Divining the Chaos

    When I teach I often emphasize the importance of divination. It’s a tool we should be using all the time not just when we want to see what our love life is going to be or if we are going to get a job etc.  I use divination when I have specific question, but those cases are in the minority. Usually what I use divination for is planning a ritual or spellwork. Is this a favorable time for this ritual etc? Is this what the Gods want, or are they asking something else from me? Have the Gods accepted my offering? And so on.  Although I am not a member of ADF, I have always admired that they use divination at the end of their rituals to determine if the offering they have given the Gods were accepted, and any messages from the Gods. Why don’t we see more of this kind of divination?

   In addition to all that there is another sort of divination that I find I often use, something I call divining the chaos. In a way it could be seen as simply paying attention to omens, but I find it is more subtle than that.  Most of us are accustomed to doing divination with a set of card, runes, bones etc. There is a physical, tactical component to it.  We don’t get into that state of Seeing unless we have our tools in font of us.  I personally use bird divination a great deal, which requires nothing more than being observant of the world around us and being open for the answers it wishes to give you.  Perhaps that is one of many reasons I find divining chaos to be just another intuitive step. 

   So what is divining chaos anyway?  Well basically its paying attention to the chaos and events that unfold around you.  Here are a few examples.  During a big ritual at an event I run we had all but two of the main people hosting one of the rituals have something come up where they could not be a part of it.  We have three big rituals at this event, and the first two went on without a hitch. But the closer we got to the last ritual the weirder things got. The first thing, which should have been a glaring stop sign to me, was that the bag with items we were going to use during the ritual was the one bag that didn’t make it to the event. It was all packed and ready to go, sitting on the couch and in plain sight. How I didn’t see it when I did the final “we got all the things” check before we left I have no idea. Still I planned to just carry on and adapt.  Then one person who was involved in ritual has a family issue and let me know they would have to leave a little early on the last day of the event, the day of that particular ritual of course.  Then the next key person bowed out, they had been up too late doing some intense work with some folks the night before.  All good reasons, all part of the chaos of running an event.  It comes with the territory.

   So basically about a half hour before ritual I was left with myself and two other people and no way of doing the ritual we had originally written.  A few years ago I probably would have been in full panic mode.  Instead I sat next to the ritual fire and listened.  I was remarkably calm.  Then I planned out a completely new ritual in my head and that what we ended up doing. And you know what? It ended up being exactly what we needed.  The ritual I ended up writing in my head in five minutes had elements that had profound messages to some folks, all elements that would not have been in the ritual if I just chugged on and stayed the course I had originally plotted out.  One person told me afterwards that they had been given a very specific message that when they received a specific item in ritual it would be time for them to continue on their path, and because the other tokens I had originally envisioned were left at home, I ended up using the item they were told to look for.  Another person had been having an initiatory experience all weekend and was having misgivings about moving on from a dedication from one deity to another.  The deity they were moving on from was the one I ended up focusing on in the ritual. My original ritual had little to do with that deity and focused on other ones. Afterwards they said they had the closure they needed and felt love and acceptance from the deity they were moving further away from in their practice. 

   The point of course is that there are messages in the chaos. They are there, we just have to listen, to read their meaning so that we can change our course of action.  If I had just stopped and listened when I forgot my bag and just changed the ritual at that point, I doubt all the other chaotic coincidences would have happened. 

   Another more recent occurrence of divining the chaos happened where someone who was originally supposed to facilitate a ritual I was involved in ended up having some chaos happen at home.  In the end they ended up being a participant and receiving the messages they needed rather than being the one facilitating and giving the messages to others.  In the end it was exactly what the Gods wanted it and needed it to be.

   Divining the chaos instead of just trying to side step it can be invaluable.  It required that we stop, take a breath, and ask what are the Gods telling me?  Where are they pointing me?  We like to think we have everything mapped out, that everything will go as planned, but that’s not how life works.  That’s not how the Gods or the universe works. There is meaning in the chaos, and sometimes it leads us exactly where we were supposed to be in the first place.   

Magic: Empowering the Disenfranchised or the Passive Aggressive?

                      

   “No” is perhaps the most important word we learn as children.  The world will tell you “no” a lot.  You might lose a job, someone will break up with you, someone will disagree with you, a loved one may die, the crops might fail, you won’t always get what you want. We live in a world where “no” is common place. When our parents tell us “no” we learn how to manage disappointment, because you have to.  Sometimes a parent telling you “no” can be a kindness, because you are learning to manage disappointment in a circumstance where the stakes are low.  Not getting that toy or watching a movie, isn’t going to be the same as getting evicted because you cant adult.  Childhood is the training ground for adulthood, and learning how to manage the “no’s” life throws at you.  Not stopping them, but managing the circumstances of the “no” and your emotional reactions to them.  You have to learn how to deal with disappointment in life, its part of being an adult, its part of growing.

  So what happens when people fail to hear “no” enough, or develop the moral character to say “no” to themselves.  And what does it have to do with magic you might ask?  Well it has a lot to do with it.  Magic is a tool that takes the world’s “no’s” and turns them into “yes’s”.  And if you haven’t developed the discipline to say “no” to yourself that can become a problem. Because once people hear “yes” all the time they don’t want to hear “no” anymore, and they forget how to hear “no.”  That person who disagrees with your blog post, curse that bitch!  Cut ahead of me in the grocery store, curse their first born!  Not agree with some point minor point about the Gods and make me question my own beliefs, start a Witch War!

  I have heard it suggested that the consequence of learning magic outside of a mystery tradition calcifies us in a state of only wanting to hear “yes”.  Going through a mystery tradition, under the best of circumstances, forces us to deal with our own personal shit and grow.  Being someone who isn’t part of a traditional mystery system I would say working with my Gods as a devotional polytheist does very much the same thing - The Morrigan and gods like her won’t let you ignore your demons, not for long anyway. But it does raise an interesting thought:  Is magic more inclined to be misused when we become addicted to the idea of eternal “yes”?  

A mystery tradition is a structured set of “no’s” that gradually turn into “yes’s”.  Having an authentic dedication to one’s Gods is no different. And there is no coincidence that dedication is a word used in both cases.   A part of your dedication, your agreement with those deities is accepting the limitation that go with that dedication.  Those limitations could be a multitude of things.  For example a part of your dedication to a deity could involve accepting a geis, and not being able to cut your hair, not being able to visit a graveyard, or kneel, as just a few examples.  There is also the fact that Gods have their own agendas and sometimes they want us to learn or deal with something that we just want to sweep under the rug, and they have a habit of shaking our lives upside down until we listen.  These are all limitation, even if we don’t like admitting it.  They are all “no’s”.  And it forces us to accept the idea that “no’s” are necessary for growth.  

   Between working on a project about Taboo Magic and many of the classes I’ve done this year I’ve mentioned a time or two that I feel curse work has value and that it can be the last resource to the disenfranchised.   During one of those workshops we spent a lot of time going over the idea of stepping outside of yourself and your emotions to consider the work.  Are you in the right? Or are you just pissed?  If you step out of the emotions of the moment are your actions still justified?  Is this really just about me, and my “stuff”? Basically can you tell yourself “no” and distinguish whether the work is truly justified? Can you live with the consequences of what your work will manifest in the world?  

I really do believe curse work can be a moral thing. It can be restorative justice, and while I don’t believe in the Neo-Pagan version of karma I can respect the idea that sometimes we have to "be" karma instead of expecting the universe to fix a problem. 

The problem, of course, with that is most people are not familiar with curse work.  It usually plays out like this. 

Step 1. Person condemns cursing, says no one needs to do that, its wrong. How dare you suggest that is useful! 
Step 2 Someone get under their skin and pisses that person off. 
Step 3 They go from condemning such magical work to becoming Little Miss Curse Pants Supreme and they start doing magical things they have never done before and probably don’t understand the mechanics of.  

That can be a dangerous mix to all involved.  

   So in a discussion about such things during one class someone said something that got me thinking. In a kind of off handed joking way one person suggested when used for the wrong reasons curse work and magic in general becomes the art of the passive aggressive. Most of us laughed because, well, most of us know someone who has done just that; Or are aware of a situation where someone used magic as a petty way to manipulate a situation. Because magic works, plain and simple, and only you can choose if your Will is put to good uses or malicious ones.  

People seems to have the idea that universe or the Gods will cancel out “bad magic” that karma will strike down anyone who does anything harmful. Basically karma will handle the job of dealing with telling you “no” rather than us taking responsibility for our actions. And in my experience that just isn’t true. Magic is like a light switch, you flip the switch and the lights turn on. The electricity isn’t good or bad it just does what its suppose to do and goes where its wiring directs it.  You have to have a good foundation in your own personal ethics, instead of choosing to believe the universe will decide what is right and wrong for me.

   Another interesting point that came out of that conversation was that in the age of the internet where anything you want to find is at your finger tips that there are no more checks and balances.  Anyone and everyone has access to magical texts and can go off half cocked  and stir up trouble if they want to.  Back when one would have had to find people willing to teach them, there was the chance a group would turn you away. The knowledge you sought wouldn’t be accessible because, for whatever reason, the coven, trad etc didn’t feel it was safe to give you that knowledge. There are disadvantages to that model as well, but the point being, an unstable person would be less likely to have access to magical training. 

   So is having easy access to magical knowledge a bad thing? Does it inspire people who haven’t taken the time to perfect their craft or their ethics to just pick a spell off the internet and with the very best of intentions do magical harm? Does it make us addicted to the eternal “yes”?  Perhaps it does. I don’t have a good answer, but its something to chew on.  Because most of the time when people come to me with problems its another magician, Witch, or magical person is magically fucking with them.  And most of the time its not curse work, just good old best intentions and a lack of understanding that the person casting isn’t the center of the universe.  I think on some level it is healthy to understand that all magic is a kind of manipulation. Using our Will to shape reality is manipulating circumstances, and that isn’t always a bad thing.  It just requires us to take care, and think about what we are doing, think about what the ripple effect of our work can manifest.  Doing divination before any kind of work to get a sense of both if the work will be effective and what the larger effect will be is always a good starting point.  But the fact remains, for a lot of people out there, there biggest problem is not manifesting a new job or love, its dealing with other magic workers.   

Baby Witches Then and Now

   Back when I was a baby Witch.....

   When I first started studying Witchcraft and Paganism we didn’t even have an internet connection in my house. Granted my parents were suspicious of the safety and moral uses of such things so they were pretty late in catching up to everyone else.  Barnes & Noble had a crappy new age section that was filled more with Christian spiritualism than anything of value to me.  So the only way to learn or get information was to got to local new age store.  That was the community stomping ground back in the day.  Its where you met other people with similar views, by which I mean a very broad spectrum of views and interests in the Occult. Back then you were just happy to find another person who practiced any kind of Paganism or Occultism.  If you were an Irish Pagan and found someone who worked with the Egyptian pantheon, in todays world you might not have much to talk about. But back then you were just happy to find someone, anyone, to talk to who didn’t think what you did was crazy.  The new age store I haunted was a little house converted into a store, down a winding dirt road, called Flying Unicorn Book Store.  The name and difficulty in finding it off the main road of course added to the appeal.  It took an epic quest down a mostly abandoned dirt road, to a Witch’s cottage no less, to seek forbidden knowledge….

   Or so it seemed at the time anyway.  Then Barnes & Nobles started carrying more books. Boarders opened nearby where I lived and they had not a shelf or a little shoehorned off area of a shelf, but shelves and shelves of new age books. If fact it stopped being new age anymore. There were actual sections, Witchcraft, Divination, Norse, etc.  If I had the patience to wait for the AOL running man to finish loading on the screen I could talk to people in chat rooms who identified as Pagan. Then there were webpage and so on and so on until you come to today where there is a plethora of information sharing, bickering, cliques, websites and books you can find in the online Pagan community.       

   You probably know all this already, or you might have experienced this shift yourself. There are a lot of positives to there being a plethora of information out there and being able to connect to people with the click of a button.  After all you are reading this blog post because of all those changes.  But my point is, that is not how I learned. I was primarily solitary when I started out, eventually working with a Celtic flavored group. We learned together, made stupid mistakes and learned from that too.  We all were mostly at the same level, feeling out our way as we went.  So I really don’t know what its like to learn what I do in todays world. Where finding people willing to teach you is easy, and so is finding information and people to connect to. 

   And what I hear the most from people just starting out is usually the same. They are afraid to

make mistakes. They see image after image online of Witches with their eyes closed in some ecstatic trance, sage billowing in the air around them, nails done, in their best Witchy outfit, and think they have to achieve that.  That if they don’t know enough about a subject they have somehow failed as a Pagan.  And to be honest there is a lot of what I’m going to call "Noob -Shaming" out there online.  Even big names in the community getting annoyed that someone new is asking them an annoying question, that they “should have already known”.  We don’t do a good job of supporting those just finding this path.  Being the entranced person in those pictures who knows all the secrets of the universe should not be the ideal people are striving for. Because no matter how long you have been doing this, you are going to make mistakes. You are going to fail. Or do something dumb. I have, plenty of times. And you brush yourself off and keep on trucking afterwards, you tweek and learn from it.    

  A couple of years ago I went to a public ritual a local group was hosting in New England, and as part of the ritual they sang the quarter calls. Everything went well as far as a I could tell. But after the ritual one of the women who had called the quarters was off away from everyone else at the drum circle crying her eyes out. When I went over to see what was wrong she explained she messed up on the words. She had practiced and practiced and she still messed it up and it ruined the ritual! Mind you I hadn’t even noticed anything went wrong at all. I didn’t know what words were or weren’t supposed to be said and I told her so, and that I had messed up far worse in front of far more people.

  At another event a woman came up to me after a workshop and asked me what she was doing wrong. She had only been a Pagan for a few years and there was some very difficult things going on in her life, including a custody battle that her ex was currently winning. She felt that it was all happening because she wasn’t a good enough Witch. If she was better at her craft then bad things wouldn’t happen to her. I assured her that wasn’t the case.  Being Pagan for twenty something years hasn’t stopped me from having to deal with bad things in life, its changed how I reacted to them and tackles such things though.

   At a Pagan Pride day I did a talk about speaking with the Gods and how that can be different for different people.  Afterwards a woman found me at the booth I was vending at and we talked for hours. She felt relieved hearing other people talk about their experiences during the workshop, that she had never heard her Gods speaking to her yet, but wanted to. And that she had never asked anyone for help, or how she might do this because she felt like she would be shamed for “not being able to do what all the other kids seemed to pick up on naturally”.

   The point of a spirituality, whatever version or flavor you adhere to, is to help your build a connection to the divine and help see you through dark times, and to help you appreciated the good times.  The goal is not to be a Witch who oozes spiritual power and nothing bad ever happens to because the powers of the cosmos have opened up to reveal themselves to you.  Yeah sure talking to Gods is part of it, and you might be given meaningful and powerful messages. But that doesn’t mean you still don’t have to take out the trash, or scrub your toilet, or deal with a messy divorce. At the end of the day, what we do spiritually and magically is a tool to help up through life.  Bad shit is still going to happen, but you will have something to lean on, something to help you navigate through those times.  The most powerful magick, the most earth shattering experience you have with a deity, may be when your makeup is running and you are wearing jeans and a ratty t-shirt.  And no matter how much you admire this or that teacher, they have made mistakes too.

   I think we owe to the those starting out to say its ok to be broken. Its ok to be a mess sometimes. We’ve been there too.  Your spirituality isn’t about being perfect.  Its about loving and tending to those broken jagged pieces of yourself, seeing they have value and putting them back together to make something else.  And then maybe when you think you have yourself figured out you’ll take the pieces apart and do it all over again. Being a Witch, being a Pagan, isn’t about looking like the most woke person in the room floating through an aura of burning sage.  Real Witchcraft, real devotion to the Gods, is quiet and sometimes messy. It doesn’t require ritual robes or much of anything except yourself. And yeah sometimes you are going to screw it all up, and sometimes you wont. Perfect isn’t the goal and never was.

The Voices in the Landscape

 Beara Peninsula

   As we packed for our second pilgrimage to Ireland I jokingly said to my partner that it was like we were packing for a trip to the Otherworlds. And after a moment he nodded and said “Well, yeah. We are.”  On the one hand my grandmother on my father’s side was born in Ireland, and grew up on a little farm in Mayo.  It is a place that has family ties and calls to me on that level. And on the other hand, it does feel like the Otherworlds in my mind. It is the place where the myths happened. It is very difficult to describe the awe I find in walking through the landscape of old dusty stories I have read and cherished, stories that have shaped my views of the Gods and my devotion to them. To not just walk the land but touch the stones upon it, breathe the air where the myth happened. I suppose it might be like going to Jerusalem from some people.  If there is a Mecca, a holy place for me, it is Ireland.

 Poulnabrone Dolmen

   My first trip was strongly centered on the Morrigan, as we were traveling specifically to sites connected to her. It deepened my understanding and devotion to her in so many indescribable ways.  It could be called an initiation, or perhaps a deepening of a devotion.  Even now I think of things in terms of “Before the Cave of Cruachan”, and “After the Cave of Cruachan”. Because I crawled out of that cave altered, different than when I crawled in.

   So as I packed for our second pilgrimage, facilitated through the highly recommended Land Sea Sky travel, I really didn’t know what to think.  Would this trip be like the last? I tried very hard to go into it without expectations. And as it turned out this trip was more subtle, but no less moving.  Our focus was on several of the Gods of the Tuatha instead of one single one. I felt the Morrigan often. Saw many hooded crows along our journey.  But this time The Morrigan was a background presence, there and powerful, almost as if she was stepping back, guarding the boarders, so that I might talk and connect to other things.

Tech Duinn, Donn's island where the dead
gather before moving on

   On the last trip I knew I needed to go into the cave. I can’t even describe the pull I felt, the utter glee and drive I felt, to dive down into that dark muddy cave entrance not knowing or caring what was in that darkness. Because I needed to be there. And that was that.  This time was a little different. The sites I hadn’t expected to connect with were all the ones I had the most profound experiences with.  What I also didn’t expect was how strongly Brighid and The Cailleach’s presence would come through for me on this trip.  What I love about pilgrimage is that everyone on the journey with us is there for different reasons, sometimes picking up very different things from the places we visit. Our journeys where all markedly different, yet we could travel the same road together, each finding what we needed. For some it was about connecting to ancestors, other to the Good Neighbors, for others The Gods, and for others it was the journey itself. 

   A friend recently posted online about how her practices the longer she has been Pagan have become simpler.  It’s something that really resonates with me.  I still do large public rituals, and they can be very moving and powerful.  But in my own personal practice I find the majority of the things I do are simpler, and quieter than my Paganism ten plus years ago.  Sitting and connecting to a place, quietly communing with the Gods as I pour offerings and stand before an altar. 

These are the things that are at the center of what I do. We did a few simple rituals on our pilgrimage, one a ritual in motion as we hiked the landscape, which I enjoyed immensely.  But our focus was the land, the Gods and spirits, and connection. Ritual can give you connection. But sometimes just sitting quietly, being still and open, can be more profound than ritual. 

Tree with hundreds of coins jammed into the trunk

   Being of service to the lands and these sacred sites can also build that connection.  Everywhere we went we picked up garbage left behind. And we removed certain offerings that were damaging the sites. At many of the sites we visited people left pennies and other coins. I’m unaware of specifically why modern people have started doing this. Many of the places we found them it seemed like people left coins simply because they had seen that other people had done the same. Some were even wedged or jammed into the stones themselves or into the trunks of trees. So yes we removed these offering.  We went about it respectfully, and the removed coins were collected so they could be left in donation boxes at the sites meant to help with the upkeep of these sacred places. In a way these offering that were damaging these sites have become a new kind of offering, one that will sustain the land instead.  Once we removed the coins, the damage was very clear in many places.  The coins in particular causing corrosion and damaging the rocks. My favorite picture of the trip is one at the Cailleach’s stone with everyone’s hands around it as we picked up coins and garbage from the place. I didn’t get any profound messages from that site, although I know others did, but the message this place had for me was different.  For me it was less about me getting something, a message etc, than it was about caring for the place itself. The energy felt stagnant when we first arrived, like a damned up river, but when we left it felt like that river was flowing and peaceful again.  The feeling was so profoundly changed I held back tears. Later on that day at Derreen Gardens I found a hag stone as we walked one of the trails, and I took it as a positive sign from the Cailleach, acknowledging what we had done.

Working together to clean the Cailleach's stone

Stone circle at the top of Cashelkeelty

   Our last stop that day was visiting Cashelkeelty.  To get to the stone circles at the top, which also has a spectacular view that no picture can do justice to, we hiked through a forested area, past waterfalls, through rolling hills and through sheep fields. We stopped at different changes in the landscape and spoke of the different faces of Brigid.  And when we reached the top we found the highest point and made offerings to her and sang in praise of her. Afterwards as we explored the stone circles I touched one of the standing stones and experienced what could be called an aisling, a vision of sorts.  And I understood why the Morrigan had been there guarding in the background, because for this trip is was my time to deepen my devotion to Brigid, to acknowledge something that has been playing out for a long time.  Brigid has been a part of my life as long as the Morrigan has, may times the two operating in tandem.  It was a quiet moment, yet a deeply moving one for me. 

   Some years ago at a snowy Imbolc ritual in CT my friend has embodied the Cailleach in ritual, starting out stooped and veiled. In the ritual she drank from a well and pushed back her cloak transforming into Brigid. Acting as a vessel for Brigid she gave messages to those gathered. And what I experienced on Cashelkeelty echoed and reaffirmed the message from that ritual years before.  And I found a synchronicity in that both the Cailleach and Brigid were present in that long ago ritual, and that they both spoke strongly to me during my journey on this trip through the Beara Peninsula.     

   This pilgrimage was just as profound and moving as the first one. But I find it difficult to explain my experiences at times. To my co-workers I went on vacation and came back with lots of pictures “of rocks and sheep”.  Some of my Pagan friends have asked if we did lots of spectacular rituals. And my answer is no, but we did a few simple ones. Then what did you do for ten days? Well.....

   I sat and spoke to the land, I listened for the voices of the Gods in the winds, sought their presence in the places where land meets sea, looked for them on rolling and cresting waves, I sat and was quiet and listened, and all the world spoke to me in those quiet moments.

Whale Watch and a day connecting to Manannán

A Divine Who-Ha Does Not A Moon Deity Make: Or Why the Morrigan is not my Moon Goddess

   Let’s just file this under pet peeve.  Because there are far better myths and modern misunderstandings to dispel about the Morrigan, like how she is not a sex kitten, not a goddess of sex, or a declawed war goddess. One of which you can find in a blog Morgan Daimler wrote: The Morrigan is Not My Sex Goddess.  But because this keeps cropping up and because a whole lot of people ask me about it or use it as a reason to conflate the Morrigan with other Goddesses I feel it’s worth addressing, at least in a blog post.

SO…repeat after me.

The Morrigan is not a moon goddess.

She never was, never has been. 

   And probably a lot of other goddesses you are calling moon goddesses aren’t really moon goddesses either.  Moon does not instant equal feminine any more than solar instantly equates to masculine.  It does in some systems and pantheons, but not all, and not even the vast majority.  I wrote a whole book about the solar feminine and why we need to stop putting our ideas of masculine/feminine and moon and sun into strict little boxes: Drawing Down The Sun.  Or current mindset is the result of the view points of those who pioneered the study of comparative mythology, namely that everything must be held up to the standard of Greek & Roman mythology and everything else was deviant. As well as some of those very binary view points making their way into modern psychology, like the works of Jung, which modern occultists tend to be a fan of and apply to things that they probably shouldn’t apply them to.

   Just because the Morrigan is female doesn’t mean she is instantly connected to the moon. The Irish didn’t really have Gods that fit the pattern of Greco/Roman pantheons where there were clear solar/lunar deities.  Seeing how often you have a sunny day, or see the sun shining without cloud cover in Ireland, I am not surprised. And if there are any deities in the Irish pantheon that could be considered for the title of lunar deity, all the ones that come to mind are male.  

   But the Morrigan is a triple Goddess, you say, like the phases of the moon! The concept of maiden, mother crone that we connect to the moon’s waxing and waning is a concept you can thank Robert Graves for in his book The White Goddess.  And yeah there are places where that model works, but in the Irish pantheon it doesn’t. Just like with the triple Brigid’s the three Morrigans are more like sisters than maiden, mother, crone. They are different aspects of a greater whole, or from another view point a triple set of sisters given one title who may not even be a unified being. So to connect the Morrigan to other lunar Goddesses based on the idea that she appears as a maiden, mother and crone trio doesn’t work either.

   So why do suggest working with her, or guises of her, during different moon phases, you ask? Well because the moon and her cycles, as well as the sun and planets in their dance around the universe, can be harnessed for magical purposes.  Working in conjunction with these energies and these cycle can result in some pretty successful magick.  And harnessing and aligning our work to that is always a good idea.  So it really doesn’t matter if I am working with the Morrigan, Oya, or an angelic intelligence, there will always be a preferable time to do certain work based on those heavenly bodies.    

   So please. Stop calling the Morrigan a moon goddess. And really look at the myths and attributes of other Goddesses too. A divine who-ha does not a moon deity make. Maybe look up the myths of some moon Gods to get some perspective. Rethink what you classify as relegated only to the masculine and feminine.  And don’t try to fit the Gods into boxes, they are far too old and vast to fit easily in them.  

A Feast for the Morrigan: Creating Tradition Where There is None

   It’s a new year, and Florida is experiencing quite the cold front.  Perhaps nothing by New England standards, but the chill in the air, the novelty of seeing my breath as puffy clouds of steam when we have gone hiking brings back memories of other cold January nights making offerings to the Morrigan shortly after the new secular year.  January 7^th as a Feast Day to the Morrigan is undeniably modern.  As far as I can tell the date can be traced back to Edain McCoy, who mentioned it in one of her books.  There isn’t really an explanation as to why she picked that date.  Perhaps there was a reason, perhaps not.  In the end though I don’t think it actually matters.  What I do find interesting is how we establish traditions where there are none. Whether something has been lost to time or the deity one worships never had a sacred day or feast day connected to them, how do we go about making one? And should we?

   There are many days you can connect to the Great Queen and her mythology.  Samhain usually being the most important one I honor Her on, but certainly not the only one. But even with Samhain one must ask themselves when is the correct time to celebrate?  Oct 31^st? Or Old Samhain, which thanks to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar moved the day the ancients would have celebrated to somewhere around Nov 12^th .  As modern practitioners we like things to be on an infallible schedule, one we can always rely on, but that isn’t always the case.  Even Newgrange with the sun’s light hitting the inner chamber on the winter solstice can be misleading.  Because while we can figure out the exact day of the solstice via all the convenience of modern technology, the sun actually shines into the passage tomb for several days around the solstice.  That begs the questions, which day or days did the ancient Irish celebrate or hold sacred?  Which is the right day to honor? Well the answer is simple. There is no right answer. 

   Perhaps in the end all that matters is our intentions, our reverence for the Gods, that makes a holy day sacred.  In more ways then one the yearly three days of the Morrigan’s Call Retreat have become Feast Days in honor of her.  Our main focus for the entire weekend is The Morrigan, connecting to her, making offerings, coming together in her honor.  As we approach those days each year I feel her stirring, pacing, readying for those who gather.  And I think of how our ancestors gathered to honor the Gods at different times, traveling perhaps long distances to honor sacred days, not unlike what we are doing in today's world with different Pagan festivals and events.  They may not fall on a holiday of the Wheel of the Year but in many ways we have create our own new sacred times.  And I think no matter how long The Morrigan's Call event goes on those days will remain sacred to her.  The second weekend of June will always be a time I must make offerings, call to her in ritual, because now she expects it. We have given those days to her, perhaps as much as some of us have given her January 7^th to her, making it sacred with offerings and intentions and the dedication of returning and continuing the practice year after year.   

   Perhaps we should create more modern Feast Days to our Gods, and in the case of the retreat perhaps some of us have already create some without realizing it.  A Feast Day or holy day doesn’t have to be ancient for you to make it valid.  So if your Gods don’t have holy days that are remembered or recognized create your own. And if someone else celebrates that day alongside you, great.  If not, that is ok too.  

   So even though I know its not ancient, tomorrow I will pour whiskey, speak prayers, and wander into the wild places of the area I now live and honor the Queen. And its fitting in a way that as far as the weather predictions go, tomorrow will be the last day of chilly weather in my tropical home (at least the 40 and below kind).  A mirror to other days where I walked through snow drifts to honor her. For whatever reason on those past Feast Days feeling it was important to make my offerings outside, feeling the cold and sting in the air. Letting it be a reminder that cold and struggles can be weathered.  That winter and difficult times yields eventually to spring.  And even here in Florida with mostly eternal summer, by my New England standards, there are reminders, days kissed with frost to remind me that her blessings come on the edge of a blade.