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A publisher contacted a certain writer that I know. Would he write them a book on Wicca 101?
To his credit, he told them: There are already too many Wicca 101 books in the world. What I will write you is a book on Wicca 501.
Great, said the publisher.
So my friend sent around to friends and colleagues to ask: What would a course in Wicca 501 look like?
Well, my friend, here's my answer.
But you're not going to like it.
Wicca 501
Final Exam
Like most tribal elders, I worry about my people. Is there a future for pagans?
In a group of, say, 50 pagans, one could make a case that, arguably, there are actually 50 different religions represented. How can so fragmented (not to mention self-obsessed) a group possibly have a future together? How can we possibly achieve anything lasting?
Well, something that I heard at a workshop at Paganicon 2024 gives me hope.
Hero Tales
His great-grandfather was a drunk.
He had recently moved back to the old family farm, land in-taken by said great-grandfather. According to family tradition, the old man had liked his booze, and then some.
So at Samhain, he'd take down the treasured bottle of 40-year old Scotch from the shelf and pour a dram or two for his ancestor-in-the-land.
After a year or two of this, one Samhain night, great-grandpa himself turns up in a dream and slaps him up side the head.
“What's this shit?” he says. “I want Blatz!”
(Blatz is a local beer that could charitably be described as a “beer-drinker's beer.”)
The man who told this story on himself was a respected local elder, founder of one of our regional pagan land sanctuaries.* When he told his tale, my heart leapt up and I thought: Ye gods, maybe there's hope for us after all.
I live in Minneapolis. Our sister-city across the river is named for Christianity's (arguably) ookiest saint: Miss Paul (né Saul) of Tarsus.* Ugh.
What's a poor pagan to do?
Across the New World, in repeated acts of verbal imperialism, places bear the imposed names of foreign religions. As we move toward a post-Christian America, what do we do with these irrelevant old names?
Well, I've heard pagan Califians refer to LA as Yangna, the name of the Indigenous village in the same location. That's one approach, if such a name is available.
In this particular instance, of course, St. Paul isn't the city's real (= original, pagan) name. The city was first called Pig's Eye, and the story sounds like something out of Celtic mythology.
Now, it so happens that the guy who built the original trading post in the area one day lost his prize sow. (Her name, alas, is lost to history.) She had a tendency to wander off anyway, and was about to farrow, so her disappearance was extremely worrying.
Finally he finds the sow lying by the Mississippi with her numerous new farrow suckling greedily. (How's that for an omen?) Giddy with relief, he looks around him at the place where she's chosen to give birth.
“Hmm....” he thinks.
Welcome to Pig's Eye, boys and girls.
...
They cut down the old tree.
They thought that they'd killed it. They thought that it was dead.
Oh, but it wasn't dead at all.
There was life in those old roots yet.
In time, a new tree began to grow from the old roots.
No, it isn't the same tree. Nor is it quite the old tree again, not yet.
It's a new tree, a young tree.
"Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Last year this time I responded to an essay written by John Michael Greer titled, "A Bad Case of Methodist Envy: Copying Christian models of clergy is a Pagan dead end." His essay argued against the notion of payed professional clergy and my response was to argue in favor of professional clergy -- at least having the option of professional clergy. In this essay it is my hope to build upon the ideas I shared in last year's essay but also share further reflections on the subject of the evolving nature of Paganism in general and Pagan clergy in particular.
...
Part of forming a community is defining what that community means. What do we stand for? What are our values? Who is or isn't a member of that community? And what are our goals? Today's stories for Watery Wednesday take a look at the ways in which the Pagan community is defining itself. All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!
