How many of us can honestly say that we got our start in pagan ritual from a kid's book?
I can. The book was Zilpha Keatley Snyder's 1973 The Egypt Game.
In an unnamed California college town, a disused storage yard becomes, for a small group of kids, the magical Land of Egypt, “a land of mystery and mud.”
There, in imaginative half-play/half-seriousness, they enact rites for the ancient gods of the Nile.
Then unexpected things begin to happen.
Illuminated by Anton Raible's charming drawings, The Egypt Game tells a large-hearted tale of the lived imagination. It has everything: likeable, flawed characters, mystery, even murder. Oh, and Halloween, too: that patronal holiday of children, which no kid's book would be complete without.
In 1973, assembling a diverse cast of White, Black, Asian, and Latino characters, as Snyder does here, was pretty radical for a children's book. Even at the time, I knew it was the Way of the Future.
And then there are the rituals.
Snyder captures, better than any other author that I know, the excitement, the mystery, the sheer joyful exuberance, of creating and enacting ritual.
You read about what the Egypt Gang does, and you know that ritual matters. You think: “I could do this too.”
So you do.
Modesty is not a pagan virtue; truth, though, is. Fifty years on, I can say truthfully that I'm one of Pagandom's ace ritualists.