On this Midsummer's Eve
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On this Midsummer's Eve
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How do you tell when you're in the presence of a pagan elder?
Hear what biographer Richard Perceval Graves has to say of his uncle Robert Graves (1895-1985), author of The White Goddess and prophet of the Return of the Goddess:
Graves's dedication to the Moon Goddess meant that at times...he had seemed to bring with him a breath of the ancient world, and in his presence Deyá [RG's longtime residence in the island of Mallorca] itself would sometimes appear to be a land of ancient days.
There it is. A pagan elder is one in whose presence—at least sometimes—you gain the sense of an older world, a pagan world, the way things once were.
Note also the corollary: that this elder's presence transforms his—or her—very environment.
I don't know about where you live, but here in Minneapolis the Winter Solstice is hot stuff.
Every year I'm struck by the ever-increasing number of (non-pagan) Winter Solstice events going on: drum-jams, concerts, performances. This year I was dumbfounded to hear that even a special “Light in Darkness” service for the Solstice.
Christmas' religious origins will always render it problematic in an increasingly secular culture. More and more each year it reads as a once-Christian culture's nostalgia for a now-unretrievable past.
The Solstice, on the other hand, is an event that engages us all, no matter how we see things, or where our ancestors came from. Conveniently, it also comes at a time when most people don't have family obligations.
Once you've embraced the Winter Solstice, of course, it only makes sense to do the same for its bright Summer twin. And then...well, if you're going to do the Solstices, you might as well do the Equinoxes too.
And so we'll go together, step by logical step. That's how we'll take back the West.
Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus (circa 1485) isn't just one of the most enduringly famous paintings in the world.
It's also a prophecy.
Even before the Old Paganisms were dead, the New Paganisms had already begun to arise.
The Old Pagans were Pagans-by-Tradition. In a sense, their paganism was unconscious; they didn't know that they were pagan. The New Pagans are Pagans-by-Choice. With full awareness of alternatives, they—we—nonetheless choose the Old Ways.
The emperor Julian (331-363) was raised Christian, but chose the Old Ways instead. In a sense, he was the first New Pagan. At the end of the Byzantine Era, the philosopher George (“Plêthon”) Gemistós (1355?-1452), also raised Christian, did the same. Several of his students were self-avowed pagans.
It was they who, after the fall of Constantinople, fled to Italy and, in so doing, sparked the self-conscious rePaganization of the West that we now call the Renaissance: the influx of Old Pagan learning, aesthetics, and values into the West, the process that was ultimately to break the power of the Church and to free the Western mind.
John Alden Junior: What do they want, these terrible witches?
Cotton Mather: The same thing we all want: a country of their own.
Wow, speaking of Witchsploitation: a new TV series, set (you guessed it) in Salem, Mass, 1692.