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Dreams about surgery can be scary, but often, they’re related to personal healing. If the dream doesn’t have to do with some outside factors (like you or a friend undergoing surgery in real life), then it is probably a teaching moment. Think about what sort of surgery you are having in your dream, and what things might be bothering you in your waking life that need to be cut out. Surgeries are meant to help you, not hurt you, and in the same way, this dream may be encouraging you to get rid of something unhealthy from your life. Even if the separation is uncomfortable, scary, or painful, it will be better for your physical and emotional well-being in the long run. If you have been struggling with feelings of anxiety in your life, or just general distress, consider what the source might be and what parts of that you can change or carve out of your life. Trust me—it will be a wonderful, cleansing process!

“My gods, Steven: you haven't aged a bit in 20 years!”

To be sure, my friend is being generous. The widow's peak continues its northward recession, and shows more gray than it used to. My face is finally getting that doughy look that all Posches get as we age.

Still, I'll take the compliment. For a man of my age, I'm looking good. I keep engaged and active, and I'm seeing the long-term health benefits of lifelong vegetarianism. A couple-three years ago, I started in on the Regimen: Grand Sabbat was coming up and, when you're giving your body to a god, you need to look as good as you possibly can. For all the work that it's been, I'm pretty pleased with the results. As usual, when you give to a god, he gives back; but he gives as a god gives.

“Oh, you know how it is,” I joke. “Sell your soul to the Horned, get eternal youth and beauty.”

Of Pumpkins, Perichoresis, and the Triple Goddess

“Lot o' good eating in a pumpkin, there is.”

(Nanny Ogg)

Halfway through the container of squash puree, the rich, velvety texture, the round, meaty flavor, and the simultaneous sense of novelty-familiarity that I'm experiencing suddenly halts my mindless shoveling. This isn't the butternut squash puree that I'd thought it was.

I taste more thoughtfully. I've seen this diva perform before, but only robed in sweeteners, salt, and spices. Now she stands before me in all her skyclad glory, and I'm thoroughly in love.

Turns out, Nanny Ogg was right. She usually is.

I'm trying out a new recipe: a Chilean bean, corn, and pumpkin stew.

(New to me, that is. Given its origin and ingredients—the Triple Goddess of New World cookery—this is likely a very old recipe indeed.)

I retrieve a pie pumpkin from cold storage on the back stairs, halve and clean it. Since I need only half the pumpkin for the stew, I oven-roast the remainder, puree it, and put it in the refrigerator to await some unspecified future use.

That's what I've been mindlessly shoveling down: delicious even without benefit of salt.

Move over, butternut squash.

Maiden, Mother, Crone. The Triple Goddess has become such a Wicca 101 commonplace that it's sometimes easy to overlook the richness, the depth, the Inner Life, of this abiding Mystery.

Consider, for instance, that in Old Craft lore she is/they are known as the Three Mothers.

Consider, for instance, that in Iroquoian lore she is/they are known as the Three Sisters.

The Triple Goddess is a perichoresis: a dancing-together.

Corn, Beans, Squash, the far-famed Three Sisters of the Seven Nations of the Iroquois: Three Sisters who love one other deeply, and flourish best together. Plant a seed of each of the Three in the same mound, and watch them thrive together.

The Corn drinks up the nitrogen that the Beans fix in the soil. The Bean vines spiral-climb the Cornstalk into the Sunlight. Spreading around them, the leaves of the Squash vine shade out competing weeds.

As anyone of the Frances Moore Lappé Diet for a Small Planet generation knows, together, the incomplete proteins of grain and legume combine in our guts to provide us with the complete proteins that our bodies need. The squashes round out the tally of vitamins and minerals which our bodies also need.

Cross-pantheon god-on-god correlation is an imprecise science: more an art than a science, perhaps. I'll leave it to you to map the Old and New World Triplicities onto one another.

Rest assured, though, that there is, indeed, a correspondence.

Perichoresis.

Three Sisters Stew

Porotos Granados

Dreaming that you’re guilty of a crime can be a sign that you are feeling bad about a mistake you made when you were awake. Think about your actions and interactions in the real world. Have you done anything recently that could have hurt one of your friends in some way? Offend Perhaps you said something that offended a family member? If you know you have done something wrong, this dream could also be a sign that you are afraid of the consequences of your actions. Those consequences will catch up to you sooner or later, so it’s time for you to own up to them and make things right.

Minoan art is marvelously colorful, even 3500 years later. Was ancient Crete that colorful in real life? Probably.

Part of that color would have been due to the plant and animal substances used to dye the fabric that made the Minoans' clothing, household textiles, and temple decorations.

If you are having dreams about being crushed under something, trapped in an elevator, or confined in any way, it’s probably a sign from your subconscious that there is something in your waking life that is holding you back. If you’re struggling with school, have hit a rough patch in a friendship or relationship, or just feel stuck in a rut, these feelings of frustration can translate into dreams of being literally trapped. Try to identify anything in your waking life that is holding you back. Is it some old belief systems? Relationships you’ve grown out of but are afraid to let go of? Recognizing that it’s there is the first step to moving on and creating space for yourself to grow.

“Those f*cking guards!”

My Kemetic friend is furious. He's telling me about his dream-come-true, once in a lifetime trip to Egypt: finally he's able to be in the temples for which his soul has yearned for years.

But he couldn't worship there, he couldn't offer. The guards would intervene whenever they saw anything even vaguely religious occur.

Oh, the curse of the jealous religions.

Pagans, of course, have had such obstacles placed in our way for millennia.

Fortunately, there's a way around.

One of my favorite books as a kid was Ann Nolan Clark's 1953 Newberry Award-winning Secret of the Andes. Little did I know at the time how central it was to be in my career as a pagan-in-training.

Our hero is a young Peruvian boy whose family, since the Conquest, have been the secret guardians of the hidden treasure-cave of Atahualpa, the last Inca emperor. Before he can enter into knowledge of his family's secret responsibility, he must first undergo the Testing.

In one unforgettable scene, an old man stands facing East. In his heart and mind, he recites the ancient prayers of the ancestors that welcome golden Inti, the splendid Sun, back into his waiting world.

To the stray observer, though, remarks the narrator, he looks like nothing more than an old indio, standing by the side of the road.

This is the immemorial wisdom of the secret pagan: Let the enslavers think what they will. In our hearts and minds, we can be free.

Thus will the Old Ways live, until our freedom come again.