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India being India, there's an entire genre of Bollywood films known as the “theologicals”: religious movies.

Back in the VHS Era, my friend Stephanie and I used to rent theologicals from our local Indian grocery store. Our shared pool of Hindi being pretty limited, it was always quite an experience to watch an unsubtitled 2½ hour film in a language that you don't understand. After a while, we got pretty good at figuring things out.

One of our favorites was a film called Shitala Ma (SHEE-ta-la Mah): “Mother Smallpox.” Shitala Ma is the goddess, not just of smallpox, but of all infectious diseases. (Stephanie, being something of an amateur epidemiologist, found this pretty engaging.) Those infected with disease are considered to be possessed by Shitala Ma, and are actually worshiped as her vehicles (note the donkey in the image shown above); the goddess is given offerings, and asked kindly to depart, leaving the sufferer unharmed.

Now there's something they don't teach you in Med School.

The heroes of the film are a poor family of farmers, pious worshipers of Shitala Ma. While working in the fields one day, they discover a murti (statue) of Shitala Ma buried in the ground. My memory is that the family dog led them to it.

Naturally, they hold a puja (worship) for the statue. Shitala Ma herself appears—this happens during pujas sometimes—and tells them that she wants a temple built for her in the field where the statue was found. The father of the family goes to tell the local rich man who owns the field of the goddess's apparition and of her request.

The rich man, of course, is loathe to lose the field and the income that it brings.

“No way,” he says.

Nothing daunted, our pious family sets up a small shrine to Shitala Ma in the field, and soon all the villagers are gathering there to worship the goddess.

Finally the landowner has had enough. He sends his goons to steal the statue, who drop it down a well to get rid of it.

Bad move. Angered, Shitala Ma smites the rich guy's entire family with smallpox.

Pantheacon, the largest indoor gathering of Pagans in North America, is no more. For a variety of reasons, Glenn Turner, the organizer, has decided to close it down and is retiring.

I have been associated with PCon for a very long time. I attended the first one (I think), and have been to most of them over the 20-odd years it continued. It was a chance to see friends I didn't see otherwise, to learn new things, meet new people, enjoy performances and generally to enjoy a majority-Pagan space for awhile, in stark contrast to the ordinary world.

Keep America Stupid

Reelect President Trump

"My nem iz Vladimir Putin, and I approve dees message."

I sit on the foot of the bed, singing the hymn to the rising Sun.

I'm an early riser, he's not. There are worse ways to rouse from sleep than to strains of the sacred.

His eyelids flicker open as I finish.

“Lift up your legs,” I say.

First were the Old Ways.

Then came the New Ways.

Then came the Old New Ways.

Now we have the New Old Ways.

He grins and gets out of bed.

Stars are born from the vast darkness of outer space—the Goddess’ womb, the Goddess’ belly.

What if the fire flaring from the Dragon is in fact a Phoenix that has been born within the great darkness of the Dragon’s belly: a rebirth, the Phoenix rising again? That thought came to me in a meditation. It rang with truth—rang as a major truth—as one of the mysteries of dragon magic:

“For [god/goddess], because he/she heard my cry.”

What would you be willing to give in order to get rid of the Troll-in-Chief?

The ex-voto—the vowed or votive offering—is a fine example of a spiritual technology inherited from the ancestors but sorely underutilized today.

Here's how it works. You're hoping for outcome X. So you make a vow to Deity Y: If you will bring about Outcome X, I will, in return, give you Z.

I will:

Sacrifice a fine bull.

Commission a statue of you.

Throw that beautiful boar's-head torc into the Mississippi.

It's a contingency vow. If X, then Z. No X, no Z.

If it all sounds just a little transactional, bear in mind that this practice is firmly grounded in our divine pagan gifting economy: Do ut des, a gift for a gift.

Be warned: if Deity Y comes through for you, do not fail to follow up with Z. Do not. There are lots of stories about those who didn't*, and—believe me—you don't want to hear any of them, much less become one. As Alexander the Great always used to say, It doesn't pay to be stingy with the gods.

Why do I bring this up now? Well, as you may have heard, there's an election coming up.

I'm eyeball-deep in the revisions and updates to Labrys & Horns. As I sift through the conversations we've had in Ariadne's Tribe and the notes I've taken over the past couple of years, the gods and goddesses are sorting themselves into pairs and trios - something I hadn't really expected.

When we began putting together a Minoan pantheon for modern Pagan spiritual practice, we were working with the garbled fragments that have come down via Greek mythology plus some useful information in the fields of archaeoastronomy, dance ethnography, and comparative mythology. We found lots of deities, but they didn't shake out into a human-style family tree the way so many other European pantheons did.