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The moral of the story is, sometimes even the wise can be really foolish.

Before it got burned down during the George Floyd riots, Gandhi Mahal was our neighborhood South Minneapolis South Asian eatery. While nothing particularly remarkable, what they served was acceptable Indian restaurant food, and certainly easier than cooking it yourself.

Like many pagans, I have a passion for Indian food, the hotter the better. (Spicy is just about the only form of machismo in which I regularly indulge.) At Gandhi Mahal, they offered a heat spectrum of Mild, Medium, Hot, Very Hot, Very Very Hot, You're Gonna Die, and...Bollywood.

So of course one night I just had to order Bollywood hot. Call it a challenge.

What did I order that night? I can't remember. It doesn't really matter, because I couldn't taste it anyway.

No flavor. No flavor at all. Just fire.

Fire and tears.

Oh, I ate it, ate it all. Oh yes, my precious. Did I enjoy it?

You've got to be kidding. Call it a “Three-Alarm” fire: fire going in, fire inside, fire coming out.

“Why do I do this to myself?” I thought repeatedly next morning: “I love my rectum.” The things we do for bragging rights.

Among pagans, as among traditional peoples everywhere, the lore features two general kinds of teaching tales: hero tales and screw-up tales. Hero tales teach by giving us something to aspire to. Screw-up tales teach by giving us something to be smarter than.

Seriously? Stormtroopers? At Paganicon?

I'm hanging out in the Druid hospitality suite when the masked and armed trio shoulder in through the doorway, scanning the crowd. The room falls silent, like the cantina scene in (speaking of which) Star Wars.

Thank Goddess for precedent. I step forward.

“These are not the Druids you're looking for,” I tell the leader in his white Darth Vader mask.

He turns to his comperes.

“These are not the Druids we're looking for,” he tells them. “Let's keep searching.”

They turn and go. Behind me, the room erupts in laughter and applause.

Help! I need an answer to a theological question, and I need it quick.

As I write this, the little terracotta goddess lies sleeping, wrapped in silk, on a shelf in the pantry.

But soon she'll be standing out in the corner of the garden, plunged to her thighs in the ground. Through the summer to come—night and day, rain and shine—she will watch over the growth of this year's tomatoes, eggplants, cucumbers, squash, beans, herbs, and greens.

So here's the question. Does the Garden Goddess go into the ground:

1. when I till, or
2. when I plant, and
3. why?

Waiting for the light to change at 35^th and Park, I see an eagle fly over.

My first thought (as always when I see an eagle): Gods, that's a big bird.

My second thought (craning my neck to see): It is an eagle!

My heart leaps up inside me, as it always does. I open my mouth to begin the song that you sing when you see an eagle; then I close it again, without singing.

Whatever that song may be, I don't know it.

That there should be a song that you sing when you see an eagle—an honor song, a song of soaring greeting—seemed to me in that moment, as it has ever since, utterly obvious.

That our people once had such a song also seemed—and seems—to me to go without saying.

Alas that so much has been taken away; alas that so much has been lost.

When my friend got back from the hospital, it was clear that he was going to need a cane, at least for a while. I offered to go to the cane store to get him one.

My friend being who he is, he drew up a page-long list of what he wanted in a new cane. It had to be thus-and-so, it couldn't be thus-and-so.

When I got to the cane store, it was clear that I was never going to be able to find a cane that fit all of his specifications. So—on the principle that When you need a cane, it's better to have an imperfect cane than not to have a perfect one—I picked out one that came as close as it could.

***

As pagans, our situation in some ways resembles that of the Indigenous children of North America and Australia who were torn away from their families and sent off to residential schools for reenculturation. Forbidden to speak their own languages, or practice their own religions, they became the living lost. Cultural genocide is hideous, but you can't deny its effectiveness.

For the pagan peoples of Europe, this happened hundreds of years ago. Much has been lost forever to us, their latter-day children. Our laments for the wantonness of that destruction will never cease to sound while ever our people endure.

So we take what we have and go from there. Much of what passes for modern paganism just isn't anywhere near as good as I would want it to be. Much of what we have is pro tem: what we've made for ourselves. It hasn't had the centuries of honing and deepening that come with generations of transmission.

If as a people we manage to survive, we know for absolute certain that, in time, the excellence will come. That's how cultures work. In the meantime, we make for ourselves the best that we can and go on. When we see something that's worthy, let us take heed, praise it, and strive to emulate it.

And by all means let us avoid the deathtrap of premature canonization.

***

We were learning a new chant one night. One covensib objected to it on the grounds that the imagery was mixed and internally contradictory.

His critique was a valid one, but then arose the obvious question: Did he have something better to put in its place?

The offering bears the prayer.

The ancestors thought long and hard about their foundation offerings.

In their choices, we see their intent, their wit and (like enough) their humor.

When the New Stone and Copper Age ancestors of Old Europe built a new house, they buried beneath its floor a little model of a house, lovingly rendered in ceramic detail.

No one needs to tell you what that means.

To the ancestors, it was obvious that when you built something important like a house or a temple, you first laid an offering in the ground to bear the embodied prayers of the builders.

We too have thought long and hard about what offerings to lay beneath the Bull Stone, when we raise it to mark the Marriage Point of Earth with Sky, of Land with People.

There will be three.

Do the dead still speak to us?

Of course they do.

I, Steven, who do not believe in life after death, I tell you so.

They speak to us in memories. Have you ever heard your grandmother's voice in your head, counseling one course of action or another?

They speak to us through their deeds. Through stories, through their remembered actions, the ancestors tell us today how to behave or how not to behave.

They speak to us through their words and songs. We live by the Lore, and through the Lore their words and ways come down to us. In oral cultures, memory is passed down in songs. Many covens have a Book of Shadows; we have a songbook.

They speak to us through their artifacts. Although here in North America, relations between First Nations communities and archaeologists have (and understandably so) been contentious, the Mapuche of Bolivia love the archaeologists. “Through them, the ancestors speak to us,” they say.