Beltane is one of the best festivals of the year in my opinion – a celebration of fire, flowers and creativity! It’s also the backdrop for the 1973 Christopher Lee gem The Wicker Man, the film about a hapless policeman investigating a missing child on the mysterious Scottish island of Summerisle. If you’ve never seen…
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Flora & Faunus
Sex! Now that I have your attention, we can explore the festival of Floralia, which is held between April 28th and May 3rd, symbolizing the renewal of the cycle of life, and kicking off our Beltane celebrations.  It is celebrated with flowers, drinking, hunting, games, and sex. See, it didn’t take me long to get…
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…
Wise Old Owl
 “I have great faith in fools – self-confidence, my friends call it” – Edgar Allan Poe As April Fool’s Day descends, you can fall into one of two categories. The Fool, or the Non-Fool. If you wish to be thought so little of a fool that nobody would try to fool you for a second,…
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 naĂŻf, the hero. The first card in the tarot deck, the Fool’s number is zero. A blank slate.
Magic Eggs
“Long long ago before time had begun, the moon lost a pebble and away through space it spun, in the world far below only water could be seen, it sank down to the bottom and it lay there like a dream… Magic Egg….Rejected by the devil and circled by a dove, the message inside was…
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. Â 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…
Shoot a Flaming Dragon Bomb
The Chinese Dragon is the highest-ranking creature in the Chinese god/animal hierarchy, representing power, majesty, dignity, fertility and wisdom. When he makes his appearance in effigy during Chinese New Year, he symbolizes the spiritual aspect of our existence and brings good fortune to all aspects of our lives. Â To celebrate the dragon at this time…
Giving Parties For Pets
Since the Early Times, familiar creatures were accepted as quasi-supernatural entities who would assist witches and the Cunning Folk in their magical practices. Documents of that era described them as appearing in numerous guises – usually as an animal, and most commonly as a cat, or cat-demon. Unlike ghosts or otherworldly spirits, they were described…
The New City Witches Cocktail Coven 