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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in cowans

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Confessions of a Pagan Triumphalist

Yes, I'm a pagan triumphalist.

I believe that the ways of Abraham are an anomaly in the history of human religion.

I believe that eventually we will simply reabsorb them, as Hinduism reabsorbed Buddhism.

I believe that their envisioned apocalypses predict nothing but their own eventual demise.

I believe that everyone is born pagan. Anything else, you have to be made into.

I believe that paganism is intrinsic to humanity.

I believe that (unlike the rest) paganism is natural.

I believe that paganism is inherent.

I believe that paganism is instinctive.

I believe that paganism grows from the Earth like a tree.

I believe that paganism inheres in existence.

I believe that, where there is intelligent life, there is—and will always be—paganism.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Do Witches Throw Rice at Weddings?

Do witches throw rice at weddings?

Seriously? You are actually asking me if witches throw rice at weddings?

For gods' sakes. What kind of cowanish question is that?

Of course we don't throw rice at weddings.

(“Do witches throw rice at weddings?" Ye gods.)

Cowans throw rice at weddings.

When it comes to weddings, witches don't hold with anything so newfangled as rice.

Witches hold to the Old Ways.

What's the oldest grain? Barley. Barley, which, in the dawning of days, the Mother gave to our people to be our food forever.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
The Danger of Thinking in Pagan

the guests had one month fewer

they do not speak the language of nature

(Saami poet Nils-Aslak Valkeapää)

 

Och, maybe I've just gone too far into the mists.

Cowans just don't make sense any more.

I find that I can't even bring myself to write (or say) “God”—with a capital G, like a name—as cowans do, without the quotation marks. The way that they use the word is wholly a misuse, a misconstrual, of an old word, a fine word, our word, which never meant, nor means, nor can mean anything even vaguely resembling what they mean by it.

That's the problem of thinking in Pagan. Once you start to do it, it makes so much sense that, in time, nothing else does.

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Recent comment in this post - Show all comments
  • M.T. Noah
    M.T. Noah says #
    i can't say i'm a decades long person in this fold. but i can't say i'm not. the 1/2 trained grandchild of someone who also cann
In Which Our Intrepid Blogger Reviews a Book on a (Gasp!) Non-Pagan Subject

This is Not the Resurrection You're Looking For

 

Resurrecting Easter would be a better book if it knew what it wanted to be. Art history? A husband-wife travelogue? A mystery novel à la Da Vinci Code?

Unfortunately, it never manages to decide.

In it, Jesus Seminar rockstar John Dominic Crossan and his wife Sarah travel (literally) to the ends of Christendom to tell the story of the emergence of the iconography of the Resurrection. He writes, she takes the pictures.

This important topic has received surprisingly little attention from art historians. Apart from Anna Kartsonis' magisterial 1988 Anastasis: The Making of an Image, there are virtually no monographs on the subject. The Phaidon Press series of anthologies on the art of Holy Week—Last Supper, Crucifixion, and Descent (i.e. deposition from the cross)—does not, surprisingly, devote a volume to the art of the Resurrection. Somehow, when it comes to art history, it's always Nativity, never Pascha.

So I praise the Crossans for perceiving this lack and attempting to address it. It's a pity they couldn't do so more successfully.

Oh, they do manage to chronicle the emergence and development of Christendom's two major visual representations of the Resurrection, with some attention to various dead ends and roads-not-taken along the way. Unfortunately, the art-historical material is interspersed almost randomly with pointless tales from their travels, including local-color details about what time they caught the cab and what T-shirt the driver was wearing. The quest—and narrative—are driven by forced cliff-hanger questions about the iconography (“What happens to the universal resurrection tradition in Eastern Christianity during that same fateful period?”) that are meant to seem urgent but mostly fall flat.

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  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I can go onto Bing images and type in resurrection to get a whole bunch of pictures. If I haven't run out of ink in my printer I
An Open Letter to the Editor of 'City Pages'

Dear Editor,

This concerning your coverage of Paganicon 2018 (“The Twin Cities—AKA Paganistan—Will Host a World Gathering of Witches”).

In the vocabulary of modern Witches, the word cowan (rhymes with plowin') refers to a non-Witch. It is not necessarily a derogatory term.

Not necessarily.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Thirteen Surprising Facts About Cowans

Cowans are not all alike.

There are Protestant cowans, Shi'ite cowans, Hasidic cowans....

Cowans are not necessarily anti-pagan.

Some cowans actually like pagans.

Cowans don't all look alike.

Next time you're with a group of cowans, take a really close look. You'll be amazed!

Cowanism is not a single religion.

In fact, there are many different forms of cowanism.

Many cowans find the term “neo-cowan” deeply offensive.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Brand Spanking New

Brand spanking new.

A curious expression, certainly: what does one have to do with the other?

In fact, it's birth imagery. Birth imagery? you might think.

Ah, but this was birth the cowan way.

Back in the Bad Old Days of the Cowan Era (CE), it was customary to hold newborn babies upside-down by their feet and give them a good, solid swat on the behind. Supposedly, this was to get the newborn to take its first breath.

In fact, of course, most newborns breathe automatically, and for those that don't, there are much less violent methods available.

But for cowans, the gesture held deep meaning. At the very moment of birth, it subjected the newly-born to the life of indignity, violence, and subjugation that most people then could expect to live.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Anne Newkirk Niven
    Anne Newkirk Niven says #
    I delivered all three of my boys at home with a midwife, and believe me, there was no spanking involved! It hadn't occurred to me
  • nolongerhere
    nolongerhere says #
    Unfortunately, Steven, it hasn't. Not if you enter a typical maternity ward rather than a birth center. I deeply appreciate your a

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