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Two armies were to meet in battle, one Danish and one English.

Now it so happened that the king of the English was a Christom man, and brought with him to the battle a troop of tame priests and monks to pray for victory.

Before the armies engaged, the Danes first swept in and slew every monk and every priest.

O the perfidious pagans! cried the English king. To massacre the unarmed men of God!

A troop of warlocks, paid to cast baneful spells? How were these non-combatants? replied the war-chief of the Danes, grinning.

To judge from the evidence on the supermarket conveyor belt, the three of us eat three very different diets.

The Carnivore Diet. Mainly meat.

The Junk Food Diet. Mainly snacks.

The Plant Diet. Mainly greenstuffs.

With grim humor, though, I note that each of us has a bunch of bananas in his/her pile.

Bananas: the great leveler.

I won't go into how, historically, bananas became such an American icon. It's an ugly story.

I will say that it has long twisted my nuts that bananas—a monoculture grown somewhere far away and shipped North courtesy of the carbon economy—are cheaper here in Minnesota than apples, grown locally.

I'm sorry, that's just plain wrong.

When you eat bananas—even those organic, free-range, fair trade bananas that you feel so virtuous about buying at Trader Joe's—you're basically eating petroleum.

Yum, yum.

If the current dock workers' strike goes on for very long, banana prices will skyrocket.

Good.

A dead body, hanging from a tree.

When I boarded the school bus that frosty October morning, who could have guessed that what I was about to see would sear itself into my memory forever?

You have heard it said that Samhain marks the End of Harvest.

You have heard it said that Samhain marks the Homecoming of Flocks and Herds from the Summer Pastures.

Hear now as I tell of Samhain's First Beginning.

My school-mate's older brothers hunted.

That's how, when the bus stopped at her house to pick her up that Monday morning, there came to be the gutted carcass of a buck hanging by a rope from the big old maple in the front yard: strung up to bleed out, kept fresh by the autumn cold.

Never before had I felt so viscerally just how similar in weight and size a deer is to a human being.

It was like a crucifixion.

What does it mean to be a man?

Here's what I learned from my father:

Your job as a man is to see that your people are taken care of.

Not to self-actualize, not to seek illumination, but to see that your people are taken care of: that's what it means to be a man.

If that means that you have to work two jobs, then you work two jobs; if that means that you have to pick up a gun and shoot somebody, then you pick up a gun and shoot somebody: not because you want to shoot anyone, not because you want to work two jobs, but because you're a man, and that's what you're here to do.

What does this buy you? Privilege, status, praise? No, none of the above.

But here's the corollary: in taking care of your people you will, in fact, achieve both self-actualization and even, in the end, illumination.

Call it the Way of the Tribe.

A Cautionary Tale for the New Pagani of the West

He called himself a pagan, but what he really was, was an ex-Christian.

My coven-sib was dating a guy who worked at the Renn Fest. Because he identified as pagan, she invited him to our Sunrise Yule brunch.

Alas, though, he had nothing to say about the Sun, the Wheel, or the Season. All that he wanted to talk about—and he wanted to talk a lot—were Jesus, the Church, and “Christianity”—as if such a monolith actually existed.

Needless to say, the relationship didn't last long.

Needless to say, we never invited him back.

As Norwegian Egyptologist Jan Assmann sees it, the defining distinction between religions is not monotheism or polytheism, but whether they're Primary or Secondary.

Primary religions—what we may call the Old Paganisms—arise directly out of human experience of That Which Is.

Secondary religions—the Abraham religions being prime examples—arise out of reaction against Primary religions. Such worldviews, Assmann notes, are inherently dangerous because they automatically come with an enemy attached. This helps explain the bloody swath that the children of Abraham have cut through human history.

(Check out your favorite news-site. They're still doing it today.)

It also helps define an important distinction between the Old and New Paganisms.

The Old Paganisms were, by definition, Primary Religions.

The New Paganisms—alas—not so much.

Hi. My Name is: Loki.

The store-clerk's name tag takes me aback. Seriously?

What's going on here? Is this a joke? Some sort of sly pop-culture reference that I'm not getting?

A nickname? No one would name their son Loki, surely: I mean, what with the Hollywood franchise and all. Right?

Right?

It doesn't help that I find him kind of attractive. Tall, whipcord lean, big beak nose, long hair in a messy bun.

Just my type.

Also, he smiles a lot. I really like guys that smile.

So you're Loki, I think about saying, as I hand him my money. I've read about you in the Elder Edda.

Claude Tholosan's 1445 (?) treatise So That the Errors of Magicians and Witches has some pretty profound things to say about the Horned.

Admittedly, he does call him Diabolus, the Devil.

But lay that by for now.

He shows himself to each according to their desire...nor is he seen except by whom he wishes.

“He shows himself to each according to their desire.”

He's skin-strong, this one, a changer of shapes, and how you see him depends on you and your expectations. He shapes himself to you.

Relationship. It's all about relationship: his with you, yours with him.

What a god.

He shows himself to some as a man, to some as a woman, or some beast. Me, I saw a beautiful naked man with branching antlers.

To some he shows himself as Cernunnos, to some as Pan.

To Herb Sloane, founder of Our Lady of Endor Coven and the Ophitic Gnostic Cultus of Sathanas (ca. 1965)—as perhaps to M. Tholosan—he showed himself as the Devil.

One might even suppose, then—surely it is not beyond his capability—that to some he shows himself as Christ.

I say again: what a god.

“...Nor is he seen expect by whom he wishes.”