TEUFELSKUNST Occult Art Blog
TEUFELSKUNST
Occult Art Blog

March 2025

A glimpse of spring. In focus: birch, bumblebee queens, cornel cherry

1st of March marks the meteorological beginning of spring. Nature is slowly but verily waking up. Like this bumblebee queen warming up in the midmorning sun. She found a place in the crevices of an old birch tree. If you look closely you may spot the birch lady’s facial profile outlined in the scales of her bark. Bumblebees are herolds of spring. They are among the first insects waking up and flying at temperatures as low as 6°C. She could start her new colony right beside this birch, in the former nest of a mouse or rabbit.

Bumblebees have ever since been considered emmissaries of witches, devils and the dead. Their drone sound signals the presence of underworld spirits. Caring for themselves and their own hive they produce only as much as honey as needed by them selves, so they always had a somewhat bad reputation compared to the altruistic (and domesticated) honey bee. However, bumblebees are important pollinators, adopted exclusively to the flowers of many traditional witch herbs, as well as food plants.

We have had bumblebee nests in our garden, right beside the lavender bushes, and I have photographed them on nearly all my witch flowers that I’ve grown over the years. I feel lucky and blessed whenever a bumblebee crosses my path and I am able to spend time observing it in nature.

On the green moss under the tree lay a birch polypore. This parasitic fungus may chime in the last quarter of the tree. Yet it carries a plentitude of medicinal properties, being anti-bacterial, anti-viral and anti-infallmatory. It was dropped right before my feet, and indeed I could need all of it after this winter. But I left it there. The simple sight of gleaming moss has its own salutary effects on the body, mind and soul.

Birch stands for new beginnings. Blossoming now is the cornel cherry. It is one of the slowest growing woods and therefore most resilient woods in Europe, and quite similar to Ironwood. Its sulphur yellow blossoms are evoking the spring sun. Its flowers are among the first to open in spring or late winter and open the buffet to bees and other pollinators. Its bloodred fruits provide food to jays, grosbeaks, nuthatches and bullfinches as well as dormice. Its heart-shaped root system reaches in all directions and stabilizes the ground.

Its hard wood was made into weapons. In Greek myth it is even metonymical for the speer. When Romulus thrust his speer into the ground upon which Rome was founded, it blossomed into a cornel tree. The Ziegenhainer cane is traditionally carved from cornel wood.

March 6, 2025

Posted In: Nature

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Novemberness

November was once known as Windmond, Wintermonat and Nebelung. It is the darkest month, hostile and chaotic. It brings storms, disorder and weird dreams. It is the month of the ‘wild hunt’, the Cailleach, Holle, Persephone, Hecate, Brimo and other gods and goddesses of winter and death.

It is raining and snowing and the earth is being saturated with water. The cold grayness is lit up by bright saffron blossoms, colorful tree branches and berries. Wild cherry trees color their crowns red; what looks like a fiery shield or warning sign is actually an invisibility shield against herbivores. By dropping their leaves the trees now ultimately strike their solar sails. Simultaneously the fallen leaves re-assemble to form a protective and nurturing blanket on the ground, for myriads of organisms to spend the winter underneath. Here the magic happens that alchemists seek to master. All of nature’s actions are inherently logical and perfectly adjusted.

November also brings weird dreams, messages of wyrd – the weaveress, who spins, weaves and cuts the thread that forms the fabric of a person’s fate or destiny. Noteworthy, is wyrd not only the base word for modern English weird. Today the word weird denounces something supernatural, uncanny or unexpected. But wyrd is also connected to the German werden = to become, Wort = word as well as Wurz = a herb. Originally these terms, to become and to grow (as a plant) and the concept of wyrd (fate) may have been closely linked. Indeed, the wort cunner uses herbs to change a person’s destiny. The shaman or healer uses herbs to drive out sickness and avert death, which increase in the absence of day light.

The weaveress is present in many different pantheons. Sometimes she is part of a triad of goddesses of fate such as the Norse Norns, the Greek Morai and Roman Parcea. Other times she is an ancient mother goddess presiding over the souls of the unborn and the work of women, especially spinning and weaving. Germanic tribes knew her as Holle/Holda, today also identified with Perchta. Slavic peoples knew her as Mokosh or Zorya.

Frau Holle is envisioned to guard a deep well or pool from which she releases the souls of children to be born and into which she receives again the souls of the stillborn. She guards the cycle of life and death, birth and rebirth. Likewise she judges the work of man, blesses those, who finish their tasks in time and punishes those who are late or lazy. In the short month of November we are reminded that the year is in its final quarter and that we too must come to a close with our projects and rituals, but also, that we must take care of ourselves.

November rituals: healing and cleansing rituals, start a dream journal, honor god(desse)s of death and winter, process seeds and herbs gathered earlier, plant bulbs and fruit trees, burn incense for protection and oneiromancy

November 25, 2023

Posted In: Feast Days

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