The late fall season is upon us. The last bit of crops have been brought in, I've been busily winterizing my house in preparation for the deep cold of winter, and there is a sense of the world dying as it turns towards darkness. As is typical for modern pagan types, this leads to a focus in this season on our beloved dead. This is particularly meaningful to me this year, as I have lost a number of people close to me, including a relative.
Fall equinox is upon us, and this enters my favorite season of the year. It's just the right temperature to be out and about, and there's usually lots of great fresh food about. This year, I find that I've come to a point where work I had started a long time ago comes to fruition, and collecting and enjoying the results of all that labor is very much the feel of the season. And that led to the theme of my latest song, both remembering what it took to get there, and also taking those all-important final steps to be able to benefit from it.
The rites of Lughnassadh are named, unsurprisingly, after the Irish deity Lugh. Among Lugh's greatest deeds was his role in the overthrow of a tyrannical king named Bres. This led to a longstanding theme of Lughnassadh as the celebration of the sometimes necessary work of the warrior in protecting their people from the evils of the world. And in this time of humans trying to reassert their value while various overlords try to replace them with robots, it seemed like we ought to look at the stories around this battle for inspiration on how we can insist on our own value as creative beings who are part of the network of life.
Midsummer is upon us, and that means that the crops are planted and growing, the sun is high, and the animals are moving around hunting for food. It really does feel like the sky-fire of the sun and stars are concentrated at this time and have their greatest influence on our lives. So here's a song in honor of that.
In this time of year, in the late spring, modern paganism at least tends to focus its attentions on 2 main themes: The first is new life and fertility in all its glory and forms, and the second is celebrating animism, the idea that physical things in the world have some kind of living spirit. There's debate about whether the physical thing includes a spirit automatically, or whether it's more that spirits can move about on their own and have chosen to dwell inside that physical thing, but either way you wind up with something like a tree or stone or animal or body of water with a spirit of some kind attached. Once you have that idea, the next logical step is to try to make the spirit happy by giving gifts and labor to make their home a better place to dwell, in the hopes that they will return the favor or at the very least not bring you harm. So this song is about that idea, the process of identifying a spirit in the world around you and getting some ideas about what it might want from you, and why you should give to it.