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On this Midsummer's Eve

While a lot of Wiccans and other Pagans are celebrating Samhain, and some Heathen and Asatru groups celebrate Winterfyllith or Winter-Finding, I'm celebrating an old-fashioned American Halloween, participating with the neighbors on my street in the community ritual of decorating and giving away candy to costumed children. This is the first year I've done Halloween while my household includes a non-heathen pagan, but she is into American Halloween too, replicating the kind of Halloween we both remember from our childhoods.

The Asatru group Freya's Folk in San Francisco has been holding a Winterfyllith celebration for many years. They used to belong to the Ring of Troth, and when that organization split into The Troth and the American Vinland Association, they went with the AVA. I used to attend campout festivals held by that group back when I lived in California, but their Winterfyllith celebration wasn't an overnight so I didn't go to that one.

I personally celebrate seasonal changes that relate to the actual bioregion and climate in which I live, which is the Mojave Desert, so around the beginning of fall my kindred celebrates Rainbow Season, the end of the monsoon season. The first winter frost here usually coincides with Yule so that's when we celebrate the onset of winter here. My kindred, American Celebration Kindred, celebrates both heathen holidays and American holidays like Halloween.

As I did last year, I'm giving away candy from my driveway instead of having kids come to the door. I did that last year as a pandemic precaution, but I'm going to keep doing it because I like it better this way, and so does my cat. (Happy doesn't like strangers, so lots of strangers coming to the door is not on his list of favorite pastimes.) I like this better because when my neighbors and I all have tables outside we end up visiting with each other between groups of children, going to each others' tables like vendors at a slow fair. I also like this better because I get to see the costumes more, since I can see them as the kids walk up the street rather than only seeing them for a few seconds while we're trying to interact and complete the ritual phrases ("Trick or treat!") and actions (giving candy.) As I've been doing for the two decades I've lived in this house, I decorate around a different theme each year. One year it was moons and stars, one year it was Vikings, etc. This year's theme is fire. I'm hauling out the portable firepit and having a bonfire on my driveway, and toasting marshmallows.

One of the main functions of a culture's holiday celebrations is to bring a community together in shared ritual. American Halloween does that for the community of my street and neighborhood. By tradition, adults with homes participate in the decorating and giving half of the ritual, while children traditionally dress as the ghosts and monsters and fairies that arrive with the thinning of the veil between worlds on this night, enacting a propitiation of the dead and of otherworldly beings.

Now modern children often dress as heroes or other aspirational figures in addition to the fae, spectres, undead. For what is a hero but a monster who has chosen actions according to a personal moral code that aligns with society's in some way? Recently while shopping for candy to give away I noticed a child size Spiderman suit hanging forlornly on an otherwise bare rack, like the husk of a spider's victim still hanging in its web. It waited for a child who wished to dress as a boy whose hands turned into spider butts. Is this not monstrous? Is this metamorphosis any less a horror than Gregor Samsa's?

So, a pagan walks into a church: a Russian Orthodox Church, to be specific.

I'm not just visiting or sightseeing. Incredibly, I'm there to venerate the icon of “Passion-bearer” St. Yevgeny Botkin.

Botkin (1865-1918) was personal physician to “Slick Nick” Romanov, the last (well, the last before Putin, anyway) tsar of Russia. He went into Siberian exile along with the royal family, and was executed with them by the Soviets in 1918.

Even in Heaven, there's inequality. The Russian Orthodox Church canonized the tsar and his family in 1981, but didn't get around to sainting the faithful servants who died with them until 2016, more than 30 years later. Jeez.

I'm neither some sort of Christo-Pagan nor some ghoulish Romanov groupie. I'm here, rather, to honor St. Yevgeny the Physician for one reason: because his son was not just a pagan, but the father of American Paganism.

Gleb Botkin (1900-1969) managed to escape the Revolution and came (via Shanghai) to America, where he made a successful career for himself as a novelist and illustrator. He supported the (as it turns out, false) claims of Franziska Schanzkowska—AKA Anna Anderson—to be the tsar's youngest daughter, Anastasia. (Pagans have a quixotic affinity for lost causes, maybe because here in the West there's no bigger Lost Cause than paganism.) Most importantly—to me, anyway—he founded (in 1938, if you can believe it) the Long Island Church of Aphrodite, the US's first legally-recognized pagan temple.

It is told that when first our people came to the fair land of Paganistan, having crossed the waters of the Father of Waters—him that is called the Mississippi—they were met by the Lady of the Land herself.

They say that she gave them fair greeting and set into the hands of him who led them these two things: a cattail and an apple.

A diaspora, a scattered and exiled people is held together mainly by shared stories and songs, customs and language. Through space and time, generations and movement, the traditions passed down change. They fade and dwindle, but they also are revived and brightened. They are added onto, embellished. Neighborhoods and cities become their territory, each gaining its own character, each city having a synthesis of all the waves of immigrants that enter its gates. Conquest, slavery, genocide, war, so many tragedies and trauma haunt us all in different ways. Expressing what has been lost and erased and  asking gods, spirits and ancestors why all these things happened, and asking who we are now, what are we becoming, what is this this idea, this great story we are all part of, called America? We struggle, who tells this larger story of who we are, who controls and steers it determines who are the heroes and the villains.

What was the original version of the story, of the song may not be remembered?  There are a thousand versions. How well it is sung or told and whether the people believe in its poetic truth and power matters more. Each people has a story of their journey of how they became American, each is a part of a great story, the story of America.

There were once two brothers who loved the same woman.

In a fit of rage, seeing which way the wind was blowing, the elder killed the younger. He tore him limb from limb, and threw the pieces into the Mississippi.

Now it so happens that this woman was a witch-woman. She paddled her canoe up and down the Mississippi, singing songs of power as she went, gathering the pieces of her lost love wherever she found them.

She found his head.

She found his torso.

She found his right arm.

She found his left arm.

She found his pelvis.

She found his testicles.

She found his right leg.

She found his left leg.

Up and down the River she paddled, from the Headwaters to the Gulf, singing songs of power as she went. All the parts of her lost love she found, all but one. A bullhead had eaten it.

Say that there actually were witches of our sort, back in the Old Days.

Say that there were.

In the Old Country, times are hard. It's as much as your life is worth to keep to the Old Ways.

All the old stories tell of the Land-to-the-West, the Land-Across-the-Waves.

So we pack up our bags and, in hope and fear, we go there.

And when we arrive, lo! there in the forest—and such a forest!—we find him already waiting: the Horned our god (and such a god!), just as we knew him before.