I was going to post about the honey cakes I made last night. But because the insurance is the way it is in the US, I had to go with my mother and sister to pick out a coffin for my living grandmother. The insurance company has fought us tooth and nail over this and so has the nursing home. The nursing home is threatening to kick her out because of this same insurance policy. Then when my mom and sister went to visit my grandmother while I was at work, we found out her friend passed away on Saturday. They waited until we visited to tell her. I’m hoping to share with you guys the recipe tomorrow. I ask the great goddess for healing and strength. For me and mine and anyone else who needs it. 🕯️

The moon is gone tonight. Not waning. Not fading. Gone. The New Moon is exact tonight, and the sky is genuinely dark — the kind of dark that asks something of you if you let it. In ancient Athens, this was the Deipnon. The last day of the month. You swept the hearth, you cleared the threshold, you left Hekate's supper at the crossroads and you let the old month go completely before the new one was allowed to begin. No rushing into what came next. Just the full weight of the ending, honored. I've really been sitting with endings this week. In a month, my child turns one year old. A year of a whole person existing who didn't exist before. A year of myself existing in a way I hadn't before either. The Descent arc we've been walking together has had a particular texture for me personally this season, and this is part of it: the slow realization of how much has changed, and the tenderness of that. The generational healing. Your Crossroads prompt for this week: What has this last lunar month asked you to carry? And what are you willing to leave at the threshold before tomorrow's crescent appears?👇Drop your answer below if you’d like it witnessed. I’ll start. If you do want to share, this is the space. We're all standing at the same crossroads tonight. The Noumenia begins tomorrow — the first sliver of the new crescent, the new month, the new beginning. The Hekatean Kitchen launches in six days. And a new arc is already gathering itself just outside the frame of what you can currently see. 😉😅 "She who holds the torch does not fear the dark. She knows what lives there." — d'Este & Rankine, Hekate: Liminal Rites What are you leaving at the threshold tonight? En Erebos, Phos. In darkness, light. Blessings, Tirza 🌿🗝️🌙 #SundayCrossroads #HekateanHealing #DarkMoon #Deipnon #Noumenia #Phosphoros #PlutoRetrograde2026 #ShadowWork #Phase II: THE DESCENT #LiminalMagic #HekateanHerbalism #NewMoon 📚 Further reading: d'Este & Rankine, Hekate: Liminal Rites | Cyndi Brannen, Keeping Her Keys | Jon D. Mikalson, The Sacred and Civil Calendar of the Athenian Year

We walk the night‑path of the alphabet, invoking a plant, flower, or medicinal herb at each step. If the herb’s hidden wisdom is known, whisper its healing gifts as an offering to the Triple‑Gate.If only the name comes to mind, place it on the altar of letters and let the mysteries grow. How to Play: 1. We begin with A and name a plant of the crossroads. 2. You answer with B, then C, and so on, each entry following the next letter in order. 3. When you can, add a brief note of its traditional medicinal use (e.g., “lavender – calms nervous tension”). 4. If the herb is unfamiliar beyond its name, simply give the name and let the next traveler expand its lore. The Goal: To trace a continuous strand of botanical knowledge, honoring Hekate’s role as keeper of thresholds—between letter and plant, between spirit and flesh. I shall light the first candle below.

Last week we were underground with Apollo at Klaros. Today we climb to the other oracle. Delphi sat 2,000 feet up Mount Parnassus, terraced into the rock, looking out over the Pleistos valley to the Gulf of Corinth. The Greeks called it the omphalos — the navel of the world. You climbed the Sacred Way past treasuries and votive statues to reach the Temple of Apollo, and inside that temple sat the Pythia: His priestess, and the most consulted woman in the ancient Greek world for nearly a thousand years. She worked on a bronze tripod over a chasm in the temple floor. Geological surveys have confirmed ethylene and hydrocarbon gases venting from fault lines beneath the site. The ancients called it pneuma. She chewed bay laurel, breathed the vapor, and spoke — sometimes in verse, sometimes in cries the priests translated into hexameter. Kings came before war to consult her. Socrates was named the wisest man in Greece through her mouth. Klaros versus Delphi: These are two oracles of the same god, and they work nothing alike. Klaros — underground, water drunk from a grief-well, a man descends and speaks, subterranean dark, winter oracle. Delphi — mountain heights, vapor rising from a chasm, a woman sits on a tripod and speaks, sunlit, the oracle Apollo comes home to. Greek religion held both without resolving the tension. That is worth noticing. Apollo is not just the bright, rational, sun-on-the-mountain god the Renaissance handed us. He has an underground face too. He just doesn't live there the way Hekate does. Here is where Hekate enters the picture, because She always does. Hekate as Phosphoros — the torch-bearer, the light-in-darkness — is the face She carries through Phase II of the Pluto retrograde. We are in the descent. The torch is not the sun; it is the thing you carry when the sun is gone. These are related but not the same job.That is not a rivalry. It is a division of labor between sun and moon shadow that the ancient world understood clearly and that we would do well to remember. Solar return is real and worth marking. But the torch in the dark is older. Which brings us to what makes this week's timing matter.

So I am in the kitchen reloading the dishwasher for the night when I hear something hit the floor. I look and its my bag of Bay leaves off my herb shelves. No one was by it. so now I have put leaves as an offering to Hecate and I am burning some. I dont know why it fell. lol