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 Paganicon 2024

Gathering

(7:15 a.m.; sunrise 7:25)

People gather outside Ballroom A (Scandinavian Ballroom).

Welcome (priest)

Horns blow

Procession
People proceed outdoors, led by:

Stang

Libation bearers

Priest

People

People assemble, facing East.

Sunrise

As the first limb of the Sun touches the horizon, horns blow.

People pray, pour libations.

As the Sun clears the horizon, horns blow again.

Song: Turn to the East (all)

Lift thine eyes, behold the light:

turn to the East, where dawns the day.

Hope and love, forever bright,

guide and protect us on our way.

Hail the Sun's rays, shining bright

after Winter's long, dark night.

Lift up thy voice, with praises ringing;

turn to the East, where dawns the day.

Blessing and Dismissal

Priest

(Turns to face people)

What Should We Name Planet 9?

The math is pretty clear: our Sun has a ninth planet out there, so far out that it makes Pluto look like a next-door neighbor.

For now, they've taken to calling it Planet Nine. But if and when it's actually discovered, we'll need a better name than that.

What, then, should we call it?

First, a few parameters.

We should name P9 for a goddess.

Gods know, we've got plenty of Boy planets out there already. We could use more Girls in this family.

We should name P9 for a Classical deity.

Only a polytheist nomenclature is equal to describing the magnificence of That Which Is; all the other planets are already so-named. (While a foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds, internal systemic consistency is a simple matter of aesthetics. Call it contextual cognitive resonance, if you like.) No pantheon-mixing in this solar system, please.

The name should be in its Latin—not Greek—form.

After all, we say Saturn, not Khronos, Neptune, not Poseidon. While a foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of small minds....

The Latin name should be in Anglicized form.

After all, we say Saturn, not Saturnus, Neptune, not Neptunus. A foolish consistency...

Granted the above parameters, then, an obvious choice presents itself.

In the days of the emperor Arcadius, long after the rest of the region had been thoroughly Christianized, the city of Gaza remained proudly, defiantly, faithful to the Old Ways, its eight temples daily thronged with worshipers.

At the heart and center of pagan Gaza stood the Marneion, the marble-clad temple of Zeus Marnas, famed for its size and beauty. Though latterly identified with the Greek Zeus, the god of this temple (Aramaic Mâr-nâ, “our Lord”) was none other than the old Canaanite Thunderer, Ba'al Hadad himself, god of that place for more than 3000 years.

So few Christians were there among the Gazans that, when the city's newly-appointed bishop, Porphyrius, arrived to take charge, he could find only a handful in a city of several hundred thousand inhabitants.

In those days, when a new bishop rode into his city for the first time, it was customary to give him a triumphal welcome, the road before him strewn with branches and palm fronds, the air perfumed with incense. On March 21, 395, however, the people of Gaza gave Porphyrius a satirical entry instead. They strewed the road before him with thorns, fouled the air with burning cowpies, and met him with jeers instead of the expected hymns.

Porphyrius burned hot with anger, but the emperor would brook no interference with the city or its ways. Gaza was a wealthy city, and paid its taxes faithfully, fattening the imperial treasury with its annual revenues.

Porphyrius soon ingratiated himself with the empress, predicting that she would soon bear a son. When she did so, after the child's baptism, he was finally given the permission he had long sought to destroy the temples of Gaza.

Imperial troops entered the city on May 12 in the year 400. The plunder and rapine continued unabated for twelve days and nights. When they were finished, pagan Gaza was no more.

They enter from opposite ends of the circle: he in antlers and bare chest, she shrouded in shadow.

A flute sings. They join hands and dance.

Their dance ended, she reaches into his chest. He gives an involuntary, back-of-the-throat groan, and falls back.

Over him, she opens her hand: an apple, pulsing in the firelight. I wince at the juicy squelching noises as she cuts it up.

The pieces pass. We eat. On my palate, dull from fasting, the juice sings like autumn rain.

My next-door neighbor stands in his front yard, garden hose in hand.

Welcome to the Long, Hot Summer of '23. We haven't seen Drop One of rain in weeks.

“Fifty percent chance of rain tonight,” I say over the fence.

He casts his eyes up to the sky: Here's hoping.

“Maybe we need to start thinking about killing the black goat,” I say: my standard in-group joke during rainless times like this.

(Black for dark rain-clouds. Thunder likes goats, they say. A bull, of course, would be even better, but these days, who can afford one?)

“Any chance they'd take squirrel instead?” he asks. Drought notwithstanding, it's been a bumper year for mast; there are even more squirrels frisking around than usual, which in this neighborhood is saying something.

“Not a chance,” I say. “It has to be something you value.”

He shakes his head. Damn gods. “Well, here's hoping,” he says.

“Here's hoping,” I say, and move along.

Is Alexander the Great Actually Buried in Wisconsin?

In the dream, I'm attending a pagan festival, the main claim to fame of which is that the body of Alexander the Great—yes, that Alexander the Great—is buried on grounds.

Now, the ultimate fate of the sôma, body, of Alexander the Great, Talisman of Alexandria, remains one of history's enduring mysteries.

Said festival being held in Wisconsin, then, this strikes me—even in dream-logic—as unlikely in the extreme, to say the very least.

How he got there, the stories don't tell. A likely enough scenario readily presents itself, though: late Antiquity, the rising power of the Church, hostile to a rival Savior, an epic journey westward of the faithful across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and thence (presumably) up the Mississippi: fodder for a C-grade popular novel, one might think, with scenes switching back-and-forth between the ancient world, and an incredulous archaeological present.

I gaze into the heart of the fire. I can't say I'm not feeling a little nervous.

It's my first conversation with N since, under my direction, we enacted the Men's Mysteries, the secret rites of initiation by which the tribe's boys become the tribe's men.

From my perspective, things went well. To judge from the shine that's been on this year's initiate ever since, they went very well indeed.

Still, N is something of a senior statesman among us: a man of unquestionable integrity, my elder in age, experience, and wisdom. He never speaks anything less than the truth, and what he thinks, matters.

Slowly, he nods his head.

“Well, I'd say that was a good one,” he says, “Just the way we've always done it.”

He pauses.

“And if it wasn't, it's how we always should have been doing it.”

Somehow, the fire seems to burn a little more brightly.