Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth

In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.

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Steven Posch

Steven Posch

Poet, scholar and storyteller Steven Posch was raised in the hardwood forests of western Pennsylvania by white-tailed deer. (That's the story, anyway.) He emigrated to Paganistan in 1979 and by sheer dint of personality has become one of Lake Country's foremost men-in-black. He is current keeper of the Minnesota Ooser.

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 Alpine Strawberry Ali Baba

“Heart berries,” the Anishinabe (= “Ojibwe”) call them.

Don't get me wrong, now: I like commercial strawberries just fine, while acknowledging that, eating them, we're essentially eating petroleum. In fact, I'm grateful for them and—the day is coming, let us admit it the now—when they're gone.

But make no mistake: they're ciphers, no more, standing in for the real thing.

Until a friend recently gifted me with a bag of local strawberries, I'd forgotten just how very good they really are.

They're tiny, real strawberries, especially compared to those styrofoam monsters from the supermarket that you could carve a jack o' lantern from, that seem to get bigger and more flavorless every year. Our local berries, by contrast, are small: the very largest, maybe the size of your thumbnail.

Oh, but all that flavor packed into just one.

It doesn't get much more sensual than real strawberries. These, after all, are strawberries that you have to suck.

 

How to Eat a Real Strawberry

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File:Flag of a United States Foreign Service Officer.svg - Wikimedia Commons

 

A Thought Experiment

 

Were there witches of our kind—people of the old ways—in the Thirteen Colonies?

Objectively speaking, probably not. (Still: a circle of thirteen stars, you say.)

But say there were. For the sake of story, let us just say that there were.

What would they have been like, those witches of the Revolution?

 

Fleeing the witch-hunts, we came. Seeking the freedom She promised our people, we came.

Forests like we had never seen before: vast, unending. And in them...Him, Him of Hoof and Horn. Him Whom we know too well to fear, already here. (Is He not everywhere?) Here and waiting. Waiting for His people.

“You shall be free,” He told us.

Here in the woods of the “New” World, we were.

 

What were we like, then, our people? How did we live? Did we know of others of our kind? Did out-folk talk of witchcraft also reassure—"There are others of us!"—as well as put on us the old fear?

How did we fare with those who were here before us? Were we, being ourselves an old folk, thereby the better able to know, to listen, to learn?

Did we not learn the New Land? Did we not learn the plants and animals, the ways and names?

Did we not learn the new ways, along with the old?

 

When Revolution came, where did we stand? What role, then, did we play?

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Interesting Writing Assignment

 

Well, now: there's an interesting writing assignment.

A brief autobiography for a forthcoming volume about pagan elders.

Flattering to be asked, of course. Everyone's favorite subject: me, me, me.

Still, there are good bios and bad bios. What makes one biography worth the reading—memorable even—and another not?

 

The Life and Times of Lord Moonwhistle

 

“Lord Moonwhistle was born in Peoria in 1942 and graduated from Hot Springs High School in 1960.”

Gee: do you want to read more of that? No, of course you don't.

What makes the story of a life worth reading? Not just the facts, oh no my precious.

What you want is a story.

You want a story that gives you a sense of encounter with someone else. You want a story that amuses, entertains, and is about something larger than just another person and their experiences.

Really, what you want is myth.

 

My Big, Fat Pagan Career

 

So I wrote a biography. I started by leaving a lot out.

For the biography of a pagan elder, non-pagan data can be of only tangential interest, insofar as it relates to the life's larger pagan trajectory. So you won't learn much about my career(s), degrees (or lack thereof), or relationships. Those things all happened, and they're all of formative importance, but not here.

Stylistics: I decided to go with third, rather than first, person narrative. When someone is the hero of all his own stories, I usually think: Gods, what a stuck-up jerk. (Cp. AC's "autohagiography.") Somehow or other, a “he” narrative sounds more objective than an “I” narrative.

Yes, it's all smoke and mirrors—in effect, a con job—but that's show bizz, folks.

What you will learn about is my pagan career.

That's way more pertinent than all that other (secular) stuff.

 

A Good Biography Is Like a Necklace”

 

Surely a good biography is like a necklace: not just a collection of beads, but of beads arranged into a larger whole.

What we have a right to expect from a good pagan bio:

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I've heard that warriors, charging into battle, get erections.

I wonder if it's true.

Being myself a bard rather than a warrior, I have no personal experience of the matter. Knowing my own unpredictable man's body, though, with a mind (not to mention a sense of humor) of its own, I could well believe it.

Ah, the mysteries of male physiology.

Now, erections are about lots of things—ask any guy waking up in the morning or (again, reportedly) hanged man*—and sex is only one.

But if this nugget of received wisdom is actually trustworthy, I could well understand why the Redcrest legions so feared the skyclad charges of Celtdom.

After all, it's kind of hard not to take an erection personally.

Not to mention the fact that a bobbing boner pointing in your general direction tends to be rather, er, distracting. Charging into battle against a naked, shrieking, woad-stained enemy with a sharp sword in his hand is decidedly not a good time to go losing your focus.

I don't personally know many warriors—in fact, I can't think of any—who have experienced the kind of face-to-face combat that the ancestors did, so there's no one of my acquaintance that I can ask directly. If there's a way to web-search this topic without first getting directed to every porn site on the planet—and believe me, I really don't want to go there—I have yet to find it.

(Porn sites carry lots of computer cooties, and besides, who's going to trust a porn site for information of any kind?)

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 Words Before a Skyclad Ritual

 

First skyclad ritual? Nervous?

I remember mine. Twenty years old, all jacked up on hormones and excitement. Oh, I was so afraid I was going to...um, embarrass myself.

I didn't. Nobody ever does. I've been to a lot of initiations over the years, and I've never known it to happen. It doesn't happen, because that's really not what's going on here.

And even if it did, this is a men's ritual. Every single guy down there has an unpredictable male body of his own, with a mind, and sense of humor, of its own.

Believe me, we know all about it. If anything, we'd read it as an omen. A good omen.

Funny thing about skyclad: it's only an issue before you've actually done it. Once you have, everything changes. The world changes.

No, seriously. I'm going to make a prediction here. At some point this evening, you're suddenly going to come to, and you'll think to yourself: Holy shite! Here I am, butt naked in the forest with a bunch of other guys, and I'd completely forgotten that I'm naked!

That's Her gift to Her children. That's why we do it. Well, one reason, anyway. This first time is important because it teaches you things about yourself that you'll never learn in any other way.

Once you've seen that power of the mind—years of arbitrary social inhibitions, gone like that—you can't help but wonder: If it can do that, then what else can it do?

That's where witching begins.

So, here are a towel and a bag. Take them up to the bathhouse.

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First off, congratulations on the publication of The Book of Cernunnos, a devotional volume dedicated to the Gaulish god of the same name. Why the specific focus on one particular god from one particular time and place rather than, say, on the Horned God more generally?

Rick Derks put a very nice devotional anthology together on the Horned God (Hoofprints in the Wildwood – 2011) and Jason Mankey has his book on The Horned God of the Witches. But no one has – to the best of our knowledge, anyway – ever done a book for Cernunnos. Jason and I are both devotees of Cernunnos, and a few years ago we decided that with all the devotional anthologies in the world, it was time Cernunnos had His own.

 

 

What makes Cernunnos so perennially popular among modern pagans?

He is a God of the Wild, a God of Nature, in a time when Nature is both under attack and fighting back. Cernunnos reminds us that for as far as we’ve come in the past 10,000 years of civilization, we lived on the edge of the wild for between ten and twenty times as long. We still need the wild – Cernunnos is a connection to the wild.

 

So, you're a Cernunnos guy yourself?

Yes. I feel like He’s been around me my whole life, but especially since I first encountered him in a “drawing down” ritual in 2006. I took priestly vows a year later, and He’s been an active part of my life ever since.

 

If you could ask an ancient Gaulish priest just one question about Cernunnos, what would it be?

I would ask the most vague and open-ended question I could, to try to get as much information from the priest as possible. I’d probably lead with “who is Cernunnos?”

 

Me, I'd want a story.

Iconography apart, we know virtually nothing about the Gaulish Antlered God: no hymns, no rituals, no mythology have survived. (We don't even know, for instance, if he had a Partner.) Does this present a danger for the modern pagan: the danger of projecting what we want to see onto a vague but attractive ancient template?

On one hand, yes. On the other hand, we in this time and place are simply doing what our ancestors did centuries ago: interpreting our experiences and comparing them to the experiences of others, to try to paint a broader picture of this person we’re encountering. For a God with no established lore, that’s the only way begin.

The Gods can speak to us just as They spoke to our ancestors.

 

Gods, don't they just? Would an ancient Gaul recognize the Cernunnos of this anthology?

We have no way of answering that question. I suspect they would find some things familiar and other things not.

 

Fair enough. What surprised you most in pulling this anthology together?

Just how broad and varied people’s experiences of Cernunnos have been. And yet, as different as they are, you can see the common threads running between them. Cernunnos may present Himself to different people in different ways, but it’s still Cernunnos.

 

What did assembling the anthology teach you about Him of the Torc?

Patience and determination… as befits such a very old, very primal deity. This project took far longer to complete than we ever expected, and there were multiple places where we considered dropping it. But His message was always “just keep moving forward.” So we did, and now the book is complete.

 

OK, big theological question: is the Gaulish Cernunnos qua Gaulish Cernunnos an entity discreet from the horned gods of other times and places--Pan, say, or the God of the Witches? If not, what is their relation to one another?

I am a hard polytheist – my answer to that question is “yes”. My default position is that different Gods are different persons, unless there’s a good reason to suspect they’re the same person known by a different name in a different place. To address your specific example, Cernunnos is clearly not Pan.

 

Is there a moral side to the Gaulish Cernunnos? Does he have any ethical implications?

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In the dream, I am standing with a Chinese family before their household shrine.

Beautifully carved in wood, the shrine is elaborate, immense: it takes up an entire wall of the house.

The gates of the central niche are opened. Behind them stands a finely-rendered wooden statue of Kwan Yin.

Kwan Yin is removed. Behind her stand yet another pair of gates. They open, revealing several painted panels depicting colorful female figures that I cannot identify.

“Pagan goddesses!” cries a woman's voice, as if horrified that such figures should stand behind the boddhisattva.

Now the painted goddesses, too, are removed. Behind them stand yet another pair of gates. These, in turn, open.

An outdoor light shines through. The niche has become a doorway.

Through the open doorway, a long landscape spreads out before our eyes: mountains, valleys, rivers, in unending vista, stretching out to a blue and misty horizon.

Behind Kwan Yin, the goddesses. Behind the goddesses, the Land.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    "The weeds will inherit the Earth."
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    "Behind Kwan Yin, the goddesses. Behind the goddesses, the Land." I like that. I look out my window and see my garden. The weeds

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