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“So, are you ready for Christmas?”

Och, other people's holidays. The question comes at me from out of left field: I'm sitting on the table in an exam room, having my blood drawn.

In past years, I might have answered defensively.

“I don't celebrate Christmas!”

“Sorry, not my holiday.”

More recently, my response would likely have been more conciliatory.

“Actually, we're Solstice people.”

“Where I come from, we still call it Yule.”

Maybe I've lost my fire. Maybe I've mellowed with age. This isn't spiritual imperialism, or proselytizing. The nurse is just being friendly in a thoughtless kind of way; her question has no more meaning than “How are you?” or “Cold enough for you?” Yes, there are assumptions going on here, but really, what matter does it make?

Where I come from, we call it the Yule-frith: the peace of Yule. In the old days, it meant that you could safely travel unfriendly territory.

 Dear Cowan (that's “non-pagan” in Pagan),

 Yes, I'm pagan, and no, I don't want to talk about it.

That may surprise you. Here in the US, we're lousy with people who can't wait to tell you all about their religion, usually in excruciating detail.

Well, I'm not one of them.

I'm not just being froward here; this is an integral part of who we are. For us, religion is tribal; it's ours to us, and—quite frankly—none of your damn business. Think of the religion of Zuñi pueblo. It's not for talking about with non-Zuñi. As a Zuñi elder once remarked about missionaries, “They throw their religion away as if it isn't worth anything, and then they expect us to take it seriously.”

In fact, what seems to you mere friendly curiosity—and we are interesting, I acknowledge that—strikes us as both rude and deeply intrusive.

Oh, I understand that your questions are well-intentioned. What you need to understand is that, as a non-pagan, you're operating out of privilege, and in fact—if you'll pardon me for putting it quite so baldly—a sense of entitlement. You think that you have the right to ask me anything that you bloody well please, and that I somehow owe you an answer.

Well, I'm here to tell you that you don't and that I don't owe you shit, my friend.

If you really want to know about me, my people, and our ways, there are plenty of resources out there. Go and educate yourself. Then if you come to me with questions, you won't be coming from a place of ignorance, and I may just consider answering.

Maybe.

“You stinking cowan,” I say, fondly.

My friend returns my grin. He's no cowan, and we both know it.

“Now, now,” he says in mock-offense. “No need to get insulting.”

Cowans. (First syllable like the animal.) What is it about non-pagans that makes them so...well, cowanish?

You're cowanish if you're:

• Clueless to the point of offensiveness, especially about things pagan.
• Unobservant, especially of your environment.
• Ignorant of the natural world and its processes.
• Uncomfortable with the body and things bodily.
• Incapable of seeing other people's perspectives.
• Unquestioning.
• Insensitive.
• Incurious.

Of course, these stereotypes are utterly unfair, and largely a product of pagan self-conception. You certainly don't have to be a cowan to be cowanish.

But, then, that's kind of the point of the exercise, isn't it? Nobody wants to be cowanish, not even cowans.

Your Warlockry:

I'm not a witch, but many of my friends are. Over the years I've noticed that, while my non-witch friends all throw their Halloween parties on Halloween Saturday, my witch friends usually throw theirs two Saturdays before.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you: double the pleasure, double the fun. Just wondering.

Clueless in Cowanistan

Dear Clueless Cowan:

There's a simple and obvious (to a witch) answer to your question, which (if you had asked them) any of your witch friends could have told you before you could count to thirteen, and it has to do with convenience and the fact that, just like everybody else, most witches hold down day jobs.

This means that, most years—ah, the times!—most witches don't actually hold their Samhain rituals on Halloween itself. The vast majority of Samhain rituals end up taking place, by default, on Halloween Saturday instead.

In short, my dear cowan: witches tend not to hold their Halloween parties on Halloween Saturday because, for many of us, that's Coven Night. Hence—witches liking a good Halloween party as much as anyone—the forward displacement.

If Boss Warlock were a different kind of warlock, he might decry what, on the face of it, might seem to be a disconnect, but in fact this Long Samhain actually has a profound theological basis. Samhain isn't just a single day on the Gregorian calendar; it's a tide of axial change in the natural year.

“You one-a them Wick-ins?”

The pentagram must have slipped out of my shirt when I reached for my wallet. His question is not curiosity, or interest; there's a sneer to it.

I'd stopped to fill up the tank while driving through deepest, darkest Trump Country. Now there's a Central Casting Capitol invader leering over the counter at me.

I fix him with my eyes and wait just a little too long for comfort before answering. The little will o' the wisp smirk playing on my lips is not really intentional. Actually, I've wanted to say this to someone who deserved it all my pagan life.

My friend and I couldn't have been at the Renn Fest for more than two minutes when we ran into a gaggle of fellow pagans.

This, of course, is hardly to be wondered at. Renn Fests are famed pagan Meccas, and this particular one happened to be the Paganistani (i.e. Minnesota) Renn Fest, after all. There are so many pagans at the Minnesota Renn Fest that for a while it actually because fashionable to wear a cross, not so much out of religious conviction, as to stand out in the crowd.

They ask where we're headed, and we explain that we always start off our day there by pouring a libation for the Green Man. Pagans generally being game for spontaneous religious observance, they come along.

A pagan landmark of the MN Renn Fest—“Let's meet up at the Green Man,” people say—the Green Man stands probably 20 feet tall: a large, archaic-looking wooden mask mounted on a tree trunk, and bodied out all around with a tangle of fox grapes. This being September, the grapes are usually just coming ripe around now.

We stand before the Green Man, make our prayers, and pour out our libation, relishing the opportunity to indulge in public pagan worship. We'd like to dance around Him—that's the traditional observance—but there aren't quite enough of us to join hands.

Fortunately, this is the Renn Fest.

I just got an invitation to write for an anthology with the cheeky, if self-contradicting, title of Goodbye Jesus, I'm Going Home to Mother. (Self-contradicting because, if you're really at home with her, why bother addressing yourself to him?) It is to be, I gather, a book of tales: “faith journeys” from Jesus to the Goddess.

(“Faith journey” is the polite name for “I've changed my mind.”)

Inveterate storyteller though I am, I don't (on my own recognizance) really have much of a tale to tell on that account. For me—Christian only by virtue of infant baptism—the story is one not so much of flight from as of journey to. I fell in love, and that was that. As for so many with whom I speak, my own coming to the Old Ways is a tale more of homecoming than departure.

In those days, mind you, if you wanted the Lady, you had to quest for her. Thinking back, I'm reminded of Robert Graves' own trailblazing search:

It was a virtue not to stay: to go my headstrong and heroic way,

seeking her out at the volcano's head, among pack ice,

and where the track had faded beyond the cavern of the Seven Sleepers.

Her we sought everywhere, the Living Goddess—history, geography, folklore—and everywhere we found her. How not, since all life is a journey to her? From her we come, in her we live, to her we return. Indeed, there's nowhere else to go.

As for Jesus, I don't have much to say, except that—so far as I can tell—we know, and can know, very little about the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and that therefore all Jesuses—and one really does have to speak in the plural here—are essentially fictional characters. I can see little point in addressing him, not even to say good-bye. Return to sender, addressee deceased.