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Marine biologists find something at the bottom of the sea they can't quite explain. Orangutans provide insights into the possible origins of language. And a dead star still proves full of surprises in the depths of space. It's Earthy Thursday, our weekly segment about science and Earth-related news! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!
We think about the unique challenges Pagans with disabilities face. The meaning of the Gaulish word "iexta" is considered. And "occult" strategies of political resistance are advocated at Gods & Radicals. It's Watery Wednesday, our weekly segment on news about the Pagan community! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!
Halloween. First part sounds like hallow, which preserves the original sense of the festival, derived from Old English hælig, “holy thing or person, saint.”
This is how I grew up pronouncing the word in Western Pennsylvania, and how I still pronounce it.
Which means, of course, that this is the correct pronunciation.
Helloween. Feast of the Goddess of Death and the Underworld (= Hell), observed only by the bluest of British blue-bloods. Raw-tha.
Hilloween. Southern hemisphere festival observed in New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. Named for the Hill o' Ween, where Australia's first Bealtaine bonfire was lighted in 1794.
You know the song I mean. The one that begins:
Let the joyous news be spread....
Just to refresh your memory: first, the house begins to pitch. Then the kitchen takes a slitch, and lands on the wicked witch. In the middle of a ditch, no less. How humiliating.
It had been raining off and on for a week before we got to the festival site, and there were mud slicks everywhere. A friend of ours came limping into camp, clearly a little the worse for wear.
"What happened to you?" someone asked.
Yan tan tethera pethera pimp
sethera methera hovera covera dik
yan-a-dik tan-a-dik tethera-dik pethera-dik bumfits
yan-a-bumfits tan-a-bunfits tethera-bumfits pethera-bumfits figgits
And figgits have a notch
Paganism is a language.
It is, for many of us, a language that we are still learning to speak. We may have been speaking this tongue for many years--decades, in some cases--but it is still, nonetheless, not our mother tongue.
This fact has implications. We may have mastered the grammar and have a large vocabulary. We may, over the years, have become fluent speakers of Pagan. But we are still not native speakers, and we never will be.
After I wrote about liminality recently, I have been thinking about change and how we create it in our lives. Affirmations are a magical tool that can be very powerful, but only when constructed well. Using the present progressive tense to craft affirmations puts them in a form that draws on the Element of Fire and makes them much more effective tools for transformation.
