Archive for Paganism

I have found God

November 10, 2010 / / 4 comments

By “God,” I mean the old-fashioned God of the Torah and the Christian Bible, the God of my childhood. And by “found” I mean, I know who he is. Which, even if I don’t believe in Him, is still pretty cool.

If you think about the God of your childhood, most of you will agree that he is unquestionably male, but in a non-threatening way. Masculine but not…butch. Probably celibate, even.

In appearance, I think dignified gray hair is a must, and He is certainly tall, with excellent posture. His voice is deep and mellifluous, authoritative and yet comforting.

The attitude, though, is all-important. God is smart, of course, but more importantly, God is kind. He sure and commanding. He loves all of those in his care equally, loving us when we succeed and when we fail. Even when we squabble among one another, even when we are disrespectful to Him, He loves us.

Like a good parent, God doesn’t take sides, is proud of and respectful towards His children, gives us the room to make our own mistakes, but attempts to correct us before we go too far.

In short, God is » Read more..

Drumming the Names

November 2, 2010 / / Comments Off on Drumming the Names

Something like twenty-five years ago, I read Always Coming Home by my favorite author, Ursula LeGuinn. The people in this future-fantasy have a rich ritual life, including a ritual for the dead called Burning the Names. Names of the dead were “burned” in a community fire and grief was released.

From that, I adapted a ritual we call Drumming the Names. After the circle is cast, we start a slow, quiet rhythm. People begin calling out the names of their beloved dead, and everyone chants the name with them, to the beat. Often, the mourner will recite many versions of a name (a full name and “Grandma,” for example), while the first name offered is repeated. So you’ll hear “Nana” chanted over and over by your group while you say “Nana Jean. Jean Lipp. Nana,” and so on.

It’s pretty frickin beautiful. From the first time we did the ritual, we felt like it was an ancient tradition; like we’d inherited it from long ago.

Although LeGuinn described her Burning ritual as starting light and building, over many hours, to the names most painful to release, my experience is the opposite. We start with the big ones, the ones most pressing on our minds and hearts. Gradually, we include more and more names; ancestors, heroes, famous people, public tragedies (the Six Million, the 9/11 victims, the Haiti victims). As the circle becomes crowded with the dead (Gerald Gardner, Gene Roddenberry, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart), it often becomes joyous. The drumming picks up, people dance, and we celebrate with our dead.

(In a smaller group, it will often simply quiet and fade, and not get to that ecstatic place, and that’s wonderful too, but I do love the ecstasy.)

A bunch of years ago—maybe 1994?—around there anyway, Isaac and I were invited up to the Center for Symbolic Studies for Samhain. Real Magic did a concert, and then Isaac and I led the ritual, which included the Drumming of the Names.

It seemed like there were two hundred people jammed into the room. The drumming became ecstatic. The names floated and danced around us; it was like a wave of noise and rhythm and memory and music. I remember we stood at the altar, holding hands, kind of witnessing it, and I turned to Isaac and I said “Someday they’ll drum our names.”

And so we did. On Saturday, we drummed Isaac’s name.

Blessed be.

Departed Pagan Elders

October 30, 2010 / / Comments Off on Departed Pagan Elders

Green Egg has a list on their home page.

The Wild Hunt offers a list of notable Pagan dead for this year, as well as links to other significant deaths of 2010.

Blessed Samhain.

Philip Emmons Isaac Bonewits, October 1, 1949 – August 12, 2010

August 13, 2010 / / 12 comments

Isaac sits with the Shining Ones and eats from Dagda’s Cauldron. The mortal world is a poorer place without him.

There will never be another Isaac. Those of us who knew him well could easily think of him as just Isaac: Character, goofball, ladies man, punster, life of the party, pain in the neck, singer, priest, friend and ex-husband (in my case). But Isaac was so much more than that.

The press release gives you an inkling of his importance to the world. One of my favorite memorial posts comes from The Wild Hunt:

[The] vision of the ADF, written by Bonewits nearly thirty years ago, captures what was so vibrant and vital about him. The audacity of expecting excellence and success from himself, his coreligionists, and his peers.

“Audacity of expecting excellence”—O, yes, that’s Isaac.

I cannot begin to say how much I loved and love Isaac. As a husband, he drove me crazy. I don’t regret ending our marriage, and I know he was very happy with Phaedra, whom he married in 2004. He loved her very much and I am so happy he had that. Still, Isaac and I were married for ten years (1988–1998), and I’d qualify nine of those years as happy ones; only at the end did things break down, and our unhappiness was short-lived; we quickly became good friends.

Isaac was a wonderful, loving, proud father. He had a perverse sense of what made a good lullaby. Certainly, the baby slept better for him than for me, despite being sung to sleep with “The Internationale.” As Arthur grew, Isaac always treated him as an intelligent being and spoke to him with a rich vocabulary even when he was a toddler. In the end, it was Arthur caring for Isaac. I am proud of my son, and I know that Isaac was and is as well.

He was an extraordinary High Priest in the Craft, as well as a Druid. He had a unique ability to move energy. When he called the Gods, They came. I was already a High Priestess of the Craft, albeit a young one, when we began dating in 1986, but I consider that only half my training was done. The rest I learned from him. He was a gifted teacher, exploring the nuances of every aspect of ritual and worship. Elements of Ritual could not exist without Isaac’s influence.

What Isaac loved the most was serving the Pagan community. He loved a good fight, he loved to get down and argue, to make trouble, to stir the pot. And he did it, always, on behalf of the community. He did it to make the world better, and more Pagan, and to serve the Gods. His love of the Gods was always at the forefront of who he was. His service to the community, to the Gods, and to his work as a priest was in every decision he ever made.

In the end, I look at Isaac, and I look at someone who was fundamentally good. He was not without his flaws, but he was without moral blemish. Isaac was honest, kind, charitable, generous, forgiving to a fault, open to new ideas, tolerant, attentive, amiable, and selfless. I assure you, I have thought over every one of those adjectives carefully, and every one applies to almost every moment of Isaac’s life. I could list negatives if I wanted to, but none of them are moral failings. I believe, truly, that the Gods will look upon this man and embrace him as one of their own.

It was a privilege, Isaac. I hope we get to do it again.

Light is returning

December 21, 2009 / / 2 comments

Longest night. Darkest day. A bleak time to be sure. But once it is the longest night, then nights are shorter. Once it is the darkest day, days become bright.

Since the wheel last turned this way, my life has been touched by death, cancer, lay-offs, failure, and loss. It’s been, in short, a fuck-all year.

But I am happy, and I have hope, because the Sun is reborn, and so are we all.

Celebrate rebirth.

Blessed be.

I am dreaming of…initiation?

November 20, 2009 / / 8 comments

A few days ago, I dreamed that someone I knew was an expectant father, and his wife was in labor. I was to be the labor coach and, while my friend waited nervously outside, I went in to attend to her.

When I entered, I discovered the “wife” was an elderly Native American; a shaman (I knew) in jeans, a red flannel shirt, and a headband. The shaman got up on the delivery table and spread his legs, and from between his legs a slit opened in his blue jeans and a head began to emerge.

Well.

Last night I dreamed that I was at a festival with friends Larry & Sabina. We were playing some sort of game or doing some sort of ritual, and they needed a drop of my blood to prove my good intentions. I knew they would prick a finger but then Sabina said that didn’t work and could I please turn around. It was, I think she said, for initiation, but I don’t know what she meant. I think it was still a sex game in my mind. She lifted my hair and took a slice from the top of my spine/base of my skull (exactly where my Kali eyes tattoo is, but I wasn’t aware of the tattoo in the dream). It was a plus-sign shaped cut and it hurt horribly. I felt like she was damaging my brain. I was terrified and angry. I cried out in pain but I was afraid to move. She cut my like that, with me holding still and crying out, for a long time. I was wondering, in the dream, if this was domestic violence.

Upon awaking, that dream plus the earlier one seem to add up to some kind of message about ritual or transformation, but I can’t put it all together.

A blessed Samhain to you

October 31, 2009 / / One comment

Honor your dead, and celebrate the living.

Find a place within where you recognize these two are the same.

Blessed be.

Pagan Census: Let your voice be heard

September 17, 2009 / / One comment

Click through for all the relevant links and information. Understanding and knowledge protect us, I think, and I encourage you to participate.

Marion Weinstein: Born again

September 9, 2009 / / One comment

I have just learned that Marion Weinstein, author of Positive Magic, has passed into the Summerland. May she be born again, at the same time, and in the same place, as those who love her.

Positive Magic was a sweetness-and-light book that I have often criticized, but there’s one kick-ass spell in it that I have recommended many times.

On a personal note, it was through Marion’s help that Isaac was able to get diagnosed with the chronic illness he has. This was in 1990, when we were still married and the parents of a really cute new baby. Isaac had been getting a run-around from doctors who were uninterested in his very weird symptoms, when we read an article about a rare disease in Marion’s newsletter. The symptoms matched Isaac perfectly. He called Marion and she connected him to the author. The author had this sort of tone that I could hear from across the room; doctors can’t love getting calls from hypochondriacs who think they have whatever disease they’ve read about most recently. Clearly she thought this was just such a call, but because it was Isaac Bonewits, and because it had come through Marion, she listened. And listened to the point where she realized Isaac was really sick and gave him the information he needed to take to an MD and get diagnosed.

Maybe that isn’t such a big deal, but it meant a lot to us and I’ve always felt fondly towards Marion since then. I am sad to hear of her passing, and hope sincerely that her sojourn in the Summerland is delightful, and that her loved ones find comfort.

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