Table Of Content

Please help support our Artists and Writers! The community is indebted to the people that create, research, and provide information to us. Please take the time to look this book over, read it, learn from it, and put the information into use. Then do your part to help create this type of information by supporting the creator. If you find value in this book then please purchase it! Remember the three‐fold law Celebrating the Seasons of Life: Samhain to Ostara Lore, Rituals, Activities, and Symbols By AAsshhlleeeenn OO’’GGaaeeaa N P B EW AGE OOKS A division of The Career Press, Inc. Franklin Lakes, NJ Copyright ©2004 by Ashleen O’Gaea All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Spirit Culture Preservation Project and UFOTV e-Book Publishing. CELEBRATING THE SEASONS OF LIFE:SAMHAIN TO OSTARA EDITED BY KATE HENCHES TYPESET BY EILEEN DOWMUNSON Cover Illustration and Design by Jean William Naumann Printed in the U.S.A. by Book-mart Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O’Gaea, Ashleen. Celebrating the seasons of life : Samhain to Ostara : lore, rituals, activities, and symbols / by Ashleen O’Gaea. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-56414-731-2 (pbk.) 1. Sabbat. 2. Neopaganism—Rituals. 3. Religious calendars— Neopaganism.4. Witchcraft. I. Title. BF1572.S28O38 2004 299'.94—dc22 2003064391 To Canyondancer, with whom I’ve celebrated the seasons of life for more than 30 years; and to the Campsight Coveners, who have celebrated with us for 13. I am grateful to the ever-turning Wheel, and of course to the Gods, but don’t presume they’ll read this. I do hope that the people I’d like to thank will see my gratitude here, though: the recently disbanded Campsight Coven, the newly formed Hearth’s Gate Coven, and the past and present members of the Camping Contingent for their cooperation, contributions, and inspirations; Rick Johnson, Gamlinginn, and Kirk Thomas for sharing their experience and offering their information and advice; and Canyondancer for his supportive editing. Blank Page C ontents Preface 7 Introduction 11 Samhain, 17 Lore 27 Rituals 39 Activities 49 Symbols 59 Yule, 67 Lore 71 Rituals 75 Activities 87 Symbols 97 Imbolc, 107 Lore 111 Rituals 115 Activities 127 Symbols 137 Ostara, 143 Lore 149 Rituals 153 Activities 169 Symbols 181 Conclusion 185 Appendix A: Casting a Wiccan Circle 191 Appendix B: 199 What’s a Child Ready to Learn About the Winter Sabbats? Appendix C: Correspondences 209 Bibliography 213 Index 215 About the Author 221 7 P reface What do we mean by “celebrating” the seasons of life? What’s the point of making rituals to mark the Solstices and Equinoxes, and what we call the “cross-Quarter” days between them? The Earth will orbit the sun whether or not we cast our Circles and light our candles; we ourselves will age and die, and the generations parade through our lives, whether we notice them or not. Why do we bother? We bother because we are hard-wired, so more and more scientists suspect, to cherish and hold holy our connections to the rest of life. We are social creatures, we humans, and we see and speak reverently of our kinships—with each other and with other species, and with the systems and cycles of life itself. The word “celebrate,” according to my old Webster’s New World Dictionary (a 1960 edition left over from the undergraduate days of my husband, Canyondancer), is from the Latin celebratus, meaning “to frequent, go in great numbers, honor.” Modern meanings include “to perform a ritual publicly and solemnly; to commemorate an anniversary, holiday, and so on, with ceremony or festivity; to proclaim; and to honor or praise publicly.” Wiccan Sabbat celebrations do all these things, and quite often in great numbers, although solitary practice is considered equally valid. It’s not hard to understand how celebrating the seasons of life, as marked by Wiccan Sabbats, is commemorative rituals and festivities; it’s not hard to understand Wiccan Sabbat celebrations as public honor and praise of our Goddess and God. It might be harder to see how “proclaiming” and “frequenting” fit into Wiccan practice. 8 Celebrating the Seasons of Life In the old days, before the Inquisition, Pagans tended to “frequent” certain holy locations. Whether or not a public ritual was scheduled, it was not uncommon for individuals to pass by a well or spring, or a grove, or to climb a hill. Indeed, individuals and families frequently passed holy sites, and often stopped to make a votive offering or empower a charm. Pagan practices in the days of our lore were different than our practices today, for our understanding of the nature of deity and how magic works is undoubtedly different than what was “common knowledge” or cutting-edge theory a thousand years ago or more. What we share, with medieval (and older) Pagans and with the Neolithic ancestors of our cultures, is a faith that we are part of Nature: We belong to the Earth’s powerful systems and cycles. Do we respond to them as our ancestors did? No. Most of us don’t believe in Fantasia-like Greek gods living on a literal Olympus, or in fairy palaces that would show up in photographs, beneath Britain’s megalithic mounds. Most of us understand the life of the Otherworld to be in a different dimension, which, from our perspective, can be called metaphorical or subconscious. We understand, too, that the effect of metaphor, of our dreams and emotional experiences, can be, on CT scans, indistinguishable from our physical experience. Few if any of us fall to our knees begging for mercy when thunder booms and lightning cracks. Few expect to meet a triple goddess or a stag-headed god on the street—such experience is limited to movies and guided meditations. That doesn’t mean that movies and guided meditations can’t inspire us, though. The Lord of the Rings movies inspire me; Gandalf and the Hobbit quartet are real to me in ways that my toaster will never be. Nor, for Wiccans, does it mean that we don’t meet the Goddess and God in other people, for we do, every day. The regal aspects we give them in our liturgies are marks of the awe and respect we feel for the miraculously mundane world that is their true nature: Nature, and all its workings. From an infant’s eyelashes to mountain storms, the power and the diversity and the synchronicity of nature is that which we hold holy, what we seek to name when we speak of the Goddess and the God and when we describe their many aspects in our humble human terms.