Classic Imbolc Tale of My Epic Social Fail

Happy Imbolc everyone! Gather here with me around the temple hearth where today we celebrate Hestia/Vesta, goddess of hearth and temple flame, and also Brigid, goddess of poetry, the forge, and myriad other bright and blessed things. Sit here with me, the goddesses amongst us, the soft flickering flames inspiring our mystical vision. As the spirit of Imbolc envelopes us in its warming glow, listen carefully… oh so carefully… and I will tell you the classic Imbolc tale of the biggest social fail of my life.

In January 2007, I was a baby Pagan pursuing Wicca—my first contact with Earth-centered spirituality. I had been Wiccan for less than six months when I started to yearn for a coven. It seemed the witchiest thing to do. My housemates lovingly indulged my newfound passion for Wicca, but weren’t so much into practicing with me. I needed fellows, so I found a local coven online. I can’t remember exactly where. Being as it was 2007, it was likely MySpace. (Sigh. MySpace. Nostalgia. Double sigh.)

I wrote the contact for the coven all about my newfound enthusiasm for Wicca and my devotion to the Sumerian gods, especially Inanna. (This is months before Demeter introduced herself and introduced me to my Classical Pagan family.) The contact person wrote me back to set up a meeting. At the meeting she said, “When I heard you worked with Sumerian deities, I said, ‘We have to have her in our coven!’” Sometimes I wonder if she’d still want me so much knowing how attached I have become to the Classical gods. Would I be as interesting trailing Olympus behind me as I was trailing Inanna and Enki? Probably not. (For the record, I find the Classical pantheon FASCINATING!)

Our meeting went well. They invited me to their Imbolc celebration that was happening the next week. It was way out in the way out at the coven leader’s farm. I was young and dumb so of course I agreed happily to go with these two strange women out into the middle of nowhere at night. (It’s amazing I didn’t get murdered more often.)

The night came. I wore all black. They picked me up in a rattletrap car, the windows of which didn’t roll up all the way. It was snowy and we froze, blasting Loreena McKennit and the soundtrack to Rome—so hot at the time. (Funny how Rome was present even when I was a Sumerian.)

Over the frosty air streaming in through the open windows and over the flowy Pagan music, the women told me how they were both students at the Vanderbilt Divinity School. I was so jealous. To this day, I covet a divinity degree like crazy. They told me they would both soon graduate and be, properly, Masters of Divinity. I’m still envious. Not that I’m not a Master of Divinity, mind you, but my little materialist green eyed monster wants the paper to prove it! Envy or no, I thought they were awesome. One was going to be a Unitarian pastor, (or whatever Unitarians call their pastors). All these things made them, in my eyes, the quintessential cool girls. I wanted so much to be a spiritually quintessential cool girl.

They told me how they had been working to get Paganism more accepted and acknowledged in the Divinity School. They posted a picture of Ba’al on the student post board and freaked the Christian kids out. They cherished that fact. I cherished it with them. The school let them keep the picture up despite the vociferous Christian complaints. Job well done on all sides.

We arrived at the farmhouse of the coven leader and it was bustling. There may have been about thirty people there, mostly mid-twenties to mid-thirties, mostly wearing black, (a classy witch’s best bet for all magical occasions). One older convener wore a slinky black robe with a sequined gold crescent moon on it. She had all the magical fabulosity!

We went out to do the ritual in the middle of a cow pasture, the ground covered in snow and frost. There was probably something mystical that could have happened, tramping out into the night with magic on our minds, but all that was on my mind in that moment was, “Oh gods! Please don’t let me slip and fall and make an ass of myself in front of these cool girls!”

I didn’t fall, but the ass thing was to happen just a few minutes after reaching the bonfire.

Wait for it…

I was standing next to the coven leader. She poured some wine into the fire for an offering, then set the wine bottle on the ground behind her. I reached down and, helpfully, put it up on one of the bricks circling the fire, thinking it was less likely to get knocked over there. When the coven leader stepped away from the fire after her incantation, she stepped back into the wine, knocked it over, then looked at me as if to turn me into a warty toad on the spot!

In my more mature (cough) witchy mindset now, I would laugh and say, “Well, I guess the gods wanted an extra belt of wine!” But at the time, she a youngish witch and me a baby witch—we just took ourselves and these things so damn seriously. It was a major incident about which neither one of us said anything and instead let all the drama spin and fester in our heads the rest of the evening.

Or, at least, that’s what I did. And beyond that evening. She might have let it go right away. You never know—but oh that warty toad look! I still may be going through the metamorphosis. One day I might be writing you these posts from a lily pad and then I can say, see! It wasn’t just me who couldn’t let the spilled wine go!

But, believe it or not, that wasn’t the biggest social fail of my life. That was just the warmup.

Once the ritual was over, we went back into the house for the feast, hurrah! The food was plentiful. Everyone was chatting happily. Spilled wine aside, I was full of thoughts and feelings about the ritual that came babbling out of my mouth in great gusts of magical gusto. When I started talking about all the big thoughts and bigger feelings, there were five people at my table. About midway through, there were three. At the end, it was just me and the gold crescent moon slinky robe fabulosity lady. When I finally reached a stopping place and took a breath, she looked at me and said, “I’m going to go over to that table now.” She got up and left me sitting there alone.

I hadn’t realized everyone else had gotten up from the table long before she did. I hadn’t realized until that moment how very alone I was. I was devastated. My tender little baby witch heart withered right there and wanted to crawl under the bonfire bricks and die. To this day, I don’t exactly understand what I did wrong. Might it have something to do with the witch’s pyramid admonition about being silent? (To know. To will. To dare. To be silent.) Or was I saying something offensive I was unaware was offensive because I was so new? Or was it just I was saying too much too fast for any normal person to put up with? It’s a mystery. And there I sat, plate full of pasta salad, face full of egg, at the table ALONE still brimming with thoughts and feelings and no one to listen to them.

Another human being looked me right in the face and said she was going to walk away from me. Biggest social fail ever! (Somebody out there please tell me it has happened to you too.)

A few days later, my cool girl Masters of Divinity coven contact called and left a message saying they would be happy for me to join their coven. It still shocks the hell out of me. But my stupid pride was still stinging and my body still slowly morphing into a toad and my jealousy still greenly gleaming, so I never called her back. I was too tender to get over it so quickly. I regret it. I’m sure they would have turned out to be amazing coven mates who might have one day explained to me why the whole world walked away from me that night.

Acting out of wounded pride is dumb. Not acting out of wounded pride is equally dumb. How much might I have gained if I had been able to look past my own failure and connect with these wonderful, magical women? How much good might we have done in each other’s lives? I might have even been able to help one of them one day, or to bring them the joy of connecting with the Classical pantheon as fervently as I was soon to do.

I’ve written before about how many Pagan pantheons view hubris as the primary sin. Acting or not acting out of wounded pride is a form of hubris because it says to the gods that we are too good to learn from the life lessons they give us. We do not humble ourselves to accept our own shortcomings and that lack of humility separates us from both our gods and our fellows, making it impossible for us to do good for either one. And connecting with the gods by doing good is what this WHOLE LIFE THING is all about.

On this Imbolc, let us keep that fact close to our hearts, and keep our hearts close to each other as we gather around the hearth fire and bask in Hestia/Vesta and Brigid’s brilliant, gleaming light of love, hope, and inspiration.

-M. Ashley
Head Devotee, Temple Mercury