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Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus (circa 1485) isn't just one of the most enduringly famous paintings in the world.

It's also a prophecy.

Even before the Old Paganisms were dead, the New Paganisms had already begun to arise.

The Old Pagans were Pagans-by-Tradition. In a sense, their paganism was unconscious; they didn't know that they were pagan. The New Pagans are Pagans-by-Choice. With full awareness of alternatives, they—we—nonetheless choose the Old Ways.

The emperor Julian (331-363) was raised Christian, but chose the Old Ways instead. In a sense, he was the first New Pagan. At the end of the Byzantine Era, the philosopher George (“Plêthon”) Gemistós (1355?-1452), also raised Christian, did the same. Several of his students were self-avowed pagans.

It was they who, after the fall of Constantinople, fled to Italy and, in so doing, sparked the self-conscious rePaganization of the West that we now call the Renaissance: the influx of Old Pagan learning, aesthetics, and values into the West, the process that was ultimately to break the power of the Church and to free the Western mind.

One of the subjects I'm asked about most often is what daily life was like in ancient Crete. I've written about Minoan food and cooking here and here. And I posted about Minoan cosmetics here, including do-it-yourself recipes. But one thing I haven't really talked about much is the clothes the Minoans wore.

I did write up some information about why women in Minoan art are shown with bare breasts - that one turns out to be my most popular post ever, probably thanks to the word "topless" in the title. But there's more to Minoan clothing than open-front tops, like the ones shown in the fresco at the top of this post (the Ladies in Blue fresco from Knossos). In fact, the Minoans were surprisingly fashion-conscious.

Springtime has come to North Texas, which means both swathes of bluebonnets along the highways and sometimes monsoon-like rainstorms. It's a far cry from the winter storms that are gripping my home Dakota prairies, but there are times when the torrents of rain make it hard to remember that long warm Spring days are coming. But any good Texan will also tell you that we welcome these days of rain, because they both stave off that first 100-degree day and help to alleviate the period severe droughts our beautiful state experiences. The memories of the droughts of 2008-2010 are still fresh with many of us, and the rains give us hope that we won't watch our state burn and suffer under the sun this summer.

Spring rains and floods have been seen as blessings in many cultures over history, with the Nile floods being the most well known. So I was happy to see Anuket, the personification of the Nile River herself, show up in my oracle reading this week.

 "Don't draw pentagrams in the bathrooms; it frightens the maids."

(Sybil Leek)

They're big, they're showy, they work well in ritual.

And you don't need an athame to draw one.

I learned how to draw two-handed pentagrams from my friend Volkhvy years ago. (To the best of my knowledge, it was he who originated the practice.)

I've been drawing them ever since.

These days we mostly say widdershins, but in the Old Language of the Hwicce, the original Tribe of Witches, it used to be withershins, and that's a word to conjure with.

In those days, you were either with or wither: for or against.

Widdershins is a wither-sithe: a journey or going against.

And that way lies power.

Doing things backwards is an old, old magical technique to raise power. Think about it. Backing up is harder and more dangerous than moving forward. It takes focus. It takes concentration. You really have to think about what you're doing.

Going against the grain creates tension, and tension raises power. Believe me, you've never heard the Charge of the Goddess until you've heard it backwards.

Witherwards, one could say: dancing back-to-back, as we still do at the sabbat.

Hence our reputation for creative blasphemy. But this is no mere blasphemy for blasphemy's sake. Oh no: this is blasphemy for a purpose.

Bullying is a terrible thing.  I was bullied as a child. I was an odd duck of a kid who didn't always know how to behave in public because I grew up with an emotionally-distant father and a mother with untreated bipolar disorder who couldn't get the medical establishment to help her. Besides that, I was a clever kid who was really book-smart and terrible at coordinated sports. It was a classic nerd situation, and my peers made me suffer terribly for it.