PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

Agostino Veneziano's enigmatic 16th-century engraving Lo Stregozzo (“The Male Witch”) has been mystifying viewers for nearly 500 years.

Four naked, muscular young men rush at a run into a wetland. (Note on the upper left the ducks that their coming has disturbed.) In their midst, an elderly woman, also naked—a witch? Hecate-Diana, the witches' goddess?—holding the witch's signature emblem, the bubbling cook-pot, rides the articulated skeleton of an large animal of indeterminate species (horse?). Beneath her mount, a thickset older man on all fours, also naked, awkwardly attempts to straddle two animated skeletons, also of indeterminate species.

There's much to unpack here, and I hope to do so in a future post. For today, though, I'd like to examine more closely the engraving's mysterious title.

Numerous copies of the etching have survived the centuries. Museums generally title it either "The Carcass" or “The Witches' Procession,” but that's not what Lo Stregozzo means.

Google-translate Lo Stregozzo and you'll get: “the sorcerer.” Well, kind of.

The word is clearly masculine singular. (Lo is the form that il, “the,” takes before Zs and certain Ss.) Stregone is the masculine form of strega, a (female) witch. Some would translate “wizard.” Me, I'd say “warlock.”

What about that ending, though? (Pronounce that double Z as ts, as in pizza.) -Ozzo in Italian is a (masculine singular) “augmentative suffix”: the opposite of a diminutive. It tells you that something is “big.” Whether or not we want to take this literally is another matter.

The same suffix occurs in maritozzo, literally “big husband,” a kind of central Italian sweet bun, and panuozzo, a stuffed Neapolitan sandwich. Draw your own conclusions.

So, the big question: who is the eponymous “big warlock” of the title?

Really, it's good, sound ancestral logic.

A man broke into a Shiva temple in India and stole many valuable items from the temple treasury. When the man was apprehended, he freely admitted the break-in, but nonetheless contended that he was innocent of theft.

Innocent?

Yes indeed, said the man. I stole nothing.

But the goods from the temple were found in your possession, said the authorities.

Nevertheless, I am innocent of the charges, said the man.

In India, a temple and everything in it belong to the main god enshrined therein. This is good, sound ancestral lore: any ancient Greek would have said the same. To steal something from a god—the original meaning of the word sacrilege—was accounted by the ancestors as one of the most terrible of crimes, in the same category as incest or murder.

How is it, then, that the man claimed innocence?

Because, he contended, the god Shiva does not exist. To own, you must exist. A non-existent person cannot be said to own anything. Therefore, to take things from the temple was not theft. You cannot steal something that is ownerless.

The case went up through the courts, which—understandably—were unwilling to rule on whether or not gods actually exist. One readily understands their reluctance. Courts simply don't have the standing to rule on such a question. To rule for their existence would be to exceed judicial authority. To rule against their existence would—as the case itself demonstrates—create a deeply dangerous precedent.

Finally, the case reached the Supreme Court. Their ruling was elegant in its simplicity.

Call it a moral failing if you like, but I actually enjoy shoveling snow.

My next-door neighbor once asked his yoga teacher, “Which is the best yoga?”

Dr. Arya smiled. “Putting-on-your-shoes yoga,” he replied.

Indeed. The best exercise of all is the exercise that you get in the course of everyday life.

Up here in the Land of the Northern Star, thanks to Winter and the Mother, we have our own exercise program, ours to us. Call it Snow Yoga. Who needs the gym?

The idea is to move as much snow as you can while doing as little work as possible. Done well, it's a lean, spare choreography, consisting—counter-intuitively, maybe—mostly of pushing.

The snow is your partner. Push, push, push: then lift. Lift with your legs, though, not with your back. If you're a true snow artist, your butt will hurt by the time that the driveway is clear. Welcome to the North Country, land of toned and shapely butts.

Done properly, a good shoveling-out will take you to the place of No-Mind, where mind and body, stillness and motion, are one. The Zen of snow-shoveling.

The fine art of shoveling snow even has its own philosophy. No matter how daunting the amount of snow to be moved, you'll get there eventually, one shovelful at a time.

One shovelful at a time will move a mountain of snow.

We only got an inch of snow this time, but fortunately that still counts—as we say hereabouts—as a “shovel-able” amount.

First thing after breakfast, I put on my boots and hit the walks. I shovel myself out, then the neighbors on both sides, including Dr. Arya's chela. Hey, it's the neighborly thing to do, and they're both old, past their shoveling days.

I'm an old guy too, of course, but I'm a young old guy. Young enough to shovel, anyway.

Gods, flippin' America.

I hate that, in America's hyper-racialized mindscape, colors become shorthand for people.

I hate that—so hyper-racialized is that mindscape—to the American ear, the racialized meanings can tend to become the primary meanings of color words: that, even when used to describe color, and no more, such words tend to take on racialized implications.

Ye gods. Is there no way out?

So entrenched has such usage become that I recently heard a local heathen elder advise against using the term “wight” in public without qualification—land-wight, tree-wight—lest someone should mishear racial implications.

(The term “wight”—literally a “being”—refers to the other, non-human, peoples of the land. Some speak of “land-spirits” and the like, but personally I prefer "wight" because it doesn't specify kind of being—personally, I don't believe in spirits—only that they are.)

And yet. And yet.

Last night, the ancient language of the rite of Imbolc opened up before me with a possibility of hope for a greater enrichment.

The Mother's Way

Does the Great Mother squat to pee?

That's how you say “Well, duh” in Witch.

It's the natural way to sit.

It's the natural way to shit.

It's the natural way to give birth.

Welcome to the squat.

Born to Sit This Way

Think “sit on the ground” and you tend to think “cross-legged,” right?

But what if the ground is wet? Or covered with gravel?

Obviously—does the Great Mother squat to pee?—you “sit on your heels.”

The chief sits cross-legged. The war-band squats.

Why? Easily told.

The chief deliberates. The warriors act. From a squat, you can rise more quickly. Pushing off the ground with both hands will give you added speed and momentum.

That's why the Horned, drighten to our dright, sits with legs folded beneath him.

Born to Shit This Way

Think about it. Squatting is the human body's ideal position for evacuating.

That way, Earth and her gravity help pull the waste from your body.

Why are Westerners so prone to constipation and back pain? Blame the sitting toilet, which makes you do all the work.

The best form of exercise is exercise that you get in the course of everyday life. Consider how much full-body exercise you're getting when you squat down several times daily to empty your bowels.

Born to Give Birth This Way

Same deal with giving birth.

Doing so prone is for the doctor's convenience, not the mother's. When you give birth squatting, you have the Mother and her gravity to help pull the baby from your body, instead of having to force it out with sheer muscle power.

If you can't squat, it's well worth learning to. In fact, I'm squatting, perfectly comfortably, as I write this. How can I still do this at the ripe old age of 69?

Easily told.

You know the stereotypes.

5000 years ago, a horde of milk-drinking, pot-smoking, trouser-wearing, pastoralist warriors rode (on horses) out of the Pontic-Caspian steppes to take over much of Eurasia. We can follow the trajectory of their expansion by the kurgans—burial mounds—that they left behind, in which those very warriors were buried with full panoply of arms.

There's a certain amount of truth to the stereotypes, certainly. But with the advent of genetic science, a fascinating new window of insight into the ancient Indo-Europeans opens up for us.

In fact, one in twenty-five of those warriors buried with arms in those barrows was a woman (Winegard 99). One in twenty-five.

Take that, Marija Gimbutas.

Really, we shouldn't be surprised. We know that women in historic Celtic-speaking societies underwent arms training. (Think of Boudicca. Being able to defend yourself is a valuable skill.) Well into historic times, the Scythians—essentially, Indo-Europeans who stayed on the steppes—were known for their women-under-arms, who gave rise to Classical legends of the Amazons. Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great, unifier of Persia, lost his head (literally) after treacherously attempting to annex the kingdom of Scythian warrior-queen Tomyris of the Massagetae. (He had previously proposed marriage to her, but she turned him down.)

Warrior goddesses turn up all across Indo-Europeandom, from the Morrigan in the West, to Durga in the East, with Athene in-between. Why would we be surprised to find an underlying social reality to match? Religion reflects society, as every student of either knows.

“If you build the candy cottage, the kiddies will come.”

(Frebur Hobson)

I pulled my mother's girlhood copy of the Brothers Grimm off the shelf the other day, and found a version of Hansel and Gretel like one that I've never seen before.

Move over, Disney.

Here's how I remembered it: wicked stepmother, weak father, kids abandoned in the woods.

Candy cottage, wicked witch, caged Hansel.

Gretel plays dumb, pushes witch into stoked oven. H & G, liberated, find their way back home. Stepmother—Elmira Gulch to the witch's WOW, maybe—has died meanwhile died.

Happily ever after with weak but loving dad.

The original, though, is much longer and far more interesting. They use her magic against her, you see.

To start off it, it's not a wicked stepmother who wants to abandon the children in the woods to starve to death, but their mother. That's way scarier.

(One wonders, though. It's scary when mom stops doing everything for you and pushes you toward independence, but it's really far worse if she never does.)

The witch's house isn't candy, but of bread, and thatched with cake. The windowpanes are made of barley sugar, though.

In this version, the children manage to escape the witch's clutches and flee into the woods, but first they steal her wand and the pipe that hangs on her wall.