Many Satanists celebrate today’s seasonal pivot point, feeling simpatico with our homeworld’s continuing seasonal cycles. In the Northern Hemisphere, Spring arrives, succeeding Winter’s stasis with verdant surging. In the Southern Hemisphere, Autumn soothes after the scorching Summer months.
Here in the haunted Hudson Valley, Winter was mostly free of snow, though frigid temperatures held sway. At last, warmth is returning, though not without some final chilly nights. The bulbs have begun awakening, pushing their way into the sunlight, delighting us with early flowers—always such a joy for us when our garden revivifies!
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873 – 1943) was a tremendously gifted musician—a virtuoso pianist, conductor, and composer whose darkly expressive music was considered to be the last flowering of Russian Romanticism. Igor Stravinsky, the arch modernist and also one who immortalized a pagan Spring rite in sound, affectionally called him “a six and a half foot scowl.” Of course one would then not be surprised that Sergei set a rather grim poem by Nikolay Nekrasov as a cantata for a baritone singer, chorus, and orchestra titled “Spring.” In the poem, a man broods through Winter with murderous thoughts regarding his philandering wife, but the arrival of Spring brings him solace, and one would assume saves his wife from physical harm by her rather disturbing spouse. Here is a performance by Sergei Leiferkus, baritone, and the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia and The Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Charles Dutoit. The linked video displays the manuscript of the composition completed in 1902. At 16 minutes, it is a sweeping work that sounds rather cinematic, with the sighing chorus and surging orchestral passages…it takes one from darkness to renewed hope with a gentle, consoling coda, and that is a fitting sensibility for the arrival of Spring tonight.
May you all seize this glorious day and its enchanting night to contemplate the wonders of Nature, as we all are part of its boundless mysteries.
Hail Satan!
—Magus Peter H. Gilmore