PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com 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.
So, the cat died.
Me, I'm not an Afterlife person. I think that when the breath is gone, we go back into the grand dance of everything, the eternal sabbat of the atoms. And this seems to me both beautiful and good.
But as I move through a house newly filled with absences, stillnesses where I expect movement, it somehow consoles me to think of the Antlered sitting cross-legged with all the animals around Him, and old Mr. Rudycat snugged up in His lap. Or, more likely, draped around His neck and across His shoulders like a black-and-white fur collar, but with a pink nose. And probably switching Him in the face with a long, black tail from time to time.
Yep, that's the Rude all right.
Emily was the first kid to grow up in the local pagan community, and you couldn't help but feel a sense of investment in her. Smart, talented, charismatic, it was evident to everyone that she was going to be High Priestess of Minnesota some day, if not the first pagan president. When she died unexpectedly at 21, her death shook us all.
In my sorrow, I found it somehow consoling to think of her in That Land where it's always a long, summer afternoon, where cicadas drone and bees boom in the apple trees whose branches bear leaf and flower and fruit all together.
Odd: though I don't believe in the Summerland, having it as part of my mental repertoire gave me the power to help the healing of my own hurt.
As a rule, witches aren't believing people. If belief is a gift, I didn't get much. My gods are the old powers, the ones you don't have to believe in because their existence is self-evident: Earth, Sun, Moon, Thunder, Sea, Fire, the Winds. If I speak of the collective plant life of planet Earth as the Green God, or its sum total of fauna as the Horned, well, that's well within ancestral understanding.
So I call myself a polyatheist. But don't talk Dawkins to me, please. He and so many of the new Atheists Militant are really monoatheists. They don't believe in God. Those that I've read are really rather amusing in their passionate fundamentalism. There's one truth and they've got it. Sorry, that broom never flies. Literal or nothing are not the only options here. You'd think they'd never met a metaphor in their lives.
Well, it's different for polyatheists. We understand the power (and truth) of the Many.
And we understand the power of Metaphor.
Sleep well, Rudy, draped over the Horned One's shoulders.
You sure were one fine cat.
Kyoht Luterman, Horned God (2004)
Oh gods. You mean the scheduling crunch doesn't let up after death?
Beautifully said. As a fellow atheist Pagan, I like the framing and I'm sorry for your loss.
In the greater scheme of things, the loss of a pet seems a small grief, but it's a grief nonetheless. Thanks, Mark.
Apparently there is something like nine times as much to do and explore in the spirit as there is physically, but without the burden of bills, rent or taxes, so it's easy to get distracted.
Seriously? You sold your car because a piece of cardboard told you to?
All other things being equal, I always say, consult divination.
But, for gods' sakes, be smart about it.
Yea or nay? you ask, and throw the bones.
Yea say the bones, but you think: No, nay!
So now you know your real mind on the matter.
There's your real answer, subtly delivered.
A Word to the Wise: Use your divination.
Rheims Cernunnos
Gallo-Roman relief, 1st century CE
I once read that we lay down our path through the afterlife in the dreams we have when we are asleep. That we know the dead live on because they visit us in our dreams when they can fit us in their busy schedules.