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Bright Heart, Bright Mind

or

Pay No Attention to That Cross Between the Antlers

“Saint” Hubert, they call him: patron of hunters.

Check out Albrecht Durer's painting of Hubert's famous vision. What do you see? A man, kneeling to a worshipful Stag, praying.

Pay no attention to that cross between the antlers.

You know the story. Maybe you've lived it yourself.

Good Friday, when all good Christians should be in church, praying. You're not among them. You, you're out in the woods instead, hunting.

Hunting.

What do you find there? The Horned, the worshipful Stag: the Animal God, lord of all humanity.

Hubert, hyge beorht in the old Language of the Witches: “bright heart”, “bright mind.”

That crucifix between the antlers? A mere cloak to hide behind during the Hidden Times, a bringing-in of the Old Ways.

Once we dwelt in the fertile plains. Beef was our food, the milk of cows our drink.

Then we were driven out.

Into the rocky, unfertile hills we fled, which cannot sustain a cow.

We became a people of the goat, for whom the Horned wears caprine horns and hide.

Like goats, we witches are survivors.

That's why it can't help but seem to me something of a moral failing that I don't like goat's milk.

Oh, I've tried. “This chèvre has a nice, lemony tang to it,” I say hopefully.

But in my heart, I understand that it's really myself that I'm trying to talk around.

Maybe it's just a matter of what I'm used to.

Maybe I'm secretly longing for those fat days of our onetime freedom.

When, on the morning after

the witches' sabbat, the Horned

leads us up out of the woods and,

to the singing of meadowlarks,

mounts the horizon and,

lambent with white flame,

disappears over the edge,

I've always wondered whether

he sinks down into Earth

or walks off into the Sky,

or maybe both;

but now I know.

I, Steven of Prodea,

Steven son of Russell,

with my own eyes have seen

the Gates of Heaven swing

wide to admit him, and lo!

to the sounding of horns

and trumpets he entered in,

and lo! the gates were shut.

This with my own lips I tell you,

and what I tell is true.

Myth meets myth.

“Why do they hate us so much?” a boy growing up Evangelical once asked his father.

(True or not, this is a common belief among Evangelical Christians.)

“Because so many Christians are such jerks,” his father told him.

There are forms of Christianity that I, as a pagan, respect, even admire.

With its intellectual vacuity, utter lack of social conscience, and political triumphalism, Evangelicalism is decidedly not one of them.

Like many gender-non-conforming kids, I grew up socially isolated.

Elementary school wasn't so bad. Having grown up with me, the other kids mostly just accepted me for who I was. Junior high, though, was hellish. There I was the weird kid, the outsider. (There must be easier ways to learn self-reliance.) In high school I finally made some friends among the other egghead creatives. I loved my new friends all the better for understanding the worth of what I'd worked so hard to gain.

Then I lost most of those friends again to the so-called “Jesus Revolution.”

By then, my pagan identity was already fully formed. I could see their so-called “revolution” for what it actually was: a total abrogation of intelligence, an unthinking embrace of the worst kind of reactionary conservatism.

(I was right. My former friends and their co-religionists were precisely the demographic that betrayed us to Reagan and his successors, including Trump.)

Suddenly, the witch-boy was the pariah again. Finally, I decided to end it.

This is a drabsha.

Unrelated to the Christian cross (but is it?), the drabsha is an important symbol of the Mandaeans, called the Last Gnostics, an ethno-religious minority originally from the southeastern Middle East, now dispersed throughout the world.

A wooden cross draped with a white silk cloth and decked with branches of laurel, it symbolizes the light of the supreme god Hayyi Rabbi, “the Great Life,” covering the four quarters of the world.

This is a stang.

One of humanity's oldest gods, the Horned is still worshiped around the world.

We do him no wrong if we think of him as the collective body of animal life on planet Earth.

Through the Hidden Centuries, the witches of the West kept faith with him and his ancient ways, as they still do.

In our day, once again, he raises up a people to himself.

Tell now of the Horned, His Bestiary.

Soon told.

For is this not his Book of Beasts, and him the All-Beast? in which is told the likeness of each beast, and kind, and singularity: its life and loves and ways, and life within his life?

For are they not in him, and he in them?

Is his life not in them, and theirs in him?

And does he not delight in them, as they in him?

His the life-in-great, and theirs in-small?

And every birth of them an increase to his being, and every death, diminishment?

And, being beasts ourselves, does not our love go out to them, and so to him?

To him the All-Beast, one-in-many, manyness in one?