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Does a Twin Cities Coven Determine the Fate of Nations?

You know what they say: If they gave medals for rumor-mongering, the pagan community could field an Olympic-class team.

Did you know that, from atop seven towers across western and west-central Asia, Satanic adepts constantly broadcast psychic vibrations that guide world events?

Did you know that at Samhain every year, from an island at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers, an old and powerful coven raises a massive cone of power in order to affect world events during the coming year?

I hear that this year they'll be doing it to bring down Putin.

As for those Satanic Towers of Power, they've told this story about the mysterious Yazidi people of Iraq and Syria for years. So far as I can tell, the story was fabricated out of whole cloth by a sensationalist journalist named William Seabrook in the 1920s, which hasn't kept it from gaining a life of its own since then.

In fact, the towers are a fiction, and the Yazidis aren't really Satanists at all: at least, not in the sense that people generally mean by the word.

As for that second story, though....

Witches tend to throw their Halloween parties two Saturdays before Samhain. (On Samhain Saturday, folks in our community tend to be otherwise engaged.)

So, I'm at my first Halloween party since the pandemic began when I first hear the rumors about the powerful coven on the island down at the Confluence determining the course of world events. Through the course of the evening, I hear it several times, from several different people. In fact, the story sounds familiar.

It should. That's my coven they're talking about.

In Lakota lore, rivers are gendered beings. The Mississippi, father of waters, is a male river; the “sky water” Minnesota, female.

Where the two flow together, the Great Rite occurs. Their confluence marks the center of the world, from which everything arises, and around which all creation turns.

As for that powerful coven, well: this coming Samhain will be our 43^rd together. Sounds pretty powerful to me.

As for Samhain on the island at the center of the world: well, yes, that much is true, too. Kind of. (It's actually every other year.)

(The rumor had got the name of the island wrong, though. When I corrected one woman, she insisted: “No, no, it was Pike Island, I'm sure.”)

Massive cone of power: check. At least, it's predictably one of our most powerful rites of the year, in a river-mist-shrouded, newly-naked, golden-carpeted grove of cottonwood trees on the island at the center of the world.

And, in fact, we have already hexed Putin. (You can read about it here.) These days, his war in Ukraine's going pretty badly, I hear.

As for determining the fate of nations through the course of the year to come...

Well, if somebody has to do it, I'm sure glad it's us.

Why did Allah prohibit the drinking of wine to believers?

According to the Yezidis, it was out of jealousy and fear.

Islamic law generally prohibits the use of intoxicants to Muslims—not that this has slowed the use of drugs such as qat and hashish in the Muslim world, mind you—and Wine is regarded as the first, the chief, the Mother of all Intoxicants.

(When coffee was first discovered, Muslim religious authorities ruled it an intoxicant, and its use therefore forbidden to Muslims. This ruling was so universally rejected by the 'umma that in the end the mullahs just had to suck it up.)

Known euphemistically in Arabic as the Red One—as if even to pronounce its name would be dangerous—wine is specifically forbidden in the Qur'an. Though the book itself provides no reasons for this prohibition, the Yezidis—a Kurdish-speaking religious minority centered in Iraq, whose worship of the Peacock Angel would seem to have arisen in the 13^th century in antinomian protest against the tyranny of the Mosque—do.

(That, in Europe, what we now know as Old Craft also arose in antinomian protest against a tyrannical Church, at roughly the same time, must be considered, at very least, a striking coincidence, if not the actual Hand of some god.

Presumably, the Left Hand.)

When Allah saw how much humanity loved the Red One, they say, he feared that they would always love and worship it more than himself.

Therefore, in jealousy, he did what those unequal to the race—just as Republicans in the US are trying to do today—always do.

He banned the competition.

(That Islamic mystical tradition has always equated Wine with Divine Love tells a truth both older and deeper than any Revelation.)

The blood of the grape is the blood of a god, Red Blood of a Green God. Before any others, the Green Man first wore vine leaves.

Thresholds—doorsteps—are sacred. Neither inside nor out, both inside and out, the threshold is, like all other betwixt-and-between places (and times), a major locus of sanctity in any building.

In Old Craft lore, the Horned, preeminently god of the In-Between, is said to be seated on every threshold. Every passage through that doorway is (or at least has the potential to be) thereby a rite, an encounter with a god.

For this reason, they say, it's best not to tread directly onto a threshold; one should step over it instead. (It's old woodsman's lore never to step on anything you can step over.)

This is really a pretty subversive idea. Every building contains within its very fabric a place inherently sacred to Old Hornie: your house, the supermarket, the mall. Every building makes a place for Him. So there's a place sacred to the god of the witches in every synagogue, church, and mosque on the planet. Now that is subversive.

Much like the European Old Craft, the religion of the Yezidis, the people of the Peacock Angel, is an oral tradition transmitted largely through the medium of songs. These songs, called qewls, are sung at gatherings by a caste of itinerant musicians, the qewwals.

This excerpt (stanzas 1 and 16-22) from the Qewlê Šêxubekir (“Hymn of Sheikh Obekr”) relates the generation of the Heptad, the Seven Holy Powers (“angels”), of whom Melek Tawus, the Peacock Angel, is Chief (cp. the seven yazatas of Zoroastrianism).

Qewls are notoriously difficult to translate and interpret, due to their obscure vocabulary and densely allusive nature, but these stanzas shine with a simple jewel-like clarity in their contemplation of the Great Mystery of Something from Nothing.

They say that He of the Horns looked upon his people and his heart was moved with compassion at their suffering.

For an age and an age, two ages, he wept, and the tears of his weeping filled nine jars.

And when his weeping was ended, he took these nine jars and, with their waters, extinguished the fires of Hell.

The Mothers and Fathers reckoned the Horned One as god of animal life generally—what, in History of Religions lingo, is known as a “Master of Animals”—but for all that, he is rarely ascribed a sacred bird of his own. Birds, of course, are given mostly to the Sky Powers: raptors to Thunder, water-birds to Sun and Moon, etc. It's fascinating that these embodiers of the animal god's being should be given to other gods, as if they somehow constitute his yearning for them, as Earth's quartz yearns to the Moon. But to Himself the lore alots the merest avian handful: corvids, perhaps the peacock (see below), the robin (as Promethean bringer-of-fire) and, of course, the cock.

Everyone knows that the rooster—I suppose one really must say “cock” here—is the Devil's bird, (“Men call me the Devil,” he is reputed to have told Scots witch Isobel Gowdie, “but they know not what they mean”), and better it be if it's black. It's a staple of Southern (American) folklore that to invoke the Devil you sacrifice a black cock at a crossroads at midnight. Why a cock? Standard etiology would have it that the cock, being preeminently the bird that proclaims the coming of light, is the sworn enemy of the Prince of Darkness, Enemy of Light. But, as one might expect, matters are considerably more complex than that.

The domestic chicken originated in Southeast Asia and, it would seem, first came to the British Isles with the Romans (Yeates 166). Nonetheless, one finds the cock's head associated with the Horned One on the coinage of the Dobunni, the Keltic tribe that in later days morphed into the Hwicce, the “Tribe of Witches.” The rooster has a reputation as the most virile and pugnacious of birds, a fitting emblem for the father and protector of the people, the Pater Hwicciorum (Yeates 165-9). (Interestingly, though, the use of “cock” for “penis” derives, not from the name of the bird, but from the sense of “water-tap.”)