For those of you who couldn't join us for our Living Room on October 13, 2010 titled "Samhain: A Season of Harvest, a Circle of Remembrance," we hope you enjoy this transcript of our evening! During our Living Room with the Temple of the Spiral path, they led us in a celebration of Samhain, a sacred time of remembrance and harvest, one of the Eight Holidays known to modern Neo-Pagan witches as the Wheel of the Year.
Modern neo-Pagans orient their practices around a celebration of cycles of nature, both lunar and solar. The old Irish festival of Samhain, which evolved into the modern celebration of Halloween, is a festival of endings, beginnings, and in-gatherings. It is believed that the immanent world, and especially our ancestors, are closest to us at this time and last fruits of the harvest must be taken in to ensure survival, be it literal or spiritual. After casting the circle, we built sacred space by acknowledging the four directions and elements, singing:
“Air in my Breath, Fire in my Heart, Water in my Blood, Earth in my Bones” ~ By Javelin
During Samhain, in particular, and in this rite, we acknowled those who have passed beyond the veil - ancestors of blood as well as those of spirit. We then invite and acknowledge nature spirits, divine guides known as the Sidhe (or Fey folk), and the presence of God and Goddess (in this case, Cailleach, the Scottish Hag of Winter, and Cernunnos, the Lord of Animals) to bear witness.
Participants were encouraged to reflect on all that they had harvested in the light half of the year and mindful of what they were thankful for. Witches honor death as a necessary part of the cycle of life - our own fragility as well as the fragility of all that we value is part of this cycle. So during the core work of the ritual, we tranferred energetically and meditatively our individual thankfulness to a handful of bird seeds which were then put into a basket and eventually scattered in the wild as an offering to nature.
“Free the Heart, Let it go, what you Reap is what you Sew”
~ By the Crow Women
The Symbolic Great Rite - “There is no greater magic than that of love” - was used to bless the juice and pumpkin bread which was brought to the ritual. The wording expressing the centrality of fertility and polarity.
The circle is the supreme symbol of the earth mother and of the endless cycle of the seasons, which is embodied in the following closing song that we also sang as a group to close our ritual:
“We are a Circle, within a Circle, with no beginning and Never Ending” ~ By unknown
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For anyone wanting to learn more about pagan communities in New York City, the following websites and e-lists are great for perusing:
www.nyc-ppp.org and the Meetup.com Group for NYC Pagan Pride
www.adf.org An Draicht Fein, or “Our Own Druidry”-
www.witchvox.com listings for open pagan events, particularly for Wiccans but other groups as well,across the world and in each of the fifty states.. A website that has been in operation for well over 15 years and is packed with much information.
www.cog.org (Covenant of the Goddess) A National Organization of Cooperating Wiccan covens, the oldest in the country, which was founded in the 1970’s in order to secure legal rights for Wiccan clergy and increase cooperation amongst the diverse Wiccan community.
...and many more!
The posting of this kind of information is wrong in an Adventist web site. Please i pray that you will remove this from the web site.
Posted by: Joe August | Dec 03, 2010 at 09:15 AM
Joe,
Perhaps you are right. But this is not "an Adventist website" more than it is a Wiccan website.
It is hosted by people who want to live out their particular faith while connected with others. Faith house is a human space where people who want to learn from and experience the other can do so.
As for me personally, I am an Adventist Christian who is way to ignorant about others to afford isolation.
Samir
Posted by: Samir Selmanovic | Dec 03, 2010 at 10:13 AM