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As pagan bumperstickers go, it was really pretty subtle.

A Thor's Hammer with antlers.

What it meant to whoever owned the van, I don't know. I could imagine several possibilities.

But I know what it meant to me. Hey, I've heard the stories.

They say that Old Hornie—but he would have been Young Hornie then—used to live up in the sky, in the House of Thunder, to the West.

Well, they say he didn't just live there.

It lies at the opposite pole from All gods are one god.

All gods are distinct.

So Thórr ≠ Perún ≠ Perkunas ≠ Zeus ≠ Jupiter ≠ Indra ≠ Ba'al ≠ Changó?

Yikes.

Although, in a History of Religions sense, I can see a certain merit-of-convenience to the hyper-Distinct school of thought, I have to ask myself: just how far does this extend? Is African Changó a different god from Brazilian? Is the Thunderer of my valley existentially distinct from the Thunderer of your valley next door?

If dreary monism is the danger of “All gods are one god,” is not the danger of “All gods are distinct” atomization? Personally, when I see gods getting smaller and smaller, I worry.

Looking at pagan history, I note a pronounced tendency to look for one's own gods behind the masks of other people's.

It may well be my first memory.

I'm laying in the dark screaming, terrified of the thunder that has wakened me. My father comes into the room and scoops me up into his arms.

We're moving. I distinctly remember passing from the darkness of the hall into the light of the kitchen. My mother is saying: Russell, what are you doing? Russell, what are you doing?

He carries me out the back door. Rain is sluicing down. We both must have been soaked through immediately, though I don't remember noticing. Out we go, into the heart of the storm.

What is harder and more enduring than oak?

What is more delicate and ephemeral than a flower?

Oak flowers: a seeming paradox, but all those acorns must come from somewhere. The contradictory softness of the hard. The oak being Thunder's tree and all, one thinks of all those stories in mythology in which the Thunderer, most manly of gods, dresses in women's clothing. Clearly, he's not all bluster and bravado. Clearly, he too has his hidden depths.

Welcome to the season of paradox: the blooming of the oaks. You may need to expand your mental picture of what a flower looks like. But flowers they are, male and female, and they bear within themselves the oaks of millennia yet to be.

While visiting my cousin in Germany, I picked up some jars of oak honey at the village shop. It was amazing, the least sweet honey I've ever tasted, dark upon the tongue.

Sun lives in the east and walks to the west. A god of regular habits, his nature is warm and dry.

Thunder lives in the west and walks to the east. His nature combines both fire and water: a volatile god, much given to outburst.

Unlikenesses such as these are wont to breed fierceness in both love and battle.

And having battled and loved, the daughter of their reconciliation is Rainbow.

(So they may do; after all, they are gods.)

Rainbow is a gentle and well-loved goddess, giver of golden joy. Daughter of reconciliation, she champions unity among peoples.

Caution: Rant Alert

It's an arbitrary and artificial cycle without relation to the natural cycles of the world, an oppressive seven-headed monster.

I say, let's kill it. Death to the week!

Yes, I know that pagans invented it. (Since pagans invented just about everything, that's really no great shakes. Pagans invented slavery and genital mutilation too. Face it, they haven't all been winners.) Tart it up with pagan god-names if you like, but we are not fooled. The intrusive Roman proves it's a foreign import.

When Muhammad of Mecca (piss be upon him) was setting up Islam, he intentionally replaced the traditional solar-lunar calendar with a strictly lunar calendar that careened through the solar year like a drunken bicyclist. In this way he guaranteed that the holidays of his religion would never accrete any of those nasty (and inevitably paganizing) seasonal associations, as the holidays of Judaism and Christianity had. Well, you can't say he wasn't savvy.

Same deal with the week. That's why the Hebrew prophets denounced new moons and holidays and championed the Sabbath instead. Stop looking at the Sun and Moon to tell time; you don't need them. Look at the calendar instead. Why measure our lives by the cycles of nature when we've got this nice, convenient, man-made cycle instead?

You could call it Core paganism.

It's a paganism that anyone can practice anywhere, at any time, regardless of who you are or where your people came from, because it's the common inheritance of us all and we each of us spend every moment of our lives immersed in it.

You could call them the Old Gods; the ancestors did.