Vice.com goes among the Dodekatheists, followers of the Olympic gods. Click link for video with English subtitles.
Polytheism is “democratical.”
Vice.com goes among the Dodekatheists, followers of the Olympic gods. Click link for video with English subtitles.
Polytheism is “democratical.”
¶ The word went around last week of the passing of Jonas Trinkunas (1939–2014), founder of the revived Lithuanian Pagan group Romuva. This Lithuanian website has video of his funeral ceremony, everyone in archaic ritual gear, lots of singing and drumming. (Video may be slow to load.)
¶ “Perhaps the future Carthaginians were like the Pilgrim Fathers leaving from Plymouth – they were so fervent in their devotion to the gods that they weren’t welcome at home any more.” But do not let that sentence give you any warm feelings until you have read the rest.
¶ The polytheists’ Ark was round, but still held animals.
Christine Hoff Kraemer has assembled a list of books and websites on contemporary Pagan theology.
I was happy that I only once reacted with “What is X doing here?” And maybe I ought to give X a second look (or maybe not).
You really ought to read most of those books.
Last week M. and I climbed over the ridge to “Camera Trap Spring” (our personal name for it) to leave an offering to Tlaloc.
Thing have changed a little bit since a year ago. The ground is black with ash. Stones have cracked from the heat of a forest fire.
That ground-up bark on the ground is mulch dropped from a helicopter in mid-April. Mixed with grass seed, it is supposed to help the grass grow to hold the slope against erosion. For more about that re-seeding and our visit, see the other blog.
The tiny spring is in the upper right quadrant of the photo. The little jar holds a liquid offering, while the turkey feathers are offered in lieu of a real turkey, which if I had been an old-time Nahuatl-speaker, might have been offered in lieu of a human child.
Obviously, things change.
In my personal practice, I care less about questions of authenticity, ethnicity, book-knowledge, or “the lore” than I do about the land. I think that I live at the fringe of the area in which Tlaloc (or Someone like him) was anciently honored; therefore, for the past two years, I have been trying myself to do so.
This little seasonal spring is like a miniature version of the whole hydrological cycle. Rain and snow fall on the rocky ridge above it — the entire collection area is probably smaller than a football field. Then the spring flows, in direct proportion to the winter snows, until the water is all gone.Through evaporation, through the urine of bears and elk — however it goes — the water flows back into the cycle.
• At The Used Key Is Always Bright, a young boy’s dream of “small gods” intriguingly includes “the god of keys.”
• Ivo Dominguez deals with someone who thinks that His People own the idea of four directions, the elements, etc. Via Miniver Cheevy, where there is a postscript.
• Christopher Penzcak talks about the Mighty Dead and the idea that “There is a part of the Inner Planes, the Other World, which is called Witchdom. There you may learn much, if you can contact it. There are spells and chants, dances and music and such woods and streams as delight the hearts of witches.” That came from a “channeling” done by Doreen Valiente in the 1960s; make of it what you will.
• Pharoah Tutankhamun was a lot more important dead than he ever was during his short life. So for him, can we say that the embalmers and craftsmen did give him immortality?
• Magic is a way of living: or why Dion Fortune got it wrong, from Anne Hill.
• Sannion on why you do not need external validation in your practice . . .
• . . . followed by Galina Krasskova on the same topic: “How can you ever find your way, or center yourself fully in the road of devotion if you’re endlessly willing to change your path on the whim of a random person’s say so? How an there ever be integrity in what you do if you’re constantly worried about how others are going to respond?”
This went around a couple of weeks ago, but I never blogged it. Now I have.
Here’s a short list of things we could do if we brought back the Greek gods:
• Go to oracles.
• Go on quests.
• Fight monsters.
• Challenge gods to contests.
• Go to Hades and try to rescue dead loved ones.
• Dip babies in magic rivers, making them invulnerable.Now, not all of those are good ideas — most of them are insanely dangerous — but man, they’re still a hell of a lot more exciting than sitting in church for an hour every Sunday.
I recently reviewed Philip Heselton’s latest biography of Gerald Gardner, but I did not have time to discuss one of his final observations, written in a too-brief closing chapter, “An Assessment of Gerald Gardner.”
Heselton writes, “Indeed, he really didn’t, I think, have any of what we might call ‘spiritual’ feelings: at any rate, he never wrote about any.” Nor, in his assessment, did Gardner believe in spirits or have any success at working magick on his own (640).
Think about that, the chief founder of a new Pagan religion who never had one of those knock-you-down experiences with the gods that convinces you that She, He, or They are really there. Compare, for example, the experience of Feraferia, Fred Adams, also back in the mid-1950s.
If he, Edith, and friends were talking about witchcraft during lazy days at the nudist camp in the late 1940s, they had a lot of concepts swirling around, concepts such as these:
All of these ideas are swirling around and bumping into each other in Witchcraft Today (1954). But there is not much about deities — for that, Doreen Valiente should get the credit, I suspect.
Somehow this vagueness and messiness of definition ties in — in my mind at least — with P. Sufenas Virius Lupus’s recent blog essay, “Bringing Back the Gods.”
What I am noticing more and more recently, however, is that modern Paganism is being purposefully defined so as to not include the gods. In recent weeks alone: Jonathan Korman has defined “the pagan sensibility” as not necessarily needing to include the gods; John Halstead has discussed the four centers of modern Paganism, but has portrayed the deity-centric forms of Paganism as inherently creedal; and here at Patheos’ Pagan Portal, Yvonne Aburrow has defined “theology” as “reasoning about the Divine” rather than “reasoning about the gods,” which is not remotely the same thing (on which more will be said in a moment).
For a long time now, I’ve been hearing modern Paganism characterized as a “nature religion” or an “earth-based religion.” That is true to an extent (and in some cases, far less true than others—and not necessarily in a negative sense). However, I suspect a huge reason that it is characterized that way—especially to non-Pagans—is because of fear of being thought foolish or “primitive” for recognizing the gods. We have then internalized that dialogue and have spent lots of virtual and actual ink on determining whether or not one group or another is truly “earth-based,” when in fact that understanding in itself might be more of a problem than an accurate portrayal.
On the “nature religion” part, I would suggest that non-theistic nature religion is rooted in 19th-century American thought, and Catherine Albanese tackled it well in Nature Religion in America and other writing. So it is not a reaction against contemporary polytheism originally, but a genuine spiritual current on its own. I have argued that the existence of that spiritual current made it easier for Pagans in the 1970s and 1980s to grab the “earth religion” label — partly as camouflage.
And some people just have not had that knock upside the head that leaves you saying, “All right, You are real and now we have some sort of relationship.”
I would agree that there is a cultural prejudice against polytheism. Some practitioners of what look like polytheism to us have maybe learned to emphasize a “Great Spirit” or “High God” behind them in order to avoid that label. It’s what you say when the missionaries have you backed into a corner.
• At Wytch of the North, a lengthy blog post on being a godspouse.
We are looking primarily for practical articles describing new and original rites and rituals that cross barriers and challenge social norms. Although the bulk of the book will be made up of practical working material, we will consider articles relating to historically significant rites, philosophical discussions on the nature or significance of transgression, and first person accounts of actual rites and rituals. Original artwork will also be accepted for consideration.
• Certain ponderosa pine trees in my region are identified as being “sacred trees” to the Ute Indians. I would like to know more about this, since is a distinction between these “cultural” trees and those that were de-barked for eating purposes — this link addresses both eating the inner bark and the “cultural” use, complete with power dreams.
A little idol like this one, purchased at the Nashville Parthenon* gift shop, sits on my bookshelf. Truly, Caffeina rewards her followers, as this article in The Atlantic notes:
But that caffeine is only mechanism behind coffee’s health effects is supported by a small study of 554 Japanese adults from October that looked at coffee and green tea drinking habits in relation to the bundle of risk factors for coronary artery disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes known together as metabolic syndrome. Only coffee — not tea — was associated with reduced risk, mostly because of dramatic reductions observed in serum triglyceride levels.
So aside from caffeine, just what are you getting in a cup, or two, or six? Thousands of mostly understudied chemicals that contribute to flavor and aroma, including plant phenols, chlorogenic acids, and quinides, all of which function as antioxidents. Diterpenoids in unfiltered coffee may raise good cholesterol and lower bad cholesterol. And, okay, there’s also ash which, to be fair, is no more healthful than you would think — though it certainly isn’t bad for you.
* Is it a functioning Pagan shrine? You bet it is.