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Across Pagandom, an unexpected trope recurs again and again at the Winter Solstice: the segregation of the sexes.

The Great Dance of the Wheel

The heart of our Midwinter's Eve observance is the Great Dance of the Wheel.

Two concentric circles. Inside, the men, facing out. Outside, around them, the women, facing in.

They dance to the same song: the old, old song that tells the story of the Sun's life, death, and rebirth.

During the verses, the circles revolve in opposite directions, alternating deosil and widdershins.

During the chorus, they dance toward, and then away from one another: four steps in, four step out.

This is the point of the ritual during which—as I expect from all good ritual—I generally experience the oceanic sense of immersion in the greater world around me.

Spear Dance

On Mother Night, the men of the North Country Theodish kindred retreat to the traff, a jerrybuilt outdoor shelter.

There they change, chant around the fire, and prepare to approach the house, where the women are busy with rites of their own, with the Hooden Horse, in the traditional Spear Dance.

After the Dance, the men and women sing back and forth to one another, improvising jesting verses.

Meanwhile, in the Hindu Kush...

Chaumós, the month-long Winter Solstice festival of the Kalasha, the last remaining Indo-European-speaking people to have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity, is marked by a strict period of segregation of the sexes.

The men move out of the houses and sleep in the goat sheds. During the time of greatest sanctity immediately preceding the Solstice, sex is forbidden.

In a state of heightened ritual purity, the men and women dance separately, singing raunchy songs and aiming obscene jests at one another.

Among Pagans Old and New, the Winter Solstice tends to mark the end of the old cycle and the beginning of the new.

“An Island of Paganism in a Sea of Islam”

The Kalasha people of what is now northwestern Pakistan have begun their celebration of Chaumós, their month-long Winter Solstice festival.

Numbering some 4000, the Kalasha are something of a miracle: the only remaining Indo-European-speaking people who have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity.

Though, unsurprisingly, some Hindu nationalists have claimed them as Hindus, their religion is actually closer kin to the Vedic religion as practiced by the Indo-Aryans when they first entered the Indian Subcontinent some 3500 years ago: the ancestral ground from which the various “Hinduisms” later arose.

Who Is Balumain?

During Chaumos, the god Balumáin rides into the Kalasha valleys on a steed with flaming hooves to bring back light and bless the Kalasha people for the coming year.

It's unclear what his name means. The Kalasha themselves no longer remember, and various scholars have construed it variously.

His identity, however, is not in question. His secret name, used only in certain chants sung by a handful of elders at high points of the festival, is Indr.

He is the Indra of Vedic mythology.

An Indian Thor

Though no longer actively worshiped in Hinduism—to the best of my knowledge, he no longer has any active temples in India—Indra was the major god of the incoming Indo-Aryans' pantheon: the Divine Thunderer, chiefest of gods, akin to Thor, Taranis, Perkunas, Perun, Jupiter, and Zeus.

Like his brother Thunderers, his chiefest deed, as celebrated repeatedly in the hymns of the Rig Veda, is his defeat of the dragon Vritra.

What Has the Thunderer to Do with the Solstice?

Why invoke the Thunderer, of all gods, at the Winter Solstice, of all times? The Kalasha themselves no longer remember.

Italian anthropologist Augusto Cacopardo, a lifelong student of Kalasha religion and culture, though, has a theory: that, in its original configuration, Chaumos was precisely a festival that celebrated—and, indeed, actualized—the god's primal triumph over the chaos-dragon.

The name of Balumain's foe has been long forgotten, but an early night of the festival, featuring winding, serpentine, torchlight processions, is still called by the Kalasha Nong Rat, the “Night of the Serpent.”

A Vedic Key

Why does Indra fight Vritra? He does so to free the Waters, Cattle, and the Sun, which the monster has greedily imprisoned in a cave.

O lord Indra: you caused to appear the hidden rays held captive in the cave as the Sun, releasing them to all the people, says the Atharva Veda (20:40:3).

It seems likely that a similar myth once underlay the Kalasha festival.

More and Many More

On the final day of the festival, as the Kalasha dance to honor the god's departure from their valleys, it is said that Balumain counts the people. If they number more than in the previous year, then there will be yet more of them in the year to come.

In the face of a hostile Islam, Kalasha culture is currently undergoing something of a renaissance, driven, among other things, by the interest shown in them by Western scholars and, indeed, the knowledge that, here in the West, there exist those of us who are intentionally choosing to return to the Old Ways that are theirs by right of inheritance.

I'm not sure who shot the white markhor, or when.

For 20 years, though, his head, with its splendid crown of corkscrew horns, horizontal like Khnum's, has hung over my fireplace, watching impassively over conversation and coven meeting alike.

(I found him at a local antiques mall on, of all days of the year, Midsummer's Eve. At our celebration later that night, I waxed enthusiastic about my new purchase to the group, to the utter mystification of a non-pagan guest. “Pagans have a thing about horned animals,” a coven-sib told him, by way of explanation.)

The Kalasha of the Hindu Kush, the last Indo-European-speaking people to have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity, hold this wild mountain caprid sacred to the peri, the mountain fairies or elves. To these goat-herding pagans, markhors are the “flocks of the peri,” just as Highland Scots refer to deer as “fairy cattle.”

(The Kalasha and the Gael are, of course, distant kin, sundered by some 4000 years. Just how old, one wonders, is this metaphor? And what does it say about us that we should expect the lifeways of Faerie to mirror our own?)

Really, he's the centerpiece of the room, the Goat, with a gaze that's hard to avoid.

Through the seasons, I deck him variously. At Samhain this year, I wound his horns with orange lights and hung them with black and orange ornaments.

Playfulness is one thing, disrespect another. I try to be careful about this, never crossing the boundary into mockery. He always lets me know when I've gone too far—anyone who's been around the Maypole a few times will know what I mean by this—and when he does, I always back off.

Somehow, the Old Ways always manage to come down to relationship.

After the Samhain stuff came down this year, the room seemed too dark—oh, our Northern winters!—so I rewrapped the horns in white LED lights with so strong a bluish cast to them that one feels cold just looking at them.

Something was still missing, though, so a few days ago I hung some faux icicles along the light-wound horns. Lights and ice: together, they perfected the look.

He wears them proudly, attitudinously. From Lord of the Sabbat, master of unholy revels, he has become the Snow Goat, lord of Winter.

Maybe, as we get closer to Yule, I'll cut some branches of holly from out front and make him a collar. Or would that seem to tame him too much? We'll see what himself has to say about it.

The Goat always gets the final say.

In the dream, I'm in the Kalasha valleys for Chaumós, their great month-long celebration of the Winter Solstice.

(Living in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains, the Kalasha are the only Indo-European-speaking people who have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity.)

The culmination of the festivities is to be the revelation of the Three Hidden “Idols” of the Kalasha.

When the three wooden images are finally revealed, I realize—much to my surprise and delight—that they are none other than the Three Gods of the Great Temple of Uppsala: Óðinn, Þórr, and Freyr, but rendered in a distinctly Nuristani idiom.

“They don't remember very much about their god.”

That was the phrase that leapt out at me.

I'm a gangly teenager in the family room of our home on the southern shores of Lake Erie, reading for the first time—with mounting excitement—Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today.

“They don't remember very much about their god.”

As if in the voice of an anthropologist observing from outside, Gardner is describing the beliefs of the witches of the New Forest.

How can you not know much about the god you worship? I think, with adolescent arrogance.

Naturally, I wanted to know more.

Now, just how much any human can be said to know about any god remains, of course, an operative theological—or perhaps epistemological—question. Rhetorically, Gardner's observation very cleverly turns a defect into an advantage. “They've been around for so long that they've forgotten much,” he implies. In fact, as we now know, the reality of the situation was somewhat more complex.

In fact, this type of forgetting does happen regularly in oral traditions. The Kalasha of what is now northwestern Pakistan, the only Indo-European-speaking people who have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity, have lost virtually all of their mythology, and their gods tend to be shadowy figures, known mainly for their practical functions. (That's what happens when life is a struggle: it's the basics that you hold onto, while the non-essentials slough away.) Why do the altars of the gods all feature four carved wooden horse heads? No one among the Kalasha remembers any more. We don't know why, they tell researchers: it's always been that way.

(Cross-cultural comparativism provides a ready answer to the question: they're the four horses that pull the god's chariot. Altar as quadriga: a characteristically Indo-European kind of metaphor, preserved like a flower in amber for more than 4000 years. Yes Diana, academic arrogance aside, sometimes the anthropologist really does know more than the informant.)

That skinny, wide-eyed teen in Erie, Pennsylvania didn't know any of this, of course; he was feeling his way with his skin. That didn't stop him from taking up the challenge, though: just as Gardner intended, perhaps.

As I make the physical and spiritual preparations for this summer's upcoming Grand Sabbat, the ecstatic adoration of the embodied Horned Lord, I look back over a life of more than 50 years in the Craft.

"Reuse, repurpose, recycle."

Me, I'm a man of peace, but the more I think about it, the more it starts to look like prophecy.

Across the Indo-European-speaking world, and beyond, they tell the story of Thunder and the (variously-named) Three-Headed Monster.

In a nutshell: the three-headed monster arises and oppresses the people. Thunder arises, arms himself, and after a terrible battle, slays him, freeing all the people.

And there was much rejoicing.

It's an old story, with reflexes across Europe and Western Asia. We see it in the East (Indra v. Vritra), the uttermost West (Thor v. Midgard Serpent), and in between (Zeus v. Typhon). Italian anthropologist Augusto Cacopardo has even suggested that the story underlies the great Winter Solstice festival of the Kalasha of what is now Pakistan, the sole remaining Indo-European-speaking people who have continuously practiced their traditional religion since ancient times (Cacopardo 116-118).

At this point, the astute mythographer will be asking: Why three heads? That's where the prophecy comes in.

Those who contend that, historically speaking, marriage is a male-female phenomenon only are, in effect, wrong.

In fact, there's good evidence for rites of male-male bonding—a functional equivalent of marriage—across the Indo-European-speaking world.

Such a rite survives to this day among the Kalasha of what is now northwestern Pakistan, the only IE-speaking people who have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity.

The Goat at the Heart

Being a mountain culture, the Kalasha are aigocentric: goat-centered.

Like the Celts of ancient Britain, Kalasha culture is transhumant. During the Summer, the young men take the flocks of goats up to the Summer pastures in the mountains and live there together for months at a time.

It's unsurprising that intense emotional relationships should spring up between these young men. When two of them wish to make a lifelong commitment to one another, it's time to enact the traditional rite of, in effect, blood brotherhood.

An Act of Mutual Adoption

Together, the two sacrifice a goat to Sájigor, the protector of flocks. (Here in the West, the Horned has always been patron of male-male bonding.)

Having slaughtered the goat, they roast its kidneys over the fire. They then feed one another pieces of the kidneys on the tips of their knives.

Then they suck each other's nipples.

Though pungent with symbolism throughout, it is this final act which articulates the rite's central meaning. Across the Indo-European world, the act of suckling figures as part of the rite of adoption.

The Kalasha rite of blood-brotherhood constitutes, in effect, an act of mutual adoption.

A Pan-Indo-European Phenomenon?

Nineteenth century travelers' accounts make it clear that this rite was once common among the cultural kin of the Kalasha, the so-called “Kafiri” cultures of northwestern Afghanistan, now—since its forcible conversion to Islam during the 1890s—called Nuristan, “land of light”.

In fact, British consul George Scott Robertson undertook the rite with Waigali warrior Shermalik, and wrote of it in his 1896 book The Kafirs of the Hindu Kush, though he clearly didn't understand the implications of what he was doing.

We may suspect that similar, parallel rites of male-male bonding once occurred across the Indo-European-speaking world. As among the Kalasha, traditional societies tend to be structured along lines of kinship; such rites serve to build ties between kinship groups, and are hence indispensable for long-term cultural stability.