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Cozy Coven Chats with Jenny C. Bell
Cozy Coven Chats shares the witch's journey. Jenny C. Bell has been a witch for over three decades and believes it's an empowering path. Jenny seeks to reclaim the word witch as well as the power of the witch's story. Join Jenny in exploring all weird and wonderful of being a witch.
Cozy Coven Chats with Jenny C. Bell
Beyond History: Redefining My Relationship with the Wheel of the Year
Jenny C. Bell shares her personal journey and evolution of celebrating the Witch's Wheel of the Year, offering fresh perspectives on how to make these eight annual Sabbats more meaningful and connected to your actual lived experience.
• The Witch's Wheel comprises eight Sabbats: two equinoxes, two solstices, and four cross-quarter days
• History behind these celebrations is often murky and controversial within the witchcraft community
• Celebrating one-day rituals or focusing too much on historical accuracy can create disconnection
• Pay attention to the actual seasons where you live rather than following generic celebrations
• View each Sabbat as a "slice of the year" rather than a single day celebration
• Cross-quarter days serve as transition periods between major seasonal energies
• Gardening and herbalism offer practical ways to connect with seasonal changes
• Each season carries unique energy: Imbolc (spark), Spring (renewal), Beltane (beauty), Summer (joy), Lammas (harvest), Autumn (release), Samhain (honoring death), Winter (rest)
• Modern witches should evolve rather than just romanticize the past
Text me through my website or reach out on social media to continue this conversation about evolving your seasonal celebrations.
Welcome witches. In today's chat. I want to share my own journey through the Witch's Wheel. The Witch's Wheel of the Year are the eight Sabbaths, and those are the two equinoxes, the two solstices and then what we refer to as cross-quarter days. So we have eight Sabbaths in general and I wanted to share, because I'm interested in the witch's journey, my own journey, I would say as a, as an evolution, maybe a deconstruction of celebrating the wheel of the year. I'm Jenny Seabell and I'm your host and if you'd like to pour yourself a cup of tea, I'm personally drinking a nice cup of jasmine, which is my second favorite tea. I really love Earl Grey, but I also really love jasmine and that's why my favorite cartoon person of all time is Uncle Iroh from the Last Airbender, because I feel our love of tea unites us and if he was a real person he'd obviously be my best friend. But anyway, I digress so on to the evolution of the Sabbaths in my opinion. So we just had a spring equinox. I'm recording this the day after the spring equinox.
Speaker 1:Some people refer to it as Ostara. Some people find that term offensive because it's connected. Give it a research, give your own research to it, but I did read about its connection to some anti-Semitic literature the word so not necessarily the celebration, but the word and it was used in this publication. That was terrible, terrible and influenced some terrible things and some terrible people. So it's interesting. So, anyway, the there's a lot of controversy on some of these cross-quarter days, such as the Ostara controversy I just brought up People just, you know, really trying to hold on to traditions and some people saying that they're fake traditions. I've seen people refer to Wicca and Wiccan folklore as fake lore and I try to respect every witch on this show, so I'm not going to call it that. But there's just a lot of kind of murky history as to, you know, how this wheel of the year, how these sabbats kind of came to be, and so I wanted to talk a little bit about that. But I also want to talk about my own personal kind of journey and how I view them as a way to kind of maybe encourage you to celebrate them a little differently or see them a little differently. So I want to start with that.
Speaker 1:When I the book I had and I still have that was my kind of introduction to Sabbaths, was Sabbaths A Witch's Approach to Living the Old Ways by I think it's Eden, but Aidan McCoy came out in 2001. So that was a long time ago and that's pre like internet on the phone, right For all you youngsters. We had the internet at that time but we didn't have it in our pocket, and I think the evolution of having it in our pocket has allowed us to do more research and learn more from other cultures and other people around the world and hear from other voices. That has really kind of changed a lot of what maybe we thought was true pagan history or true Wiccan history. And again, always do your own research.
Speaker 1:So I started off with this approach that these are real ancient holidays and whether or not you believe that is up to you that these were real ancient holidays that people had been celebrating in Europe and other places throughout time and history and we were just kind of reclaiming them. And I'm a huge Joseph Campbell fan. I talked about that and I know that there are a lot of similarities in timing and when our ancestors around the world would have celebrated certain things like summer solstice obviously was very important. Winter solstice the equinoxes, cross-quarter days gets a little murky as to exactly when and who, and so originally I believed that they were all these ancient holidays and that I was really stepping into this kind of ancestral way. I would celebrate them only on the day. So you know, if it was Ostara, spring, equinox that day, I would celebrate it, maybe do something in the book, make a recipe, do a spell, sing a song, whatever, and then move on and not think about the next holiday until it came. And that was just kind of how I did that for years.
Speaker 1:And then when I was closeted, I was still recognize the day and like no, it was a special day, an important day, maybe make a little something different, but not really make a big deal and not really feeling at all connected to it. So this method of trying to connect with these old ideas or ancient ideas wasn't working for me. Celebrating it as one day off wasn't working for me. Celebrating it, not celebrating it, wasn't working for me either, because I wasn't really tuning in. And so what I've kind of come to do and learn are I look at the wheel of the year and I'm going to encourage you to do it the same way in two different ways. So the first thing that I want you to look at is I want you to become more aware of where you live.
Speaker 1:So I for a long time lived in the Mojave Desert and when I would see like with you know now, with Instagram, other people's celebration of you know, the winter, solstice or even spring or any of the cross-quarter days, I was like okay, it looks pretty much the same out my window, no matter what the season. The Joshmint tree, I mean, sometimes it fruits, but it doesn't change all that much. Occasionally it would snow where I lived, but really I was not. It's not the Halloween town for seasons that we all kind of romanticize at all and I think for a lot of us we don't. A lot of people don't live in that kind of place. It's, you know, it's like a only a certain amount of Europe, a certain amount of the United States that really gets those four distinct seasons. And that's actually part of why we moved to the PNW was the family.
Speaker 1:Just, my husband especially was like I really want four seasons because he grew up in the desert. It's like I really want to know, like I want to see that it's fall and like feel fall and not have this 80 degree weather. So anyway. So I want you to first think about if you're going to celebrate the wheel of the year, you're going to celebrate the Sabbaths, I want you to really pay attention to your own weather because chances are most likely, maybe your spring doesn't really happen on the equinox or, when everybody is sharing online about all these flowers blooming, you don't have that, or maybe you're still in deep snow.
Speaker 1:So I think, for me, what changed, what helped me get better on this path or feel a deeper connection to this wheel of the year because I do now was really paying attention to my own surroundings, my own weather, the earth outside of my home, the earth beneath my feet. Really attuning to the earth I live on was huge change and it was eye-opening. And it's very similar to people that menstruate. When they really kind of sync up their menstruation with the moon cycle, you get a deeper understanding of the moon cycle because you have like an inner moon cycle. It's the same idea, right? So, instead of getting hung up on the history of these sabbats and whether or not it's true and whether or not it's fake lore or true folklore and this and that, I just kind of let that go and I started focusing on the actual changes I'm seeing and, as I've become a gardener, those changes are more, more perceptive to the changes. I can see them better. I think Mikey my cat, just my black cat, obviously he just wanted to chime in. I think he agrees with me.
Speaker 1:So you know, like right now it's spring and it's cold and raining it just snowed earlier this week and I'm not seeing bees. I do have a few flowers opening, but they're bulb plants for the most part, right Daffodils and crocus. A few other little blossoms are happening here and there. My elderberry tree, which is native, just opened a few leaves. So spring is happening, but it's a slow start to spring here, whereas your spring might be different, right. So that's the one thing I want you to reflect on, think about as you kind of go through your own wheel of the year and the eight Sabbaths.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I've come to really enjoy, and I think is different, is I like to think about the wheel of the year. I like to think of it as a pie or a pizza pie with eight slices, and in those slices is the vibration, the energy of each of the Sabbaths. So right now we're in spring equinox and we will stay in the energy of spring equinox the balance, the light, returning the new energy, the birthing, the manifesting, the seed planting, all of that that goes with that. We'll stay in that until Beltane, and that way you're not having this pressure in this modern world to drop everything and say, okay, march 20th, I can't do. I have to like, do this huge ritual and I want to. I want to bake treats and I want to plant seeds and I want to go outside and see bunnies. And putting all this pressure on yourself as a modern witch, right. Instead you get the whole slice, sure, on yourself as a modern witch, right. Instead you get the whole slice so you can break up all of your celebrations, you can enjoy the entire season.
Speaker 1:So I like to think of them as seasons and I like to think of them as eight seasons. So instead of having the four seasons, we have the eight and we're noticing the nuances right of the change. And with the cross-quarter days, I really like to look at them as in between the other seasons, right. So we're in spring right now. Beltane marks the middle of between spring and summer and so with that I like to start to, I like to bring in, still honor the spring, but start to bring in some of the summer energy, right, or what are things that you associate with summer as a witch or where you live or just in general in your life, and then you start to marry those summer vibes, that summer energy, that summer magic, with the spring and that becomes the Beltane ritual, right? So that's sort of how I have started to look at the wheel of the year, because if you really, if you really do the research and you really try to make this in real and you try to be like no, this is what witches of old did, you're gonna find out that's not really the case.
Speaker 1:This is a more modern idea of witchcraft and there it's interesting. Really, I think the one that's most interesting is Samhain, right, because you have this Celtic holiday, but it also lines up with the Day of the Dead, and it also lines up with other days of dead or days of honoring the dead throughout other cultures. So it's not just in Mexico, there are some other cultures that honor their dead at the same time, and then the Catholic Church obviously likes to kind of tie in stuff. They have all souls and all saints and all that. So you have this time frame around Samhain. That's all about honoring the dead. So it's not just witches. There are other people honoring the dead, and so that's all about honoring the dead. So it's not just witches, there are other people honoring the dead, and so that's one of those days where I'm like this they got this one right, like this one's important.
Speaker 1:And all these cultures across time and and across continents and places are celebrating the dead at the same time, like, like there's something, energetically speaking, where we feel this is the right thing to do at this time as a human culture, as a collective, and that's the other thing to consider, right. So you're considering your own land, where you live. So you're noticing your own cycle of earth. Right, you're thinking about the cross quarter days as in between the other major seasons, right. And then the other thing to think about is the collective energy, and so I like to think of that more than the history, because the history is murky. So if, collectively, a lot of people on October 31st, november 1st, 2nd, are feeling spooky season, right, it's Halloween. They're feeling like facing fears, they're feeling like honoring the dead, they're feeling this change in the air.
Speaker 1:Halloween night always feels magical to me, and it has since I was a child. That's why it was my favorite holiday. It's there's something. There's something there if, collectively, we're all feeling it, and that's another thing to consider, right. So really like, what I'm saying is I kind of threw out the books and the literature and the studying of the wheel of the year and the Sabbaths, and I threw that out and I thought to myself what's going on collectively? What are people feeling modern day? What's going on in the earth around me and how can I celebrate this or honor this for a chunk of the year, like a pie slice of the year, instead of just a single day. And now I feel like I really tune in. I really love working with the Sabbaths. I really look forward to the changing of the seasons. I have a wheel, a plaque on my wall that I change and I really feel when the seasons change now and I feel that energy and I feel that shift and I feel much more attuned to the earth and all of those and collectively to other people. Today in our coven someone posted saying that they really, since joining our coven, are starting to really tune into the earth and the changes.
Speaker 1:Like a lot of times, I think, with witchcraft, why I think witchcraft is so good for people in general is it invites a sense of presence to in connection to the earth right and other spiritual they are spiritual paths and religions do that too. They invite a presence, but they don't all invite a connection to the earth right. And that's what's really special to me is I'm at these holidays, I'm being asked, I'm being invited, I'm being asked to stop for a second and look at the earth and notice how she's changing, and to me that's beautiful, right going and just seeing the subtleties of okay. So yeah, it's pretty cold, but there are some things blooming like spring is really mother nature is showing me a little ankle, like she's. She's showing me like spring's coming, honey, right, and that's really exciting. And then I kind of get that exciting feeling. And so it's the same with all the holidays, with Imbolc, I get really deep into wanting to light candles, right. I really. I feel at Imbolc, I feel I'm going backwards.
Speaker 1:By the way, the one, the holiday before this one, I feel, on that February 1st, 2nd, like when will winter be over? It's so dark, it's so cold, it's so wet. I need the sun. I'm lacking vitamin D, everyone's sick. There's so much heaviness at that time that when Imbol comes, I need it. I need to light the candles, I need to reignite my own inner spark. I work with Bridget personally. I need all of that. I need her to come in and be like, okay, let's get that fire going again, because I'm really feeling wilted and stuck in the dark, reverie, in the hermit kind of mode of winter, and I need that spark and so right, so we have that. So we have kind of these, these energies, and the other thing I just want to take you through them right, so we have in bulk, in my opinion, was what I just told you. It's about reigniting the spark. In the dead of winter we have spring. Equinox for me is fresh energy, it's new energy, it's hope To me.
Speaker 1:I celebrate the new year at this time. Now, I know that doesn't go with the normal witch's wheel of the year. A lot of witches celebrate it Samhain, yuletide, in between there around there. I just don't agree with that because it's dark and sad. I just don't. My spring lines up better with the astrological new year which is now and my new year lines up better, right, I feel invigorated by Aries season and I feel invigorated by spring, so I like to celebrate this time as the new year. That's my way, beltane.
Speaker 1:I like to really get deep into flowers, like, give me all the flowers. I'm a Taurus, I'm Ferdinand the bull. I want to smell all the flowers. I want to collect flowers. I want to make flower crowns. I want them on my altar, I want them everywhere and of course, I leave a ton for the pollinators. I want to plant them. I want to go to the flower farm down the street, like I really just want to celebrate the beautiful sensuality of flowers and color and feeling beautiful. I want to really have infused beauty into my life, into my home. So it's all about beauty for me.
Speaker 1:And then summer is all about fun. I mean, I went to school. I had summers off. I was a teacher for a long time. I had summers off. Summers always marked fun for me. My kids are home, we're doing more things. It's more joyful. I always feel joy and I think, always think of summer tied with the original Pamela Coleman Smith drawing of the sun card in the tarot where it's the little baby, like with the sun and the riding the horse, and it's just like such a joyful. It one of my joyful pictures. It's like new birth and happiness and light. It's like all the good things right venture with the horse, and that's how I think of summer. I think of summer as joy, adventure. I like to get a lot done. I feel a lot more energy. All of it really tune into that right.
Speaker 1:And then between summer and fall we have another cross-quarter day and there's again some controversy. But around August 1, we have Lammas Lunasa and I personally use that as a first harvest time. So I will make cornbread. We often will have like a harvest meal of whatever I'm growing or we're foraging. This year we joined an awesome I'm really excited a farmer's CSA, so we'll be getting baskets of seasonal food. If you have one, join one. We did it when we lived in California. I found one here. I'm so excited to get our first basket in May. And it feels good to support a farm. It feels good to be able to eat local and seasonal, because there's so much, so much more nutrients when it's local, because these plants are surviving your area right, so they're surviving the smoke season that we go through in the PNW.
Speaker 1:Anyway, side side, sidetracked Back to the holidays. So with that holiday I make cornbread and we feed the land we each pick. There's four of us in the family. We pick a place, a north, south, east, west. One of us picks one of those directions. That was the word I was looking for. We pick a direction, we give our thanks to the land spirits and we offer the cornbread and I always will offer, whatever I grow, some of it to the deer and to the jays and the other pollinators, and never take all of what we grow either. And the same with foraging. Please don't take it all. Ever take small amount leaves. I'll leave a lot for everyone else. And so we do that. We really just celebrate the harvest and the bounty. It also is getting ready for going back to school, and so there's a lot you know collectively, culturally too, that we can tie in.
Speaker 1:And then we get to the autumn, equinox, which I think is like when everybody feels witchy, from like autumn until Halloween. Everybody is a witch, everybody wants to be a witch. I have my TikTok always gets everybody is a witch. Like everybody wants to be a witch. I have my TikTok always gets so many more views. Like everybody is ready to be a witch. And so with autumn is all about release, right, it's pretty clear Even for where I live. I look around and the trees are losing their leaves. Well, that means I need to lose something.
Speaker 1:Summer gets really robust. It gets really busy. You're able to do a lot because there's a lot of sunshine, a lot of warmth, a lot of freedom, a lot of free time, a lot of good food, and now, with fall, a lot of that goes away. And so you have to start to strip back and pare down, you have to say no, you have to set boundaries, you have to let some things go, you have to prepare for winter, you have to. You know're you're going to be canning and jarring, it's all those things right. And I work a lot with herbs, which has really helped me tune in with the season. Foraging and working with herbs has been a huge, and I'll talk about that in a little bit.
Speaker 1:And then we get to the um, we get to the in between which we talked about, halloween, samhain, day of the Dead, and it's so magical, so potent at that time, and that's the time to honor the dead, but also to honor the things that have died in your life, right, the past, careers, the wins, the losses. I like to just honor all the death. And I also like to do shadow work because in the end, right that's, we're entering the shadow, entering the darkness, and that'll help make winter a little bit easier. We get to winter and it's so funny because it's like, okay, we want to rest and receive and relax, but if you live in a culture that celebrates Christmas and New Year's, you're not resting or relaxing at all. It's very busy and so we want to try to balance that.
Speaker 1:So for winter, I like to think of it as cozy, resting, receiving, setting myself up for health. I like to do a lot of tinctures and a lot of preparations elderberry syrup, things like that in the fall, so that winter is healthy. I like to do a lot of warming things in winter warming spices, warming soups, warming foods, a lot of twinkling lights, a lot of vitamin d, right things like that, like preparing to go inward, to hibernate, to get into darkness, and then we go back and then after that is inmbolc. So that's kind of how a quick overview of how I look at the wheel of the year. So I've kind of let go of a lot of the folklore, myth, history, all of that.
Speaker 1:The only one I really stick with is Imbolc. I really feel belongs to Bridget in my mind, my heart, and that's works for me. It may not work for you, so I definitely stick with that. And then with works for me. It may not work for you, so I definitely stick with that. And then with Halloween, samhain, I like to honor the dead, and that's partly because I lived in Southern California for so long and all my friends were Mexican and my best friend is Mexican still and to me that's such a beautiful culture and time of year to celebrate and honor our loved ones, and so I always like to put up pictures or piece, you know, do a whole like ancestor altar and personal. That's what I like to do and it feels good to me and it feels right to me. But it may not feel right to you. It may instead feel like I want to, you know, treat it as in between fall and winter.
Speaker 1:So if we're looking at what's in between fall and winter, what's that energy? It's, you know, growing darkness. It's letting go even more, it's going within even more, it's shadow work, it's all of those things. So, yeah, so I just I wanted to make this episode a little bit more about my journey, go a little further than the previous episode, but specifically about the wheel of the year, because every year I see just these posts that are just not kind. They're kind of aggressive and baiting of other witches trying to challenge you know, like, oh, you call it Ostara, well, you're a racist and it's just so like intense. It's like why? Why do we have to? Why do we have to fight within the community Like we're already a niche group and there's a lot of people that don't like us outside the community why we have to fight within the community? Can't we talk like grown-ups and have grown-up conversations and whatever? So I've really tried to release a lot of that instead really trying to find my own way and do my own thing.
Speaker 1:And so if you garden and If you work with herbs, that's such a gateway into really figuring out your own path with this, because, as a gardener, you're already celebrating the wheel of the year. Like you know, I need to be planting, I need to be planning, I need to be harvesting. All of that comes. The wheel of the year is based off of the planting schedule. So if you start to garden, the wheel of the year suddenly makes like actual literal sense. Right, it's no longer ethereal, it's no longer this kind of abstract idea like hands in the dirt. Oh, this makes sense. Like right now I'm literally planting seeds and previous holiday I was planning the garden and I was pruning previous to that. It's like all the whole cycle. So really getting into that.
Speaker 1:And if you don't, you don't have a green thumb, you don't have the space working with herbs, right. You start to really look and take some herbalism courses. You'll see herbalists, traditional herbalists and especially Chinese herbalism like really tries to help the body get through the different seasons, right. So for winter I'm not eating cold foods. We're starting to get into spring. It's still cold outside, so I'm still starting my day with like a warm broth or warm tea or oatmeal. I'm starting I need to help my body warm up before I put foods into it. I'm taking like drinking warming teas, like clove, and I'm putting cinnamon in. A lot of the things I'm doing. I'm using more spice, trying to warm the body and then when we get to summer, I'll be eating a lot of melon and watermelon and trying to cool the body down right.
Speaker 1:It's like tuning in with these seasons, with the Sabbaths. If you tune in with the earth around you through gardening or you tune in with your own body, your own body's needs. What is your body telling you? Your body's like I'm tired, I'm sluggish, we're not getting sunlight, we're not getting vitamin D, I need to rest more in the winter. Your body. Suddenly, in the summer, I want to do all these things. There's sun going. The sun is so bright, it's so warm, it's so. It's so long, it's so bright for so long. Right, it's like all the way till nine o'clock at night.
Speaker 1:I want to be doing stuff, I want to be active, and that's really, I think, the gift of the wheel of the year is the getting to know yourself, your own body, getting to know the earth, getting to know the collective, getting to tune in with the energy. That's the gift and that's what I think is should be the focus. That's my opinion, right? This is where I think we should focus, not on the history, not on the witch gods. And what crystals and what colored candle do I need in my altar? No, no, no, no, no, none of that.
Speaker 1:Right, like, let it go, let the books go and do it for yourself, because I think, in the end, when we look back at witches of the past, that's what they were doing, right? They were living connected to the land, they were working with the plants, they were looking at the animals and when were the animals being born? And oh, this is the time for this. And it wasn't so much about all this other showy stuff, it was about really tuning in with their own body and the earth around them. So I hope this inspires you. If it does, great. If you're like this doesn't make any sense to me, let it go. But thanks for listening and yeah, let's have a conversation. If you're inspired by this and you think it's really interesting, there's a way you can text the show on my website and you can tell me what you think, or you can reach out to me on social media. But let's just keep evolving. I think that's the thing. Is witchcraft.
Speaker 1:It can't so many people want to get into witchcraft, to like go back in time. There's a romanticist like a romanticizing of the old, tiny ways and like I want to. I want to connect with the ancestors. I want to connect with the ancestors. I want to connect with the ancient witches. I want to do what the ancient people were doing, and the truth is it's hard to do that because it's murky, because they were erased right. A lot of these people were burned, their books were burned. A lot of these people were doing this stuff quietly and silence silenced, right. A lot of these people weren't going to tell their neighbors what witchcraft they were doing. So a lot of it we don't have, and so it comes down to some of the history we do have and a lot of it's conjecture right. So instead, make it yours, make it modern, make it make sense for you, because in the end, you're the witch and it's your path.
