CCMBA- Complete Conscious Mind Body Alignment
(the original cranial sacral work)
...PaganSquare
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CCMBA- Complete Conscious Mind Body Alignment
(the original cranial sacral work)
...CCMBA- Complete Conscious Mind Body Alignment
(the original cranial sacral work)
...
During their recent trip to Pakistan, eventual heir to the British throne prince William and his wife Kate Middleton paid a special visit to Bumboret Valley, home to Pakistan's famed pagan tribe, the Kalasha.
Sometimes called the “last pagans of the Hindu Kush,” the Kalasha, numbering some 4000, live in three remote valleys in what is now NW Pakistan. They are widely known for the freedom (and beauty) of their women, their wine-drinking, and their polytheistic religion.
Of all the Indo-European-speaking peoples, only the Kalasha have practiced their ancient and traditional religion continuously since antiquity. Characterized by sacred dances, outdoor sanctuaries, and animal sacrifice, the religion of the Kalasha offers an unparalleled window of insight into the practices and thought-ways of the pagan ancestors. More than anything else, it resembles an archaic form of pre-Hindu Vedic religion.
You can see unedited footage from the October 16th royal visit to Kalashastan here, courtesy of Ishpata News, the local Kalasha news outlet. (Ishpáta is the most common greeting in the Kalasha language: "Hello!".) You will recognize the Kalasha women by their distinctive and colorful clothing and headgear, and the men by the feathers in their Chitrali caps. During the long centuries of Muslim oppression, Kalasha were forced to identify themselves in public by wearing feathers in their headgear. Pagans being pagans, they took it up as a distinctive sign of pride, and unapologetically sport feathers to this very day.
The coverage of the royal visit is well worth watching (and doesn't Bonny Prince Billy look fetching in his feathered Kalasha cap?). After centuries of being despised as ignorant unbelievers, the Kalasha are currently undergoing something of a cultural renaissance. (Part of this new confidence in Kalasha identity derives from the knowledge that people of the West [i.e. us] are embracing, by choice, what the Kalasha already have by inheritance.) As several of the spokespersons interviewed toward the end of the clip discuss, the highest levels of Pakistani government, including Prime Minister Imrat Khan, have recently awoken to the knowledge of the living cultural treasure that the Kalasha represent, and moved to enshrine their rights by protective legislation. In a culturally homogenized world increasingly flattened by unthinking monotheization, pagans are the guarantors of freedom and eco-cultural health.
Don't be put off by the lack of subtitles, or the 26 minutes of narration in Kalashagrom, a profoundly archaic language closely related to Sanskrit. Here is your opportunity to hear the voices of the pagan ancestors, vibrantly alive in our hour and day.
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The headgear being such a prime marker of Kalasha identity, I found the Presentation a graceful and moving gesture: conferring, in -
I just watched up through the Presentation of the Hats, but that was fun.
My kindred held our Rainbow Season ritual to mark the end of monsoon season here in the southwest desert. After the rain comes the rainbow, so after the rainy season comes the Rainbow Season. In heathenry, the rainbow is sacred to Heimdall, so as part of our ritual, I told my version of the story of how Heimdall retrieved Freya's jewel.
Here's a short video of the stage of ritual prep in which we're putting on our ritual jewelry:
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Gods, it's dark.
These mornings I'm mostly up by 5: dark outside, dark inside. We've already lost Summer's long twilights. Now the Sun goes down and wham! it's dark, with nary a time between.
In a moon's time, paradoxically, I'll be able to navigate in here at this hour without turning on lights, what with all the ambient urban light reflected from the snow.
But for now, with the leaves still on the trees, and the creeper on the side of the house, I'm moving by feel.
Every few years, we hold our Samhain on an island at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. In the stone-built WPA hall with its central hearth, it's easy to forget what century you're in.
What I always notice most is how dark it is.
Last time, we must have had 50 candles burning on the tables to light our feast: a spendthrift extravagance of light for this most festive of feasts. Even so, it's dark. I think about the ancestors, who viscerally understood this annual descent into darkness in a way that we, with our electric-lit lives, hardly can.
Walking up the street this morning, the beauty of the waning Moon in the southeastern sky pierced my heart like a spear, the pearly, opalescent colors of crescent and disc precisely mirroring those of the pre-dawn sky. Only early-risers truly appreciate the Wane.
This past weekend, at Knox-Metropolitan United Church in Regina, Saskatchewan, history was made. It was, I believe, the first time that a traditional Christian church publicly hosted an event specifically around ChristoPaganism. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think this has happened before, anywhere. There have been a (very) few gatherings for Christian-Pagan dialogue, but nothing that has brought Pagans and Christians together to explore the bi-spiritual path of ChristoPaganism, within the walls of a church.
I am so thankful for Pastor Cam Fraser and the congregation of Knox-Met for taking a chance, in a very public manner, to invite me to offer this introduction to ChristoPaganism. And I'm equally grateful for the individual Christians, Pagans, and spiritual seekers who gathered together to learn, to share, to pray, and even to do ritual together.
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