It is often hard to distinguish the boundary between mysterious rituals of enchantment and simple acts of domesticity.
A day spent scrubbing floors, of making an offering of knees and fingernails, causes a house feel more like a home than any rent payment.
The baking of a bread seasoned with gossip and trivia knots friendships together more surely as any team-building exercise.
A few weeks ago Curio invited Coil and the other shop witches to craft cakes and partake in shared sorceries of the hearth.
Coil’s iced entreaties for an early spring weren’t entirely successful from a meteorological perspective, but subsequent slices of cake were consumed with suspiciously locustlike voraciousness.
We hope everyone gets to enjoy some cozy comforts in the coming week. Or, if not, they at least get to make themselves sick on processed sugar in the shape of tiny chickens.
The Lenten seasons is a great time to contemplate how great it is not to be a medieval peasant (all of the feast days notwithstanding). The fast of Lent was a virtue made of necessity, since by this time most of the winter food stores were exhausted, and the early crops had not yet arrived.
We don’t want to understate the amount of hunger worldwide, or to ignore the fact that food scarcity remains an issue for many Americans; but most of us in the West live with staggering caloric abundance.
Here at Hierophany House, we plant seeds mostly for the kittens to have things to dig up and smother, and Augur’s mother raises a garden every year primarily to feed to local rabbits. (They still think they’re being terribly cunning when they discover the “gaps” in the fence.)
We are grateful to have larders so overflowing with Peeps and Yoohoo that the closest we get to starvation are these terrifying Snurses. (Snail+Purse = Snurse.)
Full video on Instagram.
You might think that the reason this clock is ticking is ghosts. Ghosts is usually a great choice as it’s very difficult to disprove, and we have been talking about ghosts a lot this month.
However, in this case, it’s not ghosts.
You might also think that it’s a spring that came loose because the clock was recently moved.
That answer is boring, and also wrong.
The correct answer is The Thing in the Wall.
The south eastern corner of our Eldritch Ballroom is where The Thing in the Wall lives.
The Thing in the Wall is usually pretty shy. It likes to tap on the plaster, and occasionally makes spiders disappear. More troublingly, although thankfully less frequently, it also makes spiders appear.
(To be fair, we think it just does this because the kittens really like to play with the spiders. Even Things in the Walls like kittens.)
It is mostly tolerant of guests, but its social batteries are small, and after a while it can get fussy.
It was an absolute champion to put up with the first day of wallpapering. However, by the second it was starting to rattle not just the plaster, but everything nearby.
Luckily, the work was finished before the kittens made themselves sick with spiders and now the clocks which are supposed to be silent have mostly returned to that state.
The clock (and its matching candelabra) was produced by Tiffany’s in the late 19th century by someone who loves gargoyles as much as we do.
Equinoxes are great times for spirits and clocks, so come visit us this for a signing with The Cunning Farmer on Saturday and discount seeds all weekend!
(For any audio sleuths, the video and the audio were collected separately and gain was adjusted for the voiceover, but this is the sound the clock was making.)
Original post with video on instagram.
Lt. Commander Atramenta Murderpaws is not ready for the equinox.
But you can be, with a copy of the new book from Inner Traditions by longtime shop regular, The Cunning Farmer.
He’ll be here this Saturday (3/21) dedicating copies and answering all your magical farming questions about how to grow award-winning garlic without making Demeter jealous.
In all seriousness, he is an exceptional human being, a bottomless well of knowledge about magic and the natural world, and someone we’re honored to call a friend. To celebrate, we’ll have his new book at 25% off for this weekend only.
Just look at his awesome tractor and beautiful farm!
We’ll have plenty of palm stones in spring colors, and all our seed packets will be at 2024 prices for the weekend.
You can also see the scale of dragon that tried to murder Augur, and, if you have x-ray vision, look at his thankfully not broken ankle.
Baroness, incidentally, thinks farming is dumb, but does want everyone to see the fish she caught and is helping Augur mount. (Her fish is an 80 million year old Mosasaur fossil that Baroness did not hunt, and she helped by trying to eat superglue.)
Happy Friday the Thirteenth!
During the last (we hope) snow of the season, we traveled to Patterson’s Tower, a gothic revival folly with commanding views of the landscape south of Dayton.
It was built in 1941 by the National Youth Administration, one of the organizations that provided employment and education to those struggling during the Great Depression.
In 1967, a young couple seeking refuge from a thunderstorm made their way to the tower.
Sadly, there was no grounding rod, so when a bolt of lightning struck the roof, it traveled along water that had seeped down the interior walls and arced to the teenagers.
For one of them the consequences were fatal.
Even without its grim history, the thing looks like the set from a mid-century horror film. Perhaps that’s why it’s been nicknamed “Castle Frankenstein.”
Later this month our friends at the Know Theatre are putting on a new Victorian ghost story called “The Ravenside Occurrence.” In their honor, we’ll be doing a few haunting related posts from locations within a short drive of Covington.
If you decide to visit any of these sites, please be respectful to the living and the dead.
Thanks to Dayton’s Parks for preserving this wonderful structure.
