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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
H-lloweens

 

Halloween. First part sounds like hallow, which preserves the original sense of the festival, derived from Old English hælig, “holy thing or person, saint.”

This is how I grew up pronouncing the word in Western Pennsylvania, and how I still pronounce it.

Which means, of course, that this is the correct pronunciation.

Helloween. Feast of the Goddess of Death and the Underworld (= Hell), observed only by the bluest of British blue-bloods. Raw-tha.

Hilloween. Southern hemisphere festival observed in New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. Named for the Hill o' Ween, where Australia's first Bealtaine bonfire was lighted in 1794.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Taking a Slitch

You know the song I mean. The one that begins:

Let the joyous news be spread....

Just to refresh your memory: first, the house begins to pitch. Then the kitchen takes a slitch, and lands on the wicked witch. In the middle of a ditch, no less. How humiliating.

It had been raining off and on for a week before we got to the festival site, and there were mud slicks everywhere. A friend of ours came limping into camp, clearly a little the worse for wear.

"What happened to you?" someone asked.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Yan Tan Tethera: 1-20 in Witch

 Yan tan tethera pethera pimp

 sethera methera hovera covera dik

 yan-a-dik tan-a-dik tethera-dik pethera-dik bumfits

 yan-a-bumfits tan-a-bunfits tethera-bumfits pethera-bumfits figgits

 And figgits have a notch

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Do You Speak Pagan?

Paganism is a language.

It is, for many of us, a language that we are still learning to speak. We may have been speaking this tongue for many years--decades, in some cases--but it is still, nonetheless, not our mother tongue.

This fact has implications. We may have mastered the grammar and have a large vocabulary. We may, over the years, have become fluent speakers of Pagan. But we are still not native speakers, and we never will be.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Mariah Sheehy
    Mariah Sheehy says #
    Yes, I think if you're talking about (Neo) Paganism it can be very broad theologically- we have the tradition-minded polytheists,
  • Gregory Elliott
    Gregory Elliott says #
    Yeah, the 'what is paganism?' can of worms has been opened. If you go with a simple 'paganism is nature reverence and this worldly
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Your definition of paganism has the advantage of being clear and testable. Assmann (who doesn't use the term "paganism") prefers t
  • Gregory Elliott
    Gregory Elliott says #
    "...religions that arise out of humanity's religious instinct and its interaction with the world, and the religions that arise out
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    "Pidgin Pagan"! Gregory, I rarely belly-laugh before noon. Modern English having started out as essentially an Anglo-Norse Trading

After I wrote about liminality recently, I have been thinking about change and how we create it in our lives. Affirmations are a magical tool that can be very powerful, but only when constructed well. Using the present progressive tense to craft affirmations puts them in a form that draws on the Element of Fire and makes them much more effective tools for transformation.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

Thig thugainn, thig cò' ruim gu siar -  
Gus an cluinn sinn ann cànan nam Fèinn, 
Thig thugainn, thig cò' ruim gu siar - 
Gus an cluinn sinn ann cànan nan Gàidheal. 

Come to us, come with me to the west - 
And hear the language of heroes (of the Fèinn),
Come to us, come with me to the west,
And hear the language of the Gael.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

Fun fact about me: I have a degree in speech-language pathology, and my concentration was in clinical phonology with a heavy emphasis on linguistics. I love studying the sound systems of a language and how sounds are tied to meaning. Today I happened across Forvo, a linguistic site that specializes in using native speakers to demonstrate how to pronounce words. It is single words and not sentences, but it's still helpful in developing an ear for nonnative speakers.

Of course, Forvo has a list of Norse mythology terms and many other languages as well. I hope that resources such as this will help preserve and protect against linguistic extinction. Every language has its own way of expressing a view of the world, and the language we speak undoubtedly shapes the way we think about everything in the inner and outer world. As Pagans we are explorers of other worlds, and so preservation of language is as precious as any other resource.

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