This ritual permeates your handmade massage oil with passion. Your intention and intuition add a lovely and loving magic to your time together. Gather the following supplies:
1 cup of almond or sesame oil
...PaganSquare is a community blog space where Pagans can discuss topics relevant to the life and spiritual practice of all Pagans.
Popular subjects in contemporary Pagan culture and practice.
“So, why sixteen circles around the Wheel?”
I'm wearing my new Sun-wheel petroglyph hoodie. (In this dark time, I tend to surround myself with icons of the Sun.) Boldly displayed on my chest is the Sun-wheel itself, one of the ancestors' most sacred symbols: in each quarter thereof, a mini-Sun; around it, sixteen more.
Leave it to P, a detail-oriented guy if ever there was one, to ask about specifics.
Any teacher knows the scenario. I didn't realize that I knew the answer to his question until he'd asked it. I'm happy to tell him, but of course I owe him some attitude first.
“Really P, I'm disappointed in you," I say in my most withering headmaster voice. "Isn't it obvious why sixteen?”
He gives me the look that I deserve.
“Four: it's the sacred number of the Sun. It's like nine: three threes. Sixteen is four fours: double the power.”
Such bantering play, of course, everywhere characterizes the conversation of the loreful.
In Bronze Age Britain, writes archaeologist David Miles in his magisterial 2005 The Tribes of Britain,
You could have any kind of house you liked provided it was round, 8 metres across and had a south-east facing entrance (96).
From the Bronze Age well into the Celtic Iron Age, ancient Britons “seem to have had a particular fondness for circular houses” (Miles 96), an architectural fashion rarely seen on the Continent.
It's hard to escape the conclusion that the circle had a deep meaning for these ancestors. Remember that these are the people who built the stone circles.
In virtually every culture, the house is an icon of the universe: floor = earth, walls = world, roof = sky.
(Cellar = underworld, one might add.) One might mention here as well the round barrow, house of the dead.
Stone circle = house = universe. Remember this next time you cast a circle.
So: the ancestral roundhouse, also—as you will appreciate—known as a "wheelhouse". (We'll leave aside the 8 meter—26 foot—diameter for now. Clearly, houses have to be of a size to hold their inhabitants.) Why did the door of the roundhouse need to face the southeast?
(One thinks of the traditional Diné [“Navaho”] hogan, always built with its door facing the rising Sun.)
Roundhouses had no windows; often, they didn't even have smoke-holes. (Smoke filtered up through the thatch.) Roundhouses were dark. A southeastward-facing doorway ensures morning light.
Southeast is also the general direction in which the Sun rises during Winter, when its warmth is most needed, and—in particular—at the Solstice, the Sun's annual rebirth. Think of the many megalithic monuments oriented to the Sun's rising (or setting) at this time of year. It's difficult not to see some deep symbolism here.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why, I would suggest, it is a roundhouse, and not, as proposed, a longhouse, that we need to build here at Sweetwood Temenos.
“It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows out of the darkness, though maybe not for those who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we may forward into the darkness and the wind.”
Were you surprised? You shouldn't be.
People are tired.
People are tired of hearing—even by implication—that white people, men, and America are villains.
(They're not.)
They're tired of hearing that there are 72 genders.
(As if anything so amorphous as gender could possibly be so tidily quantified.)
They're tired of hearing that men can be women and women can be men.
(They can be trans-women and trans-men, but that's not the same.)
And, believe me, people are thoroughly sick of hearing about your f*cking pronouns.
Folks, the Left has let us down, and that badly.
"I feel like we're waiting for the results of an STD test," said a friend the other day.
I've been looking for the perfect metaphor to capture my sense of the harrowing ride we've been on here in America for the last while. So thank you, Keridwyn, for giving it to me.