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“Can you roast marshmallows over a sacred fire?”

Young Fiona's plaintive question was no idle one.

We'd kindled our Fire of Meeting in the sacred grove on Friday night. All weekend, it had burned continuously, receiving prayers and offerings each morning. Then rain threatened to extinguish it.

(In the end, it didn't, but there was no knowing that at the time.)

So we added a burning log from the sacred Fire to the (non-sacred) fire that burns in the pavilion where people gather when weather's wet, thus (by "contagion") rendering it sacred, thus prompting Fiona's profoundly theological question.

To generalize: may sacral Fire be used for practical purposes as well?

All Fire is sacred, but—by the nature of things—we have to use it for practical purposes, too.

In the face of this paradox, the ancestors cut a deal with the Powers that Be: we maintain sacred Fires to embody, to epitomize, the sanctity of Holy Fire. These we treat with the utmost regard, as honored guests. No waste may be burned in them, only offerings.

Only by virtue of this, is it given to us to make practical use of fire as well.

(We need only look around us in the culture at large to see the dire results of the violation of this primal agreement.)

So: when sacred Fire is the only Fire available—as in this situation—is it permissible to use it for practical purposes—cooking, say—as well?

In the pagan world, local custom takes priority. One could regard this as a general principle of pagan social protocol.

If in your valley, you keep Yule in one way, then when I'm visiting you over the Winter Solstice, that's damn well how I'm going to keep Yule too, regardless of how I may celebrate back at home.

Hey, you have the perfect right to be wrong if you want to.

Needless to say, there's a certain amount of tension here with the universal human belief that the Right Way to Do Something Is—of course—the Way That I Do It.

In practice, it's a balancing act. If you tell me that your name is Xfghstk, pronounced “Tom,” I will call you Tom to your face. What I call you behind your back is another matter, and you can't say you weren't asking for it.

To extend this principle of Local Priority, I generally ride with the idea that the local pronunciation is the correct one; still, that horse will take you only so far. When I hear native Midwesterners drawling out Nyaaawlunz, in verbal caricature of some son or daughter of the Crescent City, I cringe. Maybe that's how they say it Down There, boyo, but Up Here at this end of the Mississippi we say New Orleans. That's four syllables, mind you, not three. Dialect is dialect, but affectation, after all, is affectation.

Case in point: Appalachian. North of the Smith and Wesson Line, we say: AppaLAYshun. South of it, AppaLATCHun.

This raises problems for inveterate listeners to National Public Radio such as myself. Unfortunately—NPR being based in DC—this means that the NPR Received Pronunciation is AppaLATCHun.

I confess, I grind my teeth whenever I hear this. (It bothers me in particular when Aaron Copeland's Appalachian Spring gets deformed into AppaLATCHun Spring. Shudder.) From Southrons, I'll accept that pronunciation, since they have their own customs, and probably don't know any better.

When, however, I hear fellow NPR-listening Northrons parroting that pronunciation, I invariably feel the need to intervene.

“In the part of AppaLAYsha that I come from, we say AppaLAYsha,” I admonish.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for merriment, and making merry—and let us take a moment to savor that fine old phrase, and consider the implications: “merry” isn't something that you are, it's something that you do—is a fine old Yuletide thew (that's “custom” in Witch).

Still, there's something about the greeting “Merry Yule” that, like a shot of vinegar, sets my teeth on edge.

I'm sure I don't need to tell you why. To my ear, it smacks of keeping up with the cowans, which (in my experience) is rarely the best modus operandi. Yule is Yule, its own thing, not something that you write in, having erased “Christmas.”

So, if not a merry one, then what kind of Yule do we wish one another?

The default adjective for holiday salutations in English is, of course, “happy.” There are worse things than a Happy Yule. Colorful, though, it's not. Likewise, since the greeting is often yoked with “and a Happy New Year,” you've suddenly got a “happy-happy” pairing which is, to say the least, infelicitous. Then there's that clunky BUM-bum-BUM meter to it. “Happy Yule” may do the job, but dance on the tongue it doesn't.

Well, when in doubt, consult the kinfolk. Norwegians wish one another a Gledelig Jul, and Danes a Glaedelig Jul: a Glad Yule. (Icelandic is similar: Gledileg Jól.) Now, a glad Yule certainly beats a sad one, but in English there's something forced about the phrase, almost pretentious. It sounds like Translation-ese, which—of course—is exactly what it is. Cognate-for-cognate isn't necessarily best translation strategy.

For Swedes, though, it's God Jul: a Good Yule. Now that I like. Forceful, firm, terse even. (It's cold up here in the North Country: you don't want to go letting all that cold air in. Hence our proverbial Northron taciturnity.) Metrically, it's got that nice, assertive spondee: BUM-BUM. A Good Yule doesn't mess around. A Good Yule tells you what's what. It goes in, does what needs to be done, and gets out again. A Good Yule is lean, and sinewy, and oh-so honey-sweet on the tongue.

It's worth noting that up in Scotland where Yule's Yule and no one has ever bothered with that newfangled Christmas business, it's still Guid Yule, short and sweet.

Well, in the pagan world you'll make up your own mind, and glad I am of it. If you wish me a Merry Yule, or a Happy one, or even a Glad one, I'll gladly take it—as witches say—with both hands.

A friend of mine insists that her dog is pagan.

Well, if one defines “pagan” as “following the thews (customs, life-ways, religion) of one's thede (= tribe, people),” I guess I could buy it. Witches (insofar as we follow anything) follow the Witch religion, dogs follow the Dog religion. I would imagine that the Dog religion is a pretty basic biological religion, with an ethical code strongly based on loyalty.

Rather like human paganism at its best, actually.

Then, of course, there's the Kitty-Cat religion. I'm certainly not privy to the inner mysteries here, but so far as I can tell, Cat religion is monotheistic.

There's one god, and it's Me.

Maybe that's where the Abrahamics got it from. This would fit with my theory that monotheism is essentially narcissism writ large.

I'm playing here, of course, but the question is a serious one: can animals—let me be specific and say non-human animals here—be said to have religion? The answer, of course, would depend on how one defines “religion.”

The Virtues* are central to most Old Pagan systems of ethics, and chief among them is Honor.**

How's yours?

What do others say about you?

What do those that know you well say about you?

What do those that know you less than well say about you?

How good is your word?

If you say you'll do something, do you follow through?

If you take an oath, do you keep it?

A friend once asked me why I don't capitalize 'pagan.'

Here's why.

Back in the old days, we didn't have a separate word for 'religion.'

We didn't know that we needed one.

In those days, religion interlaced with everyday life and behavior like intertwining patterns on a runestone.

In the language of the Anglo-Saxon Hwicce—the original Tribe of Witches—the word þéaw (today we say thew) meant “tradition, custom, usage, habit, conduct.” In the plural it meant “virtues, manners, morals, morality.”

But that was as close as we got to 'religion.'

That's why we had to import the foreign word.

The old-time Tribe of Witches didn't have a separate word for “religion.”

Or “tradition.”

Or “morals.”

They had one word for them all.

The Hwicce—the Anglo-Saxon tribe (and later, kingdom) that (according to some) gave rise to the name and lore of today's witches—spoke their own dialect of Old English, the language which (after a crossbow marriage with Norman French) gave rise to Modern English.

Living in a state of cultural wholeness that we can only fantasize about today—what culture critic Stephen Flowers would call “integral culture”—their word ðéaw denoted many of the shared things that together make a people a people: Religion. Custom. Tradition. Usage. Virtue. Conduct. In the plural, it also meant virtues, (good) manners, morals, morality.

Imagine a world in which all these things were the same thing. That was the world of the witches.