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Morpheus Pendragon
Summoner
Joined: 24 Jun 2007
Posts: 127
Location: Carmel, IN
Sat Jul 07, 2007 8:13 pm |
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Hallows Eve: The Season of the Witch and the Six Turnings for the
Dark Master of Elfhame
by Robin Artisson
Every Autumn Leaving
Of all the Times of the Year, late Autumn has always been my
favourite. I like to think of myself as a person who possesses a relatively
sharp sensitivity - "sensitivity" here meaning a kind of conscious
awareness and connection to the natural forces around me. I also know that the
spiritual and religious outlook of the Old Craft helps me to
appreciate much more than just Autumn's red and brown leaves, or cool, crisp
breezes. For me, as for most people in the modern day who consider
themselves some sort of "Pagan," the tides of the darkening Autumn have an added
dimension of spiritual meaning and power.
The full force of these added dimensions cannot be described, but
they are certainly felt - and they add a note of mysticism and a
pleasurable longing that cannot adequately be expressed. This is the time of
gourds and straw, of bonfires and festivals, and of the chilling touch of
deeper mysteries, those of life and death, and the shaded realms
beyond, all of which come from the earliest times, and still carry the force
of those times.
To some ancient Pagans in Northern Europe, the time roughly at the
beginning of November was the beginning of their Winter - culturally
and spiritually speaking, if not astronomically speaking. The Old Celtic
"Samhain," and its Germanic equivalent "Yule" (which was more aligned
to the actual later solstice), had a feel of culmination and dissolution
into darkness, before a new year began. This feel was the "final
sigh" of the earth as it gave into Winter-sleep, after a long year of pulsing
forth life under the impetuous Sun.
Yet this "feel" also contained a sense of excitement; the dark and
almost erotic feeling of "giving in" to the mysteries beyond which is
the hallmark of the genuine experience of both the journeying Witch, and
the dying person, who both face the weird immensities of the Netherworld
in their own ways.
To all of this can be added the more mundane aspects of Winter in
ancient times - drawing in animals and Winter food-stores, and kin-
groups coming together to restore their bonds of clan and family before the
hard spirits of Winter, snow, and the long nights took their own tithe in
life - this may serve to explain the festive times that occurred in
the late Autumn halls and villages of all our ancestors.
The old people were all aware of the strong, surreal force of the
late Autumn. The strange interim time between the descent into Winter's
gate and the true formalization of the New Year was a wild and uncanny
time, a time when there were no longer hard distinctions between one world
and another, or one state of awareness and another. 'The Dream and
the Waking' were overlapping, in oftentimes eldritch ways.
The reason this is so is because the return to the darkness of Winter
was nature's way of showing a deeper theme: it was a minor, yearly
echo of the return to the primal chaos or formlessness which was the
origin of all things - and this "Old Night" of chaos was itself once a
unity.
This Old Night was "all that was" before Old Fate spun forth the
great emergence and differentiation. There was no "this world or that" or
"dream and waking" in the Old Night. It was alone and it was all. The
universe itself will one day be drawn back into the original state;
and from there, it will come forth again, from the womb of Old Dame Fate.
As the old Scottish saying goes, "Thus it was, thus it is, and thus it
shall be, evermore - the ebb and the flow."
All Hallows is the in-drawing, the height of the ebb tide, before the
flow of life into a new year. It is the Season of the Witch, because
the states of mind that the Witch achieves by trance, whereby she
overcomes the "separation" between herself and other creatures, or her fellows,
or between herself and the immense and dark Otherworlds, is easily
captured in this season. In the right places, the Otherworlds come to
the Witch - the unseen forms of those who live beyond this world are
swimming about us at all times, anyway; this season is simply the turning down
of the garish light of life, so that their subtle forms can be
apprehended more easily.
It is the river of the living mindstream that the "others" swim in;
the parts that are submerged below the horizon of consciousness are the
parts that the dead most easily rest in - and in this season, their
motions are made apparent. This season has inspired fear and awe in
all generations of humans that have come before.
I'd like to talk about the experience of the Hallowmas Season, from
the perspective of Witchcraft, and what we who follow the Old Rite need
to expect and consider, if we truly wish to step through the dark gate
of Winter, into an experience of deepest wisdom and melancholic joy,
amid the flickering remains of the old year.
_________________
Priest Morpheus Pendragon
Summoner, Coven of the Shadows of Midnight
Elder, Elder Kindred of the Nordic Shadows
Elder, Brotherhood of the Wolf
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