Ocean's Ways

Comparative studies, CR, and mysticism

2008-05-02T12:44:00.001-07:00

Erynn Laurie's Searching for Imbas blog has a new post discussing the issues with attempting a more mystical Celtic pagan path. It discusses some of what I've been touching on the last couple of days in regards to cross-cultural studies and process. I remain glad Erynn started this blog. She's been a strong advocate of CR since she started out referring to it as a "NeoCelt" path, and the more information that gets out presenting the diversity of CR, the better. We'd be worse off if only one set of voices was heard.

Authenticity and the modern neopagan

2008-04-30T20:17:00.000-07:00

The irony of arguments amongst reconstructionist pagans that come down to whether someone's authentic or not has been driven home to me lately. I'm not talking about the perfectly valid attempts to get people to stop claiming a tradition they've only practiced for ten weeks is the way the ancestors did it when we have no proof of it. I'm referring to how, once you get to where people are working with the lore, the culture, and their own inspiration, some people seem to think they can decide if you're doing it wrong and they're doing it right. When you don't know how X was done, being sure someone else's method of approach is faulty because it disagrees with your own interpretations is the best way to be considered didactic and dogmatic.

I don't know if it's possible for any CR to say they practice a truly authentic Celtic spirituality, especially not one that's true to the pre-Christian Celts. We're all bringing in outside influences, learning the cultural norms, figuring it out as we go along, and are never going to get to the heart of what it was like before the Christians showed up. We can't. We don't speak that form of the appropriate language. We don't live in that environment. Can we get something useful to modern times out of our struggle to understand? Of course. If it wasn't useful at the start, we'd all go do something else. But don't be fooled into thinking any of us will ever have a lock on what's accurate past the cold facts in a book. We can only work the ways the gods move us to follow and keep faith in the rightness of our own path for ourselves. We don't have to agree with others who use the same methods if our facts coincide. Where our paths overlap, we have common purpose and community. Where they do not, we have diversity.

Those who would attempt to sow dissension in the ranks because of disagreements over approach or the individual voices of the gods, ancestors and spirits who speak to each of us will have their works treated with the due and proper respect they deserve. Those who reach for a balanced sense of priorities and speak truth will receive their right reward as well. So I pray to the gods, so I ask it be. So shall it be done.

Pure as the driven slush

2008-04-29T23:17:00.000-07:00

How do you stay true to a cultural tradition when that tradition itself is subject to change? I've long seen comments about being careful how to approach culturally based religions. The issue of not showing it sufficient respect gets balanced by being careful not to treat it as if it's trapped in amber.

Is it possible to be a purist about a culture that's a Heinz 57 thanks to multiple invasions and cross-cultural integrations? I've been told it's wrong to look at a culture, freeze it at a moment in time, and decide that's the only right space to work in. Can't disagree with that.

So how is it when I look at the Celtic cultures as a living, breathing entity that has changed, will change, and is as clean of outside influence as a used air filter, I wind up finding out I'm doing it wrong because I'm looking at the cultures that influenced it as well as ones that parallel it in some areas?

Defining the membership

2008-03-30T20:14:00.001-07:00

It would seem that there is a small but fervent movement amongst a minority within the Celtic reconstructionist community to define anyone whose practices include more traditions than CR, regardless of how separately they may practice them, as not being truly members of CR. As I am someone who practices both CR and Umbanda, this naturally has me interested. I don't think of myself as affected, mind. I don't think the parties responsible for spreading this particular poison are qualified to make this sort of judgment call. They will claim all sorts of reasons why they are, of course. That sort always does. Ironically, the CR FAQ does not decree this particular separation. I should know; I was there when the language was set down and agreed to by all authors and primary contributors. Would it be fair to say that someone who insists on claiming someone can't be CR if they are also practicing a second faith tradition isn't really CR themselves? Or would I be sinking to their level? Not that it matters in the long run. I know what I am doing and how I am doing it. I don't need the approval of someone who is neither teacher, close friend, nor family member to say what or who I am.

Trust and reputation

2008-01-09T14:20:00.000-08:00

I've had a lot of cause recently to contemplate the value of matching words to deeds. I'm plagued with one form of this issue. I get great ideas and then allow myself to be distracted from bringing them to fruition. It's a fear/ADHD/bad habit trifecta that I'm slowly working to overcome. It has an impact on how I'm perceived. I'm not painting myself as some great elder, but reputations are built, not granted.

What has me moved to say more than "I'm flighty" to whatever audience I still have is how I've had pokes from more than one direction lately about the standards to which I hold people who present themselves as leaders in the pagan communities I have contact with. It's not so much that I need to change them as I need to express them. They may change later, but that's how it is with opinions. I'd like to think this set of standards will only need minor tweaking over time, though.

This one's kind of a throwaway that I wish was more obvious to more people, but based on some discussions I've had, I need to point out the issue of image. Dressing for respect doesn't have to mean suits and business dresses. It would, however, tend to involve sticking the wizard's hat into storage for at least some public events and learning how to pull off the eclectic look in a fashion that doesn't resemble a historical re-enactment costume cop's idea of a nightmare.

Age doesn't always bring wisdom. I've had people claim I should treat certain older pagans with more respect because of what they did 40 years ago when everything they've done since that phase of usefulness has carried the aura of self-aggrandizement and suckering the rubes. I remain unconvinced. While I find the "one bad act cancels out a lifetime of good ones" approach people often take with volunteer labor to be more than occasionally ridiculous, the reverse is always silly to me. If you look at a stopped clock and insist it's not stopped because you only remember the two times a day it's right, you're doing it wrong.

Then there's the issue of authority in a tradition. Duration of personal practice can often mean you have a decent grasp of a tradition's ins and outs, especially in one with a set corpus of practices. If the tradition is still in the "fly by the seat of our pants" phase, this is harder to establish. This is when I look at who is setting up the healthiest combination of guidelines and building tools for others to work with. The health level is also gauged by how they respond when people use the same or similar tools to get to different conclusions. Analyzing the logic and/or willingness to recognize that the same thing doesn't work for everyone shows a security in one's viewpoint and practice. Emotional reactions, whether passive-aggressive or outright insulting if not somewhere in-between, lead me to wonder if the self-proclaimed elder is fantasizing while counting their gray hairs again. This also winds up linking back to the "what did you do recently" vs. "what did you do X number of years ago" argument. Consistent visibility and sound guidance are more important to me than simple duration of presence.

The authority issue is also related in my mind to whose opinions are significant. This can be more personal than general in scope, but the broader gallery of observers does speak up from time to time in almost anyone's life. The standard I'm working on applying more assiduously is "solicited over unsolicited, solicited from people who are currently guiding my education over those who aren't, and consider the reputation/behavior of all of the above regardless of degree of solicitation." J. Random Blogcommenter who claims to know better than me about some point of Celtic practice without sourcing their citation will not sway me much. If JRB turns out to be a Ph.D. in Celtic Studies who had a memory fault as to the name of the book they'd read, I'll at least try to do some legwork myself to see if I can find what they're talking about. But if Dr. JRB is also a known troublemaker, even if the cite is accurate, I will look at it with a sharper eye.

If I were to keep a mental list of "Top Ten Ways Neopagandom Could Improve," stricter standards for who to trust as valid instructors and sources of criticism would be very high in the rankings. But pinning that sort of list down is an activity I'd rather do when I feel like amusing myself with pie-in-the-sky fantasies that don't involve the CA state lottery.

Changes

2007-10-16T20:28:00.000-07:00

The blog's needed a name change for some time. I realized recently that part of my problem with it was that "Red Raven" no longer fit me. If nothing else, I stopped being a redhead. And as Manannán mac Lir has been formally asserted as my patron, I felt this blog should reflect Him a bit more. Thus the name change to Ocean's Ways.

The topics I cover won't change. My willingness to speak, however, is returning as I rise out of the mental hermitage and work on asserting a few things a bit more.

Sense of humor, anyone?

2007-07-16T13:50:00.000-07:00

Some British neopagans are up in arms because Fox Studios paid someone to paint a biodegradable image of Homer Simpson in his underwear next to the Cerne Abbas giant. They seem to think it's an act of sacrilege and plan to work "rain magic" to make Homer wash away sooner. Since the giant only dates to the 1600's, their assumption that it was carved with blatantly pagan intent seems a bit strange to me. It's as if nobody ever committed graffiti until the invention of spray paint. For all they know, they're defending the sacred nature of the work of a pack of drunken teenagers. The fertility association it's gained would easily be explained by someone coming along after the carving, having a quickie in the chalk, and deciding the resultant pregnancy was because they did it in the penis instead of, say, the club. But why ask me? I'm just someone who's read Ronald Hutton and realizes the fact that some "ancient" traditions only started after the Christians showed up.

Doing the right thing

2007-06-12T20:45:00.000-07:00

Posted to the Imbas mailing lists.

Imbas needs strong leadership. I'm incapable of providing that under current conditions. I should've realized this years ago, but inertia is a harsh mistress. If you'll pardon the Latin, mea maxima culpa. I could cite work, my husband's lack of same for several years, and various happenings in my spiritual life as explanations, but I don't judge them to be excuses.

That said, I resign as president of Imbas, effective immediately.

I appreciate the good will of those who are capable of sympathizing.

Those of you who are not are welcome to your opinions. I'm not claiming to be a victim or otherwise blameless, and I expect my reputation's not doing so well in some circles over the truth within what's been going on.

And if any choose to speak ill of me for this beyond the truth, may the gods bless you with what you deserve for it.

Energy, blog news and a bit of CR content

2007-05-18T23:10:00.000-07:00

I have had an extremely busy life the last few months. I've also been entering into a phase where my inner development is drawing energy away from more public explorations of same. I'm physically healthy, finances aren't any tighter than they used to be, and the rest remains stable enough. I am simply in a headspace where if I don't spend the energy on what I'm doing in real time, I won't get done what I need to do. I know this is horridly cryptic, but it's as good an explanation as I can make right now. Those who need to know the details are aware of what I'm talking about.

On the administrivia front, I just switched this blog over to the Google-modified side of the Force. My thoughts of migrating to a different space are being set aside for now. Whatever energy I have for blogging will be better spent writing than making Wordpress sit up and beg. I think the swap has killed the comments I had at one point, which is a bit annoying. They were uniformly interesting and very nice to see.

In CR news, I want to notify anyone who's still paying attention and may not have heard from other sources that Erynn Rowan Laurie's written a book on ogam divination (Weaving Word Wisdom) that frankly looks to blow the concept wide open. I'm not sure how so many writers on the subject have failed so completely to look at the Auraicept na nEces and seen that not only do they keep getting some of the trees wrong, there is much more to ogam than trees and vines. Erynn has gone back and done that and more. It's an expansion of her booklet on the subject that she released in late 2005, and it will be available through Immanion Press in September. What I've seen of it has me very excited.

Not moving, not gone

2007-04-09T23:10:00.000-07:00

I realized I could either spend the energy I have for this blog migrating it or updating it. I'm going to update it instead. The next one will be much less than a month from now and a lot more interesting, if not at least a fair bit longer.

I hope some of you are still with me. :)

Update

2007-02-24T23:18:00.000-08:00

PantheaCon and other personal stuff of a good nature has been consuming my February. More on the move will be posted in March.

I aten't dead!

2007-02-01T21:40:00.000-08:00

I started the migration process to a new server and had my January suck my free time dry. I may just declare it done during a free half-hour, switch the LJ RSS feed to the new URL, and run from there over the weekend. I've had more than one topic I wanted to discuss get back-burnered because I didn't want to have to re-copy the posts. It'll be rough on the new one for a bit, but it'll be there at any rate.

Pagans and Christians

2006-12-25T14:44:00.000-08:00

I was inspired by someone else's commentary to do my own two cents on an issue in pagan circles: anti-Christian bigotry. I see it in comments on blogs, in forums, and face-to-face discussions. Everything from Wiccans who will accept any tradition's gods in a circle except That One to reconstructionists who refuse to respect their ancestors because they're Christian. Parents who think it's fine if their kid investigates any of a dozen faiths except That One. People who insist it's OK to hate Christians because of the Burning Times, the Inquisition, the Salem trials, the snakes, or whatever, but just let someone even look at them funny for wearing a pentacle the size of a hubcap and they go off about how it's St. Patrick all over again. The fact Patrick's hardly responsible for half of what he's saddled with is a related point. A complete refusal to look at the entirety of a religion's history and cherry-picking for strawmen and scapegoats is textbook behavior for religious bigots.

Guess what, kids. I don't care if you went to a bad church. I don't care if the priest molested you. I don't care if you were beaten into compliance. You don't get to blame the religion for its followers any more than the rest of the world gets to blame paganism for its problem members. The Tuatha de Dannan are not held responsible for the racists in Celtic pagan traditions, but Jesus is held responsible for the bigots in His faith. How is this fair? How is this even?

The Christians have a saying about how you shouldn't pick on the mote in your neighbor's eye until you remove the plank from your own. If you insist on looking at Christianity and only see the extremists and perverts who use it as a cover for authoritarian or pedophilic behaviors, you have a plank. It's called bigotry. And it's not true to any pagan faith I can think of.

Oh, and Merry Christmas. Solstice is over, so I figured the proper greeting of the day was in order. I promise you won't go up in flames if you say it.

Migration

2006-12-19T19:50:00.000-08:00

Now that Haloscan has decided to force you nice people to see ads when you leave comments on my blog and Blogger's little now-released beta isn't likely to remain optional for long, I'm going to bite the time and effort bullet and migrate this blog to my own setup on my own domain and use Wordpress. If ads are going to ever turn up on this blog, I want to get a cut.

Dedication, sacrifice, and breakfast

2006-12-17T12:10:00.000-08:00

There's a half-joking analogy about the difference between involvement and commitment relating to breakfast. When you look at a plate of bacon and eggs, the chicken was involved and the pig was committed. This also applies to the question of sacrifice. I see the question of "should we do some kind of blood sacrifice" come up sometimes. The knee-jerk reply that comes back when it arises is, "Donate blood and dedicate the act." Dedication is not sacrifice the way eggs are not bacon.

In the ritual deposit areas in Celtic tribal lands, researchers have found weapons that were deliberately broken before being cast into the pits. From what they can see, the weapons were being given over to the gods. I don't know if there's anything in the Celtic lore about a weapon being dedicated to a god, but when someone does that in other traditions' source material, they get to keep the weapon and it is used in this world. If you donate blood and dedicate that act to the gods, the blood stays in this world and is used here. That is why it's a dedication. If it were a sacrifice, to follow the form established in the past, you'd need to pour the same pint onto a fire, thereby transferring it to the Otherworld for the gods' usage. Also, there is a distinct difference between bleeding yourself to the gods and using a different animal's blood. Using your own blood can be taken as a sign of an even deeper commitment to the act than may be intended. I'd much sooner see people buy some pig blood from a butcher or use ghee as the Hindus do to ensure the wrong message isn't transmitted. Of course, if all the signs say, "Do it yourself," who am I to question if they do it safely and sanely?

This is not saying people should go to a blood bank and try to talk them out of keeping the bag of blood you generate for them to do a "proper" blood sacrifice. What I'm saying is that if you're going to sacrifice something, some part, if not all of it, is supposed to go to the gods. In short, it has to be ritual bacon. So it is that people dedicate themselves to gods instead of sacrificing themselves to them. The latter implies ritual suicide.

Lights, Pentacle, Controversy

2006-12-10T14:45:00.000-08:00

10,000 Reasons to Doubt the Fish has an interesting controversy on his block. A family of Wiccans living next to fundamentalist Christians decided to erect their own holiday display, including a 5-foot wide pentacle in lights. The inevitable argument ensued.

I've been seeing more pentacles appear in holiday light displays in my own area. I may not follow that faith, but I'm always glad to see a moment of diversity, right up there with the people who've taken to hanging lights for Hanukkah. It is a sad day when people who claim to be good Americans refuse to realize this country was built in the spirit of freedom of religion and try to co-opt December for their own purposes with no respect for others' reasons for the season.

Checking In

2006-12-02T19:19:00.000-08:00

I try not to end things just by walking away. I'm not ready to shut this blog down and don't intend to. I have been swamped by my day job to the point of hauling work home on nights and weekends. This leaves precious little time for blog posting. Once the insanity eases, I'll be able to at least assess my situation regarding the Roost and take matters from there. I'm getting some clear messages that I'm going to need to re-evaluate a lot of what I do in public fora due to shifts in my spiritual life, and nothing will be left out from the process.

I miss writing for you all, and I'll let you know if I'm going to close shop or not. I prefer my "worlds" to end with bangs instead of whimpers, if not merely a clearly closed door.

No Irish Spoken Here?

2006-11-12T00:20:00.000-08:00

Kathryn Price NicDhàna's blog, Pàganachd Bhandia, tipped me off to the sad and horrid case of Máire Nic an Bhaird, who was arrested on the streets of Belfast for the crime of using Irish to say goodbye to her friends within earshot of a police officer.

A link to the PDF describing the case from the Celtic League is here. And if you think people are all rallying around this woman and her usage of Irish, guess again. DemiOrator also cites a discussion with Nic an Bhaird in which she explained her side.

This must have sent a few shock waves through the growing Gaeltacht in Northern Ireland. The devolution talks have been making all official attempts to express and support NI as a multilingual society, but this attitude has apparently not sunk in with the constabulary. I hope that whatever else happens, some education takes place so that the police remember there's no good reason to assume "oíche mhaith duit" means "up the Rah." (For the record, it means, "good night.")

Sorting out the laws

2006-11-06T20:54:00.000-08:00

Jason Pitzl-Waters posted recently about the decision in Ireland to eliminate the dual-ceremony system of marriage imposed on practitioners of most religions other than Roman Catholicism. I did some more looking around, and found two things. First, Pitzl-Waters misstated the current situation somewhat, though the editorial (requires registration) that inspired him didn't exactly help in its sweeping comments on the issue mixed with some odd ideas about Druids. It is noted in the General Register that other religions besides Roman Catholicism have means of performing weddings without forcing a second wedding onto the believers. Church of Ireland, Presbyterian, Quaker and other Christian faiths, as well as Judaism, are noted as being eligible to perform weddings without the need for a second ceremony. Islam is noted as being ineligible very specifically, but any religions other than that are not mentioned at all. The context of "other religious bodies" within the rules has most likely been interpreted as meaning "Christian denominations not listed here" over the years, especially considering the concept appears between the Presbyterians and the Quakers.

That said, the law change to quit forcing people outside of those groups to go through two ceremonies or arrange to have a registrar on site is a very good idea, and one that helps bring Ireland more into modern times. That aspect of the story led me to the Pre-Independence Project currently being undertaken by Ireland's Office of the Attorney General. They are going through the laws that have been on the books since before the founding of the Republic of Ireland and making sure all of the laws have been ones passed by their own government instead of applied by the British Parliament and carried forward by sheer momentum. I suspect the marriage law is one of these. Other obsolete and non-applicable laws have been progressively stripped from the books as well.

And while this doesn't put Ireland back in the days of the native brehon laws, a system that predates the Magna Carta, an Ireland truly under Irish law will be a nice reality to have back again. I share Pitzl-Waters' hope that the marriage law amendment, as well as other changes, will make it a more equal state, devoted to rights for all citizens regardless of religious faith or lack thereof.

Credulity, credulousness and curmudgeonism

2006-10-20T22:07:00.000-07:00

Ever think that some pagans would be better off as skeptics in the Amazing Randi vein except they can't quite get past the idea of having to be an atheist to do it? I see this sometimes. Their knee-jerk reaction to ideas like dealing with the Fair Folk of any variety with something closer than ten-foot silver tongs is to snark first, get pushy later.

Oh, certainly, lots of people take that sort of thing to an irrational conclusion, like the fluffybunnies who think all of the Shining Ones are friendly playmates who look like Tinkerbell. But I've seen people get rudely dissected for material that has some grounding in the lore, if not their perceptions, the latter being occasionally hard to argue with. I've made comment elsewhere about the Norse lore relating to attracting a helpful house brownie only to have someone get cute about chocolate fudge in a fashion that clearly indicated they weren't only punning to be cute. It's only annoying in that they showed no understanding of context and assumed they had the right of it when they clearly couldn't tell elfshot from Elfquest.

What some pagans seem to find hard to believe is that the lore of the cultures they are at least allegedly drawing their beliefs from is rife with stories of interactions with non-god-type entities with varying agendas and different means of being addressed. They either scoff or assume they all must be treated very carefully if not outright ignored. I grant you, an Asatruar setting up a house for their local wight isn't going to have a spic-and-span house as if by elfin magic, but it's perfectly within the lore to guess their tendency to always be able to find their house keys despite having no real system for keeping them in the same place might be related.

On that note, I need to put some cream out.

Thinking and Contemplating

2006-10-05T22:33:00.000-07:00

I've been enjoying blogging and interacting with other bloggers for a while now, but lately, I've been turning a bit more private. It may just be me experiencing the change of the seasons in a way I never have before. That said, I'm not sure how often I'll be posting for a while, and I'm sure I'll be reading less often than I used to. I don't plan to shut this down, but I figured I'd make a note so the regular handful of you who've been following along will know why I've gotten quieter in case you hadn't been told via other means.

Of course, saying this, I may find myself posting a flurry in about a week or two. I'm just going to roll with it for a while and see what happens.

Flogging for a Friend

2006-09-24T20:11:00.000-07:00

A woman I count as both an elder in Celtic Reconstructionism as well as a friend of mine, Erynn Rowan Laurie, has made available her first pass at an ogam book, Not Your Mother's Tree Ogam. Comprising her thoughts on the first 20 ogam characters (she doesn't work with the forfeda for reasons she explains), both of tree and non-tree sorts (yes, Virginia, it's more than birch and ash), it's a look at nearly 20 years of meditation and research as well as a preview of coming attractions for her first full-sized book since A Circle of Stones. Since I gave her a squib for her WitchVox entry for the book, I figured I should also promote it here. It truly is a useful work, even if it's small. It's also dead cheap at $5.

When Myth is Found to be Fact

2006-09-20T22:22:00.000-07:00

One of the passages in the Lebor Gabála Erénn that is sometimes argued about is what was meant by the claims the Milesians came from Spain. Some considered it possible, others weren't sure. The question appears to have been settled, alongside any claims that there is such a thing as a unique strain of genetics that could be called Celtic.

Bryan Sykes, the man who worked out the Daughters of Eve research that demonstrates 95% of humanity descends from seven women based on DNA markers alongside many other accomplishments, spent the last several years researching the genetic history of Great Britain and Ireland. What he found supports the LGE's claims of the origins of the Milesians. Genetically, the large majority of residents of those two islands can be traced back to the northern coast of Spain. About 6,000 years ago, the civilization on that section of the European mainland were shipbuilders of sufficient talent that their crafts made it to those islands. They weren't the first humans there; some small population already existed there but was mostly subsumed by the newcomers. Successive waves since then that left their marks were the Saxons, Normans and others. Also, the markers for the first wave are so consistent across the two islands that it is foolhardy to claim a genetic difference between a Londoner and a Dubliner without one of them being non-white. Or perhaps not. Interestingly, the probable source of the "black Irish" also seems to have been located. Around the same time those Iberians were making the journey (the Oisin genetic marker in Sykes' nomenclature), some people from northern Africa were there along with them and settled primarily in the coastal areas (labeled the Eshu marker).

I look forward to getting my hands on his book, which is being published as Blood of the Isles in the UK and Saxons, Vikings and Celts in the USA. I dearly wish my paternal line had the Irish and that I had the spare cash to take advantage of the genetic testing available through his institute's site. But those of you who do may find it worth a look.

Something Older, Something Newer

2006-09-06T21:21:00.000-07:00

Here's a phrase to strike fear in the heart of your average Neopagan: The Old Ways. Fear of being seen as a fluffybunny leads to rejecting it. Fear of not being taken seriously leads to embracing it. It comes up a lot, especially in Wiccan circles. Was Margaret Murray misreading things? Was she on to something? How far back could the traditions from which Gardner built Wicca possibly go? Some Wiccans insist their tradition comes from a single tradition that once existed all across Europe, possibly before the arrival of the first Indo-Europeans. Others aren't so sure they know or even care.

When I see that, I contemplate whether my religious traditions are truly in direct touch with the Druids and realize that to me, it just doesn't matter. But I know I'm in touch with something that predates me, Gardner, and the founding of the Golden Dawn. The Irish Celtic culture. The modern form of Irish is traceable to a time before Julius Caesar. The roots of Celtic culture go back farther than that. What does it matter that the rituals I perform don't have a provable, traceable pedigree to Cathbad? The perspective and philosophy behind them have a clear path of origin. They haven't been separated out and tacked onto something from another tradition that claims it as its own by an unprovable birthright. I may combine one from another, but I know from whence they came. I don't need to claim we were all under one tradition in the first place.

I also feel far less compulsion to worry about what happened in the past to make this path harder to travel. Any discussion of the Burning Times leaves me out from the start, as I remember the pre-Christian Romans have far more Celtic pagan blood on their hands than any Christian group ever had. I know the conversion of Ireland was one of slow centuries of persuasion, not short years of strife and torment. The witch trial insanities barely touched the island a few centuries later. And the slow conversion method left hints and hybrid forms in its wake that even Rome and England could not wholly extinguish before they became interesting enough to write about. The language remained and a clearly connected, albeit changed over time, culture with it. And the more I learn of that culture, the more I am in touch with its battered but unbroken line.

Not that claims to ancient ways matter. All religious traditions were new once. All religions are built on what came before and so bear a common lineage to the first African protohuman who said a prayer in a language nobody has spoken for millennia but everyone uses a trace of. We are all new. We are all ancient. Such is humanity.

When is a Celt not a Celt?

2006-08-30T21:51:00.000-07:00

The genetic identity of three mummies found in the Takla Makan Desert has been declared far and wide to be Celtic. But that's the popular press talking. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a common genetic marker that says "this person is a Celt." There are common markers amongst the Irish, not the least of which is for a blood disease in which the body doesn't process iron properly. But the Scots don't share it to the same degree. The Bretons and Welsh don't, either, let alone the Cornish and the Manx. The assumption of red hair marking a Celt is a fantasy, too, as red hair is more common amongst the Norse.

So what does that make the most embarrassing archaeological find the xenophobic Chinese government could imagine shy of discovering they were founded by time-traveling American capitalists? Most definitely genetically European. But that's as refined as it gets unless you're lucky.

As for the carvings, their similarity to continental Celtic designs makes perfect sense without assuming the mummies were refugees from prehistoric Aberdeen. It was noted years ago that the blatantly Caucasian mummies and wall paintings in the area were associated with the Tocharians, a culture that started up near the Ural Mountains and extended their reach along the Silk Road. The Ural Mountains are where a lot of the European cultures got their start, so design elements in common make sense. As for the fabric? Tocharians were Silk Road traders. The trade routes did not terminate at either end of that road; they branched out. Without clear evidence they had more than those pieces in that vicinity, it's quite a leap to claim they were from that part of the world. And the Scots were not the only people who wove like that then, either.

Their being Tocharians does put them right into the Indo-European matrix alongside the Greeks, Norse, and others. This means their burial traditions are useful to contemplate for possible common threads. Blue stones where coins normally go in some IE burial rites are still likely to be an offering for the conductor of the souls of the dead, for example. But Tocharian is not a Celtic language, and a few dolmens and spirals don't make them a Celtic culture.

Milestones and exposed myths

2006-08-20T21:26:00.000-07:00

First, this represents my 100th post. Go me.

Second, and more importantly, I wanted to recommend Phillupus Doctor Ecclesiae Antinoi's latest essay on Witchvox. In it, he discusses the history and contents of the early Irish literary tradition and what they mean to Celtic pagans. He suggests good approaches to the material, especially when it comes to trying to avoid falling for some of the traps of presumption that are common in Celtic pagan circles. I know it's a piece I'll keep in mind in future years as I progress further in this tradition. And if you're wondering why someone with a non-Celtic name would write such a thing, his mundane certifications include a Ph.D. in Celtic Studies. He's probably spent more time on the material in the original language than most people in CR.

Nature and Culture

2006-08-12T16:33:00.000-07:00

One of the blanket terms for Neopagan traditions is "nature-based." This is a label which many reconstructionist pagans reject for our traditions. Yes, our calendar of feast days is related to natural events, and the lore from which we draw inspiration for our practices is rife with tales of nature interactions as told through the bonds and wars amongst our gods. But frankly, claiming a reconstructionist pagan is practicing a nature-based religion is not presenting the entire picture.

A nature-based religion in and of itself requires no relationship to a culture other than some passing nod to the majority secular one of the nation in which the practitioner resides. A subculture within it, to be sure, but there's nothing barring a nature-based pagan from developing a practice that bears the names of gods not followed at any time in Europe or any other nation. As a reconstructionist, the standards are a bit different. And what those standards encompass is more than the cycles of the moon and sun.

Not only are we seeking to build a religion that's sensitive to the cycles of the natural world, we're working out how to do this within a specific cultural framework. This is why many of us prefer the term "culture-based" paganism over "nature-based." The relationship to nature is part of the culture and cannot be removed from it without significant difficulty. There's something to contemplate in a culture such as the Celtic set, in which a god established a holiday in honor of a goddess who clear-cut a forest to permit grain to grow and died from the effort. How do we square that with many of the minimal-impact philosophies bandied about in environmental circles? Do we curse our ancestors for their cruelty or recognize it as a sign that it is impossible to live on the earth without affecting it and choose how to do so instead? And how would our ancestors have felt about it then? How do the modern members of that culture square it in their heads? These questions are just one example of the wider set contained in determining and practicing a culturally sound approach to nature interactions.

We also do not worship nature per se. Forget all of the jokes about druids and trees; they were part of a symbolic complex, not the end-all of the lore. Natural events, the gods, the ancestors and the spirits that dwell within and without the world at the same time all combine into one dynamic system that informs the culture and is interpreted by it at the same time.

Nature is, thus, part but not all. It's impossible to split them, so labeling something with part of the whole just doesn't make sense to me.

Strikingly dissimilar

2006-08-01T21:27:00.000-07:00

I'm usually wont to take on modern politics in my blog here, but this topic strikes too close to home for me to avoid it.

Cindy Sheehan, one of the more well-known American protesters against my country's involvement in Iraq, has declared herself to be on a hunger strike. Potent statement, you say? Yes, it can be. Those of us who are old enough to remember the IRA and INLA prisoners who staged one in 1981 will never forget regardless of what side of the argument you landed on then or now. Those of us who've studied Irish history know it's a tool of last resort for the common man to gain justice from someone who has offended the concept. The goal is either concession or death. One starves. One sits and waits for death or satisfaction; there is no third road.

Ms. Sheehan, however, seems to define "hunger strike" as a "liquid diet." Then there is Code Pink, an anti-Iraq War group who is calling for people to do 24-hour to two-week fasts, but to make sure they drink their fruit juice and eat avocado slices if they really need to. The ten who died in 1981 only drank water unless forced, and even that didn't stop them. And some of these self-declared "hunger strikers" are flying around the globe to discuss their goals. A true hunger strike does not involve transcontinental flights. No poet attempting to get paid would ride around the countryside discussing why he was doing it.

I'm not saying where I stand on the Iraq War. What I'm saying is they're abusing a term and a practice with a very long and unbroken tradition, and I do not like it. Not in the slightest.

One-trance pony

2006-07-16T12:49:00.000-07:00

Chas Clifton recently blogged about a change in the big-ticket events at pagan festivals he attends. They used to do large, participatory rituals. Nowadays, that pattern has apparently shifted, at least in his neck of the woods, to rites involving multiple priests and priestesses "drawing down" an aspect of the Wiccan Goddess and people either waiting for their turn to come in a circle or filing into a tent where the aspect's carrier is ensconced, in both cases for very brief consultations. I freely admit I have all but no experience with Wiccan rites aside from being a very occasional attendee of same. At the same time, I've been studying trance possession for the last three years and know people who've been at it for far longer. My background has left me a bit bemused by this usage of the talent.

I've both attended and been involved in rituals that contained trance possession and involved larger groups. I've attended a Hrafnar-run seidh ritual, in which the seidhkona will often embody deities from more than one tradition during the course of the evening depending on who's asking the questions as well as reaching out to speak with any requested dead person. I was one of three women selected to carry Brigid for a public ritual attended by over 200 people. But in neither case were the trancing individuals set up as a private oracle in a tent. I know of a different seidh group where something similar to that is done, but even then, we're not talking about long lines and ten-second visits. I grant you, the Brigid ritual included what we called the "rock star" routine in rehearsal. The three of us performed rapid greetings to everyone who we could reach in our thirds of the space. But greetings are not consultations.

What can you get in a few short seconds from an aspected deity? A fortune cookie quip? Is it so difficult to get in touch with the numinous that people have to stand in line to get a brush with it? And is there real community in a ritual where you only get a group vibe going long enough to allow the drawing down to happen, then you stand and wait until your turn is up and either leave for the next event or watch until everyone else is done before it's closed? The Christian churches know the value of audience participation. Are there Wiccans who are forgetting? If so, I feel sorry for them. If Wicca is a religion where all are priests, this shifts the power structure outside of that approach and into a system of priests and congregation. That brings it closer to the Christianity so many people within Wicca left behind. That would only reinforce the suspicion many outside Wicca hold that the more modern versions of it are Christianity minus the rules and with a Mommy Goddess Who doesn't do more than give hairpats and consolation. And truly, I don't know of many deities Who would easily tolerate being treated like a divine ATM for long. The ramifications are many, I fear, unless my distance on the issue is introducting mistaken impressions.

Finds and fantasias

2006-07-02T00:11:00.000-07:00

I don't know if this find is going to pan out the way the initial talk about it is going, but I have to say the first wave of chatter about the remains of what may have been an ancient astronomical observatory being found in the Amazon has been interesting. I love finds that turn assumptions on their heads.

At the same time, my cynical side is flirting with the notion of taking bets on how long it'll be before someone hypothesizes the Druids either went to or came from Brazil. The second most likely claim will be that some of the Atlanteans escaped north while the rest went south, thus the parallel observatory situation. Before you claim none of us are that stupid, it's my understanding that Diana Paxson's deliberately fabricated names for Freyja's chariot-pulling cats in a novel Paxson wrote have since been taken for ancient lore.

And of course, if this first wave of hypothesis doesn't pan out, we'll hear far less about the debunking and still have to deal with the "Amazonian Druid" contingency. I suppose it won't be much worse than having to face the AD&D crowd.

Irony, thy name is blog commenters

2006-06-26T12:48:00.000-07:00

While not qualifying as a right-winger in American terms, I do tend to poke my nose into that zone of the blogosphere at times. I find it helps me get a variety of perspectives I would otherwise lack. Most of my friends are very left-of-center while I seem to float amongst the classifications depending on which topic is under discussion (albeit leftward-biased for the most part). This habit of mine has led me to discover the latest tempest in a titanium PowerBook known as Jerome Armstrong's admission he's dabbled in astrology.

To establish my perspective, I'm not much of an astrology type. I'm a fan of Rob Brezny's weekly column for the writing at least as much as I am for the times he's managed to pinpoint the issues I'm facing in a given week. He misses as well as hits, but he's a good read in any case. I'll let people cast my natal chart, and that has led to some interesting coincidences being mentioned along the way. I'm a Mercury retrograde Doubting Thomasina, something I get accused of being by true believers because I was born during such a phase. Independent observation says I'm better at communicating during retrograde periods, but that could easily be because I'm just paying more attention during those phases so I can act as an example. Some would call me a bad druid for this stance. The way I see it, if I'm going to play with oracular divination, I should do it in a system that doesn't force me to conform to an elemental system I don't work with anywhere else. Tarot and ogam-casting are far more my speed unless and until someone comes up with an astrological system that doesn't use the Greek elemental patterns or Robert Graves' fantasias.

All that said, I've done a fair bit of exploration in astrology to come to that conclusion, starting back when I was 13 and dipping in off and on ever since to keep my memory fresh on the basics. I know the newspaper forecasts are so vague as to be impossible because they're attempting one-step forecasts for people with thousands of variables in their charts that cannot be accounted for in the space provided. So when I see some of the commentary on Armstrong's revelation, I know I'm seeing people who have no idea what they're talking about. Opining that it's evil because their Dominican teacher told them so. Citing the Bible, which both condemns fortune-telling and grants a pack of astrologers access to the Divine made flesh, starts to sound as ludicrous as the claim that Sun opposite Jupiter retrograde in my natal chart is why I can't save money but always have enough to get by does to the disbelievers. And the people who base their derision on the newspaper columns are the finest examples of the breed. It's like assuming you know enough about Darfur from watching a report on Angelina Jolie's latest visit there.

It's perfectly possible to dismiss astrology as hokum after studying it for a while. Assuming it's hokum from seeing the sloppiest form of it is rather like assuming all Christians are evil because of people like Pat Robertson. Or that all pagans are crazy because of Kevin Carlyon or the drunks at Stonehenge. And these commenters are quite sure they're being sane. I think I'd rather take my chances with the newspaper astrologers.

Administrivia

2006-06-25T15:41:00.000-07:00

I've edited my post announcing the CR FAQ to make sure my level of contribution to it is made clear. The Internet equivalent of telephone tag seems to be affecting how I put it the first time (in brief, contributor does not equal co-author, and trust me, I'm plenty aware of the difference).

I've also updated the blogroll to account for the passing of two retired blogs (Right Wing of the Gods and Phoenix's Nest), dropped a blog that shifted focus and so shifted away from reading mine (the former Following Flidhais), and removed with a moment of mourning the fine Myth and Culture blog that had been the home of Maggie Caray before her sudden passing back in April. The Sacred Grove is now Cypress Nemeton (and would you please fix my listing in your blogroll, Fiacherry, as it is not merely Red Raven?). The link section has been updated to include the FAQ and drop Ord Brighideach due to my having resigned from it in order to pursue other Brigidine interests.

Big Announcement

2006-06-24T15:56:00.000-07:00

Because I looked in the wrong places first, I found out I can actually announce the release of the Celtic Reconstructionism FAQ. I was one of the eight people who did a bit of blood-sweating (admittedly not as much as others) over that, and it's good to see it wrapped up and live. People have wanted a CR 101 book for years. You may consider this to be it, at least for now. There will be a hardcopy edition sold via Lulu.com in the near future. And since Manannán mac Lir has been considered to be one of the major movers amongst our gods to get this tradition off the ground, we chose this day to do it. I can only hope he is pleased with the results of our labors.

ETA: Since Jason Pitzl-Waters' choice of words about my relationship to this in his blog post might mislead some people into thinking I'm claiming more than I should about it, I want to note that the primary co-authors are Erynn Rowan Laurie, Kathryn nicDhàna, Chris Vermeers, and Kym nì Dhoireann. The rules of UPG I posted here a few months ago are included, and I wrote some or most of a few of the answers as well as inserting bits here and there in several others and acting as one of the "some people" in the answers where variations in patterns amongst CRs are noted. That last position was held by pretty much everyone on the project at some point, of course.

Happy Rent Day!

2006-06-24T15:36:00.000-07:00

No announcement as of yet, but I wanted to make note of my reference to Rent Day. It's not the formal name for it, but St. John's Day is the day that the Isle of Man traditionally pays rent to Manannán mac Lir for the use of the island. Said rent is paid in rushes, sometimes interpreted as yellow flag irises.

Usually, I take today and go to the ocean so I can give Him some yellow flowers and beer. But I just performed a ritual this morning, dedicating someone to Him for a year and a day the way I was six months ago. I think I may be entitled to do elsewise today. Like recover from the long hours involved.

Not going away

2006-06-15T22:46:00.000-07:00

I wanted to make sure to note that I'm still planning on posting here. I'm having a busy June, though, and that will culminate in both semi-private achievements and a public announcement I'm very much looking forward to making. But more on that around Rent Day/Midsummer/St. John's Day.

A question of pain and belief

2006-06-03T17:40:00.000-07:00

I don't normally get theological in this blog, but I'm feeling motivated today. I ran across an atheist whose argument for their stance was, in part, "No deity worth its salt would allow its believers to suffer. If they don't intervene during situations involving abuse, they're not worthy of respect and probably don't exist." To say I disagree would be the polite way of phrasing my attitude toward that concept.

Yes, the gods have power. There's a certain amount of responsibility that goes with it. But claiming that the gods have to make sure their followers aren't attacked or abused or they don't exist is like arguing your parents have to make sure you don't get harassed in school or they don't love you. On some levels, it starts to sound like, "Your parents didn't buy you a pony? Well, they couldn't possibly be real parents. You must have made them up."

It also carries, from my perspective, a very odd mental relationship to free will. If we are able to choose as we will, there are times when the choices will cause another pain. And this world, for good and ill, is constructed to permit people to do just that. Is it tragic that people are hurt due to this? Yes. Is it proof the gods don't exist? Not to me. The same system that permits someone to choose to cause pain also allows us to choose to heal. To be kind. To love. If pain is eliminated, I can't see how we as people will grow. The system of the three cauldrons described in the Cauldron of Poesy discusses how sorrow and suffering help turn the inner cauldrons so they may be filled, granting understanding and wisdom to the person who applies themselves to do so. If life is all kittens and cotton candy, the cauldrons cannot turn but partway. Joy turns them as well as pain. And before anyone asks, I am a survivor of multiple kinds of abuse, so I am not speaking as someone whose biggest complaint about her parents would be the aforementioned pony. I have material to move my cauldrons and to spare.

Of course, I'm arguing as a polytheist, but I really don't see where in any statements about the three-omni god of the Judeo-Christian matrix where he's in on any sort of contract to keep his people's lives free of pain, either. It only seems to exist in the minds of some atheists and lightly committed theists who are stunned to realize belief isn't a golden ticket to Wonkaville.

Does this mean I never question when I don't get what I ask for? Surely you jest. I threatened the gods with ritual deprivation if they didn't pony up the job I'm currently in, and they came through on deadline down a vector I wasn't actively pursuing. And I was well and truly angry when I did that. I wasn't just yanking their chains in hopes they'd respond like good little puppets. I know the gods don't play that way. I have too much evidence to expect them to. Oddly, it doesn't cause me to disbelieve. Maybe it's because I know I'm working with entities whose final goals are unknown to me. Moreover, they have preferences, distastes, and a far different perspective than I do.

I am not arguing that I am but a child to their parental brilliance, as many monotheists would. I argue that the power structure is more complex. They need me, as they need all believers and even some unknowing non-believers, to help them do what they want to do. In return, they help all of us who ask properly to do what we want to do provided the two sets of goals don't stand in active conflict. It's closer to negotiating with aliens than attempting to be a child to a set of inscrutable parents. But I never forget the aliens have bigger guns. I sometimes remind them that I'm the one who has to help pull the trigger, though. Neither side can get too cocky.

Another semi-personal reminder post

2006-05-28T20:24:00.000-07:00

I don't have time to go into this now, but the concept of how to engage cultures within their own context and recognizing the difficulty of being 21st-century Americans dealing with the writings in early Christian Ireland and similar areas is attempting to turn into a blog post in my head. I'm a bit too distracted with a science fiction convention right now or I'd launch into it.

Gone to the Otherworld

2006-05-17T20:30:00.000-07:00

Leigh Ann Hussey, musician, bard, actress, and pagan liturgist, died last night in a motorcycle accident. She was 44 years old.

Magical Acts Ritual Theater, an offshoot of her work in the Oak Line of NROOGD, has a memorial page posted here.

Personally, I knew her more by reputation than direct contact, but she was a friendly and energetic woman. Bright, talkative, and extremely talented in many ways. She will be deeply missed in the San Francisco Bay Area pagan, music, science fiction and filk communities as well as anywhere she touched lives.

What is remembered, lives.

Reality check for the matriarchalists?

2006-05-16T20:37:00.000-07:00

Stone Age Britain was hardly a haven for horse-riding patriarchal steppes-dwellers, so I guess this report of violent deaths amongst the people living there at the time must have all been ritual sacrifices. Or faked by the patriarchy in an attempt to use science to hide the truth about the Universal Mother. I'm beyond caring, frankly. Anyone who believes that claiming the lie of the prehistoric matriarchy is so important to their myth they treat it as reality is as bad as a young Earth creationist to my mind. Just as illogical, just as disproven, just as fundamentalist.

It's all about the PR

2006-05-13T22:11:00.000-07:00

Terry Jones, who came to international fame as part of Monty Python's Flying Circus, has turned his hand to historical studies these days. His most recent is of especially keen interest to Celtic Reconstructionists and other European-focused pagans, as he has worked to put the lie to the notion that the Celts (as well as other non-Roman civilizations) were uncouth idiots. The book about this, Barbarians, has been released in the UK with a television series to follow on BBC 2; one can only hope both will land on US shores very soon. This excerpt from the article he wrote about it for the BBC is a faint taste:

The Romans kept the Barbarians at bay for as long as they could, but finally they were engulfed and the savage hordes overran the empire, destroying the cultural achievements of centuries. The light of reason and civilisation was almost snuffed out by the Barbarians, who annihilated everything that the Romans had put in place, sacking Rome itself and consigning Europe to the Dark Ages. The Barbarians brought only chaos and ignorance, until the renaissance rekindled the fires of Roman learning and art.

It is a familiar story, and it’s codswallop.

I expect Mr. Jones to handle the material with scholarly attention as well as a touch of the sort of humor you'd expect from a man who once played a Hammond organ in the nude for laughs.

Growing up can be a good thing

2006-05-05T22:53:00.000-07:00

CR used to be a tradition where arguments would split friendships irrevocably. One such led to the formation of the Imbas mailing list from the ashes of a debate on Nemeton-L. I joined the online CR community shortly after that, as memory serves. Since then, I've seen multiple iterations of arguments about everything from clergy within our tradition to three realms vs. four elements, the placement of the sacred cities, and on up to the latest row about male flametenders for Brigid.

The difference with the last argument is that nobody felt the need to flounce out of the forum it happened in to start their own little fiefdom. There are two different groups doing Brigid order building now, but that's a positive thing to my mind. There is a need for diversity if a tradition is to flourish. I've argued we're a living tradition and not an attempt to build a replica of a dead past before. That sort of thing only proves it to me.

The unfortunate truth is not everyone grows up. I've seen people who think it's 1991 in CR and they can act any way they please, only to be shocked to learn their tricks are getting so overused a five-year-old can see them coming. That sort causes schism and continues to do so. I'm at the point where if someone wants to encourage the children, they should sit at that table and quit acting like they're being grownups.

We still have our issues, blatant acts of denial, and petty gamesmanships. But I'm so relieved it's possible to sit down in even an electronic forum and not worry the next words out of my mouth are going to lead to yet another irrevocable blowup.

Why it's lore, not holy writ

2006-04-25T21:18:00.000-07:00

It's a good thing Celtic Reconstructionists know better than to take every word written by the monks who wrote about pagan Ireland seriously. Otherwise, we'd have to buy into this segment from The Life of Adamnan and ask ourselves some odd questions:

Cumalach was a name for women till Adamnan come to free them. And this was the cumalach, a woman for whom a hole was dug at the end of the door so that it came over her nakedness. The end of the great spit was placed upon her till the cooking of the portion was ended. After she had come out of that earth-pit she had to dip a candle four man's hands in length in a plate of butter or lard; that candle to be on her palm until division of food and distribution of liquor and making of beds, in the houses of kings and cheiftains, had ended. That women had no share in bag or in basket, nor in the company of the house-master; but she dwelt in a hut outside the enclosure, lest bane from sea or land should come to her chief.

But it's easy when it's obviously propaganda and not the subtler workings, such as some of the odd encodings in the myths. I still wonder if anyone who wants to recreate the "real" old ways will ever be caught taking this one seriously.

Oh, yeah, right...

2006-04-21T23:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my blog's first anniversary. Go me for getting there.

And one of these days, I'm moving this to my own domain. Blogspot's been eating older comments I've received. That is not nice. The setup's been done, I have bookmarks telling me how to migrate from this to Wordpress, and the rest is spare time and choosing to apply it. Heh.

Why I don't resent the Christians so much, one in a series

2006-04-20T21:02:00.000-07:00

Philobiblon provides a discussion of part of the impact of the pre-Christian Roman invasion of Celtic Britain in What the Romans did TO us (i.e. women). Say what you will about the Roman Catholic Church's attitude toward women, they saved female babies from being treated as disposable. Besides, nobody's yet proven that any Christians performed mass slaughters of Druids (hint: when you see an Irish saint's life story, treat it as propaganda, not historical fact). The Isle of Mona massacre was not run by a bunch of priests.

And in yet another moment of modern innovation for me, I refuse to let history tell me how to react to Nova Romans. I prefer a more balanced perspective on modern times.

The point and purpose?

2006-04-16T20:58:00.000-07:00

I've argued in the past about certain elements of the hagiography of St. Patrick that demonstrate a political intent on the part of its writers. In a far more comprehensive fashion, Lisa Bitel argued for similar approaches to St. Brigit's hagiography in her essay, St. Brigit of Ireland: From Virgin Saint to Fertility Goddess. The timeline of her life story's development and the historical context are a fascinating bit of perspective into what so many of us base our beliefs upon as modern pagans. Some might argue Bitel's perspective is a bit too focused on the idea that the pre-Christian gods of Ireland were closer to a literary invention than legitimate gods, but I'd suggest they keep in mind that to those Christian writers, those gods were not as real as they are to us. Cultural context means so much in all of this.

The darker side of CR

2006-04-13T21:33:00.000-07:00

I've been logically aware of the fact Celtic Reconstructionism is not perfect for the entire time I've been involved with it. I came in as an adult, after all. I know when you put human beings into the mix, you'll wind up with problems. But a recent conversation showed me exactly where we as a tradition are facing severe growing pains.

Many if not most of the people reading this blog are probably aware of the modern orders, both Christian and pagan, who watch over Brigid's flame. From the nuns in the saint's abbey in Kildare to the Daughters of the Flame and Ord Brigideach, the fire that was re-lit in Ireland now burns around the world. I myself am a member of OB and keep a 20-day vigil cycle.

One thing none of the currently extant organizations are is CR. OB and DotF are more generi-pagan. OB has a clear policy of accepting Christians (I can't speak for DotF). This attempt to be all things to all Brigid worshippers leads to a lack of common liturgy and in some respects, a sense of community in the membership in my experience. Others are quite happy there, but I've been backing away from it very slowly aside from lighting the candle when I'm supposed to.

Noises started being made not so long ago about putting together a CR order to keep the flame. Liturgy would be designed, flames distributed to the 19 members, and so forth. This first one is being designed to be all-female in keeping with the pattern established with, at least, the nuns of Kildare. Intellectual honesty compels me to note that there's no hard evidence of the practice starting before the Christians showed up. Nobody's about to ask the nuns to let them do a complex archaeological dig where they have to, say, put their vegetable garden.

Personally speaking, I don't do well in all-female groups unless it's a small social circle of a temporary nature. "Women's space" feels wrong to me, even if only via e-mail. I'm very much female. I just prefer mixed company. So I would not be able to participate in that all-women's CR Brigidine order for long before it got to me. My husband was wanting something similar, so he broached the idea of a gender-blind flamekeeping order in a public space.

I wish I could frame some of the objections in a civil manner. I can't. They weren't civil, even if politely phrased. I don't mean the people who dislike the idea but are willing to admit they aren't Brigid's police force. I might be a bit sad about those, but I'm the last person to expect everyone to agree about how to handle the lore. I mean the ones who started making sweeping pronouncements about how men should never honor Her in that fashion and should be happy with alternate approaches regardless of the call they feel. The fact the nuns of Kildare give the flame to all comers was dismissed as a modern innovation by Roman Catholics who weren't in touch with the real truth behind the ritual.

That's the dark side. The orthodoxy of the convert. Forgetting when it's convenient that we're not working with a set of static images from a dead culture. If an innovation by members of a living Celtic culture is forbidden to members of CR because it contradicts older material, not just something that makes someone uncomfortable but an influence that must be ignored by all right-thinking people, we should stop lying about being willing to engage the modern cultures and make like the Society for Creative Anachronism clone we get accused of being.

Be vewy, vewy quiet...

2006-04-09T15:02:00.000-07:00

Humorous twist on the title aside, I'm going to risk being politically incorrect and speak out in favor of Daven and the others I'm aware of who are essaying bunny hunts in pagan fora. Why? Many of the same reasons he cites. Misinformation hurts our image as a valid set of religions. Argue how a bad start can lead to good development all you want, but if that's your response to the hunters, riddle me this. How else are the clueless newbies going to get past the first phase of stupidity? Random flailing, the way the rest of us did? How fair is that? So long as the "hunting" is done with respect, I don't see where the problem is.

We have experienced people in multiple paths, from my own Celtic Reconstructionism to Wicca, Asatru and more, who are able to ease the transition of the uninformed and misinformed to at least disagree with them on a more educated basis. Insisting they should be left alone to stew in their ignorance out of some misinterpretation of kindness is patently ridiculous.

Sloppy studies

2006-04-04T21:41:00.000-07:00

I know I'm a bit late to the party in discussing the latest attempt to see if prayer conforms to the scientific method. I still feel like chiming in.

Here's my beef with it. You're talking about attempting to apply the scientific method, which works splendidly for non-sentient forces like gravity, onto a sentient, independently operating entity. It's like attempting to predict humans. You can get autonomic and reflex behaviors pretty well down, but when it comes to the softer stuff, like emotions and whether you can get your neighbor to feed your cat, there are variables science can't eliminate. The will of a deity to act like a performing seal has to be even slipperier than black ice. Frankly, if I were a god and knew those prayers were being done purely in the name of proving my existence, I'd have a bit of fun with it so long as the results didn't mess with the broader picture. And I rather doubt the Christians' god is above such behaviors himself. I respect him as much as I do any god I don't have direct allegiance to. I just find that most gods I deal with like to have their occasional joke. I've seen no evidence that Jehovah's any different. He's just as slaved to the web of nature as the rest of us, too.

The only way I think any prayer studies will ever be trustworthy is if they manage to find a situation in which the targeted deity is required to answer. I don't think that's going to happen.

It's a sad phenomenon

2006-03-26T21:43:00.000-08:00

Those who are paying attention to the appropriate areas of modern American journalism have noticed a fairly steady stream of stories about plagiarism in the mainstream media. In CR circles, we're not immune, unfortunately. All the talk about virtues of the ancestors can't trump the desire for self-aggrandizement through theft with some people. Yellojkt's Foma*: A Plague of Plagiarists focuses on the secular world's problems with it, but the words still hold true. Though I suppose a pagan excuse set would have to include items like, "I was doing automatic writing; I can't help it if the god quoted you."

Oddly relieved

2006-03-14T13:10:00.000-08:00

I came across the Religious Affiliation of Comic Book Characters in my wanderings while home sick from work today. I noticed a few interesting details:

1) The majority of human superheroes are Christian.
2) The vast majority of villains are anti-religious, areligious, or atheist.
3) There's only one listed character who has even a tenuous link to Celtic practices.

The first two don't surprise me, but I think the writers are missing some real opportunities by pandering to mainstream American assumptions like that. The third has me relieved. My Asatruar friends have enough of a love-hate relationship to Marvel's depiction of Asgard's finest as it stands. I'm not sure I want to seek out anything depicting Dr. Druid, though. The description on Marvel's site is more than enough for me.

So I have promised, so I have done

2006-03-01T22:43:00.000-08:00

I said a few months ago that I wanted to put up a post about the misconceptions surrounding St. Patrick that run riot in the neo-pagan world. I just did this little coredump onto an LJ community. I'll share it here as well to prove I wasn't kidding. It's not as scholarly as I had planned, but it covers the message I want to put out well enough.

---

Let's get this one settled out here and now.

The myths surrounding St. Patrick that need to be squelched have already popped up elsewhere on the Internet this year. Perhaps a bit early; I think the odd winter weather's sprouting them funny.

These are, to my knowledge, the correct statements about the big three misapprehensions about the saint that neo-pagans fling around this time of year and any other time his name comes up. I'm sorry if this runs long; it's a pet peeve of mine.

1) Patrick was not the first Christian in Ireland. He wasn't even the first bishop sent by Rome. That honor went to Palladius, who showed up the year before Patrick did. Best hypothesis is that Christianity first appeared in Ireland sometime in the second or third century of the common era. Palladius was sent to serve as the representative of Rome to those Christians, who were in the south of Ireland. Patrick was sent to start evangelizing the northern Irish. His inflated importance to the Irish Catholic church was due entirely to the Leinster diocese's propaganda. See St. Brigid for the other success of their PR campaign.

2) The snakes he drove out of Ireland were not symbolic of druids, pagans, or goddess worshippers. They were, quite simply, snakes. The tale was lifted from the life story of St. Hilaire, who was said to have evicted the snakes in a section of France, as an explanation of why there are no native snakes in Ireland. That piece of ~~plagiarism~~ explicative text was added in the 10th century. Earliest versions of Patrick's story don't include it. They do, however, include direct claims of him besting druids in magical combat and argument, as well as having druids in his personal retinue. Catholic saints' stories, by and large, do not truck in allegory. To cite a different reptile story, they really did mean to say that St. George killed a dragon. I have never seen anyone who's bothered to study the way Irish saints' lives were written down and embroidered take the snakes to be symbolic of anything. It is a neo-pagan invention to assign that story any degree of symbolism.

3) Most of the druids, and many other pagans, were still around when Patrick died. It took a century or so after his death to finish the conversion process, and it was hardly what you'd call a complete success. This proves he didn't show up with an invading army and cut down all protesters. If he had, I think he'd have been the first Christian martyr of Ireland. They didn't get any blood martyrs there until the Vikings started showing up and poking at monasteries. The conversion process was one of social pressure and legal wrangling to switch power to the churches, not one of swords and bloodshed.

Thank you. Good night. Happy St. Patrick's Day. Please skip the green beer. You don't know where it's been.

The Laws of UPG

2006-02-27T21:22:00.000-08:00

I was going to write something else, but the concept of the Laws of Undocumented Personal Gnosis came up during the first one and seemed to be a much better topic than ranting about the Plastic Paddy Racist of the Month (Na Astaraichean, if you want to Google the loon).

The laws, in first draft:
1) No UPG is allowed to contradict known facts about the associated pagan culture and stand as more than a modern invention. It is also probably useless unless you don't care for accuracy.
2) If a UPG does not contradict known facts but cannot be verified within the same body of knowledge, it remains a modern invention. This does not mean it is useless.
3) If a UPG turns out to fit a gap in known tradition in a fashion that does not activate the first law, it is worth pursuing further.
4) If a UPG that meets the second or third law is arrived at by people who have had no real contact with each other, it remains modern but is Shared. This means the group just may be getting somewhere interesting.
5) If a UPG becomes a SPG and said SPG is adopted outside of the groups who first thought of it, it becomes a modern tradition.
6) There is no way for a UPG to become Ancient Lore unless it is kept mostly intact for at least 1,000 years.

Any refinements that y'all might want to suggest, leave them in comments. I'll be grateful.

Time to blog?

2006-02-19T11:15:00.000-08:00

I'm at Pantheacon this weekend. Time to blog is at a very tight premium accordingly.

Personal bits update

2006-02-13T22:21:00.000-08:00

The contract-to-hire position I mentioned late last month is reaching the "to-hire" part next week. It's a very good environment for me. My boss is mellow about my paganism as far as she's been exposed to it (my description of Pantheacon was met with, "Oh, that sounds pretty cool"), the company encourages its people to do more than act like a cog, and I see lots of room for growth in my career there. They know I blog. They don't care as long as I'm not divulging company secrets or abusing company time to post.

This does mean my thoughts of migrating to a different blogging software package and domain are in abeyance for now, though. I'm not chafing at this setup so much that my lesser quantity of free time is crying to be sacrificed on that particular altar.

A lovely debunking

2006-02-08T19:47:00.000-08:00

Every so often, Barry Fell's claims about ogam in the United States come around. Monroe Oppenheimer and William Wirtz did those of us who have large issues with Fell a big favor by laying out exactly where he went completely off the deep end.

New with potential

2006-02-07T22:01:00.000-08:00

Brehon Law Project is a new blog which looks to serve as an adjunct to the website and real-life symposia on the subject. I hope it lasts a good long time.

Personal note

2006-02-05T21:18:00.000-08:00

If any of you are planning on being at Pantheacon this year, I'll be around. My husband and I co-edit the convention newsletter. We're also participating in two rituals. On Friday night, we'll be working the Pomba Gira ritual. I'll be on stage helping with the singing. Sunday evening's Brigid ritual includes me as one of the three Brigids. Both promise to be excellent, even if I do say so myself. I'll also be hovering around from place to place, as is my wont at Pantheacon.

Identity politics of a different sort

2006-01-27T23:41:00.000-08:00

One of the more personally disheartening divides in modern Celtic paganism is over the matter of gay rights. One individual who identifies as Gaelic Traditionalist (I'm led to believe some GTs would rather he stop making them look stupid, thus the dodge language) recently snarked that "the bridge crew of the USS CR" hauled its personal politics into Celtic religion along with them. I put it as "them" because I wasn't there for the start of it. I just happen to agree wholeheartedly with keeping Celtic reconstructionism a safe place to be queer.

In a large respect, the pro-gay stance of CR/senistrognata is indeed an import with no easy proof our ancestors would have felt comfortable about it. Same-sex marriage was impossible under brehon law, albeit for heavily biological reasons. Marriage and children were linked to where some of the lesser degrees of it were designed to protect the interests of both the mother and the offspring gotten by a one-night stand or a rape. Brehon law is mostly silent on the topic of homosexuality. The modern concept of a queer identity was non-existent then. But the fact some people had same-sex relations was well known. One of the valid grounds for divorce under brehon law was discovering your spouse was only interested in having sex with members of their own gender. My readings in early Irish Christian penitentials has led me to discover very specific descriptions of same-sex activities that were frowned upon by the Church, so the behavior was religiously proscribed under that tradition. But the pre-Christian attitude in Ireland is not noted.

Greek writings about the behavior of Gaulish soldiers may shed some light, though. Those men had no problem with at least situational homosexuality with little respect for military rank in their choice of partners. We're not talking Theban pair-bonding, which was blatantly pederastic. The writer made it sound as if the soldiers' idea of a good night off would be fit for a Castro District porn store shelf. Was it just because the women weren't there? Quite possibly. But that to me indicates a more flexible attitude toward sexual behavior than that of modern times. Your average American male would see extended time away from women as a reason to learn new variations on what his dominant hand can do. I've also seen a translation of Roman graffiti in which one man declared he was abandoning all attempts at dating women in favor of men. No identity labels were involved, just a statement of behavior.

It would be easy to romanticize the situation based on scanty evidence. At the same time, I am hard put to see where refusing to treat queers as equals is inherently more Celtic than embracing the concept. And if it's more Celtic to sneer at the notion of supporting rights for all regardless of sexual orientation or identity, then I think I'd rather be American for that aspect of my beliefs. Self-hatred is quite definitely not one of the Celtic virtues, and I know what I'd rather be Gaelically incorrect about.

A small poke at presumption

2006-01-17T20:33:00.000-08:00

Circle Jerk at the Square Dance invites people to play Spot the persecution. I see in this both a critique of the fundamentalist right wing of modern Christianity and perhaps an unsubtle reminder to some of my fellow pagans about the difference between social difficulty and persecution.

Personal update

2006-01-14T12:49:00.000-08:00

I am about to start a contract-to-hire position performing software QA at a startup. I realize I've been a once-a-week poster already, but it's possible this will drop even further down my priority list depending on how the rest of my life fares around my day job. It may be a hiccup where I only do the first three weeks and the company decides I'm not worth keeping after all. I may have more leisure at the job than I've been warned about. Either way, I wanted to make note of the change in case I get even more quiet than usual here. I'll try to maintain some contact with blogging, though. I've been enjoying this.

They will know we are pagans by... what?

2006-01-13T11:03:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in my last entry that I've embarked on a dedication to Manannán mac Lir. One of the conditions of the dedication is my wearing a symbol of it on a daily basis. After due meditation, I chose a mermaid as the symbol. Other events confirmed that I chose properly. So far, there's been no reaction to my wearing one around my neck. I recently added what I will charitably call a fan art cloisonne pin of Jessica Rabbit as a mermaid to my purse to make sure I have a mermaid no matter what (I sometimes forget to wear the necklace). But should someone ask why, I am duty-bound to answer.

This leads me to contemplate what it means to have a closer walk with my god and being more open about it than I used to be. It's sensitizing me to how others approach it in their lives. I'm one of the last people to think we need to evangelize the unfaithful. One of the aspects of my tradition that I appreciate is how we don't think we have all the answers. And I know there are people in situations where being out isn't a wise idea. But I think some of us, myself included, can be too cautious about this.

I live in one of the most liberal areas of the United States. I am also primarily surrounded by free-thinkers in my social circles, whether they're pagan, atheist, Christian or Jewish. I still get touchy about revealing some bits of my beliefs. That's common in pagan circles. I see people online who claim to be pagan but never discuss their faith, even in their own blogs. There's a wide difference between admitting what some of your beliefs are and sharing oathbound material, but some pagans don't seem to want to do even that much

I do know there are places where it isn't safe to admit much. But as with the gay rights movement, which I've had contact with longer than I've been a pagan, the question comes down to this: how long does keeping silent act as a safeguard, and how long does it act like a means of maintaining the status quo? Does our refusal to admit what we are perpetuate the reasons to keep it to ourselves? And when does the burden of speaking the truth outweigh other considerations?

Notes and meditations

2006-01-04T01:52:00.000-08:00

Neopagan fundamentalism is as hateful, vindictive and closed-minded as any other religion's. The only real difference between the neopagan form and the larger faiths' approaches is that there is no such thing as a neopagan-run organization with enough weapons to do anything more than take over a 7-Eleven. At least not this week.

***

In a semi-related sense, I'm debating whether the label "pagan" is properly applied to me. I don't mean I'm returning to Christianity. I mean whether it's appropriate for a Celtic reconstructionist to use the term. Is it reclaiming in the sense that "queer" is being reclaimed, or is it muddying the issue? I may revisit this later.

***

I forgot to mention that I'm now on a year and a day dedication to Manannan mac Lir. I can't predict what that will mean to this blog, though I suspect it'll continue in some form. I won't be changing the name. That's already been discarded as a meaningless idea.

Admin: Contemplating migration

2005-12-28T19:30:00.000-08:00

I discovered recently that my domain server provides me access to WordPress for no extra charge. Blogger's not a bad site, but I find it a little restrictive. I also dislike how people can report blogs here as offensive and, with enough votes, get them dropped from Blogger's promotional areas for no reason other than personal sentiment. So I'm curious if anyone reading this has performed the migration and whether they have any suggestions for how I can do it in a relatively painless fashion. I'd like, ideally, to transfer the posts. I know I'll need to get my LiveJournal RSS feed redone, as it'll be a new URL, but that will be the easy part.

Also, any pros and cons of WordPress would be useful for me to hear if you'd be willing to share. Thanks.

A bit of history for your Solstice

2005-12-21T16:03:00.000-08:00

The Passing Parade: Cheap Shots from a Drive By Mind points out in his unique style how the timing of the celebration of Jesus' birth came about. It also supports my belief that Emperor Constantine did far more to reduce the influence of pagan beliefs in Europe than St. Patrick. But I guess it's easier to pick on an itinerant bishop in the same way that some animal rights groups bellow more about socialites in fur coats than bikers in leather.

Seasonal fare

2005-12-13T11:36:00.000-08:00

Isaac Bonewits' latest project on his blog reminded me that my husband produced a T-shirt design to point out a truth about any shift in the seasons.

To keep within the theme of this blog, his pagan-specific designs can be found under Woo Beach Designs. He's done some interesting work with bindogam.

Carnival time

2005-12-13T11:24:00.000-08:00

The latest Pagan Carnival is up.

The failing which market, now?

2005-12-09T23:48:00.000-08:00

There was a lot of chatter in the pagan blogosphere about Phyllis Curott's claims that the big-name booksellers were abandoning pagan books in the face of pressure from the Moral Mafia (to resurrect Playboy's term for them). I found her claims to be somewhat unlikely, but I wasn't entirely sure why. It was more of an instinct than something I could throw facts at.

Until this week, at any rate. I received an early Christmas present. Sitting amongst the gift book section at Barnes and Noble, I spotted The Element Encyclopedia of 5000 Spells by Judika Illes. Not just one, but a stack, sharing space with the coffee table books on ancient Rome and Monty Python. My traveling companion bought it for me when he saw how intrigued I was by it. And the word on the street is that Illes did a fair bit of good homework in putting it together.

If Barnes and Noble is too scared to sell pagan books, they have a funny way of showing it.

My first fisking

2005-12-01T18:03:00.000-08:00

I had the idea at the start of this blog that I'd do “I Read This So You Don’t Have To” reviews of bad Celtic books. This is related to that idea, but it’s a website instead. I’m usually mellow and balanced, but false claims are not the same as differing opinions. That said, I present a personally annotated history of the Celts and Druidry as presented by the Druidic Craft of the Wise.

The Cwmry, or Celts, are a collection of tribes that descended from a fair-skinned People who survived the Great Flood on the western slopes of the Himalayan Mountains.

The book of Genesis says that the waters completely covered the planet. Ararat only emerged long after the rains stopped. Or are Celts really merpeople? Can't be that. He didn't mention Atlantis.

As for the name of the people, I would love to cut them a little slack, but I can't seem to find enough rope. I know Welsh is a language that divorced itself from Hawaiian and lost the custody battle over the vowels, but it does have rules. And amongst them is that “Cwmry” anglicizes to Cumbria.

And trust me on this one, even if I am merely an amateur anthropology geek. “Pale-skinned” and “Himalayans” match as well as “Swedish Bikini Team look-alikes” and “Bantu tribesmen.”

When asked who they were, the teachers replied, "We are Pan," meaning "We are all of one mind," for this is the meaning of the name. These bearers of ancient Wisdom are commemorated with the head of a goat and the pipes of music to remind us of the age when the Old Wisdom Religion was first introduced to the Celtic people.

This would then mean that Wikipedia got it wrong when it says:

His nature and name is alluring, particularly since often his name is mistakenly thought to be identical to the Greek word pan, meaning "all", when in fact the name of the god is derived from the word pa-on, which means "herdsman" and shares its prefix with the modern English word "pasture".

The Encyclopedia Britannica would probably love to know that, too.

After about 2,150 years, the Sun moved into alignment with the stars of Sagittarius and the Celts befriended the horses who had multiplied and flourished in the mountains.

Wikipedia freely grants that the domestication question is up for considerable debate. But even if you take the Ukrainian evidence that page mention as proof of riding, it still places DCoW’s claims in the wrong millennium and about a thousand miles too far to the west, as you will see in a moment.

For the record, I’m polevaulting over a couple of paragraphs to spare you more than a passing mention of how Aescalapius (sic), the “man-teaching serpent,” was a Celt. It proves I care.

By the Age of Gemini, about 8,500 years ago, the Celts had migrated across the European continent.

Doing the math, this places our stalwart Celts as a flourishing culture about 6500 BCE. The early Greeks had only just started domesticating animals. There’s no sign of this activity in central or western Europe for another millennium or so. Our friends here claim the Celts civilized the Greeks at least 1,000 years prior. The archaeologists must be doing their math wrong.

At that time a new priesthood of Wisdom arose to lead the tribes of Cwmry (the traditional name for the Celtic people). With their guidance they entered into a time of peace and prosperity that lasted for nearly 6,000 years.

Why, of course the original Celts spoke Welsh. Never mind the Gaulish inscriptions behind the curtain! The great and powerful Father Eli has spoken.

And do I have to mention that the Celts didn’t emerge as a unique cultural group until sometime between 1200 and 600 BCE? No? Didn’t think so.

The Druids were the teachers, historians, physicians, counselors, musicians, seers, artisans and warrior chiefs of their tribes and villages.

Oh, damn. They almost got one right. I was so hoping.

In 432 A.D., the Grand Council of Druids met for the last time at Stonehenge.

I think he means the first time.

The Archdruid, Agricola, had received a vision that the Old Wisdom Religion preserved by the Druids throughout the past three ages, must yield to the revelations and traditions which were to become prevalent in the coming Age of Pisces.

Any relation to Cnaeus Julius Agricola? Georg Agricola? Coca-Cola? Hey, I know! It's Agri-Cola, the pause that refreshes your awen and awakens the fires of imbas forosnai!

More seriously, tell me how any druids at the time were only discussing Christianity in 432 when there were priests of that faith in Ireland before Patrick showed up. And he wasn’t even the first bishop the Pope sent. That honor goes to Palladius, who showed up the year before and worked an entirely different section of the country. And yes, sending a bishop to a country means you already have priests there. Do you really think the Church would send an officer to do an enlisted man’s job?

A vast majority of the Druidic Council shared Agricola's vision, and disbanded the Council to re-form as the Orthodox Celtic Church. (original link theirs - ed.)

Wow. So the Eastern Orthodox Churches are really Irish? Oh, right. The Greeks are really Celts, so the rest of them have to be. I forgot.

A young Druidic priest named Patrick was sent to Ireland, and a descendant of his mission has survived as The Church of the Culdees.

The particular church they link to seems to actually be descended from Polish Old Catholicism. As for the real Culdees, I think those anchorites from France would’ve been surprised to hear they were Druids.

In later centuries, when the Roman Inquisition found the clergy of the Celtic Church guilty of heresy for their differing philosophical beliefs, the teachings of Druidic wisdom were preserved with the rites of secret societies such as the Freemasons, and "The Knights of the Star and Garter."

An inquisition started in 1542 to combat Protestantism was really aimed at Catholic churches that were too Druidic, so an organization that existed in some form over 400 years earlier was created in retaliation to protect their teachings.

Pull the other one. It has mistletoe on it.

After 432 AD, the Old Wisdom Religion no longer had the Druids to guide them, but many families and clans preserved the ancient teachings in what has come to be called the Old Religion, the "Wiccan" or "Wisdom" religion, also known as the Craft of the Wise, or "Witchcraft."

And lo, the Celts of antiquity, who spoke bastardized Welsh since the waters of the Great Flood receded, switched to Anglo-Saxon.

In the Golden Age of Knowledge, the spirit of Chiro, the Lord of Time...

And the patron of bonesetters.

OK, OK, I just swiped at a typo. It was a straight line the width of a freeway.

The Age of Knowledge dawned over the center of the American continent at the Winter Solstice of 1971, as Jupiter, Mars and Venus moved into a conjunction in the sign of Scorpio, forming a brilliant star in the heavens during the early morning hours that Christmas Day. Three months later, astrologers watched in the dawning hours of the Equinox as the rising sun's rays touched the first stars of Aquarius. ... Perhaps the perspective of where we have been might provide a light for what path we should take in this New Age, as the Christian Era of Belief yields to the new Era of Knowledge in the Age of Aquarius.

The Age of Aquarius actually started in 1997. No, 2000. Um, wait, maybe it’s coming in 2150. Or is it 2638? Oh, if only I had the wisdom of Chiro to show me the way!

Well, I could, according to that site. For a small fee. But I think I’d be better off going to a chiropractic college and learning something that’d earn me an honest living. And no hating on chiropractors. Mine’s a peach and hasn’t pushed any snake oil on me the entire time I’ve been seeing him. Unless there’s some in the massage lotion he uses on my neck.

And thus concludes my first foray into “I Visit Websites So You Don’t Have To.” Any bets on how long it’ll take for a member of that organization to email me or leave a comment about how I just don’t get it?

A nod to the day

2005-11-24T12:17:00.000-08:00

I hope all of my American readers have a good Thanksgiving, no matter what your politics are about the day.

For my non-American readers, I hope you're having a good Thursday.

I'm taking time today for friends, cheesy oversized balloons, and Arlo Guthrie.

The memories linger on

2005-11-22T13:26:00.000-08:00

A housing project in St. Fillans, Perthshire, UK had to be redesigned when the locals pointed out the large rock they wanted to move had fairies living under it.

He said: “A neighbour came over shouting, ‘Don’t move that rock. You’ll kill the fairies’.” The rock protruded from the centre of a gently shelving field, edged by the steep slopes of Dundurn mountain, where in the sixth century the Celtic missionary St Fillan set up camp and attempted to convert the Picts from the pagan darkness of superstition.

In a fit of wisdom not always seen, the laws in the UK dictate that local customs need to be honored in such matters, so they have to redesign the project to go around the rock. I find myself hoping the owners remember to set out some cream at least once in a while.

It also seems to me that the aforementioned saint didn't completely succeed in his quest. But most of the Celtic saints were just about that effective, no matter what they tell you about St. Patrick. Elsewise, the Rev. Robert Kirk and W. Y. Evans-Wentz would have had nothing to write about.

It's that time again

2005-11-20T13:47:00.000-08:00

The Pagan Carnival is up.

A welcome rebuild

2005-11-16T12:27:00.000-08:00

Jason Pitzl-Waters reports that a pagan well is being rebuilt near a church in Llanllyfni, Wales. The reaction from the locals is best summed up in this quote:

Resident Julie Williams, 33, whose Glanaber Terrace home is close to the village church, said: "I think it's a lovely idea to create a footpath and refurbish the well.
"It's especially interesting for the children in the village to know more about the history of the place."

If each side in the Christian-pagan tensions within the USA adopted this sort of attitude, we'd all be far better off. But I fear the fundamentalists on both extremes will always be with us.

Eclectic, multi-path, or who cares?

2005-11-15T19:05:00.000-08:00

Terri of Lilypily Daze asked me some very good questions off of my most recent post. During the process, the question of whether I'm an eclectic pagan came up. I wanted to give that a better amount of consideration than the comments section would provide.

I describe myself as a Celtic reconstructionist pagan. I also do work within the Asatrú and Umbanda traditions. I consider the latter two to be supplemental practices that enhance my home tradition. It is an extremely rare day when I will call upon orixa and gods in the same ritual. I think I've done it once outside of an Umbanda house gathering, and that was because I'm a huge believer in asking as many possible sources for help that I can find when keeping a roof over my head is the goal. Umbanda can't help but be eclectic; that tradition raises the concept to an art form.

The pivot point, I suppose, is where one draws the line and declares a person's practices to be eclectic. If that word means "works with more than one set of gods, regardless of how clearly the lines are drawn amongst them," then I'd be eclectic. The fact I don't merge deities from different traditions into one and claim it to be all the same path to the same divine may cause others to not see me as eclectic.

What I consider myself to be is a student. My home "university" is the realm of the Tuatha de Dannan and other gods and spirits of the Celts. I am doing "semesters abroad" with the other traditions to learn what I can from them. Those teachings enhance what I do for the Celtic gods. The supplemental teachers do not change my principal affiliation. Therefore, I don't see myself as a full-scale eclectic. But I'll freely admit to not being single-minded about my sources. When you're dealing with a tradition like Celtic paganism, where we have lots of supposition and a relative paucity of hard facts, it's almost mandatory to do that. So long as I footnote my sources, I'm at least avoiding being a fluffy bunny.

Lost bit of mindset?

2005-11-13T19:39:00.000-08:00

Within Celtic reconstructionist tradition, there is discussion of achieving the appropriate mindset. A lot is made of gaining a certain familiarity with the language and culture. There are certain details that, no matter what we may try, we are most unlikely to regain. One of them struck me today.

All cultures have a concept of blasphemy or tabu. There are places you don't go. Actions you don't perform. Words you don't say. Even if they don't use those precise terms, there are danger zones into which a member of the group cannot move without suffering certain consequences. Not every member of the group may agree on them, but there are always limits. Modern paganism is not immune to this. Many treat Christianity as the tabu zone despite claiming respect for all faiths. Other terms mark the boundaries past which offense to the speaker's concept of orthodoxy or orthopraxy has occurred. Eclectic. Fluffy bunny. Folkish. It may not be called blasphemy, but "please don't do that where I can see it" is only a polite version of "get thee behind me."

I'm not saying those limits shouldn't exist. I firmly believe that limits are necessary in many areas. I've used all three of those terms to mark the place past which I will not go myself. What I'm coming to realize is that in all of the details we wish to reconstruct in Celtic paganism, one thing we lack and may never get back with any surety is what our ancestors felt to be blasphemous speech. We have a lot about what the Christian Celts thought qualified, but what came before is one of those areas of research I haven't seen touched on. I'd love to be wrong.

And I refuse to assume they had no such concept. I can't think of a single culture that lacks a forbidden zone. Even in modern American society, we see boundaries and discuss the concept of "dirty words." Certainly, it's easier to find entertainment that uses such things than it used to be (thank you, Lenny Bruce). But we all know we're working with material that polite society isn't supposed to be so free with. I myself was considering tidying up my speech when I realized I would be doing it to American standards instead of Celtic.

Am I blaspheming by muttering, "Mother of the gods" when I feel annoyed? Or am I entering the wrong territory for pagan Celts if I speak of bodily functions with four-letter words in the same context? Or is it both? I wish I knew. It would enhance my understanding of how they thought immensely.

Stopping to remember on this day

2005-11-11T11:11:00.000-08:00

On this day, I honor the ancestors of blood and spirit who gave of themselves in military duty and lived to tell how it was and reap the benefits alongside those of us who stayed home.

I am able to worship as a pagan because of them.

I am able to speak my mind in a public forum without fear of reprisal because of them.

I have friends and lovers who would not be here otherwise because of them.

My own family lines would not have arrived on this continent were it not for service in the military. And I rather like it here.

All honor to those who served with honor and integrity. May those who malingered and deserted find the fate they deserve. May those who seek to deny the veterans their fair due also find their proper fate. And may the Morrigan continue to watch over her warriors and help the ones fated to die in service to find their proper rest.

Not your average Lutherans

2005-11-06T16:40:00.000-08:00

While out and about in San Francisco today, I passed by Ebenezer Lutheran Church. It's an otherwise unassuming building, rather normal as churches go. But the banner hanging from it caught my eye. It was announcing a "Goddess Rosary" prayer session.

I noticed the URL for the church's website on a different banner and checked it out when I got home. I may have to remember them the next time I see pagans insist all Christians believe in a heartless, patriarchal god. The folks at Ebenezer Lutheran are not the majority in their sect or faith, but they're part of a trend within Christianity that deserves some respect from those of us who stand outside of it and also respect the divine feminine in one form or another. The rewrite of the Lord's Prayer they placed on the front page of the site would fit in admirably at some Wiccan rituals I've attended.

A moment of the personal

2005-10-29T19:03:00.000-07:00

I was given three days' notice of termination from my job on Thursday. The stated reason is budget cuts, which doesn't surprise me. Changes were in the wind, and the only small surprise to me was how swiftly they affected me so directly.

The fact that I am being removed from the place I've been the last five years during Samhain isn't lost on me. I'd begun stagnating. I'm also someone who has to be pushed into change sometimes. There have been hints and clues that I'm going to do just fine, though. My husband's been out of work for three years and his resume's finally getting more notice. I have one resume in a friend's hands and will be distributing it more widely next week.

In other news, I've been working toward dedicating myself more specifically to Manannán mac Lir. I'm not becoming a henotheist by any stretch of the imagination. I realized I needed a more specific relationship with one of the Celtic gods in order to improve my focus on all of them. The evidence pointed to him as the one to turn to.

I'm also putting myself out in more public rituals. Tomorrow, I'm the Maiden in a Wiccan ceremony dedicated to the Morrigan. In February, I will be assisting with an Umbanda ritual for Pomba Gira (it's public, so it's strictly PG-rated, gang ;>) and a Brighid ritual that I expect to be something of a Wiccan-Celtic fusion. Both of those will be at Pantheacon, an event I look forward to more and more every year. I'm in a phase where I'm checking out multiple approaches to ritual so I can learn more about what I do and don't want to have in my own creations.

Honoring a fallen warrior

2005-10-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

Thanks and praise to you, Rosa Parks. Your choices that day in 1955, whatever the motivation, brought about very needed change. May you go to your god and rest well in his presence.

Oppression should not stand

2005-10-22T14:48:00.000-07:00

The Free Copts الأقباط الأحرار is blogging the anti-Christian activities of Muslims in Egypt. Any pagans who think we're oppressed in the USA may wish to gain some perspective by contemplating the difference between a Pagan Pride Day rally and some of the events listed here. Say what you will about fundamentalist Christians, but they don't lay siege to our places of worship and attack our clergy en masse.

I don't know if they'd accept our prayers as pagans, but I think it only right we take a moment and reflect on their situation. It must not happen here. It should not happen anywhere.

Stop being on my side

2005-10-19T15:32:00.000-07:00

Ah, Halloween. The time of year when we the pagan metacommunity get to be paraded in front of the rest of America so they can see whether we're still wearing the same old bling. Time to count how often Satanism is brought up. And, maybe, just maybe, an opportunity to enlighten a few people about what we are as opposed to what we aren't.

The people who get contacted for interviews are getting better and better at it, as you can see in this cross-section. Overall, it looks good, even if I keep seeing such people make blanket statements about Christianity that fall apart on contact with reality. For one, I defy anyone to tell me that ecstatic Christians don't get hands-on with their god. The biggest difference between being touched by the Holy Spirit at a revival meeting and drawing down the moon is force of numbers and who qualifies to do it. Speaking from ignorance of the primary mainstream faith doesn't help our cause too much. But I admit it could be worse. We could be watching the media talk to the sort of pagan who thinks it's possible to redirect a hurricane with candles and good thoughts.

Christianity isn't immune to that sort of belief. Pat Robertson claimed to have rerouted a hurricane through prayer. And most people thought he was nuts. Including some pagans. But I highly doubt there is no overlap between the people who gainsaid Robertson but think asking the universe to dissipate Hurricane Wilma is a keen idea. And from where I sit, the rank-and-file don't see a difference between them. They're both claiming enough hubris to be able to exert long-distance control over a force of nature just becaues they're on the side of the righteous. Said force of nature was set in place by the gods and forces they're calling upon. So this means they're both trying to tell the gun to not send the bullet out of the chamber when the trigger is pulled. And anyone with a passing understanding of the laws of cause and effect knows a bad argument when they see one.

I am not saying magic or prayer don't work. The plural of anecdote may not be data, but I've seen too many events that beggar coincidence. And those events are far more localized from what I've seen. If you know someone in the path of a hurricane, focusing on asking that their house be spared is more likely to work. If you must play with the weather, the "Rain, rain, go away" chant actually has sense in its childishness. "Not now, but later" is safer than "stop it and don't come back" when you work with elemental forces. May as well try to get a tractor-trailer to jump a ravine.

Summon the barkers

2005-10-16T19:58:00.000-07:00

The latest Pagan Carnival is up.

Why matters

2005-10-13T11:57:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I protest the notion that religion automatically leads to societal problems, as posited in the Times of London a few days ago, is that I have seen spiritual practices work on the individual level to spare people from a great deal of personal dysfunction. By my logic, a group of healthy thinkers organized in a society will not have as many problems as one composed of people with more pathological mindsets. And if religion can help people be more sane, its presence in a society will not automatically lead to problems the same way burning coal leads to air pollution. I’m obviously not the first person to feel this way. And an article in the Guardian points out that how one approaches religion may be the big difference between healthy and unhealthy practices.

The article discusses Robert Winston’s latest book, The Story of God. Within it, he discusses the genetic tendency toward faith and morality (noting that the two are not intrinsically linked) and how people have approached those questions over time. The commentary on Gordon Allport’s research back in the 1950s within it gets to the core of my beliefs on this issue. Allport saw two sorts of religiosity in standard practice: intrinsic and extrinsic. The intrinsically religious see their faith as an end in itself. Practicing their beliefs is a central and personal experience that informs how they conduct their lives. The extrinsically religious, however, see religion as a means to an end. They practice because they think it is the right thing to do in order to fit in or advance socially. Allport’s research found that the intrinsically religious were more prone to be well-adjusted. The extrinsically religious were more prejudiced and in a higher state of emotional stress overall.

Follow that with the study performed by the University of Michigan some years ago on ecstatic Christians (old-school fundamentalists and snake-handlers) vs. mainstream Protestants. I turn to the article’s wording to explain it further:

After further analysis, however, there appeared a tendency to what can only be described as mental instability in one particular group. The study was blinded, so that most of the research team involved with questionnaires did not have access to the final data. When they were asked which group they thought would show the most disturbed psychopathology, the whole team identified the snake-handlers. But when the data were revealed, the reverse was true: there was more mental illness among the conventional Protestant churchgoers - the "extrinsically" religious - than among the fervently committed.

It seems clear to me that the extrinsically religious are setting the tone of the dialogue for spiritual expression in public these days. The intrinsically religious would be, I think, far less prone to insist on adding their god’s name to a patriotic pledge and insisting it be recited by people who worship elsewise. They certainly wouldn’t want their central tenets carved into marble and placed in a secular building. That would make it too impersonal as well as imposing on the personal beliefs of others.

That leaves me with two thoughts. First, people shouldn’t blame religion when it’s the motivations behind its practice that make the difference. Second, attempts to appeal to the extrinsically religious from an intrinsic position may need to consider how they are motivated by social pressure. Is it possible for us to encourage a society that looks down on enforced conformity without turning that into the new oppression? I can’t answer that myself. But it needs to be asked, I think, in many places.

Fallibility

2005-10-10T14:19:00.000-07:00

I've seen one too many rants about various habits of modern reconstructionist pagans (pick one, there are dozens to choose from) that boil down to, "If it's not attested in the lore, you're a bad pagan for doing it." Maybe it's because I'm working in a tradition where I know we didn't get all of our details written down and had much of what was transcribed hopelessly altered, but that argument annoys the living daylights out of me. Why? Simply put, the lore is fallible.

Those of us on reconstructionist paths are participants in interrupted or modified traditions transcribed by imperfect beings with their own agendas. None of us approach them as tabulae rasa, either. Also, it's the rare modern pagan who's a participant in the descendant of the culture in which the lore arose. Those themselves have changed despite all attempts within the culture to the contrary. And during the life of that culture before whatever break occurred, the lore itself changed. If it didn't, we'd all still be consulting tribal shamans to figure out which spirit to appease to cure our migraines.

The fact our ancestors of blood and spirit changed with their times, however willingly, tells me that if we don't admit the lore isn't the end-all and be-all of what we do, we're failing as inheritors. It's not right to declare our modern inspiration or language usage to be identical to what they did. But it's also not right to insist we restrict ourselves to some fantastic concept of static, unchanging belief they themselves didn't follow. Within Celtic tradition, there is lingering evidence of gods rising and falling in popularity. We know the Germanic pagans altered their approach to Wodan when exposed to the Danubian Celts' worship of Lugus. And how much more so would the gods and traditions of our ancestors shift and change with the technological and theological innovations in the intervening centuries? We can't even begin to guess. But change they would.

I fail to understand why some pagans want to treat their written lore as being the perfect transmission while laughing at the Christians who think their lore is equally inviolate. It's just as ridiculous to claim Snorri transcribed a perfect record of how all Norsemen practiced their beliefs as it is for Christians to claim the Earth was created in six days. The lore is a base, not a stopping point. Using it as a means of bashing people who speak in a way you find inappropriate is fundamentalist thinking. If someone else's modern approach is labeled as such, as my late grandmother would say, kwitcherbitchin'. Nobody's forcing you to join in on it.

Toward Better Pagan Books

2005-10-04T14:14:00.000-07:00

Jason Pitzl-Waters has been contemplating the state of the pagan book market in the wake of commentary by Phyllis Curott. She attempts to blame the right-wing fundamentalist insurgency for slacking sales. Others blame the economy, Curott's own writing skills, and a tendency by many publishers to sell bad or simply grossly mislabeled books. I fall into that last category.

Let me explain the labeling accusation before moving on. As a Celtic pagan, I find that a majority of the books on the shelves claiming to be Celtic spirituality just plain aren't, at least not as I understand it. I'm told by these booksellers that Wicca, Feri, Arthurian fantasy, and offshoots of 18th-century mystical orders are Celtic paths. From where I sit, none of these demonstrate more than a passing familiarity with what we know of Celtic beliefs and traditions. On the rare occasion that someone has approached Celtic reconstructionism in a book, it's either wound up on a very small imprint or we get insulted in its pages. So for me, it's not so much a matter of whether I can buy the books as whether books about my faith even exist. I've become intimately familiar with ABEBooks and have gotten back in touch with my higher vocabulary skills as I plow through scholarly texts and write my own book in my head.

So, what do I want out of pagan publishers? Let's start at the beginning, with editorial integrity. If the author can't document it, publishers shouldn't let them claim it's something it's not. There should be no shame in admitting something is a synthesis of research and inspiration. It should be OK for the author to admit they thought up something while looking at the stars one night and found it worked. All traditions start somewhere. And age has nothing to do with acceptability in the eyes of the US government, if certification as a religious organization is a concern (as someone commented it would be to me once a while back). They're hard on anyone who starts a non-profit, especially one claiming a religious exemption. The number of frauds who've come along over time under that umbrella have burned them badly.

I agree with Pitzl-Waters' beliefs about what would be good to see coming out under pagan imprints, such as history, theology and issue-based writing. While I don't believe that all pagans should hold to identical politics, getting a pagan perspective on various issues would be a refreshing change from "become a Celtic shaman" books. More books that admit Wicca isn't the be-all and end-all of paganism would be a good idea. And alongside biographies of our bigger names, critiques of their work appearing on bookstore shelves might also be worthy endeavors. Nobody is or should be treated as untouchable. It's the sign of a mature tradition if it can look at its founders and admit their failings. It would demonstrate to newcomers that we're not all of one mind about someone.

I don't feel as if I pay enough attention to the pagan section of the bookstores to say much more than this. As previously noted, my book-buying focuses more on scholarly treatises with enough footnotes to choke a dissertation board. But I'd buy more from the "New Age" range if it touched on what I do. There's only so much I can do with Mara Freeman's texts before I retreat to Barry Raftery for a sense of realism.

Reality vs. The Times of London

2005-09-29T11:27:00.000-07:00

Jason Pitzl-Waters chased down the actual conclusions of the study I wrote about yesterday. The Times of London appears to have played fast and loose with the facts. All the researcher wanted was to spur more investigation. He didn't claim that theism leads to social problems.

The opportunity to claim the Times was indulging in America-bashing is almost too obvious. But I've also been hearing about the hurricane coverage in some of the more salacious tabloids over there. The Sun claimed American soldiers were killing Katrina survivors from gunboats. I realize that the Sun is not the Times, but what the former does blatantly, the latter has been known to hint at. And jumping from "we need to investigate whether theism is a related cause" to "America stinks because it's too damned religious" is a very easy way to drop such ideas into what looks on the surface to be a respectable article.

Religion, government, and binary thinking

2005-09-27T10:50:00.000-07:00

Wow. I ask the universe for source material, and I get this article popping up on my reading list. Thank you, universe. Have a cookie.

The Times of London has reported a study that claims a direct relationship exists between religious belief and social problems. The author attempts to prove this by showing that the United States, the only industrialized nation where the majority of its citizens believe a lone deity created the universe, is also near or at the bottom on such metrics as teen pregnancy, homicide, and STI rates.

The fact the United States has a piss-poor performance level on those matters is hard to refute, especially ones dealing with the aftereffects of poorly handled sexual behavior. But this study appears to suffer from one of the logical fallacies so many of these do: correlation implies causation. I'd need to look at it more deeply to be sure, as I don't trust newspaper summaries of case studies. But I also have a hard time believing simple comparisons of statistics. The bias of the author is always a risk factor in such situations.

I will note that many people have deluded beliefs about what Christianity as a professed faith does and doesn't mean. It doesn't take away the raging hormones of youth. It doesn't cure insanity. It certainly has only a palliative effect on poverty if taken purely as a belief instead of put into action in the form of charitable work. And regardless of what the voting patterns of the faith's most vocal adherents may demonstrate, it does at least hint at the need for fair taxation and attention paid to the downtrodden. But all faiths share the lack of a magic wand against all ills. I'm hardly faulting the majority in comparison to the rest of us.

The article itself has a very large flaw aside from taking this study at face value. It falls right into the trap of assuming the options are sloppy monotheism or nothing. It pays no attention to whether a nation that truly lived by Christian values, which this country categorically does not, might or might not do better than one that only pays lip service to the notion. And I realize it wasn't in the purview of the study to look at subsets of the American population to see if those who practice non-JudeoChristian belief systems were just as prone to those ills. But the insistence it's one or the other shows a short-sightedness about religion that I recognize all too well from sexual orientation studies that ignore bisexuality. Once again, binary thinking leaves the picture incomplete.

I'm the last person to say that religion is mandatory for a good system of ethics. I must note, however, that ethics are nothing without action. I can believe in the gods of the Celts, but if I do not act on those by living an honorable life and remembering the gods and ancestors in ritual, I may as well drape myself in plastic shamrocks and get drunk on green beer. There are many professed Christians in this country, but far too few actually understand what that means and how to live within its strictures. I don't mean taking the right-wing approach of "go ye into all the world and force the gospel down the throat of every creature." I mean noting where it suggests approaching life with respect. Treating oneself with respect. And any government that claims Christian inspiration needs must remember that "God helps those who help themselves" was said by a Deist, not an apostle.

There are those who will note any government that pays too much attention to religion is a problem. The Taliban is an extreme case, but history is rife with only marginally less toxic examples. I don't know if we have a record of a government that used what many 21st century people would call higher ethics, claiming their religion as the source, and how it went for them. Lack of evidence in this case is not proof it's impossible. Human nature is too diverse. I also know we have clear and recent records of how fanaticism needs no deity to wreak havoc. Neither Stalin nor Saddam Hussein were particularly religious. Religion is a tool. How we use it makes the difference.

Writer's block runaround attempt

2005-09-26T13:26:00.000-07:00

I'm wanting to write more for this site, but I find myself hitting a mental roadblock. Topics rise up, start to gel, and then dissolve. So, I ask you, my friendly readership. Are there topics you'd like to see me write about? I may not do all of them, especially if I think I'm underinformed on it and can't get to it, but I'm sure I can think of something based on what's said.

I feel a bit like a cheater for doing it this way, but I have no idea when I'd be inspired if I didn't get myself some kind of kick in the rear. Of course, I could just grab my book on Celtic sex magic when I get home and use it for the Books I've Read So You Don't Have To idea I had when I started this but haven't done anything with. Still, I'd appreciate the feedback if any of you have suggestions.

It's that time again

2005-09-18T12:16:00.000-07:00

The Pagan Carnival is up.

In honor of the day

2005-09-16T15:42:00.000-07:00

As today is a national day of prayer and remembrance for the victims and survivors of Hurricane Katrina, I wanted to contribute mine. I wouldn't call it brilliant, but I mean every word.

Hail to all the gods, ancestors and spirits. May you help us here in this world to bring relief to the suffering and affliction to those who would profit from exploiting this tragedy to selfish and profane ends.

Hail to you, the honored dead, victims of the hurricane. May you be safe and secure in the Otherworld with your ancestors and gods. Please watch over your descendants and help them toward better lives.

Hail to you, Lugh, bringer of storms. Your terrible might and majesty revealed to the world the truth about the hidden corners of America. May the good such a sight can lead to far outweigh the tragedy that led to the revelation.

Hail to you, Dian Cecht, first of all physicians. May your skillful hand guide the hands of those who work to heal the wounds inflicted by this cataclysm, both physical and mental.

Hail to you, Brighid, guardian of fair judgements. May there be an accounting on all levels for the failures and poor decision-making that preceded and followed landfall. May the guilty face their just retribution.

Hail to you, Nuada, fair and honest king. May you keep our leaders honest and forthright. Let their promises of today be their actions of tomorrow.

And may those who have opened their homes and hearts to the refugees receive three times the blessings they give, in this life and the next.

When Two Tribes Go to Four

2005-09-07T16:22:00.000-07:00

In my blog wanderings the other day, I came across William White's Eject! Eject! Eject! discussing the concept of two tribes of people. He dubs the emotion-led tribe Pinks and the logic-led one Grays. This springs from what he sees as conflicting reactions to such events as Hurricane Katrina and the 9/11 attacks.

Setting aside the pop culture significance of those terms, it's the binary thinking it shows that I find to be a larger problem in this society. The idea that everything should conform to perfect ratios and either-or arrangements did humanity no favors, even if the Greeks came out of it with some damn fine architecture. It has its place; it's misapplied outside of it.

I'm not denying such people exist, mind. I've seen examples of both in my daily life, and depending on the day in question, I could be seen to swap allegiances. This is where I start having issues with the whole notion of two tribes that are dedicatedly opposed to each other in approach. It's possible to see when it's time to play it gentle vs. knuckle down and work. If it's not possible to cross the line, there's a problem.

This leads me to Maggie Macary at Myth and Culture speaking of the need to restore imagination to a higher priority in Western culture. It is primarily considered the bailiwick of creative artists these days. In disaster planning, however, a lack of imagination gets us results such as the debacle in New Orleans. It contributed a great deal to the intelligence failures surrounding 9/11 as well. The commission report on those events made that blisteringly clear.

This led to my concept of a third tribe, one led by imagination. Drawing from logic and emotion to build a synthesis of the two, seeing where beauty and joy can lead as well as pragmatic simplicity. Making sure facts are the basis instead of mere dreams, but not letting binary logic control how they see either what-is or what-if. I can only dub this tribe Fluorescents. That might open a different can of worms, but it's the best word I can think of right now.

As I'm sure we've all seen, there seems to be a fourth sort in the human condition. They have emotionally driven behaviors springing from misapplied logic and a fantasy life that shows imagination, but not one based on facts. I think, to contrast with the third tribe, they could be called Burntouts. It sounds sadly final, but when their opposite is a longlife bulb, I'm not sure what else to use.

Analogies to Dumezil's four functions don't quite work past a certain point. Unless you want to talk about the benefits and risks of each sort of tribe member being in a first function job, anyway.

Pissing in Other People's Beer

2005-09-07T13:53:00.000-07:00

While Celtic reconstructionst paganism/Senistrognata tries to get a self-definition that focuses more on what we are and do over what we aren't, we have growing pains. One of them is when people get fixed on what we are not to the point of insulting other traditions. It leads to the trait I titled this post with. "You're doing something I disagree with, so you're stupid and wrong and believe in a lie," in any of three dozen configurations, gets uttered far too often. I've likely been guilty of it myself as I've matured in my faith. But I have worked on letting go of it. After all, I've been the recipient of such accusations as a Senistrognatan from people who claimed to have a lock on the One True Celtic Way(tm).

Does it matter that Wicca, while having borrowed elements of Celtic tradition, is not in and of itself an ancient Celtic system of belief? Only if you want a genuinely Celtic tradition and think Wicca is it. But if you like Wicca for what it really is, I don't think it's appropriate for people to accuse you of buying into a lie. And I will act accordingly if someone tries to force that sort of opinion in a space where it isn't welcome. Like, say, any mailing list I happen to run. I may be a bit pushy about how I enforce it where I have control. But if there's one thing I want clear, it's that the spaces I run are bigoted against one thing: bigotry. If that means my butt cheeks can break coal, so be it.

I know it may be somewhat tacky to take the mailing list laundry to this forum, but I also know how rumors spread. I think this is sufficiently important for me to make it public off-list. I've been misquoted enough in the kerfuffle as it stands. But being accused of claiming Senistrognata arose from Asatrú gave me a laugh, at least.

The barker's calling

2005-09-04T21:20:00.000-07:00

Jason Pitzl-Waters has brought us round two of the Pagan Carnival.

Noted with hopes I'll really do it

2005-08-30T20:31:00.000-07:00

Before March 17 of next year, I really want to set down an essay detailing where people have been getting the legend of St. Patrick and the conversion of Ireland wrong. The more I look at it, the more I realize that pagans have been buying into church-generated propaganda in their quest for a whipping boy. I have no love for evangelism per se. I also have no love for swallowing a fraud as if it were valid history. I'm a big fan of disliking what someone really did, not what people have been misled into believing happened.

My sources look to include Barry Raftery, modern writings on the history of Celtic Christianity, and a fascinating set of penitentials written by Irish monks in the 6th-8th centuries. I may pull in bits about Christian conversion efforts that make his look like leaving a Chick tract behind in a public restroom, just for the sake of perspective.

And just for the record, I was inspired by a History Channel attempt at discussing Celtic history that swallowed the same propaganda without the bloodshed that gets assigned to him. I also freely admit that the hatred spewed every March 17 in pagan circles has been getting to me more and more every year. It sometimes has hints of anti-Irish bigotry attached, only making matters worse from where I sit.

Quick check-in

2005-08-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

I'm still around, but this is production week for Equus and thus a lot of my time and brain cells are otherwise occupied.

I do want to note we got a rather lovely review. And you can just spot me in the background of one of the pictures.

The Carnival has put up its tents

2005-08-21T11:33:00.000-07:00

Jason Pitzl-Waters has initiated a Pagan Carnival on his blog, The Wild Hunt. My thanks to Chas Clifton for submitting an article of mine when I was too horsed out from Equus to think straight about sending one in myself.

Legal contemplations

2005-08-11T17:04:00.000-07:00

First, I want to note for the record that I am a complete sap for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. I always make sure I know where my Kleenex are when it comes on, as I'm almost guaranteed to lose it before it's over. I've been known to need one during the introductory segment. And Ty Pennington is second only to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy's Thom Filicia in my mental list of interior designers I would hire if price were no object.

This lawsuit that has been brought against ABC TV and EM:HE has got me thinking on a few levels, not all of which have to do with whether or not I should worry about EM:HE's integrity. I'm handing them a large chunk of benefit of the doubt right now. They get told a story, they check it out, and move forward on the belief it's legitimate. If they were lied to, which is essential to the argument the Higginses are making in their suit against the Leomitis, they're victims as much as anyone else. They're the ones who paid to turn a three-bed one-bath into a nine-bed six-bath. I wouldn't be surprised to see a parallel suit for fraud.

Now let's assume that the Higginses aren't lying. Under American law, they'll get a cash settlement that they may never see, as the Leomitis could turn around and file for bankruptcy even with the changes Bush signed into law. If ABC is held liable, they may use it as a PR opportunity or lock it up in appeals for years. The losers might sell the house to pay it off instead, leaving neither with the fruits of the makeover crew's labors. I am left wondering how a brehon would have judged the case.

Irish law before the imposition of Anglo-Norman jurisprudence was based on compensation for injustices rendered. There was a complex system based on the gender and social standing of the offender, the offended, and the nature of the crime. And you had to pony up. This is why the penalties were based on your rank. It's hardly fair to force an apprentice blacksmith to pay a landowner's penalty.

In this case, a lower-class person offered the hospitality of a middle-class landowner was used by the latter to obtain a false elevation in rank, then ejected when the cameras went away. Under hospitality law, the landowner went above and beyond the minimums required. But at the same time, they presented themselves publicly as a united household, not merely making the other family honored guests. This could be seen as linking their ranks and elevating the poorer family accordingly.

I should note that under brehon law, all of the orphans are legal adults (age of majority in pre-Anglo Ireland was 14 for women, 17 for men, and the youngest of the five is 14). This turns the suit into adult vs. adult, making each of the orphans eligible for compensation according to their genders.

Returning to the presumption of liability (the case isn't settled, so I'm not saying the Leomitis did anything wrong), there's also the matter of ABC being defrauded. There were no corporations in brehon times, so the closest parallel I can see is they yanked the chain of the local nobility. Who would be within their rights to press for compensatory justice.

So, you have a landowner who, assuming guilt, is indebted to five lower-class adults and an upper-class individual. I think you'd call it theft under that code. With a return of the stolen property plus additional compensation for the time and trouble, the Leomitis would probably lose the house.The neighbors who pitched in (parallel to the crew ABC hired) would probably enact some amateur justice of their own, and they'd never let that family come back to that section of Ireland again. And I think that if the nobleman had studied Cormac's philosophy on rulership, he'd give the now-abandoned house to the Higginses.

You know, there are times when I like the idea of a system based on compensation with no way to file paperwork to get out of it.

The data's changed. So, now what?

2005-08-10T14:50:00.000-07:00

One of the questions that has been asked of Celtic pagans from people of multiple persuasions is "what do you do if the scholarship changes?" Celtic studies is prone to fads, fancies and the more solid reasons for alterations in approach. Many documents lie untranslated. New discoveries shape analysis of older ones. And even etymologies get the occasional revisit.

Take the Gaulish god Belenos. For decades, people translated his name as "bright one" and the Victorian presumption that all shiny male gods are sun gods carried into modern times. Recent work has discovered that its definition is closer to "strong one" and may also be related to a Gaulish word for henbane in an echo of how one Latin name for it is apollinaris.

Now, Apollo is a sun god, but he is also a god of healing. And in all of the times Apollo was conflated with gods in Gaul by the Romans, none of them were ever stated as being solar deities in the extant descriptions. It was always Apollo's other aspects, such as healer, that led them to merge the two. Thus, Apollini Beleno was a healing god with no solar aspects.

There are modern pagans who class Belenos as a solar deity, using prior scholarship as their guide. The new data contradicts this approach. And the news leads to examples of how different pagans treat such changes. I know of some who look at the information as the god's way of letting us know we're getting him wrong. Others refuse to change, whether because it works for them or they'd prefer more direct input from the god in question before they change their approach. While I'm all for that kind of spiritual inspiration, I can't help but remember the old joke about the man who said "Jehovah will provide" when rescuers came by to fetch him off the roof of his house before the waters rose too high and he drowned. I can't help but picture Belenos looking at the people who insist he's a solar god in the face of the new data and saying, "I sent you three Celtic scholars and a dictionary! What more did you want?"

Some would argue that innovation shouldn't be treated too cavalierly. A tradition must be allowed to change. I agree with that. But the best, most appropriate and respectful changes come from a base of true understanding. The Victorians shaped the data to fit their assumptions. This is not understanding, it is appropriation. Their presumptions work for some people, I know. And if you're aware that you're using their material instead of more attested ancient lore and admit as much, it's not that big a deal. But honest eclecticism shouldn't get anyone too annoyed, I think.

Burnout, dysfunction, and your friendly neighborhood pagans

2005-08-01T14:37:00.000-07:00

I ran across this essay on Dysfunctional Behavior and the Pagan Scene in the Full Circle Events newsletter thanks to Blackthornglade's LiveJournal. As the leader of a pagan organization that is suffering from burnout and has seen its share of the walking wounded, it resonated extremely deeply with me. No religion is a sure cure for mental illness, nor should it be an excuse for same. And tolerating the dysfunction in our groups in the name of a false unity only drives the saner people out.

Lughnasadh

2005-08-01T00:10:00.000-07:00

Happy Lughnasadh! As I suspect just about everyone reading this knows, today is the usual day for observing the feast day of Lugh, the Irish god of many skills, as well as a celebration of the first phase of the harvest and the start of autumn. Lugh is described as one of the pan-Celtic gods based on common names and overlapping functions within the set of pre-Christian European tribes commonly called Celts these days. It was originally a two-week festival, but it's rare to find any pagan individual or group nowadays with that kind of time who'd have the money to throw that sort of party.

For an excellent essay on Lugh/Lugus, I recommend Alexei Kondratiev's writeup on the subject.

Brian Walsh has set up an online shrine to the Many-Gifted Lord. If you don't have time to do a full ritual, a visit there wouldn't hurt.

Lugh is one of my patrons, though only since last year after Lughnasadh had already passed. I am grateful to Him for His encouragement, advice, and butt-kicking this year. Hail Lugh!

One nation are we, all pagan and free?

2005-07-29T14:28:00.000-07:00

Brendan Cathbad Myers looks to be stretching his bardic wings with this piece, inspired by the the movement to make South Carolina a haven for Christian fundamentalists, with secession a "last resort":

Well, a few enterprising Pagans read in the news that there is a Christian Fundamentalist group that wants to get as many Christians as possible to settle in the state of South Carolina and eventually declare the state an independent Christian theocracy, devolved from the rest of America. This got us thinking, we can do the same! A few months before that, at the death of John Paul II and the inauguration of Benedict XIV, we got to thinking, wouldn’t it be cool to have our own Vatican City, somewhere in the world? It’s been tried before, and never successfully, but our attempt has something no previous attempt at herding Pagans into one mould—I mean uniting them in harmony—has had. People are showing up! Huge crowds are converging on our sovereign territory, a farmer’s field in Greenland, every day. And it can only get better from here.

I rather suspect the attempt in South Carolina will go at least as well.