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 “Second, Mother of Third”

 To Pagan Friends, Going to the City of Hekate

“They worship the Moon here, just like we do at home.”

—Osred Osbertson to his brother Oswin, King of the Hwicce

Remember.

Remember, it is not to Istanbul that you go, neither to Constantinople.

Rather, you go to Byzantium: pagan Byzantium, City of Hekate, City of the Moon.

She, Threefold Lady, was the city's patron in its youth. Now, in its age, she is its patron still. From each mosque, her crescents proclaim her; let them say what they will.

There is no Moon but Her.

(Whose sacred dogs still rule those streets by night?)

Say what they will, Holy Wisdom is hers, as it was and always shall be. From the ancients we know that, among its columns, columns from the far-famed temple of Artemis of Ephesus, wonder of the world, still stand, remembering. Find them, feel them, remember.

(We of the Old Ways remember that things might have been far otherwise. We remember, and we tell those tales, remembering.)

She waxes, she wanes, she waxes again. What was hers, is still, and ever shall be.

On February Eve, we sing a song to honor the snowdrop (galanthus nivalis, "milk-flower of the snows"), first flower of Spring.

It's a simple song, simple-minded, even: a children's song. We've sung this song, or one like it, for hundreds—maybe thousands—of years, at this time in the year's turning, to honor the courage and the promise of the year's First Blooming.

Snowdrop, snowdrop, little drop of snow,

what will you do when the cold winds blow?

I'll hide my little head, and say:

Cold wind, cold wind, go away.

Here in the Witch diaspora, in the Midwest's Upper Mississippi Valley, we're still knee-deep in Winter. We'll see no snowdrops here for another two moons, maybe three.

But a world away, on the banks of another great river, the Severn, the snowdrops are blooming even as we sing.

These were the lands where, fourteen hundred years ago, a people not yet called the Witches—they knew themselves as the Hwicce—dwelt.

 The People Before the People

Mark you, lad, that little wee Saturn-planet hanging in the Yule tree's uppermost branches, rings and all: and can you guess for why?

Well, for the Saturnalia, of course: December 17^th, this very day.

(Not that the Red Crests would have known their Saturn thus, mind you, but we do: for this is our remembering, not theirs.)

Not for that we keep the Saturnalia—though there be them in Romeburg as still do—nay, not with our Yule, the torch-lit Yule of the fathers and mothers in all its shining glory a few days hence, but for that we remember.

For are we not the Witches, and children of the Dobunni?

We are, and they—the Dobunni, them of the Two Bands—the People that were the People before the Hwicce, them as gave us our tribal name.

Aye, them we were, and them we are still.

Dobunnitas

For there in the South, among our old tribal hunting runs, we came early-by to Redcrest ways, even before the coming of the Redcrests themselves. Did not our own kings mint their own coins then, back in our days of freedom?

(And do we not mind still the Silver Lady and the Three-Tailed Stallion?)

And then when the Redcrests themselves were come, did not we ally ourselves with them against our foes, the Cats of War—the Catuvellauni, they were called—for that they had taken to themselves of our people's lands, and would have had more, were they not thus thwarted?

Yes, and did we not stand shield-to-shield with the Redcrests during Boudica's War, against those same Catuvellauni, in their standing by her? ('Victorious', they named her, but in the end, she knew defeat.)

So by little and little we came to Redcrest ways, what they called Romanitas; but never did we forget our own Dobunnitas.

No, nor have we ever forgotten.

The Witch-Year's Torch-Lit Yule

Witch Money

The little silver coin, 2000 years old, is tiny, barely the size of my little fingernail.

It is a coin of the Dobunni: the original (so say some) Tribe of Witches.

The People of the Two Bands

At the beginning of the first millennium, the Dobunni—the People of the Two Bands—lived in the Cotswolds and Severn Basin of what is now southwestern England.

Like the other Celtic-speaking peoples of southern Britain, they Romanized early; even before the Roman conquest of Britain, they were minting their own coinage. We can gain some sense of the extent of their tribal territory from the distribution of these coins.

600 years later, this same territory was inhabited by an Anglo-Saxon-speaking people called the Hwicce (HWITCH-eh). Archaeological and genetic finds make clear the area's cultural and demographic continuity from the Celtic to the Saxon periods.

Interestingly, the same territory is also characterized by a distinctive kind of Neolithic burial mound. In the tribal hunting-runs of the Hwicce, it would seem, roots both cultural and genetic run deep.

What if Gardner was right after all?

What if the Craft really does reach back into the Stone Age?

Heads and Tails

I hold the coin, a miniature Moon in black and silver, on the pad of my index finger.

On one side, barely legible through centuries of wear, a lunar profile looks to the left. On the other, a three-tailed stallion rushes to the right.

Face and horse: who these may have been to the Dobunni, the Elder Witchery, we cannot know.

I read the two sides of the coin together: she looks toward him, he rushes to her.

Who they may be to the Younger Witchery, though: well, now, that would be very clear indeed.

Dear Boss Warlock,

Just out of curiosity: Is there such a thing as a half-witch?

All-Witch in Albuquerque

Dear Al:

No.

Oh, the word halwich—pronounced HAL-itch—exists, and has existed for a long time (it comes from the Old Hwiccan healf-Hwicce), but it exists as a term of schoolyard invective only. Witch kids, alas, can be just as nasty as any other kind.

If you have one witch parent, you're a member of the tribe. That's Witch Law. “The Old Blood will out,” the old ones used to say, sometimes adding: “One drop is all it takes.”

Usually, of course, they would cackle as they said this.

Oh, you can opt out, of course; or you can try to pass.

(Cartoon: Boss Warlock Tries to Pass. Scene: Boss Warlock standing in convenience store, surrounded by puzzled-looking crowd. Boss Warlock: “Blessed be, my fellow cowans.”)

Litha or Lithe?

Back in the 80s, many Wiccans started calling the Summer Sunstead Litha. In a sense, they've got history on their side.

(That's LEE-thuh, with the “soft” th of leather, not the “hard” th of think, though I've also heard LITH-uh, with a "short" i and "hard" th.)*

In the old Anglo-Saxon calendar, June was known as ærra Líða, “before Litha” and July aeftera Líða, “after Litha”. (J. R. R. Tolkien, a proud Hwiccan** lad himself, modernizes these as Forelithe and Aerlithe, but I'll get back to that.) What comes between June and July? Well, given a little wiggle room, and the fact that the Anglo-Saxons reckoned by moons, not by calendar months, it seems fair to assign the word Litha to the summer solstice.

(In the same calendar, December and January were aerra Geol—Foreyule—and aeftera Geol—Aeryule—respectively.)

What the word originally meant, and why it should be assigned to this particular season of the year, is another matter altogether.

Unclear Origins

As an adjective, OE líðe meant “gentle, soft, calm, mild.” I suppose one could read this meteorologically, though personally, I find this (if you'll pardon my earthiness) a pretty limpdick explanation. As a verb—líðan—it means “to go, travel, sail.” Bede of Jarrow mocks up a reading here, claiming that the calm seas of solstice-tide usher in the sailing season. Sorry, sounds contrived to me.

I think that the most solid conclusion to draw here—considering the fact that, folk derivations aside, we don't know where the word “Yule” came from either—would be that Litha's etymology remains unclear.

Still, considering that Midwinter has a folksy by-name of its own—Yule—it's somehow satisfying that Midsummer should have one as well.

(For what it's worth, my own linguist's intuition here is that both Yule and Lithe derive from some solstice-celebrating pre-Germanic cultural substratum, and that neither word has a convincing Germanic derivation precisely because they're non-Germanic in origin. Perhaps time and future research will tell.)

The Lure of the Exotic

It certainly wouldn't be the first Old English word to be adopted lock, stock, and barrel into the Modern Witch vocabulary, Wicca and Eostre being two other prime examples. I strongly suspect that many Wiccans actually like the sense of mystery and exoticism that such archaic forms impart. Still, to my ear, there's something affected, something inauthentic, about using such words in everyday speech.

As a name for the Summer Yule, Líða didn't survive into modern times. If it had, though, and had undergone all the usual sound-changes through the course of the last 1000 years, we can say exactly what it would have sounded like today: Lithe (rhymes with blithe).

Shire-Reckoning

In fact, that's exactly what J. R. R. Tolkien does call it in Lord of the Rings.

The Shire-year of the hobbits features two extended periods of celebration: Yule and Lithe, with the (summer) sunstead itself being known specifically as Midyear's Day. Both holidays are characterized by extended festal periods, known respectively as the Yuledays and the Lithedays.

Though Tolkien himself doesn't use it, I think we can feel justified in coining, by analogy with Yuletide, the term Lithetide: the period of extended celebration between the astronomical solstice and Old Midsummer's Day, what we now celebrate as the Fourth of July. Lithe's thirteen days thus parallel those of Yule.

A Craft of Now

Well, lots of Wiccans apparently like feeling exotic. (Who doesn't like to feel special?) If you want to live in a museum—or, worse, on Renn Fest grounds—year-round, that's up to you.

Me, though, I'm with the hobbits here. I'm all for a Craft that we live and do everyday, not just when we're in circle.