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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in ukraine

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

Yeah, yeah: robins, daffodils, blue skies.

Let us consider those other signs of Spring.

 

Potholes.

That metallic shriek from under your car is probably the sound of your axle breaking. Spring's freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw cycle wreaks havoc on the streets, which in turn wreak havoc on your undercarriage, not to mention your dental work.

Freezing Rain.

And you thought snow was bad? Ha! Talk about misery, danger? Baby, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Glacial Lakes.

Yes, the snow is melting, but—the ground being still frozen—there's nowhere for the meltwater to go. So it pools.

Better leave some extra time to get wherever you're going. Once you factor in the time needed for portage, you may just be doubling your trip.

Refreeze.

By day, a glacial lake; by night, a skating rink.

Better practice your falling skills, mate. Believe me, you're going to need them.

Mud.

Once the ground actually does begin to thaw, it softens. Welcome to Quagmire Season!

Among other reasons, Putin's 40-mile road-jam is stalled north of Kyiv because it has to stay on the road. It's rásputitsa season in Ukraine, the mud-time, which means that you might as well stay at home. Once a tank sinks into the mud, you'll never get it out again.

Mat' sira Zemlya, Moist Mother Earth, fights back.

Flotsam and Jetsam.

The receding high tide of Winter leaves behind it six month's worth of accumulated detritus: beer cans, syringes, potato chip bags. The occasional gritty quarter is the best you can hope for.

The Dog Shit Miasma.

A plague on irresponsible dog-walkers. Nothing says early Spring in a Northern city quite like that whiff of canine waste that hits you every time you step out the front door: six months' worth, all thawing at once. Hoo-ha.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

My son, the Church is always on the side of the powerful.”

(Werner Herzog, Aguirre: Wrath of God)

 

If I were patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, right now I would be threatening Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin with excommunication.

But of course, I'm not patriarch of anything: I'm just a gay warlock from Paganistan.

(Gods, who is this guy? Who could possibly take someone like that seriously?)

Check out ROC Patriarch Kirill's flaccid response to Putin's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

He's sorry that people are suffering. He hopes that civilian casualties can be avoided. He prays for peace in Ukraine.

Note what he doesn't say: That the war is wrong. That the war is unchristian. That the war needs to end.

Let me tell you the back story.

For the last 300 years, ecclesiastical affairs in Ukraine have been lorded over by the Russian Orthodox Church. Three years ago, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was granted autocephaly (essentially, jurisdictional independence) by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, the Orthodox not-quite-pope; to date, thousands of churches in Ukraine have transferred their allegiance (and property) from the Moscow to the Kyiv patriarchates.

Needless to say, the ROC was pretty unhappy with this state of affairs. In a nutshell, Kirill backs Putin's rape of Ukraine because he sees it as a way of getting back the property and power that he regards as rightfully his own. Essentially, he's Putin in a golden omofór.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 Putin voodoo doll seeking donations on Kickstarter | Euromaidan Press

 Some Thoughts on Image Magic

 

I don't know any Ukrainian witches personally, but of two things we can be absolutely certain.

First, that there are witches in Ukraine. There are witches everywhere.

Second, that they're making very good use of all those little Putin dolls.

 

Here in the US we tend to speak of magical images as “Voodoo dolls,” but of course the Craft has its own traditional terminology for this very venerable magical technology. In the language of Witchcraft, we generally speak of mommets and poppets.

(Quick: Name a famous 60s Witches-and-Warlocks singing group.)

Though the terms sound similar, and (these days, at least) tend to be used synonymously, they have very different origins.

A poppet is a magical image, a puppet a plaything, but the historical relationship between the two is obvious. Both are diminutives, from the Norman French word poupette, a small child or doll (cp. modern French poupée, “doll”), ultimately (via “Vulgar” Latin) from the Latin pupa, “girl, doll.”

Interestingly—pins notwithstanding—witches (especially British ones) sometimes use “poppet” as a term of affection for a small child. Witches are strange people.

Mommet, on the other hand, has a rather more sinister history. Interestingly, the word derives from Muhammad, the name of the Muslim uber-prophet.

Islamophobia is nothing new in the West. (Considering the nasty history of Islam, and the endemic sibling-rivalry of the two big Abrahamic imperialist superpowers down the centuries, that's hardly surprising.) Medieval Christians and Muslims were wont to diss each other as pagans (remember paynim?), and to characterize one another as idolaters. So a mommet (or maumet) is an idol, an image, a false god. Maumetry meant “idolatry”.

Of course, these days witches mostly don't use mommets for worship.

If we had to make a distinction between mommets and poppets, one might suggest—counter-intuitively, one might think—that poppets are female magical images, mommets male ones.

As I'm sure I don't need to tell you, the Craft has its own warped sense of humor.

 

In Terry Pratchett's Witches Abroad, arch-witch Nanny Ogg meets up with Mrs. Gogol, the Voodoo lady. An interesting dialogue ensues.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

Those who have been following Russian strongman Putin's rape of Ukraine will be familiar with the sign of the tryzhub (“trident”), the national symbol of Ukraine.

It is the symbol of Perun, the Slavic Thunderer.

Around 820, the people of Kyiv (KEE-yiv; in Russian, Kiev) invited Rurik (Norse Roerekr), Varangian prince of Novogorod, to rule their city. He accepted their offer, and his descendants, called the Rurikids, ruled there for more than 400 years. The tryzhub was their family crest.

 

Though Rurik was himself a Christian, his Norse forebears had been worshipers of Thor, known to the Slavs among whom they settled as Perun.

Compare the tryzhub with the keraunos (“thunderbolt”) in the hand of Zeus on this Archaic vase:

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Seems like every ancient people had their own name for Thunder. I'll have to take a look at Qos' iconography.
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I've seen depictions of the Edomite god Qos holding something that could be a thunderbolt or a grapevine. I've read that the Roma

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

Pit Vipers Can 'See' You, Even in the Dark | HowStuffWorks

 

Watching the unfolding of Putin's bold-faced invasion of Ukraine this past week and more, I could hardly help but ask myself: in a like situation, what would I do?

Would I flee? Would I stay and fight? If so, how? I've never been trained to weapons. I've never even fired a gun, or wanted to. The gods help those now faced with such cruel decisions.

No one doubts that the land war in Ukraine won't last long. What then?

In the media today I've been hearing much of insurgency: the war after the war. Witches understand insurgency. We should: we've been fighting a spiritual insurgency for hundreds of years now. The Witch's Way is naturally insurgent.

Witches are mostly not ones for frontal attack, for overwhelming force. Witchery tends to act by indirection: over, under, and around are our ways.

I think of the words of Old Woman to Artos the Bear: We are the viper that stings in the dark.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 File:Put ratnika by Andrey Shishkin.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

In Andrei Shishkin's neo-Romantic painting Put' Ratnika, “The Way of the Warrior,” a youthful blonde soldier in camo fatigues, with backpack and a machine gun slung over his shoulder, stands on the edge of a stone circle gazing—respectfully, one gathers, to judge from his removed helmet—upon the statue-menhir of an ancient Slavic god.

The god is himself a warrior, with helm and sword. Before him burns a sacrificial fire; behind him, a cloudy army rides across the sky.

 

As Mariya Lesiv describes in her 2013 book The Return of Ancestral Gods, contemporary paganism in post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine tends to be characterized by both a profound social conservatism and a pronounced nationalistic character. In the ongoing Russian-backed war in Donbas—the two break-away provinces in south-eastern Ukraine where fighting has continued since 2014—there has been a noteworthy pagan presence on both sides of the conflict, including one all-pagan battalion named for Svarog, the ancient pan-Slavic god of Fire. To judge from the kolovrat patch on his shoulder, Shishkin's soldier may be a member of one such. Perhaps we are to understand that it is he who has lit the sacrificial fire.

If Russian President Vladimir Putin goes through with his proposed invasion and annexation of Ukraine, we can be sure that there will be pagans fighting among both the invading and the defending forces.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

In Which Our Intrepid Blogger Ties a Knot in Putin's Dick

 

Magic has always been the power of the powerless.”

(Bruner Soderberg)

 

Gods: where is a suicide bomber when you need one?

In the technical language of magic, a ligature is a spell of binding: in particular, the binding of a man's sexual potency.

(Whether or not there exists a female equivalent, I don't know. Reply hazy, try again later.)

To ligate is to tie off with a ligature; the act itself is ligation. Ligature refers specifically to the cord with which one does the binding. The word comes from Latin: perhaps the Red Crests, themselves no mean imperialists, were especially adept at this particular magical technique.

I suppose that, in a way, it's consoling to be reminded that, when it comes to politics, Americans have no corner on either narcissism or stupidity. (Even considering Putin's longstanding inferiority complex vis à vis the West, though, outsmarting the Trumpster is still a pretty low bar of achievement.)

Still, when it comes to despicable, you've got to admit that Vovchik's right up there with the Donny-boy himself. A man who stoops to poisoning his enemies really can't sink much lower.

Compared to cowardice like that, what is an act of magic? Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, man without honor, I tie a knot in your dick.

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