PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

“There's something wrong with those trees,” I can remember thinking.

February in Jerusalem: the City of the Evening Star.

(Centuries of scuttlebutt notwithstanding, the name “Jerusalem” has nothing whatsoever to do with shalom, peace: really, how could it? The city was originally named for Shalém, the Canaanite god of the Evening Star.)

(Put that in your Abrahamic pipe and smoke it.)

I've gone up to the Rockefeller Museum to see their famous collection of Bronze Age Syro-Palestinian (“Canaanite”) art and artifacts. Clearly, an old olive grove stood here once: some tired, neglected old olive trees still linger frumpily around the edges of the parking lot.

There's something wrong with them all. Something is growing in them, something that you can't help but intuitively know shouldn't be there: balls of yellow-green leaves completely unlike the trees' own dusty-silver foliage.

Something intrusive, disturbing, eerie even, something that seems to shine with an uncanny light of its own.

It was the first time that I'd ever seen wild mistletoe.

I'm not sure who shot the white markhor, or when.

For 20 years, though, his head, with its splendid crown of corkscrew horns, horizontal like Khnum's, has hung over my fireplace, watching impassively over conversation and coven meeting alike.

(I found him at a local antiques mall on, of all days of the year, Midsummer's Eve. At our celebration later that night, I waxed enthusiastic about my new purchase to the group, to the utter mystification of a non-pagan guest. “Pagans have a thing about horned animals,” a coven-sib told him, by way of explanation.)

The Kalasha of the Hindu Kush, the last Indo-European-speaking people to have practiced their traditional religion continuously since antiquity, hold this wild mountain caprid sacred to the peri, the mountain fairies or elves. To these goat-herding pagans, markhors are the “flocks of the peri,” just as Highland Scots refer to deer as “fairy cattle.”

(The Kalasha and the Gael are, of course, distant kin, sundered by some 4000 years. Just how old, one wonders, is this metaphor? And what does it say about us that we should expect the lifeways of Faerie to mirror our own?)

Really, he's the centerpiece of the room, the Goat, with a gaze that's hard to avoid.

Through the seasons, I deck him variously. At Samhain this year, I wound his horns with orange lights and hung them with black and orange ornaments.

Playfulness is one thing, disrespect another. I try to be careful about this, never crossing the boundary into mockery. He always lets me know when I've gone too far—anyone who's been around the Maypole a few times will know what I mean by this—and when he does, I always back off.

Somehow, the Old Ways always manage to come down to relationship.

After the Samhain stuff came down this year, the room seemed too dark—oh, our Northern winters!—so I rewrapped the horns in white LED lights with so strong a bluish cast to them that one feels cold just looking at them.

Something was still missing, though, so a few days ago I hung some faux icicles along the light-wound horns. Lights and ice: together, they perfected the look.

He wears them proudly, attitudinously. From Lord of the Sabbat, master of unholy revels, he has become the Snow Goat, lord of Winter.

Maybe, as we get closer to Yule, I'll cut some branches of holly from out front and make him a collar. Or would that seem to tame him too much? We'll see what himself has to say about it.

The Goat always gets the final say.

The first snow of the season is magical the way it transforms the world. Bare trees suddenly wear a soft white mantle that sparkles in the light. Empty gardens and city parks are transformed into an enchanted fairyland. As snow covers the ground new shapes seem to emerge — is that a gnome I see beside the bench?
     But this is just a prelude to the arrival of the Cailleach. In Scotland, she is Cailleach Bheur the crone goddess and personified spirit of winter who brings the snow and storms. She heralds the fierceness of the season, the howling winds and drifts of snow. Winter will turn from gentle to harsh, and yet, the deep-frozen landscape has a stark beauty all its own. 
     Call to the Cailleach and she will be there to guide you through the season. Listen for her voice in the wind. Her message of winter: Face into the storm, see what is coming, and know that you can hold your own against anything.
     When the snow falls and the wind rises, light a white candle in her honor. Close your eyes and feel the special magic that can be gained through winter’s lesson.

A Literary Mystery

He's arguably the 20^th century's most famous Phoenician: Phlebas, the uncrowned Fisher King of T. S. Eliot's monumental 1929 poem The Wasteland.

IV. Death by Water

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and the loss.

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

“Death by Water” has haunted me since first I committed it to memory as a graduate student years ago.

Perhaps because the lament for Phlebas is the lone entirely comprehensible section in Eliot's ruined city of a poem, it has gone oddly undiscussed by critics. Apparently, it has never occurred to even a single commentator to ask about the name itself.

In fact, it has much to tell us.

In Praise of Seasonal Pragmatism

According to the borborygmic rumblings of Evangelical paranoia, the greeting “Happy Holidays” is a foisted Deep State plot to elbow Christmas out of its rightful (and deserved) first-class civic preeminence.

Well. After the November election just passed, I guess they sure showed us.

Or maybe they just need to get out more.

Me, I know people who celebrate—or at least acknowledge—all sorts of holidays at this time of year, including (in roughly numerical order):

• Yule
• Christmas (religious)
• Christmas (secular)
• Hanuka
• Solstice (secular)
• Nativity
• Saturnalia
• Dies Natalis Solis Invicti
• Chaumós
• Pancha Ganapati
• Hogswatch
• Lurlinemas

Not to mention Thanksgiving and New Year's.

I don't personally know anyone who celebrates Kwanzaa—which friends tell me is largely a top-down affair anyway, more officially- than privately-observed—though no doubt that's only a matter of time.

(Festivus, of course, is a NY in-joke, not a holiday.)

Despite the outcome of the recent election, I am still finding reasons to be thankful and practice gratitude during this holiday season. I have a wonderful circle of close friends, I can still converse with my family and spend time with them, and I’ve enjoyed enough steady freelance work the last couple of months to pay my bills and stay on top of things. I’m not going to preach about fighting the good fight, or never giving up hope, or staying cheerful no matter what. For one thing, it’s just not practical for everyone right now, myself included. What I can share, is that there’s no better time than the present for practicing self-care.

Good Company

It can be all too easy to get lost in social obligations, trying in vain to create the perfect meal, or worrying too much about how we’re stacking up to others at this time of year. We need to let ourselves off the hook, take a deep breath, and cut ourselves some slack. Visiting should be about the people, not the places. The setting is a backdrop, and the food we share together is a complement to the good company. Plus, there is no such thing as perfection–so there, too.

Dea Gravida

I bought the little goddess in, of all places, Jerusalem.

“How many people come to Jerusalem to buy idols?” I laughingly asked the dealer in the little antiquities shop where I bought—say, maybe, redeemed—her. In Hebrew, the question has a certain pungency that it lacks in English.

(In an even deeper irony, the real answer is: millions do. Books like the Torah, the Bible, and the Qur'an are the most dangerous idols of all; they've caused more human suffering than any statue ever did.)

She's maybe 2500 years old, of a Phoenician iconographic type known as the dea gravida, the “pregnant goddess.” (In English, to be “gravid” is not just to be pregnant, but to be really pregnant.) Nearing the end of her term, with her elaborate hairdo and veil, she sits in a chair with her right hand held protectively, reflectively, over her belly. There's a stillness to her. She's waiting.

Mold-made, an affordable best-seller of her day, tens of thousands like her survive. That explains how someone on a student budget like me could afford to buy one, and why the Israeli government would let her out of the country. (Nation-states are usually jealous of artifacts found within their borders: in this case, up north in “Galilee of the gentiles,” where Phoenician influence was strong.)

The little goddess sits on an altar in my bedroom, where I see her every day. In a house filled with Green Men and Astartes, somehow this is the time of year, this pregnant time before Yule, when I find myself noticing her most.