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Let me tell you something about human beings.

We go everywhere. In our travels, we meet others of our kind.

When we meet, two things happen: we fight, and we have sex.

America is a Great Rite of Peoples.

From this, we derive our vigor.

The Great Rite: the Hieros Gamos, holy marriage, the Conjunctio Mysticus, the mystical union.

The Union of the Gods renews the world.

Witches are a Great Rite of Peoples.

Even back in old tribal days, we were already a mixed people: the Dobunni, the people of the two bands. Later, we became the eponymous Hwicce: Celt and Saxon together—Angle, actually—not to mention the flotsam and jetsam of the Roman Empire who just happened to wash up on these shores. Meet my friend Tree: his grandfather comes from Numidia.

These days, people of all sorts call themselves witches: a mixed and mongrel lot, just as we always have been.

In recent days, I've attended three different Samhain observances. At all of them, I was impressed to notice that not once—not even once—did anyone bring up the Election.

No, this was not some taboo in operation, though anyone with any experience in such things can tell you that politics profanes the sacred every time.

The reason? We're tired. We're sick of it.

We're sick of the divisiveness, the vilification, the mean-spiritedness. We've got work to do, hard work, the hard work of making a living in a hard world; we simply don't have the time or mental space for such childishness any more.

So we've moved on.

A Great Rite of Peoples

Do we celebrate Samhain?

Mostly, yes.

Do we observe Samhain?

I hope so. The unexamined life is not worth living.

Do we keep Samhain?

Bingo.

We are keepers, we pagans. We keep. We keep to.

And not just Samhain. We are those who keep (and keep to) the Old Ways, long after others have thrown them away.

We retain them. We hold them. We guard them.

Like Americans, witches are a Great Rite of Peoples.

We hold to the Old Ways.

We keep the Old Ways.

I have seen twilight at mid-afternoon.

I have gazed into the face of Totality.

I have beheld the Black Sun.

By many traditional peoples around the world, eclipses are accounted unchancy and ill-omened events.

(Why not? Seeing them can strike you blind.)

Unsurprisingly, witches see matters differently.

What do witches make of eclipses?

Sabaean archpriest Federico de Arechaga (Ordun), while not himself of the tribe of Witches, certainly knew how to think like one.

He was wont to refer to weddings—all weddings: male-male, female-female, male-female (in this he was far ahead of his time)—as “eclipses.”

For witches, eclipses—those of both Sun and Moon—are considered Great Rites, hieroi gamoi, alchemical weddings of Moon and Sun.

As local priestess Hillary Pell put it, “The Union of the Gods renews the world.”

They bode, we say, coming change.

From Pittsburgh, we drove 72 miles north to Pymatuning.

Swollen with eclipse-pilgrims, the trip—an hour and a half in the going—took four and a half hours in the coming-back.

For three unforgettable hours, differences were laid aside. Rightist, leftist, centrist; Republican, Democrat, Independent; Trumpist, Bidenist, None-of-the-Above-ist: as the great Marriage of the Gods, in all its cosmic glory, unfolded before us, we, too, were one.

When America's witches gather...who will live, and who will die?

August 1997.

In Paris, Princess Di, newly divorced from the heir to the British throne, is killed in a tragic auto accident.

Meanwhile, in Paganistan...

The Festival

...the local pagan community hosts the annual gathering of the nation's largest organization of Witches and Wiccans. But tensions run high...

The Ritual

...as the Ritual Committee plans a national first: a daring, and shocking, central ritual, the Dance of the Stags.

Two Stags clash in what appears to be a battle for dominance, but ends in a Great Rite. The Three Veils bless the Union as the Stags chase each other off into the words, naked and dripping cream.

The Players

The local council's First Officer, furious that, as she sees it, her beloved Goddess is being sidelined at her own festival, vows not to attend the ritual, while...

the First Stag finds himself increasingly unsure where ritual ends and reality begins, and...

the Young Stag struggles with an unexpected passion, as...

his Partner wrestles with anger at what she herself has helped to create.

Merrymeet 1997. Who will live...and who will die?

“...hottest ritual ever.” (Bruner Soderberg)

 Sexual content

“I mean, one of their initiations is letting yourself be sodomized,” says my friend, with obvious distaste. “Really, what's up with that?”

We've been discussing the OTO; he's alluding to the Ordo's XI° initiation. I'm not OTO myself, though I have friends that are. I am, though, gay. I could easily tell him what's up with that.

I will never, never get used to hearing a sacred act of love, one of the most intimate things that it's possible to do with another person, be spoken of with such visceral loathing. To my surprise, though, I don't find my friend's clumsy faux pas offensive. Rather, I find myself loving him for it. He's actually just given me a gift.

All too often, being gay, like being a member of any minority, means being reduced. You don't merit full personhood; you're always the gay guy. In this reducing atmosphere, of course, gay men, distressingly often, become synonymous with a single act of love, which (ironically) some of us don't even like. “Nothing like being reduced to one action,” a gay friend of mine once remarked, bitterly.

(Talking with an acquaintance at Pagan Pride one afternoon, I listened with increasing confusion as she spoke effusively about something that I'd supposedly done recently. Finally, I realized what was going on: she had confused me with D, the other prominent gay elder in the local pagan community. [You know, those gay guys all look alike.] I thought of telling her: “No, I'm the other gay guy.” I didn't, though; she would have felt humiliated to have made such a mistake. Aînesse oblige: elderhood obligates.)

What my friend has just told me, without realizing it, is that in his mind, I hold full personhood; I'm not gay first and foremost. It's an odd, and maybe even pathetic, thing to be grateful for, but I am.

The two of us have been friends for a long time; there's a lot of love between us. Still, there's an important point to be made here.

Predictably enough, they're calling it the “Christmas Star”; actually, of course, it's neither.

Once in every 800 years, Jupiter and Saturn meet in the sky and kiss. Seen from Earth, they will appear to join and become one. This time around, this Great Marriage occurs—of all the well-omened days of the year—on the day of the Winter Solstice.

Let me be frank: after this dark, dark year, we'll take whatever omens we can get.

Winter is Sky Time. The leaves come down, and the heavens open up. Historically, here in Minnesota, December is the year's cloudiest month, but this year has brought us a succession of clear, fair days of long, slanting Sunlight. These last Sunrises of the waning year have been spectacular, and our Northern nights have been alive with Northern Lights, the dancing daughters of Earth and Sun.

You yourself can witness this 800-year Wonder, this Great Rite in the Sky, wherever you are.

 “The Goddess is great.”

(Jesus of Nazareth)

So, here's the story. After crawling, barely alive, out of the tomb (they took him down from the cross too soon), Jesus is thoroughly sick of his previous life and ministry. Physically alive but dead within, he wanders off into the world as a wounded itinerant healer.

So begins the “20th” century's most unlikely pagan novel, D. H. Lawrence's 1928 The Escaped Cock, a.k.a. The Man Who Died.

Well, but there's more. In his travels, he chances upon a Priestess of Isis. He stays with her in her temple, in its sacred seaside grove, and in time she heals him of the world-hating philosophy and physical impotence from which he has suffered heretofore.

“I am risen!” he proclaims when, courtesy of the priestess' ministrations, he achieves his first post-crucifixion erection.

In Escaped Cock, the gospel morphs into—and is healed of dysfunction by—the story of Isis and Osiris. Jesus, become Osiris Risen, sires tomorrow's Horus, and once again wanders off into the wide world of experience.

“Tomorrow is another day!” he proclaims (along with Scarlett O'Hara) as he sails off alone into the sunset.

Oh, Lawrence. So jejeune: if only we would all just shed our sexual inhibitions, the world would be healed and everything would be just peachy. Ah, if only things were so simple.