PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com 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.
Is it a salad? Is it a pickle?
Well, yes.
Looking for a cold side-dish to lighten and brighten your post-Yuletide board?
Bright with ginger, tender-crunchy with radish, and a wild electric pink color to boot, this dish is just what the witch doctor ordered.
Every recipe's a spell.
Boss Warlock's Knockout Gingered Pink Radish Salad
Real Change in the Real World
Reader, I'm casting a spell as you read this.
That's how word-magic works.
Every post's a spell.
Why do I blog?
Easily told: to bring about change, real change in the real world.
Not only to bring about change in consciousness, as odious old Uncle Al would have it—though certainly it begins there—but real change in the real world.
Ye gods, how grandiose is that?
Word-magic only works when someone is listening.
Therefore, in order to work word-magic, you have to make them want to listen.
You have to give them something.
You have to make what you're saying worth listening to.
In other words, you have to establish a connection.
Before hitting the “Publish” button, I always stop and ask myself first: is what I'm saying here likely to bring about the kind of change that I want to see? i.e. have I said what I'm saying in such a way as to open the reader to Posch and his ideas? Or am I just blowing off steam?
If the answer is B—as it not infrequently is, especially when I'm writing about matters that I care too much about—then I don't publish.
Well, mostly not.
A word to would-be workers of word-magic: alienate your reader, and he'll stop reading. Alienate your listener, and she'll stop listening.
Then your spell has failed from the outset, and the change that you want to see, won't come about.
“Merry Christmas,” says my friend's husband.
It's a surreal moment.
He's Jewish, I'm Pagan. Christmas isn't a terribly active category for either of us.
Do I detect irony? No. I shake my head and smile.
“You too,” I say, pondering the complexities of human interaction.
Even as a callow first-time reader of Dante's Divine Comedy, I could readily see the major design flaw in the overarching architectonic symbolism of that soaring cathedral of a masterpiece.
It makes Lucifer the—literal—center of the universe.
Like Dante, I too had my own selva oscura experience.
He, though, wanted to find his way out of the dark forest.
Me, I sought a way in.
Forests can be literal or figurative. Mine were both.
The self, too, is a dark forest: one that it took me long to find the courage to enter.
In the end, desperation drove me.
“It's all about gay sex. Everything is always about gay sex. Even straight sex is all about gay sex.”
(Sparky T. Rabbit)
It would have been obvious to any ancient Greek.
Who would have thought that you can't really understand the birth of Dionysos without knowing about gay sex?
You know the story.
Semele is pregnant with Zeus' child, but makes the mistake of asking to see her divine lover as he really is, in the full glory of his divinity. Note to self: bad idea.
Blam!
One lightning-strike later, Zeus implants the still-gestating fetal Dionysos into his own thigh, from which the god is, in due course, born, and hence—in the by-word of the Dionysiac mysteries—known as “Twice-born.”
To judge from the surviving literary and artistic evidence, the most common form of male-male sex in ancient Greece was what Classics professors refer to as “intercrural intercourse": what your average street hustler would call “thigh-f*cking.”
That explains why Dionysos is born from Zeus' thigh.
As my friend and I enter the store, we're met with a near-solid bank of red.
It's January 3, 2025.
“Gee, I wonder what holiday's coming up next,” she deadpans.
The moral of the story is, sometimes even the wise can be really foolish.
Before it got burned down during the George Floyd riots, Gandhi Mahal was our neighborhood South Minneapolis South Asian eatery. While nothing particularly remarkable, what they served was acceptable Indian restaurant food, and certainly easier than cooking it yourself.
Like many pagans, I have a passion for Indian food, the hotter the better. (Spicy is just about the only form of machismo in which I regularly indulge.) At Gandhi Mahal, they offered a heat spectrum of Mild, Medium, Hot, Very Hot, Very Very Hot, You're Gonna Die, and...Bollywood.
So of course one night I just had to order Bollywood hot. Call it a challenge.
What did I order that night? I can't remember. It doesn't really matter, because I couldn't taste it anyway.
No flavor. No flavor at all. Just fire.
Fire and tears.
Oh, I ate it, ate it all. Oh yes, my precious. Did I enjoy it?
You've got to be kidding. Call it a “Three-Alarm” fire: fire going in, fire inside, fire coming out.
“Why do I do this to myself?” I thought repeatedly next morning: “I love my rectum.” The things we do for bragging rights.
Among pagans, as among traditional peoples everywhere, the lore features two general kinds of teaching tales: hero tales and screw-up tales. Hero tales teach by giving us something to aspire to. Screw-up tales teach by giving us something to be smarter than.
Rheims Cernunnos
Gallo-Roman relief, 1st century CE
