E-photo by M. Komoroski

Every year, on the weekend closest to Beltane, the folks at Cauldron Farm hold a weekend-long Beltane camping festival. Every year dozens of pagans from all walks of life pour into their 18-acre farm, setting up tents in their ritual field between the firepit and the stone altar, and spend the weekend erecting and dancing around a maypole, drumming at bonfires, having woodswalks to learn wildcrafting, and generally having a good time with other pagans. Many of them come from nearby cities; for a few, this is their only foray outside the urban jungle.

One year, a local pagan woman came with her entire household/coven/group, about seventeen of them, mostly under the age of twenty-five. They were all self-styled urban “Goths”, wearing lots of black clothing and silver pagan jewelry. For many, it was their first pagan gathering. In spite of the fact that Beltane is billed as a camping event, and participants warned to bring such items as tents, food, bedding, and warm clothing, many of these kids brought nothing but the clothes on their backs. Three of them brought only a bag of ballgowns and makeup between them.

Upon arriving, they were welcomed by Raven and Bella Kaldera, the owners of Cauldron Farm and organizers of the festival, who were busily driving a tractor back and forth to the ritual field, moving people’s luggage. They were attired in their usual work clothes of flannel shirts and overalls. The visitors walked through Raven’s herb garden with its standing menhirs and plaster Madonna painted to look like Mariamne of the Sea, the Green Man murals on the barn, the metal zodiac on the garage where a hex sign is usually placed. They passed into the ritual field, walking under an arch formed of living trees, past a rough stone altar in the north, a plaster chalice in the west, a torii gate of the winds in the east, and a firepit in the south. They were shown a place to camp by their hosts, who went off to move more luggage.

Their matriarch later reported to those hosts that her charges’ bemused reaction to all this had been to ask her, “Are Bella and Raven really pagans? They’re not even wearing black!”

This was evidence of more than just trying to figure out how to place closeted pagans. The Kalderas are about as out as one can get and not constantly wear a sign saying, “Witch!” on their foreheads every day. It was partly about how paganism, when placed back in its original native home, the rural environment, becomes subtle and blends in. Traditional pagan motifs stand out in a city or suburb; they are noticeable. In the country, on a homestead the likes of which our ancestors lived in, they seem somehow unremarkable, natural, fitting into the landscape.

It also shows an appalling ignorance of the roots of most pagan customs that are over fifty years old. Everything in ancient pagan Europe revolved around the agricultural year, which varied with climate and local ecology. Each high holiday was associated with certain ways of obtaining food. For most people, and that includes most pagans, food is something that comes shrink-wrapped at the supermarket. The links of fertility and sacrifice have been cut between most of us in America, and we stumble through rituals and symbolic gestures we do not fully understand, feeling vaguely as if there are deeper levels that we are missing.

For those of us who homestead, there’s no mystery to it. In fact, the “mysteries” for us are wonderfully concrete. We can see and feel and touch them (and shovel and chop and cook them, too). We watch the Wheel of the Year go by, and our reactions are a constant “of course!” Of course the egg is the symbol of Ostara! Of course the holiday of February 2^nd is named after ewe’s milk! Of course the Sacred King must die! (Don’t worry, we’ll explain everything.) The symbols aren’t abstract to us; they’re shorthand for our reality.

Pagan homesteaders are a rare breed. It’s not easy to become one. First of all, you have to have enough money to actually buy a good chunk of land, and support yourself enough, somehow, to keep paying your property taxes and keep yourself alive while you work your land, acquire livestock, and make all your mistakes. You have to be strong enough for manual labor, and you have to love the work. You have to deal with isolation and, sometimes, ignorant neighbors. We are not suggesting that every pagan should move back to the land, or that our faith is not equally viable when practiced in non-rural areas by folks who shop at the supermarket. However, we do feel that it is important to understand where our faith came from, what its symbols are, and why we do what we do. It is also important to have a strong understanding of our place on Mother Earth, especially as regards our food chain and what we owe to Her every time we take a mouthful. Every pagan should understand these things, know them in the marrow of our bones, regardless of our lifestyle. The only way to do this, that I know of at least, is to get out there into the green places every so often and work for your food the old-fashioned way. Once you have a connection to the Green Man, you’ll fight harder to keep Him alive.

I moved with my wife Bella and my daughter Jess to Cauldron Farm, a small greenspace in Hubbardston, Massachusetts, in 1996. Before this, we had lived in the city for many years, only dreaming of homesteading the way our ancestors had. When I met Bella, we both were struck by the fact that we had so many of the same books on our respective bookshelves—books about herbs, self-sufficiency, and farming. We both even had copies of Alicia Bay Laurel’s rare hippie classic, “Living On The Earth”. Sparks were struck, and we vowed to make the dream reality. Five years of urban scraping and saving later, we did it.

Our most supportive mentors in this process were our friends Tchipakkan and Aelfwine, pagan homesteaders in New Hampshire who run Four Oaks Farm. They helped us get livestock, recommended books, and could be called on in an emergency. We were impressed by their down-to-earth attitude as pagan farmers. Tchipakkan sends out a weekly news-of-the-farm letter, and during that hard first year, when we felt the full brunt of being stuck in a rural area with no close friends, those letters made a big difference. It felt very good to know that other people were doing the same thing we were, and looking at it in a similar way.

This book has three threads. One is the Great Calendar, the turning wheel of the year, reflected in four actual traditional calendars: the eight Celtic solar high holidays, the Celtic lunar months, the lunar months of the Algonquin Native American people, and the archaic Saxon monthly calendar.

The second thread consists of excepts from the Four Oaks Farm chronicles: weekly letters sent out through snail mail and email by Tchipakkan for the last several years, telling the tales of day-to-day coping on their small New Hampshire homestead.

The third thread consists of the dozens of interviews we had with other pagan homesteaders across the country. In a way, this was the most wonderful part of the book. We sent the questionnaire out over email, in pagan publications, and through the grapevine. We weren’t sure that we would actually get any questionnaires back, but we were so happily wrong. Responses came back from many, many places—from Indiana to the Mojave Desert of California, from Ontario to Arkansas. The struggles and joys many of these folks dealt with mirrored our own; many brought tears to our eyes, and all of them warmed our hearts. Many of these came from states and areas where other questionnaires had failed to turn up visible pagans, proving once again that we really are everywhere. To us, they had a more personal meaning: we are not alone. Others, all across the world, whisper a prayer to the Earth Mother and the Green Man as they place their precious seeds in the dirt and smooth them over. Everything we do is being done by others, as it was done by countless of our ancestors before us.

There’s nothing glamorous about homesteading, even if you’re a pagan. The great back-to-the-land movement of the late sixties and early seventies largely petered out, with nearly all of its denizens moving back to the city after a few years of chopping wood and shoveling manure. Their motives were good—“getting back to the Earth, man!”—and not so different from ours. They just had an altogether too starry-eyed idea of how much hard, nasty work it would entail. When you’re all sick with the flu, it’s below freezing and snowing outside, there’s an impromptu skating rink between you and the barn, it’s six in the morning, the animals all need to be fed/milked/etc. and you are vaguely considering such options as suicide, bribing a friend—any friend—with cash to come over and handle it, getting one of your kids up at gunpoint, or declaring a nervous breakdown just to be able to call in sick this one time, it can make you look pretty cynically at your choices.

Then again, you might stagger blearily out to the barn, cursing the world and yourself, and there in the straw is a new infant lamb, being licked down by its mother, and it looks at you with big two-hour-old eyes, and you wouldn’t trade this life for the cushiest condo in Greenwich Village.

This is not a book on what to do in order to homestead. It’s more a book on how to do the things you have to do. If you want plain, factual info on homesteading, see the suggested reading in the Afteryule chapter. If you want more information that you feel we haven’t covered, the likelihood is that it will be covered by these books. This book is about how we as pagans do all those things a little differently. You’ll find some simple, practical facts next to (hopefully simple and practical) magic and ritual that’s been done in the past and that you can, if you choose, do yourself. It wasn’t easy to decide which facts to include and which to leave out; as it was, this book grew to over 400 pages before I realized it.

Most of all, though, this book is about treating homesteading as an earth-centered spiritual discipline. To me, it is more than just an ethical choice to create a little less pollution and waste fewer resources, more than just an aesthetic consideration, although those were also part of my choice. This is the way that I honor the Earth from which I sprang and to which I will fall. Everything I do here is an act of worship.

We’ve organized this book around a series of calendars. All calendars began with the changes of climate and weather that circle the Wheel of the Year, but there is no one calendar that is “right” or ”correct”, because the climate and weather are different in every region. We chose four calendars—the European eight-holiday Wheel of the Year that includes the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days; the Celtic lunar Ogham calendar; a monthly calendar used by the Algonquin Indians; and the old Saxon calendar. Each month has its own subject, moving organically through the year. All old calendars, in fact, revolve around an agricultural year; the calendar we use now doesn’t do this because it was designed in Rome, an urban environment, with politics rather than planting in mind.

One note on sources: The spells and charms and customs in this book came from a variety of sources, most of them the mouths of pagan homesteaders. Some can be verified in such books as Sir James Frazer’s “The Golden Bough”; others, for all I know, were made up by the homesteaders themselves. I make no claims or guarantees about undocumented spells and charms. Frankly, a spell or charm doesn’t need to be old to work. Homesteading pagans tend to specialize in the kind of spellwork referred to as “kitchen magic” or “hedge witchery”, which lends itself well to alteration and adaptation. If someone has done a ritual for several years and it has worked well, it’s a tradition. This is a book of practical agricultural magic and ritual, not an academic resource. There are plenty of those on the market already.

The origin of the word “pagan” was the Latin word “paganus”, or country dweller. (Likewise, the word “heathen” originally meant a dweller on the heath.) The colloquial meaning of “pagan” was rather like our modern term “hick”. It implied someone rural, uneducated, and probably overly superstitious. It is a source of great irony to us that a religion of mostly urban and suburban dwellers has chosen this word for their religious label. Of course, magic works and the gods do speak to you wherever you live, but there is something very primal and magical about living a lifestyle closer to what the people who formulated these beliefs actually experienced.

I can’t know how an ancient peasant experienced things, including those things that I find to be spiritual, but I know that when I dig in the dirt and pray over my seeds, when I feel the milk squirt out of the teat and hear it rattle against the side of the bowl, when I go out on Midsummer Eve to gather flowers of St. John’s Wort, I am coming very close. Perhaps I am coming as close as I ever will. Once upon a time, the people who I have to thank for being alive did these very things, and by doing so insured their survival, and my own.

For the ancestors and those still yet to come,

Raven Kaldera
Cauldron Farm Year 2001
Hubbardston, Massachusetts

Personally, I don't think anyone can really understand water unless they have hauled it in buckets to meet their daily needs. I don't think anyone can understand fire unless one has cut and hauled wood, and depended on fire-building skills to keep warm. I don't think anyone can understand air unless one has worked outdoors in all four seasons, watching the sky and the weather, feeling and smelling the difference between air that blew in off the ocean, air that blew over the great lakes, and air that comes in from the great plains, or their local equivalents. I don't think anyone can understand earth who has not had a compost heap. There is no substitute for direct and personal acquaintance with the elements as they manifest on this plane.

-Beorn, Virginia pagan homesteader

Cauldron Farm Barn. Photo by D. Adler.

© Raven Kaldera, 2004