 people! I'm Ginny Metherill and I'm a fourth generation witch. I have received so many comments on my previous video which was about November witchcraft concerning the great American beast of Thanksgiving and I'm reading through these comments it became immediately obvious that the only thing I can do with them is to make them into this video on a pagan Thanksgiving. I'm a Brit and I know pretty much nothing about Thanksgiving so I've had to do quite a lot research on to this video and the bare bones of it as I'm sure you're all aware but I'm not going to teach you to suck eggs I'm just going to say that in the 1600s the Pilgrim Fathers came over and settled with the help of the Wampanoag tribe and if I've pronounced that name correctly reduced a successful first harvest and had a great feast to celebrate it. This tradition then has carried on and was formally recognised as a national feast day in America by Abraham Lincoln and has been celebrated pretty much ever since. That as far as I'm aware is the bare bones of it but let's take a little bit of a deeper dive because basically Thanksgiving is where a group of people come together in their family units generally and have a celebratory feast together. The elements around this gathering together and having large feasts really echo and have great correlations with British paganism and the harvest home. The Pilgrim Fathers when they left these British shores for America would have taken their daily customs with them and the biggest biggest event in the whole of the agricultural year is the harvest and a safe and plentiful harvest was longed and hoped for. It was a huge deal and let's face it as still is because if we don't harvest properly we're not going to eat. So the harvest home festival has been celebrated by pagans, Christians, Jews, any other religion that you can think of in between because it was such a huge deal to all of us. The harvest home is essentially where the last sheaf of corn or barley or whatever your crop was is brought into the barn and safely stored away and this is cause for huge amounts of rejoicing and at the end of this time of harvesting a feast was held including all of the surrounding country folk, their neighbours and whoever else is around. This is called the harvest home and this harvest home in the UK tended to be formalised and celebrated on Mickelmus which is the 29th of September where a goose stuffed with apples was roasted and everyone would feast then sing, drink wine, have a party and it was a bit of a knees up an abender. There was a lot of pagan traditions and depending on where you were in the country these varied enormously. I think I'll put a video up here for you should you want to delve a bit deeper into that. In the earliest pagan forms of these festivals there's a lot of blood rites that happened and sacrifice it was known to be a time for human sacrifice and to counter any devils or hexes that happened to be in the area. As we grew as a society this became more formalised into a more joyous and celebratory occasion and still today is regarded as such. So one would imagine that when the pilgrim fathers alighted having sailed across the pond in the Mayflower and set up camp wherever it was near the Wampanoag tribe somewhere forgive me I don't know but they would have bought their customs with them you know why not you don't stop celebrating Christmas just because you've moved house so they would have bought a celebration of the harvest festival with them and those traditions. One of which was harvest supper was celebrated with roast goose cattle and pigs and sheep need a couple more months to grow on but the goose is ready now and so it was always a bird that we had. Now so when the pilgrim fathers obviously went over and they said oh yes yeah I think we'd like a bit of a harvest home supper they didn't obviously have necessarily a couple of geese lying around because they'd possibly all died or been eaten but there were plenty of wild turkeys Wampanoag would have obviously introduced them to them and said that you know it's a good eating delicious wild turkey and why not they are delicious and also feel a crowd. Now of course with your wild turkey you carve it and what do you lovely american folk do you take the wishbone and then since it depends on the family occasion the two youngest will pull the wishbone apart and whoever gets the largest will make a wish. Now if that's not pagan I don't know what is this tradition of breaking a wishbone is actually a lot older than you probably realized and goes back to the Etruscan civilization who were an ancient Italian so southern european nation who lived many years BCE so we're talking 600 to 1000. They considered the wishbones could tell the fortunes of a person you would leave them to dry in the sun and they'd stroke them and wish upon them they were used for divination and were magical objects that could be used to predict the weather. I don't actually know how they could predict the weather and how they were it was divine so but apparently that is what they believed. After the Etruscans of course came the Romans who adopted this particular love of the wishbone and in fact instead of touching it and leaving it in the sun to make their wish they thought over it two men would grab hold of it and break it and whoever got the largest piece of the wishbone was the one who could make that wish. So the English nation then acquired this custom when it was conquered by the Romans who bought it with them Etruscans after all were the early Romans. They called the wishbone a merry thought merry thought the wishbone isn't that charming because you've got a wish or a merry thought from it so you thought this was an American staple tradition it's believed to have been carried out for over 3 000 years. One of the centerpieces of the Thanksgiving table is the cornucopia the horn of plenty and I think I've actually made a video about this which I'll put up here there's definitely quite a lot of cornucopia in that video so that you can learn about further about the traditions but the cornucopia is literally taken from the old pagan traditions of the Europeans. It is a beautiful tradition though because it does signify the abundance and the thanks and the joy of the season with the beautiful gourds and grains and stunning fruits that are full out of your cornucopia. This is a synonymous with American Thanksgiving tables it does mean that you're going to have great luck throughout the next year. It very much seems to me that different parts of America seem to have different styles of feast somebody wrote to me about beans with mushroom soup and onions on the top dried onions on the top I've never heard of anything like that before I did enjoy reading about everyone's traditional different foods that they have at their feast however it did seem that one thing was always included and that was pumpkin pie. Now I have a theory about pumpkin pie because of course the pumpkin is a North American gourd. We have tiny little turnips or mangleworms which is the rather disgusting of cattle food which we would turn into jack-o-lanterns for sour and halloween. Americans obviously took the pumpkin the pompillon which is from the French pom-pom because it doesn't look like a big fat pom-pom they would have carved them up for a sourn and then what are they going to do apart from use the insides of the pumpkin and make a pie obviously they have to put a load of molasses with it another such deliciousness because pumpkin in my opinion is revolting I mean butternut squash I can eat all day till the cows come home but those horrible orange pumpkins that you make into jack-o-lanterns you really have to try to make them taste halfway decent in my opinion all recipes are gratefully received to making them taste the modicum better than they actually do. It's a pumpkin pie I reckon is such a traditional part of the Thanksgiving feast because it came from when they carved the pumpkins for sourn into jack-o-lanterns that's my theory I'm sticking to it. What do you think but it does make sense doesn't it and as part of a pagan Thanksgiving having a pumpkin pie is definitely one of the major events and finally for a pagan Thanksgiving if you happen to be in the state of Alabama you are most likely to have come across a deviled egg as part of your Thanksgiving feast now deviled eggs are eggs which have been mixed with spices i devilish stuff and you know served as an hors d'oeuvres. This is taken directly from the Romans who used to stuff full their guests with deviled eggs in order to fill them up before they gave them the wine. See it was an easy way to get your guests to not drink too much wine by giving them lots of eggs to start with they even called this to fill with eggs but in Latin obviously not English they've used it as a form of appetite suppressant maybe that's what you're doing in Alabama. I wanted to mention the deviled eggs here because they are quite old-fashioned aren't they but it's got nothing to do with the devil and everything to do with spiciness you know devilish diavolo if you think of pizzas from Italy diavolo they're always hot and that is what devilish means if you bring all of these traditions together you would be looking at a pretty pagan Thanksgiving. I love the thought of all the women together preparing the individual dishes for Thanksgiving and putting their blessings into it that pretty much sums up any feast that I have as this is pure kitchen magic. Let me know what you think in the comments below. Don't forget my patreon shop is up and running get a patreon.com forward slash Ginny Meddl for the details you can also sign up there to become a coven member. My other tiers are sold out because there's only one Ginny to go around. 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