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Peaches: It might seem obvious, but eating peaches encourages love. They also enhance wisdom. An amulet made with the pit can ward off evil. A fallen branch from a peach tree can make an excellent magic wand, while a piece of peach wood carried in your pocket is an excellent talisman for a long life.

Pears: It is believed this uniquely shaped fruit brings prosperity and a long life. Somewhat similarly to peaches, the pear nourishes powers of lust and love. Shared with a partner, pears can be used to induce sexual arousal. Pear wood is also very good for magical wands.

Figs: Figs hold a place in our culture from the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Unsurprisingly, they are associated with sexuality and fecundity. If eaten ripe off the tree, this fruit will aid in conception and help men with issues of impotence. A fig tree grown outside the bedroom will bring deeply restful sleep and prophetic dreams. Outside your kitchen, a fig tree will ensure there will always be plenty of food for your family. Anywhere a fig tree grows it will bring luck and safety. A folk charm holds that gifting someone a fig grown by your own hand binds them to you. Wield your figs wisely.

Grapes: Planting grapevines grants you abilities for money magic as well as gardening and farming. The ancient Romans painted pictures of grapes on the garden walls to ensure good harvests and fertility for women. Eat some grapes for mental focus, and magical spell workings for money are abetted greatly by placing a bowl of grapes on the altar.

They call it “the Kiss of the Horned.”

Though I've borne my witch-mark now for more than 50 years, I've actually never seen it. What is so simultaneously near and faraway as your own back?

As the old stories tell, you get it when you swear yourself to the Craft. (“Body and soul, whole and all: I give myself to you,” you tell him.) They tell me you can still see the faint, faint whisper of it if you look very hard, just above my left shoulder blade, so much a part of me has it become.

(Why left, you ask? Easily told. Left is nearer the heart.)

“Are you willing to shed your blood for the people?” he asks.

How you answer will change everything that comes after. Think well before you reply.

Consider it tribal scarification. That's what an initiation is, in effect: an adoption into the tribe, the Tribe of Witches. If you'd been born into the tribe, you would already have undergone the proper rites of adulthood. For those of us who weren't, this is the equivalent. There's no birth without blood.

The witch-mark: a kiss, a love-bite. Answer true, and you'll bear the sign—His Sign—now, and for all your days.

While we often think of herbs and flowers as having special properties, it is much less commonly known that fruits also contain much magic you must try for yourself:

Apples: This beloved “one a day” fruit is associated with the goddess Pomona and contains the powers of healing, love, and abundance. Samhain, the high holiday of the Wheel of the Year, is also called the “Feast of Apples,” and they are used on the Halloween altar during this festival. Cutting an apple in half and sharing the other half with your beloved will generate magic so that the two of you will stay happy.

“I love you more than I love God,” my first boyfriend once told me.

Then he freaked out, because it was true.

Two young priests-in-training—me to the Horned, he to Christ—trying our best to follow our respective loves, in a time of discountenance for love of man for man.

In the end, the cognitive strain became too great for him to bear. It never occurred to him what from the start seemed obvious to me: that he best loved one by loving the other as well.

So we went our separate ways: him to his priesthood, god and people, me to mine.

We're now both nearer death than birth. My life has been the happier, I think. He has a pension, though.

Do some loves exclude others? Do we not, in loving others, love our gods as well?

For the Horned, for Him Who is all animal life, surely so. And for Christ?

To me, who maybe have no right to an opinion, it seems that perhaps a case could be made. Gods help me, I'm no longer so convinced as once I was that, in the end, my boyfriend's god and mine are even so different, after all.

Here is a delightfully easy recipe that will produce a flavorful homemade liqueur that smells as good as it tastes. If you are interested in making a hassle-free bottle of special spirits, apples are a wonderful way to start. Start with these ingredients:

4 apples, sweet ones, not sour

eigh  n.  1. the horse as sacred being  2. the rune eoh  3. (liturgical) the steed (personifier) of a god

"The god rides the man as meaning rides the rune."

They say that in the Old Language of the Witches, every word meant three things: something good, something bad, and something to do with a horse.

In those days, we were a Horse People.

We'd been a Horse People since ever we first rode out of the East; indeed, they say that it was we who first tamed them. Put differently, it is to us that the Horned first gave horses, back in the dawn of days.

(So let it never be said, when the young bucks of our tribe ride out horse-reaving, that they are stealing horses. The Horned gave horses to us. Everyone knows that you can't steal what's already yours.)

So important were horses to our world that we named a rune for one: eoh, the great life of the gods, the movement of the cosmos.

New ways came. We settled. From a People of the Horse, we became a People of Cattle. The joke then became “...and something to do with a cow.”

We lost the old word eoh—and much else—but if it had (mutatis mutandis) survived in continuous use, we would today say eigh (rhymes with hay; cp. eight).

Among us today, as it did to the ancestors, eigh still means “horse,” but a horse in its intrinsic sanctity.

Still it names the horse-rune, eigh.

Also it names the steed of the god, the priest that the Horned rides in ritual: for the god rides the man as meaning rides the rune.