Now that the festival of Lammas is here, we can plan a Bread & Salt rite which you can integrate into any picnic or summer social gathering to celebrate the harvest with your friends and family. This is the traditional time to make and eat Lammas Loaves which represent the body of the earth Goddess…
Category: lore
Cool as a Cucumber with Sage Advice
After the recent and ongoing panic and upheaval in Europe, now is a good time to cool down and cleanse, for which we can use mainly cucumbers and sage. Anybody behind you in the supermarket queue will be impressed by your basketful of vegetables, herbs and yoghurts as you gather some of Mother Nature’s Little…
Death in the Afternoon
At the Place Denfert-Rochereau in Paris, there is a small booth built of black-stained wood. If you pass through its door, you can descend 130 steps down a narrow stone circular staircase, then follow low dank concrete tunnels until you arrive at your destination: The World’s Largest Grave. This is fantastically popular as a tourist…
The Green Man Cometh
The Green Man is a mysterious chap. A nature deity, he is usually depicted as an anthropomorphic form composed entirely of lush, green vegetation; his face sprouting leaves instead of hair and branches streaming from his mouth. Interestingly, though he appears to be obviously pagan, the Green Man peers out from the architectural details of…
The Divine Fool: Zero & Hero
The Fool is many things and none. The Fool is the jester, the joker, the trickster, the clown, the simpleton, the naïf, the hero. The first card in the tarot deck, the Fool’s number is zero. A blank slate.
Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit
As the festival of Ostara approaches, let us consider the Easter Bunny. He’s a funny old stick. Represented in early folk culture as a stern old-timey Germanic Easter hare or Osterhase, he would judge people annually to deem them worthy or not of his colourful bounty of eggs – not unlike Santa Claus at Christmas….
The Witch and the Silver Cup: “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”
You may have heard about a little film called The Witch that generated a lot of positive buzz out of Sundance last year and is now playing in theaters. If not, here is the trailer: The film is being billed as horror, and it does have some horror elements, but it will disappoint those in…
Purify yourself with pearl for a perfect Imbolc
The first cross-quarter day following Midwinter this day falls on the first of February, and marks the first stirrings of Spring. It is a time for self-reflection and purification in anticipation of the new season. This is the festival of Imbolc. And it’s your time to be a Pearly King or Queen.
Adventures in Strega, Italian Witch Liqueur
Liquore Strega is a saffron-hued herbal liqueur from Benevento, Campania, Italy. “Strega” is Italian for witch, drawing on legends of witchcraft in Benevento that go back to truly olden times. Benevento was a hotspot for a cult of Isis, a temple for which was also devoted to Hecate and Diana, all representing goddess moon aspects….
Making Diversion in Disguise
New Years Eve for witches is really Samhain, or October 31st, but we can go ahead and party along with the normals tonight, because for why not? A bit of wassailing and mumming would be fun. It’s trad, dad. Mumming has been around since the ancient Romans started it all way back when, the basic…
The New City Witches Cocktail Coven 