Last Winter—
Broadening the Picture
As we consider our stories, let’s review how last Winter played out. Our last Winter had three phases that we will look at in greater depth:
The Cold Arrives: circa 1925–1932
Days without Sun: 1933–1941
The Blizzard: 1942–1945
The Cold Arrives: Circa 1925–1932
In 1925 the United States was enjoying an unprecedented economic boom. Industrialization had grown the economy, and the results of World War I had been economic stagnation and damage to infrastructure in Europe, which had the temporary effect of shutting European goods out of international markets. As Britain, France, and Germany reeled from their losses, the United States had a tremendous opportunity. After all, none of World War I had been fought on American soil, and while roughly 2.8 million served overseas, American casualties were light compared to those of our allies. Around fifty-eight thousand American soldiers were killed in action, while the British suffered more than seven hundred thousand killed in action 28 and the French lost more than a million.29 For those Americans who served in the trenches in France, like my paternal grandfather, the war was a life-altering experience. However, it was also comparatively rare. Being a veteran of the Great War made one a member of an exclusive club, and there was the sense among those veterans that most people could never understand what they had been through or what modern warfare was like. They organized in groups like the American Legion, whose initial mission was to require the government to provide ongoing healthcare for veterans after they left the service, including support for amputations and chronic health problems resulting from wounds or chemical warfare. In this way, the impacts of World War I on American society were much like the effects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the next saeculum—they loomed larger than their actual physical impacts and contributed to a sharp cultural divide between those who fought the war and those who reaped the resulting economic benefits.
But many more things were happening than the fallout from World War I. In the earlier part of the saeculum, in the Summer era at the turn of the century, education for women, women’s rights, and suffrage had come to the fore as major issues. The founding of many women’s colleges meant an explosion in the number of young women who had access to postsecondary education. While some women did go to college earlier, it was an elite opportunity reserved for a few. The founding of literally dozens around the turn of the century meant that Lost Generation women (born between 1885 and 1905) attended college in unprecedented numbers. This created a social class of educated women who could work at white-collar jobs, who earned their own wages without being dependent on a male relative, and who embraced a sophisticated definition of independence. While of course women had always worked, most had been employed in factories, as domestic help, or in other low-status jobs in the late nineteenth century. (This was not true earlier in the century, or in the eighteenth century, but there was a Victorian backlash that we tend to think of as the status of all women prior to the turn of the century, when in actuality it was simply the previous phase.) However, the ending of this phase and the opportunity for women’s education created a new ideal—the Flapper.
The Flapper lived on her own not because she had to but because she wanted to. Whether that was in a (gasp) boarding house or with friends, she had her own place that she paid for. She drove an automobile, thereby rendering her comings and goings free from parental interference. She spent her own money on her own clothing, purchasing or making things in a style that her elders would certainly not approve of—short skirts, stockings held above the knee with fancy garters that showed when she walked or sat, and “combinations”: a one-piece silk or cotton undergarment with no boning or stays, just a connected camisole and panty. She listened to the radio, pulling in hot songs from across the country. Most importantly, the Flapper was perceived as being sexually free. After all, there was no one to police her chastity! Who knew what she might be doing?
Of course as with any ideal, most women didn’t live the full lifestyle touted as the new big thing. My granny had attended a women’s college for two years when she met a veteran five years her senior—a man who was (scandalously) divorced—and dropped out of school to marry him. A picture from the time shows her with the bobbed haircut that was the Flapper signature, and certainly she danced the Charleston and went to jazz clubs and drank despite Prohibition, but she was not a young single lady in the big city. She was a young married woman with a baby boy born in 1924, and her job was keeping the books at a company owned by her husband and brother. And yet she certainly considered herself a Flapper, a part of the social movement away from Victorian morality.
In the 1920s there was a sense that society was reeling. New technologies had emerged that contributed to enormous social mobility as well as physical mobility. For example, the ubiquity of rail travel to almost everywhere in the United States meant that immigrant populations no longer had to cluster in seaport cities but could move to where the work was. This meant there was enormous cultural disruption as monocultural rural areas suddenly experienced an influx of people from an entirely different culture. My maternal grandfather, then a high school principal in a small town in upstate New York, struggled when half the students were suddenly Catholic immigrants from Southern Italy—a big change in a town previously rock-ribbed WASP like something out of a play by Thornton Wilder. Anti-immigrant sentiment ran high, only instead of the immigrants being Spanish-speaking and from Central America, as they were in the 2000s, they were Italian-speaking and from Sicily.
Sometime in the 1920s, Autumn turned to Winter. Exactly which event marked the transition is something historians continue to debate. Did Winter begin with the rise of Mussolini, the first of the Fascist dictators, in 1922? With the election of Herbert Hoover as president in 1928? With the stock market crash in 1929? As with many seasonal transitions in the great year, no one single moment marked the shift. Cultural change is gradual. A new technology emerges, but not everyone rushes out to buy it the day it becomes available! New technologies slowly penetrate, becoming more common until they are ubiquitous. The same is true of cultural touchstones—for example, in the 1920s, movie houses became common in American cities and towns, bringing the latest Hollywood movies to even very rural areas and creating a new widespread media culture. By 1930, moviegoers were buying ninety-five million tickets per week.30 Also by 1930, “talkies,” movies with sound, were replacing silent films, making going to the movies even more attractive. However, people didn’t all decide to go to the movies every week one day in 1927! Gradually, over a decade, going to the movies became easier and more common across the country.
Likewise, the increase in crime in the 1920s didn’t happen overnight. The murder rate rose 78 percent between 1920 and 1933, reaching a level nearly twice the murder rate in 2015. The prison population increased by 361 percent.31 This was a gradual change across the period, not a sudden leap in response to a single event. People were in truth living in a more dangerous world, and the rising sense of fear was based on actual events.
The economy crashed in October 1929 when the stock market tanked over a period of several days, losing more than $30 billion in value, or $92.1 billion in 2017 dollars. This kicked off the Great Depression, the greatest economic problem the United States has ever known, and ruined not only individual investors but pension funds, insurance companies, and banks themselves. Many small banks closed, their customers losing all their money permanently. (There was no FDIC then, because it was created in response to this crisis.) It is not exaggeration to say that millions of individuals and families were completely financially ruined.
The results of the crash continued to spin out over the next few years. For example, my maternal grandfather was an elementary school principal in 1929 and my grandmother was a fourth grade teacher. They were not initially impacted. However, the next year the town could not collect enough taxes to keep the schools open and had to lay off most of the school personnel. Both of their jobs ceased to exist at the same time as the elementary schools simply didn’t open in the fall of 1930. Like so many others, they migrated to find work, a family with a young child moving from relative to relative, seeking permanent employment.
Meanwhile, a few miles away, my paternal grandparents faced the same problem. My grandfather and great-uncle’s business went bankrupt for lack of customers, putting them and my grandmother all out of a job at once. Their house was foreclosed on. Things that had been bought on credit were repossessed. My grandfather found temporary work as a night shift security guard, then a bunch of short jobs as a salesman for various businesses. He also took up bootlegging. Crime pays, and in the Great Depression, people did what they had to do.
You have stories like this too. Maybe you know them. Maybe you don’t. But they are there. The entire United States went through an enormous economic convulsion. From 1929 to 1932, millions of people were displaced or financially ruined. Winter had come with a bang.
Days without Sun: 1933–1941
In November 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president of the United States. Ten weeks later, Hitler became chancellor of Germany. In early 1933, the stage was set for the conflicts to come.
And yet at the time few people thought that either development was a game-changer. Yes, a Democratic challenger had limited unpopular Republican President Hoover to one term. Yes, Hitler was a populist demagogue who preached anti-Semitism and encouraged the worst impulses of radical right-wing groups. But neither of these developments appeared outside the framework of “normal” in 1933. It was only as their policies began to take effect, leading two nations in opposite directions in response to the global financial crisis, that the storm clouds on the northern horizon darkened to such a degree that ignoring them became impossible.
Throughout the middle 1930s, most Americans were focused on personally surviving the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s policies were slow to take effect, and there were calls for revolution from both right and left. We forget that both Fascism and Communism had organized political support in the 1930s, and that both Hitler and Stalin sought to destabilize the United States and encourage a new government aligned with Germany or Russia. We are no longer aware of the level of polarization, of the clashes between various groups in American life, of the hatreds that were fomented then. Most people who lived through this time wanted to forget. They wanted to remember great movies, warm family relationships, or childhoods made happy by parents who tried so hard to protect them—not lynchings, massive marches against one group or another, and the fear that spread like a miasma beneath the surface. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong, and it was only possible to ignore it for so long. We don’t remember because those who were there wanted to forget.
Thomas Hobbes, the English political theorist, called this state “the war of all against all,” arguing that people don’t organize politically in favor of something or to pursue some positive goal, but out of fear of others. Fear and violence, he argues in Leviathan, are natural. The normal state of human existence is for peoples to seek to destroy one another based on memberships in different tribes, and that truly every group is perpetually at war with every other group. Sometimes, temporarily, this state of affairs may be interrupted, either by the strength of some overwhelming overlord, or by constructing a social contract that imposes peace. Hobbes was in favor of these social contracts but doubted that any contract could constrain humanity’s natural impulses to hurt those who are different for very long.32 In the 1930s it seemed that the rational systems of the previous century had been utterly destroyed and that the war of all against all was unleashed—rich against poor, Christians against Jews, white against black, women against men, and so on. Every conceivable division was to the fore, and every fight was to the death. Losers would literally burn.
How do you live in a world like that? Those who were alive at the time had to come to an answer. They had to find ways to survive and thrive. For some, the answer was family, and for others, work. For some it was spirituality and personal peace. For others it was taking up arms. For some, it was craft, and for others, the pursuit of law and justice.
Some failed. Some died. Some gave up. Some decided that the only thing that mattered was getting rich on the spoils. Winter tests everyone and it separates the gold from the base metal. Understanding the stories of people who lived then can show us how they faced the crisis and help us make conscious choices about whose paths we wish to emulate.
As the 1930s drew to a close, war raged in Europe and Asia both. On July 7, 1937, Japan invaded China. On September 1, 1939, German troops invaded Poland, beginning World War II. Americans watched nervously. Many advocated “America First,” staying out of all foreign wars. Some wanted to intervene on the part of allies like Britain, France, and China, while others were sympathetic to Germany or Japan. Most feared what would happen if the United States became embroiled in these struggles. Some denied this was possible, still saying that there would be no major war even as the conflicts escalated. The internal war of all against all reached a crescendo with radio personalities exhorting listeners to one side or another, marches of German-American Bund supporters in major cities, and threats to assassinate President Roosevelt from the Silver Legion.33 What decision would the United States make?
On December 7, 1941, the question was answered when the Japanese bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, killing 2,335 American soldiers, sailors, and airmen as well as sixty-eight Hawaiian civilians.34 The next day the United States entered World War II. The storm had broken.
The Blizzard: 1942–1945
What can we say about a crisis that touched almost every person living in the United States at the time? How can we imagine the scope? More than sixteen million Americans served in World War II, about 11 percent of the total population. (This number does not count women who worked in war material factories, men in the merchant marine, or many other civilian jobs that were directly involved with the war effort.) Given that half the population was over 50 or under 10, and that of the other half many were teenagers, mothers of young children, or unable to serve because of their health, nearly every possible young man served. Nearly half a million were killed, if you include merchant sailors killed at sea.
Each of those people had parents, children, brothers and sisters, friends, lovers—every single person who lived through these years knew many who fought and some who died. Everyone had stories. My Great-Uncle Bill, then a small-town policeman on the Carolina coast, was too old to serve, and told the story of a friend’s son lost at sea when his ship was torpedoed. The Graveyard of the Atlantic was kind; his body washed up on the beach and was found by his elementary school teacher, allowing his parents to know what happened and bury him properly rather than wonder and mourn at an empty grave. My mother, graduating from high school in 1944, watched every boy in her class but one go to war right after graduation. Many never returned. And my father was in combat for 180 days, from the Normandy Breakout to the Rhine Crossing.
You have stories. You may know them. You may have listened to them when you were a child, asked for them as a teenager, or even dreaded hearing people tell them. Remember them. Some of them are terrifying and some are boring. Some are “you had to be there” kinds of stories. Some make you uncomfortable. Think about them. Pull them out of the back corner of your mind and examine them again.
Or maybe you don’t know the stories. Maybe something has interrupted the transmission of lore. You never heard them. They’re still there. There are many ways to research the lives of people who lived such a short time ago, to reclaim the birthright of a story that is yours. If you can, and there are those of your folk who are still living, take this opportunity to ask for their stories and record them. In the next decade, the last people with adult memories of World War II will be gone. It will be too late to ask for their stories then.
Why does it matter? It matters because the stories of the momentous events of the last Winter are the keys to navigating this Winter. We are sailing in what is for us uncharted waters, dangerous waters filled with treacherous shoals. We need the maps that tell us what currents run here, the astronomical observations that teach us the pattern of the tides, and the portulary that will bring us to harbor. We have not sailed these waters before, but those who came before us did. They lived through Winter. Their stories can guide us.
The years 1942–1945 brought momentous changes. Aside from those who fought the war, enormous changes happened that touched everyone at home, from the growth of industrial jobs that finally allowed employment to rebound from the Great Depression, to women entering the paid workplace at unprecedented levels, to the undermining of barriers like segregation. For a lot of people these years were a hold-onto-your-socks time, a roller coaster of bad and good that upended their lives. By the end of 1945, the world was forever changed, and so were they.
A Rite in the Style of the Previous Winter
As we talked about in the last chapter, there was a flourishing magical community in the last Winter. As is true of the magical community today, it was very diverse. A number of elements went into it:
• Folkways of particular ethnic groups, from Native American, to Afro-Caribbean, to various European and Asian beliefs. Some of those folkways were very ancient, and some were syncretic and evolving.
• Spiritualist beliefs popularized by the various teachers and organizations in the Spiritualist Movement of the early 1900s.
• Offshoots of the Golden Dawn and the many American Lodges that formed either as descendants of Golden Dawn traditions or were inspired by them.
• Psychic research and “scientific magic” based on the new field of parapsychology exemplified by the Rhine Institute.
• Neopagan groups that sought to re-create ancient (mostly Classical) rites like the Church of Aphrodite on Long Island.
• Revealed doctrine books purporting to explain the secret teachings of Ascended Masters, usually from Tibet or East Asia. Many of these were part of correspondence courses offered by individual teachers.
As is true of the magical community today, many people who had an interest in spiritual, occult, and magical things had knowledge of and affiliation with more than one of these threads. Books proliferated, allowing ideas to cross-pollinate from one tradition to another, reaching people who were not part of communities with a living tradition and inviting people from one group to expand their knowledge by learning about another group. There was the common Universalist thread to much of this—the idea that all of these pieces were part of a greater whole, and that each individual seed held a truth. The Missionary Generation had a drive toward syncretism—that by assembling all the disparate pieces, the greater truth could be learned. The Lost Generation tended to be more prosaic—if it works, do it.
Of course each individual’s experience was different. Some remained solidly within one tradition and some sampled eclectically. One thing which may surprise us today is the strong tradition of Christian magic: the idea that there was no conflict between being a good Christian and using “God-given” gifts for the betterment of humanity. This was a core principle of many of the Universalists. My paternal grandmother certainly considered herself a strong Lutheran. To her, having the Sight or going to séances or speaking with the dead would have been simply using a gift. The gift was neither good nor bad. What you chose to do with it was moral or immoral. Using it to harm others was wrong, just as using the gift of superior strength to punch people was wrong. In fact, many of the models specifically invoke Christian theology in magical ritual with Psalms, Bible verses, and angelic invocations.
As Winter deepened, so too did the desire to know what the future held. In uncertain times people crave guidance or want to “lift the veil” and get a hint of what is going to happen. As a result, there were many forms of divination popularized, especially tarot cards. Tarot had been around a long time—since the fifteenth century by some accounts—and decks had been commercially available since the Tarot of Marseille in the late eighteenth century. However, the Rider-Waite deck, with its beautiful illustrations by Pamela Colman Smith and its accompanying guidebook, was published in 1909 and rapidly became the most popular and readily available deck.35 By the late 1920s it was widely known as a divination method in the United States, whether for “fortune-telling” at bazaars and fairs, or in earnest. A large part of its success was that it was easy to use. Unlike pendulum dowsing or scrying, which required either affinity or a great deal of practice, or bibliomancy, which required faith in the Bible, or many other methods that required instruction from a teacher to learn, the Rider-Waite tarot came with instructions and has been beginner-friendly ever since. You don’t need a personal teacher and you don’t need extensive practice to gain anything useful from it. It’s perfectly possible to buy the deck and the book and get to work.
The following is a ritual constructed around using a tarot deck for divination in the style of the 1930s. Again, what individuals and groups actually did then is as varied as it is now, but this gives a good glimpse of the style of the time, written for a modern group to enact. This is a community-based ritual, but if you are alone, you can adapt as needed to your situation. Some notes before we begin:
• You do not have to use the Rider-Waite deck for this, though it is most appropriate. Use whatever deck you prefer and are familiar with.
• This ritual cuts down the focus on energy work, polarity, and familiarity with your ruling element and astrological sign because most modern groups don’t use these concepts as extensively. However, the concepts are introduced because they are critical to the structure of the ritual.
Today, we tend to think of polarity as being about male and female rather than about projection versus reception of energy; however, this concept emerged in circles that were mostly or exclusively male in the nineteenth century and was not about physical gender characteristics to begin with. It was only late in the century, in the era of the Golden Dawn, when the idea emerged that women’s energy, still perceived as inherently different from men’s, was necessary to a balanced circle. Prior to that period, most Lodges had been exclusively male, and polarity had nothing to do with the biological sex of the participants.
What emerged was the ideal of a circle that perfectly balanced male and female energies as well as elemental affinities. The ideal circle would have six heterosexual couples: six men and six women paired off, each man a projective fire or air sign, and each woman a receptive water or earth sign. This almost never existed in practicality. In real life then, as today, you and your friends don’t sort that neatly. Real groups seated to create energy balance with the people they had, and this was often far from the recommendation. You do not have to try to re-create the ideal—almost nobody ever had it to begin with, and they all did perfectly well without. In practice, the important thing is to balance the energy so that it rests lightly in the hands of the officiant, each person contributing to the group’s desire in a way that is harmonious and easy to direct. That balance has nothing to do with anyone’s physical gender.
However, you do need to know people’s astrological signs. Here is a chart showing what a person’s elemental affinity is based on their sun sign:
|
Air |
Fire |
Water |
Earth |
|
Aquarius |
Aries |
Pisces |
Capricorn |
|
Gemini |
Leo |
Cancer |
Taurus |
|
Libra |
Sagittarius |
Scorpio |
Virgo |
However, the sun sign is not the only important influence in a chart, and without going into a long and technical discussion of astrology, just bear in mind that sometimes the other influences in a chart are more important to an individual than their sun sign. If somebody is a Sagittarius and says they actually have an affinity with water, go with that.
To seat the circle you will need at least four people, one on each of the elemental quarters. Ideally, each quarter should be held by someone with an affinity for that element. Decide who will be doing each quarter, and then if you have more than four people, put them between the quarters in a balanced way. In other words, if you have a fiery Aries and a fiery Leo, don’t put them next to each other. Put an earth or water between them if possible.
This ritual is written for two leaders. In theory, the priest is the projective air or fire person who will lead from South, while the priestess is the receptive water or earth person who will do the divination from North. In practice, then as now, things varied considerably. Let’s take the example of my grandparents from the last chapter. My grandmother was a very projective, high-energy Leo and my grandfather was a receptive, “psychic” Scorpio. She would have led off South and he would have done the divination from North, essentially switching the roles. Also, he would be switching off his natural quarter of West to North in order to better balance the circle. When we read or hear about the very rigid rules in this style, bear in mind that they illustrated the principles, and that in real life people adapted generously. Thus, rather than use the terms “priest” and “priestess” for the two officiants, we will use “warden” and “reader” to reflect their function in the circle.
You will need:
a table large enough for everyone to sit at, preferably round
chairs for everyone to sit at the table
a candleholder with five branches (like an Advent candleholder) or five votive cups that can be placed together
five candles (one yellow, red, blue, green, and white—tapers if you are using a candelabra or votives if you are using votive cups)
a ritual sword or knife
a deck of tarot cards
matches or a lighter
Optional extras:
a tablecloth with a mandala design or other symbols that speak to you
a compass if you do not know which way is north in the place you plan to do this
an ashtray if you are using matches
Set up the room with the table and chairs and tablecloth if you are using one. Use the compass to align the candelabra or votives to the directions so that the green candle is in the north, the yellow is in the east, the red is in the south, and blue is in the west. The white candle should be placed in the center. Put the matches or lighter and ashtray where they will be close at hand to the person sitting in the East chair. Put the sword or knife where it is in reach of the officiant who will be calling South and acting as warden. Put the tarot cards where they are in reach of the officiant who will be calling North and acting as reader. Turn out electrical lights so that the room is only dimly lit by the candles.
The Rite
Gather around the table. Each person should sit in their proper chair.
Warden: Take a moment to take a deep breath. Ground and center. Be here. [Pause while everyone does this, then nod to East to proceed.]
Eastern Quarter: Raphael, Angel of the East, of Morning and Spring, spread your protective wings over us and guide our sight, that we may seek true knowledge rather than deception. [You are not simply warding the space—you are also warding the reading. Light the yellow candle.]
Southern Quarter/Warden: Michael, Angel of the South, of Day and Summer, spread your protective wings over us and guide our sight, that we may seek justice rather than advantage. [Light the red candle.]
Western Quarter: Gabriel, Angel of the West, of Evening and Autumn, spread your protective wings over us and guide our sight, that we may seek compassion rather than fortune. [Light the blue candle.]
Northern Quarter/Reader: Uriel, Angel of the North, of Night and Winter, spread your protective wings over us and guide our sight, that we may seek wisdom rather than folly. [Light the green candle.]
Warden: Most High, Mighty Ones, grant us sanctity within this circle, that our work may be for the betterment of humanity and those assembled here, that we may better serve and guide, that we may act in accordance with the good. Let no deception enter here. Let no despair overtake us. Let no harm come to any as a result of these actions. So may it be. [Light the white candle. Unsheathe the blade. Progress clockwise around the circle, visualizing tracing a barrier of light around the outside, behind the chairs of everyone seated. When you return to your place, put the unsheathed blade on the table before you.]
Reader: Let us join hands. [Each person takes the hand of the person on each side of them.] We are together. We feel each other’s heartbeats. We hear each other’s breaths. Pause, and listen. [Allow a moment of quiet, each person simply holding hands and feeling the energy of the circle. It may feel wonderful. It’s a protected space, and if the energy is well-balanced it will be natural and pleasant. If the energy isn’t well-balanced, the reader should try to even it out.]
Warden: [When enough time has elapsed] In days of old, the gods spoke through sibyls and prophets. We humbly ask for counsel, that we may use this knowledge to the good. [Ask the question. Some examples:
What will befall each of us in the coming months of crisis?
How may each of us best serve?
What should each of us be especially on guard for in the next months?
How can we, as a group, help with a certain problem?
You can certainly make up your own question if you prefer, but remember that it needs to apply to everyone present, and it should not be for a selfish purpose.]
Reader: [Shuffle and cut the deck according to your usual practice. You will then lay out a single card toward the center of the table. This is the main issue facing the group. You should interpret it according to your own deck. Pass the deck clockwise to the person on your left, who cuts the deck, draws a single card, and lays it faceup in front of them. Interpret it according to your deck. When you have finished, the person passes the deck to their left, and the next person does the same thing. This proceeds until the deck has come all the way around. Cut the deck and draw a card for yourself. If you see connections, it is appropriate to discuss all the cards together or the relation of certain cards to the group card in the center. This is very individual and can be as long or as short as the reading suggests. If the group members like, they may do another round with another question, beginning with someone asking it and you shuffling. This may proceed several times but should not exceed four or five because the amount of energy involved is certain to tire you and diminish the quality of the answers. When the last reading has been completed, put the deck away.]
Warden: Mighty Ones, we thank you for this good counsel. May we use the guidance you have given us well, and in all things act for the benefit of all, not for merely our own. We take your counsel in that spirit. Thank you. [Take the sword or knife and begin walking counterclockwise around the circle. Visualize retracing the line of protection, erasing it as you go. When you return to your starting point, sheathe the blade and extinguish the white candle.]
Northern Quarter/Reader: Uriel, Angel of Winter and Night, thank you for your protection. [Extinguish green candle.]
Western Quarter: Gabriel, Angel of Autumn and Evening, thank you for your protection. [Extinguish blue candle.]
Southern Quarter/Warden: Michael, Angel of Summer and of Day, thank you for your protection. [Extinguish red candle.]
Eastern Quarter: Raphael, Angel of Spring and of Morning, thank you for your protection. [Extinguish yellow candle.]
Warden: Thank you all. The circle is open.
Afterward you may wish to eat a meal together to ground everyone and to take time to talk about the reading. This may be a potluck, something more elaborate, or you can just order a pizza. The important thing is that people have a chance to talk and to ground the energy of the experience. Some things to consider in addition to discussing the questions and answers you received:
• What did you think of the style of the ritual? How is it the same or different from what you are used to?
• How does it feel to balance energy this way? Is this something that you would like to incorporate more often, or is it not comfortable for you?
• What do you think of doing something in the form of nearly a hundred years ago, before the Pagan revival? Does it speak to you or not?
• How does this style relate to the season it was current in, the previous saecular Winter?
Once you have had time to talk and ground, the ritual is concluded.
If you are solitary and are not able to do the ritual because it inherently calls for at least two people, consider the following questions after reading the ritual’s instructions:
• What did you think of the style of the ritual? How is it the same or different from what you expected?
• Is this a ritual you would feel comfortable doing? Why or why not?
• What do you think of doing something in the form of nearly a hundred years ago, before the Pagan revival? Does it speak to you or not?
• How does this style relate to the season it was current in, the previous saecular Winter?
• If you were able to re-create this ritual, what part would you take? What questions would you ask?
You may wish to write the answers to these questions in a journal if you are keeping one as you work through this book.
Drawing Conclusions
As we look back on the season of Winter in the last saeculum, 1925–1945, one thing that must strike us is how great the difference is between the beginning and end of that period. This is roughly analogous to the period 2005–2025. In other words, we can expect 2025 to be as different from 2005 as 1945 was from 1925. It’s a lot of motion. We are going through major changes as a society and as individuals. No wonder our world seems so out of control sometimes!
However, now that we’ve found our charts—the navigational data left by previous generations—we’re ready for the next step of determining our own voyage on the sea of Winter. In order to reach a goal, the first thing you need is to know where you’re starting from. In the next chapter, we’ll examine where we were at the beginning of our current Winter.
28. “Viewpoint: 10 Big Myths about World War One Debunked,” BBC News, February 25, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25776836.
29. Michel Huber, La Population de la France Pendant la Guerre (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1931).
30. “Let’s Go to the Movies: The Mechanics of Moving Images,” Moah.org, retrieved May 18, 2019. http://www.moah.org/movies/movie_theatres_p.html.
31. Tim Nash, “Organized Crime in the 1920’s and Prohibition,” The Finer Times, February, November 23, 2008, https://www.thefinertimes.com/organised-crime-in-the-1920s.
32. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin Classics, 2017).
33. Mel Ayton, Hunting the President (New York: Regnery History Press, 2014).
34. “Frequently Asked Questions about Pearl Harbor—How Many People Died at Pearl Harbor during the Attack?” Visitpearlharbor.org, retrieved May 18, 2019, https://visitpearlharbor.org/faqs-questions-pearl-harbor/.
35. Place, The Tarot.