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No creative person is “on” all the time.

That's why I'm sitting here at five in the morning writing this.

I'm just coming off of a weekend spent (virtually) at the 2022 Current Pagan Studies conference, for which this year's theme was “Visions of Imagination and Creativity.” There's nothing quite like spending a couple of days hearing a bunch of smart, creative people sharing thoughts on the nature of creativity and our relationship with it, to get one thinking about one's own.

Here's mine: when I'm “on”, I run with it.

I have a certain superstition that, in the course of any given life, there's X amount of creativity given to each of us. You can use it or not, as you choose. But—like everything else—there's a limit to how much you get. Say “no” to creativity, and it may not be back.

I'm not entirely sure that I actually do believe this. For one thing, my experience has been that creativity builds on creativity: that, like an athlete, the more you exercise a particular muscle, the more performance you'll be able to get out of it in the future. But, at very least, I find that operating on this belief—that there's a limited amount of inspiration available to me in this lifetime—seems to be the best way to get the most out of my creative faculties.

I lay down the other afternoon to get some much-needed sleep. Drifting off, I found myself thinking of a couple of stories that I'd written years ago, but since lost: “Why Hare Has Forward Testicles” and “How Coyote F*cked the Chief's Son (and Got Away With It).”

(Unlike virtually any other male animal on the planet, buck hares wear their testicles in front of their penises rather than behind them. Hey, that's worth a story. And as for the other: well, what's more fun than a good, raunchy Coyote story, especially one with lots of hot, consensual gay sex?)

In the early days of Paganistan, M and N were everyone's favorite couple. Even when the Witch Wars burned through and people weren't talking to people, everybody still loved them.

They were witches, Alexandrians, both fine-looking folks. Somehow, even that never created any hard feelings, they were just so much in love with one another. It was hard to think of them separately, so naturally did they fit together. A friend, in conversation, once referred to them as lovers, then corrected herself.

“You guys are so much in love, I keep forgetting that you're married,” she laughed, and we all joined in, because it was so true.

When M died, it came as a shock to us all. For one thing, she wasn't very old. For another, well...she was just so vital. She'd known that she was sick, of course, but hadn't wanted to darken her last days by spreading the knowledge around. N, of course, was with her to the end. It seemed utterly fitting that she should have died on Valentine's Day.

She hadn't been out to her folks; in those days, few of us were. The pagan community showed up en masse—no pun intended—for her funeral. There probably hadn't been that many witches in a church since the Burning Times. In the eulogy, the priest kept talking about what a good Christian she'd been.

February is a windy, cold month in Minnesota. A stiff, bitter breeze blew in off the prairie as we stood in the cemetery. Still—M would have loved it—there was something playful, even carnivalesque, about that graveside service. Someone, incredibly, had brought along a bouquet of helium balloons: bright colors against the stark, white snowscape. After the prayers, they released them. Watching those balloons soar up and away into they sky was heartbreaking, the perfect metaphor. As they flew away, the tears flowed.

Afterward, the pagans gathered over food and drink for our own remembrance. N looked devastated.

Sorrow had made me bitter. The priest's words still rankled; I complained about them to a friend.

But he was wiser than I.

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Howler, n. a glaring blunder, clumsy mistake, or embarrassing misjudgment, typically one which evokes laughter

Ah, The Sea Priestess: arguably Dion Fortune's most influential novel, in pagan circles at least.

So, DF: what's with the River Dick, already?

While imbibing the antediluvian wisdom that Morgan, the eponymous Sea Priestess, imparts to Wilfred, clueless West Country Mama's boy, concerning relations between the Eternal Feminine and the Eternal Masculine, generations of serious students of the occult have had to choke back the guffaws when it comes to some of her fictional place-names.

Hey, SP readers: remember the River Dick? Of course you do. Technically, of course, it's the “Narrow Dick.” “Where the Broad Dick is, I have never been able to discover,” says Wilfred. “There is no Broad Dick,” Morgan helpfully explains. “The original name of this river was the River Naradek. 'Narrow Dick' is only a corruption of it”.

(Naradek is named after a river back in ye olde Atlantis, but of course, you already knew that.)

And of course you remember the town in the novel named Dickmouth, don't you? Come on, don't pretend that you don't.

The Sea Priestess was first published in 1938. “Dick” has meant “penis” in English since the 19^th century at least, if not longer. It's hard to believe that Fortune could have been so utterly clueless as to be unaware of this.

Or was she?

So what's with the River Dick?

Given the novel's central metaphor of the Sea as Primal Mother, I suppose that Fortune could conceivably be setting up some sort of equivalency here along the lines of Sea : Feminine :: River : Masculine. If so—even considering the fact that Fortune's writing is by no means lacking in vulgarity (gods know, the lower classes are always good for a laugh), and that, as a writer, she is not always in full control of her medium—somehow, giving a slang name for “penis” to the Great Masculine seems, well, uncharacteristically crude, even for her.