My Idyllic Weekend in the Birkenstocks
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Picture it:

PaganBitch!, armed with her trusty Bullshitometer, at a three-day Dionysian retreat hosted by Hellenic reconstructionists*. The setting was gorgeous, the house a mansion, the participants genuinely nice folks. I was hyped about the prospect of worshipping in the company of educated, sincere devotees who really have their collective finger on the arts and goals of authentic ancient pagan religious practice. This time things would be different.

Alas. Head and shoulders above the rank and file as they were in terms of scholarship, I found these elite intellectuals depressingly similar to most NPs in one crucial sense: the fundamental disconnect between what you espouse and what you actually do. In other words, we spent three days and nights fervently invoking Dionysus with beautiful words and lovely robes, masks and ivy wreaths, but we were invoking Dionysus as...

...a nice, safe God of civilized behavior and moderate consumption of wine!

Is it ME? Correct me if I'm wrong but my Dionysian associations might include moderation only at the very end of a list which would surely start with excitement, freedom, ecstasy and danger. The God Himself is deep, complex, mysterious and dark, and His presence causes things to spontaneously happen around Him—dangerous, magical, inexplicable, uncontrollable, scary, wonderful things. Nothing about Him or His rites have ever been what one might consider "nice" or "safe" or "moderate." Accompanied by rampant satyrs and wild women (a dead giveaway right there), the ancient Dionysian mysteries almost certainly included dangerous substances in addition to wine. "Magic mushrooms" and a mysterious brew called "soma" are said to have created altered states in which the illusion of "reality" is stripped away to reveal ecstatic truth, often leading to loss of inhibition to the point of orgiastic romps of epic proportion, encouraged by the music of pipes and drums. He was a rule-breaker, a loose cannon. No wonder Dionysus worship was outlawed by the state. It challenges the status quo in every area of life, loosens the bonds of repression, sets people free—and freedom is the most dangerous drug there is.

True, Dionysus at some point taught his followers to mix water with their wine (but wasn't that just so the orgy would last longer?) Also true, Dionysus is not a simple Bacchus, and our hosts did not want to see their spiritual retreat degenerate into a mundane drinking party—I get that. But these struck me as excuses and, though I had no reason to doubt their sincerity or intelligence, it quickly became obvious that these worshippers did not mean for their invocations to be taken seriously. It was equally clear that, if Dionysus HAD "answered the call," in all His outlandish glory, it would have been a disaster.

Imagine my disappointment when these "reconstructionists," who of all people should have known better, turned out to be little better than any other gang of posers invoking a God whose attributes they didn't want Him, or any of us, to express. The Cantankerous Crone didn't know whether to laugh or scream in the face of such sacrilege, such hubris. My bewilderment and frustration mounted as it registered that, consistently throughout the weekend, we failed to perform any of the observances that might have encouraged real ecstasy to spontaneously blossom within the souls of the celebrants. Conspicuous by their absence were...

...the rhythmic drums and haunting pipes which might have inspired us to move our bodies in sensuous, suggestive ways...

...the nakedness which might have helped lift societal inhibitions and imbue us with a sense of sacred freedom...**

...the meditations and exercises which might have put us in touch with the Divine Dionysus within...

...the imbibing of substances which might have stripped away our foolish fears and notions of "reality" and revealed to us the brilliant, outrageous truth of our existence...

...the physical contact which might have led to pleasure, desire, and ultimate loss of ego...

...onions, garlic, and spices in the food, thereby removing the last vestige of potential for stimulation, sensuality, and excitement!***

Well, it worked. They kept the lid on the old boy for three whole days...it was hell. By Monday, I couldn't get out of there fast enough, so I could rub the patina of fear and hypocrisy off my body, kiss and caress my friends, get high, sing and dance and play, and overindulge in EXTREMELY LARGE FLAVORS!

In the wake of this fiasco, I've been giving the following question a lot of thought:

WHY DO NEOPAGANS KEEP INVOKING GODS THEY HAVE NO INTENTION OF LETTING THROUGH THE DOOR?

At first, I concluded that, though They scare the hell out of you, you think you can change or control Them. Get real. You can't even change or control your friends—and wouldn't want to. You love them despite their faults and annoying habits, you accept them as they are. Likewise, with few exceptions and little leeway, the Gods are a package deal. If you want Them to "answer your call," you must invoke them as humans have always invoked them: through the symbols—including the rites—which define and describe who They are and what we can expect from Them. And when They "come," it is as They have always come: AS THEY ARE. As your deep mind KNOWS Them to be. And we must welcome Them.

Furthermore, devotees don't "work with" the Gods, we SERVE them, we EMULATE them. That means furthering Their agendas, manifesting Their attributes in our daily lives. It's not about us. The Gods do not respond to our prayers, or take any notice of us at all, unless and until we MAKE CONTACT through our actions, emotions, and altered states, our service. And once that contact is achieved, They don't just conveniently go away. As any true priest will attest, once a relationship has been established, it's out of your hands, the Gods will invoke you!

The practically omniscient PaganBitch! anticipates your lame-ass arguments.

"The Gods, as self-created beings with independent will, are responsive to our needs and requests. We are perfectly free to choose the form we want a God to come in. Therefore, it should be possible to invoke one aspect of a God and ignore another. For instance, we could invoke Zeus as a father-god and not worry about getting struck by lightning at the bonfire."

True, to a degree—it is lawful (in other words, it sometimes works) to have a God play down a specific attribute or lessen Hi/r intensity for a limited time and purpose. But think about it: If They are self-created beings with independent will, They have their own agendas. They can decide for Themselves when and whether to respond to an invocation, and in what way. Why should They change Their stripes to spots for you? What have you done for Them lately? Asking Them to do so will likely just piss them off.

On the other hand, if They are mindless forces of nature with no will, They would be compelled to act in accordance with Their programming, whether you like it or not. Either way, asking Pan to preside over an Easter-egg hunt makes as much sense as inviting Jeffrey Dahmer to baby-sit your kids.

Another argument takes the opposite tack, that humanity creates the Gods by our own will and imagination, and that anything we create we can control or change. At any time, simply by deciding to, we can determine what the God brings to the circle and what S/he leaves behind. We can completely rewrite the attributes, ignore the myths, and reshape the God in our own image.

That doesn't work either. If humans create the Gods, then we've been doing so for millennia, more than enough time for the accumulated expectations, meditations, contemplations, and visualizations of hundreds of millions of worshippers, all concentrating on a fixed set of attributes, to forge Their personae into clear and recognizable archetypes. Yes, some Gods have "changed," but those changes didn't happen overnight. Do you really think you can reconfigure these archetypes—at a moment's notice, as it were—to suit your whim? NPs are fond of saying Satan isn't real because Christians made Him up. But Satan is every bit as "real" as any other man-made, self-spawned, or divinely generated deity; to attempt to re-invent Him as a god of peace and compassion would be ludicrous, dangerous, and futile.

But We are NeoPagans, and we care not for logic or tradition or respect or humility. Our religion, apparently, allows us to deny the authority of our Gods; to reshape Them in our own image; to invoke Their presence and aid for a ritual or spell, then dismiss and forget about Them until next time we want something; to "work with" Them, like hammer and nails, without finding out and providing what They want from us because, just because Doreen Valiente rewrote the Charge to say so, we think the Gods require no sacrifice from us. They are simply there for us to exploit. How WHITE of us.

Thus making NeoPaganism, to the extent that it is considered a religion, the most blasphemous religion on the planet.

So, as I was saying, my first thought was that it is a combination of fear and ignorance and hubris that causes NeoPagans to call forth the Gods while keeping Them at bay. But that explanation does not take the above-mentioned reconstructionists into account, who, though riddled with fear, are not ignorant and are nothing if not respectful of the ancient rites. Then one night, while honoring Dionysus in my own way, the awful truth revealed itself to me, and this core truth, the secret sin festering at the heart of the NeoPagan movement, constitutes the greatest blasphemy of all...

YOU DON'T BELIEVE.

You don't believe we have the power to summon the Gods (screw imminence, They're just too far away), or

You don't believe YOU PERSONALLY have the power to summon Them (and obviously, as with your "belief" in magic, if you can't do it, nobody can), or

You don't believe the Gods hear us when we speak or come when we summon Them (in other words, They are as unapproachable and unresponsive as Jehovah), or, best of all,

You don't really believe the Gods EXIST (you have company: Christians don't believe in Jesus either); hence, you never expect a response to your invocations!

In the end, whether the Gods are "real" can only be "proven" through personal gnosis, the subjective certainty that allows us, compels us, to express our beliefs through our actions. Your religion posits that They do exist and, like any religion worth its salt, it offers a way by which a devotee can transform belief into certainty—by walking in the Way of the Gods.

Unfortunately, most of you will never achieve gnosis. Your initial, deep-seated lack of belief in the tenets of your own religion explains why you go about practicing it in such a half-assed way, ensures your continued ignorance and hypocrisy, and virtually guarantees that your invocations, spells, healings, and conjurations will continue to have the same result they've always had:

ZILCH!

In other words, the Gods will never show up. Lucky for you.

(If you believe in that sort of thing.)

Darkest blessings for the Samhain season, my pretties,

PaganBitch!

* For those of you who don't know, a reconstructionist is someone who does enough homework regarding hi/r chosen path or pantheon so as to incorporate as much authenticity into hi/r practice as is deemed appropriate. Most recons—most Neo's in general—have eliminated animal sacrifice (they won't even acknowledge the human kind) from their practice, finding the wanton spilling of innocent blood abhorrent, citing alternatives which give the same effect. As if they knew what effect the ancients were going for. Anyhow, maybe there are and maybe there aren't, but it's their right not to participate in anything to which they have a moral objection. Fine, if only they would stop there. But they don't. Most NPs tend to throw out, change, or gloss over any practice or godly attribute that even marginally encroaches on their "comfort zone." That includes anything they don't understand, so these days we're talking about practically everything.

** I'll save my rant on the wearing of brassieres under halter tops for another article. For now, let me just note that, over the weekend, in discussions of the extensively quoted Bacchae, many of the recons in question displayed some understanding of its central theme—that repression of the "animal nature" is ill-advised: it's unnatural, and it doesn't work. Pressure builds until all that repressed aggression and libido eventually bursts forth, manifesting in violent, destructive, uncontrollable ways. The answer to unhealthy repression is joyful expression of our natural wildness from time to time, and that is what Dionysus offers His devotees. But once again, in actual practice, the wall that separates talking the talk and walking the walk was never breached.

1:45 - 39 Comments - 22 Kudos - Add Comment

Mommy, Mommy, What’s a Pagan?
Category: Religion and Philosophy

So what exactly is a Pagan? and how is that different from Neopagan?

There are dozens of sites on the web purporting to give us the answers to these burning questions but, like virtually every issue before the NeoPagan Community, there can be no definitive answer because nobody can agree on anything. We stand united on almost nothing except gaping generalities like "Earth is good."

Oh, we can all tell you that pagan comes from the Latin word paganus, meaning country-dweller, and we can all tell you, a la the NP Mythos, that we can infer from this that, since those in the cities were first and most easily converted to Christianity, pagan ipso facto means follower of the Old Religion. Don't try to pin us down on exactly which Old Religion, though. Since paganus is a Latin word, the Old Religion in question is probably not Celtic or Norse or even Native American but Etruscan/Roman or Pelasgian/Greek or some such, so your typical Celtocentric NP doesn't want to look into that too closely. (Settle down, Strega witches—many of you have allowed that Grimassi lad to sell you a little twisted mythology of your own.)

Most dictionaries have traditionally told us that a pagan is simply anyone who isn't a Christian. The list of non-pagans was later amended to include Jews, and then Muslims. But we are NeoPagans and we care not for dictionaries, nor traditions, except the ones we make up ourselves! As soon as we stick the Neo- onto it, we are free to define Pagan in any way we choose. And choose we do. While rejecting the very general dictionary definition, in an effort to be more specific about what a pagan is, we have managed to make our definitions even more general while creating confusion, one thing we do very well. The problem is, we don't really want to define it, we just want to make it look like we could if we wanted to. "It's all very complex. You wouldn't understand."

PaganBitch! has scoured the web for clarity on this question. What I mostly find is attempts to define what a pagan is in terms of other words that we likewise don't really understand. Words like "shaman," "witch," "magic-user," "old religion," "magickian," "earth-spirituality," and the like. They tend to be vague and self-contradictory. Let's look at a couple of examples.

The following is harvested from the Witches' Voice, which boasts over 70,000,000 hits, so I guess it's safe to say this site is a major outlet for disseminating this kind of "information." Its precise location in the site is FAQs for the Press. I have included some comments as footnotes:

Pagans:

Since the terms Witch and Wiccan are often mistakenly interchanged*, many simply call themselves 'pagans' or 'Neo-pagans' when talking with others who may not be familiar with the complexity of the different belief systems**.... Neo-paganism is a term used most often to describe people who follow an earth-based belief system or religion*** Druids and the Norse tradition of Asatru...are considered to be pagan belief systems, but their adherents are neither Witches**** nor Wiccans. Neo-paganism should also not be confused with the 'New Age' movement as pagans are almost exclusively involved in distinctive nature religions or earth-based practices***** while New Age spirituality draws from many sources and esoteric spiritual techniques.

Here's what was just said:

Pagan is interchangeable with NeoPagan, and both terms are what Witches and Wiccans use to avoid confusion. They also refer to all those, including Druids and Norsemen, who follow an earth-based belief system or religion. These belief-systems/religions, unlike the "'New Age movement," do not draw from many sources and do not employ esoteric spiritual techniques.******

Okay, everybody down with that? Well then, let's keep looking.

One of my favorite NP sites is A Mystickal Grove†, which, right out of the chute, claims to be the "ultimate Earth Spiritual localation on the World Wide Web." Its webmaster, in Lesson 5 of their teaching section, is "forced" to address the "age-old debate" as to the difference between Wiccans, Pagans, and Witches. Oh boy! Clarification at last! I'll try to sum it up in paraphrase. (I will make no attempt to correct spelling, punctuation, or grammar in any of the direct quotes, though. More fun that way.)

First off, "both Witches and Wiccans are Pagans." But what are pagans? Well, all Pagans, we are told here, worship "energy" as the ultimate deity.†† They may or may not cast spells. Wiccans are a subgroup of these, characterized by the fact that they anthropomorphize deity.††† They too may or may not cast spells. Witches also form a subgroup of Pagans and they do cast spells.†††† Okay, glad we got that cleared up.

Later on—in Lesson 8, I believe—the "age-old debate" is revisited (you’ll like this one):

"By definition,††††† Pagans tend to...work mostly with the creative, life-force energy rather than accessing a God or Goddess.... To a 'pure' Pagan, this energy is the ultimate diety and they find that working directly with it is in their best interests. Also note, that they tend to believe that adding physical artibutes to the energy in a Goddly manner...is not needed and unproductive."

What was just said: "Pure" pagans by-pass the gods and go straight to the "creative life-force energy," the "ultimate deity." What the...?! Obviously, this does not describe the vast majority of pagans of across the board, who almost universally tend to anthropomorphize deity, like the Chinese, Africans, Norse, Maori, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Indians, Native Americans...and, yes, most NeoPagans.

Well, I guess I've made my point. Seems to me that every attempt to define what we are simply heaps confusion on confusion. Maybe the dictionary has it right and we should just get back to

"We ain't Christians, Muslims, or Jews, all right?"

and let it go at that. Then maybe we could get back to being autonomous individuals again. Wouldn't that be sweet?

*Got that right, but how come we start right off talking about "witches" and "wiccans" when the question is "What is a Pagan"?

**Translation: "pagan" is just what we call ourselves to people who don't know the difference between a "Witch" and a "Wiccan"; this is indeed confusing because, according to Wicca, there is no difference.

***Whatever that is; this is yet another definition that's almost impossible to pin them down on (see Gimme That Earth-Bound Religion!)

****Tell that to the Norse and Druid sorcerers/shamans—they probably don't subscribe to the very narrow definition of "witch" so popular in NP circles today. This is one small but poignant example of McWiccans presuming to dictate who is a witch and who is not. In addition, there is a case to be made that the Heathenry and the Celts are/were not really "earth-based" at all.

*****Okay, where to start... Still don't have a working definition for "distinctive nature religions or earth-based practices." However, (1) by the actual definition of the word, most real pagans, like Buddhists, Hindus, the ancient Egyptians and Greeks and Romans and Chinese, and yes, MANY MODERN NEOPAGANS, don't consider their practices particularly "earth-based" either; (2) if only the NPs would do their homework, they would find that real New-Agers (a term that comes to us from at least as far back as the 19^th century mystery school tradition and therefore is older than Wicca) revere nature and the Divine Feminine  as much as anybody—maybe more; (3) scratch most Neopagans and you will find what they themselves publicly denigrate as the New Age mentality; (4) see "eclectic witchcraft," meaning "drawing from many sources."

******According to the American Heritage dictionary, esoteric means intended for a small group, not publicly disclosed, or confidential—Wiccans swear each other to secrecy and do not disseminate their Books of Shadows, so they are obviously esoteric; it also means difficult to understand. Ah, now we're onto something.

†This site doesn't seem to exist any more except as a sort of online vending machine. I'm keeping this stuff in, though, just because it's so damn hilarious, and there will be more on them in the future.

††Hmmm—whudaya think, you all agree with that?

†††Unlike Christians?

††††Not according to the McWiccans, who hold that, though they are all Witches, they don't all cast spells. Go figure.

†††††By what definition? They refer to a definition as if they had provided one, at least not one that might prepare us for what comes next...

11:38 - 17 Comments - 18 Kudos - Add Comment

You Tell Me...
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Just when you thought PaganBitch! was making it all up—a small but significant chunk of evidence. What you are about to read came to us, you will note, two weeks after 9/11. Not that there is any connection...

You may also note some subtle problems. Rather than enumerate them for you, at this point I think I'll just throw it out there and let you tell us what they might be in your comments. Or not.

From: ourladyofthewels@a...

Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 09:45:03 EDT

Subject: [Mid-Atlantic-PLC] ACTION ALERT

ACTION ALERT -- Lady Liberty League

I will be appearing as an expert witness in a court case where the government will be determining what will be considered as legally recognized faith tenets and/or practices for Wicca/Paganism. This case will not preclude future litigants from adding additional practices or tenets in future court cases, but it will establish what will be legally recognized by governmental institutions as acceptable practices. I am not including items already accepted by the State, only those which are currently contested.

Items currently contested as necessary and/or legally recognized practices for Wiccans/Pagans by State officials include the following:

1. The need to celebrate or participate in ritual for the 8 major sabbats. (They say we do not need to participate in or acknowledge these sacred holidays.)

2. The need to meet for study and/or to pass on oral or written religious traditions. (To meet in circle with others.)

3. The need to celebrate new moons, full moons, or rights of passage.

4. The requirement for sacred space, land, or a designated space to do

ritual in.

5. The need for any specific ritual tools or other religious items including: altars, pentacles, representations of Gods or Goddesses, herbs, oils, incenses, candles, chalices, wands, tarot cards, book of shadows, crystals, stones, natural objects, runes, etc.

6. The State also says that no Wiccans practice Vegetarianism or Veganism as part of their personal religious practice and that Wiccans may not abstain from eating meat while in government institutions or service, for religious reasons.

There are a few other issues in contest, but these are the main ones being reviewed by the court.

It is critically important to recognize that, while many of us are from different and diverse traditions, with different requirements and different ideas about what is important and necessary to practice our religion, a ruling by the court specifically stating that these are not tenets of our religion will adversely affect each and every one of us.

This ruling will be used in the future as a test in determining government-recognized Pagan holidays (days you can legally take off of work), allowable practices in Pagan after-school clubs, rights granted to prisoners, practices allowed in hospitals and hospices, and allowable practices in the military, etc.

I need letters directed to the court verifying that in fact, these contested practices are fundamental basic religious tenets of Wicca and Paganism, to present as evidence on our behalf. This will be a landmark case so please do your part.

Please use your own Wording, and if you have a letterhead, please make use of it. Also include any coven or organization affiliation you may have, or if you are solitary, say so.

At the end of your letter, you should include a statement as follows:

I, (name), certify that, if I were to appear in a court of law, the foregoing would be my truthful testimony under oath.

Sign and date the letter and mail it to:

Patrick M. McCollum

550 Center St. PMB 133

Moraga, CA. 94556

I have included a simple sample letter to demonstrate what we need:

Coven of the Three Oaks

Sept. 20, 2001

To the Officer Of The Court

Your Honor,

As a Wiccan Priestess of the Celtic path and as a member of the Coven of the Three Oaks in New York, I would like to verify that the following are basic religious tenets of the Wiccan religion. While we as Wiccans generally do not make use of written doctrine, and have many different traditions, these tenets and others are accepted worldwide to be fundamental requirements to our religious practices:

The need to celebrate or participate in ritual for the 8 major sabbats.

The need to meet for study and/or to pass on oral or written religious traditions. (To meet in circle with others.)

The need to celebrate new moons, full moons, and rights of passage.

The requirement for sacred space, land, or a designated space to do ritual in.

The need for specific ritual tools or other religious items including: altars, pentacles, representations of Gods or Goddesses, herbs, oils, incenses, candles, chalices, wands, tarot cards, book of shadows, crystals, stones, natural objects, and runes.

Personal commitment for some to Veganism or Vegetarianism.

I certify under the penalty of perjury, that if I were to testify in a court of law, the forgoing would be my testimony.

Janice Smith, Sept. 20, 2001

10:37 - 3 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Celtic Shmeltic
Category: Religion and Philosophy

You've all heard the joke, "Oh sure, we play all kinds of music—both Country and Western." Well, all over the web, in my search for intelligent NeoPagan life, I keep seeing the same joke: "We cover the entire gamut of pagan traditions—Celtic, Norse, and Druid (and, oh yeah, heh-heh, some Native American")...or Santeria, or Voodoo—spelled voudon because that's French, and the French are more civilized and less scary—and white!).

Back in the day, we just lumped them all together and called them all WASPs—White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.* They fell (actually, they were shoved) into disrepute in the 1960s-'70s because the rest of us got tired of their elitist, globally imperialist bullshit.

WASPs have historically shown their disdain for mere mortals in many, many ways, from raping and pillaging and outright occupation, to selective intermarriage among the "right" twenty or thirty WASP dynasties (they don't call it "breeding" for nothing), to their support of various and sundry eugenics movements to weed out those of "lesser stock." They tend to be haughty, greedy, ruthless, and elitist. (I suppose you could say that about other groups as well—what sets this gang apart is that it's been so bloody successful at it.) No, it's not my imagination, they really, really do think—KNOW—they're better than everyone else.

We were so vocal and insistent that the WASPs be recognized for the white-supremacist imperialists they are that we actually took a chunk or two out of the empire's armor for about a minute. Some people (i.e., enlightened anthropologists, archeologists, and hippies) were becoming aware that ancient cultures and their swarthy denizens might not be all that primitive, might have a great deal to offer, might in fact actually be superior in many ways to our pale modern culture. "WASP" became a universal put-down. I imagine more than a few WASPs cringed a lot during that period.

And vowed revenge?

We don't hear the acronym WASP much any more. But that doesn't mean they went away, they just ducked and covered for a while. Like many of the great family empires in history, they just waited, laid low, then changed their names and reasserted their supremacy (the Royal House of Windsor was named Saxe-Coburg-Gothe until World War I (1917), when it was deemed bad PR to be German in England—and that's just one example).

Now they're back, and tricksier than ever, trying (successfully, it would seem) to monopolize, define, and ride herd on the NeoPagan movement. Only here they are called "Celtic" and "Norse." (Though why they don't spell Celtic with a Special-K to distinguish themselves from the basketball team I'll never know.**)

Despite an occasional weak-ass assertion to the contrary, the NP movement in general, and McWicca in particular, is WASPocentric. The BritWiccan Druidoids come right out and own up to it—never mind that the real Druids may very well have been something other than Celtic. If you don't believe me, try referring to Imbolc, or Samhain, or Mabon, or Luhgnasah by any other ethnic epithet in their company. Then go turn up the thermostat 'cause it's gonna get chilly. How about their notion of the afterlife: Summerland? Avalon? Valhalla? How come the Burning Times seem only to refer to the English Inquisition and Salem? (Just like the Jews were the only people victimized by the Nazis.) Why do they all dye their hair red? Why will they turn out in droves for Irish music festivals but not for, say, Sweet Honey In The Rock or Ladysmith Black Mombasa? What makes Buckland and Cunningham more desirable sources of information about magic than Leland, Fortune, and Regardie? (Well, I guess that's a no-brainer: they're a lot less challenging and they tell the bunnies what they want to hear.)

Oh, sure, we could all cite instances where African drumming tapes were used to accompany a ritual, or something other than runes or stones was used for divination, or some coven offered some watered-down adaptation of a native ceremony, or what have you. There are exceptions. But guess what?

The Exception Proves the Rule.

The Hebrews left us with the incredibly profound and complex Tree of Life and tons of magical scripture to peruse. The Egyptians, though secretive, left clues and signs and prayers and magical instructions all over their pyramids and papyruses. The Rosicrucians studied these and expanded on them with practical work and reams of literature covering literally every magical purpose imaginable. The Yogis, the Sufis, the Chinese, have bequeathed to the world a treasure-trove of knowledge and magical technique. And then there are the relative contemporaries like Dion Fortune, McGregor Mathers, and many other hermeticists and alchemists, wrote extensively about their own work (and I mean work) in the field of practical occultism with their feet firmly planted in the Orient.

Conversely, NPs who claim to "follow the Celtic Tradition" sure have their work cut out for them. If the Celts had a richly textured cosmogony and magical tradition at any time in the dim past, we'll probably never know. They didn't write things down in the first place, there was next to nothing left of their oral tradition by the time the RC Church was finished with them, and what did survive is hopelessly garbled, thus making the "Celtic Tradition" the most difficult on earth to research and practice. One can only guess from the bits and pieces of lore left to us what the corpus of Celtic teaching may have comprised. But that's the beauty of it, don't you see? It's the perfect excuse to know next to nothing, do very little, and make things up as you go along.*** This way, you can claim to be following the "Old Ways" and keeping alive the "Wisdom of the Ancients" and nobody can challenge you on any grounds. There's nothing to learn, nothing to memorize, no pesky techniques to master, no mythos to guide you, no writings to study. It makes absolutely no demands. Perfect!

Meanwhile, I could count the number of "people of color" I've seen in pagan covens and study groups on one hand. Why? Because the NP movement was, is, and probably always will be dominated by lazy, dishonest white folks who have no real connection to any magical legacy of their own, whose religious ethos still has more in common with Judeo-Christianity than any kind of authentic paganry, who have to steal scraps of lore from other cultures and make up stories about themselves to gain credibility in their own and each other's eyes. And the biggest fish in the pool, the toughest dog on the block—in other words, the most respected member of a Neo coven—will invariably be the one who is (or looks, or claims to be) "the most Celtic."

In other words, McWicca et al. is a snooty club which subtly excludes—while claiming to be divinely inclusionary—magico-philosophical elements they can't claim as Celto-Norse, and the people who come to them offering knowledge of non-white traditions. Come to think of it, they also exclude all elements of their own professed tradition that don't fit in with their fairy-tale image of it.

So if your area of expertise is Asian,  Egyptian, Indian, Sumerian,  African, Greek, Hermetic, or even truly shamanic magic or religion or philosophy, and you're considering joining a Neo coven, think again. Oh, they'll take you in. They might even fuss over you at first, show you off as some kind of trophy, maybe. But if you expect to achieve any kind of real acceptance, take The Bitch's advice:

Keep your mouth shut and dye your hair red.

PaganBitch!


*Back in the day, people didn't draw too fine a point with regard to differentiating among the Honkies, as in fact most people don't to this day. Ample evidence exists that, by the 7th or 8th C, as a result of rape, slavery, and intermarriage (even among the upper classes), Celts and Saxons were virtually indistinguishable. The Viking influence, for the same reasons, further muddied the waters. Today, one would be hard-pressed to prove one's ancestry as "pure Celt." Or pure Anglo-Saxon, for that matter, or anything else. So you reconstructionists can just get right off my back. We're making sweeping generalities here, remember?

**See MagicK With a Special/K)

***See Eclectic Paganry

****From the 19th Century, when Celtic Studies were first accepted into universities, Celtic scholars have always made clear that when we speak of the Celts we are identifying only a linguistic-cultural group not a biological group. The Celts are a people who spoke a language that we identify as a branch of the Indo-European family of languages.

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Torch Your Tarot Now! (it's the only way you're gonna get any Light out of it...)
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Taro Orat Tora Rota Ator!

There is no better view of pagandom's staggering ignorance of magical principle than that afforded by Tarot. Back when Hector was a pup, the only commercial decks available were the Rider-Waite, the 15^th-C French Marseilles and Cary-Yale Visconti decks, and, if you were lucky enough to be studying with the Builders of the Adytum, the BOTA deck. Other decks, like the Gareth, were around but were next to impossible to get your hands on. The (not really Egyptian) Egyptian deck, (not really Aquarian) Aquarian deck, Crowley-Harris Thoth, and a few others, appeared a bit later. Of all these, only the BOTA, Rider-Waite, and Thoth decks have any magical value. In that order.

Today, bookstore shelves groan under the weight of hundreds of "tarots," from the Abyssal deck, featuring underwater photography of nothing in particular, to the wildly surrealistic Zodiac pack. On the road from A to Z, the horrified occultist can find the Hello Kitty, Alice in Wonderland, Baseball, HP Lovecraft, Sailor Moon, Cat People, and many other decks of cards purporting to be Tarot. Most of them are very interesting and pretty—and expensive, ya chumps—and virtually all of them are utterly useless.

Some of the decks now available are stripped down, simplistic, often arbitrarily deviant variations of the Rider-Waite deck. Some are resurrections of older decks, some conglomerates of ancient images. Many more of them purport to represent the personal magical "views" of untrained posers. Many simply serve as vehicles for cool artwork. They are not Tarot. They are cards with pictures on them.

Many Neo's, in defense of their decks, claim they work just fine for them, thank you. Gazing at the pictures, they claim, enables them to enter into a mental state whereby useful ideas come to them. I don't dispute that, in some cases, they can. But that's like saying you love your car because, even though it has no engine, it's fairly easy to push uphill. The only help their deck gives them is to serve as a point of concentration that might help them enter a trance state. A deck of playing cards would serve just as well. Or a metronome.

Just in case you're thinking PaganBitch! is blowin' it out 'er ass (of COURSE you are!), here is a bit of empirical evidence for you to chew on. Even though divination is by no means the primary use intended by the creators of Tarot, it is the only avenue that connects it to NeoPagandom. So, a couple of years ago, a series of experiments was made at various NP festivals in which "tarot" readers, using whatever stupid deck they wanted, were challenged to a read-off. Each reader chose a partner, who picked a piece of paper out of a basket on which had been written the name of a famous dead person, assumed that "personhood," and shuffled the cards. The other one read. Then they switched roles, picked a new dead person, and did it again...

Of course, there might be other excuses—I mean, reasons—for the abysmal showing made by virtually every Neo who thought s/he was a hot reader with a hot new deck. Maybe hi/r partner wasn't concentrating when s/he shuffled the cards. Maybe s/he didn't have a handle on the readee (I mean, how could you expect someone to know who Hitler was?). Maybe there was too much distraction for the reader. Maybe one of them was having a bad day...

Or maybe their so-called tarot decks, coupled with ignorance of traditional tarot symbolism, were not giving these readers any help at all, maybe even worked against them.

Now, if you were really interested in knowledge, you would be kissing my ass right about now, begging me to explain what REAL Tarot actually IS. Lucky for about two of you, I don't care whether you're interested or not. I'm going to tell you. For all the good it'll do. First, a small history lesson.

There are many theories about where Tarot came from and when. It doesn't matter. Esoteric wisdom has it that, at some point, it entered the minds of a bunch of Wize Guyz that, between the Catholics and the Muslims and the Scientists and other Dangerous Idiots, the esoteric knowledge they had painstakingly accumulated was in peril of being irrevocably lost. They searched for a way of synthesizing and preserving the entire western tradition of magic and philosophy and put it into a form which would be (1) comprehensive in scope, covering every phase of the cycles of macro- and microcosmic experience; (2) retrievable by anyone who looked at it, regardless of language or culture; (3) invisible to the orthodoxy; (4) still around long after they themselves were dead and gone.

Because they understood the human mind, they concluded that images were the vehicle by which they could achieve all of those goals.

(1) "Tarot Speaks the Law of the Wheel of Nature!" Spanning generations, virtually every western magical "alphabet" was pressed into service: astrology, tree of life, number, color, direction, myth... The "letters" of these alphabets were made to form sentences, and together the sentences made paragraphs. Nothing was randomly placed—each picture says something very specific and complex. Nothing was left out, to the best of their considerable ability. There are dozens of symbols on each Rider-Waite major key. You guys just don't know how to identify them.

(2) The symbols used were carefully chosen so that they would, at least theoretically, be understood by the subconscious mind of everyone who looks at them. Don't believe it? Okay, what word comes to your mind right now when you visualize a bird in flight? ... Pretty obvious, isn't it?* Combining the symbols based on their vast knowledge, these complex glyphs were designed to stimulate subconscious activity and to retrieve very specific information already "residing" there.

(3) Of course, the ideas about god, man, and the universe being put forward by these sages were considered heretical by the most dangerous religious orthodoxy on the planet, namely the RC church. The symbolism was by necessity heavily veiled, the pictures given innocuous titles like "The Pope" ("The Hierophant").

(4) And finally, what better way to preserve the ancient wisdom than through the vices of man? Something we can always count on. This epic synthesis of the esoteric knowledge of the ancients was presented to the world as a gambling game. Brilliant.

Tarot is a work in progress. It is by no means set in stone. Magicians still argue about the order of the keys, placement on the paths, all kinds of stuff. But you have to study what's there, what was intended, how it all works, before you get to have the fun of experimentation, of jumping into the debate. As Buddha said, you must know the law so that you can break it well.

PD Ouspensky, Gurdjieff's chela and one of the 20^th C's greatest philosophers and occultists, called Tarot a book by means of which a person, stranded on a desert island, with little education and no other resources, could become conversant on virtually any subject, simply by looking at the cards every day. When you look at any major arcana key, you are looking at a reflection of a facet of your mind (microcosm) and of the Mind of the God (macrocosm). Is your tarot giving you that?

Burn your cutesy new deck, if you give a shit.

Get a Rider-Waite or a BOTA (and follow their coloring instructions to the letter). Look at one key (major arcana) for five minutes, a different key every day. Keep a journal of everything that comes into your mind during those five minutes. Review it in a week or so.