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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in Thirteen Days of Yule

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The Witchiest Number

Call it triskaidekaphilia.

Lucky thirteen.

Thirteen is an oddball number, which is why witches like it so much. The ideal coven: the god and his twelve companions.

“Six and seven,” witches used to say: a greeting, back in pre-Blessed Be days. For reasons obvious to those in the know, this was a covert expression of Craft identity. In Italy they said “Five and eight” instead, for the same reason.

The ancestors counted in tens and twelves. Twelve was the “long ten,” as 120 was the “long hundred.” That explains why the teens don't start til thirteen; it used to be “three-ten.”

So thirteen means, “the cycle begins again.” Thirteen is both an end and a beginning.

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  • Tasha Halpert
    Tasha Halpert says #
    We used to have Triskadelaphilia parties in our homw every yoear on any Friday the 13th. It was fun! I wrote an article on it just

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Ass's Ears

 'Tis a fine, foolish thing to wear a crown.

(Proverb of New Crete)

 

Sometimes Old Hornie wears an ass's ears.

Tomorrow is Thirteenth Night, the last of Yule, when the Merry Monarch of Misrule holds sway.

It's a short reign, but a merry one.

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The Yules

They say that if you add up all the gifts in The Twelve Days of Christmas, you get 364.

364.

The Twelve (witches would say Thirteen) Days of Yule are a microcosm, a year in little.

So Yule is actually the Yules: Twelve (witches would say Thirteen) of them, and every one a Yule.

The same pattern of the Twelve Between turns up elsewhere. The old Zoroastrian New Year, Nawrúz, at the vernal equinox, is a festival of thirteen days.

Mircea Eliade suggests that the intercalary dozen serves to reconcile a solar year of 365 days with a lunar year (= 12 lunations) of 352.

There's actually an old (15th century) Scots song kin to the one you may know called The Thirteen Days of Yule. It begins:

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Yule Rush

Ah, life in the Broomstick Ghetto.

In the days since Mother Night, I've several times caught myself wondering: Why are all these people still running around?

Then I remember.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Troll Night

Well, it's here: the Thirteenth Night before Yule.

So potent a power is Yule that the Thirteen Nights cast a sort of shadow before them, a kind of inverse Yule.

These are the year's darkest nights. In the darkness, monsters assemble, more and more each night. It is the season of the troll.

Troll Night they call it, the thirteenth before Mother Night. At the doorstep, they lay out offerings, but the doors themselves they ward and hammer-sign from within. Here and no further, the wardings and offerings say.

Word is, the trolls will be particularly bad this year. Bad governance, or the threat thereof, always angers the beings of the land. 

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  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Myself, I'll be setting out some of the cherry vodka I made this June, and have been saving for Yule. Of course, I'll have a nip m
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Booze. Porridge. Sardines. I'm sure there are others, but that's what people that I know put.
  • Haley
    Haley says #
    So, what kind of offerings do Trolls like? Other than raw meat and unfortunate wanderers, of course.

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Burning Yule

In some places, Yule goes out with a blaze.

Where my parents live, there's a drop-off point in the parking lot at one of the local malls. Yule trees, wreaths, and swags of greenery—now beginning to dry—accumulate there.

And on the Saturday after Thirteen Night—brought to you courtesy of the local fire department—old Yule goes out in a blaze of glory.

Bold Yuletide is past, Thirteenth Night is the last.

So we bid you adieu: great joy to the New.

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Warlock Songs

On the morning of Thirteenth Day, the warlocks sit in the sauna and sing their warlocks: varð-lokkur, their songs of power.

They sing up the Sun, in its years and days.

They sing up the seeds, and the harvest to be.

They sing up the lambing, the calving, the fawning.

At the turning of winter, the warlocks sing summer.

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