The Slacktiverse

Unequal Rites

The Arlington County Court refused to grant me the right to perform marriages in Virginia, apparently on the grounds that my "congregation" does not own a building.

I presented my certificate of ordination and documentation of the 501c3 status of the Order of the White Moon, which ordained me. Since my Order is incorporated in California, the secretary asked me if I had a congregation in Virginia; I said yes. She asked me to list the address of the congregation, and I said that we don't have a building. She asked, "So, what, you just meet in each other's homes?" I said yes, we meet in each other's homes, or out of doors (Wicca is, after all, an earth-based religion, but I thought that mentioning that would only be prejudicial to my situation).

The secretary left and came back with the Clerk of Court who said that they were not going to approve me. I asked if it was because we don't have a building. He said, "Yes, you don't have a building, and there were a few other things." I asked him if he would give me a written list of the reasons I was being denied. He refused; he offered to show me the relevant section (Sec 20-23) of the Virginia Code. I assured him that I had read the Code, and asked again if he would give me more specific reasons I was being denied. He said that approving these applications was at his "discretion" and that he didn't "feel" I met the qualifications, but he wouldn't tell me how. He told me that I could apply to another court in another county but that he thought they would probably give me the same answer.

Has property ownership now become the measure of what constitutes a "real" religion in Virginia, or at least in Arlington County? Or is this another example of anti-Pagan discrimination at work?

Patchwork enforcement and a history of discrimination

Virginia is one of the few states in the US that requires clergy members to register with a circuit court in order to be able to perform valid marriages. The requirements in Sec 20-23 of the Code state that the minister must present proof of ordination and "of his being in regular communion" with the organization that ordained him.

These requirements are apparently interpreted in widely varying ways across various circuits in Virginia, as different courts' websites list different types of documentation - or none - that may be required.^[1] For courts that openly state they require more than just proof of ordination, the way they ask for information gives tremendous privilege to traditionally-organized, i.e., Christian, groups. Although these forms sometimes refer vaguely to a "person of authority" all of the named roles (deacons, elders, pastors, trustees or church clerks) are associated with mainline Protestant churches and church organizations. Other forms ask for copies of charters, bylaws and outlines of organizational structures. And if granting these applications really is up to the "discretion" of the Clerk of Court, there is wide scope for potential discrimination against minority religions with or without the fig leaf of requiring a "location" and other organizational trappings potentially beyond the reach of minority religious organizations.

This problem goes back more than a decade; in 1999, the American Civil Liberties Union helped another Wiccan priestess get her application in this situation approved.

I think it's not unreasonable that I am concerned about what kind of documentation will satisfy the court. I serve multiple groups, one of which meets in a designated location, but since it is an open circle, the people who attend are mostly not members of my ordaining organization. If I provide documentation of this group meeting in a specific location, will the court then ask how many people attend, and how often we meet? What will they require to conclude that I am "really" a High Priestess in a "real" religion?

Why this matters

This is about more than performing weddings. This decision has a chilling effect on me trying to function as clergy in other ways; if the Court will not recognize me as legitimate clergy in this situation, will my right to confidentiality be protected? How can I assure people who come to me for counseling that their communications with me are protected by clergy privilege?

And since this is one of the two major forms of government approval used by a wide range of institutions and organizations to determine whether someone is a "real" clergy member, it can impact my ability to reach out to those who have particular needs: people in hospitals, the military, and prisons all need clergy services, but those institutions are much more likely to deny me the ability to minister to the people involved if I can't say that I'm approved by the State of Virginia to perform marriages.

And although I might have my application granted if I tried another court, that does nothing to resolve the doubt cast on my status by the court with jurisdiction over where I live and do most of my ministry. If another court approved me, it would only serve to highlight the irregular and potentially biased variations in granting recognition across jurisdictions.

What you can do

I currently plan to gather additional supporting documentation and reapply, and if I am denied again, to ask whether I can appeal to a judge of the court. I am also currently seeking advice from the ACLU, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and the Lady Liberty League. Here's what you can do to help:

First, get the word out. The more Pagans and followers of "non traditional" religions pull together, the better our chances of being recognized as "legitimate" in these kinds of situations.

Second, If you are a Pagan clergyperson (or a celebrant of a non-traditional Christian religion) in Virginia and you have applied to perform marriages, please email me. If you were approved, I'd like to know when you were approved, in what court, with what paperwork, and what questions they asked, both written and verbal. People who have been declined, please tell me that too. The more information I have for comparison the better.

Third, I would also like to be able to present letters of support from other Pagan and "non traditional" clergy or officiants and potentially from Pagan and non-mainstream Christian organizations that ordain people, especially ones that ordain people all over the country. If you're interested, please contact me. And if you have other ideas about how to help, please speak up!

Fourth, please provide spiritual and magical support. Pray and send energy that I am able to gather the evidence I need and make a convincing argument, that the court will grant my new application swiftly, and that I may stay positive and be patient throughout this whole process.

Fifth, keep an eye on "Things you can do" section of "This week in The Slacktiverse" for further information about things that can be done.

I sincerely hope that together we can ensure this is the last time a Pagan in Virginia has her credentials questioned and her status as clergy denied.

--Literata

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^[1] For example, see the documentation required and/or questions to be asked for Prince William County, Arlington County, the Country of Fauquier and Fairfax County. ↩

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NOTE: This piece is adapted from an post published at the same time at Literata's blog. TBAT waived the normal time lag for crossposted material due to the pressing and important nature of the subject of the post.

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Litha - Element of Fire

(Trigger Warning: Fire imagery)

On Wednesday near 1pm as I darted from one air-conditioned venue to another, I took just a moment to acknowledge the sun standing at its zenith, dead south, pouring out heat of such intensity that even being outside for a few minutes was difficult. In the evening, I stood on the roof of my building and watched the sun set, appreciating the temperatures that were still hot but seemed tremendously cooler by comparison. The Element of Fire had made its presence known on the summer solstice.

This is the next solar festival, or quarter day, in the Wiccan calendar, and in keeping with my theme for this time around the Wheel of the Year, I want to explore the Element of Fire, its connections with the summer solstice, or Litha, as it is called in Wicca, and the symbolic representations of fire used in Wiccan ritual and in Tarot. ^[1]

On the whole, the correspondence between summer and Fire is a fairly straightforward metaphorical connection: summer is usually when we experience the hottest part of the year, and one of fire's most obvious characteristics is its intense heat production.^[2] Fire also provides light, and this is the climax of the "light" part of the year. The solstice is the peak of the Sun's energy, the longest days and shortest nights. Concentrating on Fire at this point on the Wheel can help us understand all the changes that have taken place since the year started and begin to prepare ourselves for reaping the results as we move into the waning light and the main harvest season of the year.

These qualities of change and transformation, where Fire represents both destruction and potential renewal, are why the tool I use to represent the Element of Fire is a knife. This is not the attribution that most Wiccans use, although it is not uncommon, either. To understand why most Wiccans associate blades with Air, we have to look at Tarot.

I mentioned back in the Ostara piece on the Element of Air that most Tarot decks based on the Rider-Waite-Smith prototype associate the suit of Swords with the Element of Air, and the suit of Wands with the Element of Fire, but there is evidence that this was a "blind," or deliberate inaccuracy, inserted in the Tarot decks intended for public consumption by the creators in order to honor those creators' vows of secrecy to the Golden Dawn. Whether or not it was a blind, the original RWS deck became influential in English-speaking countries, so most Tarot decks continue to use those associations, although a minority use the reversed Swords - Fire and Wands - Air associations.

I don't follow the Golden Dawn, so for me this is mostly a matter of why most Tarot symbolism differs from what I use in my own rituals. I see wands, or their larger versions, staves or rods, as a way of directing intention that has a lot to do with intellectual choice and reason. The wand's larger cousin, a staff or rod, can be used to symbolize authority based on knowledge and experience, both parts of the intellectual domain of Air. Personally, my favorite version of a wand is a pen, and since Air is associated with language, that supports my association of wands with Air. I enjoy using fountain pens, whose very design reminds me that historically quill pens were made from feathers, certainly a symbol of Air, and this cements the association.

On the other hand, to me any blade used in ritual - whether a sword or a knife - symbolizes and embodies separating, changing, and transforming in ways that are the essence of Fire. Along the same lines, it is impossible to make metal blades without fire. Not just warmth or heat but the real blazing inferno of a forge is required to render rocks into sharp steel. The product itself is the most dangerous of the Witch's tools: hurting oneself with a pen is generally unlikely, but simple carelessness with a small blade can easily cause serious injury.^[3] Similarly, fire is inherently dangerous: when in balance or being managed, it is useful and even life-giving, but without serious supervision, it will wreak a frighteningly self-perpetuating kind of destruction. Windstorms, floods, and landslides are all dangerous, but they typically represent an unusual behavior of the Element and will exhaust themselves eventually: the landslide has only so much material to move, as the water floods higher areas it loses energy, and whirlwinds are slowed by the obstacles they encounter. On the other hand, the more fire consumes, the more energy it has and the more it spreads itself, growing rather than diminishing.

But when it exhausts itself, the transient heat and light disappear along with the flames. In this way it's also the most ephemeral of the Elements, another example of its tendency to go to extremes. All of this can make Fire both an attractive Element and one that is hard to relate to. While we depend on it as a tool, we don't want to experience it ourselves. The kind of transformation that Fire as an Element represents is often frightening and something we do not want to undergo: dramatic transformations are not easy, even when they are less drastic or sudden than that of fuel consumed in a conflagration.

But Fire reminds us that we have to accept these situations as part of life. In every season, life exists in a constant state of rebirth. While some transformations are harder or more sudden than others, nothing is perfectly static. Connecting with and celebrating Fire can help us understand that. In particular, at this turning point of the year it can help us prepare for the transition to autumn and harvest and exemplify the tools to cope with that season and its transformations.

Summer is what connects the seed of life created through interaction to the coming harvest, and the heat and light of summer help bring that to fruition. When those developments are ready, we have to move into reaping, in the way that harvesting transforms what was a growing plant into the very bread of life. This process requires the Element of Fire at each and every step, in both the blade that cuts the stalks and the warmth that helps a loaf rise. The scythe's blade and the hearthfire are interconnected manifestations of the Element of Fire, and the duality of their symbolisms is a good representation of the Element which goes to extremes but also unifies them.

In this season, as we see the sun at its pinnacle, we experience transformation whether we want it or not. Perhaps the Element of Fire can help us learn to value the transient and the living, to cope with the changes inherent in life, and to gather the results of our earlier work as we go forward. How are you in transition - either slow or speedy - at this solstice?

--Literata

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^[1] The solar holidays are the equinoxes and solstices, called the quarter days. The previous one was Ostara. These alternate with the cross-quarter days which are derived from Celtic fire festivals; the last Sabbat was the cross-quarter day of Beltane. In the Southern Hemisphere, it is currently the time of the winter solstice, Yule, which corresponds with the Element of Earth. I'll contrast these pairings and discuss how they interact in an upcoming piece.↩

^[2] Since a recent thread was talking about food associations, it's also worth pointing out the American tradition of having cook-outs centering on food cooked over (large, often charcoal) open flames. There's also a broader tradition of serving cool or cold foods as a counter to the season's climate. The juxtaposition of these points to another feature of the Element of Fire: the tendency to go to extremes, including opposing extremes simultaneously.↩

^[3] These are not the only traditional Witch's tools; more will be discussed with the other Elements, and exactly what is "traditional" depends on which tradition one ascribes to as well.↩

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Beltane - Sacred Sex

(Trigger Warning: Sex, reproduction)

In addition to the four Elements, on the cross-quarter days of the Wheel of the Year this year I’m going to explore four major themes or concepts that I think are deeply important in Wicca. Please note that Wicca is not the only kind of Paganism that there is and that even within Wicca interpretations vary widely, so this is not authoritative about anyone else’s practices or beliefs. It’s offered as food for thought.

Wicca is not a religion based on a text. Even the forms of worship vary tremendously, with nothing resembling a formal liturgy that is widely accepted or agreed upon. Most Wiccans, though, are familiar with a few important pieces of writing and many use them in ritual at times or consider them important reflections of the religion. The best-loved of these is Doreen Valiente’s The Charge of the Goddess.

The Charge exists in many forms and has been revised over the years by different practitioners. Here is a version by Starhawk, a famous feminist Pagan author. I’ll note that some people use the whole thing, but I personally only use the section from “Hear now the words of the Star Goddess…” to the end. In British Traditional Wicca, the Charge is read at each ritual, and others may use the Charge similarly, especially near Beltane. The reason is simple. One of the most oft-quoted lines of the Charge says:

Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.

In Wicca, sex is sacred. This has a lot of metaphysical connotations: the union of Goddess and God is seen as the source of everything, and stories of that union take many forms. But it’s also about the purely human. Beltane is traditionally a fertility festival, even more so than Ostara, perhaps; as we begin to enjoy the longer days and warmer temperatures of spring and summer, it’s natural to be interested in making whoopee. And as we noted at Ostara, our nonhuman neighbors also tend to engage in acts of love and pleasure with great enthusiasm around this time of year.

But for me, it’s important to understand that this valorization of sex is about a lot more than it can seem. Yes, “all acts of love and pleasure” certainly refers to intercourse, and it also refers to a lot more than that; any loving act of pleasure is included, regardless of the genders of people involved. It doesn’t say “acts of love and pleasure that lead to conception” or even might lead to conception. To me, it’s a bit misleading to say that this is about fertility – unless one expands the concept of fertility to mean a lot more than simply making babies.

One of the ways I like to express this is to say that it’s not as much about having sex as it is about making love. My partner and I make love with each other in all kinds of ways that happen fully clothed and outside the bedroom: he makes dinner, I do the laundry, he gives me a foot rub, and we go to sleep having expressed our love for each other with great depth and passion, just not with “sex” per se. Don’t get me wrong – sex is one of my favorite ways of making love – it’s just not the only one, or the most important one for all situations.

Think also about the meanings of the word “intercourse.” Yes, it is usually used only to refer to sex these days. But historically, its meanings have included what today we might call “dialogue” or “exchange,” where people engage with each other in any number of non-physical ways. To me, these too can be acts of love and pleasure. When two friends have an engaging conversation that leads to the creation of a work of art, I can see that as a kind of non-sexual “intercourse” which has also brought forth something new in the world. And if a work of art has a life of its own, as we often express it metaphorically, then this too is a kind of fertility, of bringing new life into the world.

These expanded ideas of intercourse and fertility make my understanding of Wicca one where sex is sacred not because of sex acts themselves, but because it is one of the most wonderful, vital examples of a whole class of activity – all acts of love and pleasure. Wicca is about connections: connections within nature, connections to deity, and connections between individuals. All acts of love and pleasure that create and celebrate connections between people, especially ones that are fruitful or productive in those people’s lives, are sacred.

This weekend, I participated in a ritual that included dancing the Maypole. The Maypole has a long history as a fertility symbol. But what struck me about it, as I steadied the pole and my friends whirled around me, was not the pole itself, but the network we wove as we did so. This wasn’t just about union between two people; it was also about community, coming together to celebrate how our interconnections are important to the fabric of our lives, and how those interactions bear fruit in so very many forms.

And those are what I celebrate this Beltane. Yes, I include plenty of bawdy humor and making love both in and out of the bedroom with my partner, but I also celebrate the ways that I connect with others: through song and story, image and word, through all the myriad interconnections that make my world the vibrant, vital place that it is. One of those is The Slacktiverse, and so I celebrate each and every one of you, too, this season. With that, I wish you many acts of love and pleasure, of many different kinds. Bright Beltane to you all!

--Literata

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Ostara - Element of Air

We've been around the Wheel of the Year once together, so for the next iteration, I'm going to concentrate on the four Elements on the equinoxes and solstices and on four concepts that I see as fundamental to Wicca on the other Sabbats. For Ostara^[1] we'll start with the Element of Air.

I capitalize those words because I'm using them as proper nouns. The four Elements, as conceptualized by classical Greek philosophy, are not the same as the elements on the periodic table, and when I say Air, I'm not just talking about the stuff going in and out of your lungs. I'm referring to the archetype, the whole abstract concept which includes what you're breathing, but it also includes the whirlwind and the summer breeze, the freezing breath of winter and the surprise of walking past lilacs in bloom.

And symbolically, the Element of Air represents even more than that. The four Elements can also be construed as broad categories with a wealth of symbolic meanings through what we call associations or correspondences. Most Wiccans, for example, cast a circle (or Circle, if you like) as part of their rituals. Each cardinal direction within that circle is associated with an Element. Correspondences differ - sometimes wildly - but I'm going to discuss the system that I use, which also happens to correspond to the one most commonly used. Just keep in mind that none of this is set in stone - or written on the wind. My associations are:

East - Air
South - Fire
West - Water
North - Earth

Now, since East (there's those caps again) is where the sun rises, it's associated with dawn, and also with springtime, as the "dawning" of the year. So Air also represents beginnings, a fresh start, and even "a fresh breath." You'll find that many of our clichés can be used to summarize these sorts of metaphorical connections; that doesn't mean the connections are trite. To me, it's an example of the way a lot of these metaphors are embedded very deeply in our culture and our thinking, as reflected in and mediated by language.

The Wheel of the Year and the circle also correspond. Each of the direction/Element pairings - called Quarters - is associated with one of the solstices or equinoxes, in my understanding. Yule is in the North, Ostara in the East, and so on. Then the other four Sabbats, often called cross-quarter days, take the positions in between. This makes Ostara the perfect time to reflect on the Element of Air.

Air is associated with travel and movement. Thinking back to the days before cars, this makes a great deal of sense; in Renaissance times, ships depended on the wind, and they were the major form of long-distance transportation. Even after that, steam power depended on using air pressure as a driving force.

In several mythologies, birds are the archetypal messengers of the gods, representing both this association with movement and the function of communication. And, after all, speech literally depends on air. Thus the realm of Air became the domain of language, and also of reasoning, deciding, judging, and other intellectual pursuits. Unfortunately, this is where Air can start to get a bad rap.

While this understanding of the Elements does go all the way back to Greek philosophy, the current understanding of it was transmitted to us in the Western world mostly by way of the Golden Dawn. This esoteric organization, most active around the end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s, collected and organized much occult knowledge. They are also the origin of the most familiar design of the Tarot deck, which can give a negative impression about Air.

Tarot originated during the Italian Renaissance and is actually the precursor of the modern deck of playing cards. I'm not going to go into too much history here; the upshot is that in the early 1900s, members of the Golden Dawn designed and commissioned a particular Tarot deck, variously called the Rider-Waite or the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS), which has been the basis for most subsequent decks in English-speaking countries.

A Tarot deck consists of 78 cards: four suits, with ten numbered cards and four Court cards in each suit, and twenty-two independent cards with their own sequence, which are now called the Major Arcana. As the deck transformed into modern playing cards, the Major Arcana were dropped, the Court cards reduced to three (jack, queen, king), and the symbols of the four suits became spades, diamonds, hearts, and clubs.

In Tarot, the suits are Swords, Pentacles or Coins, Cups, and Staves, and the suit of Swords is most commonly associated with Air.^[2] For various reasons, the Golden Dawn created images for these ten cards that included some of the most negative-seeming depictions in the deck. Now, Tarot images are complex things in and of themselves, and I'm not going to try to explain too much of that right here, so let me just say that some of the cards in the suit of Swords have basic interpretations such as depression and grief.

The Court cards, which are often interpreted as people involved in a particular situation, can also take the judging function of Air to an extreme; the Queen of Swords is frequently depicted or described as harsh, even shrewish. The King of Swords is stern and demanding; he's a judge who won't accept an excuse.

With all of this imagery going on, people who work with Tarot a lot, and especially with the RWS deck, can get kind of a negative impression of the Element of Air. There's good reason to think that some of the seemingly negative imagery in this suit isn't drawn directly from concepts about Air, but rather from other mythology that the Golden Dawn incorporated. Regardless, it's important to remember that none of the Elements is exactly warm and cuddly: Fire isn't meant to be played with, Water includes the tsunami and the flooding rains as well as the refreshing drink, and Earth by itself can be as barren and inhospitable as the depths of the desert.

And part of the complexity of Tarot is putting each image in context. While swords are meant for killing, not all blades are intended solely for destruction. Psychologically, the functions of judging, choosing, and deciding are absolutely necessary - when kept in balance.

This is why it's hard to talk about each of the Elements alone. Part of what keeps the Elements in moderation is the way they exist in balance with each other. The spring weather includes the storms which help strip away the last of the dead leaves from last year and the gentle breezes that tease open the new buds. We need both, and the interplay of wind, water, and warmth that moves across the world is what allows for the variations and tempers the extremes.

With all of this in mind - the domain of Air - I invite you to enjoy this Ostara by finding a time when the weather is cooperative and maybe even a place where those sweet-smelling buds are opening. As you reflect on what air and Air mean to you, what roles they play in your life, and how you relate to this Element, take a deep, gentle breath. May it be the fresh start you need!

--Literata

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^[1] In the Northern Hemisphere, the vernal equinox is approaching, which is Ostara, while in the Southern Hemisphere, it's the autumnal equinox, which is Mabon.↩

^[2] This is a point of disagreement which I will address in greater detail in the Litha piece.↩

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Imbolc - Poesis

Trigger Warning: Birth referred to abstractly

So far in this series, I haven't written much about magic, or about specific deities, but for Imbolc, I'd like to delve into both areas, and in particular the way that my matron goddess, Brigid, helps me understand magic.

There are lots of Celtic influences in Wicca, and one of the most obvious is the Sabbat of Imbolc, which is traditionally the feast of the goddess Brigid. ^[1] No other Sabbat is so closely tied to a particular deity; even the rebirth of the Sun at Yule can be interpreted within a multitude of cultural contexts, historical and modern. And while Imbolc can be celebrated as the recovery from that rebirth and presage of spring, many people come together to honor Brigid at this time of year. She is an enormously popular matron and a figure that nearly anyone can turn to, which is perhaps why she was adopted as a Catholic saint and her worship continues in multiple forms down to the present day. I think her continuing popularity and accessibility are due in part to the way she embodies some of the fundamental ideas of magic as a way of interacting with the world.

Traditionally, Brigid has three specialties: she is the matron of healing, especially midwifery; of smith craft; and of poetry. Her history as a healer would be enough to explain her popularity, since nearly everyone needs healing at some point. But the other two areas seem like a strange combination: blacksmithing is not usually associated with either healing or poetry, and it is even more unexpected for a goddess to take an interest in what is traditionally a male-dominated craft. But the piece that seems not to fit is in fact the key to understanding the relationship between all three areas, as well as her continuing presence in Wicca. Smith craft is just that, a craft, and healing and poetry can be approached as crafts as well. It is this idea of crafting in many different forms that makes Brigid such a good representative of witchcraft as well.

Another way to understand this is to start with the idea of poetry. This English word comes from a Greek root, poiesis, which has to do with the whole concept of crafting and creating, almost in the sense of shaping. ^[2] To me, the way a skilled poet can go to the heart of a matter with just a single word exemplifies poesis. By the very faculty of naming and describing, poesis can influence the nature of a thing. This is not creation ex nihilo; it's about emergence and shaping the way something develops in the world.

All three of Brigid's areas are forms of poesis: healing is a process of transforming a situation, and a midwife in particular has the unique opportunity to help both mother and baby. Blacksmithing is also literally a process of shaping and forging something; it turns lumps of rock into useful tools. As these examples show, poesis is not just about words, but to me, the use of language in shaping reality is one of the most amazing examples. When a skilled writer crafts sounds and squiggles to produce meaning . . . well, that's why we call it poetry. To me, all of these are magical processes, making Brigid fundamentally a goddess of magic itself.

Now, when I say that smithing is a magical process, I don't mean that it is purely magic in the "Harry Potter" sense: the smith doesn't wave a wand and instantaneously transfigure iron ore into horseshoes. The very idea of sorcerous shortcuts eliminating the hard work and necessary effort of the craft is antithetical to my understanding of magic. It doesn't break the laws of nature, it works within them, just like everything else in the world. ^[3] This is why I don't tend to ask whether something is "magic" or not. Instead I ask how magical it is. Think of something as simple as a seed sprouting: I can understand the biology, the chemistry, and the physics of it, but the simple fact that an apparently inert object can, under the right circumstances, transform itself into a living being thriving on simply dirt, water, and light is magical. It fills me with awe and joy. It is the numinous in the mundane which is characteristic of what I call magic.

Looked at this way, healing is also terrifically magical, whether it comes about because of meditation and mind-body work, or because of pharmaceuticals and surgery, or (better yet) some of each. Terry Pratchett observed that stopping someone from choking "doesn't even sound magical until you understand that a way of turning nearly dead people into fully alive people is worth a dozen spells that just go twing!" ^[4] If you've ever seen someone suffering from low blood sugar have a dose of glucose administered, you'd think it was downright miraculous: in a matter of minutes, a person can go from passed out cold to walking and talking as if nothing ever happened. Understanding how that works so that healers can use it to help people, to make a difference in the world, makes it even more magical to me.

When I practice magic, it is closest to a form of poetry. I may use many different tools - stones, herbs, candles, cords - but what I'm doing, deep down, is describing things, crafting an understanding of the world that transforms from one thing to another, the way that the twist of a good poem suddenly transforms your understanding from one thing to another: snowflakes aren't just snowflakes, they're bits of lace. That juxtaposition of different understandings that changes the whole situation is the closest I can come to expressing what practicing magic is like.

These acts then become part of the narrative that I am making of my life, and taking that narrative into my own hands is most magical of all. It empowers me and it challenges me: if I really have these choices, what do I do with them? It helps me be more the storyteller and poet of my own life. I don't have complete control, of course; this isn't a work of fiction. But here in reality, it makes a difference, even about the things it can't change. Magic and poesis do not "magically" fix all of the hard situations in my life. They help me face hard things gracefully, with understanding.

--Literata

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^[1] There are myriad ways to spell the name of this goddess, including Brighid, Breed, Brigit, and more.↩

^[2] See poesis. It actually comes by way of Latin, because while the Romans excelled in rhetoric and oratory, they admired Greek civilization for its much older and broader tradition of literature in all forms, and many of the great Roman writers considered themselves students of this Greek heritage. Another form of this root survives in medical terms like hematopoiesis, the process by which blood is created.↩

^[3] This is why I both agree and disagree with Clarke's Third Law: yes, technology can be magical, but to me, obfuscation is not a necessary part of magic. Understanding how something works increases my appreciation for the wonder of it and is part of why I find things magical.↩

^[4] Pratchett, Terry. A Hat Full of Sky. New York: HarperTrophy, 2005. page 379.↩

Final note:

Here at The Slacktiverse, we've now completed one cycle of the Wheel of the Year. I'd like to get some feedback from the community about whether there is continuing interest in more posts for Sabbats. If there is, I thought I might use the next cycle to explore other aspects of Wicca such as the four Elements, commonly used tools, forms of work and worship, and possibly some connections to Tarot. What do you think?

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Yule - Sustaining Rebirth

Six months ago, I told a story of Litha being destruction averted, because although it is easy to associate warmth with the very energy of life, it is important that we not be overwhelmed by it. ^[1] Yule, by contrast, is a celebration of life being created anew, and created again, even in the midst of cold and darkness. It is a time when re-creation leads, appropriately, to recreation.

People in temperate climates have a long, long history of celebrating the days when the sun seems to stand still, halting its northward journey and then turning southward again, promising longer days and an end to winter, even if it is a long way off. ^[2] Midwinter solstice heralds a fresh start, and the promise of the whole world coming back to life - not miraculously restored after just a few days, but gradually reborn through the more mundane magic of germination and gestation.

Of course, this isn't the only time of year we talk about new life coming into being, but it is one of the most poignant and symbolic times. I've seen so many rituals, both at Yule and other holidays, that speak to people's desire for rebirth in their everyday lives. It's easy to want a fresh start, a sudden and dramatic change - just like magic! - which will remove our obstacles and change our bad habits in one fell swoop. It's easy to create a ritual that panders to the most unexamined form of this yearning for a quick fix, to assure people that if they simply want it hard enough, or light enough candles, it will happen. Worst of all, it's too easy to let this devolve into the idea that the universe is a vast wish-granting machine, and that if you don't get what you want, either someone is out to get you or it's all your fault. A similar idea is at work in the secular custom of New Year's resolutions, and they are famously ineffective.

The natural world doesn't work that way. The sun doesn't suddenly spring back to its position at the height of summer - and it's a good thing, too, because that kind of transformation without transition would be incredibly traumatic. This is true for humans, too. Sudden changes and fresh starts do occur, but they're not always something to be yearned for, and they're seldom as easy as we would like to imagine. More often, rebirth is not an instantaneous process. Usually it arises not just from our wishing but from our working. New life and ways of life usually require that we make choices day after day, again and again, choosing anew and working in support of that choice.

We experience this in our relationships, too; they have to be nurtured on a regular basis. A marriage vow, for example, isn't something that magically forges a lasting, loving relationship between two people. It's choosing to live out that vow, again and again, choosing to love, to forgive, to be patient, that keeps the relationship alive, helps it be reborn day by day. It's not that every single choice, or word, or action has to be perfect, but that enough of them are good enough to tip the balance. It's not the making of the vow but the keeping of it that provides the warmth of love in the heart of the family, just as it's not the single moment of Yule but the gradual lengthening of days that warms the world for springtime.

This kind of gradual progress can be frustrating. The day after Yule isn't noticeably longer, and it's going to go on being cold for quite a while. In the face of that, it's important to celebrate the magical moments, like the days when the very sun stands still and then changes course. But often, our culture puts too much weight on the single moments, with unrealistic expectations leading to inevitable disappointments: the big dinner must be a time of jollity and familial love, the long-awaited present must be perfectly surprising and satisfying all at once, and so on.

Instead of trying to force Yule, or New Year's, or any other single moment, to give me instantaneous transformation, I try to follow the Sun's pattern. On this shortest day, I take time to pause, to stand still and just be present. Then, when I want to renew or re-create my life in some way, I do it gradually, gently, a little at a time. That kind of sustained rebirth, a daily, incremental newness of life, has a name: growth. Growth, and the precious knowledge that it continues, even in the cold and dark of winter, is what I celebrate in this season.

--Literata

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^[1] At this time, the Northern Hemisphere is approaching the winter solstice, while the Southern Hemisphere is approaching Litha, or summer solstice.↩

^[2] Solstice comes from the roots "sol," meaning sun, and "sistere," meaning to come to a stop. [Online Etymology Dictionary]↩

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Samhain - Listening at the Doorway of Winter

Samhain has its roots in an ancient Celtic fire festival. It falls at the boundary of October and November, marking the end of autumn and the beginning of winter.[1] Samhain is a time of transition, an in-between space. It is a liminal time (from limen, the Latin word for threshold) Samhain is a doorway, connecting golden harvest time and cool, still darkness. Across the threshold, the seasons meet and touch. They stand in relationship.

As I’ve said before, I believe that relationship is the essence of Wicca. In Samhain’s liminal beauty, I see a celebration of the challenges and ineffable fulfillment of living in relationship.

Folklore holds that liminal times and spaces (crossroads, thresholds, midnight, Samhain) bring us to a closer relationship with the Otherworlds, lands of enchantment and imagination. The Veil between our everyday world and the Otherworlds begins to thin. The inhabitants of the Otherworlds reach out to us and make themselves felt.. The nature of those inhabitants varies across stories and traditions – they may be the Good Folk, the puca and the bean-sidhe, the kelpie of the well and the hinkypunk of the marsh, and other kinds of creatures as well. Many of the secular traditions of Halloween are inspired by the tales of these creatures, playing on the possible relationships between humans and spirits.

More solemnly, the Otherworlds are home to the spirits of our beloved dead, and Samhain is their festival. At Samhain we acknowledge that we exist in the midst of cycles of death and life. The thinning of the Veil at Samhain enables us to affirm and celebrate our relationships with those who have passed over.

During a previous conversation here at The Slacktiverse, someone asked me how I could have a relationship with someone who isn't alive anymore. How would that work, without the other person communicating and responding to me?

I don’t find the lack of active communication to be an insuperable barrier to being in relationship with my beloved dead. After all, I have relationships with living people who don’t communicate with me (or at least not very often.) Just because I haven't spoken or written to someone in months doesn't necessarily mean I have stopped relating to her. If my partner and I were separated by circumstances, our communications might be infrequent, but the intensity of my relationship with him would not be dissolved simply by time and space.

When I open the door to greet someone I haven’t seen for a while, I am often struck by how their presence is more vivid than my memories or imagination of them. I remember the prejudices, the follies, the foibles, as well as the charm, the wit, and the mannerisms, but time and distance can dull those recollections, like a reproduction of a vibrant oil painting sketched in misty watercolors. When the real person crosses my threshold, I realize how much I’ve forgotten. The relative I haven’t seen for years turns out to be both more kind than I remember and more nauseatingly guilt-inducing than I would like to recall.

This, then, is the challenge of trying to be in relationship with someone without active input from the other side. This challenge is clearest in our relationships with the beloved dead, who lack the ability to refresh our memories of their impact and their essence. Renewing those relationships at Samhain teaches me more about what it means to live in relationship with others.

Across distance and silence, I can think about, remember, and hope and wish and pray for the people I love, living and dead. In doing so, I am relating to them. The challenge is to stay open to who those people actually are, not just who I might wish them to be. I must listen to them.

Without listening – without paying careful attention to the reality of those we love -- we run the risk of wearing down the memory to just the parts that are comfortable for us, evening out all the sharp edges and unexpected valleys of the other's personality into a featureless, indistinguishable lump. We can romanticize a lost lover; we can mythologize our beloved but questionable ancestors.

The same wearing-down process, unfortunately, can occur in relationships with people we see every day. Unless we listen, we fall out of relationship with the living person and into an easier but ultimately flawed relationship with a caricatured memory. Metaphorical silence and distance leads eventually to literal distance, when one person says "You're not who I thought you were.”

This is why learning to listen is at the heart of living in relationship. It's a challenge to seek out the unexpected, the uncomfortable, the unusual, the unknown. We have to make the effort to acknowledge that someone with whom we're in relationship is really an Other -- someone separate, distinct, different from ourselves and our ideas, images, and imaginings. This process of learning to listen, learning to be open and aware beyond ourselves, calls us to be more than just ourselves as isolated individuals.

At Samhain, we practice this in our relationships with the dead. Just because they’re silent doesn’t mean we can’t listen. One of the traditional ways to relate to the deceased at this time of year is the dumb feast, where places are set for those who have passed over and the meal is held in silence. It combines a fundamental human connection through shared food and drink with an explicit example of listening, of recognizing that for such a connection to be shared, we have to make space and time - and silence - for others. This form of contemplation is especially appropriate as we begin to move into winter, a time when the world as a whole becomes more quiet, more still. We trade speech for silence; that encourages us to engage in other forms of communication, forms which may be more amenable to other kinds of awareness and relationship.

Striving to be in relationship with people who are not immediately present is also a way to learn to be in relationship with others who are present but whose voices are hard to hear. In Wicca, I am in relationship with the land and water, with plants and animals, all of whom communicate with me in non-verbal ways. As with an absent person, it is easy for me to hear only what I want to, to disregard the reality of these parts of my world in favor of the more comfortable constructs inside my own mind. But if I take time to listen, they speak to me, confronting me with the reality of their situation, more vivid and amazing than any imagination of my own. Opening to this awareness also teaches me about how to be in relationship with those whose voices are too often silenced: people who are not like me, people who are underprivileged, people who are far away. When I challenge myself to remember the complexity of the people I love who have passed over, it makes me better prepared to acknowledge the complexities that someone else's life may hold. It teaches me to seek out their voices, hearing from them in ways I might not expect or easily understand; it prepares me to hear even things that make me uncomfortable -- an essential part of an ongoing relationship.

This kind of listening is not necessarily the absence of talking; after all, our lives are stories told in dialogue. But it is dialogue -- not monologue. When we learn to listen, we encounter the reality of relationships, the reality that our stories are all told together. When we listen, we cannot assert complete control over our own narrative by shouting to drown others out; we cannot plug our ears so that no one else's story can interfere with our own. When we listen, we participate in stories of relationship. Listening is an act of awareness, of being present with and in the dialogue that surrounds us.

When we listen not only to the words but to the silence, we discover that the meaning of the story is formed by the silent pauses between words. Without them, all our speech would be incomprehensible noise. The silence is the heart of the story.

The liminal spaces that seemed empty are full of potential and interaction. The fullness of those spaces brings us to fullness, into full participation in the relationships that are the essence of life together.

The stories of Samhain are stories of relationships that cross all boundaries – between autumn and winter, between this world and the Otherworlds, between life and death. The rites of Samhain bring us to the threshold, the doorway, the liminal space where we connect across the boundary between self and other. And so at the threshold of November, I stand in the great silent pause between my story and that of my beloved dead – and I listen.

--Literata and Morwen

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[1] Of course in the southern hemisphere summer is just beginning and the upcoming feast is Beltane.↩

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Spiriting away Democracy

A group of conservative Christians who want to make the US into a theocracy are "laying siege" to Washington DC with "spiritual warfare" - why this matters and what you can do.

This article is full of links both to give readers the opportunity to get a fuller background on what I discuss and because some readers may find it almost unbelievable that this is taking place. If there is anything here without a reference for which you would like one, please ask in the comments and I will do my best to provide. I have not linked to the websites of the people peddling violent rhetoric, but some of the links here will lead you to them through one or two layers of connection.

Trigger Warning: violent rhetoric, abortion, misogyny, anti-Catholicism, anti-QUILTBAG rhetoric

Theocracy by any other name: Christian Dominionists

The Christian Dominionist movement has been getting a lot of press in the US lately, including National Public Radio interviewing Rachel Tabachnik, who has been writing about Dominionism for several years now. On the website Talk 2 Action she has a comprehensive discussion of their ideology, in which she argues that Charismatic (or neo-Pentecostalist) Dominionism is "the next thing" sweeping through conservative Christianity, even displacing pre-millenial dispensationalism (the theology of Tim LaHaye). A more concise overview is also online. Fred Clark has mapped the evolution of Dominion theology from the "hyper-Calvinist" theonomy of Rushdooney et al., through Pat Robertson and others, to the neo-Pentecostalist approach of C. Peter Wagner, the father of the New Apostolic Reformation.

Dominionism goes by many names and has many aspects, but the core idea is that Christians who believe in a particular sub-set of conservative ideology should take control ("dominion") over everyday life here and now. The goal is to "reconstruct" (hence, "Reconstructionist") society on a narrowly-defined Christian basis in order to bring the kingdom of God to earth as soon as possible. One strategy employed by Dominionists is to take over what they have named the Seven Mountains of culture by working to get people who agree with them in positions of influence in each "mountain" or area of concern.

Increased public awareness of this aggressively theocratic ideology has led many people, even those involved in it, to deny it exists and to blame liberals for being paranoid or trying to smear right-wing Christians. C. Peter Wagner himself has responded to critics by claiming that the NAR is benign and tolerant and that left-wing fears are overblown. This is the same Wagner who has told his followers that they are "mandated to do whatever is necessary to take dominion" and that "dominion means ruling as kings." As Fred pointed out, since Wagner wrote an entire book titled Dominion!, it's reasonable to think that dominion is exactly what Wagner is talking about.

Those religion journalists who have researched this movement have observed that most of the people accusing them of paranoia don't know the movement well enough to make such claims - or they're blatantly lying about never having heard of Dominionism before, because they made the exact same denial years ago. Even other conservatives criticize Dominionism, which suggests that it's not merely a liberal conspiracy theory. Fred documents how Dominionism was considered cause for concern within Christian circles twenty years ago, and points out that the development of the movement since then has been almost exactly as predicted.

Because of that growth and the increased publicity, there have been efforts by Dominionists to disassociate themselves from the movement as an identifiable group. They use a networked structure rather than a traditional denominational membership structure, and the multiplicity of organizations involved is stunning. This kind of shell game with names and titles does not obscure the fact that there is an identifiable core of individuals involved and that the ideology they spread has gained a considerable amount of influence with many, many conservative Christians. Their "prayer networks" which mobilize to take part in "spiritual warfare" are spread throughout the country.

But this isn't just about prayer. As Fred points out, "'a theocratic social order' was what they said in 1990 and they meant it then." They mean it now, and they are taking political action to make that happen. Those same prayer networks and the massive "nonpolitical" prayer rallies are also being used to spread information supporting conservative Christian candidates with ties to the movement and as the foundation for an effort to register millions of new conservative Christian voters who will support those candidates.

For example, despite the denials, Rick Perry's event "The Response" was a characteristically Dominionist event in which many members of the NAR played prominent roles. Wagner has admitted that the NAR's involvement in the rally was a sign of their "growing influence." And Perry isn't alone in courting this voting bloc; Michele Bachmann has been involved with related movements and institutions, including getting her law degree from one such establishment, and she continues to include current Dominionists on her staff.

This insightful conversation between two of the best-informed journalists following the NAR and Dominionism goes into more detail on the movement's successes in the legal realm:

But I do think that people have been distracted by focusing too much on bizarre statements Perry’s prayer friends made (the Statue of Liberty is a demonic idol, Oprah is the harlot of Babylon, and so forth)—and that has made some people think that dominionism is just a bunch of demon chasers with a militant-sounding theology who want to take over the world.

That’s too narrow, and I think has (1) opened a door for the dominionism deniers, and (2) caused people to overlook some of the real-world creations of dominionism. The religious right has, in so many ways, succeeded in creating institutions meant to supplant “secular” ones. One of the founders of Oral Roberts University law school (where Michele Bachmann earned her law degree) called this his "dominion mandate.” Look at Regent University, where Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell earned his graduate degrees, or Liberty University Law School, where students are taught to engage in “civil disobedience” when a court order conflicts, in their view, with “biblical law,” or the Alliance Defense Fund, a law firm created to take on cases that would result in overturning of Supreme Court jurisprudence on separation of church and state. That’s the sort of thing dominionism has actually accomplished, in the legal field alone.

One of the Dominionists' key goals is to make abortion illegal again. Rather than pursuing a complete reversal of Roe v. Wade, recently activists involved with them have pursued a stunningly successful campaign to make legal abortion impossible for women to access. In state after state, burdensome regulations have targeted healthcare providers who perform abortions, forcing them to go out of business or stop providing abortions. In state after state, so much "protection" is imposed on women seeking abortions that they can't get what they need - multiple days of leave to travel, multiple doctor's visits, days of "waiting periods," counseling from "crisis pregnancy centers" whose one goal is to use Christian rhetoric and outright lies to prevent women from getting abortions, and more. More than one state is currently considering a "personhood amendment" to the state constitution which would define a fertilized egg as a person, resulting in a ban on not only abortion, but also some forms of birth control and in vitro fertilization, as well as potentially triggering criminal investigations into miscarriages. The national government nearly shut down over Republican attempts to deny federal funding to an organization that provides reproductive health care, even though federal monies do not pay for abortions. Women's rights and control over their own bodies have been rolled back, gradually but inexorably.

I don't want to see the same thing happen to my religious liberty, which is why I'm concerned about the next big event the NAR is putting on.

DC 40: Laying siege to the capital

The website Right Wing Watch alerted me that prominent members of the NAR including Cindy Jacobs, John Benefiel, and James Nesbit are organizing a nationwide effort to "lay siege" to Washington, DC through "spiritual warfare." This "warfare" is a form of highly aggressive prayer that does not just address the Christian god. It involves expressing "directives" for the Christian god to do very specific things, often for and to other people, and it is usually done in a very emotionally charged way.

The idea of "spiritual warfare" isn't just a metaphor, either. If you have read any of Frank Peretti's books, it's a bit like that, except more energetic, and the "prayer warriors" usually see themselves in direct conflict with the forces they are fighting. They literally believe in complex organizations of demonic forces and spirits that possess and inhabit places, people, and organizations. One of these has been identified by some NAR members as "The Queen of Heaven." They insist that all representations or ideas of the feminine divine are driven by one very powerful demon. (They see Catholic Mariolatry as part of the same demon-worship.) It is a major goal of the Seven Mountains approach to dislodge this spirit in order for "true religion" (their narrow sub-sect of Christianity) to be able to take control of the world.

In particular, they have decided that Columbia, a personification of the United States (much like Britannia for the UK and Marianne for France), is a face of this demon, as are female representations of Liberty and Freedom. Since they are obsessed with legalisms, they have issued a faux-legal "divorce decree" to separate the country from Ba'al (another name for a related demon - it's hard to keep track) and assert that they have used their spiritual authority to rename the District of Columbia as "the District of Christ."

As part of this spiritual-political agenda, an initiative called DC 40 is going to carry out this "siege" by organizing prayer networks across the country, starting on October 3rd. The same effort is variously called DC 40, 40 Days of Light over DC, and 51 Days of Reformation Intercession. The idea is that they will have each state take "the point man" position in their assault on DC for one day. On the state's particular day, its prayer networks are supposed to be especially active, and there may be a coordinating demonstration held in the state capital. There will also be "intercessors" or "prayer warriors" on site in DC for the first 40 days (hence DC 40). For the last eleven days they will be in Philadelphia, but still praying for DC. Their stated goal is "to change the spiritual atmosphere over DC forever."

My initial reaction:

As someone who has a strong devotion to religious liberty, I find this “siege” dangerous and disgusting. It fundamentally misunderstands the nature of religious liberty which was built into our country at its founding. Whether one sees liberty as an idealization or as a personification, Liberty is a very strange creature: she says right up front, “Of course you have other gods besides me.” Her law is to allow others their reverence so long as it harms no one. In direct contravention of that principle, these people are actively seeking to change the government of the United States so that my religion – indeed, any religion except their specific sub-sect of Christianity—would be disallowed, and public laws would compel private adherence to their interpretations of their spiritual directives, at the specific expense of religious liberty, and even personal liberty, for all who disagree. I will be spending this time making a daily devotion to her, not against these conservative Christians, but in hopes that they and I might find ways to live peaceably together in a nation that values religious pluralism.

For those of us who actually do revere Columbia, Liberty, or Freedom, this is almost exactly like the situation described in the Baptizing Dead Quakers post. DC 40 has specifically said that "Intent is a force," and that they are using their intent to create change in the real world, which is what most Pagans would describe as magic. In my framework, they are doing magic to coerce me into converting, by force, not by persuasion. To me, this violation of self-determination is fundamentally, almost inexpressibly, evil. It is also terrifying to imagine the kind of Christian theocracy they would impose if they did change enough people's minds.

In response, Pagans have started organizing to protect religious liberty at the Hail Columbia project. Since we have participated in raising awareness about DC 40 and are beginning to organize counter-protests in some of the states as well as protective magical efforts, the DC 40 leadership has become aware of us. In their last newsletter, they specifically addressed Pagans with more aggressive, gory rhetoric. They have also demonstrated that they think any resistance against them, even to protect Constitutional freedoms, is the same as an attack on them. They have no capacity for compromise.

As Jason Pitzl-Waters points out, and as I have described through more research, these conservative Christians claim that they are Biblically directed to cause specific physical harm to people who disagree with them, and that they have done so through prayer. Whether or not you credit those claims, it is certainly their avowed intent to cause real, physical changes in the world, and they are mobilizing to do so through more than just prayer. They are already spreading lies that plant the seeds for another Satanic Panic, and the people who were wrongly accused and arrested in the last one can tell you how very real damage has been done by that before.

DC 40 has the potential to do a lot more than throw around some prayers and create prejudice, though. The experiential and deeply emotional ritual of prayer that they practice is also a way of engaging in an orgy of reinforcing and encouraging each other's hateful and apocalyptic ideas, and those ideas translate into non-magical actions, especially in politics. The prayer guide that is being distributed to people who want to participate in DC 40 is a political document. It touts specific policy objectives touching on all areas of life. I think DC 40 is in part intended to get people emotionally and spiritually invested in these ideas so that they will provide financial and organizational support for the NAR's objectives, and most of all, so that they will vote for policies and politicians who would enact these goals.

Restriction of women's rights is only the tip of the iceberg. As they gain more influence and control in government, NAR-associated leaders have advocated for the US to adopt their interpretation of Mosaic law from the Old Testament, which includes the death penalty for people who engage in gay or lesbian sex, or any sex outside of hetero marriage (including adultery), people who break the Sabbath, people who blaspheme, and even disobedient children. Fred points out, though, that they wouldn't adopt the parts of the Old Testament law code that try to ensure social justice and prevent poverty, probably because the NAR has made some apostles and prophets quite a tidy sum.

Their personal profits only begin to indicate the kind of financial and organizational power this movement is gathering and directing towards ends that would undermine every freedom I hold dear.

What You Can Do: Awareness, Activism, and Spiritual Support

Raise awareness. Educate yourself about Dominionism, the NAR, and similar groups. Educate others. Don't let people dismiss this as nothing to worry about. There's an old saying that "sunlight is the best disinfectant," so let's get what they're doing out in the light of day. If you are Christian, consider educating others within your faith community about the NAR and what you think of them.

International awareness matters, too. The New Apostolic Reformation touts itself as an international movement with apostles and prophets in many countries. They already claim to be having an impact in South Korea and China. When seemingly unaffiliated people with a similar message show up, do some research or push your journalists to trace them and their connections.

Be active! Especially in the US, participate in the political process. Hail Columbia will be posting a sample letter that you can send to your elected officials to show your support for religious liberty. When you become aware of stealth bills to undermine separation of church and state, especially at the local or state level,, tell your representatives what you think and how you want them to vote. If you can, donate time or money to an organization like the ACLU, People for the American Way, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, or other proponents of civil rights. Attend an interfaith event in support of religious liberty or one of the counter-protests.

Lend spiritual support. If it is in your religious practice, consider saying a prayer or sending energy to support DC and resist theocracy. For example, you might pray for the US to maintain its commitment to the freedoms listed in the Constitution. Since this is a fairly tense situation, especially for those of us in DC, knowing that we have the support of others makes a world of difference.

Comments saying that these conservative Christians are "crazy" will be subject to moderation, because that's an insult to people with mental illness, and because that's not a reason to dismiss them: whether or not you think they're in touch with reality, they're in touch with their ballot boxes.

--Literata

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Mabon - the myth of progress

Mabon, the autumn equinox, is something of a blank slate. In the Wheel of the Year, the “cross-quarter days” are Celtic fire festivals; the other solar festivals - the solstices and the vernal equinox - are grounded in proto-Germanic cultures. In those Germanic cultures, though, the autumn equinox has no strong history of celebration; it doesn’t even have a distinguishing name. To keep the Wheel of the Year in balance, Gerald Gardner included the autumn equinox, but left most of the details open to interpretation. The name Mabon, drawn from Welsh mythology, came into common use later on, but doesn't do much to specify the nature of the festival.

As a result, different ways of interpreting the multiple harvest festivals have sprung up. Some groups focus on the Celtic roots of Lunasa and leave the harvest symbolism to Mabon; others describe Lunasa as the start of the harvest and the equinox as its end, and may call the festival Harvest Home instead. [1] Still others describe Lunasa as the grain harvest and Mabon as the fruit harvest. It depends on the group, and the bioregion, and the weather. This multiplicity of interpretations is one of the things I love about Paganism: each open space is fertile soil where multiple myths can take root and flourish simultaneously.

Understanding and relating to Pagan myths has taken practice, though. When I first became Pagan, I used to be confused and sometimes downright irritated when I read tales of deities who didn't seem very godlike, coming from a monotheistic perspective. I mean, they get drunk, they have fights, and they cheat on their spouses, not always in that order. They're not exactly the kind of example we'd want to imitate in most cases.

As I grew in my practice and engaged more with the myths and with different kinds of stories, I gradually reached the conclusion that my assumption - that myths are stories about gods whom humans should seek to emulate - was a holdover from my Christian past. In Christianity, religious narratives about Jesus or good Christians are presented as exemplars for followers to emulate. This approach is very god-centered, and when taken to its (il)logical extreme, it can almost erase the adherent by reducing her to a mere reflection of the beatified.

I’ve come to see the older myths as human-centric stories. The gods act like humans - and do they ever! - except that the gods are bigger and stronger, so when they screw up, they royally - or maybe deifically? - screw up. The myths reflect humans back to themselves, but enlarged. The stories don't minimize the bad in favor of the good, or vice versa; they magnify all the parts and possibilities, or they add unique features that weren’t present before.

The myths give both storyteller and audience the chance to engage with human stories in an exaggerated setting so that they're more interesting, more exciting, more dangerous, more tragic and more amazing. Throughout, though, they are fundamentally human stories.

This approach also helps me understand why so many overlapping, contradictory versions of the same myth can co-exist. The myths are no longer central; the teller and audience are, so it is natural for the people to adapt the myths to tell the stories they need to tell. No one is trying to find the single unchanging standard for behavior; the multiplicity of myths encourages us to adapt our responses to the situation, just as the storyteller working on the fly might have to alter the ending to fit the narrative corner she backs herself into. What matters is that the story works, that it's good enough, that it fits its context.

The most encouraging thing about this approach to the myths, though, is that because we're telling them, we can change them. They grow with us over time. And that's important, because my favorite myth is the myth of progress.

Historian Laurence Keeley, in his book on prehistoric warfare, wrote that modern people tend to view prehistory in terms of two competing myths: the myth of the golden age or the myth of progress. [2] The myth of the golden age conceives of the world as continually declining. It leads us to assume that the past was always better than the present - if not in hygiene or life expectancy, then in some in some ineffable but presumably more important characteristics like social structure and morality. The myth of progress supposes the polar opposite: it tells a story of continuous development, usually with technological and social development being used as evidence of the present's superiority.

It is quite accurate to describe both of these worldviews as myths; as the Slacktiverse's motto says, it's usually more complicated than that. Depending on the period and place that a historical narrative tries to describe, and what the narrative's author views as "good," it may seem that these myths take turns driving alternating ages of development and decay, or that one is predominant for all the period under consideration, or both, or neither.

For example, the history of Europe in the centuries after the end of the Roman Empire is usually told in accord with the myth of the golden age, while the history of the time around the Renaissance and the Enlightenment is usually presented as progress. Neither of these is entirely true or entirely false, especially depending on who and what the person telling the story considers important. Each framing, though, highlights some aspects and supports some conclusions, while pushing other matters into the background.

For the present moment, I try to make narratives that loosely fit with the myth of progress. I think that trying to tell our own stories as a part of the myth of the golden age is fundamentally discouraging, but trying to tell them as part of the myth of progress is a fundamentally optimistic position which can not only make us feel good but inspire us to do good.

To me, starting from a position that assumes the past was better seems like an invitation to despair; we can't get back there, after all, and if you think, as I do, that a certain amount of change is inevitable, then we may not even be able to hold on to the fragments of it we retain. The ability to learn and the ability to change are tied up together. An attitude of suspicion about all change seems to me to be inherently resistant to learning, and hence to growth.

The myth of progress, by contrast, is an invitation to hope. We can't change the past; we have to acknowledge it in all its beauty and grandeur, its cruelty and despair. But with that acknowledgement, we free ourselves to work on what we can change: the present, with an eye towards the future. As Terry Pratchett wrote, if we do a good job of changing our own present, when we get to the future, the present will "turn out to be a past worth having." [3]

In this way the myth of progress is more than an invitation to hopeful feelings: it is an invitation to hopeful action, to hope and love enacted. The myth of progress, and the mindset that comes with it, help me tell my stories in ways that guide my actions. Because I continue to have hope, I continue to put forth effort to make the world - and its stories - continue to improve.

And although some of the stories we tell are ones we really don't want to live through, sometimes we tell ourselves stories that we do want to live up to, stories that inspire us to be better than we thought we were. I think America's founders did that, for example, telling themselves a story about how things might work out much better in a society where religious liberty was guaranteed to all. The ones who found hope in that story were able to convince the ones who wanted to preserve an imaginary golden age of state-sponsored Christianity, and so there are clauses of the First Amendment to the Constitution which prohibit government establishment of a religion and guarantee free exercise to all.

But even at the time the Constitution was written, the story of free exercise for all religions was not the literal truth; it was in some ways a myth. Native Americans and slaves were not granted the rights the founders proposed, at least in part because they were seen as not really citizens and not fully human. State-sponsored Christian prayer continued in schools until the mid-20th century. Today, the US still lives up to that lofty ideal only imperfectly, but it has made tremendous strides towards making what was once a myth into a reality for more and more people. That gives me hope.

This is what I love about Mabon; more, perhaps, than any other Sabbat, it is a festival about which Pagans are actively making their own myths, in all their many forms. Mabon is an opportunity for us to look at our myths, and the stories we tell ourselves about our world, our past, and our potential futures. And since Mabon is so open to reinterpretation, it reminds us that if we don't like those stories, or where they're going, then maybe we can start telling the story differently, trying many versions, until we find the ones that we can live with and live in.

So, what's your myth? How do you use a myth - of progress, or something else - to tell your own stories?

--Literata

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[1] Here I use the modernized Irish spelling for this holiday rather than the "Lughnasadh" spelling most Pagans are used to seeing. ↩

[2] Keeley, Lawrence H. War Before Civilization. Oxford University Press, 1996, p 4-5. ↩

[3] Pratchett, Terry. I Shall Wear Midnight. Harper Collins, 2010, p 336. ↩

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

How Clumsy Cat and Witch Kitty came to stay

Trigger Warning: Illness and death of pets, poop, lack thereof, and World's Smallest Enema

Anticipation

Last spring, I approached LitSpouse to discuss the idea of fostering a mother cat and litter during kitten season. I had always dreamed of helping to raise kittens, and here was my perfect opportunity. Plus, I was volunteering with a shelter that had an adoption program, so I thought it would only be temporary. It seemed like the best of all worlds: adorable kittens, the joy of helping fellow beings, and in the end they would all go to good homes, leaving our family just the way we had been.

Spouse questioned me about how I would deal with letting the kittens go when they got adopted. I said that as a Pagan, I recognized that "everything has a season, and all seasons come to an end." Those words would come back to haunt me in both good and bad ways throughout our fostering. It turned out, as these things usually do, to be more of a challenge than I had anticipated. Fostering was a microcosm of life,with all the joy and despair inherent in the real world, but also with the love that makes it all worthwhile.

I. They Arrive

When the coordinator called to tell me that she would be coming over that afternoon with a mother and litter, I was almost pacing with excitement. I had visions of meeting the little bundles of furry cuteness that would romp joyfully through my life for the next few months. Then reality arrived.

The mother had gotten carsick on the way over. What actually came out of the carrier was one very unhappy and slightly stinky cat and five small squirmy things resembling nothing so much as blind hamsters with webbed hands who were coated in icky goo and screaming at the top of their minuscule lungs.

If I say so myself, I handled the situation pretty well. Washed kittens, dried them off, and held them in a clean, warm towel. I soon had a lap full of quiet, furry, mostly adorable kittens. After helping Momma cat clean up as much as she would let me and throwing the carrier bedding in the wash, I was ready to deposit them in their carefully prepared nest and watch nature take its beautiful, cuddly course. You can guess how well that worked out.



It turned out that Momma cat was painfully young and undernourished - not starving, but you could have easily studied the feline spinal column in her. Imagining myself in her place, I’d be pretty overwhelmed, too. I was worried that she might not have been producing enough milk for all five kittens. Ah! I thought. I have a solution! Off I trundled to mix up a batch of Kitten Milk Replacer. No joy. Even with a tiny little bottle, these kittens would not be fooled by a substitute. The biggest benefit of my first attempt at bottle-feeding was that one of them pooped on me, which at least assured me that something had been going in to produce that output.

We named Momma cat Cassie, short for Cassandra - a girl in way over her head. Although you can't easily sort them all out, there are five kittens there: two black-and-whites, Smudge and Tux, and three gray-and-black tabbies, Hilary, Witch Kitty, and Clumsy Cat. Smudge and Tux were named for their respective fur patterns. Hilary is named after Edmund Hilary, because he always tried to climb to the top of the mountain of kittens. Witch Kitty and Clumsy Cat were named after their personalities developed later.

II. Some of Them Depart

I will never name a pet after a tragic heroine again. In hindsight, the name was more appropriate than I wanted it to be.

After a few days Cassie didn't want to eat. When I talked to the person in charge of medical care for foster cats, she told me regretfully but firmly that this was probably panleukopenia, or feline distemper, and that the shelter could not afford a few thousand dollars to put all six cats in emergency veterinary care, especially given the fact that they were unlikely to survive. I understood the rationality, and it helped that she knew exactly how I felt and helped me do what was possible.

We fed Cassie chicken baby food lick by lick. I held her in my arms and I sobbed, pleading with her to survive. She just looked at me, seeming more peaceful than she had since she arrived. I promised her that we would take care of her babies. When she started to get dehydrated, we gave her subcutaneous fluids to make her more comfortable, and we took care of the kittens. When she needed a break from them, she would get out of the nest and go over to another corner of the room to rest. She passed away in her sleep in that corner, and I like to think she knew that she could let go because her kittens were going to be taken care of.

Spouse and I started caring for the kittens completely. Tiny kittens require feeding every few hours. What with preparing formula, filling bottles, feeding the kittens, cleaning the kittens, cleaning the bottles, and cleaning ourselves, it seemed like every time we got to the end of one cycle it was time to start mixing formula again. I took Cassie's body to the vet for cremation, and didn't break down crying until after I got back to the car. I sat there and cried for a few minutes, and when the worst had passed, I started the car and drove home. I had too much to do to break down for long.

A few days later, our suspicion of panleuk was confirmed when Hilary stopped eating, too. We did what we could, and I slept part of the night in a recliner with him cuddled on my chest. After about 24 hours, his breathing was getting too difficult and we had to have him euthanized. I held him and told him that we were going to make it better, make it not hurt, the only way we could, and then the vet gave him the shot. I held him close, and when he was still, I wrapped him up in a towel that he had thought of as his substitute mother.

Spouse angrily declared that it wasn't fair. I said that I knew, and my words came back to me: every season comes to an end. Spouse asked if it was OK for Hilary's "season" to be a scant three weeks of life. I said that it wasn't, but that at least we had given him a chance to open his eyes and climb to the top of the mountain.

III. They Grow

The next day, the shelter was able to provide me with killed-virus vaccine and antibiotics. Tux had stopped eating, and we were afraid that we would lose the whole litter, but with the meds things started to turn around. After about four days of dripping Pedialyte and diluted formula onto his tongue one drop at a time, he started taking the bottle again, and I was overjoyed.

We gave them injections twice a day and fed them every two to three hours at first, although as soon as we could we skipped one feeding in the middle of the night to get six solid hours of sleep. Eventually the interval lengthened to about four hours, and we stopped the antibiotics. I was following the estimated developmental markers for kittens, but I was too busy with the endless cycle of preparing, feeding, cleaning up, and preparing again to keep detailed notes. They started to hit the developmental goals, though, with big blue kitten eyes and teeny tiny kitten ears all out of proportion to their heads, and they played and explored and slept together.

One of the challenges of surrogate mothering is that bottle-fed kittens tend to be constipated. The stinky electric orange toothpaste poop was not forthcoming, although I was dutifully rubbing little kitten butts after every meal to stimulate the lower end of the alimentary canal. After advice from a vet, I diluted their formula a little more and got more serious about stimulation, and eventually the situation was resolved. One of them, however, still had difficulty sometimes, and I had to resort to more serious measures: the World's Smallest Enema, a tiny amount of glycerin, which produced copious results. I never thought I would be happy to be covered in poop.

Although there are whole weeks blurred together into endless cycles of taking care of the kittens, let me be perfectly clear that I was also entirely in love with them and glad to be doing what i was doing. I was just simultaneously so tired, though! Even as I marveled over each new development - retractable claws! - standing up! - I often thought to myself, "When they are old enough, they'll all be adopted out, and it will be quiet again."

I should probably mention that Buddy and Sweetie - our two adult Siamese - had not been as laissez-faire about fostering as I had hoped. At the first moment the carrier arrived, Sweetie took herself off to hide in my closet. She absolutely refused to come out, except once about 18 hours later when she emerged long enough to pee on Spouse's uniform and give me a withering glare. I got the message and brought her food and water bowls and a temporary litter box, and she stayed in there for about a week.

But as time went on, things got easier. Sweetie came out of the closet, and eventually the kittens started weaning; predictably, Smudge, the biggest, was absolutely thrilled with wet food and actually sort of liked dry food too. Tux took to it shortly thereafter, eating plenty to make up for the weight he had lost while sick, but the two tabbies, the girls, had a harder time. This was when we started to realize that there was something different about Clumsy Cat.

IV. We Learn

Clumsy Cat just couldn't get the hang of eating. Every time she tried to aim her mouth at the food, her head would get more unstable, not less. At first I thought it was just kittenishness, but then I realized it was something more. The other kittens went on to wet food almost exclusively, but she still needed the bottle.

It turned out that even though she had never shown symptoms, Clumsy Cat had been affected by the virus that took Cassie and Hilary. Panleukopenia tends to attack one specific area of a kitten's developing brain. This is a condition known as cerebellar hypoplasia, or CH, which permanently damages the cat's motor skills and coordination.

CH, as it is abbreviated, does not cause any pain and does not limit a cat's lifespan, but because the cats look "damaged" or "wrong," sometimes they are mistakenly diagnosed with seizures or neurological disorders, and sometimes they are simply considered unadoptable. Both attitudes lead to an unnecessarily high rate of euthanasia for CH kitties. In the end, our experience shows that CH kitties can be some of the most rewarding companions in the world.

CH cats have trouble understanding and controlling where the parts of her body are in a three-dimensional sense. During Clumsy Cat's kittenhood that meant two things: she was slow in learning to walk, and she had trouble eating from a bowl. I continued to help her learn to eat by licking from my finger and then a spoon, and eventually she was able to eat from a bowl as long as she could lean up against something to steady herself while she ate. As she learned to walk, she could stay on top of her front feet, but her back end would fall over with every one or two steps. To compensate, she tended to keep her center of balance forward and low, and would lift her back feet up high further out to either side than was needed. This gait seems to be a distinctive adaptation among CH kitties.

In fact, Clumsy Cat never stopped adapting; she got better day by day, week by week, and month by month. At first we were worried that she wouldn't be able to walk or play much, but her drive to conquer the world - just like most cats - was indomitable. She learned to walk, in her own unique way, and she learned to eat. Most of all, she learned to play. She was just as avid to chase balls and feathers on strings as the other kitties, and her effort paid off. The one thing that remained a problem for her was the litter box. After weeks of frustration, we introduced her to puppy pads, where her footing was more stable, and they work remarkably well. We just didn't tell her they were for dogs.

These days, the most remarkable thing about Clumsy Cat is her purr. I swear that she knows we've saved her when no shelter would, and that we love her for exactly the cat she is. Just the lightest pet is enough to start her purr motor going, and she can be heard from a yard away.

Coming Home

As summer turned to fall, I worked with the shelter to place the kittens. Smudge and Tux were adopted together and have been very happy in their new home. But it is very difficult to find adopters for CH kitties, especially because so few people are familiar with the condition. Even though most CH kitties require relatively little in the way of accommodation from their humans, these "special needs" kittens are passed over time and again.

We ended up adopting both Clumsy Cat and her sister ourselves. Witch Kitty earned her nickname by appointing herself my "familiar," coming into my space whenever I did Wiccan rituals and attentively following every action. At other times she makes a nuisance of herself by annoying Sweetie or chasing Buddy, but both "kittens" - now over a year old - have become beloved members of the household. Clumsy Cat's purr continues to rock our world.

Fostering was an incredible challenge, much more than I bargained for. The rewards have also been more than I could have imagined. For all the pain in the heartbreaking struggle to save even some of the kittens, what I have gained has been immeasurably more wonderful. Even though we couldn't save them all, we made a difference. I know that there are cats who are alive and happy because of what we did. Some of them sleep with me at night.

--Literata

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.