WALKING WITH HECATE

editorial

by Melanie Fire Salamander

Samhain: Life folds into the dark now, with the end of the witches' year. The wet comes. It's a time of reckonings. The veil between the worlds grows thin, as they say.

This Samhain closes a year of great intensity for many, the last witches' year of the millennium. You thought you were all done with the word "millennium"? Well, the great hoopla about the Year 2000 notwithstanding, the millennium is really ending now. A peculiar unrest is in the air. Many people's lives have been shaken recently. Between my parents' deaths and other troubles, not the least publisher Sylvana's illness, mine has been. This year I've found myself walking with Hecate.

If you call yourself a witch, or if you work magick, I believe you'll end up walking with Hecate someday. She is the mother of magick. A lot of nasty spells have been said in her name over the last three millennia, but that served to keep her name alive. I expect she laughs at such spells - people tying themselves back to the karmic wheel with hate and anger would be amusing, from a goddess perspective. Not to say Hecate is without compassion; she is not. But she is a tough goddess, the Goddess of the Crossroads. Between her two torches, she goes all places. She can handle witches and workers of magick, who look into the dark. Look into the dark, ask for her help, and she will be there to aid you.

If you find yourself in darkness, I believe you'll end up walking with Hecate. So I did, in the darkness, fear and pain this last year brought. She showed me how to make that darkness, fear and pain into an initiation of light, courage and release. But necessary first was her darkness, through which she led me, walking forward with her torch.

To her servants, Hecate gives many gifts. She is a muse and a mother of divination. This issue of Widdershins centers around this gift of hers, divination, so appropriate to Samhain, when we can see all worlds. We offer you four stories on divination - one on working with the Tarot, one on divination by the Maya, one on considerations about reading the "future" and one on a sense of divinatory narrative, of what happens next in a life story. We bring you also Samhain fiction, dark and bright, our astrology and news columns and an article that considers the links between public ritual and theater. You probably already have seen the interview that our Samhain crone, Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki, was gracious enough to give us.

Ashcroft-Nowicki closes the interview saying she'll spend her Samhain communing with loved ones recently passed over. This Samhain, I expect to see loved ones of my own. I hope for you this Samhain your loved ones come in peace, bringing you joy and comfort from the other side. Know too that when you need to pass into that darkness, Hecate will be there to lead you, if you so choose.

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