Esbats, handfastings, drawing down the moon. The nights that ask more of you than a candle and a spare hour, and are remembered for longer.
There is an hour at the close of the day when the light turns low and gold, when the grass still holds the warmth it took in at noon, and two people stand facing one another with their hands already half lifted between them. A cord waits, folded, in somebody else’s palm. This is a...
The moon comes up over the roof-line after dusk, white and whole, and lays a cold silver road across the floorboards. Drawing Down the Moon is the central Wiccan full moon rite. In it the Goddess is invited to descend into a living body. From that body she then speaks. A priestess stands inside the...
The night arrives silver. Past the roofline the moon lifts full and cold, and the ordinary hour thins until it will hold something else. An esbat is the witches’ rite of that light. It is kept on the night the moon stands full, and a night either side is allowed as well. The circle is...
The house has gone quiet, and the tap runs cold across your knuckles. Above the roofline the moon has climbed clear of the chimneys, small and hard and very white, the way it looks on a night when the air has no softness left in it. You set a glass jar on the sill where...
The first moments after waking possess a silence unlike any other. The day has not yet gathered its full weight. Thoughts remain distant, the rooms are quiet and the mind stands close to the place from which dreams have only just withdrawn. This is the hour chosen for assimilation with the God and Goddess. The...
When the last harvest has been gathered and the fields begin to surrender to frost, Samhain arrives. It is a night of endings, but never of emptiness. The old year withdraws into darkness, carrying what has been completed, lost or outgrown. Beyond that darkness, the first quiet shape of the new year waits to be...