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“You have to understand, my daughter is profoundly autistic. For her, other people simply don't exist.”

The man thanking me for the ritual that I had brought to a festival earlier that summer has tears in his eyes.

By the time that he's finished with his story, so do I.

The Bride of the Forest

Together, we process to the Circle. The Maidens of the tribe dance for the Elders.

The Elders select one of the maidens. We veil and garland her as a bride.

We take her in procession to the ford, where it crosses Turtle Creek. There we wait.

Across the creek, the god emerges from the forest. His body is a man's body, tall, naked, shining, but his head is the head of a nine-point stag.

(“Wow,” breathed a little boy standing near me. “Is that really him?” His father took his hand. “Yes, son,” he answered, as much to himself as to the boy. “Yes, it is.”)

He stretches out his hand to the Chosen Maiden.

She runs to him, tearing off the veil and garland in her eagerness, splashing through the water. Hand-in-hand, they enter the forest together.

We turn back to the Circle. In return for the gifts of the Forest, we have given of our own; but the sorrow of that giving lies deep upon us nonetheless: so young, so fair.

Suddenly, she is back among us: she, the Bride of the Forest.

And look at the belly she's got on her now. She's pregnant!

The drums come up. Joyously, we dance.

“...People like you and me, she doesn't even see,” he continues.

His voice lowers, trembling.

“But she could see the god.”

A Religion of Converts?

One might, on the face of it, think that most New Pagans are—in effect—converts.

Some seventy-five years into the Pagan Revival, I suspect that, still, the vast majority of us didn't grow up this way. I myself was, as they say in New Crete, “hatched in the wrong nest.”

And yet, if they asked you, “When did you become pagan?”, would the most honest answer really not be, “This is who I've always been”?

In my travels, I've met a spare handful who became pagan as the result of (if you'll pardon the comparison) a “road to Damascus” experience: the overwhelming, life-changing epiphany of a god or, more often, goddess.

But the fact remains that, for most of us, becoming pagan is not so much a matter of becoming something that we weren't before as it is of discovering a name for who and what we've always already been.

When you go to a holy place—a temple, say—sometimes you want to take some of the sacred Fire home with you.

But, of course, traveling with a living Flame is not always possible. (Just try getting onto an airplane with one.) So here's what you do.

You kindle a virgin candle—one that has never been lighted before—from the sanctuary Fire. Then you extinguish It. (You should do this by pinching, not by blowing; it's more respectful.)

Then, when you get to where you're going, you relight the candle. This will then be the same Fire as that of the sanctuary, sacred Fire of sacred Fire.

How so, you ask? Easily told.

Though extinguished, the flame lives in the wick.

Call this, if you like, a convenient legal fiction. But is it really? Is not all Fire, in the end, Fire?

(What, after all, is Fire? May we call It a Being? Is It not more process than thing, more verb than noun?)

There are some who would say that we can never be pagan as the ancestors were pagan. They would contend that too much has been lost, that we are too much changed by time, and that we can never now regain what was theirs by eldright.

Guilty as charged.

Yes, I do occasionally post on non-pagan topics—Justin Trudeau's butt, for example.

(But is Justin Trudeau's butt a non-pagan topic? ”If you want to understand the gods,” said Socrates, “look at excellence.” ) Yes, I do occasionally get grief about it, mainly from myself.

Please find attached my pathetic collection of excuses, many of them mutually-contradictory.

You can draw your own conclusions.

Just because it doesn't have a pentagram on it, doesn't mean it isn't pagan.

I like to think that I'm writing about the Deep Paganism. Just because it doesn't look pagan on the surface, doesn't necessarily mean that there's no pagan there.

To the pagan, all things are pagan.

Sunsets, recycling, milk. Stupas, church architecture, the Qur'an. Beads, shoveling snow, men's bodies.

To the pagan eye, there's pagan everywhere.

Maintaining a healthy paganism means having outside interests.

To the Deeply Pagan, our paganism touches on everything that we do, think, and say.

Still, the healthiest relationships are always the ones in which all parties involved keep up their outside interests.

I may be a Paganism Bore, but so long as I can maintain interest in at least some non-pagan topics, I'm not completely hopeless.

Well, so I like to tell myself. You be the judge.

It's a test.

Aha! You think this is non-pagan? Look more deeply, my friend!

Everybody needs a break now and then.

In some ways, the new paganisms and Evangelicalism have a lot in common: they're brash, impetuous, young religions, inexperienced, with poor impulse control and a strong Do-It-Yourself ethic.

So in these Latter Days, as Evangelicalism shows its true colors, what lessons can we learn from our successful, but callow, neighbors?

Be for, not against.

In the old days, I always say, Christians used to fight about whether the Spirit proceeded from the Father, or from the Father and the Son, or about whether or not the Son was equal to the Father: substantive issues.

Now they fight about gay sex.

Evangelicalism started out in the early “20th” century as a protest movement against modernity. A hundred years on, they're still reacting.

When you let yourself be defined by what you hate, rather than what you love, you become—by definition—a monster.

Q.E.D.

Embrace history.

Having largely rejected the historic Christianities, Evangelicalism's time-depth is shallow. For the Evangelical, there are two important times: Bible Times and Now.

A people without a history is a people without a memory, without identity. Lacking the lessons and precedents that history cannot fail to provide, you make the same mistakes again and again and again.

Support the arts.

Just look at all the great art, music, and architecture that Evangelicalism has produced.

“In the old days....”

Lots of New Pagan narratives begin this way: implicitly, if nothing else. Back in Pagan Days, you see, we used to....

Then follows the story of what we did or thought or hoped for, back when Pagandom extended far.

In the old days isn't good anthropology. Good anthropology requires specifics of time and place. In northern Staffordshire during the 1850s.....

But in the old days isn't anthropology: it's myth. Back in the Pagan Dreamtime, in the days before May Eve, the young bucks would spend time in the woods building May bowers. That way, you'd have someplace (relatively) private to bring your sweetheart back to after the bonfire revels.

Or so they say.

Don't mistake in the old days for history, although it may be that too. When pagans talk about the Old Days, we're not really talking about how it was.

What we're really talking about is how it's going to be.

I sit on the foot of the bed, singing the hymn to the rising Sun.

I'm an early riser, he's not. There are worse ways to rouse from sleep than to strains of the sacred.

His eyelids flicker open as I finish.

“Lift up your legs,” I say.

First were the Old Ways.

Then came the New Ways.

Then came the Old New Ways.

Now we have the New Old Ways.

He grins and gets out of bed.