Category: Uncategorized

Brigid and the Mountain Ash

November 9, 2012

Photo Nino Barbieri.

Along with many other people, I have been reflecting for a long time on ways of making witchcraft (meaning Euro-shamanism) more relevant to the ecologies of North America. Like most forms of shamanism, witchcraft contains many elements specific to geography, including things like weather patterns, local flora and fauna, and geological formations such as mountains or springs. When transferring witchcraft to a new setting, there are inevitable changes that need to take place. Fortunately shamanic systems are highly adaptable. In the 21st century, this adaptation does not have to start from scratch: Appalachian folk healers, New England dowsers, southwestern curanderos, and herbalists from many other isolated communities have all trod this ground before. Often they have incorporated practices learned from Native American healers. There are problems that arise in continuing this trend, having to do with cultural sensitivity and the need to maintain the integrity of magical belief systems. Yet American witchcraft still has not “grown up,” in the sense of being firmly rooted in place. There is very little mythology and magical folklore that reflects the mountains, rivers, trees and animals specific to the various regions.

The American Mountain Ash seemed to me to fit nicely into a Euro-shamanic framework. This tree grows in moist lowland areas, but is especially prevalent on high rocky slopes at the edge of tree line. It is a very attractive tree, with a lovely shape and interesting leaf patterns, and it has big clusters of white flowers in the spring. The colors white and red have special significance in witchcraft. White is the color of the maiden aspect of the goddess, the color of the sacred white sow, and a color associated with death. Red is the color of the mother goddess, the color of the blood of the womb. Red, too, has a death association, and bodies were once painted with red ocher to symbolize rebirth in another world. The Mountain Ash has bright orange berries, and while red is not interchangeable with orange in a crayon box, for magical purposes the two colors often overlap. Mountain Ash berries are very attractive to birds, particularly grouse, and many animals feast on both the berries and the leaves. Moose especially love to browse the Mountain Ash tree. The sour berries are edible for humans as well, although they cannot be eaten in any great quantities because they are a mild laxative. Traditional medicinal uses for Mountain Ash berries or bark infusions include the treatment of depression, digestive ailments, colds, colic, and post childbirth ailments. Mountain ash berries have a component that has been synthesized to treat glaucoma, which in magic would give the tree a visionary quality. Mountain Ash wood separates easily from the bark, and its flexibility has made it useful for canoe ribs and snowshoe frames. Having economic usefulness, medicinal qualities, the colors white and red, a positive impact on the local ecology, and an attractive appearance gives a tree magical importance.

I was feeling rather smug about my identification of a new magical tree, when I learned that the American Mountain Ash is a New World subspecies of the rowan tree. Oh well.

Every beginning magic student hears about the rowan tree. The tree with magic berries, protected by a dragon. The source of the best wands. The tree of strong protection, which banishes lightening. The tree of vision. Both saints and heroes had some of their most extraordinary revelations under the rowan tree. “What’s a rowan tree?” I recall asking on more than one occasion. The response would be, “Oh, it’s some tree that grows in England, and it [recites a litany of magical qualities].” Why didn’t anyone tell me that the rowan is the Mountain Ash? Because they didn’t know. Because most of us learn about witchcraft in urban settings. Because I was studying in California, and the Mountain Ash doesn’t grow there any more than the rowan does. Because the study of magic has gotten lost in its abstractions. This is one of the reasons I started the Yellow Birch School of Magic, because I wanted to connect pagans with the tangible foundations of magical practice.

The rowan is the tree for the second month of the Celtic tree calendar. Says Robert Graves, “The important Celtic feast of Candlemas fell in the middle of it (February 2). It was held to mark the quickening of the year…” Quickening refers to the point in the pregnancy where fetal movements can be felt by the mother. In folklore it is believed to be the time when the spirit incarnates in the growing fetus. Graves goes on to say “Since it was the tree of quickening, it could also be used in a contrary sense. In Danaan Ireland a rowan-stake hammered through a corpse immobilized its ghost; and in the Cuchulain saga three hags spitted a dog, Cuchulain’s sacred animal, on rowan twigs to procure his death.”

By identifying the rowan tree with Candlemass, I have given away the link between this tree and the Celtic goddess Brigid. February 2nd is also known as “Brigid’s Day.” Brigid is the Celtic fire goddess. Patricia Monaghan says of her pre-Christian worship, “She may have been seen as a bringer of civilization, rather like other Indo-European hearth goddesses (Vesta, Hestia) who ruled the social contract from their position in the heart and hearth of each home.” Fire is associated with vision, and Brigid’s Day is a day for divination, particularly weather divination. This is why the groundhog sees or doesn’t see his shadow on this day. And how is the rowan tree connected with fire? For that we have to go back to those little orange berries, the color of a warm fire.


Sources

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.

Ketchledge, E.H. Forests and Tress of the Adirondack High Peaks Region. Lake George, NY: Adirondack Mountain Club, 1967.

Monaghan, Patricia. The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore. New York: Checkmark Books, 2008.

Ristic, Radomir. Balkan Traditional Witchcraft. Trans. Michael C. Carter, Jr. Sunland, CA: Pendraig, 2009.

Tree Encyclopedia. American Mountain Ash – Sorbus americana

A Wonderful Samhain to Everyone

October 31, 2012

Our most sacred holiday of the year, communicating with ancestors, acknowledging our many gifts, recognizing other worlds. Truly we are blessed.

Frigga and the Birch

September 7, 2012

White Birch tree. Photo Willow.

The birch was discussed a few months ago in the series on the witch’s broom, but a whole book could be written about this magical tree. This week we turn to the relationship between the birch tree and the Germanic goddess Frigga.

Trees going by the common name of “birch” belong to the family betula, which abounds in northern climates, though the various species differ in appearance, habitat, and other characteristics. The two species prevalent in North America are the Paper Birch, which produces the material for the lightweight birch bark canoes that were once the predominant mode of travel in the north, and the Yellow Birch, which is known for its highly aromatic leaf buds. Neither of these characteristics are shared by the White Birch or Silver Birch, the two species Germanic sacred lore is based upon. The White Birch is the most northern growing Eurasian hardwood and the only tree found in Iceland. The Silver Birch has the whitest bark of any betula. In some cases it is impossible to distinguish which tree is being referenced, but fortunately the two are very similar, their chief difference being growing habitat. The following discussion will apply to the White and Silver Birch, but one or more of the magical characteristics of these trees can be found in other birches native to North America.

The birch is an attractive tree, often quite tall, that buds early in spring. Deer are dependent on birch twigs during periods of heavy snow, and the inner bark of the tree is edible for humans as well. Birch produces abundant sap that was once used for sweetening beverages. Twigs are traditional material for thatching houses or weaving baskets, and the bark is used for smoking meat or tanning hides. The fragrant wood burns even when wet. Birch is the preferred wood for constructing drums due to its resonance.
The rune Boerc.


The birch tree is believed to dispel evil, which is why participants leaving the traditional Nordic sauna are gently flogged with birch twigs. The household broom was once constructed with birch twigs and witches still prefer birch for their brooms. In Germanic provinces in medieval times, young men would decorate birch trees for the May rites in homage to their lady love. Birch was the favored wood for the Maypole.

Birch bark was often a medium for runic script, and the rune Boerc corresponds to the birch tree. D. Jason Cooper calls this rune one of “healing, regeneration, and the atonement of past deeds” and it is used magically for increasing fertility and aiding childbirth. In divination, Boerc means abundance, possible marriage, stability, and purification.

Boerc is Frigga’s rune. The prose Edda says of Frigga that “she knows the fates of all men, though she speaks no prophecy.” Frigga is known for her propensity for silence, which is another way of saying that she holds the mystery, mistress of truths that are hard to penetrate. She rules the hidden realms, including the realm of the dead.
Silver Birch. Photo Speifensender.


In Germanic lore the most popular death scenario is that half the heroes slain in battle go to Valhalla, the hall of the god Odin, while the other half go to the hall of the goddess Frejya, all feasting in merriment while awaiting the final battle. Those who die of sickness, old age, or other inglorious means, on the other hand, go to the cold inhospitable realms of the goddess Hel. In a competing and less celebrated scenario, the dead go to Fensalir, the hall of Frigga located on a distant sea-island, where they feast in abundance and harmony forever. Frigga is a pre-patriarchal, pre-Indo-European goddess whose inevitable marriage to the chief Teutonic god Odin reflects not only her power and high status, but her rulership of the death realms that Odin penetrated to achieve his status as a shamanic deity.

Cooper asserts that “Little is positively known of Frigga’s worship in pagan times, since the Christians were harder on the goddesses than the gods of the north.” What little has been positively discerned has been pieced together from fleeting references in the many texts penned in Christian times. Other things can be inferred about Frigga, however, from her association with gold, spinning and weaving, and the birch tree. Being goddess of death and goddess of sustenance seems contradictory, but it mirrors the generosity of the birch in winter and summer. The spinning wheel is a common metaphor for the cyclic nature of the seasons, and spinning goddesses are almost invariably spider, snake, or sun goddesses. The gold thread that Frigga spins and the golden tears she cries suggests she is linked to the sun. The qualities of the birch, taken together, are also reflective of the sun. Birch leaves turn striking gold (Silver Birch) or a dark red (White Birch) in fall, and the white branches of the tree are awakened early by the rays of the sun. Remember, too, that birch wood burns unseasoned and when wet, suggesting that the tree stores or contains the sun’s fire.
Silver Birch. Photo Alexey Novitsky.


Frigga ia an important goddess, one that deserves more attention, and every reference to her, tangential as it may be, is filled with messages. I have limited discussion of her here to the places her story intersects with the birch, but feel free to add more in the comments.


Sources

Blount, Martin. “Lady of the Woods – The Birch.” White Dragon.

Cooper, D. Jason. Using the Runes. Wellingborough, UK: The Aquarian Press, 1986.

Gimbutas, Marija. The Living Goddesses. Berekeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.

The Gylfaginning at Sacred Texts.

Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1940.

Monaghan, Patricia. The Books of Goddesses and Heroines. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1990.

Sacred Earth. “Birch (betula sp.) – History and Uses”.

It’s all in how you see it

August 30, 2012


The internets have been in a titter for a week, and no doubt every Blue Moon café, restaurant and tavern is in high celebratory mode. Really, the significance of the Blue Moon is that it is hard to categorize. Solar and lunar time only reconcile about every nineteen years, so there are twelve lunar cycles and some change in any solar year. Whether there are twelve or thirteen full moons depends on which day you start the calendar. Depending on the tradition (and the latitude), we label each month’s moon according to its seasonal significance. Thus the January moon is the “Wolf Moon”, the February moon is the “Hungry Moon,” the March moon is the “Storm Moon,” etc. What happens when you have two full moons in a month? You don’t know how to categorize the second one. It’s also an uncommon occurrence, occurring only about every three years.

A Blue Moon is a full moon in which you do something you wouldn’t ordinarily do, and something that you probably won’t do again for awhile. When I had a large teaching coven, the women would circle with the men on that night, just to show that we were not categorically opposed to it (but still not willing to make it a regular occurrence).

The color blue in lunar context has some significance. Red is ordinarily the color associated with the full moon (look at it closely some time), a phenomenon that was easier to see when the moon was closer to the earth. Red is a very powerful magical color, associated with the Mother and characteristic of the Dianic Tradition. White is the color of the waxing moon, associated with the Maiden, while black is the color of the Crone and the dark portion of the waning moon. Thus we have the three important magical colors of the Dianic Tradition and many others. Blue is a cooling color less frequently invoked, which nonetheless has its own important properties. If colors are invoked when casting a circle, blue is often linked with the direction of West. In shamanic traditions which are based on the number four, unlike Indo-European cultures, which are almost always based on the number three, blue is usually included as one of the four basic colors.

A lot of pagans are saying that the Blue Moon has very special powers, but I disagree with this. In and of itself, the Blue Moon only has meaning if you accept the validity of the Julian calendar. How many of us do? I accept that I have to work with this calendar, to navigate the business and larger social world, but magically my calendar is marked in different time, beginning on November 1st. Other people may start their year at the winter solstice, or the spring equinox, or at some other time. What gives the Blue Moon its significance is the the permission people give themselves to loosen up, be unorthodox, try something new. This is the special energy that drives the Blue Moon.

The Woman Who Walks With the Wolves

July 27, 2012

This week’s tree post will be about Athena and the Olive. I’m working on it now–it’ll be up later today or tomorrow. Instead of writing blogs today, I got a chance to play with some real wolves. This is Cree. He’s about five years old and very shy.

The Linden Prophesy

July 20, 2012


The tree goddess this week is the Latvian Laima (pronounced like the first word in “lima bean”). Her Lithuanian name is Laime. Be careful not to get her confused with the fairy goddess Lauma or the Greek Lamia.

Laima is associated with many trees, but especially the linden; many birds, but especially the cuckoo; and many animals, but especially the cow. Laima is the goddess of birth, fertility, fate and prosperity — goddess qualities that seem to go together. Laima measures the length of the day, the length of a lifespan, the length of a spell of good luck. I have a mental picture of her flying around with a wooden ruler measuring things. (“Baby girl, you are going to be this tall.”)

Large-leaved Linden Tree. Photo by Willow.
The linden is the tree more commonly known as the basswood in the United States and the lime in England. It has soft wood used for musical instruments and a pliable bark used for basket weaving. It is a choice wood for carving. The sweet smelling flowers of the linden are brewed for respiratory and urinary infections. The flowers attract insects, particularly bees, which produce a honey prized for flavor and medicinal qualities. The insects in turn attract birds, as does the linden fruit.

The bird Laima favors is the cuckoo. The reappearance of the Common Cuckoo from her African migration marks the beginning of spring in Europe, and the cuckoo is said to prophesy by her number of calls. According to Marija Gimbutas, “Another folk belief relates that the tree on which the cuckoo sits becomes sacred and imbued with the powers of the goddess. If a person peels a piece of bark or breaks a branch of this tree, he or she will know the cuckoo’s prophesies.”

The cow is the special animal of Laima, also associated with the linden tree. Laima presides over the birth of calves, usually by appearing in the stall as a black snake or a black hen or even a black bug. In one song she appears in the cow stall as a linden tree:

A branchy linden tree grew
In my cattle stall.
This was not a linden tree,
This was Laima of my cows.

Laima produces goats and sheep from her other trees:

All roadsides were covered with Laima’s trees:
From a birch a ewe was born,
From an aspen-tree, a little goat.

It is common in Euro-shamanism for land animals to have a bird form. Here we have sheep and goats with tree forms.

Of course Laima also measures the length of a woman’s pregnancy and presides at the birth of children. She governs the bathhouse and sauna where Latvian women traditionally gave birth. In this role she takes the form of a woman with braided hair bearing linden branches.

Why so swift Mother Laima
With linden twigs in your hand?
To still the tears of a young bride
Who came last year to our land.

Laima can appear as one goddess, three goddesses, or as many as seven. In various aspects she may be given different titles, such as “Cow Laima” or “Fate Laima.” This is interesting in the context of the linden tree, because its trunk often looks like it has multiple trunks fused together. The American Basswood has several distinct trunks rising from a single base. The linden tree exemplifies the idea of the goddess who is many and one.

American Basswood



Sources:

Evans, Erv. “Scientific name Tilia Americana.” North Carolina State University Cooperative Extention.

Forler, Scott. “Linden-Lime-Basswood Honey” The Honey Traveler, 2011.

Gimbutas, Marija. The Living Goddesses. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999.

Motz, Lotte. The Faces of the Goddess. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Nix, Steve. “American Basswood, A Common Tree in North America.” About.com.

On the Non-existence of Woman Hatred

June 8, 2012

Title page from the seventh edition of Malleus Maleficarum, printed in 1520.

I’ve been reading a long excerpt from the Malleus Maleficarum this past month. If the name sounds familiar to you, but you can’t quite place it, this was the prime resource manual used during the European witch persecutions. Written by two Dominican inquisitors, it became, as Charles Kors and Edward Peters say in their introduction, “the first encyclopedia of witch beliefs…constantly cited in support of those beliefs by Catholics and Protestants down to the eighteenth century.” Its usefulness for pagans today is limited. How much direct knowledge of witchcraft (outside of the courtroom or the torture chamber) either cleric had cannot be known, as this is a question that would not occur to most historians. The breadth of the authors’ theological knowledge, their familiarity with prior writings on the topic, and their understanding of various legal theories come across clearly. These two men took themselves very seriously. Reading their arguments it is easy to see how hard it would be for an accused witch to defend herself.

The Hammer of the Witches, as the book is also called in English, is essential reading for witchcraft students who reference legal, scholarly or ecclesiastic documents of the time, not because it has much credible information in itself, but because it delineates the stereotyped confessions that interrogators sought to coerce from their victims. In other words, it lays out the witchcraft belief that should probably be discarded, at least where it appears after 1487 when the book was published. I do not mean to infer that ecclesiastic writing on witchcraft prior to 1487 was sound, but this is the point where the distortion becomes re-distorted. Think of a stained glass filter imposed on an inverted black-and-white photograph.

I read the entire Malleus in the mid 1990’s (you can find the book in any mid-sized public library) and the thing that struck me most about it was the intense misogyny. It made me quite ill. The default male pronoun is not used here, and the hypothetical witch is almost always a “she.” The most emphatic condemnation is reserved for the village midwives, who in those days were the herbal doctors for ordinary people. They “surpass all other witches in their crimes” while at the same time “there is scarcely any tiny hamlet in which at least one is not to be found.” There is a long rigamarole averring that not only evil-doing witches, but witches who heal or break evil spells, are guilty of heresy and subject to prosecution. And the text is littered with remarks such as “Women also have weak memories; and it is natural vice in them not to be disciplined, but to follow their impulses without any sense of what is due” or (citing Seneca) “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil” or “through this defect [bent rib from Adam] she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives.”

But the authors of Malleus are not woman-haters, as they take pains to establish, and this is why I wanted to discuss the book. They freely admit that “When they are governed by good spirit, they are most excellent in virtue” and “they have brought beatitude to men, and have saved nations, lands and cities” and even “by faith led nations and kingdoms away from the worship of idols to the Christian religion.” The problem is that “they are more credulous, and since the chief aim of the devil is to corrupt faith, therefore he rather attacks them” and “since they are feebler both in mind and body, it is not surprising that they should come more under the spell of witchcraft.” The problem is not women per se, but the weakness of the flesh, since “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable.”

The association of witchcraft with women did not exist in a theoretical vacuum. In places where witch hunts were most severe, eighty percent or more of those executed were women. While it is speculated that many of these women were marginal, vulnerable and powerless, Malleus makes clear that the Inquisition was attempting to target the most rebellious women, those women who clung to superstitions and rejected Church authority.

Even when systematic assault on women is at its most severe (widespread torture and execution under false charges), it is never framed as an attack on women. It is an attack on some commonly acknowledged evil (“carnal lust” or “the Devils’ corruption”) or an exultation of an ideal sentiment (“noble womanhood”). We do not live in enlightened times when women are no longer considered contemptible by the majority of people, because that time of outright popular contempt never existed.

This lesson from the witch hunts is relevant to the current assault on women’s rights, an assault most obvious coming from the Christian Right, but which is actually happening across religious and political ideologies. The slogans used are “religious freedom” or “free speech” or “pro-sex” or “the 99%” or even “equality”–sentiments no reasonable person can disagree with. But we have to look deeper, and examine what the actions and proposals being hidden beneath these flags mean for women. This what the slogan “Never again the Burning Times” really means: resisting systematic attacks on women’s freedom committed under the guise of accepted values.