This Weblog has Moved to http://scrivener.circleofthedarkmoon.org

We've moved. This weblog for the Circle of the Dark Moon Coven and Witchcraft/Magick school has moved to http://scrivener.circleofthedarkmoon.org. Say goodbye to the 800 pound google-plex gorilla with delusions of being microsoft and disney combined and say hello to Wordpress running on our own server and in our own domain.


Be sure visit this blog at its new home. Also, once you're at our new home you may want to update your links and RSS subscriptions. I hope to see everyone at our new web location.

I wonder whether I might've spammed our new location link a little too much.

*sigh*

I wish these interminable website changes would finally be finished so I can get back to writing. 

Stop Stealing Bandwidth

Some of you may have seen this image before. In fact, some you may have seen it recently when you signed on to whatever social fritter-your-time-away-with-twitter networking site you subscribe to. Expecting to see your avatar, you instead saw my little message to you.

Your immediate reaction was probably something along the lines of "what an asshole. He took down the picture I was using and replaced it with this stop sign graphic. Doesn't he know that everything on the internet is supposed to be free. How dare he. Now I have to find another f***ing picture for my avatar."

Well children, if you had played nice I wouldn't have taken away your picture. In fact at the time, all the graphics on my site were able to be downloaded. It was only when I'd found literally hundreds of links to that graphic did I take action.

I'm not going to go into a big lecture here about hotlinking. Anybody savvy enough to hotlink already knows that it is theft of bandwidth--or maybe you don't.Hence, the reason I'm not too up in arms.

Anyway since it's so popular, I've posted the now notorious pentacle02a picture below this paragraph. Make as many copies as you like, or even hotlink to it. This picture is on Blogger, and not my servers so I don't care.

In a way I'm flattered that the graphic is so popular. But since we run many applications on our servers including a large database, we really need all the bandwidth we can muster. I know, I know by even having that graphic up there is allowing site hits. I was hoping people would get the message with the stop sign graphic.

Anyway, as I said, below is the original pentacle02a.jpg picture courtesy of Circle of the Dark Moon.

Enjoy the graphic.

Meetup is dead; long live www.circleofthedarkmoon.org, Huzzah!

This announcement has been a long time in coming.

Effective July 20, The Circle of the Dark Moon ™ Meetup sites in Warner Robins, GA and Akron, OH will no longer be available. All further group activities, for that matter any activities, announcements, or class scheduling will be coordinated through http://circleofthedarkmoon.org.

As I said at the first, this announcement has been a long time in coming. The original time frame for the changeover was May/June of this year. However, problems with the database implementation offered by our ISP eventually led to us having to host the database on our own servers. That solution took longer to arrive at than we hoped.

Why are we making this change?
There are several good reasons that we’re shifting all activity to our domain.

1. It’s been a lot of work maintaining three sites: the Warner Robins meetup, the Akron meetup, and our own domain site, which ultimately suffered because we spent too much time maintaining the meetup sites. The biggest chore was maintaining accurate calendars of activities for all three sites. The new calendar page that lists activities for both Warner Robins and Akron (including class times) is located at http://circleofthedarkmoon.org/calendar.asp.
As you will note, the calendar widget is powered by Google and is free—always a good price in these hard economic times. Sorry, everyone else is overusing phrase for his or her own ends so I thought would too.

2. It’s been expensive maintaining the meetup sites. We’ve been paying meetup.com $19 USD / month essentially for the privilege of using free tools wrapped in a website and a UNIX CHRON job. By dumping Meetup.com, we’ll have more time and monetary resources to expand the functionality of our own website. Planned enhancements to the http://circleofthedarkmoon.org website include the following:

a. Add the ability to upload your picture or an avatar.

b. Add a member list page along the lines of meetup.

c. Addition of a forums page. In fact we’ll be using the same forum engine that meetup uses. This is a free forum application. It’s as I said earlier, meetup essentially cobbled a bunch of free applications together in a website wrapper and charges $19 a month to use the site. Well, good for them but we refuse to pay them any longer.

d. Add a page to edit your account settings This is the next enhancement and should be complete no later than the first week of August.

e. Overhaul some of the content.

f. Begin assigning email addresses to registered users from our domain so they don’t have to use their personal email addresses.

3. We think it’s important for us to increase our web presence and search engine popularity by moving our content back onto our own domain instead of having our content make meetup more popular in web searches.

What does this mean to me?

The most important thing for you to do is to register at http://circleofthedarkmoon.org. Go to our homepage, and click “Membership” on the menu. You’ll be taken to a page where you can register your information—note that we require very little personal information. Registration is easy and shouldn’t take as long to complete as reading this post.

Aside from having to register at our site, nothing else really changes. We are not dissolving or going away. We’re still going to be the most active teaching coven in Georgia; we’re still going to hold in-person and online classes; and we’re still going to be holding open circles for all sabbats and esbats. And, all registered users will continue to receive email updates about upcoming events and other items of interest. We’re just not going to be listed on meetup any longer.

What happens on 20 July?

We’ve spoken (well emailed) Meetup.com about this and the only way they will delete a meetup group (even group owners cannot delete their own groups) is if a meetup group has no members.

WTF?

If I merely step down as organizer or leave meetup, meetup.com will open up the sites to be taken over by anyone with $19 in their wallets. Apparently, meetup is more concerned about getting their monthly extortion than protecting the privacy of meetup members. By allowing any Tom, Dick, or Johnny-joined-lately spammer (and yes spammers watch meetup for groups that are open for new organizers) all of your personal information is at risk.

Therefore, in order to get meetup to shut these groups down, we are going to delete all the members from each meetup group on 20 July. You will receive an email to that effect and the reason for being removed from the group will be something to effect that this meetup group is being moved to Circle of the Dark Moon domain.

Please don’t take offense at being removed. It’s not because you did anything wrong. We’re doing this to protect your privacy. Belief us we’d rather not do it. It’s going to be a pain manually removing almost 200 members.

Yes, I’m finally done with this long post.

We don’t want to leave anyone dry-docked as it were especially the Akron area members. We’d been working with a couple of assistant organizers there to facilitate local meetings and possibly even arrange for group rituals. We can certainly still use the help, so any interested parties including current assistant organizers should contact us via http://circleofthedarkmoon.org/ContactUs.asp.

In closing, there are just a couple of things to remember:

1. Register at http://circleofthedarkmoon.org. (if you’ve already registered there you don’t have to register again.

2. Please don’t take offense at being removed from the meetup groups.

3. And please accept our apologies concerning the “last minuteness” of this announcement. We thought we were paid up through the end of the month with meetup since they’ve been charging our credit card the first of the month. This would of given about a two week notice before the shutdown, but according to meetup we’re only paid up until 20 July.

On behalf of myself, Duir, my wife, and fellow coven sisters and brothers, we hope to merry meet all of you again at our/your site: http://circleofthedarkmoon.org.

This announcement will be repeated this weekend and on the day of the 20th. In addition a copy of this announcement will be placed in the forums and our website blog.

Meetup is dead.

Long live The Circle of the Dark Moon. HIP HIP HUZZAH!

Dedications 2008

Congratulations to our new dedicants for 2008.

Dedication is usually a first step for coveners as well as solitaires. It is a group or personal declaration of intent to follow the Wiccan path and always strive to honor the Gods, increase your knowledge of the craft, and live by the rede. Within traditions such as the Dark Moon tradition dedication is usually followed after a period of study (traditionally a year and a day) which leads to a first degree (the dedicant is now considered a true witch).

After a first degree comes a second degree where the witch now takes on the responsibility of teaching first-years and additional coven responsibilities.

Upon attaining a third degree a witch may decide to leave the coven and hive-off forming their own coven. For those third degree witches remaining in the coven, there are adept and master adept degrees.

Our dedicant list for this year include (alphabetically)

Amanda B
Andrea
Barbara
Danika
Leroy
Lisa + Steve
Rae (dedicated remotely)

Congratulations dedicants.

Bealtaine Rune

Our bard has once again taken it upon himself to rewrite the Witches' Rune (oh the blasphemy for the dogmatically impaired.) I hope you like it. Use it in your ritual if you like. What he's wriiten really does capture the spirit of Beltane in 28 lines.

Bealtaine Rune

A Maying, a Maying we come between April and June.
Hearken unto the Bealtaine Rune.
East then South, West then North,
Dance about the Maypole then sally forth!

A nutting, a nutting we will go,
from sunset ‘till Beltane morn’s first glow.
We’ll look for nuts ‘neath streamers of the Maypole.
If we can’t find any, off to the greenwood we’ll go.

Out of sight, we’ll pick flowers by the dim light.
Don’t look for us; we’ll be out all night.
We’ll gather hawthorn and alder decorated with balls bright,
Twined like lovers laying the night’s delights.

It’s so very dark here in the greenwoods.

We might meet Little John Maid Marian, or Robin Hod.

Come harvest will be a new crop to remember this May Eve:

Hodsons, Robinsons, Johnsons more than you might believe.

Horned hunter of the night,
with the Goddess by his side,
Embrace and smile to see such a sight,

Couples everywhere beyond the balefire’s light.

Back to the fire for one last run.

Bid farewell to the Goddess and the Horned One.

By the power of the Moon and Sun,

Jump the flame for luck and because it’s fun.

By the morning light we’ll parade our charade.
With woven boughs and garlands we made,
We’ll leave flowers and nuts in each doorway,
As a pretense for spending May Eve in the glade.

A Beltane Primer

I found this article about Beltane on paganweb.com.
Beltane is a fertility festival, concerned with Nature enchantments and offerings to wildlings and Elementals. The return of full-blown fertility is now very evident. The powers of elves and fairies are growing and will reach their height at the Summer Solstice.

Beltane, most commonly pronounced "BELL-tayn", but also can be "BEEL-teen", "BEEL-tawn-uh", or "B'YAL-tinn", is one of the Greater Pagan Sabbats and is usually celebrated on May 1st. In the Celtic tradition it is celebrated on May 1st or the first Full Moon in Taurus. The Scottish tradition of PectiWita celebrate their Sabbat on May 15th.

Other names used for this Sabbat are Bealtaine (Irish Wittan), Whitsun or Old Bhealltainn (Scottish PectiWita), Bealtinne (Caledonii or the Druids), Samhradh and La Baal Tinne (Faery Wicca), Roodmas, Rudemas (Mexican Craft), Walburga (Teutonic), Walpurgisnacht (German), Walpurgis Eve, Celtic Summer, Giamonios, Tana's Day - La Giornata di Tana (Aridian Strega), Floralia, The Great Rite, May Day, and May Eve. It is also known as Cetshamain in Ireland, and is one of the few specifically Irish festivals.

Beltane is the time of year when we celebrate new life, fertility and the earth's ripe abundance in all its forms. It is a time of pure joy, bliss, and playfulness.

For many, crops are planted and animals bred. As Pagans we honor the divine union of the God and Goddess, and the consummation of that marriage which we believe symbolically fertilizes our crops, our animals, and ourselves. It is also a time of beginnings, the beginnings of many new projects.

Celebrate Beltane

• Arise at dawn and wash in the morning dew: the woman who washes her face in it will be beautiful; the man who washes his hands will be skilled with knots and nets.
  
• If you live near water, make a garland or posy of spring flowers and cast it into stream, lake or river to bless the water spirits.
  
• Prepare a May basket by filling it with flowers and goodwill, then give it to one in need of caring, such as a shut-in or elderly friend.
  
• Beltane is one of the three "spirit-nights" of the year when the faeries can be seen. At dusk, twist a rowan sprig into a ring and look through it, and you may see them.
  
• Make a wish as you jump a bonfire or candle flame for good luck—but make sure you tie up long skirts first!
  
• Make a May bowl —wine or punch in which the flowers of sweet woodruff or other fragrant blossoms are soaked—and drink with the one you love.

Celebrants sometimes jump over broomsticks, especially at Handfastings which are very common during this season, or dance around May Poles, as both of these are symbols of fertility.

Traditional activities include blowing horns, and gathering flowers. Solitary Practitioners might consider the weaving together of ribbons as an alternative to creating and dancing around the May Pole.

Many like to celebrate Beltaine by decorating their homes and themselves with fresh flower garlands, or by stringing up greenery around their homes and places of work.

Sending flowers to loved ones, planting new gardens, cleaning out the cupboards and general spring cleaning are all traditional Beltaine gestures.

Plaiting and weaving straw, creating things with wicker, making baskets and fabrics are traditional arts for this turn in the Wheel of the Year.

Symbols of Beltane

Traditional symbols used to represent Beltane are the May Pole (the traditional full-size one is about 10 feet tall), May baskets, crossroads, eggs, butterchurns and chalices. Symbolically, many Pagans choose to represent Beltane with fresh flowers all around the ritual area as well as their homes and the cauldron is often totally filled with gorgeous Springtime flowers. Roses, bluebells, marigolds, daisies, primroses, violets and lilac are associated with Beltane.

Beltane Altar

Altars are generally adorned with seasonal flowers. Other appropriate altar decorations for the season include mirrors, a small May pole, phallic-shaped candles to represent fertility, and daisy chains.

Gods and Goddesses of Beltane

Appropriate Deities for Beltane include all Virgin-Mother Goddesses, all Young Father Gods, all Gods and Goddesses of the Hunt, of Love, and of Fertility. Some Beltane Goddesses to mention by name here include Aphrodite, Arianrhod, Artemis, Astarte, Venus, Diana, Ariel, Var, Skadi, Shiela-na-gig, Cybele, Xochiquetzal, Freya, and Rhiannon. Beltane Gods include Apollo, Bacchus, Bel/Belanos, Cernunnos, Pan, Herne, Faunus, Cupid/Eros, Odin, Orion, Frey, Robin Goodfellow, Puck, and The Great Horned God.

Colors of Beltane

The most common colors associated with Beltane are white and dark green, and red... but also appropriate are all the colors of the rainbow spectrum itself. Stones to use during the Beltane celebration include sapphires, bloodstones, emeralds, orange carnelians, and rose quartz.

Plants and Animals of Beltane

Plants and herbs associated with Beltane are primrose, yellow cowslip, hawthorn, roses, birch trees, rosemary, and lilac. Also included are almond, angelica, ash trees, bluebells, cinquefoil, daisies, frankincense, ivy, marigolds, satyrion root, and woodruff.

Animals associated with Beltane are goats, rabbits, and honey bees. Mythical beasts associated with Beltane include faeries, pegesus, satyrs, and giants.

Incense

Use lilac, passion flower, rose or vanilla. These can be used alone or blended as you like.

Foods

Dairy foods and eggs are in tune with this season. Sweets of all kinds, honey, and oats are all fine foods for Beltane. Simple dishes such as vanilla ice cream and egg custard are quite traditional fare on this day. For something a little different, try some of the recipes below: