Jim: Ding, dong. Mabon calling! Am I dating myself with that one?
Katie: No, I know what you're talking about, but I guess to see if any of our listeners know.
Katie: Anyone who grew up watching Edward Scissor Hands . I hate to use that as a reference of why I knew it, but... There you go.
Jim: You didn't actually grow up with ladies coming to the door, actually selling Avon.
Katie: No.
Jim: That's how we always pronounce Mabon. How do you pronounce Mabon? Is it Maban? Maboon? Mabin?
Jim: I think it's Mabin or Mabon.
Jim: The way to get into a fight on the internet is: disagree about how something is pronounced.
Katie: Yes. Or make a declaration with no leniency. Yes. It's only this.
Jim: Oh, right. Maybe that's how we can really get attention on our podcast, is declare something incorrect with ultimate assuredness and watch the comments and the flame war grow.
Katie: Yes. Every comment just starts with. 'Actually...'
Jim: I think we found our new marketing strategy.
Light From Lantern presents: Knit A Spell. I'm magical maker: Katie Rempe. And I'm the maker of magic: James Divine. Join us as we stitch together the symbiotic relationship between crafting and 'The Craft'.
Jim: Welcome to Mabin, or Mabon. It's the Fall Equinox.
Jim: What's your favorite season?
Katie: I'm a Virgo, so fall is where I'm at.
Jim: I am a summer boy. I am not a fan of fall. I know. I'm like the one, the odd person out when it comes to, give me my pumpkin spice, whatever. Nope. I want sunshine and warmth and happy frolicing days. I turn on my sunshine lamp and steal myself and get ready to go on vacations to sunny places.
Katie: I feel you there.
Jim: You are coming to us live from a sunny location.
Katie: That's right. I'm here in the satellite headquarters of the light from lantern corporate. It does not feel like anything is turning into cooler weather because there's only one season here and it's endless summer.
Katie: This is the time of year when the light changes to leaning towards the darker time.
Jim: That's right. So the Equinox is when we have equal point of day and night is the idea. The days are no longer the longest portion of the 24 hour period and the night after the autumn Equinox start to become longer.
Jim: So that is something to ponder. Here we are, teetering on this moment of balance. This moment of gosh, here we are equal night and day. That symbolism can be really deep.
Katie: Yeah. I think of it as a time similar to spring. We're on the flip side of this, where everyone's doing their spring cleaning and of coming out of that, like cabin fever situation. It's the same just in reverse.
Katie: So it's still like a review time. And maybe I just didn't realize this happens all the time, but this particular Equinox also falls over Mercury Retrograde. So it's makes total sense to revisit things, do all the re things and make that all part of it.
Katie: Looking back, how did your past six months go? Because, oh my God, do you even realize it's been six months? Ugh. And what do you need still? What don't you need? It's a great time to release.
Jim: Yes, my husband and I were just talking about that. He was really feeling the urge to do a spring cleaning and he said, I know it's autumn, but I feel like doing a spring cleaning.
Jim: And it's so funny. I didn't think about it until just now. It's not just Mercury that's retrograde Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto, all retrograde. Every planet is retrograde except Venus and Mars. So the lover and the fighter are direct, but everyone else is retro grade. Welcome to the Autumn Equinox.
Katie: So a great time to slow down. And I guess maybe that makes sense that we kind of wanna nest. Back in the day where this would be the time where we'd be preparing for the winter to come and hopefully not die.
Jim: In modern culture, we think about the Autumn Equinox as the first day of Autumn. But if we think about it from a seasonal perspective, we can think about the Autumn Equinox as the peak of Autumn.
Jim: We know that Autumn started before this. If you're in the Pacific Northwest, or if you're in the Northeast, if you're up in the Northern half of the United States, you've already started to see signs of Fall. You've seen the grass getting toasty. You've seen the leaves they're starting to get a little crinkly. The early trees are starting to say I'm about to turn and it's any day, now that we're gonna see that one tree that's gonna start and it's all gonna go at once.
Jim: In mainstream culture, we say the first day of fall, but really we've started to get this pre fall experience.
Jim: So it's helpful to think of this as the middle of fall.
Katie: Anyone with kids will probably feel that way too, because don't you really feel like it's fall when the kids go back and that's can be like August, September?
Jim: When the kids go back, it feels a little more like the first day of fall.
Jim: If you are like me and you love summer, one of the things that's really helpful to accept and embrace fall and autumn time is to think about it as a daily cycle. This is also an annual cycle.
Jim: Summertime is like you're at work during the day. And after a hard day work, you wanna come home, pour yourself a really lovely beverage, kick your shoes off, put your feet up and relax. That time between working and relaxing and actually sleeping that's Autumn.
Jim: And if we put it in that type of context of get to eat a lovely dinner, get to spend time with loved ones. Maybe you go and do a fun activity and the remainder of the evening or the afternoon that you enjoy before it gets too cold or before it gets too dark and you enjoy that evening, wind down time.
Jim: This is when you get to knit or crochet or do a passtime. You prepare yourself for an evening and for sleep.
Jim: Maybe you tidy up a little bit., You know, Brush your teeth. Some people take a shower in the evening. This is the way to think about Autumn that has even me Sunny, Jim starts to embrace it.
Jim: And this is the season that we're celebrating with Mabon.
Katie: The season of cozy, the cornucopia season. If anyone has a parent like me, who loves to decorate during this time, husks of corn are coming in or hay bales, as decorative items. And we're gonna talk more in our second half about it. This is the second harvest as we've talked about before.
Katie: Yep. And then we'll be ending around the Halloween season.
Jim: Samhain, yes, with our blood harvest. That's right, so that we have this triple harvest season, beginning of August with lughnasa or lammas when we harvest the grain.
Jim: And then we have Mabon and this is the fruit harvest. And this is when we have the blackberries are ripe and other fruits are here. Apples start to come in, things like that. And we really have this boom to the harvest season.
Jim: And at Halloween at the end of October, at the beginning of November, we have Samhain. And it's spelled like Sam Hain, but it's pronounced 'sow-wen' and this is when the winter squash the pumpkins, the large hard shelled squash are ripe.
Jim: And we have the culling of the herd. So we have the blood harvest. It's the last harvest and winter is next. And so we prepare ourselves for the long, cold winter.
Jim: We are here in the middle of these three harvests. So you'll see those ears of decorative unedible, corn, we'll see little effigies of pumpkins, and we'll see the symbol of the cornucopia. Now we looked up the symbol of the cornucopia.
Jim: Haven't you ever wonder? Because Katie and I did. Where does the cornucopia come from? What is with that symbol? So what are some of the things we found so fascinating?
Katie: It is a symbol of abundance and prosperity. And of course, related to things that brought prosperity: goats, so horns. They were used as a cup, it's literally abundance.
Jim: Cornucopia, the horn of plenty, is thought to have come from several different sources, but was seen in ancient Greece as the symbol of the goat that fed the God's Zeus as an infant, as he was being hidden from his murderous father Cronos. And the goat that fed and nourished Zeus had horns.
Jim: There's other stories in myth of Hercules wrestling with a river, God breaking up one of his horns as a symbol of victory and of abundance.
Jim: And then of course, there's several Greek Roman Dees associated with the harvest prosperity, spiritual abundance, like Gaia or the earth goddess, the goddess Demeter, the name, Maya, the goddess Fortuna, all of them being pictured with the cornucopia. One of their attributes that they carry and out of this cornucopia. Fruits and wheat, shafts of wheat, all these things. So this comes from thousands and thousands of years ago.
Jim: This is pre-Christian iconography that is taken for granted and in modern depictions, we see it in, of course, every Thanksgiving you walk into any craft store and you're gonna find a cornucopia. Absolutely. But we've seen it in surprising places.
Jim: Coats of arms in Columbia, Peru, Chile, the Philippines, but even in North Carolina. The seal of North Carolina has cornucopia Kharkiv, Ukraine, which is in the news a lot.
Jim: And you would think about Ukraine being the bread basket of Europe. Their symbol on their coat of arms is the cornucopia.
Jim: So we celebrate Mabon with Thanksgiving. In our tradition, we often get together, Create ritual, and then we feast, we celebrate it. We also do a very special thing.
Jim: We have a large statue of Demeter, and so we really think about the myth of Demeter and Persephone. For anyone who isn't familiar with that myth, when Demeter has her daughter, and they're happy and it's forever springtime. There's always food for all the people.
Jim: And one day the Lord of the underworld Hades comes up from the underworld and there's a secret plan between Aphrodite and others and Zeus to marry Core off to the wealthy and handsome God of the underworld. And the God of the underworld thinks, okay it's arranged.
Jim: And he comes up and snatches his wife away from her mother. And then Corey goes down to the underworld, the goddess of flowers, innocent little girl goes down to the underworld and Hades and her have time in the underworld. And Demeter is so angry that she spreads a blight throughout the earth because she doesn't have her daughter.
Jim: It turns out she can't actually create food because she needs her daughter. Without the flower there can be no grain. This is finally figured out and Corey, now Persephone comes back up and realizes this and is not her intention to starve the world.
Jim: So it works out that she'll come up to the earth for a certain number of months. And that's when spring is here and the harvest season occurs, and then you go back to the underworld and serve the underworld and serve the souls there for part of the year.
Jim: So this is the idea behind the seasons.
Jim: So we will veil Demter at Mabon and then unveil at the spring Equinox.
Katie: Very cool. All right. Let's take a quick break and when we come back, we'll jump into some making for Mabon.
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Katie: He's also now offering divine hand tarot readings. Find out more about all of Jim's amazing offerings at thedivinehand.com and on his Instagram page where you'll find him as DivineHandJim.
Katie: And we're back. As we mentioned earlier in the episode one fun thing to do for your Maban celebration could be making a bread cornucopia or knitting, a cornucopia or crocheting, a cornucopia, or somehow crafting a cornucopia whatever your preferences.
Jim: Cornucopia make it.
Katie: Yeah.
Jim: There's a lot of instructions on the internet. You'd be surprised what you find on the internet. I could see, that would be a wonderful gift for someone is to, make a cornucopia or draw a cornucopia, even on a greeting card.
Katie: Including elements that are found locally. That's great way to tap into the energy is like what's blooming, what's really abundant right now. Bring that in to mimic the abundance from outside, inside.
Jim: We've also purchased the baskets that look like cornucopia that can hold rolls and, or bread or anything. And then actually use that to serve dinner. Or decorate one that you find.
Jim: So I think there's a lot of different ways to use that symbolism of the cornucopia. Remembering that cornucopia is a symbol of abundance and prosperity. And you can take that further. You can put herbs of prosperity and weave that into your cornucopia. Charge it in ritual or with intention with prosperity, with oils that bring prosperity and abundance.
Jim: That would be a really magical act to do with a, with an ancient symbol of prosperity that goes back thousands and thousands of years.
Katie: Speaking of making for the season, one of my favorite things to do, no matter the season, is to make food for people and host friends. And that's a huge thing to do around this time.
Jim: This is a time of year when a lot of the crafting I think about is really around recipes and food. I love to cook. My husband loves to cook.
Jim: I notice that the figs are in season here in the west coast. The easiest recipe ever is to slice ripe figs in half, stuff them with a little bit of goat cheese and drizzle them with a balsamic vinegar reduction, which you could just get in a bottle. Three simple ingredients make a fantastic appetizer.
Jim: And it looks amazing on the plate. When you put that platter out, people are like, oh my gosh, what did you do? I didn't have to turn on the oven. I didn't have to do a thing. It just was three things. Things like that are very easy recipes using fresh ripe fruits and vegetables that are ripe right now.
Katie: I think a lot of people will pause their crafting habits, especially if it's more fiber related over the warmer months. It just sparks back into their memory when it starts to get cool again. Like a return of crafting.
Katie: You've been too busy and now you've returned back.
Jim: I guess it's really hard to think about knitting or crocheting a big cozy shawl when it's 102 degrees outside.
Katie: Yeah. When you're sweating and knitting...
Jim: Don't want that on your lap or anything, right?
Katie: Yeah. You're like, man, this is modern times and we don't have to be doing this I could be in the pool right now.
Katie: But another fun thing to do is just go apple picking, go for a nature walk.
Jim: Going picking is a fantastic experience to reconnect with our actual food. We went blueberry picking one time for our lamas ritual. And that was really fantastic. Going to pick something that's in season and ripe, like apples is a fantastic opportunity to see where your food comes from to see the orchards.
Jim: To, rinse off an apple and bite it right off the tree. Yeah. Even warm from the sun is fantastic experience. And to get outside, this is we have the last remnants of the warm weather on those warm days.
Jim: The nights are getting cool, but though days are warm. If you can have a picnic or transition to a bonfire. We have a fire table in the backyard, get everyone cozy with some blankets, invite people over. Those are things that I think are really fun activities to do as well.
Jim: Having that crafting also as part of that, having little mini cornucopias for people to decorate or making food for people.
Jim: Even making food together, jarring, putting little things in jars or sending them home with something can be a very fun activity for this time of year.
Jim: And it can make a task that maybe is like tedious into something that's more of a party. Like the more people you have, the more interesting it is.
Jim: Maybe everyone's assigned to bring a special ingredient. So then it's like kind of a mystery. Everything will go together, cuz it's all seasonal. I go out and pick all of these blackberries, I know this is $20 worth of blackberries that I'd be paying for in the store. So it becomes also very powerful that you can forge for these things. It's like actually pretty easy if you know what you're looking for.
Jim: Yeah.
Katie: Here's a challenge for everyone listening, go outside on your nature, walk, see what's growing in abundance. Connect with it, watch it all season and see what kind of a relationship you can have grow and learn from it over time. You don't have to learn every edible thing all at once.
Jim: Even something in your own yard. We have a plant in our own yard that we look at very often as it grows in flowers and becomes monstrous and then dies back and understanding it over the last year or two, I feel like I've cultivated a relationship with that thing.
Katie: Exactly.
Jim: It's amazing. I think about things like making candied lemon rined inviting people over and cutting the lemons and making lemon cello out of the lemon and then making candy lemon rind out of the lemon peels such a fun activity with five people or a group.
Jim: Everyone then gets a jar and gets to take home candied lemons.
Katie: If anyone listening has anything that they like to do around this time of year, why not drop us in line and let us know you could send us an email at [email protected], or you could always join our Patreon.
Jim: Join us on Patreon and comment and share stories, post pictures of what you do at Mabon. And I would love to do the same, so yes, I'm gonna head over to Patreon and post up a picture of our veiled Demeter statue. So if you wanna see that, check it out on Patreon. Yes. It's super cheap to join and we have a lot of fun there.
Katie: Yes. And as soon as you join, you get the entire past archive of our post history immediately available to you. Oh wait,
Jim: All of our secrets, all of our past bloopers?
Katie: Yes. We would love to have you join us show notes, or of course all linked up and easy for you to find.
Katie: I think that about wraps it up for this week, Jim.
Jim: Happy Mabon, happy autumn Equinox. And I can't wait for next week.
Katie: Me too. All right, everybody we'll see you next week.
Jim: Bye.
Katie: Bye!
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