Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
The Most Pagan Book You'll Read All Year
Forget Starhawk and Penczak. Screw Hutton, Halstead, and Posch.
Check out John Ozoga's White Tail Country instead.
It doesn't mention mythology, or the gods. (Not directly, anyway.) It never uses the P-, H-, or W-words, not even once.
But it's still the most pagan book that you'll read all year.
Ozoga's four-season paean to that iconically pagan animal, the white-tailed deer, will teach you the kind of things that the ancestors would have taken for granted, but that few pagans these days—even the hunters among us—know.
Daniel J. Cox's stunning photographs—150 of them—will teach you even more.
Reading about Whitetail society and—one can hardly avoid using the word—culture can't help but give the sense that somehow we're seeing here into our own tribal past (I'm Deer Clan myself, on my father's side) and—realistically—future.
You can be a witch and not know anything about Tarot.
You can be a witch and know nothing about astrology, Qabala, or the Golden Dawn.
But you cannot be a witch and not know your own territory: its seasons, its plants, its animals.
We, the new pagans, are still learning how to be the pagans that we need to become. Even our wisest, most experienced elders are still new at this; so much has been lost, and there's so much to be learned.
We can never know too much about “Nature.” The Deer People have much to teach.
My friends, let us be wise enough to learn.
John Ozoga (1988) White Tail Country. NorthWood Press, Inc.
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