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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.

New to Minnesota, my Israeli friend threw up her hands in exasperation.

“Augh!” she groaned. “Doesn't anyone around here ever talk about anything but the weather?”

Well, this is the Midwest. We have lots of weather here and we talk about it a lot. We're proud of our weather, and find it intrinsically interesting. Hell, we have weather here that can kill you. That's pretty interesting.

For pagans, of course, there's added incentive. Earth, Sun, Storm, the Winds: what we call “weather” is what the gods are doing.

To make is hard. To make takes skill. To make is godlike.

To break is easy. Any bully can do it.

This the desecrators, the icon-breakers, have never understood. Nor do they understand that, smash as they will, in the end they cannot win.

Shown above are three of the greatest gods of ancient Palmyra. In the center is Thunder: Ba'al Shamin, “Lord of Heaven,” here shown without his usual attributes of thunderbolt and eagle. To his right stands Moon (see his crescent horns): Aglibol, “Ba'al's Calf.” To his left stands Sun: Malakbol, “Ba'al's Messenger” (or “Angel”).

The breakers of the world can smash Their images, they can blow up Their temples. And let us make our due and worthy laments for such lost and broken beauty.

But the gods Themselves they cannot touch. Thunder, Moon, and Sun stand in the heavens as They always have: our very makers, givers of life to maker as to breaker.

Some stories tell themselves.

In The Miracle Detective: An Investigation of Holy Visions, Rolling Stone editor Randall Sullivan tells the story of the supposed Marian visionaries of Medjugorje, of the processes by which the Vatican authenticates (and de-authenticates) visions, and a personal tale of unbelief wrestling with belief.

But (to this reader, at least) the book's most intriguing story is its underlying pagan subtext.

Saturday night we offered to Thunder.

Together we sang, danced, and prayed that He be merciful to our gathering.

Sunday night the big storm hit.