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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What NOT to Do at a Coming-of-Age Ritual

 How to Build 5 Different Types of Campfire

The thing that I remember most was the look of sheer, excruciating boredom on the young woman's face.

 

The secret rites by which the tribe's girls become the tribe's women duly enacted, I was the first man to arrive for the after-party, red-wrapped gift in hand.

When I got there, the women were still sitting in a circle on the floor, talking at—not with—the newest of their number. They thought, I suppose, that they were imparting valuable life-lessons.

Instead—their actions contradicting the supposed effect of the ritual they had just performed—they were treating her like a little kid who has to be told what to do.

 

I don't know how people came to think of a Coming-of-Age ritual as the appropriate time and place to lecture the young on the Weird Ways of Adults.

My guess would be that, somewhere back in the Pagan Dark Ages, when the Old Lore had been lost and well lost, we knew that we had to do something for the occasion, but—lacking real Mysteries—we didn't know what it was.

So we settled for a lecture instead.

Well, the Old Mysteries are back, and then some.

Screw being talked at.

 

First, you undergo the Rite of Passage.

Then you experience at first hand the change of status that the rite accomplished.

What's a sermon got to do with that?

 

When, at this Summer's upcoming ingathering of the Midwest Tribe of Witches, the Rites of Man-Making have been duly enacted for young N, he will sit, for the first time, in the Circle of Men around the fire and, for the first time, speak as a man among men. He will listen, and be heard.

We'll discuss the ritual, of course: its symbolism, its meaning. With the Men's Mysteries so closely guarded by oath, immediately afterward is one of the few times and places when we can openly talk about them, man-on-man.

No doubt we'll talk about sex, as men do. We'll do the age-old things that men have always done when we get together. We'll tell stories from our own lives. In many them, we won't come out looking very well. This will be by design: there's no example quite like negative example.

Life lessons there will surely be imparted, but done as the ancestors did it, as our people have always done it: by story, not by lecture.

We'll laugh, we'll sing: guys, young and old, hanging out together, just as we always have, and always will.

 

We'll have no looks of boredom at this fire. No sir. None.

Hey, pass me that bottle, would you?

 

 

 

 

 

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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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