Hecate Speaks of October

The Goddess Speaks

Hecate Speaks of October

I have been with you from the beginning.  Don’t you remember my voice above your mother’s birth cries?  I, the priestess of the Earth, midwife you and all your kin.  Silently, I watched you growing, and I was at all your rites of passage.  I was the priestess holding aloft the torches of life in each hand, one pointing up to heaven and one down to the great below, for it is said, “As above, so below.”  Even the Earth herself calls on my services.  I am the Queen of the Crossroads, Witch Queen, the Transformer.  I have come again this season to scream my frightening banshee yell and scatter pumpkins in your backyards and your living rooms like so many orange balloons.

The ancient primal season fo the witch is here, and you welcome me.  Yes, you love to be frightened by me.  I force you to laugh at your own death, to dress up your children in ghostly guise.  Now comes your first sense of the coming cold season, chilling to the bone.  I bring the harvest, and if you haven’t harvested your apples, I’ll nip them with frost.  After Halloween, all that’s left in the fields is mine!

If you wish to honor me, I will show you my magickal ways.  I take away your fears of death and make you glad.  I am the keeper of the altars, outdoors and inside.  I am speaking in you when you feel the desire to stand alone on a hillside or in a clearing in the woods and talk to the full moon.  I am the wild part of you, your sixth sense, the one that gives you your hunches, premonitions, dreams.  I am the priestess immortal.  My face is threefold – young, old, and in full bloom.  I see ahead and behind; I am the hinge of reality.  I am your primal goddess.  Into your lives I bring these feelings, even now in the artificial forests of your urban concrete world.  My witches are flying on their broomsticks, and the ghosts are quaking in your windows.  All is well, Halloween is here; souls come to viist, and the living world throws a party to mingle with the dead.  I share in your merriment and warm my cold hands at your hearth.

October’s Aspects

This month received its name from its earlier position in the Roman calendar (Octo means “eight” in Latin).  In the Gregorian calendar it is the tenth month.  Just shows how rulers like to mess with time by changing its name!

FULL MOON ASPECT:

Blood Moon

UNIVERSAL EVENT:

October 31, Samhain (Halloween), summer’s end; one of the high cross-quarter days in the journey of the earth around the sun.

COMMUNAL EVENT:

Halloween, celebrations, the Spiral Dance

MESSAGE:

To let go, to clean, to remember

ACTIVITY:

Preparing for winter

HEALING PROPERTIES:

Sedation of nerves

APPROPRIATE SPELLS:

Protection spells, uncrossing spells from bad luck, memorials to the departed, evening of scores, paying back debts

MANIFESTATION:

Ivy, plant of resurrection

COLOR:

Blue

TREE:

Yew

FLOWER:

Calendula, cosmos

CREATURE:

Mute swan

GEM:

Opal, tourmaline

Source: The Grandmother of Time by Zsuzsanna E. Budaest