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Celebrating a Slavic Solstice
From EnglishRussia
The website EnglishRussia displays photos of a group of Russians celebrating Kupalo, the summer solstice.
Polish Pagans Hold Congress
Scott Simpson, co-editor of Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, is quoted in an article on Polish Paganism in a June 18, 2013 article in Rzeczpospolita, one of Poland’s largest daily newspapers.
He offers this translation:
Polish Pagans Combine Their Strength
Three Polish Pagans (Rzeczpospolita newspaper).
At their first congress in years, the followers of the old beliefs will try to overcome their theological differences.
Making harvest offerings to the gods, jumping through bonfires and releasing wreathes [into running water] — that’s how Rodzimowiercy, the followers of the old Pagan beliefs, will celebrate Kupala [Summer Solstice]. Poland’s largest celebration in a chram, the temple at Pruszkow in Mazowia, will begin on Thursday. The culmination falls on the shortest night of the year — from 21 to 22 June.
Pre-Christian beliefs started to return in the 1980s, and the Pagans say that the followers of their religion is growing. In August, in Łódz the first National Convention of Rodzimowierczy will be held. “From the point of view of this milieu, this is a breakthrough,” Scott Simpson, a scholar of religion from the Jagiellonian University tells Rzeczpospolita.
Polish Pagans celebrate six major holidays, most of them related to dates marking changes in the length of the day. On the spring equinox they celebrate Jare Gody, Dozynki [harvest] marks the beginning of autumn, and Swięto Godów – the beginning of winter. Added to this Dziady [Forefathers’ Eve], in memory of the dead, which is celebrated twice, in spring and autumn.
The most important role, however, is played by Święto Kupaly [Midsummer Night]. Pagan rites will be celebrated, among others in Warsaw, Szczecin, Wrocław, Opole, Poznan, Łódż and Sopot.
Ratomir Wilkowski, who is a żerca, that is, a Slavic priest of the Native Polish Church tells Rzeczpospolita that the biggest celebration near Pruszkow expects some [missing number] participants. “A similar turnout came last year. However, more and more people are asking about the celebration,” he adds.
How many Rodzimowierców are there in Poland? Scott Simpson says that there are around two thousand committed followers.”But there is a much broader periphery of supporters. I think that the number is growing, although not as rapidly as it was in the 90s,’”he says.
However, recently the Pagans have done much to integrate their movement.
They have managed to reactivate the Gniazdo periodical dedicated to their religion. The next step will be to organize the Congress for several communities in Łódż. One of the speakers will be author Witold Jablonski, who recently published a novel [Słowo i Miecz] about the Pagan uprising in the eleventh century in Poland.
In the registry of the Ministry of Administration and Digitization there are currently four religious Rodzimowiersto organisations: the Polish Slavic Church, Native Faith, Slavic Faith and the Native Polish Church. They try to find the principles of the faith of their ancestors in historical sources. They believe in the gods, who are identified with the forces of nature. Mother Earth is Mokosh, the Sky — Swiatowid, the Sun — Svarog, and Lightning — Perun.
However, there have arisen theological differences between the adherents. “Some Rodzimowiercy claim that their religion can be combined with other faiths. I think that is unacceptable. I am counting on the congress helping to dispel theological doubts,” says Stanislaw Potrzebowski of Native Faith.
Why are Poles going back to pre-Christian beliefs? Religious Studies Professor Zbigniew Pasek argues that the reason is the desire to seek alternatives to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. “For these people, it is not credible today. The claim that we Slavs will never regain our identity if we do not go back to our roots, rejecting foreign gods, falls on fertile ground,” he explains.
The scholar adds that many people get involved in the Neopagan movement, because they are drawn to participation in the reconstruction [re-enactment] of history. Ratomir Wilkowski argues that his faith is authentic.
“We’re not a bunch of lunatics running around half-naked in the woods. If we did not believe in it we would not create religious organisations,” he assures.
To which he adds, “Again, the journalist (relatively harmlessly) made my vague hedging answer into something short and punchy that I didn’t really say. ” So it goes!
Britain and the “Festival Gap”
A contributor to the BBC magazine takes the summer solstice as an opportunity to comment on the UK’s paucity of good festivals — particularly at midsummer:
If in this year of 2013, an interplanetary anthropologist came to England for fieldwork, what would they discover? On a variable Sunday each spring, we give our children more chocolate than is good for them, eat roast lamb and visit garden centres.
On the last day of October, we dress the kids up in old sheets, black bin liners and plastic fangs, and send them down the street to extort sweets from our neighbours. A few days later, we gather around a bonfire, set off rockets and celebrate the execution of a Catholic conspirator. The following month, we get together with our birth families to exchange gifts, to eat too much and to argue.
And that’s about it.
Not that he wants to be a Druid or anything: “Druids parading at Stonehenge seem to me as contrived as Morris dancers.” But there is a lack.
For American culture, I suggest, the Fourth of July takes the place of midsummer, falling less than two weeks later, and being a time for family and community gathering, feasting, and loud noises.
When Gods Sacrifice to Themselves
Almost all traditional Pagan cultures have one religious practice in common that contemporary Pagans for the most part avoid: Sacrifice, which means literally “to make sacred.”
Earlier this month, in fact, at a Pagan camp-out one of the elders was discoursing on the uselessness of sacrifice. If g/God were a carpenter working in his shop, sacrifice would be like bringing a hammer with the handle cut off and saying, “Here, I offer this to you.” Everyone thought that was profound.
In the entry on sacrifice in the HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion (edited by Jonathan Z. Smith, but individual entries are not signed), we read that “Naive and academic explanations of sacrifice abound. Sacrifice has been characterized as a gift (an offering)” [1], a means of communication between the profane and the sacred, an attempt to establish reciprocity between the human and the divine realms (most often expressed by the formula, “I give in order to get”), an expiation, a substitution, and a reenactment of primordial events.”
Theophrastus, a philosospher and student of Aristotle, wrote, “there are three reasons one ought to sacrifice to the gods: either on account of honor or on account of gratitude or an account of a want of things. . . . . We honor the gods either because we seek to deflect evils or to acquire goods for ourselves, or because we first have been treated well or simply to do great honor to their good character” [2]“.
Libation of Artemis and Apollo at the omphalos. Master of Shuvalov (?), ca. 440 BC. Pushkin Museum. ? Wikipedia user Shakko 2009
This is an “insider” perspective, what Smith’s dictionary would characterize as a “naive” explanation. So we think that we know what sacrifice means both in religion and in other areas of life: a killing (to Christians, Jesus’ bloody death was the one big, final, expiating sacrifice of human history), a giving up of pleasures (“She sacrificed her childhood to become a ballerina.”) or of life itself in service to society (“Military members who gave ultimate sacrifice remembered at WWII Museum”).
Then I see this headline at the Tropaion blog: “Gods Sacrificing: Iconography and Divine Ritual Praxis.” It’s a review of Religion of the Gods; Ritual, Paradox, and Reflexivity :
The book examines the numerous iconographic depictions of Gods and Goddesses performing a libation or acting towards performing a sacrifice. One example is the attached picture: a libation of both Artemis and Apollo at the omphalos. In this red-figure lekythos, the poured liquid is visible from the Apollo’s phiale. It is logical that looking closely at those pictorial evidences makes you wonder and immediately questions arise. One of the questions is the following: what these depictions mean?
The review is worth reading, for it addresses the question, if sacrifice is addressed to a “higher” Other, than who is higher than the gods?
There are always surprises in the old Paganism.
1. If “sacrifice” and “offering” can be used simultaneously, what about “libation,” as illustrated on the vase painting? Some would say so; others want life in their sacrifice.
2. Quoted in Jan N. Brenner, “Greek Normative Animal Sacrifice,” in A Companion to Greek Religion, ed. Daniel Ogden (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), 139.
Is the Church of England Desperate or Just Confused about Paganism?
With the obvious news peg of summer solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, the Telegraph reports on a rather odd initiative from the Church of England. The article begins,
The church is training ministers to create “a pagan church where Christianity [is] very much in the centre” to attract spiritual believers.
Ministers are being trained to create new forms of Anglicanism suitable for people of alternative beliefs as part of a Church of England drive to retain congregation numbers.
Reverend Steve Hollinghurst, a researcher and adviser in new religious movements told the BBC: “I would be looking to formulate an exploration of the Christian faith that would be at home in their culture.”
He said it would be “almost to create a pagan church where Christianity was very much in the centre.”
To which I can only ask, what are they talking about? Is this Christianity with mistletoe and pentacles? Do they think that they can attract the “party Pagans” to drum circles in the parish hall? The article continues,
The Church Mission Society, which is training ministers to “break new ground”, hopes to see a number of spiritual people align themselves with Christianity.
Andrea Campenale, of the Church Mission Society, said: “Nowadays people, they want to feel something; they want to have some sense of experience.
There is that.
Related: a Church Mission Society article on “being the light of Christ” at a Pagan festival in 2012. They gave free henna tattoos and did card readings with the “Jesus Deck.”
UPDATE: An Anglican priest involved says that the Telegraph’s article overstated what was going on.
i do not believe that a Christian church could adopt Paganism and remain Christian nor that a Pagan group (or individual) could adopt Christianity and remain Pagan. i do think that Paganism has much to say and offer to the world today and much that Christians can adopt – for instance whilst Christianity isn’t polytheistic, the Trinity does include the divine feminine as well as the divine masculine and those, including Pagans, who have criticized an apparently male lone christian deity are right to do so, and we as Christians need to acknowledge that and recover out own tradition of the divine feminine. similarly Pagans have often put Christians to shame when it comes to the environment when St Paul time and again talks of Jesus not saving people from the world but wanting to set the whole of creation free from suffering – we need to recover this ecological vision. i could go on but i hope you get the idea – that is what i meant by saying a Pagan church – on reflection i think i should have said a church in Pagan culture or one that learnt lessons from Paganism.
Vril: It’s the Secret
Before there was Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, water-sharing, grokking, TANSTAAFL, and line marriage, there was Edward Bulwer-Lytton and The Coming Race, published in 1871.
As Egil Asprem recently noted in a blog post titled “The (all too) secret history of Vril,”
It is astonishing how much of modern occultism is dependent on works of fiction. The machinations of secret societies, the malicious rituals of satanic cults, and the magicians’ adventures on the astral plane have all been portrayed in great detail in works of fiction, which have in turn directly influenced the creation of real organisations and inspired new ritual practices among self-styled occultists. The entire current of Rosicrucian initiatory societies even had its main impetus in a text considered by its authors to be a playful ludibrium — although no doubt one that expressed deep convictions.
Read it.
A Country “Under Christian Occupation”
The BBC profiles some Hellenes — modern Greek Pagans — with minimal snark.
Tryphon Olympios leads many of the ceremonies (BBC).
[The summer solstice is] the most important annual festival for followers of The Return of the Hellenes – a movement trying to bring back the religion, values, philosophy and way of life of ancient Greece, more than 16 centuries after it was replaced by Christianity
These people consider Greece to be a country under Christian occupation.
(Not to mention nearly four hundred years of Muslim occupation as well.)
The followers are an odd mix. There are New Age types who revere ancient traditions, leftists who resent the power of the Orthodox Church, and Greek nationalists who see Christianity as having destroyed everything that was truly Greek.
As the modern-day ancients relax in their camp at the base of the mountain, a few sell philosophy books, CDs, food and jewellery. Some wear modern clothes, others togas [sic], and a few sport a wreath.
No, Matthew Brunwasser, every ancient garment is not a “toga.”
Advice for Twenty-Something Magicians
I was one of those, briefly — it didn’t take. But this is pretty good.
On the other hand, I suspect that there will be a few of you—maybe less than a handful, maybe just one or two—who will stick with it, and make the transition into hardcore, practicing magicians, and it is to you in particular that I feel a certain responsibility to write this essay for. As a member of the generation immediately preceding yours, I kind of have a duty to pass on some hard-won information. Most of you will probably ignore it, or not even be ready to listen to it, but I feel like I should put this out there for whatever greater purpose it serves.
Science Fiction and the Grieving Process
At io9, Lauren Davis writes about how science fiction helped her to deal with her grief at the sudden death of her younger brother.
The podcasts were meant to be a distraction, like the wine or the VCDs of movies my mom had brought home from a trip to Asia that Colin had never gotten a chance to watch. But one day, I heard Robert Reed’s story “A Woman’s Best Friend” on Clarkesworld, and I found that I felt inexplicably lighter. I ran home and immediately looked up the text of the story, rereading it for clues to my sudden shift in emotions.
“A Woman’s Best Friend” is a funny story, a sort of multi-worlds parody of It’s a Wonderful Life. Instead of being led through an alternate timeline by a down-on-his-luck angel, George Bailey is dumped in another universe by an interdimensional being who finds amusement in such rearrangements. George does meet a doppelgänger of his wife, Mary, but she’s no sad spinster and is, in fact, hip to the ways of the multiverse. George left behind a drowned corpse in his own world, but he comes to find that his new home universe holds all sorts of wonders.
Really, whether it is Battlestar Galactica (also referenced in the article) or The Iliad, this is one thing that literature is supposed to do, to help you reframe your life’s problems and learn how to deal with them in a quasi-mythic way. So hurray for that.