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.
The Great Remembering
“The Khazí is the guardian of the legends. With his songs and his stories he reminds us all who we are and where we come from.” (Saifullah Jan, of Khazi Khoshnawaz)
Paganism is a matter of remembering.
We are pagan because we remember.
For a long, long time we forgot who we are. We forgot who our people are. We forgot what our people do. We forgot our stories, our songs, our rituals. We even forgot our gods.
It was a time of forgetting, the time between the Old Paganisms and the New. You could call it the Great Interruption. You could call it the Great Forgetting.
But we are still here, no different than we were before. We have not gone away, we have only forgotten.
And now we remember, who live in a time of remembering.
You could call it the Great Remembering.
Khazi Khoshnawaz is the greatest living lore-master of Pakistan's Kalasha people, the only remaining Indo-European people who have continuously practiced their traditional religion since antiquity.
Jonny Bealby (1998), For a Pagan Song: Travels in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. London: Heineman.
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