Here are some ruminations that I have accumulated over my years of practice. Over time, these will move to subpages as new ruminations bubble up ....
To dye or not to dye ....
'Tis the season for Ostara. Is it okay for pagans to color eggs? (!!!!)
This is an interesting question. On the one hand, coloring eggs begins with pagans. Granted the color was usually red and only red --- way back in the beginning. But, the point remains. Coloring eggs is a very pagan thing to do.
Eggs celebrate the potentiality of life. new beginnings, the turning of the Wheel of the Year.
Still, I have heard pagans express reservation about dying eggs at Spring Equinox because the practice has been so thoroughly assumed by Christian traditions. Don't believe me? Google 'colored eggs'. Google will automatically insert 'Easter' into the search term.
So, is it a betrayal of your pagan beliefs to dye eggs for the Spring Equinox? Is it submission to the religious authorities that you have walked away from?
I don't think so. We can participate in this activity without rebellious rancor. We aren't "taking back" something that someone stole from us. The practice was always there. Yes, others have put their spin on it. That's what human societies do. They borrow, they adapt, they assimilate. It doesn't mean that the originating society has to abandon something that has a unique meaning to it.
So, as you plan your Ostara, Spring Equinox, Eostre, Austre,Navruz or Shunbun no Hi observations, throw a few colored eggs in there (gently, of course). It's fun. It's appropriate. It's a celebration of the season.
Lughnasadh
August 1 marks the start of the harvest season at Lughnasadh in the Northern Hemisphere. The name of the ritual varies depending on the source. Some call it Lammas or loaf mass. It can also be spelled Lunasa or Lunasda.
However, you spell it, Lughnasadh is associated with Lugh, a sun god and warrior who lead the Tuatha De Danann in battle against the Formorians. It’s interesting to note that, while we call it Lughnasadh after the god, legend tells us this time was not set aside to honor Lugh’s achievements. Lugh set this time aside to honor his foster mother, Tailtiu, for her sacrifice for her tribe.
This is the first harvest. For many Pagans, it is the grain harvest, soon to be followed by the fruit harvest at the Fall Equinox and last, by the blood sacrifice at Samhain.
For me and fellow members of the House of Akasha in North Carolina, this is a time to get back to our agrarian roots. Whatever the Gregorian calendar says, Summer is over. The plants are tired and seem to be looking forward to rest – whether that means a final death in the compost heap or a respite from the chore of producing fruit until next season.
When the House was first forming about eight years ago, we wondered how to honor this season. Somehow, Lughnasadh feels like the red-haired stepchild of Pagan holidays. It doesn’t seem to have the high energy of the Summer Solstice. But, it’s not quite as festive as Mabon, with its anticipation of all those wonderful Fall activities.
We came up with the idea of have our own version of the Tailteann games. We light heartedly called them the Low Country Games, which, if you know much about North Carolina, was a poke at the Highland Games held at Grandfather Mountain.
We could have played pickup basketball or soccer or volleyball. But instead, we decided to try to emulate older games. That meant doing a caber toss, a boulder toss and a spear toss. Mind you, at the time, we didn’t really take into account that we were Irish Celtic Reconstructionists putting on Scottish-style games.
The problem was, we were a motley crew with limited funds and we didn’t have any bits of Scottish gaming equipment. What do good Pagans do? We improvised.
I cut a length of oak for the caber toss. It wasn’t the standard 19 feet, 6 inches long and it wasn’t made of larch. It was about five feet long, about six inches in diameter and it weighed a ton because it was cut from green wood! But it was a length of wood that most of us could at least manage to pick up, if not toss end over end.
For the boulder toss, no one really wanted to try to heave a huge boulder. One of our members came up with the idea of using an old bowling ball. Fortunately, it was an eight-pounder and relatively easy to grasp. Plus, the owner didn’t care that we would be chucking it around in a gravel driveway, guaranteeing it would nicked and dented when we were done with it.
For our spear, a more enterprising member resurrected his Boy Scout skills, found an old spear point in a storage trunk and scrounged a relatively straight branch from the nearby woods. It might have earned him points with his old Scout troop but it certainly wasn’t going to challenge one of the four treasures of the Tuatha De Danann.
On the day of the first Low Country games, we all gathered in the late day heat of Summer to try our hand. It was a pitiful sight and nothing that would get any of us inside the gates of Tara.
The majority of us wrestled the caber up about hip high. A couple did manage to get the log to fly end-over-end. Most found they could at least toss it away from their bodies with an “oomph,” a groan and a sigh.
The bowling ball toss wasn’t much better. The average distance tossed was probably six feet. One “athlete” scored a good 11-foot toss. There were cheers and hurrahs all around until the bowling ball rolled back toward the group. We forgot to take into account the slight incline in the driveway.
For the spear toss, the incline wasn’t a real problem. We set up a hay bale roughly 15 feet away from the toss area. This game turned out to be the most thrilling, mainly because we discovered the bend in the spear shaft and the unfortunate lack of balance between the shaft and the point made our spear a primitive ballistic missile without much of a guidance system.
After about the third warrior, someone figured out that the best way to hit the hay bale was to aim for the nearby ditch.
We didn’t set any Olympian records but, as the light of the day ended and we headed to ritual, there were definitely winners to be honored. More importantly, we had stories to tell over the balefire. Heroes were humbled; losers were heckled as only family can do.
Since those first games, we have gradually acquired a proper spear, a bow and arrow set, some shot puts and discus. We have added some games and given up others. The idea to have a hatchet toss was probably the least well-advised. A possible future addition might be games of mental dexterity for those of us who are less athletically inclined. After all, we all can’t be warriors and jocks.
The entire concept of attempting ancient games may be a bit silly. We have found a number of benefits. Some of our members are natural coaches with infinite patience to school other members in the mysterious ways of the discus or the bow.
Those of us who cringed in middle or high school at the humiliation of being clumsy at sports have a safe haven to try the things we always secretly wanted to try.
However, the most important outcome of our Lughnasadh Low Country games is the bonding agent they create in the stories that we can share from year to year. We have stories of triumph. We have stories of valiant effort. We have brave challenges to carry us into the Winter and taunts of “Wait until next year!”
And, that is what Lughnasadh has come to mean for the House. It is a time of revelry. It is a connection to a not too distant past when our great-grandparents came together at first harvest to help each other bring in the corn or cotton. They didn’t call it Lughnasadh but it was a celebration of the season as surely as our festival today.
That is because, when the hard work was done, families that had gathered for the grain harvest stayed a few days more. They feasted. They sang and danced. They told stories. They enjoyed games of strength and games of chance, with all the bragging and ribbing those activities entail.