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If you were covered with sweat and dirt, would you walk into a ritual?

If you were seething with rage, would you walk into a ritual?

If you had just killed someone—accidentally, say—would you walk into a ritual?

Probably not, I'm guessing, And rightly so.

States of ritual purity—and impurity—were important to the ancestors. Very important. While these are not something that the new paganisms have (for the most part) spent much time thinking about, I'm going to argue that, without being consciously aware of it, we generally observe such purity laws ourselves. If that's really so, then we as pagans can only benefit from becoming more consciously aware of what we're already doing unconsciously.

In some ways, I think that language often gets in the way. “Clean/unclean,” “pure/impure”: this kind of language seems alien to us. We've had it used against us so often—and against women in particular—that we've largely excised it from our thought and our practice.

Good ritual...

...we do together.

Bad ritual...

...is done to you.

Good ritual...

...lets you experience.

Bad ritual...

...tells you what you feel.

Good ritual...

...connects.

I'm not sure what the police were expecting, but it clearly wasn't us.

Midsummer's Eve. There we were, with our sister coven, up on Witches' Hill.

We'd had our picnic, we'd danced and sung the songs. Everyone else had gone up to the top of the hill to sing the Sun down. Typically, Uncle Steve was still down in the park, running around with the kids. In fact, the youngest was sitting on my shoulders.

The police car came hurtling up over the curb, tearing up turf as it went. It slammed to a stop midway up the hill. Simultaneously, in a choreographed move, both doors fly open. A cop leaps out of each and immediately crouches behind it, taut, as if expecting a barrage of bullets from the hilltop.

“Hey officer,” I say. “Midsummer's Eve, what?”

They give me the eye. Hands on guns, they move cautiously up the hill.

“Die now!” chanted the crowd as Diagóras of Rhodes circled the stadium.

They meant it as a compliment.

Olympia, 448 BCE. Two of Diagóras' sons had just received Olympic crowns. "Die now!" chanted the crowd as his sons raised him to their shoulders and bore him aloft.

Meaning: you might as well die now; you're never going to get any happier than this.

In my long and rich life, I've been fortunate enough to have several “Die now!” moments.

Here's one.

Being daughter of two fathers (gods, being gods, can do that sort of thing), it makes sense that she should be patron of same-sex love.*

Rainbow was a goddess known to the ancestors, but in our day she takes on new meaning and new importance.

As Lady of Many Colors, she protects the times and places when peoples of different kinds, of different colors, come harmoniously together.

She gathers beneath her wings the gender-nonconforming.

And of course, the men for men, the women for women, and those who move creatively between, are her special people, hers to her.

When her namesake flowers bloom, during the month of June, we see her banner prominently displayed.

Interestingly, for meteorological reasons, during this same month we often see her standing, in her own person, there between Earth and Heaven.

Today, he's almost entirely forgotten.

But he was one of the pioneers of the Horned God revival in the 20^th century.

Hans Holzer's 1969 book The Truth About Witchcraft was my second book about modern witchery. (The first was Sybil Leek's Diary of a Witch.) In it, he treats mostly with witchcraft of the Gardnerian and Gardnerian-derived varieties.

But A. Damon was different.

Damon lives with his wife upriver, writes Holzer, “within the frame-work of witch law,” as he put it when he invited me to drop in for a visit, and his “logo” or symbol is an interesting combination of the Horned God's horns and sex organs within a triangle (150).

My 14-year old's ears pricked up immediately.

Just before last New Moon I ran into my neighbor.

“Hey, Ramadan coming up,” I said. “Are you looking forward?

She frowned.

“Too much work,” she said.

Ramadan, ugh. It's as bad as Christmas.

Like Christmas, Ramadan is an old pagan holiday dressed up in motho clothing. (In this case, a hijâb.) This year it's almost back to where it started in the first place: the moon of the Summer Solstice. A fast every day, a party every night: sounds pagan to me.

Ramadan is a hot item these days. True, there are lots more Muslims in my neighborhood now than there were a few years back. But it's not just demographic. Since 9/11, Ramadan actually makes national news. (Before that, of course, although a quarter of Earth's population—including millions of Americans—were observing the holiest time of their religious calendar, somehow the American media never found this a newsworthy event.) But in these days of unthinking Leftist Islamophilia, non-Muslims fast “in solidarity.” (A friend's husband calls this “religious tourism.”) The yards of the terminally liberal sprout Blessed Ramadan to Our Muslim Neighbors yard-signs.

Well, kumbaya to you, too.