You've heard of skyclad, ritual nudity.
But that's only one of many options.
Sty-clad: dirty
Spy-clad: wearing sunglasses and a trenchcoat
Shy-clad: dressed to cover
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It flows through everything.
Everything is made from it.
Energy.
But how do you say that in Pagan?
“Energy” is a word from the vocabulary of science, which is no bad thing in and of itself.
But I would contend that for so primal a concept, we need a primal word.
In the old Witch language, they called it Géol.
The Vikings called it Jól.
The Goths—the Elder, not the Latter-Day, kind—called it Jiuleis.
All three names descend from the Proto-Germanic Jehwla (or Jegwla), the great Midwinter festival of Germanic-speaking peoples some 2300 years ago.
No one knows what it originally meant. That, of course, doesn't stop the storytellers. If anything, it encourages us.
Uncle Gerald. Aunt Doreen. Even (gods help us) Uncle Al.
I don't know about where you live, but around here I not infrequently hear people talking about our forebears in the Craft as "aunts" and "uncles."
I.e. as family.
Not, mind you, as "lords" and "ladies"; nothing so pretentious, so distancing. Aunts and uncles: not immediate family, but family nonetheless. These are titles, not of rank, but rather of relation, of familiarity, of fondness.
Aunts and uncles stand in a special place. Since with your aunts and uncles there's simultaneously a connection but also a certain distance, you can learn things from them that you can't easily learn from your parents.
In my family, in which the women tend to outlive the men, the aunts are a power to be reckoned with, and they carry the collective memory and experience of the family.
Around 1261, the troubadour Rutebeuf (“Roast Beef”) published an early French miracle play, Le Miracle de Théophile.
Little did he know that he was about to make Wiccan history.
Based on 11th century Christian legend, the play tells the story of Theophilus (“god-lover”) of Adana, who sells his soul to the Devil. The Devil is called up, by a sorcerer named Salatin, with a mysterious chant:
Part of the underlying strategy for the Repaganization of the West is, shall we say...selective replacement.
Consider the so-called “Adam's apple.” A nasty bit of someone else's mythology has, mutatis mutandis, become attached to a perfectly innocuous part of the human body. What to do?
In this particular instance, at least, there's not far to look.
The old Witch word for the (to give it its technical name) laryngeal thyroid cartilege is thrapple: a contraction of “throat apple,” the apple being, of course, the prime sacred fruit of the Tribe of Witches (and, in fact, of Northern Europe generally).
A while back I was dishing with my friend “Granny” Ro NicBourne.
“Do you know such-and-so?” I asked.
“Wouldn't know him from Ash,” she deadpanned.*