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I have seen twilight at mid-afternoon.

I have gazed into the face of Totality.

I have beheld the Black Sun.

By many traditional peoples around the world, eclipses are accounted unchancy and ill-omened events.

(Why not? Seeing them can strike you blind.)

Unsurprisingly, witches see matters differently.

What do witches make of eclipses?

Sabaean archpriest Federico de Arechaga (Ordun), while not himself of the tribe of Witches, certainly knew how to think like one.

He was wont to refer to weddings—all weddings: male-male, female-female, male-female (in this he was far ahead of his time)—as “eclipses.”

For witches, eclipses—those of both Sun and Moon—are considered Great Rites, hieroi gamoi, alchemical weddings of Moon and Sun.

As local priestess Hillary Pell put it, “The Union of the Gods renews the world.”

They bode, we say, coming change.

From Pittsburgh, we drove 72 miles north to Pymatuning.

Swollen with eclipse-pilgrims, the trip—an hour and a half in the going—took four and a half hours in the coming-back.

For three unforgettable hours, differences were laid aside. Rightist, leftist, centrist; Republican, Democrat, Independent; Trumpist, Bidenist, None-of-the-Above-ist: as the great Marriage of the Gods, in all its cosmic glory, unfolded before us, we, too, were one.

"It's just a sprinkling for the May Queen."

Well, I never did manage to find that Horned God Sex Cult that I've been looking for all these years. Presumably, it doesn't exist. If it ever did, I can read you this oracle: it didn't last long before it managed to blow itself up.

(There was supposed to have been a local sex coven back in the early days of Paganistan. No, it didn't last: they just gave each other various STDs, and then broke up.)

Probably that's just as well. As any historian of religion can tell you, your average sex cult doesn't have a very long shelf life: not terribly surprising, when you think about it. “Volatile” would be the operative word here.

Doesn't mean they're not fun to fantasize about, though.

Beltane's coming—now there's a phrase for you—and the sap is flowing.

Me, I'm a writer: it's Spring, and the green fires burn. Naturally, I've been writing pornography.

Pagan porn, of course: the convergence of obsessions. Talk about a niche market.

Well, why shouldn't there be holy pornography? Sacred pornography? Now there's a pagan literary genre, if ever there was one. Think of the Kama Sutra. Whoever decided that religion and sex don't mix? Whoever he was, he was no pagan, I can tell you that much.

I don't know about yours, but the Witch religion is an eros-driven religion. Gardner got that one absolutely bang-on right. Our gods have genitals, and they know how to use them.

That's where everything comes from, they say: “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

Interestingly, much of what I've been writing is not terribly, as they say, explicit.

In my experience (such as it is) the indirect and figurative is way hotter than getting slapped in the face with it. I learned this from, of all people, Mary Renault. Her novels have some incredibly hot male-male sex in them, but if you weren't reading carefully, you'd probably miss it.

Sex, after all, isn't something one person does to another: it's what we do together.

Gods: gay pagan pornography for smart people. Talk about the niche of a niche of a niche of a niche.

No, you won't be seeing any of my holy porn any time soon; not around here, anyway. Once I get my Substack up and running, just possibly (and selectively). For now, it circulates privately among friends: those who understand both what it means, and what it doesn't.

Not that you, of all people, need it, of course. After all, you've got a wild pagan imagination of your own.

Like every other organ, imaginations need exercise.

Predictably enough, they're calling it the “Christmas Star”; actually, of course, it's neither.

Once in every 800 years, Jupiter and Saturn meet in the sky and kiss. Seen from Earth, they will appear to join and become one. This time around, this Great Marriage occurs—of all the well-omened days of the year—on the day of the Winter Solstice.

Let me be frank: after this dark, dark year, we'll take whatever omens we can get.

Winter is Sky Time. The leaves come down, and the heavens open up. Historically, here in Minnesota, December is the year's cloudiest month, but this year has brought us a succession of clear, fair days of long, slanting Sunlight. These last Sunrises of the waning year have been spectacular, and our Northern nights have been alive with Northern Lights, the dancing daughters of Earth and Sun.

You yourself can witness this 800-year Wonder, this Great Rite in the Sky, wherever you are.

Paganistan was born from an act of love.

Beltane 1976. For the first time, on May Eve the Minnesota Church of the Wicca (MCoW) selects, by lot, a woman and a man who, while the rest dance and sing to raise the power, retire to the May bower to enact the Great Marriage of the Gods.

It was the making of our community.

We've enacted the rite ever since. This year marks the 43^th annual May Marriage, the local community's oldest ongoing tradition. It's a record that any New Pagan community could envy.

The tradition is currently carried by the Wiccan Church of Minnesota, MCoW's daughter organization, but has worked its way out into the community at large. “The Union of the Gods renews the world,” wrote local priestess Hillary Pell (herself a May Queen emerita) in 1998.

Last year, winter lingered late. A freak mid-April blizzard paralyzed growth and, two weeks later, there was still nary a sign of Spring to be seen.

In the dusk of May Eve, we kindled the Beltane Fire. Our newest member led her partner off to the May bower. As they made love, we sang and danced the sacred dances.

Now, whether or not it had anything to do with what we—or they—did that night, I don't claim to know. (I rather doubt it.) But this much I can tell you.

By the next day, there was green everywhere. Overnight, the buds had broken. Between the setting and the rising of the “ithyphallic adolescent Sun” (to quote Feraferia's Fred Adams), Spring—in amazing chloroplast explosion—had sprung.

 “The Goddess is great.”

(Jesus of Nazareth)

So, here's the story. After crawling, barely alive, out of the tomb (they took him down from the cross too soon), Jesus is thoroughly sick of his previous life and ministry. Physically alive but dead within, he wanders off into the world as a wounded itinerant healer.

So begins the “20th” century's most unlikely pagan novel, D. H. Lawrence's 1928 The Escaped Cock, a.k.a. The Man Who Died.

Well, but there's more. In his travels, he chances upon a Priestess of Isis. He stays with her in her temple, in its sacred seaside grove, and in time she heals him of the world-hating philosophy and physical impotence from which he has suffered heretofore.

“I am risen!” he proclaims when, courtesy of the priestess' ministrations, he achieves his first post-crucifixion erection.

In Escaped Cock, the gospel morphs into—and is healed of dysfunction by—the story of Isis and Osiris. Jesus, become Osiris Risen, sires tomorrow's Horus, and once again wanders off into the wide world of experience.

“Tomorrow is another day!” he proclaims (along with Scarlett O'Hara) as he sails off alone into the sunset.

Oh, Lawrence. So jejeune: if only we would all just shed our sexual inhibitions, the world would be healed and everything would be just peachy. Ah, if only things were so simple.