Day of longest light
A mediocre witchy cookbook led me to a love of the Solstice and a more grounded divinatory practice.
Solstice celebrations first became important to me because of a cookbook. It disappeared in our move last year, and my sense is that it wasn’t even that great of cookbook. It certainly wasn’t amazing in terms of witchiness or ritual—I remember just-OK recipes paired with rather basic musings on the seasons, magic, astrology, ceremony. Still, there was something about it that I couldn’t get enough of. Something about the elaborately photographed gothic spreads for the Winter Solstice—dark silverware and table cloth, weird candelabras, tubers in sinister shapes, bread baked with pentagram etchings, butter as the only form of golden light, really, to honor the longest night.
Oh shit, I thought, salivating in spite of myself. Kiernan probably can cook a better meal than that; I probably can perform a better ritual than that! We wouldn’t have to use haunches of meat either; the beginning of Capricorn season in mid-December, ruled by Saturn, was more about starches and grains anyway, dishes to see one through a season of deprivation laced through or trussed up with bloody acids. Cranberry sauces, Mars exalted. Ideas welled up about holidays different from the ones I’d grown up with, sharing food in honor of, well, yes, I begrudgingly had to admit, spiritual practices that had saved my life, in one fashion or another …
I’d been into the tarot and astrology for years before we bought the cookbook in some woo shop in a town whose name I can’t remember. The esoteric had already showed up by then in my dissertation, in my writing practice, in my therapy sessions. But as revelatory and necessary as my divination practices had become, I still balked at the idea of associating them with a newfound spirituality. I write about god and divinity just fine these days, but that wasn’t always the case. Part of the problem back then was that the cards and the planets mostly lived in my head. They existed as patterns of philosophy, ethics, and meaning that helped me understand and change my life, its moods and behaviors. But I couldn’t, like, eat them. I couldn’t pass around a Jupiter return or The Nine of Cups in a bread basket with some olive oil or butter for my husband or best friend. Could I?