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At exactly 12 midnight last night, the wire broke on the Thunder icon that has hung over my bed for the last 25 years, and the whole heavy panel of painted wood slid down the wall to where I lay sleeping below.

If it had clobbered me on the head, it would have been painful, at very least, if not downright injurious. Instead it wedged neatly between the edge of the futon and the wall, and I woke to the sound of rattling bed-slats.

To the best of my knowledge, that's the first time I've ever woken up with a god in the bed.

All's well that ends well: I'm fine, the painting's fine. I put things right, read for a while, and go back to sleep.

Moral of the story:

I didn't really notice the crow until it flew over the second time.

The coven had gathered for New Moon in the park, not so much for ritual as for the reassuring pleasure of one another's company. As covens go, we're a close one—that happens, after 40 years together—and it was good to be able to catch up and sing together again. Whatever pleasures social distancing may take away, you don't have to be close at hand to sing.

That's when the crow flew over for the first time.

Now, in a park in April it's not unusual for birds to fly overhead. But when it flew over again in the opposite direction shortly thereafter, you could see ears pricking up. This is, after all, a group of witches. Like other predators, witches are hyper-aware of surroundings and, of course, an omen is an omen.

Then it came back again.

In folk prognostication, crows are generally accounted bad omens—often omens of death—but crows and witches share certain affinities, and besides: this crow was on a special mission.

We watched it alight high in a budding maple tree. After a brief struggle, it flew back overhead, twig in beak.

Well, there's your answer. Whatever else it may be, a crow building a nest is no omen of death.

We discuss the advantages of building your nest with fresh, supple twigs. (All the better to weave you with, my dear.) We watch to see where it's nesting. (We can't tell, though it's clearly—here's an omen for you—in the pagan neighborhood.) We laugh, and sing another May song.

Chances are that, back when we still lived in trees, like our cousins the gorillas, we humans built nests there for sleeping. When we came down from the trees and moved out onto the savannahs, we kept building nests for ourselves, though tipped up onto their sides: twig bothies offer something in the way of privacy, shelter from the wind, and protection from lions. (Lions, being—after all—cats, prefer to sneak up on their prey from behind.)

Back in the old days, just before May Eve, the young bucks would spend time in the woods building May bowers. That way, you'd have someplace (relatively) private to bring your sweetheart back to after the bonfire revels.

The Romans (of course) had a phrase for it.

Absit omen: “May it not be an omen.”

As resident priest here at the Temple of the Moon, I make offerings twice daily—mornings and evenings—and pray for the well-being of pagan peoples everywhere. As one might expect of a pagan temple, the prayers take different forms depending on what time of year it is.

The prayers, of course, are recited from memory. Twice now during the last few days, I've slipped up and started prayers in their Winter form. Both times, thankfully, I've managed to catch myself before I'd got very far, and corrected the prayers to the proper Summer form instead.

But now I'm starting to worry. Even though, here in the North, Winter is the general default setting, somehow (whether rightly or wrongly) when things go wrong in ritual, they seem to take on a super-charged significance.

What would you do if you came down one morning and found shit on the altar?

Literal shit?

It happened to a friend of mine.

She'd recently moved the household altar, with its antlered Grinnygog* and photos of the dead, from a wall-shelf upstairs to a beautiful painted alcove downstairs. By aesthetic standards, the move was a quantum improvement, and yet, there it was: desecration.

What do you do when there's shit on the altar? Well, first you wash everything as thoroughly as you can, and strew the altar with salt.

Then you figure out what's going on, and what you need to do about it.

It turns out that the shit wasn't actually shit, but—hardly an improvement—spew.

The kitty had jumped up on the altar, eaten the food offerings, and then puked them back up. Yuck.

Well, kitties will be kitties. Still, when it comes to the sacred, these things don't just happen.

Tarot-Schmaro.

My favorite form of divination has always been reading omens.

Of course, there isn't always an omen lying around when you happen to need one. Hence the cards, the runes, the lots: systematized omen-taking.

What's so compelling about omens is the way that they offer themselves. There you are, in the middle of everyday life, and suddenly something out of the ordinary happens. Voilà: a sign!

Of course, omens aren't always favorable. Then it's good to have some counter-magic handy, usually spoken. Absit omen, said the Romans: May it not be an omen. Keinehora ("no evil eye") my grandmother used to say. Hornie avert, I say, making the sign of the Horns.

There was a hole in the pasture fence. That's the simple explanation for why five cows kept coming up to the wooded ridge in southwestern Witchconsin where the Midwest Tribe of Witches had gathered this summer.

Omens & Signs

Keep an eye out for any signs and signals from nature.  One of the most common and well known is finding a feather in your pathway but there are many more.  What about a poorly house plant?  If you have been looking after it properly is it a sign of a sickly relationship in the family?  Take a look in the garden, are there plants growing together or entwined that don’t usually mix?  It could be a sign of love or a relationship.  Don’t forget the plants that self-seed in the garden, where are they growing and what type of plants are they? 

Seeing order in randomly generated patterns is the essence of fortune telling and interpretation of omens. Hundreds of years ago, people might expect to go outside and see many different species of birds routinely as part of their everyday experience. Thus, reading the first type of bird one sees after asking a question was something people could reasonably expect to do as part of their normal lives, because seeing random birds was part of people's normal lives. My everyday experience includes the internet. I see random stuff on my Facebook feed and on the day's Google Doodle as I'm sipping my morning coffee. 

Random stuff is exactly what's traditionally used for fortune telling and omens. Rune casting interprets the way lots fall on a cloth. The rune Perthro, the rune of destiny or wyrd, is shaped like a dice cup, which refers to rolling dice to read a fortune. The heathen art of reading bird omens derives a positive or negative answer from whether one sees a white bird or a black bird first. (Black is the good color, because Odin's ravens are black.) In other traditions, tea leaves make patterns in a cup, and a deck of cards has a traditional significance for each card in Tarot and in cartomancy.