Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
Of Easter Eggs, Onion Skins, and the Whole Pagan Project
The red eggs are cooling on the table.
My father picks one up, an unreadable expression on his face.
"What did you use to get this color?" he asks. “My grandmother used to make eggs that looked like this."
I'm back East for Spring Break. Easter is coming.
“Do you want to dye up some eggs?” my mother asks.
Of course I do. If you need eggs dyed, pumpkins carved, or trees trimmed, call Steve. That's my niche in the family ecology.
“Sure. I'll show you how we do it in Minneapolis,” I say, obnoxiously.
We gather up all the old skins from the onion bin and throw them into the pot, along with the boiling eggs.
1980. That was the year of the first All-Pagan, All-Natural Spring Equinox Egg-Dye.
I'd been reading up on dyeing eggs using natural dye-stocks. That year we used onionskins and tumeric. (This year will be the 45th Annual Egg-Dye. Our repertoire has expanded considerably since then.) Tumeric produces a bright, sunny yellow; onionskins a rich Minoan red.
It was the latter that gave my father that tender moment of deep memory.
Somehow, this scenario seems to me the perfect metaphor for the whole New Pagan project: the recovery of lost, ancestral wisdom.
Henry Bailey Stevens called it the recovery of culture. Our work will be the long, slow work of centuries. If the prospect of such seems daunting, remember that, at heart, the process is really a very simple one, elegantly so.
One egg and a handful of onionskins is all it takes.
Comments
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Monday, 03 March 2025
They look kind of like giant robin's eggs, don't they?
If you soak some of those in tumeric dye, you'll get the most shocking electric green. -
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I hardboiled some eggs in water that I had used to cook red cabbage. They came out a nice blue color.