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When the Viking chieftain Guthorm (“Battle Dragon”) was poised to invade England, the English king called up an ill-equipped army to counter him.

Being a pious Christian, the king also assembled a vast number of priests and monks to pray for victory. Guthorm's first move in battle was to kill every single one of them.

“Oh, the perfidious barbarians!” cried the Christians. “Massacring the defenseless men of peace!”

When told of this complaint, Guthorm grinned.

None of the ancient pagan languages with which I'm familiar had a word for 'amen', but after a thousand-some years of Christianity here in the West, we've gotten used to having one. So it's well worth asking: How do you say 'amen' in Pagan?

Amen. Yes, Robert Graves uses it to end a prayer in Seven Days in New Crete, his dystopian novel of the Goddess-worshiping future, but otherwise—so far as I can tell—there's consensus across Pagandom that we need a term of our own. (Consensus among pagans. Fancy that.)

So Be It. Well, if you must. Colorful, though, it isn't. Sorry, folks, I think we can do better than this.

Ho! No. No. No, no, no. Ripping off a Lakota verbal affirmation is not the direction we want to take here. As pagans, First Nations/Indigenous people are our spirit-kin. We are the last people that should be pillaging Native culture of anything. Learn from Native people, yes. Be informed by Native people, yes. Steal from Native people, no.

Blessed Be. I've met a number of Wiccans who use 'Blessed Be' as other folks use 'Amen'. Well, OK, but it seems to me that this phrase already means so many other things in the context of Wiccan culture—Hello and Good-bye among them—that it might be nice to have something a little more, shall we say, situationally specific.

So Mote It Be. First off, some back-story. Gerald Gardner took the term from the vocabulary of Masonry, which uses it pretty much as Wicca does: as an emphatic phrase of final affirmation. Think of it as a verbal capstone, or seal.

Yes, it's Wiccan, right out of the B of S. I know non-Wiccans who eschew the term for this very reason. Here's what I like about 'So mote it be'.

Lesson 1

“What a beautiful [blowing] horn,” I say.

It was, and my friend's wife, to whom the horn belonged, told me the story.

She had raised the cow herself from a calf. After a long, productive life, the cow—I can't remember her name anymore—was happily grazing in the pasture one sunny day when...

“...Thor took her,” she said.

Translation: “The cow was struck by lightning.”

That's how you think in Pagan.

Up in northern Minnesota's Lake Country, a young girl disappeared and was never found.

“They say the lake took her,” her mother told authorities. “I don't believe it.”

Translation: “The girl drowned.”

That's how you think in Pagan.

Extract from the article “Bealtaine Rite” in The Waxing Moon, Bealtaine 1977

We met one day in May when the Moon told us it was right.

Translation: “We held our Bealtaine ritual during the Waxing Moon of May (because the waxing of the Moon mirrors the waxing of the Year).”

That's how you think 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.