A Pagan Heart

SEJACHLOVIM

2009-12-31T09:26:00.003-05:00

As a result of a magical discovery, I have resolved in the new year to say or write the word “sejachlovim” as often as possible. And I would urge anyone who reads this to do the same.
You pronounce it like this:
• The first syllable has a short “e” something like “seh."
• The second syllable has the ‘J’ of “jack” but rhymes with “Bach.”
The “ch” is guttural, but a bit softer than the German; more like the the “ch” in “loch” when a real Scot pronounces it.
•“lov” sounds just like “love,” but make the the “o” very round and resonant.
•“im” rhymes with “him,” but sing it a bit.
The stresses are on the second and fourth syllables: seJACHlovIM.
In IPA: sejachlovim / sɛdʒɑːxlʊvɪm/
Of course, you may reasonably wonder why you should say such a thing, or what it means. I can only answer that it doesn’t “mean” anything. It arose from a magical experiment, and only a description of the process by which it was derived would give you any idea. But the nature of magic is such that to explain it would mitigate or even destroy its virtues. I am working hard to erase all knowledge of its origin from my memory.
But it is a word with virtue and its virtues pertain to joy and freedom. No evil or violent or derogatory meaning lies behind it.
It is related to the word “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” but is shorter and easier to spell.
It is a work appropriate for use as an exclamation of wonder, as a word of greeting or parting, or to seal a document or end a prayer. It is definitely appropriate for shouting during orgasm.
It is also an all-purpose graffito, which should be written on bathroom walls, scrawled in wet concrete, fingered on filthy car windows, etc. I dream of the day this word will capture the imagination of a really good tagger and I’ll see it emblazoned in psychedelic colors on a public building or railroad car.
In the meantime, Sejachlovim!

Poems about Reincarnation

2009-11-04T15:54:00.002-05:00

I wrote the first version of this poem over the course of about four months, beginning shortly after I did indeed hear a preacher tell a young woman that those who come to Jesus never have to die. I did indeed think of the line quoted with is from the trailer for the movie "Electra." I like the line, but never saw the movie.

“I’ve died before,” a character whispered
In an old film trailer. “It’s not that bad.”
I never saw the film, but I thought of
That line when once I heard a preacher say
That those who come to Jesus never die.

Well, death always finds us unprepared,
Always saying “Not yet, there’s still so much
“I need to do in this shape, in this world.”
And – yes – it hurts, always, always, and then
Darkness, light, the struggle to the Mother.

But to never die? To stay always stuck
In one reality, no hope to change
The foolishness of this life’s yesterdays
For a new birth’s new hope on new earth?
Nothing but obeisance in some God’s cold halls?

I’d just as soon blink out like a spent bulb,
And, come some death, that I may choose, but not
This time around, nor yet, I think, the next.
There’s too much yet to be tasted and touched,
Many songs unsung, so much still to be done.

The Gods require of us only beauty,
Rich embroidery on time’s tapestry.
Thus, orbiting from life through death to life,
Spirits, bound by a strange attractor, shape
The rose of force and fire. Hast ‘ou seen it?*

There’s no salvation in bending a knee.
Your perfection’s the work of many lives,
Going deeper, brighter, hotter into
What Might Be in the undying dance of
Creation that even the Gods envy.

I asked my most reliable friend and critic for an opinion and she noticed several points that were either clumsy or vague. I agreed with her criticisms but couldn't seem to resolve them and keep the formal structure of the poem. So, I rewrote the whole thing in a night and produced this:

I’ve died before,” I didn’t say. “It’s not that bad.”
Those are lines from a bad old movie, but
They came to me when I heard the preacher
Tell you that those who kneel to Jesus never die.

It’s true dying always seems to come upon us
Not ready, saying “There’s still so much
I could do with this world.” And – yes – it hurts
Always, then comes the hard night trek back toward the Mother.

But do you truly want to stay forever stuck
In one face, one world, with no hope to change
The foolishness of this life’s yesterdays
For a new birth’s new hope on a new earth? Nothing

Left but groveling in some god’s cold halls?
I’d just as soon blink out like a spent bulb,
And, come some death, I’ll make that choice, but not
This time around, nor yet, I think, the next. The Gods

Require of us little but beauty: thus, spirits,
Orbiting from life through death to life,
Bound to that strange attractor, time’s womb, weave
A mighty rose of force and fire. Hast ‘ou seen it?

This is a destiny you won’t find on your knees.
Your perfection’s the work of many lives,
Going deeper, brighter, hotter into
What Might Be, the undying dance of Creation.

That was three months ago, and I've been dithering ever since. I'm not really satisfied with either version, but here they both are. Any opinions are welcome.

Beltane (slightly belated)

2009-05-03T07:16:00.000-05:00

Now is all nature engorged and aching,
Irises erect, roses slowly spreading,
We beasts trembling, our hearts’-blood thund’ring
Poised for the thrust and thrash of summer’s dance,
Joyous reaching for fall’s soft satiety
And tristesse. Now May’s strong sun risen high,
Let it begin: Twist and shout!

I call the spirits of the American Dead

2008-11-02T20:08:00.001-05:00

For Halloween, I decided to the invoke spirits of dead folks that I thought represented the America to me: I suspect this that their help is needed. I made a list, finally amounting to 108 names. I deliberately avoided generals, successful politicians and wealthy magnates, but there’s a few. My list may be criticized, I recognize, for over representing white, straight males – that would probably apply to 55 of the 108, although for some of those, their sexuality is complicated. If you have other suggestions, I’m open to them. If you don’t know who some of these folks are, educate yourself. You can find information on the internet about all of them. They are very American to me.

R. Buckminster Fuller • Lysander Spooner • Malvina Reynolds
Timothy Leary • Djuna Barnes • Von Dutch
Frank Zappa • John Lyon Burnside III • Gwydion Pennderwen
Frank Herbert • Marvin Gaye • Susan B. Anthony
Ed “Big Daddy” Roth • Humphrey Bogart • H.P. Lovecraft
Joey Ramone • Patsy Cline • Eudora Welty
Jeannette Rankin • Ella Fitzgerald • Frank Capra
Z. Budapest • Flannery O’Connor • Neal Cassaday
Dalton Trumbo • Charles Beard • Donella Meadows
Edward Hopper • Robert Anton Wilson • Thomas Paine
Sojourner Truth • Ralph Waldo Emerson • Edgar Allan Poe
Henry David Thoreau • Marie Laveau • Victoria C. Woodhull
Clara Barton • Mark Twain • P.B. Randolph
George Washington Carver • Emma Lazarus • Voltairine De Cleyre
Upton Sinclair • Thomas Edison • Alfred Corning Clark
Gertrude Stein • Isadore Duncan • Duke Ellington
Langston Hughes • Jelly Roll Morton • Eleanor Roosevelt
Samuel Barber • Josef C. Hofmann • Jack Parsons
Ezra Pound • Robert Heinlein • John Coltrane
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn • Woody Guthrie • Charles Ives
Dashiell Hammett • Margaret Sanger • Nellie Bly
Mary Cassatt • Jack London • Benjamin Franklin
Phyllis Wheatley • Josiah Randall • Maria Zapata
Jerry Garcia • Elizabeth Cady Stanton • John Cage
Marion Zimmer Bradley • Margaret Fuller • Johnny Thunders
Leonard Bernstein • Phillip K. Dick • Studs Turkel
Louis Zukofsky • Miles Davis • Aaron Copland
Harry Houdini • Aldo Leopold • Claude Shannon
Ansel Adams • John Huston • Rex Stout
Leo Fender • I.F. Stone • Bella Abzug
Janis Joplin • Vincent Anderson • Robinson Jeffers
William Burroughs • Ida B. Wells • Isaac Asimov

In Regard to Barack Obama

2008-10-21T16:04:00.001-05:00

I don’t really want to write about politics. I deal with politics and I write about politics in my mundane life, and the subject has become tedious to me. For the most part, political contests are territorial scrimmages between factions of the oligarchy. It’s not that the stakes aren’t high, but most of us won’t collect any part of those stakes: a few crumbs of the table, some party favors, but nothing of substance.
This is not to say that I don’t vote: I always vote, for somebody. I go to rallies, write polemics, sometimes even contribute money or time. But I always remind myself not to get carried away. Government power is like a tornado or an earthquake: it’s going to happen and it’s going to cause trouble. The only purpose in participating in politics is to try to limit the damage.
U.S. politics of the past few decades has been about a dispute between two factions. On the one hand, there are the oligarchs who believe that the general population of the country needs to be kept fairly well fed and a happy – happy sheep -- lest the oligarchs’ interests will be threatened. These use the Democratic Party as their front.
On the other side, there are the oligarchs who believe that their class can live indefinitely in a kind of free-floating cocoon of electronic representations of wealth (controlled by their “expertise”) and that they can always manipulate the rest of us into doing what they want. This faction uses the Republican Party as its front.
What is striking about the work of both of factions is how stupid and ineffective they are, even in pursuing their own interests. Both and all will sacrifice a chance to create anything of real value for a momentary advantage, and neither side is able to see twenty feet down the road in front of them.
But however incompetent they may be in pursuing their own interests, they wreak enormous mayhem on the rest of us while they try.
But I want to talk about Barack Obama. I will vote for him, not because I think he is “The One” or because I think he is a “lightworker.” (I’ve seen him called both on line.) I do find him more engaging than any important politician in a long time, but I can’t kid myself that he is not a willing agent of the interests that put him the position to be elected president. No one can raise that kind of money but by giving those who control that kind of money good reason to believe you can be managed.
In fact, for all the talk about hope and change, the program Obama proposes is pretty limited. Of course, after eight years of almost unimaginable social and economic destruction, anything less than actual malice on the part of a president might seem like the blessing of all the gods.
But that’s who Obama is: a basically conservative hustler who is no way interested in ending the basic injustices in the world, just moving them around.
In this case, though, I’ve come to think that who Barack Obama is doesn’t matter much: what he is matters a lot.
It’s not just that he’s a black man: his father was black Kenyan ex-Muslim agnostic and his mother was a white atheist academic from Kansas. He was raised partly in Indonesia by a man name Lolo, who was nominally Muslim, but was obsessed by the god Hanuman. Obama carries an amulet of Hanuman with him at all times.
He was raised in Hawaii and Indonesia and became a man in Chicago, hog butcher to the world.
He may want to be just like the men in the penthouse suites with the expensive suits who play with the world like jacks, but they are afraid of him because he is the product of an America they don’t know, the messy, smelly, colorful America that I, and probably you, really live in. And if he is elected, something profound will change in America, just because of that.
The political spectacle rarely means as much as it should, but sometimes it is informed by forces that are beyond anything the pundits and fixers and moneymen can conceive. Sometimes politicians are just hack actors speaking bad dialogue, sometimes they’re being by something outside themselves.
John Kennedy was like that. If you study the life of JFK, it’s hard to discern the great liberal hero of myth. But the myth has been far more important than the man.
When you hear Obama’s supporters chanting “Yes, We Can,” you’re hearing the voice of something more than a slick Chicago lawyer.
There are weird signs and omens all about. It’s worth noting that Election Day will occur under a lunar void, moving from Capricorn to Aquarius, while Mercury enters Scorpio at 11 a.m. EST.
We’re driving up to a cross road with the wind rising, all the needles on the dashboard spinning around.
I think this one really matters.

The gods are anarchists

2008-07-22T20:42:00.002-05:00

One of the old Taoist sages said that the perfect Emperor would be one who, at the beginning of his reign, seated himself facing in an auspicious direction and a never spoke another word.
That is certainly my idea of the proper use of sovereignty and I find that I believe the gods, or those gods whom I find worthy of honor, understand this wisdom, and, therefore, do not strive to rule anything.
The gods I have cultivate the acquaintance of are fundamentally anarchists. True, they may cause events to happen because it is their nature to do so, but they have no lust to control other beings. They will guide those who asked to be guided, they will teach those who ask to learn, but they do not demand that anyone follow them or do things their way.
They will visit bad luck on those who deal with them without proper manners. And the gods kill, of course, because death is part of what they are. Some gods will visit us with horrible pain, but not because they are punishing us or attempting to control us, but because to do such things is their nature.
The real gods, those who deserve our honor and devotion, are not rulers or bosses: they are masters.
“Master,” though, in the sense of a Japanese sensei, rather than in the sense of a master of slaves. This word “master” is one of many English words that betrays itself. It has been used to mean “despot” or “overlord,” but it also means one who is superbly skilled or deeply learned.
Fans of Lord of the Rings – the book, this isn’t in the movie – may recall the scene where the hobbits are in the house of Tom Bombadil. Frodo asks Goldberry “Who is Tom Bombadil?” She replies “He is Master. No one has ever caught him by field or stream.”
While Tom may seem a ridiculous figure to some with his feather hat, yellow boots and nursery-rhyme songs, but one could do worse as an image of God of Forest and Field and the Wild Free Things. The identity of Goldberry seems obvious also.
But if you want a harder-edged image of divine liberation than Tom Bombadil, consider Nietsche’s Superman.
A lot of nonsense has been written and spoken about Nietzsche and his vision of the superman, mostly because of his purported Nazi admirers. This is nonsense: Nietzsche would have despised the Nazi project, not because of its cruelty and violence, but because the Nazis necessarily devoted their lives to running the lives of weaklings, as he would have considered them.
The Superman, as conceived by Nietzsche, does not seek office, lead movements, command armies, rule nations or own slaves, because to do so would be weakness, and to control others is to be controlled by the need to maintain control.
The gods I know understand that, too.

Thoughts after the Solstice

2008-06-26T18:38:00.000-05:00

Of my solstice poem, posted here last week, my best friend and most useful critic (because she never lies just to be nice) said “I think the image of a dying sun gushing fire onto us is a little unsettling, but only a little.”
I agree; I find it unsettling, and meant it to be unsettling.
There are several ideas lying behind that poem which admittedly couldn’t be extracted from the text.
There was the thought of the Taurobolium, the sacrifice to the Great Mother made in old Rome in which the communicant stood under a perforated platform so that the blood of the sacrificed bull poured down upon him.
I also was thinking about Longleaf Pines, the huge pines that once dominated much of Georgia. Longleaf forests require fires: the mature trees survive the fires, and the seeds germinate only in fire-scorched soil.
But also though about global warming. I’ve been concerned about the greenhouse effect since I first read about it while preparing a sixth-grade science project, long before it was a popular topic of conversation.
In fact I think we – by “we” I mean our human “civilization” in the form it now exists – are screwed. The climate is destabilizing and at some point it will snap. The system will got out of control, and many bad things will happen before it reaches some new equilibrium – and it will reach that equilibrium, but by then the world will be a very different one in which humans have lived through our recorded history (an eyeblink in geological time.)
The disaster is upon us and I doubt that anything our great nation-states and corporations and leaders can do will stop it happening.
And maybe that means humans will get another chance, to start over again and maybe not screw up so bad. Which is the other thought behind the poem; that the head of the sun is burning off our botched civilization.
I wrote some of this thought to BF&MUC, who has heard me say such things before. She replied: “I'm not fond of the thought if ‘starting over’" means lots of pain and/or mortality for many humans. If it means we have a chance to avert such suffering by changing ourselves a bit, that's ok -- of course I realize that we might all have differing ideas about how we need to change.”
She’s right, of course. I don’t hope for the disaster; I just think it’s inevitable. The point to hope for, work for, strive a way of salvaging something from the disaster.

Lines for the Summer Solstice

2008-06-15T20:28:00.001-05:00

High has he risen, radiant and Holy.
Call him Bel, Attis, Tammuz or Balder.
Beautiful and proud, his heart draws the shadow’s blow.
From his death-wound, let the Fire pour down.
Let the Sun’s heart-blood burn the Earth clean.
Let the buried seeds of old Magic be wakened.
Let the Sun’s sacrifice set us free.

But DO you BELEIVE?

2008-05-30T19:43:00.000-05:00

In my last entry, I talked about dealing with people who want to know “Do you believe in [G]od?” but I realize I did give an answer to the question itself, not the answer I would give if I weren’t being deliberately evasive, or just being a smart ass.
The simple answer, of course, is “no, I don’t believe in your Capital-G God.”
Or “I do not believe that the universe has or needs a king, a boss, an owner, a dictator, or a big daddy, or a chief disciplinarian.”
I really have a tough time with the idea of “belief,” anyway, and I have told people (sort of quoting Robert Anton Wilson) that I don’t believe anything. Which is true: I’m unwilling to regard any question as utterly settled, or to agree to any statement simply because of someone says it is true or because I am afraid of not believing it.
That seems to be what most people mean by believing.
But, as anyone whose read this must realize, I constantly refer to gods and spirits, and so on. So what’s that all about?
All I can say is that the gods I refer to are the one’s I know. I know them like I know the members of my family.
My upbringing and training is such that I feel a need to rationalize my experience, and I used to devote a lot of time to trying to explain what the gods were, how spirits or daimons or elves could exist, trying to resolve their existence with a sort of mechanistic idea of the universe.
But I can’t, and I’ve finally come to realize that it doesn’t really matter. Anything that has consequences is real and the gods have had great consequence in my life, whether they are understood to be webs of ether, powerful extraterrestrial time travelers, or fragments of my own mind, it doesn’t matter. Knowing them makes my life better and understanding the present colors my perception. Real religion, as the ancients understood, is not about what you believe, but about what you do.

I believe in more Gods than you do

2008-05-18T15:54:00.000-05:00

In my former life as a defense attorney, I was once sitting court waiting to enter a pretty good plea deal for a client who had behaved stupidly, as is usually the case. My client, Jerry, was whispering excitedly to me of his latest experience: he had been Saved.
I don’t suppose it will come as any surprise that small-town Georgia boys facing third DUI charge often find Jesus between arrest and trial. Jerry’s sudden enthusiasm for church going was not knew, nor was what came next, the invitation to come to his church next Sunday.
“I’m not much of a churchgoer,” I said. As a small-town southern lawyer and a small-town southern newspaperman, I usually stay quietly in my broom closet. Of course, when you are a middle-aged white man from a known “good” family and hold socially important jobs like lawyer or editor, it’s not hard to pass as a good Christian: as long as I don’t do anything extraordinarily weird, it’s taken for granted that I am of the tribe.
(Once a woman whose grandchildren I had just extracted from the machinery of the State threw her arms around me in the courtroom shouting “you’re such a good Christian Man.” I just patted her on the shoulder.
(Of course, she KNEW I was a Christian because I had accomplished a good thing and brought justice. She KNEW that only a real Christian could do that or would even try.)
(Right?)
Anyway back in Judge Campbell’s crowded courtroom, Jerry and I exchanged a few more muttered phrases as he tried to probe the state of my soul. Finally, he fixed me with a solemn glare and asked “You DO believe in GOD, don’t you?”
Just at that point, the bailiff hollered “All rise,” and that was the end of that. Possibly, this proves that some god -- my buddy, Hermes? -- was paying attention. I took care of Jerry, but he left without further discussion, and also without further payment. In the end he stiffed me for about $500.
But what about Jerry’s question: do I believe in “God?”
Notice that it’s a trick question, because the word “God” is being used both an abstract concept of deity, and, at the same time, as a proper name, the name of the Christian God, in fact. If you answer “yes,” you seem to be affirming a very specific and Abrahamic idea of what deity can be. If you say “no,” you seem to be denying any spiritual or religious truth at all.
This is approximately the same question asked by the much-publicized poll of last year that concluded that some huge percentage Americans “ believe in God.” But in that poll, as someone commented at the time, the only alternative to "God" was "None of the Above."
There is no room any god that is less than the unchallenged boss of the universe. No room pagans, polytheists and other weird types.
I used to answer people like Jerry by saying things like “I believe in at least as many gods as you do.” That made me feel very clever, but just baffled the Jerrys of the world; sometimes it made them angry.
Because what they really mean when they asking you is “Are you afraid of what God is going to do to you if you don’t do right?” and “Do you believe that my God is the Big Boss, the one who’s going to come and justify all of the things that are important to me?”
And the only answer I can give them is “No.” So usually I don’t say anything at all.

Morality? What morality?

2008-05-09T19:32:00.001-05:00

Continuing some thoughts spinning off from my correspondence with Kate, who was writing a term paper on Pagans and conversion. Again, Kate plans to publish the paper and I think she should (with a few reservations I have expressed), so I’m not trying to steal her thoughts. She can speak to herself.
But responding her thoughts focused my own thoughts on some topics – including the question of what constitutes Pagan “morality.”
This is an important question and one I’ve wrestled with a good bit.
To Kate’s question in her questionnaire “How do you [as a Pagan] decide what is moral behavior?” I first answered, “How do you know I do?”
That was too flippant, of course, but I don’t think I am unique among refugees from Christianity in having a somewhat uneasy relationship with the word “morality.” I have too often heard the word used to bludgeon people were doing naught but what comes – or ought to come – naturally.
That said, I think of myself as a “good” guy: that is, I think that, by and large, I treat other people as well or better than they deserve. In practice, I’m comfortable with the idea that good behavior is like Potter Stewart’s opinion of pornography: I know it when I see it.
But that’s not entirely satisfactory, because history, recent and ancient, is filled with people who were sure they know good from bad and, acting on their intuition, created horrors.
At one point, Kate suggested that the golden rule might justly represent the basis of most Pagans’ view of morality to outsiders. I replied as follows:

“ The Wiccan Rede is ‘An it harm none, do as thou wilt.’
“The Law of Thelema is ‘Do as Thou Wilt shall be the Whole of the Law; Love is the Law, Love under Will.’
“The law of three-fold return is simply that whatever you send returns thrice. If you will indulge my quoting myself, from my response to your survey:
“’ I don’t think the universe counts on its fingers, but obviously, if you make the world an uglier, harder place, then you live in an uglier, harder world; if you make the world a more beautiful and happy place, then you live in a more beautiful and happy place.’
“These are the principle sources of guidance I see used in by pagans.
“Xtians tend to think that the golden rule – ‘Do unto others as thou wouldst have others do unto you.’ – is uniquely Xtian, but actually it had been around in one form or another long before Yeshua cribbed it from Rabbi Hillel. Confucius had a version 500 years early: ‘Do not do to someone else that which you would not want done to you.’
“But Christian morality is inevitably a counsel of fear: instructions to helpless mortals as to what they must do to avoid angering their irresistible and bad-tempered god. The golden rule, even understood as rule of prudence, still emphasizes the individual’s dependence on the community.
“Modern pagan ‘morality’ as represented by the principles I’ve mentioned, is far more individualistic: it emphasizes the actor’s power to change the world s/he lives in, rather hir helplessness and dependence, either on gods or other people, and seeks its reasonable and prudent limits. It is aimed toward defining the most that an individual can do rather than curtailing his power.
“In this, modern Paganism is different from the religions of the Classical urban civilization, which emphasized duty to the community, but I think that is a necessary outcome of the means by which our ways have been transmitted: by occultists, outsiders and rebels. And I think this a good thing.”
I’m fairly happy with that as a beginning point for seeking a kernel of modern Pagan “morality” or ethics or what you would call it. But it’s only a beginning.

the Vision of Wholeness

2008-05-02T20:43:00.001-05:00

I’m back, blogging again after giving up the effort 13 months ago in the face of complication, depression and technological cussedness. I think – I think – I will be blogging at least once a week, maybe more. I have a backlog of potential material.
This is largely inspired by a correspondence with a young lady named Kate who is writing a paper on Paganism for her college philosophy class. Her paper is quite good, she will undoubtedly publish it herself and I’m not trying to steal her thunder.
But, as often happens with me, trying to explain myself to other people, I came to understand more clearly just what I was thinking. So, although I am indebted for Kate for helping me clarify my thoughts, she is in no way to be blamed for any foolishness that maybe detected here in.
The question is this: are all the gods and goddesses but aspects of one central principle, or are they distinct entities existing within the multiverse along with the rest of us entities, phenomena and things.
The unity of the godhead is a widely held belief among Pagans and many others who would not be at all interested in calling themselves Pagans. It is, as I understand, a major line of thought in Hinduism.
It’s a tenable position and one that I adopted at one point in my explorations. However, I have come to reject it, mostly because it simply seems alien to my personal experience of the gods. To me the gods are in no sense abstract, but real, distinct, and, in Richard Eberhardt’s phrase, “as sensual as tears or dreams.”
(Not to the say that all the gods and goddesses don’t sometime bleed into each other, but then I think most human are blurrier around the edges than they imagine themselves to be. We are, after all, only a set of more or less high probabilities.)
Of course, it sort of attractive when one is among dominant monotheists to be able to say “I really am like you guys because all the gods are just one god.” It makes small talk less complicated.
But I think there is a real metaphysical experience that lies at the root of this feeling of the oneness of the gods and of oneness with the gods.
Anyone who has gone very far in any mystical practice will have had a vision of the wholeness of the universe/multiverse, which is very comforting. I believe this vision is that which is called Ain Soph Aur in Kabala, Brahaman in Hinduism, or the Tao of Lao-Tse. When mystics confuse this with their local war god, the monotheistic error arises.
As it happens, just after I started thinking about this, I watched an episode of “Battlestar Galactica” in which the sometimes-treacherous Gaius Balthar, now prophet of the “one god” told his follower “something loves me.” I understand what he means: I’ve had that feeling myself, and I think the ease with which people who have been raised to believe that there is either “God” or nothing confuse this vision with the local war god who operates the Abrahamic religions, accounts largely for the continued credibility of those churches.
But to my mind it is a mistake to understand this wholeness, however harmonious and comforting it may be, as “God” or “the Gods.” The gods are part of it, but so are you and I and so are the cockroaches and viruses and clouds of gas in space.
More importantly, this “wholeness” doesn’t DO anything, because every action and all of its consequences are already complete in it.
It may love you, but not anymore than it loves itself or your opposite. It may be some creator god staring at itself from each end of time, like Narcissus enthralled by its inflection. But it cannot be your guide or your companion or your protector or your lover. This is what the real gods are like.

a banishing ritual

2007-03-18T20:28:00.000-05:00

Events having overtaken me I don’t seem to be able to concentrate on the heavy philosophical work I had previously undertaken, so ...

Here is a version of the banishing ritual which I hope you may find interesting:

Before Me:
Wind-Borne Warrior,wings of gold,
Slaying folly with Wisdom’s Sword.

Behind Me:
The Sea-beast’s Mistress, blue sea-wave treading,
Carrying to me the Cup of Joy.

On my Right hand:
The Lion-Headed Lord of Flame,
Red-robed, bearing the Rod of Will.

On my left hand:

Earth’s Green Lady, a black bull leading,
New birth’s star gleams on her sickle’s blade.

Here at the center,
I Am that I Am

Still as the infinite Void above me,
Alive and fecund as the whirling Earth below me,
I burn with the Sun and
Laugh with the Moon
For now which is forever,
So Be It.

In the Country of the Blind

2007-03-05T21:24:00.000-05:00

“The organ that senses the numinous atrophies with the flesh.” -- Hakim Bey

“Standing downtown, seeing sunset gilding
asphalt, old brick, the buckled concrete
slabs yielding to shoots of stunted elm,
the corner’s guardian,cracking stone’s grip.
As we stop there, something holy glides by,
warm/chill spirit fingers fondle us in passing,
That which is acknowledging those who know

Only the maimed believe they are alone,
but so many are ...” -- me

I’ve worked in bits an pieces on a post for more than a week that now threatens to become 3,000 word essay, and I’m still not satisfied with it. The work seems to be worth saving and maybe publishing someday somewhere, but has become too unwieldy for a blog post. And I had sworn I wouldn’t go a week without posting something here.

I set out to write something about the nature of gods and of our knowledge of them. Perhaps nothing distinguishes Paganism from the other religions and even from materialism/atheism, is the active presence of our gods and goddesses as real entities with who we may interact directly, all citizens in our degree and role of monadic multiverse.

Starhawk, in The Spiral Dance, says that, when people ask her if she actually believes in the Goddess, she asks in return “Do you believe in rocks?” This beautifully terse rejoinder neatly captures the spirit of the thing.. Goddesses and Gods are with us all the time. No grace is required, to know them. No faith is required to learn from them. You need only be alert with all your senses, including the senses you’re not supposed to use. Or so it seems to me.

But, if we are honest, we must acknowledge the problem with this: Rocks are different from gods. If one discovers a huge rock in the back yard, one can predict,with great confidence, that any number of other humans who come into the back yard will agree that there is a big rock there. On the other hand, if one encounters a god or a goddess -- or a fairy or an angel or an oread -- we can have no such confidence. Most likely a randomly selected person will either make circly motions around his ears or perhaps call for help. Likewise, no amount of scientific testing, as it now exists, will find the slightest trace of manifest deity. Why is it, if our deities are manifest, that so few humans notice them?
Maybe we’re just crazy. Maybe when we claim that gods and spirits are around us and speak to us and respond to us, we are no different from the ragged people who sleep in alleys and wander around the streets chatting with invisible presences. While I might point out that I’m pretty functional -- I made good grades, have a career in a profession, own a home, keep bills paid most of the time, have raised children to be fairly functional themselves. I don’t think I’m crazy. But not I, and neither you, can prove the existence of our gods. And unlike Christians as such, we cannot fall back on the inaccessibility of our transcendent deities.

For myself, the question of the reality of the gods does not arise: they are as real as myself -- however real that may be -- and I am no more able to not know them than I can cut out my eyes.

I use that image -- of self-maiming -- deliberately. The only adequate explanation I can come up with is that most people are maimed, that some of their capacity to perceive what is real in the world has been taken from them. It arises, I think, from the teaching that the self exists apart from the flesh; that we humans are a glob of permanent stuff zipped up inside our bodies like a banana in a peel. Real spirit is rooted in fiber and dirt, and water and stone, and fusing hydrogen and whirling ions, for that matter, but not different from matter and energy. Matter/energy makes no sense without spirit, but spirits which don’t know their own flesh cannot know other spirits and so are alone.

What Paganism Means to me

2007-02-23T22:00:00.000-05:00

“Pagan” is the word I have adopted to described my most profound attitudestoward the world and every thing in it: I am a Pagan. I am a lot of other things, of course: a man, an American, a grandfather, a lawyer, a gardener, a writer, a cook, a licensed driver, and so on. But the aspects of my self that I call “Pagan” have become increasingly important to me.

Butwhat does that mean? The gods stalked me or I stalked them for a number of years but they struck suddenly. Others, as I understand it, have had a similar experience: years of questing and experimenting and lurking around the edges of this thing, half-embarrassed dilettantism and fuzzy-minded speculation, until, one day, one night, one hour, in some ceremony, maybe with a group one has shyly crept into or maybe alone with some half-assed improvisation conducted in the back yard, suddenly there is an answer, a surge, a presence,and the world changes for you.

“Like coming home.” I’ve seen others describe this experience that way since then, and that, I swear, is exactly what I thought. I suppose people say that for the same reason people who’ve been near a tornado say “It sounded just like a freight train,” because that’s what it sounds like.

But one enters that old homeplace without necessarily remembering how the furniture is placed or when dinner is served. You have to figure out what it’s all about for yourself (although there’s help available these days.)

Maybe you don’t really need to analyze it too much. Those of us -- which is all of us -- who were raised in the world made by the Religions of the Book are inclined to think that religion should give a comprehensive account of the world, its fate and that of the little folk who adhere to it.

Religion hasn’t always been that way. It’s clear that in Old Rome and Greece, your religion was something you did, not something believed. The pious were those who performed the rites correctly as they had always been performed, and the prophets were those who came up with new rites. Religion, “Re-linking” or “tying back” in Latin, was community magic performed to keep the world on its proper course and the community stable. It was not necessary to believe anything.

Questions of final truth, of the nature of the gods, the fate of man after death, the end of the world were matters for poets or philosophers. And the argument could be made that the philosophers, in their desire to reduce to universe to tidy categories, paved the road to the hell of monotheism.

But I, raised in the chattering and organizing class, can’t really resist the philosophical impulse. I’ve spent more than 20 years trying to figure out what being Pagan means (along with what to call it.). I’ve come up with the following tentative creed which works for me here today.

The universe inhabited by many consciousnesses, some older and some younger, some faster and some slower, some larger and smaller, but none greater and none lesser than I.

The real gods are with us, in our blood, in the dirt beneath our feet, and in the stars and in the void. When we learn to perceive them, we must love them because they are beautiful and graceful, and even terrible. But we are neither their property nor their slaves, although we may sometimes be their prey.

There is a force we call magic which is the very sinews that hold the universe together. By it the gods mold, maintain and destroy all the worlds, but so may we. All the many consciousness of the universe has access to magic in its kind and to the extent of its strength. As such, we, as humans, must be objects of creation and destruction, but are also its subjects and its verbs.

This human race, the mass of hairless apes of earth, has been brought to grief for more than two millennia under the delusion of its helpless subjugation to a life-hating cosmic despot. Betrayed by that delusion, our species stands near to a well-earned extinction, but there is too much good in us to go without a fight -- and there is still time.

Every single thing at every single moment is absolutely unique and and inextricably intertwined with and dependent upon every other unique thing. Nothing is ever finally complete and nothing is every truly lost.

One last conclusion: there is no end to quest for answersto this question. Anyone who thinks that the answers they’ve found are the final answers is a fool, and a dangerous fool at that. To represent the whole of reality would require a brain larger than the entire universe.

Witches, Wiccans and Pagans

2007-02-19T22:02:00.000-05:00

I call myself a Pagan these days. Regrettably, if I were to call myself a witch, people would just think I was peculiar. I tried calling myself a Wiccan for awhile, but found that this got me in trouble with certain other Pagans; I have, you see, never been initiated into a coven. I always disliked the term "Neo-Pagan" simply because I dislike the common use of the particle "neo-";. happily, neo-Pagan is really unnecessary, because modern Pagans are really the first Pagans, Paganism a modern out of the spiritual inspirations and epiphanies of Old Europe and the Mediterranean. So I am a Pagan, qualified by “modern” when occasionally some qualification seems called for.

I regret that I cannot call myself a witch. The image of the witch has fascinated me since I read Frank Donovan's Never on a Broomstick around 1971. Donovan's image of witches as secretive rebels tending the flame of ancient tradition through the dark ages of persecution charmed me and was the seed from which my grown-up opinions sprouted. Yes, I know, good sober scholarship has cast the theory of the great Pagan underground derived from the writings of Margaret Murray, Charles Leland (and Gerald Gardner, for that matter) into question, and no responsible Pagan will admit to clinging to it (or so one hears), but it was at least a useful and instructive myth. (I suspect that the historical validity of this idea has been too easily abandoned, too, but that's a topic for another day.)

It also mattered to me then that Donovan's witches were sexy and frequently nude. I read somewhere that you might be giving Paganism a bad name if one reason you became a Pagan was the chance to dance with naked witches; at 14, I was guilty. I can't say I am ashamed of that, because the idea that sexuality and sensuality could be sacred was a revolutionary one to the Southern Baptist boy that I was, and it is still a revolutionary idea and central to my kind of Paganism. (Even though, alas, I have yet to dance with naked witches.)

"Witch" is also attractive to me because nothing is more directly defiant of the more militant and intolerant kinds of Christians than to identify oneself as a Witch.

Unfortunately, words mean what great numbers of people generally understand them to mean. The meaning of "witch" as it is mostly widely known these days derives not from Pagan speculation or even from Christian paranoia but from popular movies, TV and children's books. And witches in the most popular of those pop culture sources, have some common characteristics: They are not religious, pagan, infernal or otherwise; they are invariably females; they have magic powers acquired by heredity or happenstance, rather than study or divine/infernal dealmaking; and they are usually not exactly human.

There are bad witches, like the Wicked Witch of the West, or the witches in old fairy tales, or some Disney movies. Often you can tell they are not human because they don't look human, i.e. the Wicked Witch of the West and her clones, the Halloween witches, have green skin. The evil queen in Sleeping Beauty turns into a dragon under stress. And, as I realized while reading bedtime stories to my grandchildren, the "witches" in traditional fairy tales are often described extreme physical deformities that mark them as something other than human.

There are good witches -- Samantha Stevens, Sabrina the Teenaged Witch, the Charmed Ones, the distaff magic workers in the Harry Potter novels -- who look human and are often pretty, but still are not quite human. The witches and warlocks in "Bewitched" referred to Darren and other non-magical humans as "mortals" and it was implied that the witches were hundreds of years old. (The Charmed Ones also refer to non-magical folk as Mortals, although they seem to be pretty mortal themselves.) In the Harry Potter novels, only those born with the capacity to do magic are witches/wizards; muggles and squibs can't do magic no matter how many years they may study; Witches and Wizards live an existence unknown to and separate from the muggles. Sabrina was actually native to a sort of alternate universe that she entered through a hall closet.

But in the popular imagination the Witch is not person atall, but is a supernatural being. When we call ourselves "witches," we are inevitably classed by the public at large with people who claim to be the reincarnation of Cleopatra or the bastard child of Elvis and a UFO pilot.

If "Witch" is untenable because it evokes absurd connotations to the general public, "Wiccan" seems a more likely choice; if it has less romantic resonance than "Witch," it is also bears less bizarre cargo of confusing signifiers. "Wiccan" has almost become respectable, and most fairly well-read people recognize that it connotes some sort of religious practice or belief. But I discovered a few years ago while participating in an on-line discussion of Wiccan Religion at a big well-known web site, I discovered that there are some folks who get really wrought up because people without the proper pedigree use the term. One woman who was posting to the board was startlingly bitter that anyone without a provable history initiation traceable back to Gerald Gardner would dare express any opinion whatsoever on a Wiccan board. She reminded of a Christian woman who once tried to explain to me why she objected to Gay marriage. To the Christian woman, being monogamously and heterosexually married for life was a mark of her triumph her sinful nature, and was the great accomplishment of her life; she felt that honoring other arrangements as "marriage": somehow cheapened her accomplishment. To my traditionalist correspondent, her purely Gardnerian, properly documented initiated was a mark of her triumph over ... I never was sure exactly what, but it was apparently the great accomplishment of her life. I tried to elicit an explanation, wasn't terribly impressed with the response, tried harder, and perhaps became unnecessarily personal. I don't always play well with others in the rhetorical sandbox. The moderator kept bouncing my remarks, so I finally gave up.

Since then I've learned more about so-called traditionalist Wiccans. They're a strange bunch: Their who position stands or falls on the uniqueness of initiations emanating from Gerald Gardner. Unfortunately, Gardner claimed to have received his initiation from Old Dorothy of the New Forest, so either his initiation was not unique, or he was a liar. The traditionalists are, therefore, unique in human history: a religious movement bases its claim to authority on its insistence that its founder was a bare-faced liar.

Don't get me wrong: Gardner was a liar, a brilliant and original liar,clearly touched by the Lord of Wild Things, who is the god of con artists and tale tellers. But the god's lies and those inspired by him always disclose truths and liberate those with wit to understand them. What bothers me about the traditionalists is that, in their fear of uncertainty and ambiguity, are setting Gardner up as the
Mohammed of the new religion, the "onlie beggeter" whose authority is the touchstone of all that is good and true. Certainly, you can build a religion around such a figure -- most of the World follows such faiths -- but if that's the kind of religion Wicca is to be, I want no part of it.

"Pagan" is a better word. Not "neo." Virgil, Euripides, Hesiod, the Druids of Mona, the Shamans of the steppes, the priests of ancient Egypt, none of them knew they were Pagans, or even that there was something special or common among their beliefs. Until the rise the desert monotheisms, there was nothing for them to define themselves against.

Virgil,Ovid, the Latin poets wrote about "pagani," the people who lived in the country and made sacrifice at the Pagus, the boundary stones. The poets had a certain affection for those pagans, the country people who still believed in the old rituals, but they certainly didn't regard themselves, cosmopolitan sophisticates living at the heart of a burgeoning empire, as of those country people. But that's who I identify with, the people who sacrificed at the boundary stones, who were sunk into the earth and root to it, like the stones themselves.

Later, we hear, the Roman military aristocracy adopted the tern "pagan" as a term of contempt for people who were not in the army, people who stayed at home on the farm rather that going out to conquer the world. I admire those people who stayed home to raise crops rather than going off to fight stupid wars. those people were pagans, but they didn't know they were Pagans.

When the Christians came to power in the Fourth Century, they picked up the soldiers' slang and called those who resisted joining their "Army of Christ" Pagans, people who stated loyal to the gods of earth and water and fire and air, rather than floating off on dreams of heaven. I can certainly identify with those Pagans.

And "Pagan" has been used through as a term of abuse for rebels, free thinkers, free lovers, and weirdos of all stamps. I can identify with those Pagans.

So that is my chosen history and my chose identity; I am a Pagan.

Invocation and Introduction

2007-02-12T09:15:00.000-05:00

I was raised in the South, a good Southern Baptist boy for most of my first two decades. Important events and undertakings in those times and places began with a preacher, or my father, or some august male person saying “Let us pray.” I’ve traveled some way since then a nd I am no longer a good Southern Baptist boy, but I think I shall commence this with my sort of a prayer. So let us pray:

Oh, Lady
You who must be adored,
With shining hair and honeyed breasts,
Mistress of the caverns whence issue
men and women, magic and all good things
Weaver, Brewer,
Singer, Bender,
Sower, Reaper,
Field and Forest, Stone and Sea
Nourisher, Inspirer, Slayer,
Great Whore, Limitlessly Pure
With Moonshine in your eyes

Come sit beside me,
Mother, Sister, Queen, Lover and Muse
Bless this new work of mine, which I dedicate to you,
Fill my heart with the wine of your true singers

Oh, Lord
You Old Horny, Wounded, Goatish Trickster,
Dancer in the wild places, stepping it with
the power of the storm wind,
the frenzy of the wild fire,
the grace of flowing water,
the twisted eloquence of the ancient oak
that bursts from and thrusts into the earth,
Guide to Lovers, makers, seekers and the Dead,
Conjurer, Swindler
Seducer, Redeemer,
Scourger and Encourager
Spearman, Horseman, Cocksman,
Rogue in the Night, who breaks all bonds
with Lightning in your eyes

Come Walk beside me,
Father, Brother, Lord, Friend and Accomplice
Shove me out under the lights, and
up to the battlefront, and into
her arms, kick me in the ass if I start to
doze and snatch me up by the hair if
I fall to my knees,
Bless Me
with that yawning need,
that endless desire
that moves the world

Hello, then. I am a Pagan. I have known that I was a Pagan for about 22 years now. I spent about 12 years before that hunting along that path that led me up to that mountaintop. I’ve been a Christian, an atheist, a Taoist along the way. I’ve called myself a Witch, a Wiccan, a Neo-pagan, and so on at times, but have finally decided that simply Pagan is the only word for my pact with Old Gods, Daimons and Spirits.

I am quite gray and middle aged now and suspect that time is running out on me, but I have a few things to say before I’ve quite pissed my life away on trivialities, hence this endeavor. I want to write about what I think I know about Gods and people, and other entities, and how one is to understand their being and one’s own and how the heart of the world was broken by human betrayal, and how humans thus maimed themselves in so doing, and what is to be done about. I want to talk about the great work of charming the Old Gods back to the light of plain day and what that might mean to us all. I want to discuss the shape of modern Pagan philosophy. I want to discuss why magic and sexuality have to central issues to a meaningful Pagan practice and why real Paganism can never be respectable to the big imperial religions that have leeched off humanity, and why modern Pagans who believe all religions must aspire to the condition of Episcopalianism are doomed.

It will of course, be all Only My Opinion. (Not a particularly Humble Opinion, as I am not a particularly humble person.) Henceforth, mon semblable, mon frere, you may take it as read that any statement I make, if I have not attributed it to someone else, is Only My Opinion, and that I am aware of this. Also, please understand that I do not claim the back of any Authority: I am not revealing the hidden truths of any tradition, I have not access to any otherwise-secret hereditary lore and I have not been given an assignment by any spiritual entity or formerly living person. I don’t fancy myself a guru or the leader of a movement (though I hear it’s good work if you can get it.)

But it’s all just me thinking and throwing out some ideas and trying start a discussion or possibly and argument. I don’t mind argument: I argue for a living and I’m pretty good at it. I don’t form opinions easily: if I have something to say, I’ve worked on it for awhile, chiseling away at them until I’m happy with. Other people do this, some perhaps better than I. I hope to hear from you, if you one of those; I don’t promise to ever give ground easily, but I hope I can at least always grant respect to a well formed thought.

On the other hand, not all opinions are created equal: some -- many -- are stitched together from unexamined received wisdom, half-understood tags of brighter people’s thoughts, propaganda, cant and unearned hipsterism. Such will also be given the respect they deserve.

I don’t propose to talk much about myself after this initial introduction, in part because I’m not very interesting, in part because I practice law and help to raise grandchildren in a smallish southern city, circumstances which require a prudent discretion for someone like me.

If you find any of this valuable, I’d appreciate knowing it. If you find it boring, incomprehensible or silly, well, I wish you well in your other endeavors.

All this said, let me wind up my spell with this:

Oh, Lady, Oh, Lord
Brilliant girl and ancient boy,
Here, while fiddle my craziest song,
Dance the dance you do the best,
Roll and Shake,
Twist and Shout,
and When your moans and screams have
shook the mountains to their roots and
rung the star’s crystal sphere
to the shattering note,
then may your mingled juices
rain down on the brittle bones and
sterile clay, that here
something new and strange
may grow

May you all Blessed Be.