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How do you join yourself to a people?

In the dream, I am leaving home, going to fight in Ukraine. In dedication, I carve a piece of flesh from my right calf, about the length and volume of a finger.

I vow to Tue, old Sky Father, lord of battles, to make this people my people, and this fight my fight.

I take the all-seeing Sun, guarantor of agreements, to be my witness.

***

In waking life, of course, I do nothing of the sort. Instead, from the safety of another continent—from the middle of the continent, no less—I sit and write, torn in spirit, shaken by a war in which I have no part.

***

In the Old North, war was a religious affair.

Before a campaign, a departing army would first gather for the hosting-sacrifice. Sprinkled—literally, blessed—with the blood of the sacrificial victim, they would bind themselves with a hold-oath to fight as one, laying aside all other feuds and grievances for the duration.

***

I once lost a friend to victimhood.

He had embraced victimhood as an identity. There were no oppressed in whom he could not see himself. “I wonder which oppressed group Tom has decided to identify with this week,” a mutual friend once commented archly.

In the end, weary of being cast as eternal oppressor to his eternal victim, I walked away from the friendship.

In sorrow, I walked away.

***

Gods, it's like watching a rape that I'm powerless to stop. I can't bring myself to look away, but the very act of looking seems in itself unclean, an act of complicity.

I feel like a war voyeur.

Putin's invasion of Ukraine has become a hideous kind of live entertainment as we watch it play out in real-time. Somehow my obsessive interest in what's happening seems to me prurient, ghoulish even. Something Nascar-ish is happening here: you don't really want wrecks, but the potential smell of blood has its own allure. In candor, the wrecks are the draw.

Well, war is interesting: a terrible truth, but a truth nonetheless. I think of the Iliad, the Mahabharata, the Táin, those culturally-foundational war epics. War is reality of the most extreme sort.

From the safety of somewhere else, I watch the suffering of others with fascinated horror. Try as I might, I feel myself in a state of perpetual uncleanness. How do I dare make offerings, do the sacred and necessary work, in such a state of mental impurity?

Yet the sacred work must still be done: without it, the world would fail. Better an imperfect offering than no offering at all. I turn off the radio, take a deep breath, wash my hands, and do my best to clear my mind as I enter the temple to make the morning offering.

[Note: I wrote this several years ago before i knew much about trans people. please forgive the narrow focus.]

It’s August, it’s hot, and I’m pissed. Regrettably, only the first two are seasonal.

This and my previous essay explain how we can better understand the dangers and benefits of power by combining both secular and esoteric traditions. Part one explored power’s nature, and why power is both necessary and often destructively addictive. It also laid the foundation for an esoteric understanding of power by developing a model of thought forms.  I made the case for their reality once views shared widely within the Pagan community are taken seriously.  This present essay explores Power as a thought form deeply destructive to human well-being – and what we can do about it. 

power and Power

One of the reasons so may thoughtful people -- including quite a few Pagans -- are reticent to use money money is because it's such an effective tool of war.  Money can be used to house, equip, and pay military personnel; it's also the primary weapon of economic sanctions and in trade wars.  Could there be war without money?  Of course.  A more hopeful question to ask is, "Can there be money without war?"

What makes money so powerful and so dangerous is the fact that it can be wielded by anyone, for any purpose.  Indeed, the world we live in was largely shaped by our collective-yet-undirected use of money.  When we spend to fill a desire, but not with a spiritual intent, the results we seek are often tied to consequences long after the fact.

For this week, I pose the query:  how is our relationship with money influenced by our relationship with war?

It's not an easy one to consider for Pagans.  Some of us are devoted to gods of war, or otherwise acknowledge it as a fact of life, but many others work relentlessly for peace on this planet.  My own relationship with war is complicated:  my family was supported by work at a defense contractor when I was a child, so the Cold War put food on our table.  I consider myself a proponent of peace, but I have a relationship with Ares.  I also believe that population reduction is the only solution for the many problems facing humanity and the Earth, but no one has come up with a way to make that happen which is nearly as thorough as the horrors of war.

Sobering food for thought -

I have always rejected the idea that TV, movies, video games and other forms of entertainment media cause us to become more violent.  I believe that we can face imaginary scenarios without attaching ourselves to them and examine hypothetical situations in ways that encourage us to think.