The line 'merry meet, merry part and merry meet again' is used frequently at Wiccan circles. The origin of these words is rarely considered.
The origins of this appear to lie in the Reclaing Traditon. In the 1960s Victor Anderson wrote a poem called 'By the Earth'. this was a simple circle cast. It was taken up by the prominent activist Starhawk and introduced to the Reclaiming Tradition that she was involved with. When the circle needed to be closed the lines 'May the circle is open but unbroken, may the love of the goddess be forever in your heart, merry meet and merry part and merry meet again' were used. These final lines were added because 'merry meet' and 'merry part' were greetings used by Wiccans. These themselves appear to be derived from Thompson's Long Rede that appeared in the magazine Green Egg. The source for this is possibly from a Witch Trial in 1664, where Elizabeth Styles referred to the phrase 'Merry meet, merry part'. The freemason's second degre rite also has a similar line "Happy have we met, happy have we been, happy may we part, and happy meet again" So it seems that the origin of the lines lies in Freemasonry, from where it came to Reclaiming and then it came to be widely used in Wicca.
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AuthorThe Horse's Mouth is a conglomerated blog with multiple authors. It is a voice for Cochranian Wicca in the UK. It is linked to the website wicca.org.uk and a large number of Wiccan groups on Meetup.com Archives
December 2016
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