Maurizio L'Altrella aka Laltrotopo (Italian, b. 1972, Sesto San Giovanni, Milan, Italy) - Vanitas: Quello Che Rimane - Atto IV - Traguardo (Vanitas: That Which Remains - Act IV), 2018 Paintings: Oil on Canvas
Miri it is While Sumer Ilast (Merry it is While Summer Lasts)
Middle English Translation: Merry it is while summer lasts With birds songs But now here come the wind’s blasts and weather strong Ay, but this night is long And I, with great wrong, Sorrow, mourn, and fast
[Image description: video, still, detail of a medieval painting showing an angel and another figure. The angel has orange wings and a crown, and is putting something into the core of the other person, perhaps a key.}
I don’t have a specific witch mother or witch father figure for myself, but I do have a world full of gods and spirits that have made themselves known to me - Bride and the Cailleach; Saints Lucy, Brigid, Martha, Cyprian, and Justina, the Nine Maidens, to name a few.
Because I see fixed stars and constellations as spirits, there are a few of them I also engage with. Regulus and Deneb Algedi, specifically.
Very, very specific to my personal practice is the Dawn and the Sleeper-King but witch mother/father doesn’t fit them as a title and they wouldn’t be accepting of me thinking of them that way (🤣 spirits can be so particular). Unfortunately, beyond these names and the occasional little poem here and there, there’s not much I can share about that aspect of my practice and there are several more spirits I’m not even able to list here, or even speak about.
One of the most delightful but frustrating things about all of this is that a practice becomes very tricky (even difficult) to talk about over time as these spirits make themselves known to us and we deepen our relationships with them.
I have jokingly referred to certain gods and spirits as “wingmen” because they introduce you to other spirits and then kind of peacefully fade out, or hang in the background - it’s not an end to the relationship, but called upon on an “as-needed” basis.
So, essentially the long and short of it for me is that as time moved on, the spirits I have primarily engaged with changed. And that’s okay, it’s given so much depth and beauty to the experience.
“Her mind was groping after something that eluded her experience, a something that was shadowy and menacing, and yet in some way congenial; a something that lurked in waste places, that was hinted at by the sound of water gurgling through deep channels and by the voices of birds of ill-omen. Loneliness, dreariness, aptness for arousing a sense of fear, a kind of ungodly hallowedness—these were the things that called her thoughts away from the comfortable fireside.”
From Leechdom, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, a compendium of wonderful folk knowledge of early Anglo-Saxon England, a charm using bread [hláf] hallowed on August 1st [hláfmæsse-dæg] the traditional grain harvest day.
