“They don't remember very much about their god.”

That was the phrase that leapt out at me.

I'm a gangly teenager in the family room of our home on the southern shores of Lake Erie, reading for the first time—with mounting excitement—Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today.

“They don't remember very much about their god.”

As if in the voice of an anthropologist observing from outside, Gardner is describing the beliefs of the witches of the New Forest.

How can you not know much about the god you worship? I think, with adolescent arrogance.

Naturally, I wanted to know more.

Now, just how much any human can be said to know about any god remains, of course, an operative theological—or perhaps epistemological—question. Rhetorically, Gardner's observation very cleverly turns a defect into an advantage. “They've been around for so long that they've forgotten much,” he implies. In fact, as we now know, the reality of the situation was somewhat more complex.

In fact, this type of forgetting does happen regularly in oral traditions. The Kalasha of what is now northwestern Pakistan, the only Indo-European-speaking people who have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity, have lost virtually all of their mythology, and their gods tend to be shadowy figures, known mainly for their practical functions. (That's what happens when life is a struggle: it's the basics that you hold onto, while the non-essentials slough away.) Why do the altars of the gods all feature four carved wooden horse heads? No one among the Kalasha remembers any more. We don't know why, they tell researchers: it's always been that way.

(Cross-cultural comparativism provides a ready answer to the question: they're the four horses that pull the god's chariot. Altar as quadriga: a characteristically Indo-European kind of metaphor, preserved like a flower in amber for more than 4000 years. Yes Diana, academic arrogance aside, sometimes the anthropologist really does know more than the informant.)

That skinny, wide-eyed teen in Erie, Pennsylvania didn't know any of this, of course; he was feeling his way with his skin. That didn't stop him from taking up the challenge, though: just as Gardner intended, perhaps.

As I make the physical and spiritual preparations for this summer's upcoming Grand Sabbat, the ecstatic adoration of the embodied Horned Lord, I look back over a life of more than 50 years in the Craft.

In some ways, much of what came later began with that moment of pricking thumbs and piqued curiosity in that suburban family room on the southern shores of Lake Erie.

For that, praise be to Him of the Horns: our god, god of our ancestors.

I think we can say that we know You a little better now.

Above:

Sajigor altar

Bumburet Valley, Pakistan