Witches Brew

I have feasted on roast pork, which the Ancient Celts believed was the food of immortality. The magical pigs belonged to the God Manannan; slaughtered in the evening for the feast, the pigs were reborn again in the morning. (Just as the leftovers of my feast will be resurrected for most of this coming week…) Roast pork, acorn squash, Arbor Mist blackberry merlot wine cooler, and a big cinnamon roll. And now I am watching Betelgeuse.

The Celts considered Samhain to be the end of the year. Debts were settled, law cases were heard, chieftains renewed their vows of loyalty to their kings, and the kings swore loyalty to the High King in Tara. At the end of summer and the beginning of the “dark months” the veil between the ordinary world of the living and the spirit worlds of the dead and of Faerie was at its thinnest. Many of the great hero tales, which were often tales of transformation, began with a mysterious visitation at Samhain.

This is the time of year when we remember departed friends and loved ones. My parents have been gone for thirty years, and I miss them. Our house was open to people of different races and religions, and I am sorry that I am not as tolerant as they were. They purchased some acreage in the country where we had some memorable cookouts. One Halloween Dad invited the young furniture movers who worked with him and their dates. The path back to the pasture was lit by Jack-O-Lanterns. The girls were amazed by the golden pumpkins–living on the South Side, in the inner city they had never seen Jack-O-Lanterns. They had never roasted hot dogs over an open fire or toasted marshmallows. (And they took the pumpkins home with them, and we had none left for Halloween.)

These days we are all disconnected from our food supply and the source of our consumer goods. And we are facing the crisis of Peak Oil. As cheap fuel evaporates and prices of everyday goods skyrockets, we will have to rebuild local manufacturing and local food networks. Witches Brew turned two years old this month, and I have decided to launch a new blog Brewing A Pagan Permaculture.

According to Wikipedia: “Permaculture is an approach to designing human settlements and perennial agricultural systems that mimics the relationships found in natural ecologies. It was first developed by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren and their associates during the 1970s in a series of publications. The word permaculture is a portmanteau of permanent agriculture, as well as permanent culture.”

Brewing a Pagan Permaculture will talk about creating an urban agriculture and an urban Pagan community in the years we have available before Mother Nature hits the reset button on our consumerist society. I’ll have stories about urban pioneers, alternate energy sources, and the Post Industrial Society. I’ll have links to innovative websites and lists of useful books. I will feature Pagan leaders who are already working on permaculture and the post-industrial economy. And I will try to create a Pagan theaology of decay and renewal.

Dave Haxton at MacRaven, Fox News in Raleigh, NC, and a host of other bloggers and online newspapers are reporting that Pastor Marc Grizzard and 14 other members of the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, NC, are planning a Bible burning and BBQ for Halloween Night. Yep, Bibles… And the works of heretics like Billy Graham, Rick Warren, and Mother Teresa. Earlier this month the Amazing Grace website was taken down by the website host when the Bibles hit the proverbial internet fan, but Haxton copied the content. From MacRaven:

Come to our Halloween book burning. We are burning Satan’s bibles like the NIV, RSV, NKJV, TLB, NASB, NEV, NRSV, ASV, NWT, Good News for Modern Man, The Evidence Bible, The Message Bible, The Green Bible, ect. These are perversions of God’s Word the King James Bible.

We will also be burning Satan’s music such as country, rap, rock, pop, heavy metal, western, soft and easy, southern gospel, contempory Christian, jazz, soul, oldies but goldies, etc.

We will also be burning Satan’s popular books written by heretics like Westcott & Hort, Bruce Metzger, Billy Graham, Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, John McArthur, James Dobson, Charles Swindoll, John Piper, Chuck Colson, Tony Evans, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swagart, Mark Driskol, Franklin Graham, Bill Bright, Tim Lahaye, Paula White, T.D. Jakes, Benny Hinn, Joyce Myers, Brian McLaren, Robert Schuller, Mother Teresa, The Pope, Rob Bell, Erwin McManus, Donald Miller, Shane Claiborne, Brennan Manning, William Young, etc.

We are not burning Bibles written in other languages that are based on the TR. We are not burning the Wycliffe, Tyndale, Geneva or other translations that are based on the TR.

We will be serving Bar-b-Que Chicken, fried chicken, and all the sides.

If you have any books or music to donate, please call us for pick-up. If you like you can drop them off at our church door anytime. Thanks.

Fox News, which we all know is “Fair & Balanced” did a feature on Pastor Grizzard last week.

And if that doesn’t make you feel like you’ve already eaten too many Reese’s Cups, MacRaven, in the same post, alerts us to the forthcoming “Conservative Bible Project”. Now, I’ve done a search online to see if this is a hoax–and the web debunkers are all scratching their heads–but apparently this is for real: Conservapedia is preparing a new translation of the Bible that will edit out nasty Liberal Bias. My hand to Goddess:

As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[2]

1. Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that enables a thought-for-thought translation without corruption by liberal bias
2. Not Emasculated: avoiding unisex, “gender inclusive” language, and other feminist distortions; preserve many references to the unborn child (the NIV deletes these)
3. Not Dumbed Down: not dumbing down the reading level, or diluting the intellectual force and logic of Christianity; the NIV is written at only the 7th grade level[3]
4. Utilize Powerful Conservative Terms: using powerful new conservative terms to capture better the original intent;[4] Defective translations use the word “comrade” three times as often as “volunteer”; similarly, updating words that have a change in meaning, such as “word”, “peace”, and “miracle”.
5. Combat Harmful Addiction: combating addiction[5] by using modern terms for it, such as “gamble” rather than “cast lots”;[6] using modern political terms, such as “register” rather than “enroll” for the census
6. Accept the Logic of Hell: applying logic with its full force and effect, as in not denying or downplaying the very real existence of Hell or the Devil.
7. Express Free Market Parables; explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Inauthentic Passages: excluding the interpolated passages that liberals commonly put their own spin on, such as the adulteress story
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples: crediting open-mindedness, often found in youngsters like the eyewitnesses Mark and John, the authors of two of the Gospels
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness: preferring conciseness to the liberal style of high word-to-substance ratio; avoid compound negatives and unnecessary ambiguities; prefer concise, consistent use of the word “Lord” rather than “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” or “Lord God.”

Thus, a project has begun among members of Conservapedia to translate the Bible in accordance with these principles. The translated Bible can be found here.

I think Jesus will be wanting a word with these folks when He gets back.

I just about went nuts when I decided to keep a blessings journal. By the time I got to Day 20 of my 30 day project, I was feeling decidedly ungrateful for the opportunity!

But i had a lesson in gratitude Sunday, so I thought I would take a minute to enumerate my recent blessings. A friend and I rented two tables at the Expo Gardens Flea Market. It was a very slow day; I made back the cost of the table but probably earned 50 cents an hour for the outing. Still, Sunday afternoon while we had a small spurt of gawkers, this middle-aged man stopped in the middle of the aisle right in front of our table. He calls after his wife, “I’m bleeding. I just started bleeding!” She comes back. “I don’t know,” he says. “I was just walking down that outside aisle and my arm started bleeding.”

I got the fall allergies, so the tissue box was sitting next to my money box. I started waving a tissue at him. “Yoo-hoo! Need a Kleenex?”

He took the Kleenex and pressed it against the small trickle of blood on his forearm. Then he began to tell us this horror story about having a cyst/canker-like thing recently removed from his other arm. How it had grown like a wart–only hard–and then ruptured and the center of it had fallen out and he’d had a skin graft, and now this arm was bleeding the same way…! And my brain is trying to pretend that I am not hearing this, but it’s too late! Meanwhile my friend has produced a little first aid kit from her purse and peeled a bandage.

He’s thanked me once for the tissue and thanked her from the bandage. Then he says again, with heart-felt sincerity, “Thank you for the tissue and the bandage.” And my throat closed up for a second because he was really saying, “Thank you for noticing that I was in distress.” Thank you for noticing... He was standing in the middle of the crowded aisle, and we saw him.

Oh, well, shit! So here’s a list of blessings for this week. I don’t know if I can do ten, but let’s try.

1.) I’m grateful for the friends who hauled my tubs of junk to Expo and back.

2.) I’m grateful for the encounter that reminded me about gratitude and being connected to strangers and friends.

3.) I’m grateful for the stopper in my cash flow these last two weeks: forced back to a diet of Cheerios and ramen noodles, I’ve dropped some more weight. I can’t say for sure, but I’m guessing this is the thinnest I’ve been in about fifteen years.

4.) I’m deeply grateful to Ms Renner from the Social Security Administration yesterday morning and offered to do my application over the phone. I had struggled online for a couple of weeks with the disability report. I have been impressed with the helpfulness of everyone I have spoken with at the SSA.

5.) I am deeply grateful that the stopper in the cash flow has been removed: I will be able to pay my rent and my phone bill this week. –And I had been sweating the rent!

6.) I am grateful for the rosemary garlic chicken and the Ben & Jerry’s Karmel Sutra ice cream with which I celebrated the rent payment.

7.) I am grateful that my groundhogs were out at the riverfront yesterday. I had begun to think they had gone underground for the season, but there were four fat, sleek rodents grazing in the lot.

8.) I am grateful for Swiss Miss Mocha Cappuccino cocoa,which is lowfat and tastes good by itself or in actual coffee! A Milky Way is 75 cents and a box of eight envelopes of cocoa is $1.25

9.) I am grateful I made enough money at Expo to cut my hair–and maybe go to a movie.

10.) I’m grateful for the pork roast sitting in my freezer. I am going to have a lovely feast for Samhain.

Samhain is coming; the Veil Between the Worlds grows thinner. We welcome our ancestors, and the Good Folk who live beyond the Veil…

Let me say emphatically that I do not mess around with Ouija boards, automatic writing, or any kind of communication that purports to talk with “spirits” or “guides.” I mucked about with those in my youth and tapped only the cess pool of my adolescent angst. I consider myself lucky that i escaped to tell the tale. (I have nothing against tarot cards, the I Ching or other types of divination that draw upon archetypal imagery.) Nevertheless…

I found myself charmed by The Museum of Talking Boards: An Online Museum of Ouija Boards. Talking Boards date back to the 1850’s, and the museum’s History page and FAQ page will give you a glimpse into American Spiritualism. I was taken by the gallerys of antique boards.

From 1890 to 1950 dozens of different manufacturers with names like Kennard, Fuld, Haskelite, and Lee, cranked out their unique versions of the Wonderful Talking Board. Some displayed fanciful images of pyramids, swamis, and strange, mystical places. Others were more akin to Halloween with pictures of black cats, witches, and devils. Some boards, cheaply made, were merely poor imitations of the more successful ones. Despite their popular appeal, most talking boards were used a couple of times, shelved, and eventually thrown away. This resulted in the tragic loss of a fascinating American art form. At the Museum of Talking Boards, we think that it’s time we celebrated this forgotten art. So come along with us as we display the boards, give you a little history, and if we can’t answer all of your questions, feel free to ask the Ouija.

Visit this charming, comprehensive site, and get in the Halloween spirit.

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.

This month CIPS, the Central Illinois Pagan Society, is marking its first anniversay. At the beginning of October Witches Brew also marked its first year. And while blog entries on Witches Brew have been sporadic (to say the least), CIPS has been growing like Topsy.

Last year at Samhain (Halloween), CIPS celebrated their first sabbat or holiday ritual with a circle of five people. This year on November 1st, people are coming from Bloomington and Chicagoland, from Eureka and Germantown Hills, from Yates City, from Canton and Bartonville and Peoria to celebrate the Witches’ New Year and to feast and remember our ancestors. We are expecting 12-15 children from toddlers to teens.

Usually the little ones just come to have fun. They are getting to know each other now. They eat, they smash a pinata, have a water balloon fight, color, and do simple crafts. Only the middle schoolers participate in the ritual circle–if they chose. This year at Samhain the potluck will be incorporated into the ritual circle and all of the children–and their parents–will get to participate. This is exciting for the group and a little bit scary, I think, for the organizers. We have an energetic bunch of kids.

This has been a year of new adventures for CIPS. Each sabbat now has a community out-reach project. For Samhain we are collecting canned goods for the CityLink Stuff-A-Bus food campaign. And we will be adopting a needy family for Yule.

The email list has 92 members (last time I checked). There is an herb class that meets once a month, and a month Meet & Greet for coffee and conversation. We just published the third issue of our electronic newsletter which comes out roughly every six weeks. We plan to do eight issues a year–one for each sabbat–with articles about the history of each holiday, a recipe, a spell, and a bit of humor.

And we have started a virtual library at Shelfari, an online, social networking site for book-lovers. So far five members of CIPS have listed approximately 300 titles from their personal book collections. Basic Pagan 101 books sit side by side with scholarly books on Celtic and Egyptian history. There are herbals, books on Women’s Spirituality and Native American culture, and collections of myths. There is Pagan fiction. Pagans love books and social networking on the Internet, so this should quickly become a community resource.

Even in this economic turmoil, we celebrate our community and our good fortune and look forward to the new year.

No, Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation is not in danger. The sacred heart of Pagan Ireland is being threatened by a super highway and commercial development. Prehistoric Ireland was divided into four kingdoms arranged around the sacred hill of Tara. Tara was the site of the symbolic fifth kingdom, the domain of the High King. The Stone of Fal, the Coronation Stone of the Irish kings, is there. Like the Siege Perilous in the Arthurian legends, the Stone of Fal would cry out when the rightful king stood or sat upon it. It was a center of learning and law.

Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, holds the contract for construction of the M3 highway through the Skryne Valley at the foot of Tara. Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas of the EU, has investigated the construction project and declared it illegal, but the Irish government plans to go ahead with the work. (1)

Pagans were early and enthusiastic adopters of the Internet, and the Internet is being used not only to rally global support for the preservation of this ancient site, but to work global magic for the protection of Tara. Organizers of a Samhain ritual for the protection of Tara have posted the ritual online and invited people around the world to participate. Groups and individuals in ten countries and eighteen states in the US have pledged to come together on October 31st at 8:00 pm Irish Summer Time, 3:00 pm EDT. Signal fires with be lit in eighteen areas in Ireland and in Canada, the US, Wales, New Zealand, and Venezuela.

To read the ritual and learn more about Celtic Reconstructionism, you can go to http://www.paganachd.com/tara/.

(1) Help Save Tara-Skryne Valley!
Proclaimed by: Kit O’Marcaigh
Proclaimed from: Dublin, Ireland
http://www.witchvox.com/vn/vn_detail/dt_gno.html?&id=15233

Merry Meet!

Here it comes! Halloween… Samhain … The Celtic New Year…According to Jean Markale, professor of Celtic Studies at the Sorbonne, the Celts, inhabitants of Europe and the British Isles, divided the year into two parts–the light part of the year and the dark part. The markers for their year were November 1st and May 1st. Samhain and Beltane.

Celts, by the way, reckoned a day from sunset to sunset, so Samhain actually began on October 31st.

Critics of Halloween often claim that Samhain (we pronounce it Sow-en) was named for the Celtic Lord of Death. According to Markale, it simply means “the end of summer” –in other words, the beginning of winter. It was the season of the meat harvest. In Ireland, chieftains came together for three days to discuss political, economic, and religious matters, and to swear loyalty to the High King. Attendance was mandatory. Celtic tradition said that any leader who did not fulfill his obligation would go mad and die overnight! It was a time of feasting and drinking. It was believed that the meat of pigs could confer immortality, and intoxication was a path to spiritual ecstasy. Drunken revelers could transcend reality and travel to other dimensions, .Indeed, at Samhain the barriers between the living and the dead grew thin. The fairy sidhe and the barrows of the gods and heroes opened and our world intersected with the world of myth and legend. Many of the great Irish epics begin with a mysterious encounter at Samhain.

For many Pagans, Samhain is a solemn but joyful occasion to remember and commune with our beloved dead.

Doesn’t sound much like Halloween? Well, the activities that we associate with Halloween–dressing up in costumes, going door to door to demand treats, playing tricks if our demands are not met–ARE end of year rituals. But they belonged to Christmas and to the Roman Saturnalia. The darkest time of the year was the season of Misrule when the hierarchy of society was temporarily inverted. Masters waited upon servants, and the rich were forced by the traditions of the season to share their best meat and drink with their poor neighbors. Gangs of youths went caroling from house to house, demanding food and coins, and playing tricks if they were refused. Many went in costume. Men dressed as women and women dressed as men. Some dressed as animals or spirits. There was a great deal of gambling, drinking, rough music, and sexual license.

If you hear the phrase this year, “the war on Christmas,” remember that the Pilgrims fired the first shots. Christmas was illegal in New England for many years. It was only in the mid-1800’s that Christmas became the family-oriented holiday that we know today. And all the rowdy bits got pushed off onto Halloween.

It seems as if Halloween is now becoming “commercialized” One of my coworkers remarked the other day, that there is no chance of dressing her kid up in old clothes and smearing a little soot on his face: he has no idea was a “hobo” is. But if you think about it, Jack Sparrow, Spider Man, and the Ninja Turtles are the current manifestations of our mythic subconscious, and it is fitting that we should want to meet them in the twilight between the worlds.

Among Jean Markale’s many books, you might enjoy The Pagan Mysteries of Halloween: Celebrating the Dark Half of the Year; The Druids; and The Celts. To learn more about the cultural history of Christmas, read The Battle for Christmas by Stephen Nissenbaum.
Happy Halloween. Blessed Be..