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Tethys:

The Waters Below

I just paid $100 for a story.

I couldn't be happier.

Let me explain. Pagans tend to be people of stuff. Like so many of us, I'm an avid collector of pagan artifacts. I'd acquired a gilded sterling brooch from a dealer in Tel Aviv. Dating from the 1950s or 60s, it's a reproduction of a Minoan seal depicting a seated female (goddess? priestess? queen?) in a flounced skirt holding a bouquet of poppy heads.

Whenever I acquire something, I always ask about provenance. Where did it come from? Who made it? How did you get it? Who did you get it from?

Because everything is more valuable when it comes with a story.

To this awakening goddess, celebrating holidays has more to do with personal history than traditional roots.  Imbolc, the modern Pagan celebration of an ancient Gaelic festival, means so much more to me now than it did when I first started studying Wicca and Paganism thirteen years ago.

Thirteen years ago, I found a home in Paganism at my very first public ritual, which was a celebration of Imbolc conducted by popular Pagan writer Ann Moura and her Ladies Tea Circle.  I entered my first circle at that festival, and won a raffle for the first time in my life – an amethyst earring and pendant set and an hour-long session with a psychic who would become my mentor on my path to developing my own metaphysical interests and abilities.

So the missionaries want to translate the Bible into Inupiaq.

In Inupiaq, every verb conjugates in one of two modes: what we may call Eyewitness mode and Hearsay mode.

Eyewitness mode conveys highly trustworthy information, because it means that the speaker has witnessed the event herself and can personally vouch for it as a matter of honor, of personal integrity.

Hearsay mode bears much less credibility. This is what I've heard, but I didn't see it myself and so can't personally vouch for its accuracy. It might be true, but it might not.

So the missionaries want to translate the Bible into Inupiaq.

You may not know the story of how Arachne defied the Goddess Athena with the beauty of her weaving, and you may know the story of how Arachne, born again as a mortal woman helped the hero Theseus defeat the Minator. But you probably do not know the tale of what came after.

I only know one person who is an open atheist and I don’t tend to have any opinion when I hear discussions about the existence of god. I’ll confess that I feel somewhat sorry for atheists. I think its kind of sad that they don’t get enough joy and satisfaction out of a religion to justify a bit of faith when needed. Most humans practice religion of some kind. It has been fashionable in the twentieth century to bash religion and declare it one of the major causes of human suffering. My father-in-law was one such. Culturally Jewish, his father fled the Czar when he was found to be a Communist. Harry believed firmly in an afterlife, but he had bad things to say about religion. All while participating in his Jewish community. This might seem a paradox, but it really isn’t. Judaism does not dictate belief, only behavior, and by all means debate away!

I didn’t agree with Harry, although I did agree that there had been religious wars and persecution. Religions must be part of our biology and thus serve us in a survival capacity, otherwise we wouldn’t make so many of them! It comes down to a few simple ideas. Our brains want to create stories about what happens to us. We have a biological need for meaning. (For more on this I recommend the works of Eugene D’Aquili and Andrew Newberg.) What survival need does this serve? It creates hope. Hope allows one to continue in the face of fear, anguish, and physical or emotional pain. Without hope, we are more likely to give up. For our ancestors, giving up would have, more often than not, meant death.