Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth

In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.

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Ours by Eldright

 

It's a question worth asking: do we, the new pagans, have a right to the ways and the lore of the old pagans?

To this, I would say: we do. They're ours by eldright.

David Cowley, who coined the term, defines eldright as “ancient right, tradition.” It comes to us by virtue of who we are.

We are the pagans, the True people. (It's an anthropological truism that practically every tribal name means the People, the Real People.) The contrary of this True is not false; the contrary of this True is unTrue. We are the ones who remain faithful (“true”) to the ways of the ancestors. Some have chosen other ways, as is their right. But in doing so they have thereby become unfaithful—untrue—to the ancestors and to their ways. Every people that remains True to its ancestral ways is a True people.

If we could tell the ancestors: Centuries after your time, some of your descendants will have laid aside the old ways, and some of them will keep to the old ways, and claim them by right.

 

And if we then asked them: Do you grant them this claim?

What do you think they would say?

We are the new pagans, but the old ways are our ways.

Ours by eldright.

 

David Cowley's 2009 book How We'd Talk if the English had Won in 1066 (Authors OnLine Ltd.) is a delicious romp through an alternative linguistic world that I'd recommend heartily to all speakers of Modern Heathen or Contemporary Witch.

 

 

 

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Poet, scholar and storyteller Steven Posch was raised in the hardwood forests of western Pennsylvania by white-tailed deer. (That's the story, anyway.) He emigrated to Paganistan in 1979 and by sheer dint of personality has become one of Lake Country's foremost men-in-black. He is current keeper of the Minnesota Ooser.

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