Series: A Wiccan Wheel Mystery
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Do you know what torques me off most* in contemporary depictions of the Horned God?
When the artist gets the legs wrong.
He's called the Thrice-Bent for a reason. In the arms, one bend. In the legs, two.
Check out the picture of the goat leg shown above. Note that the hind legs feature two bends: one pointing forward, one pointing back.
The forward bend is called the knee. The backward bend is called the hock.
When the Horned is shown with the rear legs of an animal (he isn't always), he should have both.
If you love the Horned well enough to depict him, you should love him well enough to look.
O thou
Betorqued Betined,
sitting cross-legged
on the altar:
in thy broad lap, O lord,
Edible flowers
You may have guessed, but I like my food and finding that some of the flowers we grow in our garden for decorative purpose are actually edible is a total bonus. Please do make sure you identify the flower correctly before scoffing it, we don’t want any accidents or worse.
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April 14, 2019
The Sanctuary of Apollo Hylates
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I stood on a subway platform as trains roared by, oblivious, paralyzed. I had been frozen by a brief, polite encounter with a former co-worker, a few weeks after I’d been laid off from my very first job, as a community college English teacher. My last set of students—young men in practical disciplines — had filled their evaluations with comments on my dress and appearance: “She should wear shorter skirts.” “She should wear more make-up.” It was decided my relationship with them had been “too personal", and my contract was not extended. Standing on the platform, remembering all this, a renewed sense of shame burned in my heart.
Over the years I would understand what happened better, with a more sophisticated eye. But at the time I was looking for emergency first aid. And I found it in the practice of “offering it up.”
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What happens when you turn loose a bunch of over-educated, under-employed intellectuals on a prosperous society in the throes of social ferment?
Apparently, you get a Pagan Renaissance.
It happened in 20th century America. It also happened in 13th century France, during what—ironically enough—is known as the Age of Cathedrals.
The parallels between the two periods are striking. In both, new agricultural techniques produced a burgeoning population, a thriving mercantile class, and unprecedented prosperity. This, in medieval France and elsewhere, was what financed the building of the great cathedrals such as Notre Dame de Paris. Students from all over Europe flooded to the University of Paris.
There they learned Latin and read the Classics. There they learned about the old paganisms.
Alas, there were no suitable jobs for most of these sons of lesser houses. The system produced far more educated people than it could employ.
So a rising tide of clerici vagrantes, “wandering clerics,” washed across Europe: getting drunk (when they could afford it), getting laid (when they could manage it), and writing rhyming hymns in Latin to the old gods of the pagan world, especially (as one would expect) to Venus and Bacchus.
(Several collections of poetry and hymns from this medieval pagan renaissance have survived to inspire and delight us today, notably the famous Carmina Burana (that's CAR-min-ah, not car-MEE-nah), which in turn inspired German composer Carl Orff's pagan oratorio of the same name, one of the landmarks of 20th century pagan art.)
According to British historian Elliot Rose, these literary New Pagans—whatever the seriousness of their paganism—hooked up with the Old Pagan witch-wives of Europe to create a newly reinvigorated Witch Cult which, a hundred years later, would give rise to, and fall prey to, the horrors of the Great Persecution. Well, maybe.
Eight hundred years later, here we are again.
