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Child of the Bog

Sacred to the Moon, wearing her colors, named for her totemic bird—reputedly, the stamens of the cranberry flower resemble a crane's bill—the cranberry is a perennial seasonal favorite.

Oh, but its signature tartness partners best with sweetness, for balance.

Bright with orange, dark with date, crunchy with toasted almond, this fruit-sweetened preparation makes a fine natural alternative to the old-style cranberry-orange relish that you grew up with, minus the truly toxic amounts of refined sugar.

Thank Goddess.

Boss Warlock's Fruit-Sweetened Cranberry-Orange Relish

Halloween stems from the grand tradition of the Celtic New Year. What started as a folk festival celebrated by small groups in rural areas has come to be the second largest holiday of today. There are multitudinous reasons including modern marketing but I think it satisfies a basic human need, to let your “wild side” out, to be free and more connected with the ancient ways.  This is the time when the veil between worlds is thinnest and you can commune with the other side, with elders and the spirit world. It is important to honor the ancestors during this major sabbat and acknowledge what transpired in the passing year as well as set intentions for the coming year.

This is the ideal time to invite your circle; the ideal number for your “coven” is 13. Gather powdered incense, salt, a loaf of bread, goblets for wine, and three candles to represent the triple goddess for altar offerings.  Ideally on an outdoor stone altar, pour the powdered incense into a pentagram star shape. Let go of old sorrows, angers and anything not befitting of new beginnings in this New Year Bring only your best to this auspicious occasion.

Of Pumpkins, Perichoresis, and the Triple Goddess

“Lot o' good eating in a pumpkin, there is.”

(Nanny Ogg)

Halfway through the container of squash puree, the rich, velvety texture, the round, meaty flavor, and the simultaneous sense of novelty-familiarity that I'm experiencing suddenly halts my mindless shoveling. This isn't the butternut squash puree that I'd thought it was.

I taste more thoughtfully. I've seen this diva perform before, but only robed in sweeteners, salt, and spices. Now she stands before me in all her skyclad glory, and I'm thoroughly in love.

Turns out, Nanny Ogg was right. She usually is.

I'm trying out a new recipe: a Chilean bean, corn, and pumpkin stew.

(New to me, that is. Given its origin and ingredients—the Triple Goddess of New World cookery—this is likely a very old recipe indeed.)

I retrieve a pie pumpkin from cold storage on the back stairs, halve and clean it. Since I need only half the pumpkin for the stew, I oven-roast the remainder, puree it, and put it in the refrigerator to await some unspecified future use.

That's what I've been mindlessly shoveling down: delicious even without benefit of salt.

Move over, butternut squash.

Maiden, Mother, Crone. The Triple Goddess has become such a Wicca 101 commonplace that it's sometimes easy to overlook the richness, the depth, the Inner Life, of this abiding Mystery.

Consider, for instance, that in Old Craft lore she is/they are known as the Three Mothers.

Consider, for instance, that in Iroquoian lore she is/they are known as the Three Sisters.

The Triple Goddess is a perichoresis: a dancing-together.

Corn, Beans, Squash, the far-famed Three Sisters of the Seven Nations of the Iroquois: Three Sisters who love one other deeply, and flourish best together. Plant a seed of each of the Three in the same mound, and watch them thrive together.

The Corn drinks up the nitrogen that the Beans fix in the soil. The Bean vines spiral-climb the Cornstalk into the Sunlight. Spreading around them, the leaves of the Squash vine shade out competing weeds.

As anyone of the Frances Moore Lappé Diet for a Small Planet generation knows, together, the incomplete proteins of grain and legume combine in our guts to provide us with the complete proteins that our bodies need. The squashes round out the tally of vitamins and minerals which our bodies also need.

Cross-pantheon god-on-god correlation is an imprecise science: more an art than a science, perhaps. I'll leave it to you to map the Old and New World Triplicities onto one another.

Rest assured, though, that there is, indeed, a correspondence.

Perichoresis.

Three Sisters Stew

Porotos Granados

The Maiden/Mother/Crone configuration of goddesses is popular in modern Paganism. It resonates with a lot of us, but there's no evidence the Minoans viewed their goddesses this way. In fact, the Maiden/Mother/Crone triplicity was invented by Robert Graves in the mid-20th century. Yes, it works, and it's meaningful to many people, so it's a legitimate part of their spirituality.

But it's not historically accurate, so we shouldn't apply it to the Minoans. If you're interested in Graves's process and teasing out which of his ideas are historic and which are purely poetic, I recommend Mark Carter's excellent book Stalking the Goddess.

They say that as Muhammad lay dying, he saw in the corner of his tent a tall, standing shadow.

“Is that you?” he asks.

“I am,” She says.

His entire life had been a struggle against the Goddess, known in Arabic as al-Lât. (“Allah” is the masculine form of this name.)

For a while, he even thought that he had won. He destroyed Her idols, rooted out Her worship, did everything that he could to crush women's power.

Now he lays dying. He is silent for a long time.

When you see the Tree, you understand right away that this is the Mother Tree of All Apples.

A farmhouse, now long gone, once stood here. Nothing remains but a pile of old foundation stones.

But the Three Springs still bubble from the creek-bed, and feral apple trees fill the Secret Valley.

The Mother Tree is oldest, and biggest, of them all.

Orchard trees are pruned, bred low for easy picking. This tree has known neither pruning saw, nor the shade of other trees. Three with outstretched arms could barely span its girth.

Approach, and understand. Three sister trees—sprung, maybe, from a single apple—have grown up together, merging, in mutual embrace: the Three that are One, the One that is Three. You'd go far to find a better image of the Triple Goddess.

What does Winter dream of?

In observational astronomy, there's a phenomenon called an "epicycle," a cycle within a cycle.

If you watch a particular planet from night to night—Venus, say—you'll see her move along her regular path. Then she stops and goes backwards. She makes a widdershins loop in the sky, then resumes her regular course.

Of course it's all a matter of perspective and bodies in simultaneous motion. But what it looks like is time in reverse.

The Year is Earth's story. From youth she waxes into ripe maturity and wanes away into age.

And now the serpent catches its tail in its mouth, time runs backwards, and old woman becomes young girl.