabon, the second of three harvest festivals. Lammas or Lughnasa is the first one at the beginning of August. It’s the Festival of First Fruits. For me, as I said in “Lammas 2009″, Lammas is fair season: gigantic vegetables, prize-winning pies, truck-pulls, the midway, the beer tent, and the politicians tents. Harvest Home is the corn harvest, and Samhain or Halloween is traditionally the meat harvest

Being a City Witch, I will not be celebrating a silo full of grain, nor will I be slaughtering hogs in October–although I do have a book that tells me step-by-step how to do that. (If you ask nice, I might dig it out and outline the procedure for you.) I’ve had to re-interpret Harvest Home for my reality. For me the corn harvest means investing for the future. Now that the Stock Market is looking up, I’ve rebalanced my pitiful 401K. I’m looking at refreshing my job-hunting wardrobe. I am getting ready to winterize the apartment.

For me Harvest Home is also about investing in the next generation. I’m a little sad that Woodruff High School is closing–I’m an old Averyville girl, and my parents graduated from Woodruff two decades before I did. Kingman Grade School is gone also. But I think the school board has made the right decision. I think Manual and Peoria High School should survive.

I think health care reform is a crucial investment in the next generation. It’s been 100 years coming. I think it’s a crucial investment in my generation. I couldn’t afford Cobra when I lost my job–not even with the federal subsidy. I currently have Aflac “if I’m hurt and can’t work” and I bought into the catastrophic illness package, but I doubt if i can continue with the catastrophic.

But Harvest Home is a festival of thanksgiving! I have been relishing fresh produce from the farmers markets, and I’ve been to Tanners and Apple Blossom Farm. I celebrated the New Moon this weekend with a fabulous omlet–onion, spinach, yellow and orange bell peppers, garlic snaps, shrimp and cheese. Major yum! And I am thinking squash tomorrow night with an apple-peanut butter filling–and a nice red wine.

Among the Ancient Celts, the “cross-quarter days”–the solstices and the equinoxes–were springboards for the greater fire festivals six weeks later. So Harvest Home is the launch for Samhain, which is considered by many as the Pagan New Year. This is the one of the times when the Veil Between the Worlds is at its thinnest and we can commune with our ancestors and with the Spirit World. Many people mistakenly think that there was a god of death called Samhain (and that’s actually pronounced “Sow-en”) but the Celtic means simply “the end of summer” or “the beginning of the dark months.” So as I give thanks for the harvest, I will be turning my thoughts toward my departed and the beginning of a new year.

International Pagan Blogging Month has introduced me to a multiverse of other Pagan bloggers. While several CIPS members are set up on Facebook, MySpace, or PaganSpace, nobody admits to blogging. Through Chrysalis’s site, however, I have been following a daisy-chain of Pagan contributors. How to chose? Do I want to read Witches and Scientists? How about Executive Pagan? Deaf Pagan Crossroads? What about Musings of a Quaker Witch? Or Pagan Chaplaincy? I feel like a kid in a bookstore.

I have subscribed to the “Minneapolis Paganism Examiner” written by Murphy Pizza–an unlikely name, I’ll grant, but a refreshing change from monikers like Lady Silver Fairyslippers. (Yes, some people do get overly creative when they find their Pagan path, and, yes, we do make fun of them.). According to her online bio, Murphy Pizza is:

[A] contemporary Pagan practitioner-scholar (with a Ph.D.). She is a cultural anthropologist specializing in religions and American religious cultures, and has been a practicing Pagan for more than 13 years. Her dissertation (soon to become a book), Paganistan, is about the history and formation of the Pagan community in the Twin Cities, and she has several academic publication credits on contemporary Paganism.

To my delight, Murphy is an unabashed, unapologetic Urban Pagan. And a science fiction/fantasy fan…! It does my New Urban heart good to read “Earth Reverence in the City“:

Earth-reverent folks are not running off to communes or the wilderness and growing organic vegetables to find sacredness in their lives, a pattern often romanticized in some contemporary Pagan books. Well, alright, some are. But contemporary Paganism sprouted in the cities — it has always been an urban phenomenon. Granted, it did come with a lot of the romantic frustration in back-to-the-land philosophies that permeated the social milieu of the 1960’s, but today’s Pagans know that the sacred Earth is not hidden under concrete — our cityscapes are places of spirit and power as well.

I know I am going to enjoy reading about Murphy’s Pagan journey in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

In The Clock of the Long Now, Stewart Brand provides a diagram of the pace of change within the layers of civilization. The top layer, “Fashion,” changes rapidly. “Commerce,” the next layer down, changes a little less quickly. “Infrastructure” and “Goverance” are slower yet. “Culture” is conservative and tends to change slowly. “Nature” is the slowest.

According to Brand, “The fast parts learn, propose, and absorb shocks; the slow parts remember, integrate, and constrain. The fast parts get all the attention. The slow parts have all the power.” (Stewart Brand – “Cities And Time”, April 11th, 02005 by Simone Davalos.) When the pace of change accelerates and Infrastructure and Goverance cannot absorb enough shock, you can expect a backlash from Culture. When Commerce and Goverance run roughshod over Nature, Nature will eventually have the last word.

The thinkers and organizations who have dedicated themselves to the Long Now are not trying to dam the rush of accelerated change, but to provide flood plains and bayous where that change can be absorbed and transformed.

You would think that Pagans, who usually practice an Earth-based spirituality, would be among the husbands and midwives of this 10,000 year project. Paganism, however, is still a relatively new movement with an increasingly younger membership. When Gerald Gardner founded Wicca about 60 years ago, he was about 40 years old and claimed that he had been initiated into an ancient religion by an old woman named Dorothy Clutterbuck, who was a hereditary witch. For the next generation, Pagan traditions were passed from teacher to student with several stages of initiation. And while there are still Pagan traditions and lineages, most Pagans these days are “self-initiated” and get their training from books and the Internet. So the majority of us are among the “fast folk.”

And a great many of us are recovering Christians or Jews–or were raised with no religion at all. Many of us have rebelled against strictures and abuses of institutions and dogma. Still critiquing the culture of our parents, we are willing to fight tooth and nail to avoid forming Pagan hierarchies and institutions. And while we might live in cities, we long for the countryside where we can “worship in nature.”

Brand says:

Cities are humanity’s longest-lived organizations (Jericho dates back 10,500 years), but also the most constantly changing. Even in Europe they consume 2-3% of their material fabric a year, which means a wholly new city every 50 years. In the US and the developing world it’s much faster.

Vast new urban communities is the main event in the world for the present and coming decades. The villages and countrysides of the entire world are emptying out. Why? I was told by Kavita Ramdas, head of the Global Fund for Women, “In the village, all there is for a woman is to obey her husband and family elder, pound grain, and sing. If she moves to town, she can get a job, start a business, and get education for her children. Her independence goes up, and her religious fundamentalism goes down.”

So much for the romanticism of villages. In reality, life in the country is dull, backbreaking, impoverished, restricted, exposed, and dangerous. Life in the city is
exciting, less grueling, better paid, free, private, and safe.

The Clock of the Long Now will be built in a high mountain top in eastern Nevada, about a day’s walk from anywhere, amid 1000 year old pines, but the Long Now Foundation understands that organizations will have to created to maintain it for 10,000 years. The Christian monasteries preserved West Culture during the Dark Ages. Inspired by the Clock of the Long Now, Neal Stephenson wrote the new science fiction bestseller, Anathem, about a monastery devoted to the contemplation of mathematics and the long now.

Many Pagans will tell you that Paganism is an ecstatic religious experience resulting in direct contact with the Divine–no intermediate clergy is required; no sacred texts are required. The notion of monastic life would give most Pagans the willies. The notion of any kind of structure or institution or approved canon of culture would give most Pagans the willies. We tend to live very much in the Right Here! Right Now! As much as we profess to be stewards of Gaia, I am not sure if we are ready to contemplate the Long Now.

The Riverfront Museum is “on”! Maybe. The referendum to raise $40 million (through a .25% increase in the Peoria County sales tax) has passed by the skin of its teeth, and it wouldn’t surprise me if opponents called for a recount. If this museum is going to be built, Build the Block supporters need to get their mojo on. It’s time for some serious Downtown magic.

Actually, the eye-catching signs that went up last fall around the empty Sears block were, magically speaking, pretty good. A successful spell should roll off the tongue and engage the senses. It should create a strong visual image of what the spell-caster wants to accomplish. Sigils–like charms or tattoos– are written symbols that can be charged with magical power. So images like “Slam Dunk” with a basketball plunging through the net in “D\/nk” are potentially very powerful. Colorful exhortations like Play it again, Peoria, Ground Breaking!, The Sky’s The Limit!, etc. do seem charged with magical intent.

But…there’s a lot of resistance to this project! So here’s one witch’s advice. It’s time to court the deva of the Sears block, and enlist its help.

“What’s a deva?” you are asking. According to Christopher Penczak in his book City Magick, “Devas are energies, or spirit forms, who create the patterns of reality on higher levels of existence. The word is originally from Hindu myth, meaning something akin to angel, but the New Age has adopted it to mean creators, or angels, of nature.”

The Romans called the guardian spirit of a place its genius loci. And it seems to me that in spite of all the bright and happy crap on the plywood walls, the deva of the Sears block is seriously cheesed off!

I am thinking, before we see any real progress on the Riverfront Museum, we might want to “make nice” with the deva. Would some flowers be too much to ask? You know, a little altar at the crossroads there at Main and Water Street with some ribbons and a candle or two? Maybe some sweets…. Pinwheels or wind chimes… Maybe some personal messages: “Dear Deva, I can’t wait for the new IMAX. Please, please, pretty please! Love you!” A guitar serenade or two…

Penczak goes on, “Some devas are called “overlighting,” because they organize their peers into subcategories around them… All cities have a devic spirit in control of them, In many ways, this is the spirit of the city itself. The overlighting deva of the city organizes the other spirits. The deva of New York City works with the deva of the Empire State Building, the deva of the Statue of Liberty, the deva of Central Park, and the devas of the East and West Villages.” We might want to stop and ask ourselves who is the overlighting deva of Peoria. WHERE is the ovelighting deva of Peoria? If it’s out on Allen Road these days, then need to call it home.

Penczak says, “Call on them in ritual. They want to make contact with you. Doing magick on their territory is going to effect them. The energy you send out for your spells will be working through these city architects… These spirit forms want to be in partnership with us. They want to be acknowledged by the mystics living with them. They are all waiting to be asked.”

I have not yet introduced myself.. I’m Sophie Gail, novice blogger, Pagan, and Witch. “Merry Meet,” as we say. I’ve not been practicing for a while, and I hope in these posts to rekindle a spark of magic in my life. –Or Magick, if you prefer.

So, why, you may ask, all the concrete? How come I didn’t choose a green forest cove for a theme or mysterious ruins by moonlight? Well, I like tree-hugging and moonlight as well as the next Pagan, but consider myself an Urban Witch. Born and bred in Peoria, I take power, when I focus, from her streets and parks, her river bluffs and valleys. I receive inspiration and encouragement on this path from author Christopher Penczak.

The stated purpose of this blog is to offer news and views that you won’t usually find in the Saturday “Faith & Values” in The Journal Star. Penczak’s City Magick: Urban Rituals, Spells, and Shamanism (Weiser Books, 2001) is a great place to start. Penczak says, “Nature comes in many forms. It finds a voice in anything created. All things are sacred. Everything–including concrete, glass, steel, and even plastic–come from the same source, Don’t be fooled into thinking things are unnatural. Why is one thing, like honey, made from materials found on Earth natural, while another, like a compact disc, made from different materials on the same planet, not natural? Both are made by other beings, bees and people respectively, from natural resources. The original materials go through a great change You can argue the merits of use, need, consumption, chemical change, and biodegradability, but neither item is more sacred than the other. Both are valued.”

I expect that you will read more about “the merits of use, need, consumption, chemical change, and biodegradability” in these posts. And more Christopher Penczak and urban rituals. For today I’ll say, “Merry Meet and Merry Part, and Merry Meet again!”