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“So you have answers,” said Dr. Powers, sharply.

“Some, yes,” replied Mrs Oldknow. “Enough to get by with.”

(L. M. Boston, Enemy at Green Knowe)

In the dream, I'm attending a talk on the subject of “First Principles”: the premises, our unproven (and perhaps unprovable) assumptions, from which everything else derives.

The room is crowded, and I'm sitting in the back. I'm interested in the topic, and want to hear what the speaker is saying, but can barely see his face.

One of the speaker's security men is sitting directly across from me. He's very well-built, dressed in a tailored suit: bald, but beautiful as a god. He's staring directly into my eyes.

I can't figure out why. I'm no threat, to the speaker or anyone else. Attraction? I only wish. No one that beautiful would be interested in me.

I smile, embarrassed, and move my gaze to the speaker.

First Principles: the premises, the unproven (and perhaps unprovable) assumptions from which everything else derives.

What are mine?

Earth is Goddess.

This is primary, irreducible, the source of all values.

Unicorns Will Always be Easier

Back when I first got to town, the Rowan Tree Mystery School was one of the big players on the local pagan scene. I myself never joined, but a number of good friends were committed members.

As part of their magical training, each student was expected to keep, in effect, an astral familiar: a unicorn, a dragon, a griffin. I'll admit, this always twisted my nuts the wrong way.

What's wrong with real animals? I wondered. If you're going to cultivate a relationship with an animal, why not Buffalo, or Groundhog, or Deer?

Why not real animals: animals that shit, and piss, and stink? Animals that we have to watch and study long to understand? Animals with wills and lives and ways of their own, animals that won't do what we want them to?

Unicorns will always be easier.

The Barrow-Wights Are Angry

A local high [sic] priestess had a mission. The barrow-wights were angry, you see, and it was her job to—I suppose—mollify them.

Well. This is Minnesota, and there are lots of mounds here. There are people in many of those mounds, the ancestors in the Land.

Seeing what has become of the Land, I could well understand that they might be angry. Well do we, the Younger Sibs, new in the Land, need to make our peace with the Land, and with the First Peoples of this Land: with what has been done, and with our role in that doing. Well might the barrow-wights be angry.

But no high priestess, however powerful, can do that work for me.

That work I need to do for myself.

Pagans in Exile

“Why isn't the Earth enough?”

(Mark Green)

I once spoke with mythologist Joseph Campbell. After his talk, I asked him a question: “Do we, then, need to return to the Earth?”

I had intended my question—not, perhaps, as felicitously phrased as it might have been—seriously. The West is in spiritual crisis, granted; how, then, do we best address ourselves to this problem? Is the sacrality of Earth not central, both to this problem, and to its solution?

Campbell, though, who had his own story to sell [sic]—the Hero's Journey—blew it off.

You can tell you're entering a temple by the shoes.

Men's shoes, women's shoes. Adult shoes, children's shoes. Sandals, brogues, sneakers: even a few dress boots. All scattered, higgledy-piggledy, across the floor of the entryway. Metaphor meets reality: to reach the holy, you have to dodge the profane.

In a standing temple, the doorway would be lined with wooden shelves to hold the shoes, but this is a temporary temple: a Lutheran church lent (with a generosity and hospitality that I find, in this time of bitter division, deeply moving) to the local Hindus for their holiday celebration.

(Back in the old country, there would be a mosquito-cloud of shoe-wallahs hovering around the door: young boys who, for a small consideration, will guarantee that your shoes are still there waiting for you at your worship's end. Here in well-fed America—let us acknowledge the fact with all due gratitude— they're not needed.)

For some, taking off your shoes before you enter a holy place might be about cleanness and uncleanness—think “ritually fit” if that language makes you uncomfortable—but for me, it's a simple matter of touch. For me, a pagan—a guest at a sister community's celebration—Earth, the ground of all being, is also the source of all sanctity, and shoes come between us and her.

After the midnight worship, my friend and host—himself a temple member—retrieve, on our way out, the sandals that we'd earlier left in a corner.

(Having arrived early to help with set-up, we'd managed that prime stashing-place; we'd kicked them off because those fortunate enough to carry the god-images to the altar need to be barefoot. The pujari—priest—preceded the god each time, ringing tiny cymbals and chanting a praise-song as we went. Music accompanies gods wherever they go.)

On a walk with our coven kid, I spy the waxing Moon, pale in the eastern sky.

“There's our Moon!” I hear myself saying.

Now, that's probably not what most people would have said in the circumstance. (I'd expect something along the lines of “There's the Moon,” instead.) But we're pagans.

We're pagans, children of Earth, and the “our” here is not so much a language of ownership as of relationship, as in “our sister” or “our mother.”

What we say, of course, is no less than truth. The Moon, after all, does indeed, in a special way, belong to us—see above—just as we belong to (as we would say it) her.

As for those others, the Motherless, well...she's their Moon too.

Back in high school, a non-pagan friend and I were discussing the winter holidays.

“But we have Solstice, too,” he contended, meaning non-pagans.

Well, in the sense that the Solstice happens whether or not you pay attention to it, I suppose that they do.

But here's my question. The Sun, the Earth: are these (so to speak) just people that you walk past in the street every day without really noticing, or are they People that you actually know and engage with?

As I write, we're nearing the end of the Samhain Thirtnight. Every morning—I'm awake then, I actually see it—the Sun rises a little later, a little farther South. Every day, he goes a little farther away, and we see that much less of him.

I don't know about you, and I don't know about non-pagans, but personally I feel that that fact somehow involves me.

It all begins with Earth.

Recently, at the Summerland Spirit gathering, I spent a day in walking meditation, fasting, naked, covered with ash. I'd suspected beforehand that I might be bored. Nothing could have been further from the truth. That day was the busiest I've spent in a long time. They say that the naked ascetic sitting beneath the tree has fought and won more battles than the bravest warrior.

So there I was, sitting under a white oak in the mid-afternoon heat, reeling with the concept: Goddess Earth.

Loads of earthy, Gaian stories today: ancient trees, blackberry wisdom, saving predators and pondering the vegan/carnivore ecological conundrum. Check them out below.

A yew tree in the corner of a Welsh churchyard is said to be 5,000 years old. Our Neolithic ancestors were as fascinated by it as we are.