❝Cult of fairy❞
“But yes, this is between you and him.”Read More...— Shawn Herles, comments from Pagan Community Notes: exorcism and hexing, Canada Pagan community, Michigan Scholarship Fund, and more.
Encyclopædia Brittanica gets it wrong
I've been working on version 3 of my lexicon. It's steady work, and helps calm me. I don't write all the definitions, I take clips if I can find well written ones.
So I was looking at Brittanica's Quarter Day page, which actually refers to the Lammas page.
““The Quarter Days—Candlemas (February 2), May Day (May 1), Lammas, and All Saints’ Day (November 1)—marked the four quarters of the calendar as observed in the British Isles and elsewhere in northern Europe. ””Every single reference I've ever seen from Valiente forward calls these the cross quarter days, they mark the transitions between the season. The actual quarter days are the solstices and the equinoxes. It helps if you visualize the year as a wheel.
— Encyclopædia Brittanica, Lammas
The second mistake is about May Day, and I am pretty sure it's a translation error and misunderstanding about agriculture. I'll just quote my own note here.
❝Enclyclopædia Britannica has it wrong here, it's a very common mistake. In some European countries especially further north, there were two seasons, winter and summer. May Day traditionally marks the beginning of the growing season, not the beginning of spring. If the summer solstice is midsummer, that makes May Day the beginning of summer.❞I doubt that anyone except a calendar geek or a pagan would have caught it. But when you're both at once, you have to tell people.— NeoWayland, May Day
Not evil
“The so-called Dark Side is not wholly an evil or negative place or force; after all, some things remain in the shadows because we've placed them there out of fear and squeamishness.”
Sometimes humans are silly
“Circles”
“Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.”
“Eternal winter twilight - Norway”
Warm Autumn in Arizona
Dreaming
❝Invoke science as an unquestionable authority and someone will show the truth behind the curtain. That’s the nature of science.❞— NeoWayland
Stranger
Mosaics
“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of the dream.
Wandering by lone sea breakers, and sitting by desolate streams.
World losers and world forsakers, for whom the pale moon gleams.
Yet we are movers and the shakers of the world forever it seems.”— Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy
Winter begins
Wintergate is my three day WebTree High Holiday that marks the gateway between autumn and winter. The middle day (tomorrow) of the holiday is the cross quarter day or midpoint between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice.
Wintergate also marks my semi-annual Hair ot the Bear. I did it myself yesterday this year. This autumn made me prickly, I've been trying not to take it out on the people around me that I care about. That includes my companions, bless their hearts. Well, my mood should start improving in a couple of days. Then I owe them both big time.
So it's with shorter hair and hot chocolate that I anticipate this High Holiday. Solar Festivals last from dawn to dawn, but High Holidays last from sunset to sunset. I still have a few hours to prepare.
And that means I need to put this entry up.
Bright & Dark Blessings, everyone.