Moon Covenant Summit

The Moon Covenant Summit offers the rare opportunity to peek behind the curtains and see how a cult is born and what goes on behind closed doors. Join Giulia Turolla, Raven Edgewalker, and Sara Mastros in this exploration of mysteric lunar work. Learn about their styles of practice, organization, and founding stories in this six-hour summit being held on Saturday, 25 February, from 3pm – 9pm (GMT). This event will be recorded.

• £7.00

• Ticket holders will receive a link to the recording once the event has finished.

• Asteria’s Nest members receive an additional 20% off the ticket price. (Interested? Read more here.)

• Proceeds will be used to cover the costs of Zoom and Vimeo.

SCHEDULE AT A GLANCE

3:00 – 4:30pm: Into Diana’s Woods with Giulia Turolla
4:30 – 5:00pm: break
5:00 – 6:30pm: ‘I shall go into a hare’ with Raven Edgewalker
6:30 – 7:00pm: break
7:00 – 8:30pm: The Goddess of the Krokopeplos, She of Learning, Liminality, and Liberation with Sara Mastros
8:30 – 9:00pm: Q&A and closing

DETAILS

3:00 – 4:30pm
Into Diana’s Woods with Giulia Turolla

Giulia Turolla will lead you into Diana’s woods, where prey and predator face their own reflections in Her shimmering mirror and warm blood mixes with holy water. The cult of Diana Nemorensis is one of the most ancient and fascinating in Italy: ancestral kingship, ritualized violence, rites of passage, cult of the dead, and an intense sacredness of wild nature are woven together, forming a landscape that is both complex and rich, where we can feel right away the presence of an ancient, powerful Mystery. We will see what happens when such an ancient, fiery deity decides She wants to work with you and how it is possible to reconcile a modern daily life with a path of exploration and devotion.

Giulia will share her own experience in balancing between practical issues and Diana’s demands: who can access the deeper mysteries and how is it possible to leave that decision in Her hands? What are the boundaries between open and closed practices? How does it work when a non-hierarchical group of witches, from different paths, are called together to explore the Mysteries and pioneer new ways towards an ancient, simmering, core of witchcraft? Let’s discover that together.

Headphones and something to cover your eyes with are recommended.

Giulia Turolla ais an Italian contemporary witch, Priestess and Teacher in the Ara Tradition. She graduated with honors in Classical Letters and Archaeology and Cultures of the Ancient World from Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna. Her personal path focuses on the practice of witchcraft as an indigenous form of shamanism and aims to rediscover and rebuild the Sacred Net that binds us to the Spirits and the Gods of the place we live in. As a researcher of European witchcraft and magic in the Ancient World, she has participated to many conferences and events, both national and international.

5:00 – 6:30pm
‘I shall go into a hare’ with Raven Edgewalker

“I shall go into a hare,
With sorrow and sych and meickle care;
And I shall go in the Devil’s name,
Ay while I come home again.” – Isobel Gowdie, Scotland, 1600s

The elusive and magical hare has captured imaginations around the globe and across millennia from ancient times though to the modern day. The sight of a wild hare in the half light of dawn or dusk is one that is hard to forget, calling us to connect and deepen our knowledge of the hare.

Hares appear frequently in myth, folklore, art ,and poetry, often linked to the moon. In some cultures, hares are deities in their own right, like the Algonquin people’s Great Hare, while in others they are sacred to many deities from the Norse goddess Freya to the Siberian Goddess Kaltes, and the Chinese Hare in the Moon. In Britain and parts of Europe the Hare is associated with witchcraft. Witches were, and perhaps still are, said to have the ability to shapeshift into hares under the light of the moon. Perhaps one of the most famous spells, by Isobel Gowdie, is to transform into a hare.

Raven Edgewalker will lead an exploration of some of the fascinating folklore, myths, and stories surrounding the hare, sharing tools and information to learn to build or deepen your relationship with hares and their spirit. Raven will speak to some of the pressures facing the hare in our modern world and facilitate an experiential trance working with the hare and its transformational powers.

You may wish to have a journal and writing tools to hand, and an eye scarf if that’s a tool you like to use in trance work.

Raven Edgewalker is a British Witch, teacher, artist and writer who dwells in the magical landscape of Somerset, UK. They are a Reclaiming and Anderson Feri initiate and have worked within both traditions for around 25 years. They have an ongoing, passionate love affair with the natural world, its physical and non-physical spirts. Raven sees their work in the world as that of building relationship, with self, with each other, within community, with deity and land and its beings. Raven has been lucky enough to teach Reclaiming Witchcamps and workshops across the world, both face to face and online as a founder and member of the teaching faculty of World Tree Lyceum – a pagan Mystery School.  Raven owns the popular pagan business Greenwomancrafts and makes their living crafting beautiful pagan tools and jewellery.

7:00 – 8:30pm
The Goddess of the Krokopeplos, She of Learning, Liminality, and Liberation with Sara Mastros

Sara Mastros will be teaching about the Goddess of the Krokopeplos, She of Learning, Liminality, and Liberation.  After a brief introduction and general discussion about the Divine Krokopeplos, we’ll investigate many of her names and epithets, and discuss how all those facets reflect different qualities of the Krokopeplos’s light.  From there, we’ll move into the heart of the matter: an exploration of the liminal space between Self-Determination and Communality.  How can the Goddess of the Krokopeplos be both one autonomous goddess and a fractious coterie of many related divinities?  How can people with different, but related, callings and practices come together to form religious communities?  What does it mean for a monastic order to construct lives of fierce autonomy, braided together in intimate bonds of community?  What learning can be extracted from that tension?  What liberation does it hold?  Finally, we’ll investigate the primary calling of the Circle of the Krokopeplos – to construct such ways of being, on both the individual and communal level.  Following the lecture, we’ll collaborate in a ritual of gate opening, spirit journey, and communion.  If possible, please bring headphones, hot water with honey, and a yellow scarf or bandana to this summit.

Sara Mastros, author of Orphic Hymns Grimoire and Big Book of Magical Incense, is Pittsburgh’s leading Witch for Hire. She teaches tarot, witchcraft, Greek and Near Eastern mythology, Pan-Levantine folk magic, and practical sorcery online and at festivals all over the east coast. She’s also a co-owner of Quicksilver Cards & Games, an app company that produces both the Fool’s Dog family of tarot, lenormand, and oracle apps and the game Enjoy Sudoku! You can check in on her courses and lessons at WitchLessons.com, sign up for her newsletter at MastrosZealot.com, or follow all her witchy shenanigans on facebook at Facebook.com/Sara.Mastros