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In Which the Eldest Warlock Speaks to the Youngest

Oh, I know what it's like, those first few times, before you learn any better.

You're always thinking: They'll all be looking at my dick.

Well, let me tell you a couple of things.

First off, I've seen your dick, and there's nothing wrong with it.

Second, let me tell you something about the God's Mask, and about its magic power.

In these times, we're not socializing in person, and not going fun places for the most part, so it's natural that people are posting fewer selfies. But if you were participating in the Heathen Visibility Project before the lockdown started, you don't have to stop. We can still participate in the Heathen Visibility Project; let's just give ourselves permission to not look perfect. If you, like me, still have to go places, you can still get selfies out and about. If you don't still have to go places, you can get them at home. It's OK if you're dressed more casually than you usually would be if you were taking pics at a nice restaurant. You may have to stay home, but you don't have to stop participating in internet projects. We may have to cover our faces, but we don't have to hide who we are.

This season's must-have accessory is the home made cloth face mask. Here's me in one of mine. I had just put my mask on after driving to my companion's care center, to deliver his mail to a worker at the front door. I don't get to see him; they are only allowing medical visits, and life management isn't medical. (Life management is what I call property management plus, the plus being errand running, help with paperwork, collecting and delivering mail, etc. Right now I don't have any pet sitting clients, although that was how I started out with this.) The design on this mask is a Thor's hammer. It's a sunprint on cotton. A sunprint is a contact photograph, in this case of a paper cutout. I usually frame my sunprints as art, but I wanted a heathen design for a mask.

Diane Don Carlos and I wrote this song for Merrymeet 1998, the year of the first-ever official male-male Great Rite at a pagan festival. It's set to the tune of Gula Gula, a hymn to the Earth Mother by Saami singer-songwriter Mari Boine Persen.

The chant explores the depths of the mysteries of the Mask, and, ultimately, the complex and layered nature of the Self.

The Mask Song

With these eyes, what are you seeing?

With these ears, what are you hearing?

With this heart, what are you feeling?

Who are you, the mask or me?

Who are you, the mask or me?

The mask—and, in particular, the horned mask—is generally reckoned among the mysteries of the Horned Lord; his priest wears it to personify Him in ritual. As such, it is also accounted a men's mystery.

Why?

As is usual with the archaic, ones looks for origins to humanity's perennial preoccupation, the getting of food.

As such, the mask originated as a strategy of the hunt.

To disguise your scent and outline, you wear the head and hide of (for example) a deer. Here we see the origins of disguise generally.

It is also the origin of the personifying priesthood: pretending, in effect, to be who you are not. Disguise yourself as a deer and act like a deer, and it gives you a better chance of taking the deer that you need to feed both you and your People.

This also explains the Mask's specific (though, of course, not exclusive) association with men. Although among people who live by hunting-gathering, virtually everyone—regardless of age or sex—hunts as well as gathers, hunting is generally accounted part of the men's sphere, since hunting large animals is dangerous and (to be quite frank), in the larger life of any given society, men are more readily expendable than women.

To this day, the priest of the Horned still wears the god's horned mask at the Sabbat, and a sacred connection to our food-sources lies at the very heart of the Sabbat and everything that we do there.

Yes indeed, it was I in the mask and the paint last night; that's no secret. Everyone knows it.

But the god was there also.

Did you for a while forget that it was me, and see and hear only the god, even if just for only for a little?

You did, and that's the mystery, and the power: that if I do my work well, and you do your work well, then sometimes, for a little, the god will consent to cast his shadow over his priest, so that in this way he may speak, and dance, and sense.

And you too may see him then, and speak with him, and dance with him.

Why does he consent to do this? He does it because we are his people, and he loves us.

And there's the mystery:

that down the long years

all manner of men have worn it,

yet somehow, in the end,

it's always him.

They say,

Ooser (“Rhymes with bosser, not boozer,” I always tell people) is a term from what Sybil Leek would call the Language of Witchcraft. It denotes a carved and horned wooden head-mask of the God of Witches.

It's a dialectal word, of unclear etymology. Doreen Valiente suggests an origin from ós, the Old English cognate of Old Norse áss, “god,” better known to English-speakers in its plural form aesir. An ooser, then, would be a “god-er,” which, since it bears the god and is worn by his personifier at the sabbat, makes sound theological (if not etymological) sense.

The famous and mysterious Dorset Ooser is the best-known example. Also known, from its bull-horns, as the “Yule Bull,” it frightened generations of Dorset children until it was stolen from its hereditary keeper in 1897 and never recovered. Old Craft scuttlebutt would have it that it was “took” to get it out of cowan hands, and that it has since remained in ongoing, if private, use among witch-folk to this day.

Well, so they say. In its own way, it's even a true story.