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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Learning Hunger

Among the many things that I learned from my family, there's one that I didn't.

How to be hungry.

I grew up in a time and place—O rarity of human history—where there was always enough food. So I never learned how to be hungry. I never had to.

Instead, I've had to teach myself.

Sometimes hunger is a matter of necessity: there's just no food. That's involuntary hunger.

But the longer that I walk the Old Ways, the more convinced I become that sometimes—for our own spiritual health—we need to take on voluntary hunger as well.

From our vast inherited spiritual technology, I'd guess that fasting is one of the most underutilized ancestral resources among modern pagans. In my opinion, we're the weaker for it.

The Grand Sabbat is coming up later this summer. I, along with the rite's other priests, have now begun the preparatory forefast. When you're to embody a god, you need to make of yourself a worthy vessel. You need to hunger. You need to be, as my friend and colleague Frater Barrabbas has put it, “loose in your skin.”

Why?

Because when you're empty, you long to be filled.

 

 

 

 

 

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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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