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Whew. There's the garden finally planted. First we did the work; now we do the magic.

We dance leaping dances to show the crops how high to grow.

(“The higher we leap, the higher they grow: around and around and around we go!”)

We plant wide-hipped little terracotta goddess figurines around the edges, to encourage and oversee.

We make love in the fields, that most sympathetic of sympathetic magics.

In the 2005-7 BBC series Rome, set in the time of Julius Caesar, ex-centurion-turned-senator Lucius Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) is finally granted a latifundia (country estate) by the Senate. In the official rite of seizin (land-taking), he and his wife Niobe (Indira Varma) process, along with the estate's people and the village priest, out to a newly-plowed field.

As the others respectfully look on, they walk together out to the middle of the field. Niobe lays down in the midst of the furrows; Vorenus lays on top of her.

Contains sexual content.

At the big Beltane that year, we held three simultaneous Great Rites: female-female, female-male, and male-male. These being Great Rites of the symbolic kind, we made use, respectively, of two chalices, chalice and blade, and blade and horn.

(Interestingly, most folks went around and drank from all three. Good old Paganistan.)

Now, it so happened that the particular drinking horn that we used in the ritual had a tendency to splash those uninitiated into the mysteries of drinking from a horn. (Hint: drink with the point down.) This caused no little laughter and comment through the course of the ritual, and my partner-in-rite who was manning the horn explained: with gay sex, there are always more likely to be liquids splashing around.

Think of it as sympathetic magic.

In fact, among gay men there's a long, almost folkloric, association between sex and thunderstorms. My own personal experience bears this out. Ask any gay guy that you know.

Of course, you don't have to be gay for there to be liquids splashing around during sex. Any guy can do it.

Here's the deal: Thunder, being Himself a guy's guy, likes men. (More men are struck by lightning than women: did you know that?) The myths attest to his liking for handsome young men. As one would expect—being Himself the Great Ejaculator—he's known to favor the male libation.

Dance, children, dance

as I sing a song of Summer:

children dance, children dance.

The thirteenth of February: Old Imbolc Day. Temperature: 13 below.

Swathed in wraps, the kid and I sit on the front porch waiting for the school bus, singing songs of Beltane.

Call it defiance.

Call it delusion.

Call it sympathetic magic.

We're not the only ones singing of Summer. In the back yard, a redbird trills, proudly delineating this year's breeding territory with a magic song.

Here in Paganistan, our cardinals winter down south in balmy Iowa, but round about Imbolc (New Style), the males come back and start the New Wheel turning. On the front porch, we sing along, turning a Wheel of our own.

Or maybe it's the same one.

I made a mistake yesterday.

More than halfway through [winter], I thought, and I haven't lost a glove yet.

Ha.

So today—of course—I lost a glove.

Let them talk about sympathetic magic.

Everyone knows that unsympathetic magic is far more powerful.

I live well out in the rural hinterlands of Ireland. Folk memory is long lived and some traditional farming practices tend to border on folk magic. One such custom that can still be found is to put an predator's carcass on display to warn off other of its species not to prey on herd animals - sheep and chickens. I have known pine martin to be nailed up on chicken coops as a warning. Walking our dogs down our lane I saw a road kill fox draped over the pasture's fence post.  It's a form of sympathetic magic. And it is deep, deep in our cellular memory. Sympathetic magic is imitative magic or correspondences according to anthropologists. You don't have to be identified as pagan to practice it.