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A Lost Poem from Book XII of the Greek Anthology

So fiery is his seed, they say,

that, in his potency, he kindles

men and women both,

and they bring forth. Well,

so they say. Man to man,

I'd gladly put it to the test.

The red eggs are cooling on the table.

My father picks one up, an unreadable expression on his face.

"What did you use to get this color?" he asks. “My grandmother used to make eggs that looked like this."

I'm back East for Spring Break. Easter is coming.

“Do you want to dye up some eggs?” my mother asks.

Of course I do. If you need eggs dyed, pumpkins carved, or trees trimmed, call Steve. That's my niche in the family ecology.

“Sure. I'll show you how we do it in Minneapolis,” I say, obnoxiously.

We gather up all the old skins from the onion bin and throw them into the pot, along with the boiling eggs.

1980. That was the year of the first All-Pagan, All-Natural Spring Equinox Egg-Dye.

I'd been reading up on dyeing eggs using natural dye-stocks. That year we used onionskins and tumeric. (This year will be the 45^th Annual Egg-Dye. Our repertoire has expanded considerably since then.) Tumeric produces a bright, sunny yellow; onionskins a rich Minoan red.

It was the latter that gave my father that tender moment of deep memory.

Somehow, this scenario seems to me the perfect metaphor for the whole New Pagan project: the recovery of lost, ancestral wisdom.

In Which Our Intrepid Blogger Meets Up with a Rattlesnake in the Woods, and What Happened Then

Actually, I never even saw the rattlesnake.

Hearing it was enough.

Let me admit just it up front: snakes scare me.

(I can't help but feel that, as a pagan, this constitutes something of a moral failing on my part, but there we are.)

That's why my first encounter with a rattlesnake in the wild surprised me so much.

“You be careful in those woods,” said my Aunt Bernie, “this is Snake Country.”

Well, I'd known the woods for years and felt perfectly at home in them. So, bushwhacking down the old overgrown logging trail, I wasn't being particularly careful that day, or even paying much attention.

When I heard the rattle, my first instinct was to laugh: it sounded exactly like a baby's rattle. Exactly.

I stop and stand still. I look and see nothing.

A sense of utter calm descends.

You know the old story.

The holy man is sitting by the river one day when he sees a snake borne along on the current. He grabs a stick and fishes the snake out of the water. It's stiff with cold, practically dead.

The holy man opens his shirt and puts the snake in his bosom. Slowly, the warmth of his body revives the snake.

Then it bites him.

“What the f*ck?” says the holy man. “Here I am, a holy man, filled with love and compassion for all living beings. I save your life, and your response is to bite me? What the f*ck?”

The snake looks at the holy man.

“Dude,” he says, “I'm a snake.”

The logic was inescapable.

To think, last summer, before I started my Monster Powers journey, I thought I had nothing left to say on this blog. lol. For those just joining this series now, it begins last fall when I first started my Gila Lizard Powers medicine (GLP-1) and became obsessed with perfume.

I resumed working on the Gila Monster tapestry after my housemate's family's visit. I put all my weaving stuff back in the front room that gets good morning light.

In the Lair of Orange Helob

Hey folks, remember the hex on Tr*mp?

News flash: it didn't work.

Dateline: Tr*mp I.

Various Wiccans and other magic-makers publicly hex Tr*mp, including regular coordinated workings.

The community publicly debates the ethics of hexing Tr*mp. Some come down on one side, some on the other.

The non-pagan media mostly snickers.

Some possible conclusions:

The hex on Tr*mp actually did work, buying us four Tr*mp-free years.

If so, apparently hexes, like canned goods, have a “use-by” date. Really, what good is a temporary solution?

Magic doesn't work.

Under the circumstances, I find this conclusion difficult to escape. Magic—at least, causative magic as literally conceived—simply doesn't work.

But then, I've never thought that it did. Thoughts aren't things. Magic is metaphor. In which case...

Tr*mp is a master magician who out-magicked all the opposition.

The Orange Helob gorged on all the energy the would-be hexers sent him, and now, bloated with power, spins his evil webs to capture yet more victims to suck dry and throw away, drained.

Dateline: Tr*mp II

Origin of the Runes I: The Historical Version.

Roughly 2000 years ago, a speaker—or speakers—of Common Germanic, the language from which English and its sister-tongues derives, took the concept of letters from either the Latin alphabet or from one of the North Italic scripts—Etruscan, et al.—and applied them to his (or her) own language.

Origin of the Runes II: The Mythic Version.

Oðinn hangs himself from a tree and stabs himself with a spear, a god paradoxically sacrificing himself to himself.

From this self-imposed shamanic ordeal, he gains knowledge of the runes—those building-blocks of existence—and their mysteries.

Two stories: mutually exclusive, one might think.

Here's the rub: from their very beginning, or at least from very early on in their history, the runes seem to have taken on a mysterious character (the very word itself means “mystery, secret”) and to have been used for magical purposes.

The same cannot be said, though, of either the Latin or (so far as we know) any of the North Italic alphabets.

The runes are something very different from the script or scripts from which they derive.

The runes aren't just an alphabet: they're Alphabet-Plus.

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