Actually, this piece comes from the well-known British HPS, author, and academic Vivianne Crowley, and it is worth reading.
On 20 March, druids, witches, and lovers of nature will gather to celebrate the spring equinox, one of the eight festivals of the Wheel of the Year. For millennia, the spring equinox was celebrated across cultures as a time of fertility, creativity, and renewal. But spring celebrations are not just for people who want to greet the dawn at Stonehenge. Here are a few ideas to try out this year at home.
She has a new memoir/how-to out titled Wild Once, which is going on my To-Read list. A tip of the pointy hat to the publicist at Penguin.
Pagan writer Rhyd Wildermuth, now living in the Ardennes Forest, or as he prefers, “The Forests of Arduinna,” offers this video of a local end-of-winter celebration called Buergbrennen (castle-burning).
He sees it as an ancient Pagan celebration taken over by the Christian church. Maybe so. Or maybe some Luxembourgish Ronald Hutton will discover that it was started by a parish priest in the early nineteenth century as a folkish morale-builder for his congregation.
Doesn’t matter. Either way, it fits Clifton’s Second Law of Religion, that all true religions have torchlight processions, at least occasionally. No torches? All you have then is a social movement or a social club.
No animals or policemen were harmed in the making of this video
Photo by Arno Smit/Unsplash/Creative Commons, via Religion News Service.
Happy Ostara to those of you who experience something called “spring.” I will be taking advantage of the last of three warm days — which have melted most of the snow that was on the ground — to split some firewood in advance of the snow expected Sunday night, Monday, and Tuesday.
That is life in the eastern Rockies, where we have a little poem about the weather:
Winter in the spring,
Summer in the fall,
Fall in the winter,
And no spring at all.
I was interviewed by a writer for Religion News Service for an article about Pagans at Ostara, which is a little funny since I am usually thinking about snow and not new life and renewal. That comes in April (along with a chance of snow).
Rękawka is a celebration held in Krakow the Tuesday after Easter, so loosely speaking, it is a spring equinox festival. My friend in Krakow calls it “a civic holiday with Pagan roots.”
Rękawka is also one name for the tumulus (artificial mound) in the video. The celebration has long included throwing offerings of food and coins from the mound. “It is possible that this was based on, perhaps even pre-Slavic, mound and a combination of threads from the legend of Krakow with Slavic beliefs. The rite may also be an echo of the ancient Celtic traditions related to the cult of the god of death Smertius” (Source).
From what I understand, in Poland as in elsewhere, there is a certain overlap between historical re-enactors and contemporary Pagans.
Saturday was the fall equinox (as I usually call it), and various various voices reminded us again that the term “Mabon” was not Authentically Celtic. (Although disagreeing, John Beckett sums up the objections here.)
Mankey linked to an older blog post by Aidan Kelly, one of the pioneers of 1960s California Paganism and also a man whom I consider a co-founder of the field of Pagan studies, based his textual criticism of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows back in the 1980s.
If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the first day of Autumn. Summer just blew by, didn’t it? If that makes you a little melancholy, well, it’s also the International Day of Radiant Peace. Yeah. Also? It’s Batman Day. And Car Free Day. And Chainmail Day. Yes, Chainmail Day is finally upon us. Also? It’s Dear Diary Day. And Fish Amnesty Day. And Hobbit Day. And Ice Cream Cone Day. And International Rabbit Day. If you don’t have a rabbit, some grocery stores keep them in the freezer section. They’re called fryers, and I think we know why. If none of those strike your fancy, it’s also Love Note Day and Elephant Appreciation Day. You can combine those, if you don’t mind getting odd looks down at the zoo. And it’s National Museum Day. And if you’re a Wiccan, it’s Mabon, which sounds a bit sinister, but it’s just their version of the Autumnal equinox. The list goes on. It’s National Centenarian’s Day. National Hunting and Fishing Day. National Public Lands Day. National Rock n’ Roll Dog Day. I don’t even want to know what that’s about. And National Singles Day. National White Chocolate Day. READ in America Day. And finally, Remote Employee Appreciation Day. There are others, but they’re even more frivolous than National Rock n’ Roll Dog Day, if you can believe it. It’s like everyone with an agenda or wacky idea picked the first day of Autumn, so as to steal from its majestic power, and they just piled on. So pick one and raise a drink. Or, since it’s Saturday, pick a lot of them and raise a lot of drinks. Why not? It’s freaking Wiccan Hobbits in Chainmail Riding a Centenarian Elephant Day! Let’s go nuts!
One-hundred-year-old Wiccan hobbits in chainmail . . . how are you going to come back at that?
They’re putting on a Mabon festival, so why not go to it? (Photo: Colorado.com)
If you are in the Northern Hemisphere, the fall equinox (Mabon) is nearly upon us — 1:54 a.m. Universal (Greenwich) Time on Sunday the 23rd. For North Americans, that is Saturday evening.
Which sounds very sensitive and contemplative . . . and lonely and depressing.
John is a smart guy and a good writer, but there is another option. Now, like Samhain and Yule, is one time when the whole society is celebrating — or at enough of them that you can ride the energy that is out there in the polis.[1]A city-state, or a body of citizens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polis.
The Sun sets in Equinox Notch, one day before the actual spring equinox.
My house comes with its own solar calendar, sort of. I discovered when M. and I moved here in the 1990s that the equinoctial sunset occurs in a notch formed by the ridge to the west, as viewed from the front porch.
Surely the ancient builders planned this!
Actually, the “ancient builder” was Alan Cook, a minister in the “New Church (General Convention),” one of the Swedenborgian denominations, who lived from 1893–1984. He was active as a minister in the 1920s, then came to Colorado to manage a summer resort in Green Mountain Falls, west of Colorado Springs. No longer a minister with a congregation, he still held some Sunday services for the tourists and wrote in a typically Swedenborgian style, which is big on correspondences between the visible world and the Unseen World.
Mountains, as we know, signify exalted states of affection. And God’s love is the most high and exalted of which we know.
Pagan me says no, the natural world was not put here only to provide a moral lesson to us humans, although I can still feel some affinity with a man who wrote,
But the man of spiritual mind should discern the far greater wealth which lies beyond mere nature [sic] and the commercial worth of rock — he may know their soul, and, in a measure at least, he will be able to share that wealth.[1]Alan Cook, “A Letter from Colorado,” Ohio New-Church Bulletin, September 1928, n.p.
I found a photo of Alan Cook with some other books and materials stored in a crawlspace, and it hangs on the Wall of Ancestors in my study — which was his study too. We do not share theologies, but I like to think he approves the room being filled with a desk and bookcases once again.
Bennett Price, founder of DeBeque Canyon winery in Palisade, Colo,, samples a cask with a wine thief.
I look outside today and see a white landscape, with light snow falling and a couple of hungry humingbirds huddled on the sugar-water feeder like barflies staring into their whiskey glasses.
Yes, it’s a typical May Day in the Colorado foothills. Is any surprise that Colorado’s biggest public Beltane festival does not occur until the 19th–22nd of May? They tried at first to do it on the “correct” date, but they learned their lesson.
Next weekend is the 76th Music and Blossom Festival in the southern Colorado town of Cañon City, not too far from me. Everyone knows, as a friend said last week, that “Blossom Weekend will be either snowing or a hundred degrees.” He forgot to mention the time in the 1990s when a hailstorm hit the parade.
But attending would be a way to “let the polis support your Paganism,” a theme that I have played with here and here this year.
So I will back up to the spring equinox, whose theme is usually “Let’s thaw out a little before the snow returns.” Some years that means a run to the desert, such as Canyonlands National Park. This year, it was Colorado National Monument. Red rock and sunshine, that’s the thing. Yay, Wingate Formation!
And wine. The vineyards were leafing, barely, whenM. and I dropped in at a couple of favorite Western Slope wineries in early April, of which our most favorite is DeBeque Canyon. (Yes, like the organizers of Beltania, we postponed the date a little.)
The trend today is for wineries to become venues. I think of one winery in Sonoma that I visited as a hitchhiking college student in the 1970s, on my way from Portland to San Francisco. I remembered it as a collection of sheds and little barefoot girls in cotton dresses running in the dust — my friend and I bought a jug of “Dago red” and took it up to the ruined hot springs that Lake Sonoma later drowned.
I returned to the same winery in 2007. Unrecognizable. There was an art gallery, meeting, space, an elegant tasting room that looked like a hotel bar . . . all glassed-in and air-conditioned. Other wineries compete with gardens and fountains and views — that is happening in Colorado too.
Not at DeBeque Canyon, not yet. You bump over the railroad tracks in Palisade to a collection of industrial metal buildings. There is Bennett Price, the owner, behind a simple counter pouring excellent wines for tasting, and telling stories of the industry’s beginnings in the 1970s. He seems to know everyone in the trade from Denver to San Francisco.
Slightly buzzed, we cross the parking lot in the strong spring sun, arms full of bottles. Yes, spring will be returning even to our foothills home. But first the spring snows will arrive to saturate the land.
The Marquez Brothers of Pueblo, Colo., playing at the Harvest Festival at the Holy Cross Abbey in Cañon City.
My approach to the eight-festival Pagan calendar works like this: the cross-quarter days are for ritual—be that outdoor bonfires or black candles at midnight.
The quarter days—solstices and equinoxes—are for public and communal celebrations: with the whole public, not just with other Pagans.
M. and I chose the latter this year, buying elderberry jam and garlicky goat cheese and drinking Abbey wines under the blazing sun. Two guys in charro outfits up from Pueblo played a ranchera–rockbilly–soft rock mix, which is exactly what you expect from a Pueblo band.
Vineyard at Holy Cross Abbey, Cañon City, Colorado
Now the Myth-Making Begins
That stuff on the winery home page about “simple Benedictine Fathers had a dream”—sounds good, right? Don’t the grape vines just look right next to the Gothic Revival abbey?
But the Holy Cross Benedictines were not “simple.” They were school teachers for the most part, running a well-respected secondary school for boys (boarding and day students) from the 1920s until it closed in 1985. Like so much Catholic education, it was a victim of demographics: not enough new monks and priests coming up, not enough church financial support to afford to pay lay (non-monastic) teachers, so no way to keep the doors open and the lights on.
The winery, meanwhile, did not open until 2002. It employs no monks in its day-to-day operations. The monks could not have made wine for sale in the 1920s anyway because of Prohibition. Their mission was educational.
But the idea of “monks making wine” is so appealing that in a generation people will be strolling the grounds of the abbey talking about how the Benedictines came to Cañon City “a hundred years ago” to plant vineyards and bottle some good cabernet franc. I would bet money on it.
It is not unlike saying that the local morris dancers or village harvest festival represent an unbroken survival from ancient Paganism instead of—in either case—something (re)invented by an antiquarian-minded vicar.
Of course, that Chile & Frijoles Festival—great street festival that it is—is a relatively new creation too. This was its seventeenth year.
Only one of the feral trees has borne really well, and I will need a longer pole than my garden cultivator to knock down the high apples. “Wait until after the first frost,” M. suggests.
And then we cross the road to a neighbor’s house where two planted trees are sagging dangerously with apples. Why haven’t the bears arrived? Maybe they will tonight. We fill our bucket in just a few minutes. Apples apples applesapplesapples.
Actually, this piece comes from the well-known British HPS, author, and academic Vivianne Crowley, and it is worth reading.
The equinox is for apples. First M. and walk the small ravine that cuts through our land–that is where the feral apple trees grow. 
Only one of the feral trees has borne really well, and I will need a longer pole than my garden cultivator to knock down the high apples. “Wait until after the first frost,” M. suggests.