The Power and Sorrow of Gododdin

Two things arrived together in a package from Amazon: a new Bluetooth mouse, currently in use, and leading Welsh poet Gillian Clarke’s new version of Y Gododdin, titled The Gododdin: Lament for the Fallen.

I first encountered the poem in my early twenties — was it while shelving books in the college library, being puzzled by the Welsh title, and taking it off the shelf? Or a little later?

I had read some of the classics of heroic literature: the Iliad of course, Beowulf in my Old English class, “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel” and other Irish tales, the Arthurian stories — this was different.

There was no narrative. Something had happened, something heroic but disastrous. A force of three hundred or so post-Roman British cavalry (armor, flowing cloaks, no stirrups, Christian), probably accompanied by foot soldiers — maybe PIctish allies — attacked a larger Saxon/English force (Heathen) at a river ford in what is now northern Yorkshire. Almost all them died in three (four?) days of fighting, even while cutting deep into the larger force.

This happened in the late sixth century, when what is now Britain was a patchwork of kingdoms. “Gododdin” is the name of a tribe, with the “dd” pronounced as “th.”

The work is attributed to the famous Celtic British poet Aneirin, written with a “strict pattern of alliteration, syllabic stress and rhyme . . . an aide-memoir for listeners to hold the poem, recite and pass it on” (viii). It’s impossible to replicate that in English, hence the challenge for translators. Think of it as a garland of flowers, each one named for an individual warrior, a pair, or a trio.1 Here is one:

Cadfannan

Before the cattle rose in the east, he raced to war,
his soldiers drilled, shield-shatterer.
Weapons rang before the bellowing herd,
belligerent Beli, border guard,

gold-torqued ox, mounted, grizzled warrior,
bone-headed boar at the dangerous border;
‘Lord save us who calls us to heaven,’
he roared, raising his javelin,

Cadfannan, praised soldier,
no doubting he trod armies under.

Or of one of the survivors, Cibno, the poet says

Cibno, wordless when war was done,
took communion on his return.

More than shields were shattered. Yet why do we care?

In 2007, I wrote a post titled “Mars and Venus Are in Love.” It was partly a response to a then-new book, A Terrible Love of War, by James Hillman (1926–2011), a psychologist in the lineage of Carl Jung, famous for titling another of his books We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy–And the World’s Getting Worse. Hillman’s “archtypal psychology” is far-reaching, and it spurns a lot of pop psychology clichés, like the whole idea of “growth“:

Hillman, with his profound intellect, disarming charm and a suffer-no-fools-gladly attitude has shaken up all that they were sure about (note-taking, diagnosing, medicating, dream work, the importance of cure) and takes on politics, architecture, soul-making and other topics that therapists thought were outside of their purview.

For all his often cap-A Archaic attitudes, however, Hillman was a man of Modernity, of the World War II generation, and like many he no doubt asked, “Why do we still have wars?” His book on war tries to answer the question, yet I felt in reading it that he was frustrated that there was no easy answer. In the end — back to polytheism — it more or less comes down to “We have war because Aphrodite desires Ares.”

As another of his readers asked, “What if Aphrodite were akin to Pan? What if she valued, not war, but Ares himself, a man-god, a relationship, a lover, yes, a lover, not a warrior?“

I have enormous respect for Hillman, although his path is arduous. Like some Witches, he suggests that a “soul” is not something you are born with, but something that you build through your life and works.

But sometimes I wonder if the answer to the war question is even more chthonic than “Venus Loves Mars.” Maybe it is simply that Earth needs blood. Humans need blood poetry, “a rousing rhyme for a bright-clad band.”

My Thoughts on Pagan Studies, in Podcast Form

In February I was interviewed by Robin Douglas, an independent scholar in London who has published in various places, including The Pomegranate, and is the co-author of a new book, Paganism Persisting: A History of European Paganisms since Antiquity.1

So you can hear a sort of scratchy-voiced me (winter respiratory crap) talking about the field and some of its background. Religion Off the Beaten Track is carried by a number of the podcast sites, including Apple podcasts and Spotify.

I have been editing an issue of Pomegranate on Eastern European Paganism, and a lot of the writing from that area reminds me Anglosphere Pagan studies in the 1990s–2000s. It’s what I call “scouting,” which is the first step in writing about any new religious movement: Who are they? How many of them are there? Where did they come from? Are they friendly?

And then once you have done that, the fun begins. Challenge the accepted notions, like whether contemporary Paganism(s) are the “fastest-growing religion.” Examine the interaction of magical religion and the fashion industry. It’s all wide open.

  1. Sadly, even the Kindle version is made from very expensive English electrons. Publisher’s site here. ↩︎

We Love Trees, and We Live with Their Bodies

A masticator (forestry machines) pulls a pine trunk. A bucket truck is in the background.

A forestry “masticator,” which mulches small trees and large branches, is here used to pull a ponderosa pine trunk off a hillside.

On Thursday, February 27th, M and I went on a city shopping trip, returning mid-afternoon. I heard a chainsaw running and thought it was a neighbor cutting road. Then another saw coughed to life, and another. Three sawyers in red hardhats were working in the pines between our house and the county road.

They worked for the electric co-op whose lines cross our property on the way to the neighbors. Those power poles were erected in the mid-1960s, I assume, when this land changed from scrubby, low-value ranch land to exurban homesites. A photo from our porch taken in the 1970s gives a clear view of another neighboring home with just little pine trees coming up. Now they are not so little.

A pine fell. “Those trees are living beings!” M cried. And they are. But we were standing on wooden floors in a wooden house that is partly heated with wood, for all that I seek out dead trees (victims of mountain pine beetle + fungus) whenever I can for firewood.

The crew was back on Friday. M. took the dog on a longish walk in the national forest while I drove a temporarily incapacitated friend on a series of errands. When I came back the tracks of a masticator ran here and there, that being a machine that “eats” branches, small trees, and stumps and leaves behind a coarse shredded mulch. I know someone who operates a masticator for a private forestry outfit, quickly thinning dense conifers to reduce fire risk around ski areas and mountain mansions.1

The foreman knew that we burned wood—almost everyone around here does—and he had the sawyers cutting logs into rounds and leaving them piled here and there. So fewer trees, but probably three cords of wood, at least.2

M. went off Saturday to see a friend. I stayed home.

Those fresh-cut white stumps. I took some whiskey and honey around to the bigger ones, left offerings, and chatted a little with them. On Sunday I started consolidating some piles, just to keep track of them. The wood is wet and heavy.

The crew returned on Monday, cut some more. On Tuesday a climber went up into the highest pine, probably more than 100 feet tall, with a hand saw to cut a “window” through the limbs. That tree is not coming down, I told the foreman. He agreed.

How do I react? Which “me” is reacting?

The forester’s son?. He automatically wants to thin the pines and to select the straightest, strongest trees for survival.

The sometime wildland firefighter? He’s happy to see fewer trees within 40 yards of the house and is also happy with the thinning. He wants to get cut out yet more small stuff.

The exurban homeowner? He is OK with some thinning, but hates to lose any visual barrier around between house and road and house and neighbors. He wants to sit on the porch and see nothing but green, which is his wife’s feeling too.

The Pagan-animist? Just thanking the trees. The oldest were probably from around 1940. Most of this forest is post-1960s, produced by taking off the cows and keeping wildfire out of a foothills subdivision.

This land then has not always looked this way. In the future it may well look different too. Right now, I step outside grateful to be here on this day.

  1. They also can “treat” the debris left from clear-cutting, instead of building labor-intensive “slash piles” and then burning them when the weather is right. ↩︎
  2. A “cord” is a stack of firewood 4 x 4 x 8 feet. Some firewood sellers may not live up to that though. ↩︎

A ‘Cookbook’ for Tarot

When I was in college and learning to cook, I looked at a lot of cookbooks — books owned by my friends who were “foodies” avant la lettre. But the trouble with cookbooks is that they were one self-contained recipe after another.

“What I need,” I thought, “was a ‘process’ cookbook. It would say something like, ‘Here is What Makes a Cream Soup.’ And then it would offer suggestions on how you could make a cream soup with mushrooms or mourning doves — or whatever.” Instead of just giving This Recipe and then That Recipe.

Years later, I did encounter such a cookbook, but I am here not to talk about it but about Rhyd Widlermuth’s A People’s Guide to Tarot: A Primer for Everyone, which to my mind does much the same thing.

Wildermuth has taken a sort of “process” approach that many authors do not. He begins with the “inner logic” or grammar of the Tarot, its cycles and its narratives. And he notes how the aces, twos, threes, fours, etc. of each suit represent similar stages in the world of that suit, each being one of the four archetypal element

Sixes are really nice cards, primarily because they speak to the period of growth and the success that comes after we face and resolve the crisis of the fives.

The esoteric meaning of the sevens is that the represent the introduction of the spiritual or external into the six earthly planes. A simpler way of putting this is that they’re what happens when an unknown complicates everything that we thought we knew.

And then he offers a page of text about each card, much like the “little white books” that come with most decks, or like any number of guidebooks, but more approachable than many of those.

The thing is, I like the messiness of the Tarot. I like that fact that it combines an Indo-European four-element system with with a Renaissance symbology (the major Arcana) that speaks of the subtle survival of Pagan elements in the 15th–16th centuries when when they were preserved by masquerade—or LARPing if you prefer. (For more on that, read Joscelyn Godwin’s The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance. )

Golden Dawn-style magicians who tried to hammer and pry the cards into congruence with the Hebrew alphabet or some other system just did violence to the Tarot, which is motherless and fatherless and owes no deference to anyone. Maybe in that sense it is “the people’s.”

Wassailing the Apple Trees Revived in the West of England

Em Sibley, the “wassail queen,” after successfully completing the ceremony at Sheppy’s farm in Bradford-on-Tone, England (New York TImes).

From the New York TImes (February 13, 2025)

A jet of steam rises with a hiss as a red hot poker plunges into a bowl of cider. A garlanded woman spears a piece of toast with a long fork and lodges the offering among the branches of a tree. Then, amid shouts from the watching crowd, the torch-lit ceremony ends with gunfire ringing out beneath the clear night winter sky.

For most of the year, Sheppy’s farm at Bradford-on-Tone in the west of England uses state of the art machinery to tend its 22,000 apple trees and produce more than half a million gallons of cider annually.

Read the whole thing.

Did the Professor Die for What He Knew of His Mentor’s Past?

Image of Ioan Culianu lecturing, courtesy Tereza Petrescu-Culianu and published by Chicago Magazine.

Shortly after 1 p.m. on May 21, 1991, a secretary working on the third floor of Swift Hall at the University of Chicago heard a faint “pop,” as she described it. The sound came from the men’s restroom next to her office. It was produced by a .25-caliber (6.35 mm) pistol that had fired one round into the head of Prof. Ioan Culianu, a rising scholar of esotericism and Gnosticism and a protegé of the famous historian of religion Mircea Eliade1 (1907–1986).

The killer was never caught. He did stalk Culianu during a book-sale event, which brought numerous outsiders into the building, but he also had to be someone who would not look out of place in an academic setting.

Bruce Lincoln’s Secrets, Lies, and Consequences: A Great Scholar’s Hidden Past and His Protegé’s Unsolved Murder is not a whodunit. More of a “why was it done-it.” Lincoln is a well-recognized name in religious studies and teaches at Chicago’s Divinity School, as did Eliade and Culianu.2

My review of Secrets, Lies, and Consequences was just published in the American Academy of Religion’s free Reading Religion site, and you can read it here.

I sweat bullets over that review, because its length was limited, and yet I was trying to fit in bits of Romanian history, Eliade’s life story, as well as Lincoln’s conjectures about the killer’s motive—which might have been a certain person saying, in effect, “Who will rid me of this troublesome scholar?”

I have defended Eliade here before against accusations about what he wrote or did in the 1930s. See, for instance, “Mircea Eliade, Witches, and Fascists” from 2020, where I did have room to go into the history more than I could do in a book review.

I always took Eliade at his word (in his published journals ) that when he left Romania to serve as a diplomat in Lisbon, he left all his previous associations behind. One thing that Lincoln’s book does is make me wonder, was I right or was I too naive?

  1. Pronounced roughly “MIR-cha EH-li-a-de.” ↩︎
  2. Several of my own professors were Eliade’s former students too. His influence was huge. ↩︎

Does the Pagan Resurgence Start with Folklore?

“Politics is downstream from culture,” people like to say online — which is just a re-statement of something that I have long believed, that “Life imitates Art.”

Maybe I am just reflecting my online environment and the podcasts that I listen to, but folklore is suddenly big. My feed has a lot of British contributors in it; some have MA’s in folklore, which won’t get you a teaching job but maybe will give you the skills to write, make videos, and so forth.

So there is a plethora of podcasts, such as the Modern Fairy Sightings podcast, hosted by Jo Hickey-Hall, one of Ronald Hutton’s former graduate students. Zines like I haven’t seen them since pre-Internet days. One of my favorites is Hellebore, edited by Maria Pérez Cuervo, also a former grad student (fill in the blank).

So this is also niche stuff, but you have to add it up.

The Epigram, Bristol University’s independent student newspaper, just this week published an article “The Old Gods- The Resurgence of Paganism and Folklore,“

These traditions may seem to belong to another time – yet interest in paganism and folklore is growing across the globe. Shamanism, although not an organised faith, is the fastest growing religion in England and Wales, according to the 2011 and 2022 censuses. In the US, the number of Wicca adherents is now over 1.5 million. Wicca, founded in the early half of the 20th century by Gerald Gardner, is one of the most influential and popular branches of the modern neopagan movement, with a complex variety of branches, denominations and traditions across the world.

I am not sure where those numbers come from, so just consider them to be “hand-waving.” Counting Pagans is a real difficult problem.

North America’s Pagan resurgence, should one occur, is going to look different. But there are cross-overs. Just today I stopped at the nearest small-town grocery store. This guy was stocking the shelves (not one of the employees that I recognized, so maybe new), and he was wearing a big ol’ Mjölnir amulet around his neck, maybe a reproduction of the one at the linked page.

A Waking Dream: The New Age Salvation Army

This is what a background in religious studies plus sleep-deprivation will do to you.

On Friday I was in Manitou Springs, the old spa town on the west side of Colorado Springs, where I spent most of my twenties and had various formative experiences, such as meeting my wife, forming a coven, running a business, deciding to go to grad school — everyday stuff.

See, for instance, “The Witches of Manitou — More than an Urban Legend” and “One Night During the Cold War.”

Manitou has always been a tourist town, first peddling mineral springs, then a sort of generic “rubber tomahawks” Western tourism during the 1950s–1970s, with digressions into low-end art galleries, head shops, mountain-man paraphernalia, natural food stores, and of late New Agey stuff.

Having bought something at a shop selling Southwestern Indian jewelry, I went to Red Dog Coffee for a burrito, then crossed Manitou Avenue from the shady side (left of photo) toward the sunny side, where I had parked. I was tired, Foggy-brained. Needed coffee. I was so tired that I left my purchase there on the coffee house counter, and one of the baristas brought to my table. Duh!

In the crosswalk, I heard a resonant, ringing sound. I saw a man in a red coat holding a large red bowl, one of those “singing bowls” that played by running a wooden rod around inside the rim.

It made perfect sense! Adapting to the New Agey vibe in Manitou, the Salvation Army, collecting for its Christmas charity work, had switched to a singing bowl instead of the usual sidewalk bell-ringer with a kettle on a tripod. It was a “begging bowl,” like those used by some Buddhist monks!

I started feeling in my jeans pocket to see how much post-coffee change I had — or should i pull out some bills? (It’s a Christian denomination, but I still support the SA’s efforts).

Then I stepped up onto the sidewalk and turned toward the bowl-player. He was talking, trying to pull people into a gift shop. If I had dropped coins into his singing bowl, he might not have been pleased.

I walked a few yards to my parking spot, shaken to realize that I had been half in a dream-state. And I still had to drive through a hour and a half of high-speed multi-lane freeway traffic to Denver to visit a sick friend, which was Part 2 of my trip. Wake up! Be here now! No dreaming!

But we are always dreaming, just as the stars are always shining even when the Sun’s light over-powers them.

Lithuanian Pagans Gain More Official Recognition, But What Does that Really Mean?

A Romuva celebration (Euronews).

After repeated tries, the Lithuanian Pagan group Romuva, which was formally organized in the early 20th century, has received a higher level official recognition

Romuva has been granted official recognition following the Constitution and the Law on Religious Communities and Associations, as well as the Justice Ministry’s conclusion that it meets legal requirements. The ministry noted that Romuva has been active in Lithuania for 25 years [see below for why that matters] while its teachings and rites do not contradict Lithuanian laws and generally accepted moral norms. Romuva applied for official recognition on 17 May 2017, but at the time parliament rejected the move.

In 2019, [and again in 2023] the organisation appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which ruled in 2021 that by refusing official recognition parliament violated the European Convention on Human Rights

Lithuania’s rulers abandoned Paganism in the 1200s (for political reasons at least partly), and the country became majority Roman Catholic. But if any European country did have a hidden “Pagan survival,” it was Lithuania. Or the nearest thing to it.

Once free of the USSR in 1990, Lithuania set up a hierarchy of “registered” religions — a hierarchy that might be on its way out. Right now, it looks like this, says Scott Simpson, lecturerer at Jagiellonian University in Poland and co-editor of Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe.

The media understandably struggle to explain the complex Romuva situation in simple and interesting terms to the average reader. They sometimes err on the side of making it sound like this is the first time that Romuva is counted as a religion at all, and sometimes err on the side of making it sound like they jumped straight to ‘established church’ (TASS has good example of that).

What has happened is that the religious organisation of Romuva, in keeping with Lithuanian law in spite of some hard-to-forgive discriminatory delay, has moved from being in the first tier (a ‘registered’ religious organisation) to being in the second tier (a ‘state-recognised’ religious organisation).  This will give them some more abilities, such as their religious marriages can automatically be counted as state marriages without the need for a separate trip to the registry office.

The change in status for the religious organisation isn’t, in theory, a change in status for the religion.  Citizens of Lithuania have freedom of religion and conscience, and can practice their religions without registration if they wish to do so. (You could call that ‘level 0’ of registration.) But what those citizens get by registering as a religious organisation is the ability to act as a legal corporate entity, for example to collect funds in an organisation-owned bank account. Of course, there is also an intangible psychological and social element of seeming like a legitimate religion when one has an official registration. (You could call this ‘level 1’ of registration.)

One of the most important metrics for making the jump upwards is to have been registered as an organisation at level 1 for at least 25 years.  Therefore, over time, there should be a small surge in requests to the Seimas for movement from ‘registered’ to ‘state-recognised’. Romuva reached that criterion long ago and yet was refused (twice!) the change in status by the Seimas.  This was a democratic vote, and yet the lack of solid objections to Romuva (that is, they were not credibly accused of crimes against the state or any other saliant wrongdoing that could make them undesirable to the Lithuanian state) means that this decision was discriminatory.  That’s not just my opinion, it was also the opinion of the European Court of Human Rights.  At least one other religious organisation has been refused in a similar way: the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  But a new government has come into power in Lithuania with a different composition of MPs and they voted this week to move Romuva to the position that they have qualified for.  (We will see if the Jehovah’s Witnesses also get another chance in the coming weeks.  Blood transfusions might be considered more an issue there.)

Presumably, although Romuva must be pleased to have been moved one rung up, they will someday want to try to move to the next rung, ‘traditional religion’. (We can call this one ‘level 3’.) It is much less clear what the procedure would be for doing that, or whether it is possible at all. The 1995 law says: ‘The State shall recognise nine traditional religious communities and associations existing in Lithuania, which comprise a part of Lithuania’s historical, spiritual and social heritage: Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, Evangelical Reformed, Russian Orthodox, Old Believer, Judaist, Sunni Muslim, and Karaite.’  One possible interpretation is that you only get on that list by being named on the list in the 1995 law.  And therefore, no-one else will ever be added unless the Seimas decides to pass a new law that supersedes that one.  Romuva will want to claim that they are ‘part of Lithuania’s historical, spiritual and social heritage’ and therefore should be added.

But if Romuva make a play for level 3, they will face a much murkier set of criteria with a lot more difficulty in proving incontestably to all stakeholders that they qualify. Romuva firmly believe that they should be recognised as continuing the ancient tradition which survived nearly intact from times centuries before those other ‘traditional’ religion’s arrival in Lithuania. (Note that current scholars of ancient Lithuanian religion are not in unanimous agreement with Romuva’s conviction in more than one way.) And they believe that their religion remained hidden in Lithuanian folk culture throughout the centuries means that they represent ‘spiritual and social heritage’ par excellence. To them, it is a gross injustice that they were not on the short list to start with.  

But, because the current Romuva started their project in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and their current organisation was only registered in 1992, they will have to fight to be recognised as legally representing the same religion as existed in the 15th century. Technically, the precedence of Sunni Islam in Lithuania (where fragmentation of organisations does not mean that they lose ‘traditional’ status as a religion) means that they don’t actually need to show that this contemporary organisation is the same as that ancient organisation.

So far, so good. But they do need to show that this contemporary religion is the same as that ancient religion. (Cue discussion of the Ship of Theseus, etc.) As much as the adherents of Romuva believe in their hearts that these two things are essentially identical, their critics will have no great difficulty in finding academic experts who will call that into question and call them related, but essentially different. Academic fashions change, and different paradigms circulate today than circulated back in the 1970s. And without a very clear consensus from a strong majority of experts who are consulted on this, the Seimas has no great motivation to initiate the messy and controversial process of drafting and passing a new law specially for them.  Especially knowing that it is likely to get bogged down in an abstruse discussion of nit-picky historical and archaeological details right from the start.

I suspect that the clock is ticking on these kinds of laws, anyhow.  They are out of touch with the rest of EU law and they regularly run afoul of the European Court of Human Rights. I would bet that Lithuania tosses out the whole ladder system long before Romuva manages to climb to the highest rung.

Talking about “Pagan Religions in 5 Minutes”

Pagan Religions in 5 Minutes brings together seventy short essays, each answering a question such as “Do all Pagans follow the same festivals?”1 or “What are Technopagans?” or “What is the difference between Wicca and witchcraft?”

It’s part of a “5 Minutes” series from Equinox Publishing, which also publishes a book series on “Contemporary and Historical Paganism.”

Here is the whole series, Religion in Five Minutes. You can find Pagan Religions in 5 Minutes at the Equinox website or here at Amazon (North America).

In the video, book co-editor Angela Puca is joined by three other Pagan studies scholars — Sabina Magliocco, Jenny Butler, and Giovanna Parmigiani — to discuss the book and related questions.

  1. The author is Australian, hint hint. ↩︎