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The sabbat site was off a rural road. We needed something to mark the entrance, something that would say, to those in the know, “Here Be Witches."

A sign?

A bunch of helium balloons?

In the end, I nailed a deer skull to the top of a fencepost. From every tine, a long red ribbon fluttered.

Even the youngest among us can read that rune.

In Baltic lore, each of the Old Gods has his or her own sign.

For the Sun, it's the Sun Wheel. For the Moon, the Crescent.

Fire is the Fire Cross, the swastika, Thunder, the Thunder Cross, or compound swastika.

The Winds, since there are four of them, have the Cross, Heaven the Mountain. (How else would you draw a picture of the sky?)

But what about Earth?

My teacher, Tony Kelly, of the Pagan Movement in Britain and Ireland, used to say, “If we know anything at all about Earth, we know that she's Mother.”

At the time, as a good, doctrinaire second wave feminist, I found this statement reductionist and objectionable.

Since then, I've changed my mind.

So, a symbol that you love deeply and consider sacred has been hijacked by hate.

Well, I know how you feel; the same thing happened to us.

Based on our experience, I'd like to tender a few recommendations.

Lay down the battle. You've already lost. Regardless of what it may or may not mean to you, to others it means hate. Fair or not, to defend it in public now only taints you by association.

Lay off the public display. Honestly, other people find it offensive. Keep it for use in private, where people know what it means—and what it doesn't.

Choose something else for public display. Do your research. You really do have other options here. Inform yourself.

Be patient. If your values are true, time will not diminish them. It may not happen in a lifetime, or two, or three. What is truly sacred cannot be fouled forever.

“To crawfish”: to work widdershins, you might say.

This is the well-known magical technique of inversion: raising power by doing backwards what is usually done forwards.

Walking backwards. Dancing back to back. Reciting prayers in reverse.

The American crawfish (a regionalism for “crayfish”): cambarus diogenes. A freshwater crustacean (I hear they're delicious) that looks something like a mini-lobster. Unlike most fish, it moves through the water back-first: what looks to us face-firsters like backwards. How witchy is that? Small wonder it's become a magical byword.

On my last morning at Summerland Spirit festival in Wisconsin, I was talking shop with another old warlock, a dear friend and colleague who's also a co-conspirator in the upcoming Midwest Grand Sabbat. We'd made our way up to the highest point in Turtle Lake County: they say you can see 5 counties from it.

Shortly after we started making our way back down, we came across a crawfish, scuttling across the path in front of us, looking for all the world like the lobster in the Moon card.

In English, the adjective "crooked" generally means "bent, twisted, out-of-true." In senses both literal and figurative, it contrasts with "straight," and this contrast is true in Indo-European languages generally (West 413-4).

But Old Craft sees it differently.

In the Indo-European world at large, the gods are the *déiwôs, the "celestials." But the witch's gods are first and foremost the earthly gods, the powers of Here. Even in pagan days, we were (of necessity) Other; every culture needs its other. We were (and are) the institutionalized Other, necessary source of disquiet and critique from Within. Yes: even then, we straddled the Hedge.

The elder witcheries are sometimes known as the "Crooked Way" or the "Crooked Path": witchery as the Way of Indirection. Results indirectly achieved are nonetheless results. Witches rarely go in for frontal assault. We're far more likely to go around. Or under. Or over.

Small wonder, when He Himself is known (among other things) as the Crooked Serpent, Who is our teacher in the art of indirection, the Great Horned Snake whose Serpent Path we tread.

 A while back, I found myself humming an old Mother Goose rhyme. I hadn't thought of it in years.

“There's no true religion without fire.”

Robert Cochrane

A horn calls: the Voice of Thunder, speaking the Primal Word.

A young man runs in, bare-chested. He's carrying a torch. The flame streams behind him as he runs, like the tail of a comet.

He rings the clearing once, then darts to the center and lights the laid and willing wood.

And so we begin.

The stang is the standing forked pole that represents the Horned in Old (“Traditional”) Craft practice. I've written elsewhere about the custom of “dressing” the stang with seasonal garlands, and theorized about the meaning of this practice. It now occurs to me that the garlanding of the stang has an even deeper resonance.

It is universally acknowledged in Old Craft circles that the stang in-stands for the Master Himself. By Robert Cochrane's time (1931-1966), the personification of the “Devil” by the “devil” (i.e. of the god by the priest) had as a practice become moribund, so that the lore associated with it has been passed down only in fragmentary form.

That does not mean, however, that it has not been passed down. The ooser* (rhymes with “bosser,” not “boozer”) is the horned wooden mask worn by the priest when he personifies at the sabbat. Here in the American Midwest, as elsewhere, it has become customary for the ooser, when worn, to be accompanied with a “ruff” or collar of live greenery around the neck which, of course, varies in make-up with the season, just as the stang's wreath does.