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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Do Gods Have Halos?

It's something of a problem in contemporary pagan iconography.

Do gods have halos?

Halo: a disk of light surrounding the head, in art the conventional indicator of holiness. (In Greek, halo means “threshing floor”; threshing floors were clean, shining disks of ground.)

To Western eyes, halos may have something of a Christian look to them. For some, that's a problem.

But look East and you'll see that buddhas wear halos too, and so do Hindu gods.

In fact, there was a time when use of the halo was forbidden to Christian artists. Sorry, Crispus, halos are for pagans.

The halo arose in late Hellenistic art. Originally it was Sun gods who—for obvious reasons—were so depicted, but soon other gods began to wear them as well. One has to admit, as a sign, the halo sure is convenient. “A god is here,” it says.

This seems perfectly fitting, since to the ancestors, the gods were preeminently the *deiwôs, the “shining ones.”

So—for what it's worth—to contemporary pagan artists, I'd say: Go for it.

It doesn't get more pagan than a halo.

Helios (Pompeii, 1st century CE)

 

 

 

 

 

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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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