Category Archives: So Many Books

History from a Pagan Perspective


This new book looks fascinating and I'm going to add it to my (already too long) reading list.
The newly released novel "Buried: The Discernment of Pagans in Ancient Rome" (ISBN 1456471651) opens with a hostile confrontation between [P]agans and Christians. Though the Christian viewpoint may be familiar, says author Frank Troy, the reader is then swiftly transported into the unfamiliar, dangerous and strangely beautiful world of pre-Christian Rome as it is seen and understood by the [P]agan narrator. Troy, a retired literature professor, has spent a lifetime studying the literature and philosophy of European civilizations prior to the arrival of Christian ideas and concepts.

The novel's principal narrator is a 27-year-old Roman aristocrat named Aeneas. Educated in Aristotle's Lyceum in Athens, a lover of boxing and philosophy, his narrative aims to help readers understand the how and why of paganism's magnificent achievements in a range of areas including philosophy, politics, art and science.

While fulfilling his military obligation in Alexandria in 387 A.D., Aeneas falls hopelessly in love with the beautiful female scholar Hypatia. After he is discharged from service the lovers travel by way of Athens and Delphi to Rome to meet Aeneas' sister, Honoria. Unexpected family obligations require Aeneas and Hypatia to separate, but they vow to reunite. Hypatia returns to Alexandria and Aeneas and Honoria travel north to join their father, the governor of Upper Germania. As the summer passes, Honoria falls deeply in love, only to lose her lover in a war between opposing generals. Their father too becomes a victim of the war, and the siblings flee to the safety of a family farm near Carthage and plan their reunion with Hypatia. Their future, however, becomes more complicated than they ever imagined.

Troy seeks to offer readers a tale that is rich with historical details and numerous surprising plot turns, along with the narrative that interprets events in light of [P]aganism's core beliefs about the underlying nature of reality and the purpose and meaning of life. Modern readers, Troy contends, will encounter an unfamiliar world view that is initially puzzling, yet as the novel unfolds, [P]agan core beliefs gradually become clearer. Troy aims to provide insight to readers so they can begin to see that even though ancient and modern core beliefs are fundamentally different, the practical problems faced by Rome were an amazingly accurate reflection of ours today.

What's up with this recent resurgence of interest in Hypatia?

Also, Dear Mr. Troy, Since it's pretty clear that you wrote your press release, if you want to sell to Pagans, perhaps you should capitalize our religion, just as you capitalize "Christian." OK?

It's available at Amazon; I can't find it at any of the independent bookseller sites I normally recommend.

Anybody read it yet?

Picture found here.

History from a Pagan Perspective


This new book looks fascinating and I'm going to add it to my (already too long) reading list.
The newly released novel "Buried: The Discernment of Pagans in Ancient Rome" (ISBN 1456471651) opens with a hostile confrontation between [P]agans and Christians. Though the Christian viewpoint may be familiar, says author Frank Troy, the reader is then swiftly transported into the unfamiliar, dangerous and strangely beautiful world of pre-Christian Rome as it is seen and understood by the [P]agan narrator. Troy, a retired literature professor, has spent a lifetime studying the literature and philosophy of European civilizations prior to the arrival of Christian ideas and concepts.

The novel's principal narrator is a 27-year-old Roman aristocrat named Aeneas. Educated in Aristotle's Lyceum in Athens, a lover of boxing and philosophy, his narrative aims to help readers understand the how and why of paganism's magnificent achievements in a range of areas including philosophy, politics, art and science.

While fulfilling his military obligation in Alexandria in 387 A.D., Aeneas falls hopelessly in love with the beautiful female scholar Hypatia. After he is discharged from service the lovers travel by way of Athens and Delphi to Rome to meet Aeneas' sister, Honoria. Unexpected family obligations require Aeneas and Hypatia to separate, but they vow to reunite. Hypatia returns to Alexandria and Aeneas and Honoria travel north to join their father, the governor of Upper Germania. As the summer passes, Honoria falls deeply in love, only to lose her lover in a war between opposing generals. Their father too becomes a victim of the war, and the siblings flee to the safety of a family farm near Carthage and plan their reunion with Hypatia. Their future, however, becomes more complicated than they ever imagined.

Troy seeks to offer readers a tale that is rich with historical details and numerous surprising plot turns, along with the narrative that interprets events in light of [P]aganism's core beliefs about the underlying nature of reality and the purpose and meaning of life. Modern readers, Troy contends, will encounter an unfamiliar world view that is initially puzzling, yet as the novel unfolds, [P]agan core beliefs gradually become clearer. Troy aims to provide insight to readers so they can begin to see that even though ancient and modern core beliefs are fundamentally different, the practical problems faced by Rome were an amazingly accurate reflection of ours today.

What's up with this recent resurgence of interest in Hypatia?

Also, Dear Mr. Troy, Since it's pretty clear that you wrote your press release, if you want to sell to Pagans, perhaps you should capitalize our religion, just as you capitalize "Christian." OK?

It's available at Amazon; I can't find it at any of the independent bookseller sites I normally recommend.

Anybody read it yet?

Picture found here.

History from a Pagan Perspective


This new book looks fascinating and I'm going to add it to my (already too long) reading list.
The newly released novel "Buried: The Discernment of Pagans in Ancient Rome" (ISBN 1456471651) opens with a hostile confrontation between [P]agans and Christians. Though the Christian viewpoint may be familiar, says author Frank Troy, the reader is then swiftly transported into the unfamiliar, dangerous and strangely beautiful world of pre-Christian Rome as it is seen and understood by the [P]agan narrator. Troy, a retired literature professor, has spent a lifetime studying the literature and philosophy of European civilizations prior to the arrival of Christian ideas and concepts.

The novel's principal narrator is a 27-year-old Roman aristocrat named Aeneas. Educated in Aristotle's Lyceum in Athens, a lover of boxing and philosophy, his narrative aims to help readers understand the how and why of paganism's magnificent achievements in a range of areas including philosophy, politics, art and science.

While fulfilling his military obligation in Alexandria in 387 A.D., Aeneas falls hopelessly in love with the beautiful female scholar Hypatia. After he is discharged from service the lovers travel by way of Athens and Delphi to Rome to meet Aeneas' sister, Honoria. Unexpected family obligations require Aeneas and Hypatia to separate, but they vow to reunite. Hypatia returns to Alexandria and Aeneas and Honoria travel north to join their father, the governor of Upper Germania. As the summer passes, Honoria falls deeply in love, only to lose her lover in a war between opposing generals. Their father too becomes a victim of the war, and the siblings flee to the safety of a family farm near Carthage and plan their reunion with Hypatia. Their future, however, becomes more complicated than they ever imagined.

Troy seeks to offer readers a tale that is rich with historical details and numerous surprising plot turns, along with the narrative that interprets events in light of [P]aganism's core beliefs about the underlying nature of reality and the purpose and meaning of life. Modern readers, Troy contends, will encounter an unfamiliar world view that is initially puzzling, yet as the novel unfolds, [P]agan core beliefs gradually become clearer. Troy aims to provide insight to readers so they can begin to see that even though ancient and modern core beliefs are fundamentally different, the practical problems faced by Rome were an amazingly accurate reflection of ours today.

What's up with this recent resurgence of interest in Hypatia?

Also, Dear Mr. Troy, Since it's pretty clear that you wrote your press release, if you want to sell to Pagans, perhaps you should capitalize our religion, just as you capitalize "Christian." OK?

It's available at Amazon; I can't find it at any of the independent bookseller sites I normally recommend.

Anybody read it yet?

Picture found here.

Synchronicity — Wherever You Go, There It Is


Sobeit has up a great post today about the need to consult our landbase when we make important decisions.
In all [E]arth traditions there is an understanding that the land is a witness to truth, that its very molecules do not lie, that its constituent fabric and all life forms that naturally grow upon it are wise in ways that humans rarely match.

. . .

One thing is certain: whoever lives upon a land with respect is welcomed by that land in ways deeper than we can imagine - a fact we should bear in mind when issues of race and culture are raised. For those who are true to the land shall find that the land also keeps faith with them. With our ability to move about the earth and settle at will, we do well to first consult the region where we are thinking of living, going straight to the land and speaking with its spirit, so that we can live with discrimination, truth, and respect.

"Wherever you are living, go and stand on bare, unconcreted earth and commune with the spirit of the land. Return to your home and in soul-flight go back to the site you visited and ask for a better sense of discrimination."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Earlier this week, a friend and I were discussing a point that Thorn Coyle makes in Kissing the Limitless:
The [E]arth remembers us, and the places where we grew up or have lived a long time recognize our patterns, just as we recognize the patterns of those places. Upon entering a new place, I always strive to introduce myself to the energies there. If there is time, I spend long moments in meditation, sending out tendrils of my life force into the land and sky, getting a better feel for the space and the beings that reside there, and noticing what is different from my home. This introduction also gives me a sort of permission to be there, and my time there is more joyously spent.

Starhawk is talking seriously about making a movie from one of the three or four books that completely changed my life, The Fifth Sacred Thing. (It's one of those projects that makes me think, "If it could be done well, it would be wonderful. But I'm so afraid that, once the process starts, best intentions and good plans notwithstanding . . . ." And I'd rather see it not done than see it done with compromise.) One of the things I love best in that book (well, I love a lot, but, lawyer that I am, one of the things that I love "really, really best," as G/Son says,) is the description of how decision-making happens. There are people from the various affinity groups gathered together in a room, each speaking from hir heart about how best to proceed against a threatened invasion. Some argue for war, some argue for sabotage, some argue for nonviolent resistance. And, then:
The Speaker raised her hand, calling for silence, and bent her ear to the Salmon mask.
"Friend Salmon says, 'Learn from water. Water is malleable, water is gentle, but drops of water wear away stone, and everything it touches is shaped by its passing.'" She sat down again. [And then the argument goes on, some calling each other cowards, some explaining what's wrong with that notion, . . . .]

When I first read that passage, all that I could think of was the question that my Environmental Law professor asked the class: "What's wrong with Justice Douglas' proposition that someone should be appointed to 'speak for the trees?'" Older, and maybe sadder than a lot of the class, my hand went up. "Weyerhauser will create a "Committee to Speak for America's Trees" and explain why trees long for, need, in fact, must have, clear cutting." I got an A.

I've been mulling over, lately, the notion of how we can have a democratic (forget consensual, let's just talk about honestly democratic) society when the money of large corporations appears capable of contaminating everyone and everything. I'm not a member of the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." I'm so far to the left of that, that it's difficult to even see that over the horizon. But I'd be orgasmically ecstatic to see that wing of that party these days. Because I don't. Other than Elizabeth Warren, I see, from the White House on down, a whole lot of people who, while I have no doubt that they went into politics planning to do good, are the sort of persons of whom Winston Churchill is once supposed to have remarked, "We've already established that. All that we're arguing about now is the price." And I wonder, more and more, how can we ensure that there's anyone who has (1) a real seat at the table, (2) in the Salmon mask, who (3) isn't colonized by those who make money killing Salmon and destroying Salmon's habitat?

And the only glimmer of an answer that I've been able to discern is encapsulated in Sobeit's post. We have to, as a cultural value to which we all give real credence, return to, taste, and listen to the Land, our Watershed. And while I think (and I am a woman who has given her life to The Law and would do so again, tomorrow, with a happy heart) that The Law can help to make a difference, what really has to happen is for us to begin to tell ourselves better stories. As Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” The universe that we perceive is, indeed, made of the stories that we tell ourselves and our children.

And we have to start telling a different story. Not only in our legal opinions, but elsewhere, as well, in those stories that seep into our bones before we ever read a law or a news story about a Supreme Court opinion.

This weekend, I read G/Son the story of Merlin and King Arthur. And it gripped him and raised questions within him as it has (repository of so many Western archetypes that it is) in generations and generations of post-Roman Celts. In the version we read, Arthur goes to France to besiege Lancelot for daring to sleep with (the Queen of) Arthur's Land, Albion. And it is while Arthur has turned his back on his land in order to pursue the demands of Patriarchy that Mordred raises an army against Arthur, requiring Arthur to abandon his fight with Lancelot and return to Arthur's own land to slay Arthur's Son (destroying what Patriarchy pretends to be about -- male progeny -- for what it's really about -- death), lose Arthur's relationship with Arthur's land, and sail off to a land ruled by three women in order to be able to return again in the hour of England's greatest need. Although the book clearly said that "Some said that Mordred was the King's own son," that was too much for G/Son to process. So on each successive reading of the story, when we got to the part where Arthur and Mordred slay each other, G/Son said to me, "Nonna, why the King fought with his own brother?" And each time I would say, "Arthur fought with his closest male relative because he didn't know what else to do. He had boxed himself into a corner by imagining that he could own and control either a woman or The Land. Arthur was a good man who wanted to help people, but he made a big mistake. He couldn't see that women, like Guinevere, and that a landbase, like England, must be free to make their own choices. Mordred made the same mistake."

The stories that we tell, the stories that we hear as children from our Nonnas, the stories that we see on tv, the stories that they show at the movie theatres: those stories matter. They matter in as basic and as important a manner as whether or not we can find a way to do what Sobeit, Thorn Coyle, Starhawk, and Justice Douglas have all urged us to do: to listen to our Landbase, to pay attention to our Watershed.

Because, after all, we desperately need a Lorax, who speaks for the trees:
Yes, I am the Lorax who speaks for the trees, which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please. But I'm also in charge of the brown Bar-ba-loots, who played in the shade in their Bar-ba-loot suits and happily lived eating truffula fruits. Now, thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground, there's not enough truffula fruit to go 'round!

Picture found here.

Synchronicity — Wherever You Go, There It Is


Sobeit has up a great post today about the need to consult our landbase when we make important decisions.
In all [E]arth traditions there is an understanding that the land is a witness to truth, that its very molecules do not lie, that its constituent fabric and all life forms that naturally grow upon it are wise in ways that humans rarely match.

. . .

One thing is certain: whoever lives upon a land with respect is welcomed by that land in ways deeper than we can imagine - a fact we should bear in mind when issues of race and culture are raised. For those who are true to the land shall find that the land also keeps faith with them. With our ability to move about the earth and settle at will, we do well to first consult the region where we are thinking of living, going straight to the land and speaking with its spirit, so that we can live with discrimination, truth, and respect.

"Wherever you are living, go and stand on bare, unconcreted earth and commune with the spirit of the land. Return to your home and in soul-flight go back to the site you visited and ask for a better sense of discrimination."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Earlier this week, a friend and I were discussing a point that Thorn Coyle makes in Kissing the Limitless:
The [E]arth remembers us, and the places where we grew up or have lived a long time recognize our patterns, just as we recognize the patterns of those places. Upon entering a new place, I always strive to introduce myself to the energies there. If there is time, I spend long moments in meditation, sending out tendrils of my life force into the land and sky, getting a better feel for the space and the beings that reside there, and noticing what is different from my home. This introduction also gives me a sort of permission to be there, and my time there is more joyously spent.

Starhawk is talking seriously about making a movie from one of the three or four books that completely changed my life, The Fifth Sacred Thing. (It's one of those projects that makes me think, "If it could be done well, it would be wonderful. But I'm so afraid that, once the process starts, best intentions and good plans notwithstanding . . . ." And I'd rather see it not done than see it done with compromise.) One of the things I love best in that book (well, I love a lot, but, lawyer that I am, one of the things that I love "really, really best," as G/Son says,) is the description of how decision-making happens. There are people from the various affinity groups gathered together in a room, each speaking from hir heart about how best to proceed against a threatened invasion. Some argue for war, some argue for sabotage, some argue for nonviolent resistance. And, then:
The Speaker raised her hand, calling for silence, and bent her ear to the Salmon mask.
"Friend Salmon says, 'Learn from water. Water is malleable, water is gentle, but drops of water wear away stone, and everything it touches is shaped by its passing.'" She sat down again. [And then the argument goes on, some calling each other cowards, some explaining what's wrong with that notion, . . . .]

When I first read that passage, all that I could think of was the question that my Environmental Law professor asked the class: "What's wrong with Justice Douglas' proposition that someone should be appointed to 'speak for the trees?'" Older, and maybe sadder than a lot of the class, my hand went up. "Weyerhauser will create a "Committee to Speak for America's Trees" and explain why trees long for, need, in fact, must have, clear cutting." I got an A.

I've been mulling over, lately, the notion of how we can have a democratic (forget consensual, let's just talk about honestly democratic) society when the money of large corporations appears capable of contaminating everyone and everything. I'm not a member of the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." I'm so far to the left of that, that it's difficult to even see that over the horizon. But I'd be orgasmically ecstatic to see that wing of that party these days. Because I don't. Other than Elizabeth Warren, I see, from the White House on down, a whole lot of people who, while I have no doubt that they went into politics planning to do good, are the sort of persons of whom Winston Churchill is once supposed to have remarked, "We've already established that. All that we're arguing about now is the price." And I wonder, more and more, how can we ensure that there's anyone who has (1) a real seat at the table, (2) in the Salmon mask, who (3) isn't colonized by those who make money killing Salmon and destroying Salmon's habitat?

And the only glimmer of an answer that I've been able to discern is encapsulated in Sobeit's post. We have to, as a cultural value to which we all give real credence, return to, taste, and listen to the Land, our Watershed. And while I think (and I am a woman who has given her life to The Law and would do so again, tomorrow, with a happy heart) that The Law can help to make a difference, what really has to happen is for us to begin to tell ourselves better stories. As Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” The universe that we perceive is, indeed, made of the stories that we tell ourselves and our children.

And we have to start telling a different story. Not only in our legal opinions, but elsewhere, as well, in those stories that seep into our bones before we ever read a law or a news story about a Supreme Court opinion.

This weekend, I read G/Son the story of Merlin and King Arthur. And it gripped him and raised questions within him as it has (repository of so many Western archetypes that it is) in generations and generations of post-Roman Celts. In the version we read, Arthur goes to France to besiege Lancelot for daring to sleep with (the Queen of) Arthur's Land, Albion. And it is while Arthur has turned his back on his land in order to pursue the demands of Patriarchy that Mordred raises an army against Arthur, requiring Arthur to abandon his fight with Lancelot and return to Arthur's own land to slay Arthur's Son (destroying what Patriarchy pretends to be about -- male progeny -- for what it's really about -- death), lose Arthur's relationship with Arthur's land, and sail off to a land ruled by three women in order to be able to return again in the hour of England's greatest need. Although the book clearly said that "Some said that Mordred was the King's own son," that was too much for G/Son to process. So on each successive reading of the story, when we got to the part where Arthur and Mordred slay each other, G/Son said to me, "Nonna, why the King fought with his own brother?" And each time I would say, "Arthur fought with his closest male relative because he didn't know what else to do. He had boxed himself into a corner by imagining that he could own and control either a woman or The Land. Arthur was a good man who wanted to help people, but he made a big mistake. He couldn't see that women, like Guinevere, and that a landbase, like England, must be free to make their own choices. Mordred made the same mistake."

The stories that we tell, the stories that we hear as children from our Nonnas, the stories that we see on tv, the stories that they show at the movie theatres: those stories matter. They matter in as basic and as important a manner as whether or not we can find a way to do what Sobeit, Thorn Coyle, Starhawk, and Justice Douglas have all urged us to do: to listen to our Landbase, to pay attention to our Watershed.

Because, after all, we desperately need a Lorax, who speaks for the trees:
Yes, I am the Lorax who speaks for the trees, which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please. But I'm also in charge of the brown Bar-ba-loots, who played in the shade in their Bar-ba-loot suits and happily lived eating truffula fruits. Now, thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground, there's not enough truffula fruit to go 'round!

Picture found here.

Synchronicity — Wherever You Go, There It Is


Sobeit has up a great post today about the need to consult our landbase when we make important decisions.
In all [E]arth traditions there is an understanding that the land is a witness to truth, that its very molecules do not lie, that its constituent fabric and all life forms that naturally grow upon it are wise in ways that humans rarely match.

. . .

One thing is certain: whoever lives upon a land with respect is welcomed by that land in ways deeper than we can imagine - a fact we should bear in mind when issues of race and culture are raised. For those who are true to the land shall find that the land also keeps faith with them. With our ability to move about the earth and settle at will, we do well to first consult the region where we are thinking of living, going straight to the land and speaking with its spirit, so that we can live with discrimination, truth, and respect.

"Wherever you are living, go and stand on bare, unconcreted earth and commune with the spirit of the land. Return to your home and in soul-flight go back to the site you visited and ask for a better sense of discrimination."
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]

Earlier this week, a friend and I were discussing a point that Thorn Coyle makes in Kissing the Limitless:
The [E]arth remembers us, and the places where we grew up or have lived a long time recognize our patterns, just as we recognize the patterns of those places. Upon entering a new place, I always strive to introduce myself to the energies there. If there is time, I spend long moments in meditation, sending out tendrils of my life force into the land and sky, getting a better feel for the space and the beings that reside there, and noticing what is different from my home. This introduction also gives me a sort of permission to be there, and my time there is more joyously spent.

Starhawk is talking seriously about making a movie from one of the three or four books that completely changed my life, The Fifth Sacred Thing. (It's one of those projects that makes me think, "If it could be done well, it would be wonderful. But I'm so afraid that, once the process starts, best intentions and good plans notwithstanding . . . ." And I'd rather see it not done than see it done with compromise.) One of the things I love best in that book (well, I love a lot, but, lawyer that I am, one of the things that I love "really, really best," as G/Son says,) is the description of how decision-making happens. There are people from the various affinity groups gathered together in a room, each speaking from hir heart about how best to proceed against a threatened invasion. Some argue for war, some argue for sabotage, some argue for nonviolent resistance. And, then:
The Speaker raised her hand, calling for silence, and bent her ear to the Salmon mask.
"Friend Salmon says, 'Learn from water. Water is malleable, water is gentle, but drops of water wear away stone, and everything it touches is shaped by its passing.'" She sat down again. [And then the argument goes on, some calling each other cowards, some explaining what's wrong with that notion, . . . .]

When I first read that passage, all that I could think of was the question that my Environmental Law professor asked the class: "What's wrong with Justice Douglas' proposition that someone should be appointed to 'speak for the trees?'" Older, and maybe sadder than a lot of the class, my hand went up. "Weyerhauser will create a "Committee to Speak for America's Trees" and explain why trees long for, need, in fact, must have, clear cutting." I got an A.

I've been mulling over, lately, the notion of how we can have a democratic (forget consensual, let's just talk about honestly democratic) society when the money of large corporations appears capable of contaminating everyone and everything. I'm not a member of the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party." I'm so far to the left of that, that it's difficult to even see that over the horizon. But I'd be orgasmically ecstatic to see that wing of that party these days. Because I don't. Other than Elizabeth Warren, I see, from the White House on down, a whole lot of people who, while I have no doubt that they went into politics planning to do good, are the sort of persons of whom Winston Churchill is once supposed to have remarked, "We've already established that. All that we're arguing about now is the price." And I wonder, more and more, how can we ensure that there's anyone who has (1) a real seat at the table, (2) in the Salmon mask, who (3) isn't colonized by those who make money killing Salmon and destroying Salmon's habitat?

And the only glimmer of an answer that I've been able to discern is encapsulated in Sobeit's post. We have to, as a cultural value to which we all give real credence, return to, taste, and listen to the Land, our Watershed. And while I think (and I am a woman who has given her life to The Law and would do so again, tomorrow, with a happy heart) that The Law can help to make a difference, what really has to happen is for us to begin to tell ourselves better stories. As Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” The universe that we perceive is, indeed, made of the stories that we tell ourselves and our children.

And we have to start telling a different story. Not only in our legal opinions, but elsewhere, as well, in those stories that seep into our bones before we ever read a law or a news story about a Supreme Court opinion.

This weekend, I read G/Son the story of Merlin and King Arthur. And it gripped him and raised questions within him as it has (repository of so many Western archetypes that it is) in generations and generations of post-Roman Celts. In the version we read, Arthur goes to France to besiege Lancelot for daring to sleep with (the Queen of) Arthur's Land, Albion. And it is while Arthur has turned his back on his land in order to pursue the demands of Patriarchy that Mordred raises an army against Arthur, requiring Arthur to abandon his fight with Lancelot and return to Arthur's own land to slay Arthur's Son (destroying what Patriarchy pretends to be about -- male progeny -- for what it's really about -- death), lose Arthur's relationship with Arthur's land, and sail off to a land ruled by three women in order to be able to return again in the hour of England's greatest need. Although the book clearly said that "Some said that Mordred was the King's own son," that was too much for G/Son to process. So on each successive reading of the story, when we got to the part where Arthur and Mordred slay each other, G/Son said to me, "Nonna, why the King fought with his own brother?" And each time I would say, "Arthur fought with his closest male relative because he didn't know what else to do. He had boxed himself into a corner by imagining that he could own and control either a woman or The Land. Arthur was a good man who wanted to help people, but he made a big mistake. He couldn't see that women, like Guinevere, and that a landbase, like England, must be free to make their own choices. Mordred made the same mistake."

The stories that we tell, the stories that we hear as children from our Nonnas, the stories that we see on tv, the stories that they show at the movie theatres: those stories matter. They matter in as basic and as important a manner as whether or not we can find a way to do what Sobeit, Thorn Coyle, Starhawk, and Justice Douglas have all urged us to do: to listen to our Landbase, to pay attention to our Watershed.

Because, after all, we desperately need a Lorax, who speaks for the trees:
Yes, I am the Lorax who speaks for the trees, which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please. But I'm also in charge of the brown Bar-ba-loots, who played in the shade in their Bar-ba-loot suits and happily lived eating truffula fruits. Now, thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground, there's not enough truffula fruit to go 'round!

Picture found here.

And We Are Living in the Material World . . . .


Richard Louv notes:
For decades, our culture has struggled with two addictions: to oil and to despair. But what if our lives were as immersed in nature as in technology every day? What if we not only conserved nature, but created it where we live, work, learn and play? The filmmaker Camilla Rockwell recently sent me a clip from her film Mother Nature’s Child: Growing Outdoors in the Media Age.

Here's Rockwell's interview of Louv:

Richard Louv: Human Energy Through Nature Connection from Camilla Rockwell on Vimeo.


Here's Louv discussing easy ways that you can help the child (daughter, son, niece, nephew, grandchild, godchild, neighbor's child, student, etc.) in your life spend time out in nature -- now, in your neighborhood, town, suburb. I like method No. 7:
Find a guide book. Consider “I Love Dirt,”; Joseph Cornell’s classic “Sharing Nature With Children”; and “Coyote’s Guide to Connecting with Nature.”
I'm going to buy Coyote's Guide to Connecting with Nature for me and G/Son.

I'm also planning to read Louv's new book: The Nature Principal. One, and it's just one, of the things that I love about Louv is his ability to convey the need for a relationship with the material, natural world in a way that anyone, even non-Pagans (and you know how difficult they can be to talk to!) can get. I gave his last book, Last Child in the Woods to everyone in my family last year at Winter Solstice.

How did you connect with nature today?

Thank You!


Many, many thanks to the very kind "Anonymous Reader" who sent me A Pagan Ritual Prayer Book by Ceisiwr Serith. Here's one of my favorites:
*Here in this city, surrounded by a canyon of
buildings that seem to block out Nature,
I pray to the gods of nature, who are present everywhere,
here no less than in the wild forest,
or the empty plains over which the storm winds blow,
or the ocean that hides its immense number of life
in its depths.
For we human beings are not separate from Nature,
and have our own nature,
and this nature is above all to gather into
communities,
and to form societies,
and to build cities.
So I stand here in this city and praise Nature,
present here all around us.
How could we keep Her out?

*Open my eyes, Dyeus Pter, to those around me.
Open my heart, Gouwinda, with your loving care.
Unite me with them, Xaryomen,
into a society of individuals,
based on reciprocal exchange.

Picture (of my city) found here.

Home Soil


Every garden is based on affinity for and knowledge of the ground, on true intimacy and kinship with your home soil that comes not only from cultivating the garden but also from sitting completely still on the earth that you garden, and walking aimlessly and mindfully about on this same ground. These practices are rooted in listening to your soil and in following your garden down to its source. Begin by sitting still and doing absolutely nothing. Make yourself very comfortable on the ground and then, don't move at all. Give your full attention to what is happening around you. Watch the shadows of the black mulberry leaves move like cirrus clouds across the face of your garden. Be ordered by the beat of the ruby-throated hummingbird pulling red nectar out of full-blown salvias. Sink down to earth and sit deep in the saddle of your home garden. Settle yourself on yourself and let the flower of your life force bloom.

~Wendy Johnson in Gardening at the Dragon's Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World.

Landscape Guy dropped this book off at my house a week or so ago, and I am absolutely LOVING it. Reading it along with David Abrams' Becoming Animal (I've always been one of those readers who has a number of books going at once; it used to drive my mother crazy. Do you do this or do you read one thing at a time?) is an amazing experience in connecting to the Earth as part and parcel of a spiritual practice.

What do you know about your home soil that you didn't know a year ago?

Picture found here.

Dancing with Shadows


It can be difficult, as I discussed recently, to find good Pagan books. This week, I've begun reading -- and am being blown away by -- David Abram's Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Abram, to my knowledge, doesn't self-identify as a Pagan, although his bio at The Alliance for Wild Ethics says that Abram is:
An accomplished storyteller and sleight-of-hand magician who has lived and traded magic with indigenous sorcerers in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas . . . .
and he's certainly studied and written about magic. Becoming Animal is, in any event, a Pagan book, in the true sense of the word. The Politics and Prose write-up says:
The shapeshifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible: all have their place in Abram’s investigation. He shows that from the awakened perspective of the human animal, awareness (or mind) is not an exclusive possession of our species but a lucid quality of the biosphere itself—a quality in which we, along with the oaks and the spiders, steadily participate.

I'm particularly struck by Abram's discussion of shadows. Having worked with James Hillman, it's not surprising that Abram writes about shadows in ways that have multiple meanings. Although he's ostensibly talking about the kind of shadows we cast upon the ground when the sun is shining, I find some of his passages to be equally applicable (and I can't believe Abram isn't aware of what he's doing) to Jungian shadows, as well. Here's a small example:
One of the marks of our obliviousness, one of the countless signs that our thinking minds have grown estranged from the intelligence of our sensing bodies, is that today a great many people seem to believe that shadows are flat. . . . We identify our shadow, in other words, with that visible shape we see projected on the pavement or the whitewashed wall. Since what we glimpse there is a being without depth [heh], we naturally assume that shadows themselves are basically flat -- and if we are asked by a curious child about the life of shadows [again, heh] we are apt to reply that their lives exist in only two dimensions [ok, I'll stop with the "heh"s, but I think you see my point].

. . .

[M]y actual shadow is an enigma more substantial than that flat shape on the ground. That silhouette is only my shadow's outermost surface. . . . [The] apparent gap between myself and that flat swath of darkness is what prompts me, now and then, to accept its invitation to dance, the two of us then strutting and ducking in an improvised pas de deux wherein it's never very clear which one of us is leading [heh; can't help myself] and which is following. It is now obvious, however, that that shape slinking along on the pavement is merely the outermost edge of a thick volume of shade, an umbral depth that extends from the pavement right on up to my knees, torso, and head -- a shadow touching me not just at my feet, but at every point of my person.


Or maybe I'm completely wrong and Abram, trying heroically to get us back in actual touch with the physical shadows cast by our bodies, would berate me for needing to find verbal twists and psychological constructs literally breaking through his words. Indeed, in the essay on magic, linked above, Abram says:
For it is likely that the "inner world" of our Western psychological experience, like the supernatural heaven of Christian belief, originated in the loss of our ancestral reciprocity with the living landscape. When the animate presences with whom we have evolved over several million years are suddenly construed as having less significance than ourselves, when the generative earth that gave birth to us is defined as a soulless or determinate object devoid of sensitivity and sentience, then that wild otherness with which human life had always been entwined must migrate, either into a supersensory heaven beyond the natural world, or else into the human skull itself--the only allowable refuge, in this world, for what is ineffable and unfathomable.

At any rate, it's a meaty book (odd choice of words, perhaps, for a book entitled "Becoming Animal") and one full of the Pagan understanding that EVERYTHING is alive and longing to be in communion, that, "it's all real; it's all [heh] metaphor; there's always more."

If you've read it, or Abram's earlier book, The Spell of the Sensuous I'd love to know your reactions.

Update: As the stumbling oral reading above makes clear, this is a book written to be read, not spoken. The language is lush, almost rococo, and one needs to remain fully present to read it. I'm reading it, as a result, as a series of amuses-gueule, and not in one or two "swell foops," as my grandma used to say.

Pagan Books


This grey afternoon, a dear old Pagan friend of mine came over and we hung out, chatted while we made organic Swiss Chard and barley (I love cooking with friends; I need to do more of this!), did some ecstatic dance, watched the birds at the bird feeder, and generally had (what passes in my own odd world for) a very good time. She asked me what good Pagan books I'd read lately and, I suddenly realized that the answer was: "Not Many." I'm working my way through (and, unlike a lot of Pagan bloggers, being rather impressed with) Trials of the Moon (maybe because I don't believe that where one gets one's degree is as important as the force of one's arguments. It's a lawyer thing.) but I can't say that I've found too many Pagan books this year that have made a deep impression on me.

Maybe this isn't too surprising; after all, Paganism is, IMHO, a religion of experience rather than of faith or authority. You can read about mystical experience forever or you can go outside, sit on a rock, breathe deeply, and . . . begin.

But, still, when I first discovered Paganism it was through books (The Politics of Women's Spirituality was "first," although I'd grown up reading "Pagan" books such as The Secret Garden, and The Wind in the Willows, Grimm's, etc.) that gave some context to those "on the rock" experiences that I'd been having all my life. And it's a bit sad that there's not quite as much (at least that I'm aware of) great Pagan writing out there as there once seemed to be.

This year I enjoyed, and agreed with some parts and disagreed with other parts of, Restall Orr's Kissing the Hag and had reason to re-read Sacred Circles. But the most important "Pagan" book (and the author would completely reject that characterization) that I read -- and the book that I gave to Son & DiL, DiL's wonderful 'rents, and the First ex-Mr. Hecate and his partner -- was Louv's Last Child in the Woods. I read Dark Green Religion and thought that it didn't say much that I didn't already know and that it was most likely a New Yorker-length article that fared less well as a book, almost painfully "pumped up," but I can see why it's an important book for people, who, for example, frequent Huffington Post, to read. I bought and regularly refer to Bearing Torches: A Devotional Anthology for Hecate, (not of much interest unless you're devoted to Hecate), which is published by a group doing some v interesting stuff these days (Are we entering a phase where the best writing and publishing is done by groups almost fanatically devoted to very minute bits of Paganism? Is that good or is it bad?) . But it's not a book you read cover to cover. And, as always, I've had regular reason to resort to Illes' Encyclopedia of 5,000 Spells. I imagine that I will have until I'm too old to turn a page. I'm trying to work my way through a few of (and I don't think that she considers herself a Pagan) Ingerman's books and I'm still not sure if she's so advanced that I'm just not groking it or if she's not advanced enough to challenge me, but I too often find myself going, "Well, yeah, of course, and . . . " Likely, I'm not yet advanced enough.

Mostly, this year, I read a lot of good poetry and a lot of legal briefs, some so good they give me chills and some so bad I wind up raging to Young Lawyer Guy about them. I'm consistently mad for Theodora Goss' bits of stories and for most everything that Rima writes. I'm starting, more and more, to find more good poetry on YouTube than on the printed page and this, still, makes me sad. I'm a dying generation.

A lot of good Pagan writing is being done, these days, on the web, and that's v cool. I always check out (these are listed in my blog roll) African Alchemy, A Pagan's Blog, A Witch's Daily, Aquila ka Hecate, Know Thyself, Medusa Coils, The Archdruid Report, and The Gods Are Bored. There are a number of others that I check out at least once a week or so. Thorn Coyle rather irregularly posts podcasts that I'll often listen to several times while knitting, cleaning house, or walking on the treadmill.

What's the best Pagan book that you read this year? What's the worst? Where do you go for regular Pagan inspiration?

Picture found here.

Pagan Books


This grey afternoon, a dear old Pagan friend of mine came over and we hung out, chatted while we made organic Swiss Chard and barley (I love cooking with friends; I need to do more of this!), did some ecstatic dance, watched the birds at the bird feeder, and generally had (what passes in my own odd world for) a very good time. She asked me what good Pagan books I'd read lately and, I suddenly realized that the answer was: "Not Many." I'm working my way through (and, unlike a lot of Pagan bloggers, being rather impressed with) Trials of the Moon (maybe because I don't believe that where one gets one's degree is as important as the force of one's arguments. It's a lawyer thing.) but I can't say that I've found too many Pagan books this year that have made a deep impression on me.

Maybe this isn't too surprising; after all, Paganism is, IMHO, a religion of experience rather than of faith or authority. You can read about mystical experience forever or you can go outside, sit on a rock, breathe deeply, and . . . begin.

But, still, when I first discovered Paganism it was through books (The Politics of Women's Spirituality was "first," although I'd grown up reading "Pagan" books such as The Secret Garden, and The Wind in the Willows, Grimm's, etc.) that gave some context to those "on the rock" experiences that I'd been having all my life. And it's a bit sad that there's not quite as much (at least that I'm aware of) great Pagan writing out there as there once seemed to be.

This year I enjoyed, and agreed with some parts and disagreed with other parts of, Restall Orr's Kissing the Hag and had reason to re-read Sacred Circles. But the most important "Pagan" book (and the author would completely reject that characterization) that I read -- and the book that I gave to Son & DiL, DiL's wonderful 'rents, and the First ex-Mr. Hecate and his partner -- was Louv's Last Child in the Woods. I read Dark Green Religion and thought that it didn't say much that I didn't already know and that it was most likely a New Yorker-length article that fared less well as a book, almost painfully "pumped up," but I can see why it's an important book for people, who, for example, frequent Huffington Post, to read. I bought and regularly refer to Bearing Torches: A Devotional Anthology for Hecate, (not of much interest unless you're devoted to Hecate), which is published by a group doing some v interesting stuff these days (Are we entering a phase where the best writing and publishing is done by groups almost fanatically devoted to very minute bits of Paganism? Is that good or is it bad?) . But it's not a book you read cover to cover. And, as always, I've had regular reason to resort to Illes' Encyclopedia of 5,000 Spells. I imagine that I will have until I'm too old to turn a page. I'm trying to work my way through a few of (and I don't think that she considers herself a Pagan) Ingerman's books and I'm still not sure if she's so advanced that I'm just not groking it or if she's not advanced enough to challenge me, but I too often find myself going, "Well, yeah, of course, and . . . " Likely, I'm not yet advanced enough.

Mostly, this year, I read a lot of good poetry and a lot of legal briefs, some so good they give me chills and some so bad I wind up raging to Young Lawyer Guy about them. I'm consistently mad for Theodora Goss' bits of stories and for most everything that Rima writes. I'm starting, more and more, to find more good poetry on YouTube than on the printed page and this, still, makes me sad. I'm a dying generation.

A lot of good Pagan writing is being done, these days, on the web, and that's v cool. I always check out (these are listed in my blog roll) African Alchemy, A Pagan's Blog, A Witch's Daily, Aquila ka Hecate, Know Thyself, Medusa Coils, The Archdruid Report, and The Gods Are Bored. There are a number of others that I check out at least once a week or so. Thorn Coyle rather irregularly posts podcasts that I'll often listen to several times while knitting, cleaning house, or walking on the treadmill.

What's the best Pagan book that you read this year? What's the worst? Where do you go for regular Pagan inspiration?

Picture found here.

Honoring The (Sometimes Dysfunctional) Ancestors


Just a few days now until Samhein. I sit in a shaft of weak sunlight in my leaf-strewn garden and wonder, as, I guess, all old people do: "How did another year slip by so quickly?

Maybe more than any other holiday, Samhein has a huge component of fun, generally related to the coincident secular holiday. Scratch a Pagan and you'll likely find someone who loves costumes, the dark, all things "spooky." And, a large part of showing up for Samhein, being fully present in the holy day, involves our relationship with "The Ancestors." For many Pagans, that part is fun, as well. Lovingly-crafted ancestor altars, with pictures and mementos of the beloved dead, are artfully arranged. Food and music and stories that remind us of our parents, grandparents, and other now-dead relatives make up a large part of many Samhein rituals and divination and other forms of communication are used, here while the veils are thin.

Yet, for some Pagans, those of us who grew up in dysfunctional families, these practices can become fraught, rather than fun. One coping strategy that I've adopted is to broaden my definition of the term "Ancestors." I've done this in two different ways, over time.

First, through trance work,I've gotten to know some Ancestors from my deep past, especially one old, old woman who survived a lot of very cold winters inside a cave. I can draw strength and inspiration from those ancestors that I'm not able to find in my immediate predecessors. When I call upon the Element of Earth, I remember that Earth contains the bones of my ancestors, all of whom were survivors. When I ground, I can feel the layers of life under my feet; I twist my own roots deep around the roots of my own past.

Second, I've come to realize that I have any number of "Ancestors of the Heart" to whom I am not genetically related (any more than we are all, of course, Sons and Daughters of African Eve). Primary among these, I count Dorothy Parker, for her deep romanticism and idealism which she defended with her deep cynicism. She was one of my first models for how to be a smart aleck in this world and began my love affair with poetry. I count here, too, fictional characters: Susan Sowerby from The Secret Garden, Dorothy Sayers' Harriet Vane, Meg Murray and Mrs. Who from a Wrinkle in Time.

And, so when I sit on Samhein to honor The Ancestors, I will honor my own version. And, as I've written before, I hope to be:

reminded of one of my favorite passages, ever, from Ursula LeGuin. A woman importunes her ancestors for help. "Oh, it's That One. In trouble, again," the Ancestors chuckle to each other. It's what I imagine some Viking thrall saying to some settler from ancient Rus and to the barefoot old crone, the one who died lighting fires at the edge of the cave to keep the winter wolves away from the smell of placenta and mother's milk. "Oh, it's That One. In trouble, again."
But I think they'll say it with a friendly chuckle.

And I will renew my own pledge to do as Katrina Messenger once told me Jung taught that we must do: I will continue to know, dance with, and release the energy of my own shadows so that, to the best of my abilities, I do not project them onto the next generations. Some bits of my family's heritage will hopefully die with me. It's one way that I can honor those with whom I prefer not to spend time, across the veils.

Here's Angela Raincatcher and Thalia Took dealing with some of their own ancestral issues. How do you deal with yours? Who are your Ancestors of the Heart? What would an altar to them look like?

Picture found here.

May the Goddess Guard Her. May She Find Her Way To The Summerlands. May Her Friends And Family Know Peace.


Carla F. Cohen

1936-2010

With deep sorrow, I am writing to inform our friends and neighbors that my beloved store co-owner Carla Cohen died this morning. For all of us here at Politics & Prose, it is difficult to believe that someone larger than life has died, and I will badly miss my friend and partner.

A funeral will be held at Tifereth Israel, 7701 16th Street, N.W., at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 13th.

The store will be closed from 12-4 p.m. on that day. We will have a memorial service in the store at a date to follow in November. (Apart from this closing, all other events will proceed as scheduled.)


Even in today's world of Borders and Amazon.com, there are still wonderful, local bookstores. The kind of places that a bookish person can wander for hours, sampling this, discovering that, guiltily buying more than one "should." Living in DC, I have two such redoubts: Kramer's Books and Afterwords and Politics and Prose. I am touched more than I would have expected to be by Ms. Cohen's death.

The veils between the worlds seem to me to be thinning almost hourly as the wheel turns towards Samhein, and it seems to me that there are often a number of notable deaths at this time of year. I hope Ms. Cohen slipped easily between the veils and finds Summerland on the other side.

Picture found here.

Synchronicity: You’re Soaking in It



Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki:

People often say to me, "You're 81 years old; where do you get the energy from?" and I say, "I get it from that wholeness." I move out in my mind into that immensity of space and there is that, that warmth, that sense of welcoming. And I imagine myself there. I place myself there and I say to this wholeness, "I'm part of you. I came out of you. I'm going to go back into you. And I love you. I really do love you, in the deepest sense of that word, because I'm part of you. And at this moment, I could do with a little bit of you, a little bit more of you. I need some of your energy." And Thorn, I can feel it filling me up, and then, when I come back, it's there for me to use.

~Talking to T. Thorn Coyle in a podcast dated September 13, 2010.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

For the more sensitive the soul of the observer, the greater the ecstasy aroused in him by this harmony. At such times his senses are possessed by a deep and delightful reverie, and in a state of blissful self-abandomentent he loses himself in the immensity of this beautiful order, which which he feels himself at one. All individual objects escape him, he sees and feels nothing but the unity of all things. His ideas have to be restricted and his imagination limited by some particular circumstances for him to observe the separate parts of this universe which he was striving to embrace in its entirety.

~quoted in Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future by Bron Taylor. (Listen to Anne Hill interview Taylor here.)

Picture found here.

This and That



Good on the Daytona Beach News Journal for an informative, correctly-capitalized article about Pagan Pride Day in New Smyrna Beach. None of the "they don't worship Satan" nonsense and a decent description of what "Pagan" means. More like this.


I've never seen conservatives as willing to accept witchcraft as some of Christine O'Donnell's fans are turning out to be.

It's been out for a bit and I'm still waiting to find it. Terry Pratchett's new and brilliantly-titled book, I Shall Wear Midnight, sounds great. I can't wait to get ahold of it.

I Shall Wear Midnight picks up Tiffany's story as she settles - or not - into life as "town witch" on The Chalk, taking care of the things people generally don't like to think about.

There, with the assistance of the spectacularly argumentative, kilt-wearing, wee but hardy Nac Mac Feegle, she tends to the needs of her village, always riding a knife-edge between being useful and being an object of suspicion who meddles in unmentionables.

But Tiffany's skills as a witch have caught the attention of the Cunning Man (surely one of Pratchett's spookiest villains), a no-eyed spectre who menaces our heroine as she goes about the business of seeing her village through a change in baron.


Archeologists have found a wall painting of Tyche, the Greek Goddess of fortune, during excavations on the east shore of the Sea of Galilee. The picture appears to date from the 3rd to 4th Centuries, C.E.

Her head is crowned, her youthful gaze is focused, and she has abundant brown hair beneath her crown.
. . .

Apart from goddess Tyche, researchers also found a wonderfully etched relief of a maenad, one of a group of female followers of Dionysus, the god of wine on a bone plate.


(I believe the author meant to say that researchers also found a wonderfully etched relief, on a bone plate, of a maenad, not that Dionysus was the God of wine on a bone plate. )

And, in Egypt, a recently re-discovered tomb includes paintings of astrological scenes and the Goddess Nut.

The room is in very good condition and contains beautiful painted scenes in vivid colors. Blue and yellow dominate the ceiling, as the goddess Nut welcomes with raised arms the body of the deceased.


(Not clear if the author meant "astrological" or "astronomical," at least from the article. )