Today is Samhain, the witches’ new year. Like any new year, it’s a time to notice change, and a time perhaps for resolutions.
Fantasy, Erotica, Horror
Month: October 2018
My parents are dead. They were pretty fucked-up people, a drunk and a codependent. My dad wasn’t a high-functioning drunk, either—he never conquered alcoholism.
This is Potato, my witch-cat. She’s not a familiar, not the receptacle for a helper spirit. She is a fully participating member of our coven, though she hasn’t taken the coven class yet.
Potato came to Samhain. She noshed with us beforehand as we noshed. She sat by the scrying mirrors as we scried. She took part in the divination.
This Samhain, we had a visitor who brought with her a pendulum and divination cloth that said, yes, no, maybe, and don’t want to answer.
Last night, we had our coven Samhain ritual. One of our members led; she made tea from hawthorn berries. Hawthorn is associated with both the big spirit-gates of the year, Samhain and Beltaine.
Another coven member made a couple of black mirrors for scrying. She got picture frames from Goodwill, cleaned the glass well, painted it on one side with black high-gloss paint, then put the frames back together. Voila!
It’s a windy morning, Halloween weather, mixed overcast and rain, gusts pushing the clouds around. I love windy Octobers, especially nights, clouds blowing across the moon, the feeling that anything is possible, anything can step out of the shadows.
Spirits and ghosts visit this time of year. I do think the veil between this world and the otherworld is thin now. Ancestors hang in the eaves, eavesdropping. The Snoqualmie tribe, on whose land I live, also traditionally thought ancestors came back this time of year.
I have been dedicated to Hekate for more than fifteen years, and she is the guiding deity of my book series, Tales of the End Times. This is my Hekate altar, in the corner of my writing room. You can see at the right a set of Hekate cards that a witch friend of mine and I made for an event we put on, each card holding an epithet of the goddess. Hekate has dozens.
I just wrote a scene about the goddess for the second book of the series, in which a witch draws down as Hekate and prophesies for her coven. This vision came to my character Alyssa, and she describes it to Joanie and her friend Guy:
This is my backyard a couple days ago, on a misty afternoon. I live in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, in Washington state, and often the bowl of the valley below my house fills with mist early and late. I’m on the edge of a wilderness, and my backyard looks like it!
This is one of my muses, sitting on top of some things I wrote at two different pagan events to inspire myself: “You are a Celtic witch” (because whatever my practice, that is my heritage), and a now very faded list: “To keep going; to have faith; to step forward into all I can become; to have patience with myself; to love myself and my work as it is and as it grows; to let go all that stands in the way.”
My name is Mary Trepanier, and I wrote The Queen of Heaven’s Daughter. It’s the first of a septet—seven books, in a series called Tales of the End Times.
Queen is the story of two crazy college kids who fall in love. One of them is a prostitute pursued by the goddess Inanna to become a sacred whore, and the other is an engineering student in way over his head. Joanie, my sacred whore–girl, also falls for Cleo, an initiate of Inanna. Behind the scenes is a genderfluid incubus-succubus, Puabi-Ekur, who loved Joanie in a past life and wants to help her. The djinn come in with their own agenda.