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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in tribe of witches

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
a-RA-di-a or a-ra-DI-a?

It's a name to conjure with, for sure: Aradia.

It's thoroughly in keeping with the irony-laden history of the modern Craft that one of the most common names for the Goddess of Witches should derive ultimately from the name of a first-century member of the Judaean royal house.

Well, it's a long story. (I'll tell it to you some time. If you don't already know and want to find out, you can do so here. Scroll down for the good stuff.)

No, my purpose today is much simpler: stress. Is it a-RA-di-a or a-ra-DI-a?

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Make Your Own Bealtaine Bannock

Bealtaine's coming up, and with it the annual problem: how do we decide who to sacrifice this year?

Well, I don't know how they go about it where you live, but one tried-and-true method is the Bealtaine Bannock.

You cook a barley-cake over an open fire and break it up into pieces. One piece you mark black with charcoal from the fire. Then everyone draws a piece and eats it. Whoever gets the black piece wins. Or loses. Whatever.

It's a old method of Choosing. The stomachs of several bog bodies have been found to contain remnants of charred bannock. Hey, if it was good enough for Lindow Man, it's good enough for me.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
The Thews of Witchdom

The old-time Tribe of Witches didn't have a separate word for “religion.”

Or “tradition.”

Or “morals.”

They had one word for them all.

The Hwicce—the Anglo-Saxon tribe (and later, kingdom) that (according to some) gave rise to the name and lore of today's witches—spoke their own dialect of Old English, the language which (after a crossbow marriage with Norman French) gave rise to Modern English.

Living in a state of cultural wholeness that we can only fantasize about today—what culture critic Stephen Flowers would call “integral culture”—their word ðéaw denoted many of the shared things that together make a people a people: Religion. Custom. Tradition. Usage. Virtue. Conduct. In the plural, it also meant virtues, (good) manners, morals, morality.

Imagine a world in which all these things were the same thing. That was the world of the witches.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Ours by Eldright

 

It's a question worth asking: do we, the new pagans, have a right to the ways and the lore of the old pagans?

To this, I would say: we do. They're ours by eldright.

David Cowley, who coined the term, defines eldright as “ancient right, tradition.” It comes to us by virtue of who we are.

We are the pagans, the True people. (It's an anthropological truism that practically every tribal name means the People, the Real People.) The contrary of this True is not false; the contrary of this True is unTrue. We are the ones who remain faithful (“true”) to the ways of the ancestors. Some have chosen other ways, as is their right. But in doing so they have thereby become unfaithful—untrue—to the ancestors and to their ways. Every people that remains True to its ancestral ways is a True people.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
People Like Us

It's Wednesday's and Pugsley's big sword-fight scene in the school play.

A severed limb thuds to the ground. Blood sprays the front rows.

The camera pans the audience: horror, incredulity, disgust.

All but the Addams Family.

They're loving it.

I'd gone with some of our sister coven to see Addams Family Values.

There we were, a row unto ourselves among the pastel suburban families, laughing at all the wrong times.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Witcheries

Consider the suffix -ry or -ery,*  which comes to us from Latin (-arius) via Old French (-er, -ier) via Middle English (-erie) and, attached to a noun or verb, can mean either a craft, study, or practice (husbandry, midwifery), a collective plural (Jewry, nunnery), or a place in which a particular activity takes place (bakery, hatchery).

So witchery can mean:

  1. Witchcraft,

  2. Witches collectively, and

  3. Witch Country.

     

One of my favorite lines from the Charge of the Goddess has always been: For behold, I am Queen of all Witcheries. Apparently there are multiple witcheries, and She's queen of them all. Andrew Mann said of Her in 1597: She has a grip of all the Craft. That's quite a claim.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Witch Country

They call it the Driftless Area.

What strange forces spared one isolated region along the Upper Mississippi River, asks Timothy S. Jacobson, from the repeated crushing and scouring effects of massive continental glaciers during the last million-plus years? What pre-Ice Age throwbacks survived here in this unique refuge that holds more Native American effigy mounds, petroglyph caves, strange geological features, and rare species than anywhere else in the Midwest?

Every tribe has a territory. In this, the Midwest Tribe of Witches is no different from any other.

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