Archives For second-generation paganism

The Altar and How to Use It

Eric Scott —  April 12, 2013 — 34 Comments
Be it ever so humble.

I never had an altar before I moved out of my parents’ house. That seems impossible, in retrospect, but I can’t remember ever setting one up. I had some statues – mostly the same ones that line my altar today, actually – but I never thought it was important to set them up in a way that would facilitate personal rituals. For that matter, I never cared much about doing said rituals in the first place. This may explain why, all these years later, I’m terrible about remembering to actually use my altar; whenever I hear somebody I respect mention how she finds daily practice mandatory, I feel sheepish. This is my version of feeling guilty about not going to church.

When I was 18, I moved into a Truman State University dormitory in Kirksville, a small town in the far northern reaches of Missouri. Like every dorm room, it was not set up for comfort so much as interchangeability. There was nothing distinctive about it, other than having once been the maids’ break room. (The room I moved into a semester later had literally been a broom closet the year before. You kids living in Missouri Hall now, after the renovation? You don’t know how good you have it.) The furniture was the same as every other room: a “lofted” bed, which is to say, a bunk bed without the lower bunk; a particle-board desk; an uncomfortable blue chair. If you were drunk enough, you could get off the elevator on the wrong floor, walk down the wrong hallway, and climb into the wrong bed, all without realizing something had gone awry until you heard the screams.

This was a hell of change for me. My parents left no inch of their home unchanged by their presence; there might be twenty feet of bare wall space in there. An entire wall of masks brought back from Mexico, cabinets filled with collections of elf statuettes and minerals, a five-foot-tall painting of my father naked holding a yowling cat; these are only a few of the things I grew up around. (Mom and dad never really cared much about making our house “suitable for entertaining.”) The place is bewildering to strangers, who invariably stare straight ahead to resist being overwhelmed.

In the living room, my parents have a tall cabinet filled with all of their ritual equipment: robes and swords and a whole drawer dedicated to incense. The altar sits atop the Magick Cabinet, filled with so many icons of the gods that my dad had to start moving them elsewhere in the house to keep them from spilling off the edge. 

But although the cabinet was where dad performed his personal ceremonies, in reality, our entire house was an altar, every edge of it filled with items of magickal significance, even if only we understood what that significance was.

So within a week or two of moving into my bland dorm room, I was homesick – not just for my family, or the familiar environs of St. Louis, but sick at heart for the house itself. I needed a bit of it to call my  own. I needed an altar.

I had most of the things I wanted for it already, but there were certain constraints on my behavior in the dormitory. For one thing, we weren’t allowed to have knives, so I couldn’t bring my athame from home; it remained tucked away in the Magick Cabinet for several more years, until I got an off-campus apartment in my junior year. Instead I used a wooden letter-opener I got from the St. Louis Hare Krishna temple, a bit of ingenuity I’m still proud of. (Since I couldn’t take my athame on the airplane, I used that same letter-opener during Pantheacon earlier this year.) My roommate thought this was hilarious, and constantly asked me to get my athame when our mail came in. There was no way around the prohibition on fires, though, so I went without burning incense. For that, I’m sure, my roommates were thankful; broom closets aren’t that well ventilated.

Given the premium on space, I set my statues and implements up on top of the wardrobe, which abutted the headboard of my loft bed. Every night before I went to sleep, I crawled into the ten inches of space between mattress and ceiling to make my offerings, whisper my chants, and consecrate my chalice full of tap water. (Dry campus.) It wasn’t much; it lacked many of the trappings that I had always thought of as essential to practice.

But despite my situation – my threadbare little altar in a faceless dorm room in a town too small to have much in the way of other people like me – I felt very Pagan when I prayed at that altar. More Pagan than I had felt before in my life. This altar wasn’t much, but it was mine. 

And, more to the point, it was not my parents’.

I imagine all children must have feelings like I had: the feeling that their religion, whatever that religion is, belongs to their parents. Everything they have known about their faith has been shaped by their parents’ tastes and predelictions; not much about it has been defined by their own needs and desires. This is true for a child born into Paganism, too, and maybe especially for one born into Paganism. After all, my parents were eclectic, and accepted all the things that appealed to them into their version of Paganism – which, in our case, not only structured the religion, but structured the very nature of our house. (How many other kids grow up with a Magick Cabinet in the living room?) But that meant everything that didn’t suit them was left out. Perhaps they never banned those things outright, but still, if it didn’t appeal to them, it didn’t make its way into our home, and therefore, not into my head.

So when I looked around the altar of our home, I saw all the things they had put into it, and not much of my own. I had been borrowing their altar my whole life, and in doing so, borrowing their Paganism. When I built my own altar, I took my first steps towards finding my own way of looking at the world.

My practice is, of course, founded on the things my parents taught me, but it’s not the same thing. Some of the choices I have made are considerably different from theirs; some are the same. But they have been my choices, not theirs. If you look at our altars now, you’ll see how they are alike, but you’ll also see how they are different.

I’m pretty sure this is how they hoped it would turn out.

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Unsolitary

Eric Scott —  March 15, 2013 — 20 Comments
Picture taken in my parents' kitchen.

The banner of Coven Pleiades.

We are chanting, waiting for Lorelei to appear:

Full moon shining bright, midnight on the water
O! Aradia, Diana’s silver daughters

If Coven Pleiades, the Wiccan group I was born into, had only one song, it would be this one. We sing it, our voices growing loud enough to fill my parents’ house with the force of our love, loud enough to fill the dark space where Lorelei waits, her hands bound, her eyes covered, her body naked. This is her initiation ritual, the first we have held in several years – the first, I think, since my own second degree.

It’s also the first time I’ve seen an initiation from the other side of the blindfold. It’s a bit like being backstage at a play, or a magic show. I am part of a large cast, performing a show for an audience of one. When Lorelei appears, she will be set on a path beset by obstacles, a sharp and thorny forest filled with the howls of beasts. And of course, we are those beasts and brambles, both her path and the things that block her from it.

The priest, my father, goes to retrieve Lorelei from the underworld. She arrives at the edge of the circle, nervous, but ready.

“What is your name, child of the Goddess?” asks my mother, assuming the form of the White Goddess.

“Lorelei,” she says, formally adopting this as her Craft name.

“And what do you bring with you?” asks the Goddess.

“Perfect love and perfect trust,” says Lorelei.

Thus she brings the traditional wages of initiation, ready for us to offer her the bargain that they might buy.

***

Lorelei’s initiation happened the Saturday after Pantheacon. I had begun to recover by that point – returning to a soulless office job will do that for you – but still, I felt like a changed person. I had gone through a lot, been exposed to many things I had never seen within Pleiades.

Several people have told me that it was a brave act for me to come to a big event like Pantheacon alone. This was always said with the unspoken but obvious afterthought, “brave, and perhaps foolish.” I had nobody there to pull me back if I went too deep, nobody to ensure I, to use both a drug analogy and a play on words, didn’t have a bad trip. I can see how, had I been a slightly different person, or things have gone a slightly different way, I could have been overwhelmed by the experience, left broken by it. This is not to say that I made no friends at Pantheacon; the first thing I did when I got off the plane, in fact, was to meet the people who would become the dramatis personae of my weekend. But many of those folks were exactly the people luring me into new experiences, for which I might not have had the appropriate mental defenses.

This company of two thousand Pagans taught me much about solitude, and its value. I learned of my own need for loneliness in the times I had to withdraw to the quiet of my hotel room for an hour to escape the crowd. I learned more firmly about the things I could accept into my practice and the things that I couldn’t. And I learned that, sad to say, I’m really just not cut out for 1 AM hospitality suite parties. (Sorry, guys.)

On the last day of the convention, I went to Teo Bishop’s presentation on the Solitary Druid Fellowship. Compared to much of Pantheacon, it felt mellow and contemplative: just an audience, seated in the round, with Teo standing in the middle, spinning back and forth to face each of us in turn.

If I am being honest, I didn’t go to this workshop because I thought it would be particularly interesting to me. It was, after all, addressed to solitary members of the ADF, and I was neither of those. But I was more interested than I thought I would be. Teo knows how to tell a story.

In this one, he described the special needs of a solitary Pagan, reflecting the greater needs of that particular umbrella by describing what he needed in his own practice. He brought in his personal history – his past life as an Episcopalian, his current life within ADF, his love of liturgy and the Book of Common Prayer. He told us of the challenges of solitary practice – the feelings of loneliness, of personal motivation, of being disconnected from a greater religious practice. And he brought in the advantages of solitude – contemplation, personal direction, the opportunity for great work within the body of the individual practitioner.

I had never considered that being solitary could work out to one’s advantage, myself, so this last part came as a surprise – but I saw the possibilities as soon as Teo mentioned them. He had a point. Like many of the great ideas I have encountered in my life, I immediately recognized this one’s worth. Also like many of those great ideas, I recognized pretty quickly that it wasn’t meant for me.

Yet it made me think about my own practice, and how it related to the things Teo was talking about – the benefits and the consequences of being so ingrained into a group.

In my mind, the coven – or, to be more accurate, my coven, Pleiades – is the fundamental unit of religion. (Let me emphasize the words in my mind, lest you think I’m prescribing a course of action that I believe everyone must follow. You, as you have likely noticed by now, are not me.) The dynamic of the group is the basic energy which powers Wicca for me, and as our composition and focus changes, so does the religion. While I have explored and practiced several other forms of Paganism – Taoism, Kabbalism, a long courtship with Asatru – my mind always returns to Pleiades, which, to me, is Wicca itself.

This is a source of great strength, for within the group I find my teachers, who have guided me in my explorations of life and magick. Here I find my elders, who have watched me grow up, whose relationships with me have been a constant evolution. And here I find the people to whom my magick is directed, the people who assure me that my practice has a purpose beyond myself.

And this is a source of great trouble, too, because the relationships within a coven are not stable things. People move away, fall in love, break up, fall out. Even if those changes have nothing to do with our rituals, they still reverberate throughout our circle, like concentric waves in a pond once a rock has been thrown in. If those waves are violent enough, they can threaten the existence of the coven’s very existence; I suspect more covens have been destroyed by such forces than survived them.

To me, it’s worth the heartache. A good coven is a family, after all, and every family is a source of both sorrow and solace. That’s the bargain we make, and most of us, I think, find it a worthwhile one. For me, Pleiades isn’t even that old saw, a “family of choice” – I didn’t choose them. They’re simply family, as much as a family of blood or law.

***

The main business of the initiation has concluded. Lorelei has taken off her blindfold, had her hands released, slipped her robe back onto her body. She has been told the secrets, which I will not speak here. Now we sit, drinking wine and munching on cakes. We are talking – mostly about the ritual, giving Lorelei congratulations and presents. (I, in typical fashion, left my present in the car, so it will have to wait until later.) But we also talk about mundane things. We crack jokes. We talk about the present and the past. The name for the act is communion, after all. And here we are, a coven, communicating.

At one point, my dad clears his throat and speaks. “In a lot of groups, initiation means that you are a Witch. It’s a title you get by going through the ritual. Here, we don’t do that. Whether  you call yourself a Witch or not, that’s not for us to say – that’s between you and your gods.” He smiles at Lorelei. “For us, initiation means that now, you are our Witch. That you belong to us, and we belong to you.”

I have belonged to Pleiades since long before I was initiated, since I was in the womb. I am an unsolitary Pagan; I don’t really know any other way to do it. They are the the path and destination, the actors and the audience. While I stumble through the darkness of life, they are the ones stretching out their hands to mine. They guide me – and I guide them – on our eternal journey to our destination, our source, our home.

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The Weekend Before

Eric Scott —  February 13, 2013 — 7 Comments
image

Oh, like you need my phone number.

Friday

Today I bought business cards. This feels more important than it probably is.

Pantheacon starts in one week. I have never been before; for that matter, I have never been to any Pagan event like this except for the Heartland Pagan Festival and St. Louis’s Pagan Pride Day. The last time I went to Heartland, the attendance was, I think, around six or seven hundred. I’m told Pantheacon is about four times that big. That’s a lot of people to meet. Supposedly I should have gotten ribbons, but business cards will have to do for now.

“Take a look at this,” I say to my girlfriend. We live in different cities at the moment, a moment that has lasted nearly the entirety of our relationship, so this conversation happens over Facebook. I send her a picture of a business card design I made up on the Office Depot website. “Is it hideous?”

The card is blue and green, vertically aligned. At the top is a surreal picture, the silhouette of a man standing in the center of a pyramid whose walls are made of a starscape, a sky dotted with clouds, and a field. Below that, my pitch: “Eric O. Scott, Author, Blogger, Memoirist. Contributor to Killing the Buddha, Patheos, Pagan Square, and the Wild Hunt.” Below that, an array of contact info.

“Hideous is way too strong a word,” she says. “Though it’s wordy. What’s the story on that picture, anyway?”

“It was the only thing that popped up when I searched for ‘New Age.’” Office Depot, as expected, had no results at all for “Wiccan” or “Pagan.”

“The graphic doesn’t seem very you,” she says. “You are more of a tree than a mystical triangle thing. You have roots.”

This may well be the sweetest thing she’s ever said to me.

Saturday

Today is the big Mardi Gras parade down in the Soulard neighborhood of St. Louis. I don’t go to the parade – I had to work the night before, so I slept, instead – but in the afternoon I go to my parents’ party. They throw one every year, ever since my mother developed a love for New Orleans after spending a long weekend there with her a friends a decade and a half ago. Sometimes I am struck by the oddity of our fervor for an ostensibly Catholic holiday, the point of Mardi Gras being a final explosion of indulgence before the long austerity of Lent.

Then again, I suspect the majority of people getting drunk at 11 AM down in Soulard don’t plan to give up anything until Easter, either, so perhaps we’re just playing along.

They draw a big crowd this year, dozens of hungry mouths waiting to scoop out bowls of jambalaya and gumbo. People stake out their spots out on the patio, in the living room, or in the kitchen, the last of these being obviously the prime location. My dad’s friends congratulate me on my upcoming book, much to my discomfort. My aunt attempts to play the tambourine and mostly fails. It’s a good party.

A friend of the family shows up later on, once most of the food is gone. She goes to Pantheacon most years, though she won’t be there this time. (I’m secretly grateful she is staying home; I know myself well enough to know that I tend to cling to the people I know when I’m in a crowded room. The best insurance against my own shyness is to simply not know anybody.) She gives me a list of recommendations: bring a cup, keep track of time, don’t get star-struck when Margot Adler passes by. (No promises.)

“And try not to stand in the back of the elevator, if you can help it,” she adds. “There’s a guy there who will try to grab your ass if you aren’t careful.”

Something to look forward to, I guess.

Sunday

Today is a road day. I’m heading east, to Champaign, Illinois, where my girlfriend goes to graduate school. I’m working on three hours of sleep and a Coke. I miss the turn off from Highway 55 and have to circle back around, lest I end up in Bloomington and add to my girlfriend’s ledger of Evidence That I Am Bad At Directions.

It’s going to be a packed week. Four nights in Champaign, followed by another day of driving on Thursday to be home in time for my father’s birthday dinner. (Yes, he was born on Valentine’s Day.) Then a 6 AM flight to San Jose, followed by…

Something. I don’t know what, yet.

As I have noted before, I am a statistical freak. Pagans-and-Heathens-and-Polytheists – look, you know what I’m talking about – we are, by and large, converts from Something Else. My parents were both Low Protestant Christians in their childhoods. I know some ex-Catholics, some ex-Lutherans, some ex-atheists. But I was born into it. It’s all I’ve ever known. And that has non-obvious consequences.

Here’s a big one: I’ve never gone looking for a Pagan community, because I’ve always had one of my own. While I’ve known of other Pagans in the places I’ve lived – my dad infamously engaged in open warfare with certain St. Louis Pagans in the days of listservs – I’ve never sought them out myself with the hope of making connections or friendships. I considered myself as isolated from the “greater Pagan community” as I was from mainstream religions, an outlier to both, my life holding little in common with anyone else’s. (As a teenager, I would occasionally meet another teen who had just declared themselves a Witch and hear the inevitable conversion narrative. “Sure, my parents made me go to church, but in my heart I know I’ve always been Pagan.” I would smile, but inside, I always thought, “Really? Because my heart never told me that, and I actually -was- always Pagan.”)

I’m told that Pantheacon is a friendly place, that I’ll find the place inviting. I hope so, of course. But still, it’s an awful long way from home.

I make it to Champaign before dark. I kiss my girlfriend hello and say nothing about missing the turn.

Monday

Today my girlfriend spends her time preparing for the oral examination of her qualifying papers, which will be held tomorrow. Late in the evening I watch her rehearsing with her PowerPoint. Slides flash by, full of citations for studies into Russian language acquisition and data points for the relative cultural prestige of languages in Kazakhstan. Though my life revolves around language, it’s over my head; I only took one semester of Linguistics, and that was years ago.

I spend most of the day doing crossword puzzles, writing, and reading anything that comes across the Pantheacon Twitter feed. The CAYA coven posts their packing list, which seems useful, though I have no idea what counts as “necessary” ritual gear; I’ve only done ritual with strangers a handful of times. (Can you stow an athame in a suitcase? What if it’s wrapped in a sock?) The Pantheacon site suggests only picking three “must-see” events a day, as there simply isn’t time to see it all. I glance at the schedule I’d set out, which has only three empty slots throughout the weekend.

I get the feeling that I am not prepared for this, that I have decided to dive into a cenote without first learning how to swim. By nature, I am a solitary person, accustomed to sharing my religious life only with my family. I am all too aware that my experience with the “greater Pagan community” has, for the most part, come only at the safe distance of a computer screen. In a few days I will find myself standing in the middle of a convention full of strangers in California, strangers with whom I may have many more points of divergence than similarity. My vision of that coming throng scares me a little.

And then, I shrug. Oh well. So what if I’m anxious? There’s nothing to do with the unknown but conquer or be killed by it. The flight’s already booked; the business cards have been printed. The dark water glints at the bottom of the pit. The only thing left now is to jump.

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Cousin Gabriel

Eric Scott —  January 18, 2013 — 10 Comments

Soulard Restoration Church at 1216 Sidney Street in St. Louis, MO. The building once housed an Assembly of God congregation.

 

Ask my cousin Gabriel about his ’56 Chevy sometime. He’ll tell you all kinds of stories about that car – stories that never end up quite the same way, but always share the same basic formula: cruising around town, running into pretty girls, picking them up and going to the movies. The story tastes like pure Americana; I almost expect Veronica and Jughead to show up.

Gabriel has never had a ’56 Chevy; he’s never driven a car. When he was a child, he fell from a second-story porch at my grandparents’ home on Cherokee Street in south St. Louis, and it left him with brain damage. He has never been able to live on his own. But Gabriel is a vigorous storyteller, and even if you’ve heard his stories a dozen times before, you’ll ask him again, listening for the quirks of the telling, the details whose source you can’t imagine. My father gets wistful when he tells me about Gabriel’s stories: “They’re like fantasies of the life he never had.”

Gabriel was born in 1950, six years before my dad. During his childhood, my dad spent nearly every weekend with Gabriel at his family’s house in Cahokia, Illinois. My grandparents would play cards with Gabriel’s parents, while dad spent time with the boys – for Gabriel, along with his brothers Jerome and Sid, both born with developmental disabilities, were always thought of “the boys,” no matter how old they were. Dad especially liked spending time with Gabriel, because of their shared propensity for wild lies.

Dad and Gabriel would ride their bikes around Cahokia, usually without incident. But Cahokia wasn’t a big place in the 60′s, and everybody knew their family. Occasionally some older kid would decide to pick on the retarded boys, and my dad would be the one around to defend them – usually by yelling to hustle back home. Even though he was younger than Gabriel, my father always felt protective towards him – paternalistic, even. He had to. Gabriel couldn’t do it for himself. He wasn’t equipped for it.

It’s strange to think how a child’s instincts could shape my own life – how I, almost fifty years later, could be defined by one question asked by someone so young.

*                      *                      *

“Your aunt and I went to Sunday school at the Assembly of God Church on Sidney, between 12th and 13th streets,” my father tells me. That building still exists, though it now houses a different Assembly of God congregation. My grandparents never went to church themselves, but they sent their children, saying it would be good for their souls. “I think they mostly just wanted a couple of hours to themselves on Sunday morning,” dad says.

The children never went into the main church building. Instead they spent their time in another building, where they were broken up into groups led by youth pastors. They almost never saw the preacher himself, who spent all of his time attending to the congregation’s adults – the “paying customers,” as dad puts it. He was ten years old or so at the time of this story – “old enough to be larcenous,” as he puts it. “My mom would give me a dollar to put in the till. I would sneak off to the corner store and buy fifty cents worth of penny candy with the Lord’s money.”

The youth pastors had liked my dad ever since he’d won a contest for reciting the Ten Commandments from memory. He won a silver-colored ring from the contest, square-faced with an indented cross in the center. He remembers being so proud of the ring that he wanted to wear it all the time, but it turned his skin a greenish gray and smell strange. He was, apparently, allergic to the cross.

The youth pastors called the preacher in shortly after that. Every now and then, the preacher came by the Sunday school and trawled teenagers and promising children about getting saved. They had taken dad’s victory in the contest as proof of his loyalty to God, and thought he was a prime candidate. So the pastors put a chair before him, had him kneel down, and had him place his elbows on the seat, ready to pray.

“Are you ready to get saved, son?” they asked him.

“I wasn’t really clear on what that meant,” says dad. “People had talked about getting saved, had said they were so glad they had done it, but I didn’t know what it was. To be honest, I wasn’t really concerned with religion at that point. I was more concerned about comic books.” He pauses. “They played me winning that contest as a sign of devotion, but I just wanted to win the prize.”

So he asked what it meant.

The preacher straightened up and said being saved meant you understood and accepted a handful of things – things you had to say out loud, things you had to mean:

You had to understand that you were a sinner.

You had to understand that, as a sinner, you were bound for Hell.

You had to understand that only Jesus could save you from that fate.

You had to confess to the Lord that you were a sinner, and that only He could save you.

And you had to accept Jesus as your personal savior.

“They made their case on an emotional level,” my dad says. “‘Be afraid of this awful fate. You’re in danger. You need the Lord’s protection.” But their message relied on fear, and dad wasn’t afraid. “Maybe I didn’t know enough to be scared,” he says. “I wasn’t afraid of the devil. I was afraid of my father.” This became an intellectual proposition to him – an invitation to debate. And so he made a counter-proposal.

“What about my cousin Gabriel?” he asked.

Dad doesn’t know why Gabriel came to mind, though he guesses, it having been a Sunday, he had probably visited Gabriel the day before. He explained to the preacher about his cousin, about his fall from the porch before he could have possibly understood any of those questions, before he could have understood what it meant to sin or that he needed to be saved. It wasn’t his fault; he couldn’t do it for himself. He wasn’t equipped for it.

So what happens to Gabriel?

“The preacher gave me a look like they give you when your dog has to be put down,” dad says. “And he looked down at the ground, shook his head, and said, ‘Well, he’s going to hell, son.’”

“Then I’m going with him.”

The preacher tried to talk him out of it, tried to tell him that he needed to look out for his own soul, not to worry about the fate of other people. (This seems like strange advice from a person whose professional duty is to save other people’s souls.) But dad stood up and walked out, waited at the bus stop for his sister to come out. When he got home, he told my grandfather that he didn’t want to go to Sunday school anymore.

And he didn’t. That moment in the Assembly of God on Sidney had ruined him for Christianity. And although he could not know it – indeed, could not know the road it would lead him down himself – he set the course of my life in motion that day. I owe the strange chance of my religion to a ten-year-old’s question and a preacher’s abominable answer. I feel both horrified and grateful.

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The Gifts of Madame Death

Eric Scott —  November 16, 2012 — 19 Comments
Image taken at the Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis, MO

Death and Birth at the Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis, MO.
Image by William Scott.

Madame Death’s dressed all in black and seated next to a battered metal table. We do not look at her, or touch her, or do anything else to acknowledge her. For her part, she says nothing, but only watches our circle while we partake in the first communion of the night: water and crackers, nothing else.

We chew on this meager harvest, and for a moment, at least, we forget that we stand in the backyard of a house in St. Louis, Missouri, a house with electricity, heat, and more food waiting in the kitchen than we could possibly eat in one night. The ritual takes us to a darker place, a hungry place, a pit in our collective unconscious that knows that the coming months bring a time want and death. We know that we travel through a gate tonight, a gate on the road between bountiful autumn and desperate winter, and the gate is called Samhain.

For me, this Samhain cuts deeper. I expect it is the same for the rest of Sabbatsmeet, too – Sabbatsmeet being a group of covens and unattached Witches that share the festivals together. I have been a part of one of those covens, Pleiades, since I was born. We range from infants – little Julian, less than a year old – to retirees. Most of us have been a part of Sabbatsmeet for decades. This is my family, the same or more so than my legal relatives. And this year, our family has been visited by Madame Death.

“We have come to the part of the ceremony where we remember the dead,” my father says. He sets the cup and the plate, now barren even of simple grain and water, on the battered table. “Speak their names, and remember them.”

I don’t recognize most of the names spoken: people who were known and loved by someone within our circle, but who were not of the circle themselves. Sometimes we mention someone better known: a writer, or a musician. (Someone says “Whitney Houston,” and the circle goes quiet save for a few badly-suppressed snickers.) But we all knew the name that hung heaviest on our hearts.

“Barb,” says my father, the first name called.

Madame Death came to her this year. She arrived after a lengthy correspondence, the culmination of many years of cancer. We had barely seen her in years – her health had been too poor, and she had lived too far away, to travel to St. Louis for the sabbats. But still, we missed her – she had been ours, and now, she was gone. Her absence felt like January wind through a broken window.

I do not cry in the moment’s silence that follows. Instead, just as Barb’s name is called a second time, a memory floods in…

Another Samhain, more than a decade ago. I was 13, perhaps. There was no traditional ritual that year, but instead a sort of haunted house… We wandered through the halls of a familiar place made strange, encountering forms we knew and personalities we did not. I can’t remember the things they said anymore, except for one.

I remember walking into the bedroom, lit in sensuous, dangerous red. A woman with wild auburn hair sits on the bed, dressed all in black. She smiles, and it’s Barb’s smile, but possessed by the spirit of the night. She curls a finger, beckoning me to come closer.

“Oh, Groucho,” she says. “I’ve been waiting all night for you…”

My mind fills with the echo of Barb’s voice, a voice never to be heard again.

For many of those around me, I am sure the pain of Barb’s death comes from the memory of their time together – the years of shared experience, inside and outside the ritual, that make up a friendship. It’s not quite the same for me, being younger, a child of the second generation of Sabbatsmeet. I loved Barb, but I knew her entirely from Sabbatsmeet. I knew of her life outside – that she was a foster mother and a social worker, for example – but I knew her from Wicca. And her death, the third loss our circle had suffered in as many years, forced me to confront an inescapable truth: our family was aging. Some day Madame Death would come to my elders. Someday I would call their names at Samhain.

When we are finished with the calling, my parents tell us to join hands and close our eyes. I take their hands, feel the bones of their fingers twined into mine.

I doubt it would do much good to describe my meditation-visions; they were largely darkness, a dance between night and the ritual fire. Sometimes I thought I could see some of those we had lost: Tom, or Kurt, or Image. Once I thought I saw Barb, dressed forever in the Samhain black of memory. But mostly I felt the heat of the fire, and the cold of the air, and the warmth of my family’s hands pressed to mine.

My father’s voice called me back to consciousness. “Look now,” he says, “Look upon the true gift of Death.”

Madame Death opens her black robe. Beneath her hood, she is a redheaded woman, smiling. In her lap sits a serene infant – little Julian.

Because Madame Death is also Madame Life, my father explains, because every act of destruction leads to space for creation to happen, because without loss there can be no magic – and to most Wiccans, all of this will, of course, be old hat. You will have heard this all before, in books and speeches and rituals. But it’s good to be reminded of it on Samhain, reminded of why, to Wiccans, this is the most important night of the year.

I appreciate that, but it’s what my father says next that strikes me clean to the heart.

“In twenty or thirty years, some of us will be gone, and it will be Julian standing here, saying our names.” He pauses. “And that is a good thing.”

The current narrative in the United States, at the moment I write this, is that the nation has begun to change, that the dominant culture of white suburban Protestantism has begun to give way towards something more diverse. I can’t say how true that is. Life here in Missouri still feels quite entrenched in the culture the media pundits tell me has begun dying away.

But still. I look at Julian, with the serious eyes and the inviting cheeks, Julian, who is the child of my brother in Coven Pleiades, Julian, whose father and father’s father have stood in this circle before him. I look at this child, and in him I see everything I have ever been given and everything I have it in me to give. I look at him, and I see the future of our religion. Even more important than our religion, I see the future of our family, of us.

Someday my parents will be dead. Someday I will, too. Someday Julian will be an old man, and if I am lucky, he will call my name at Samhain. Someday Julian himself will have taken the hand of Madame Death, and some other child, a child whose face I can barely imagine now, will be standing in the circle that her great-grandparents once knew.

We drink at last the second communion, the honey wine and delicious cakes, singing “Hoof and Horn” as we pass the cup and plate from hand to hand. We remember the dead, but we celebrate the living.

In the lap of Madame Death, the little baby stares at the ritual fire, and then lets out a sharp and vital shout.

It is a good thing.

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