The first time I heard N say, “I'm always so surprised when I hear people calling me an elder! I certainly don't feel like an elder”, I can remember thinking, You and me both.

I've been doing this for a long time and, I think, can claim to know as much about it as many, if not most. Nonetheless, I still not infrequently find myself feeling like a beginner. That's the burden of being one of the new pagans, a community without experienced elders.

The second time I heard N make her blithe little declaration, I thought: I've heard this before.

The third time, I thought: Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Devious: You lay claim to an identity by denying it yourself, but having others attribute it to you. Hey, those anonymous others—assuming they exist, anyway—couldn't possibly be wrong, could they?

Any real elder, of course, would know that other people—other elders, anyway—are smart-cum-experienced enough to see through this kind of smokescreen.

All elderhood is relative, of course. If I've been doing this for three days, and you've only been doing it for one, in one sense that makes me your elder. Your senior, anyway.

Yet, in another way, it doesn't. You may be more thoughtful and natively gifted than I am, in which case our temporal inequality becomes virtually meaningless. If your understanding is deeper than mine, who now is the elder?

Being old doesn't necessarily make you an elder except in the most general of senses. N is old, certainly. An elder? Sorry, N, we've got a lot of shared years in this community, and I need to tell you: from what I've seen, I am not impressed.

I'm an acknowledged elder in my own community. Don't take my word for it: ask around. Even those that don't like me or think I'm an arrogant f*ck will still admit that I know what I'm talking about. For myself, I view other elders as my peers. They're the ones that I go to when I have a question, or when I'm thinking something through and need other perspectives. My friend Volkhvy, an elders' elder if ever there was one, always says: Elders tend to ask more questions than they answer.

Funny: I can't recall ever having heard N ask anyone else a question. Why ask questions when you've already got all the answers?

The fourth and fifth times that I hear N's smug little bon mot, the withering replies line up in my head.

Even in a community as richly endowed with characters as Paganistan, my dear friend “Granny” Ro Nicburne stands out.

At Twin Cities Pagan Pride last fall, she set up a shingle.

Ask an Elder

Free Advice

(And Worth What You Pay)

All day long, she fielded questions.

Some—from wise-asses like me—were joke questions. To these, she replied with the answers they deserved. Nobody does wry like Granny.

But there were real questions, too. If you build the candy cottage, the kiddies will come.

Magic of the Elder and Elderberry

(Sambucus nigra/Canadensis)

A small deciduous tree (or shrub) that grows in woods, hedgerows and on waste ground the trunk is quite often crooked and low lying with rugged bark.  It has dark green leaves that have quite an unpleasant smell but the flowers that appear in early summer are pretty and fragrant with large flat bunches of white flowers that ripen into berries that are green at first and then a dark purple colour by early autumn.

It is of course the rowan berry that most Pagans will think of when considering this tree. The bright, orangey red berries of the rowan or mountain ash have a traditional use in protective magic. However, you don’t get berries without flowers, and the flowers are out now.

It’s a good opportunity not just to celebrate this moment in the life of a rowan, but to also consider the beginnings of things whose ends we engage with. Many trees are in flower - as I write this post the horse chestnut outside my window is resplendent with bright candles of white flowers.