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.

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Steven Posch

Steven Posch

Poet, scholar and storyteller Steven Posch was raised in the hardwood forests of western Pennsylvania by white-tailed deer. (That's the story, anyway.) He emigrated to Paganistan in 1979 and by sheer dint of personality has become one of Lake Country's foremost men-in-black. He is current keeper of the Minnesota Ooser.

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To the Mother of a Boy About to be Initiated Into Manhood

 

Oh, don't worry, you'll get to see him coming up out of the woods all right: the triumphal return to the village. Hey, he's the star: this is his night, his party, after all.

We'll send a runner up to let you know when we're finished with the...doings. Then we'll bring him up—you'll hear us coming—and...let the party begin.

Oh, we'll need a bag with some clean clothes for him to wear coming back. New ones would be best. No symbolism there or anything.

By the way, if he has any friends from school or wherever that he'd like to ask to the party, by all means invite them. Let the cowans be jealous. See if I care.

Anyway, it'll be good. This ritual is a masterpiece, I tell you, a f*cking masterpiece. And talk about self-authenticating. Once you experience this stuff, you just know that this is exactly how we've always done it.

Which, of course, it is.

Well, all this is assuming that he actually survives, of course. (Grins.) But I wouldn't worry too much about that if I were you.

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You're of the Dobunni, the original Celtic tribe of Witches. You live in a traditional Iron Age Celtic roundhouse. Like houses everywhere, it shows forth a likeness of the cosmos.

 

In the center, the round hearth, with its living, undying flame.

To the right, the Men's Side.

To the left, the Women's.

Interestingly, the seat of greatest honor is where the Sides meet: directly across the fire from the door.

Door, fire, seat.

 

Men's Side, Women's Side: the language of ritual preserves these ancient usages, meaning “men generally,” “women generally.” The metaphor was originally a spatial one: “side” here meaning not “team” or “party,” but “side of the fire.”

I've long known of this traditional usage and its associations, but have wondered for equally as long: right and left sides as seen from where?

Well, I now know.

 

Archaeologist V. Gordon Childe records that among the shorefolk of the Outer Hebrides, such traditional spatial attributions persisted into the early “20th” century.

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 Zoos and Zodiacs: The Lascaux Shaft Scene – Alistair Coombs

 

At the end of the rites of man-making, the new-made men line up and receive their ritual scarification.

(You're never fully a man until you've shed your blood for the People. Same goes for women. This was true back when; it's still true now.)

These days, we have a new custom. Once the New Spears have received their scarification, those of us who somehow or other have managed to make our way to manhood without benefit of rite line up and get our scars too.

(In the old days, of course, there would have been no need for this. In these darksome times, alas, there is. Manhood without benefit of rite: disgraceful.)

That's how I got mine. If you look closely, you can see them, right here on my left pectoral.

Near the heart.

At the time—shame be upon me—it never occurred to me to ask the elder who cut me what they meant.

Now it's too late to ask. He's gone.

 

You know those old stories about how the Devil nips you on your shoulder-blade (left again), and that's your witch mark?

Same mark, different place.

Still near the heart.

 

A while back, I realized that, after all these years, I finally understood what the marks meant. Once I knew that, everything fell into place, and it all made perfect sense.

Naturally—once I'd thought of it—it seemed perfectly obvious: as if, indeed, these were the only possible meanings that these scars could bear.

We bear this knowledge on our body.

 

If you go as deep as you can go into the famed painted animal cave of Lascaux in France, you'll come to the Shaft.

Climb down to the bottom of the Shaft—it's about 14 feet deep—and you'll find, by the flickering light of the fat lamp that you've carefully carried with you, the only image of a human being in the entire cave.

It's a famous scene (but was it all painted at once? we don't know): a wounded bison, its guts hanging out, charging an ithyphallic man who seems to be falling backwards. Beneath him is a bird on a stick. A witch-man, perhaps? (That's how you say “shaman” in Witch.) We don't know; we never will.

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'...In All the Greater Temples'

Long ago, the Horned God was worshiped “in all the greater temples”, to use Gardner's pungent phrase.

(Well, maybe not all, but why pass up a snazzy quote like that?)

Then came the Great Forgetting. When he wasn't forgotten, he was reviled. Oh, our lives were the worse for it.

A few of us remembered, though. Always we missed him. In the consoling darkness, we whispered to one another prophecies of his Return.

Well, guess what, folks: the prophecies were true.

In a traditional society, now, remembering, we would make a lament for all those Lost Years.

 

Get Out Your Sieve

In terms of structure and realized characters, Goat Foot God (1936) is Dion Fortune's best novel: better, really, than either Sea Priestess or Moon Magic.

Which, of course, is not to say that it's a good novel, mind you. (As a friend once put it, “Dion Fortune couldn't write her way out of a chalk circle.”) But—unlike her turgid and (frankly) unreadable non-fiction—it has at least characters and a story to embody her ideas. The casual (and gratuitous) racism and unquestioned class prejudice of one who presumably regarded herself as enlightened should stand as a warning to the reader to judge her ideas on intrinsic merit, not on authority. Caveat lector.

Still, it's her novel about the Horned God and his Return. That you've got to love and, indeed, on that topic she has much to impart. As for the bugs in the flour...well, sift carefully. The sieve is a traditional witch's tool for a reason.

The Great God Pan she describes, in Christian idiom, as “God made manifest in Nature.” The novel tells two stories simultaneously: one of an early 20th century Englishman with a serious Vitamin P deficiency (talk about a pungent phrase), and a 15th-century English monk who rediscovers Pan via some Greek manuscripts.

Well, we need our stories from the Lost Years, too: so we remember “...or, failing that, invent” (Monique Wittig).

 

A Lament for the Horned

As epigraph to the book, Fortune cites four stanzas from her Rite of Pan. Rereading them recently, I found myself thinking: Well, there's our Lament for the Horned.

 

The Goat-Foot God

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Deep and Deeper

Take a look at any random collection of historic Leaf Mask images. What you will find is many Green Men, but few (if any) Green Women.

Why not?

If words like “sexism” and “patriarchy” are coming into your head right now, don't let them distract you.

The answer is simpler and more basic than that.

 

Green Pubes

It was one of those Winters that seemed like it was never going to end.

Just at the point—here in the frozen North it happens pretty much every year—that I was beginning to feel that Winter was eternal and Spring a mere figment of my Winter-bruised imagination—I had a dream so impacting that I'll never forget it.

In the dream, I'm gazing down contemplatively over the expanse of my own naked body. In place of pubic hair, a crisp little thicket of glossy green leaves grows directly from my skin.

Hair : animals :: leaves : plants.

 

Dionysiaca

The Leaf Mask motif first emerges in art in the Mediterranean world at the beginning of the first millennium, growing out of the common Dionysiac image of a reveler crowned with vine-leaves.

At a traveling exhibit of items from Pompeii (destroyed 79 CE) that came through the Twin Cities some years ago, I saw a painting which struck me as a kind of proto-Green Man: a male head wearing a vine-leaf crown, in which the hair and the leaves of the crown merged visually in such a way that you couldn't tell which was which.

Becoming one with the vine: it doesn't get more bacchic than that.

 

Clintonism

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Salem: Witch War Special - YouTube

 

brouhaha (BROO-ha-ha) n. [French (probably imitative).] An uproar; a hubbub.

 

bruja (BROO-ha) n. [Spanish; etymology uncertain. Possibly from Iberian/Celtiberian *bruxtia (compare Catalan bruixa, Portuguese bruxa, Occitan bruèissa, from Proto-Celtic *brixtâ [“spell, magic”] [compare Old Irish bricht (“charm”), Old Breton brith (“magic”)], or possibly a different Celtic word such as Old Irish Brigit (“high, exalted”).] A witch.

 

brujaja (BROO-ha-ha) n. [Portmanteau of brouhaha + bruja.] 1. Cowan usage. A public uproar or hubbub about whether or not someone is a witch; a witch panic. 2. Witch usage. A witch war or war of witches.

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Behold: the Green "Man" that adorns the official invitation to King Charles' upcoming coronation.

(Note that heraldic artist Andrew Jamieson's winsome little Green Guy, sporting as he does the traditional floral/vegetal attributes of the constituent nations of the so-called WISE Islands—daffodils [Wales], shamrocks [Ireland], thistles [Scotland], and wild roses [England]—renders him a quintessentially pan-British figure.)

Oh, the foofarrah.

Does King Charles' Green Man Make Him a Pagan?” howls The Spectator.

(Technically, of course, you'll notice that the Leaf Mask in question is actually that of a Green Cat, a traditional subset of the Green Man design, but that's by the by. BtW, I'm planning to be posting specifically about the Green Beast some time in the near future, so stay tuned.)

No, silly cowans, of course it doesn't mean he's pagan. (Green Men are commonly found in churches, remember?) Charles Windsor is a practicing Christian, titular head of the Anglican Church, who regularly goes on retreats at a Greek Orthodox monastery in Mount Athos. (His father was capital-O-Orthodox, by baptism at least.)

Remember, though, Charlie is savvy. This is the man, you'll recall, who once told the press that he regards himself not so much as “Protector of the Faith”, as “Protector of Faith.”

Guess what, folks: that means us, too.

You can also be sure that he knows damn well that, while the Green Man may be an ecumenical symbol of the natural world and all of humanity's essential kinship therewith, he—said Green Man—is ours—i.e. the pagans'—in particular.

No, unlike (purportedly) some of his ancestors, this king is not a witch.

But be of good cheer, O pagans of Britain. Mr. Windsor is sending us a message, and knowingly so: the Green King—champion of organic agriculture and sustainable living long, long before they became fashionable—is on our side.

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