Archive for Paganism

The War on Christians

March 29, 2006 / / 5 comments

There’s just so much good in this article (Shakespeare’s Sister gets the hat tip). I think this is the money quote:

“This is a skirmish over religious pluralism, and the inclination to see it as a war against Christianity strikes me as a spoiled-brat response by Christians who have always enjoyed the privileges of a majority position,” said the Rev. Robert M. Franklin, a minister in the Church of God in Christ and professor of social ethics at Emory University.

In fact, these people are so whiny and bratty that even a false alarm is out to get them:

Several attendees called the fire alarm suspicious, though a hotel spokesman said it resulted from a mechanical problem in a distant location.

Something should also be said about the viciously anti-Semitic Jews willing to say things like this:

Don Feder, founder of a group called Jews Against Anti-Christian Defamation, urged the crowd not to blame “the liberal, self-hating Jews in Hollywood.”

“Remember, the people in this audience are more Jewish than people like Barbra Streisand, because you embrace Jewish values, she doesn’t,” he said.

People like this make me sick, lap dogs to the Christian Right, willing to pander to people who condemn them.

Update on the Subgenius Custody Case

March 28, 2006 / / 4 comments

Jason has the skinny. Remember, humor is bad, satire is worse, and mothers shouldn’t indulge in either.

Wiccan Headstone News

March 26, 2006 / / 5 comments

A very good summary of the situation. As the article pointed out, this fight has been going on for over a decade. Every time another Wiccan veteran dies, the next petition circulates. Wiccans and other Pagans have been working tirelessly, slogging through oceans of red tape, for years and years.

Why then, [Pagans] ask, has their religion been snubbed when more than 30 others – including such relatively obscure ones as Seicho-No-Ie, Eckankar, Sufism and Humanism – are permitted? Even atheists have their own approved symbol, which features an atom and the letter ”A” in the center.

This always baffles me. It never seems like religious prejudice when you read that, because these are not well-loved groups in conservative corners. Here’s one reason:

In a step interpreted as partially smoothing the way for Pentacle approval, the VA’s National Cemetery Administration amended a rule last October that had been a bureaucratic roadblock. Until then, applicants had to submit a letter from a ”recognized central head” of the faith attesting to the fact that the requested symbol in fact represented the religion.

Because the Wiccan faith and its related sects are substantially decentralized, that requirement was essentially impossible to meet. Now, the National Cemetery Administration asks for a letter from ”a recognized leader.”

Energy exercize

March 26, 2006 / / 3 comments

When you’re raising energy in a group, most people just do something together. They all drum. Or they all “Om.” Or they meditate together.

But different people are…different. Their experience, temperment, and ability to respond and move with energy are different. They have different comfort levels, and different experiences of pleasure.

Try this:

In a group, first do something together to get a feel for that. Om or breath together or something.

Then everyone do something different. One person drum, one person Om, one person breath, one person clap hands or shake a rattle, and so on.

It’s powerful to discover that you’re all still together. There’s a beauty to it. I don’t see a lot of Pagans exploring that beauty of being different together. Try it.

One day last June

March 23, 2006 / / Comments Off on One day last June

Here’s what happened to me one day last June. I’ve told this story a lot. It’s time to write it down.

The setting is a Pagan festival. Some of you will know some or all of the people and places, but names have been changed. Suffice it to say there’s a lot of history, a lot of people who’ve known each other for a lot of years, and it’s a very special and magical place to be.

It begins with a full body massage around 11 a.m. This is a very powerful way to start the day. After that I taught two classes back-to-back. So I’m in this very shifting state; the deep relaxation and healing of massage, followed by a whoosh into teaching focusing reciting engaging being in the right place on time. Plus, teaching’s always a little dehydrating, all that talk talk talk. Never ideal after a massage. But anyway.

Now comes my friend “Alice.” (Don’t those quotes make me look like Ann Landers?) Alice is dying. This festival is where I met her, some fourteen years before. She used to come every year. Now she has cancer and wants to come to Festival one last time. I haven’t seen her in two years. Her sister is picking her up at the hospice and is bringing her to the festival. She is expected to arrive around 5 p.m. Alice’s ex-husband is also at the festival, and she doesn’t want to see him, or indeed for him to know she’s there. So there’s a certain amount of sneaking around involved in seeing her. So my inner energy flow now looks like: Healing-rushing-focusing-grieving-sneaking. Which is a little unmanageable.

So I find Alice and we hang out and we talk and hug and she wants my shirt. Demands my shirt. And I think I can give it to her, and then I think “Her sister will give it back to me soon, anyway.” That’s a hateful thought. I can’t bear that I thought it. To avoid acknowledging the thought, I refuse to give her the shirt.

I go back to camp for dinner, but no one is there, because everyone is at the tattoo ritual. One of our clan is getting a big piece on his chest, a beautiful Ganesha. I walk to the tattoo booth, and from a distance I can hear the chanting. There are a dozen or more people gathered around, giving energy to the tattooing, chanting

Jai Ganesha, Jai Ganesha, Jai Ganesha, Pahiman
Sri Ganesha, Sri Ganesha, Sri Ganesha, Rakshaman

As I arrive, the wife of the guy getting tattooed has just gotten up from her seat next to her husband, in the center of this wall of sound (she later told me it was becoming overwhelming for her). So the seat is empty, I walk up, and Being Tattooed Guy beckons me right into the center. Another whoosh, from Alice to this deep, vibrant, sacred space. I am there, chanting, in the center of it all, for maybe forty-five minutes. The artist finishes by coloring the Om in the center of Ganesha’s forehead, and we change the chant to Om.

The artist begins to clean up. People get up to leave. All at once, I just burst into tears, and sob and sob with big heaving gulping deep-belly sobs. Then it passes. (The people who held me while I sobbed had no idea what my day had been. They were just there for me. I explained much later.)

I walk back to camp. Now I’m really DAMN hungry. The path from tattoo place to camp place has merchants. I see Alice and her sisters at the bookseller’s. They’re buying The Way of Four. I go in to talk with them. Alice demands an autograph. Then she demands my shirt. Now she’s actually tugging at it, which would be weird from some people, but is not unlike Alice. So I take it off and give it to her, and walk back to camp topless.

Coda: Alice died in October, and her ashes were scattered at the festival site, at the big tree where she always camped. Her sister says she wore my shirt constantly for all her remaining days. I’m getting the shirt back in June.

The Cats Ate My Homework

March 23, 2006 / / 2 comments

For Spring Equinox, we planted seeds. It was really beautiful. Also silly, because thyme seeds turn out to be borderline microscopic, and none of us could pick them up in order to plant them. Next year, back to peas.

Anyway, so I had these microscopic seeds sprinkled across the top of this mini-greenhouse kit, sitting in the window soaking up the sun.

Then cats happened.

Now I don’t know what to do. I cleaned up the dirt that was all over the kitchen counter, and I put as much of the loose dirt as possible into my rosemary plant. Some of the microscopic seeds might have gotten in there too, and might germinate. Or not. My loose plan is now to have rosemary bread in ritual in June instead of thyme bread.

But it does sort of feel like Mingo and Fanty have prevented spring from coming, the rat bastards. That’s Arthur’s new name for them: Bastards With Paws.

WWKD

March 22, 2006 / / 13 comments

What Would Kali Do?

I was thinking I should start a thing. It would be like the fortune cookie “in bed” thing, except in this case, the word to always include is “devour.”

    What Would Kali Do about that homeless guy over there?
    Embrace him in the love of her infinite grace. Then devour him.

    What Would Kali Do about my annoying co-worker?
    See him in the perspective of the passage of vast yugas, knowing that all things pass in time. Then devour him.

    What Would Kali Do about George W. Bush?
    Devour him.

This is very convenient, because you always know what Kali would do. Whereas, I think the WWJD people leave a lot of room for disagreement. Jesus might be turning the other cheek, he might be picking up the sword, he might be speaking in the parable. Very confusing. Kali, on the other hand, be devouring. No. Matter. What.

Also, it’s comforting to know that no matter how much I lose my temper, or feel I’ve handled things badly, well, at least I haven’t devoured human heads today. (Just for today.)

So that’s it. WWKD. I’m thinking of having bracelets made.

Dancing Naked to the Gods

March 21, 2006 / / 7 comments

Jason has a fab post about “overweight Druid priestesses.”

Twenty-five years ago, when I first became a part of the Pagan community, we Pagans were objects of fear and ignorance. We were Satanists, we were evil, we were dangerously crazy. Now, we are mostly the objects of snark and derision.

This is progress. Some Pagans (especially teens) would rather be feared than mocked, but mockery is never going to destroy your life, or deprive you of a job, a home, or the custody of your child. Only fear does that. The fear still exists, especially in the rabid Right, at least when they have a moment between being afraid of gays and being afraid of women who have sex, but it is receding in most of the culture.

Even the far Right often resorts more to mockery than to fear-mongering, in regard to Pagans. Those silly Pagans, they say, with their silly little cutie-pie rituals; only we have a real religion. Wasn’t that the whole point of that Wife Swap episode—silly misguided Pagans learning from the real thing? It’s probably also why the “religious” right is so eager to tie us to Harry Potter. I doubt they think we really have unicorns and centaurs and such on our side; they just want to make us appear more involved in fantasy than reality.

And really, I’m okay with that as an interim step. I’m even okay with that as the whole package. I never got into Witchcraft to look cool to my peers. In fact, when I first got into it, I never expected to tell my peers, although that changed muchly.

Pagans I know used to get furious every time Laurie Cabot appeared on TV. ‘We don’t want people to think we look like that!’ they’d say, all aghast at the big hair and the scary makeup and the black polyester robes. My response was always that all they’d remember is that they saw a Witch on TV and she was a person not a monster. Maybe they laughed at her, and maybe that reinforced their understanding that there was nothing scary there. A year later, they wouldn’t remember what she wore, only the general impression that it was all no big deal.

I was right, I think. Oddballs on TV make people smile, and now we are mocked more, and persecuted less. So if the world wants to think I’m a silly flaky dingbat, that’s a small price to pay if we can all keep our kids and jobs and homes.

Here’s that dream I promised you

March 21, 2006 / / 4 comments

I posted this on Saturday, and it got wiped when I (okay, not me, Cranky) restored the site from a backup. It is a very cool dream and fascinates me, so here it is again, for posterity.

I am in my house. Although I never see this house from the outside during the course of the dream, I know that it is a tall Victorian, very Psycho. I am in my bedroom in the attic (sloped ceilings and such).

My friends are using my basement temple to perform an initiation. I am waiting upstairs in the bedroom for them to finish.

Suddenly I find that Alex Sanders is in bed with me. We are waiting together. Then he tries to seduce me. At first he is crude and grabby and I reject him twice. The third time he is more seductive and gentle and I respond. We begin to make love. I can hear the initiation going on downstairs. While we make love, I quietly recite some of the words of the ceremony along with the Priestess. I know Alex knows these words as well.

Then the lights go on and the initiation is going on in the bedroom. The ritual circle surrounds the bed and we have a major “oops, excuse our naked goodness” moment.

Interpretations so far include (a) I’m horny, and (b) the dream was an initiation. ‘Course, could be both.

My Copyright, My Self

March 16, 2006 / / 3 comments

I found a website that had an article I’d written years ago. It had been posted without permission or copyright notice. (No link or names; I’m not writing this to point fingers or be bitchy.)

On this site, I found quite a few articles, some attributed, some not, some with permission, some not. There were songs and poems and rituals, some without any author noted. As it happens, I knew who’d written about half of what I saw posted as “anonymous.”

This was common practice, back in the old days. Take everything you can get your hands on, and throw it up there. If you typed it yourself, clearly it’s yours. If you don’t know who wrote it, clearly it’s anonymous. It was exceptionally common among Pagans, but it’s also all over fansites, and probably everywhere else.

The old days are over.

I’m writing this, not to berate one web publisher (although I didn’t like his response, which I’ll detail shortly) but to talk about this as an issue. I’m a writer. It’s who I am, it’s what I do. It’s my bread and butter. It’s my art form. It’s my reputation. Most of what I write is free of charge. You can read this blog for free. The extensive writing I did in Pagan ‘zines in the 80s and early 90s was for free. Most Pagan ‘zines, even today, pay very little if at all. So what I get out of it is that article, attached to my name. That’s the part that’s mine.

» Read more..

« Older Entries   Recent Entries »
zeeReputation Theme