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Beltane's coming up in less than a Moon, and all over Pagandom, folks are gearing up for the big May Eve Zoom-ritual.

Sigh.

(One wonders what the effect on this year's harvest will be. Hopefully, enough couples will manage to make it out to—socially-distanced—fields that the crops won't be too adversely affected.)

The pagan world is a place of gradation. Skyclad ritual is better than robed ritual. (So say some.) Robed ritual is better than ritual in street clothes. Ritual in street clothes is better than no ritual at all.

To hold a ritual is better than not to hold one. For the most part, collective ritual is preferable to solo.

Is group e-ritual, then, better than solo real-world ritual?

Um: Reply hazy; try again later.

Oh well. We haven't survived for 150,000 years by being inflexible. For now, we'll set up our e-rituals and be glad to have them.

We have all had times where the challenges that life brings to us feel overwhelming. For the most part, hopefully, these are brief times of illness or misfortune, but it is a fact that each of us will have to come to terms less often with times of real challenge and even with death. As we journey through our lives, we seldom find these things occur at convenient moments, when we feel strong and equipped to endure. At such times we realise that all our lives are constantly navigated through realms of unpredictability and the chaos of a multitude of lives and circumstances co-existing and intersecting with our own. How much power we have over our fate is often woefully small. Yet there is to be found, even at such times, a wellspring of resources within us and around us, if not to cure, then certainly to provide a balm for our distress.  

The things that you learn from your students.

A group of us were reading and discussing our way through the transcripts of “17th” century Scottish witch Isobel Gowdie's trial dittays when my then-apprentice asked a stunning question: “What does Gowdie's name mean?”

In 300 years of witchcraft scholarship, apparently no one had ever thought to ask before.

Isobel Gowdie (GOE-dee: rhymes with Cody, not howdy) is arguably the most influential witch in history. Her series of detailed confessions shaped Margaret Murray's idea of what the Craft looked like—covens of 13, quarter- and cross-quarter-days—and from there the rest is Wiccan history.

Naming practices in early modern Lowland Scotland were strikingly different from those of Sassenach-land to the south. Women did not assume their husbands' surnames at marriage; they kept their own family names all their lives. So whatever “Gowdie” means, we can be reasonably certain that it was the name that Isobel was born with.

The majority of surnames at the time were patronymics. Your name identified you as either the son (Mac- or Mc-) or daughter (Nic- or Nc-) of your father. The son and daughter of a man named Donald would then have been, respectively, X MacDonald and Y NicDonald.

(Nicneven—a traditional name of the witches' Goddess—means “daughter of Fury [Nemhain]" in Scots Gaelic.)

In this way—as in contemporary Iceland—a woman, her husband, and their son and daughter could potentially all have had different surnames.

Gowdie's surname, obviously, is not of this type. Throughout Europe, the patronymic was the most common form of surname, followed by occupation names (Taylor, Baker, Smith) and nicknames usually identifying some outstanding characteristic of the eponymous ancestor.

This last is how the Gowdie family got its surname. In Lallans—Lowland Scots—it means “Goldie.”

Isobel must have had an ancestor who was strikingly blonde.

Libra Full Moon: Find Strength and Beauty Within ***April 7 at 7:35 pm PDT***
(Zodiac Goddess Power deck*)

It was during the Worldwide Meditation of April 4th/5th, 2020, that I was visualizing the White Light pillar coming down from Creator to gobble up confusion, fear and fight the current panic around the virus on Earth, when suddenly, out of the White cloud, came a Dark Blue cloud. Then to my surprise out of the Blue Cloud, came a huge swarm of Bees. As I watched in my meditative state, I saw them being sent around the Earth. How amazing, I thought, feeling what a perfect negative energy killing, bees can have on Earth.

The next morning I wrote an email to my friends, clients and students about my Vision, and how I felt that the Earth had gone through a transformation, had changed for the better. 

Sitting on his front porch recently, a friend of mine noticed an eagle wheeling over the house across the street.

Here in Minneapolis, we're nowhere very far from the Mississippi Valley, and we're blessed with a healthy urban eagle population. Still, it's not exactly common to see them in this neighborhood, where there's not a lot to draw them.

A few days later, my friend saw the eagle—or an eagle, at least—again, over the same house.

A day or two after that, he saw it a third time.

When next he talked with his neighbor, he mentioned seeing the eagle over her house.

His neighbor is Dakota. She hadn't seen the eagle herself, but she didn't seem surprised to hear about it. She asked him what time of day he had seen it.

“Was it around the time when the Sun's highest in the Sky?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact, it was,” he said, “all three times.”

She nodded.

So: a rabbi, an imam, and a pastor walk into a radio studio.

Actually, they skype in.

Are you as sick as I am of hearing the media's treatment of “the religious response to covid-19” being reduced (over and over and over and over and over again) to the usual voices of the usual Big Three?

Where are the Hindu voices, the Buddhist? Where are the Native elders? You'd think that the rest of us don't even exist.

Ironically, the media thinks that it's being inclusive. Good old "Abrahamic" privilege.

These segments always end with the same question: In these hard times, what gives you strength?

Said rabbi, imam, or pastor invariably respond with some navel-gazing citation from Scripture or well-polished nugget of wisdom from their respective traditions.

Figures. Their narcissistic fixation on humanity is one of the great historic wrongs that the “A-list” religions have visited on the world.

As for me, I'm a pagan. For me—as for the ancestors, as for Indigenous peoples of the world to this very day—the very heart of our living inheres not so much in looking in as in looking out.

What gives me strength in these hard times? I'll tell you.