Dr. Strangegod, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My God.

Joyous Madness, October 21, 2014

Dr. Strangegod, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My God.

There has been a lot of talk about animal sacrifice over the last short while in certain corners of Dionysian Polytheism. I have spent most of that few days reading, doing divination, and talking to Sannion, founder of the Thiasos of the Starry Bull, about the subject. The Thiasos, for those not in the know, is a fairly new Bacchic Orphic tradition centered on the revitalization and retelling of the Orphic mysteries (those founded by the poet and prophet Orpheus).

Most of those conversations have been calm, respectful, and polite. It’s a hot issue, and not one to be taken lightly– no matter what side of the coin you stand on, I think we can ALL agree that this isn’t something to be flip about. For the last few days, my coin has been precariously balanced on its edge, not falling to one side or another, until it fell over last night in the wee hours of the morning, as I sat on the couch with my cat, unable to sleep for the worry that was clutching at me.

When the topic was first broached in Thursday’s Thiasos chat, everyone seemed pretty much okay with it. No complaints, just a few questions. I didn’t say anything right away, but here’s what was happening on my side of the screen: jaw slack, stomach threatening to return my dinner, hands shaking and sweaty. I didn’t say any of that at the time– what I said (to my recollection) was something along the lines of, “I’m going to have to think long and hard about that before I decide if I’m okay with it.” And the reaction was… positive. Sannion asked me to voice my objections, if I felt comfortable with it, and some of them I could voice (how is the animal treated, etc.), but some were simply gut reactions that I didn’t understand myself.

I was a vegetarian for 11 months in college. That probably would have lasted longer if I’d had options other than tater tots and whatever “fruit” the cafeteria was serving that day. Towards the end of those months, I had a series of long talks over the phone with my dad, who happens to have a degree in Poultry Science (and, consequently, worked at a feed mill/slaughterhouse for chickens for a number of years before he joined the military). He explained to me the mechanics of slaughter. I read the science and looked into my own misconceptions about the biology behind pain, consciousness, and our own evolutionary progress as related to our digestion. And I came to the conclusion that yeah, a LOT of what we’re eating is CRAP, and we really do need to be more careful about what we ingest and how we treat the animals (and plants!) that we consume, but there’s nothing intrinsically WRONG with eating meat. I had a hot dog yesterday. It was delicious.

So, towards the end of the chat, I asked if anyone would do divination for me, as I was uneasy and unsure of my future of the Thiasos. I got two responses that night, both of which emphasized the need to think about my ancestry– and to think about how my family would feel about the slaughter of animals. Now, my family isn’t pagan, by a long shot– they hate that part of me. But they are, for the most part, farmers: pig farmers, chicken farmers, I think there are a few cow farmers somewhere in there. Both sides of my family. It’s not strange, for my grandparents, for my cousins who did 4H, for any of my family to think “Dinner’s in a few hours, I should go grab a chicken” and have that chicken still be alive while they’re thinking that thought. It’s just a non-issue. It was a part of life.

I’ve heard arguments that “we don’t need to kill for our food anymore,” but… that’s not entirely true. For the chicken farmer who only has his chickens, it’s a lot of times cheaper and easier to kill a couple chickens to feed your 12 children (as was the case for BOTH my dad’s parents) than it was to go out and BUY someone else’s produce. And if you traded your chickens FOR that produce, it was with the full knowledge that those chickens were going to be eaten.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and go one by one through the arguments I’ve seen presented, on either side of the coin. I’m not interested in arguments, and I don’t have the emotional capacity for that kind of stress. When my Facebook thread on this topic started getting heated, I deleted it. I just don’t have it in me to even watch those arguments at this time. There are only three things I’m going to address directly: my own divination, the topic of human sacrifice (and where I agree with the Anomalous Thracian on that), and where I stand now.

Divination

I use the Greek Alphabet oracle for divination purposes. A lot of the Thiastai use dice rolls and long lists of phrases, but I like the Greek Alphabet– for one, I can carry it in my pocket, and it’s easier to remember. It is, however, harder to interpret, even more so when you’re doing it for yourself and you’re terrified of the answer. So, I asked four questions, and pulled four answers:

“What will be my role within the Thiasos?”
–Omicron: There are no crops to be reaped which were not sown.
–Interpreted: Put in the work to get the result. Standing on the sidelines will merit you nothing, sowing the crops will feed and nourish you and your family.

“What is the nature of the sacrifice desired by me?”
–Zeta: Flee the great storm, lest you be disabled in some way.
-Interpreted: Zeta is the symbol of Zeus. Zeus scares the everloving shit out of me (as do Poseidon and Hades, for that matter). But this symbol, in this particular reading, read as more of a “let go of that which no longer serves you” than anything else. In this case, given the mindset and the prayers from before the start of the divination, I believe this to be a caution against preconceptions.

“Should I receive the benefits of a sacrificial animal?”
–Theta: You have the helping gods of this path.
-Interpretation: “Hon, you’re worrying too much. We’ve got this.” This was the symbol that inspired the punful title of the post, actually. It’s been coming up a lot for me lately, and almost always with a strong connection to Dionysos himself. A similar reading came from one of the aforementioned divinations from another Thiasos member: “Dionysos won’t get angry at you whatever you choose. In fact, your free choice is preferred.“

“Should I continue the work I am doing within the Thiasos of the Starry Bull?”

–Alpha: The God (Apollo) says you will do everything successfully.
-Interpretation: “Hon. WE’VE GOT THIS.” Alpha is one of the few universally positive symbols within the set. As a friend of mine stated in one of her interpretations, “Stop second guessing yourself and just act already.”

Human Sacrifice

Did it happen in the past? Yes. Even if there’s some question about the Gauls (given that the only cases of it happening there were written by their enemies, Julius Caesar in particular), there’s no question that it happened amongst the Greeks, PARTICULARLY within the Bacchic cults. You can’t read 3 (thousand) stories about maenads dismembering someone and not recognize that it is a tradition strongly rooted in blood– even if you don’t take the myths literally, which I don’t, people still died. It happened. Dionysos himself was dismembered on at least one occasion, and died more times than I can count. He’s not all wine and sex and wild parties, and to characterize him in that manner is either ignorance of myth (which is certainly excusable, especially if you’re new to this whole thing) or WILLFUL ignorance (which in my book really ISN’T that excusable). Does Dionysos call everyone to blood and gore? Of course not. We’re not all formed from the same mold, and we’re not all given the same gifts. Calling everyone to the same path religiously is like telling every artist they have to be a banker– some of them might have side skills they can use for it, but most of them are going to be uncomfortable with it. And that’s perfectly okay.

The main question for me is this: do the gods still require or request human sacrifice? Short answer… no. Long answer… kinda. The Anomalous Thracian commented on Sannion’s post about the matter with something I’m just going to quote verbatim:

“If the gods required human sacrifice of us today, as they did lawfully call for in the past, they would have ensured that we had the priests and paradigms to see these things returned. They have not, nor does it seem that is is likely to change anytime soon. We literally don’t have priests for those rituals, even if we had the rituals themselves required of us. And, as is ALWAYS stated on the subject of sacrifice, it is better to not do something at all than to do it wrongly, unjustly, without skill or training or lawful place. And the reality is, we simply do not have that job or role any longer in any tradition that I know of in Polytheist religion, today.”

Do the gods require human sacrifice? No. Do they request it? Sometimes. Does it involve someone standing over an unwilling victim holding a knife and chanting in some dead language? HELL no. A lot of what Sannion has addressed is the idea of consent– an animal is not sacrificed if it doesn’t consent, end of story. Because we don’t speak the languages of these animals, we use divination and body language to determine that consent. With humans, though, consent is different– we know our own consciousness, and I firmly believe that the ONLY person who can or should give your life for the gods is YOU, and ONLY as a last resort, when you have been psychologically evaluated and determined to be of sound mind. Sannion gave a 99.5% probability of that not ever happening – I’d give it more of a 99.9% probability of not happening.

I will never, ever, willingly take the life of another human being. I know this. My gods know this. If they ask me to do so, even if the person is willing, even then… I will tell them no. The only god I’m close enough to who would even get away with asking that sort of thing in jest is Dionysos, and like Markos Gage has pointed out, this is a god who pushes our boundaries… but doesn’t go past them, so long as they are set.

If, in some break with reality the leadership of our tradition states that we, as a Thiasos, need to accept or participate in the sacrifice of another human being, I will challenge that person, per our stated rules, for authority over the Thiasos. Failing that, I will leave. End of story. As the omens said… my choice is my choice, and it is preferred for my path that I follow my own choice. That may sound extreme, but this is one area where I won’t compromise. If someone gives their life in service to the gods (either intentionally, walking into a situation where they know they will likely die, or as part of performing some sort of service whereby they are accidentally killed), then I will respect and honor them as a martyr. But I will not knowingly cause their death.

What next?

My fears have been allayed. A combination of knowledge of the ritual itself (specifically, how the animal is killed, how the divination is done to determine consent, and the level of involvement I need to personally take) and my own divination has shown me that my choice and my gut are paramount for me, personally.

I choose to stay. I choose to receive the benefits of a humane animal sacrifice, though I have determined that I will never be the one performing the sacrifice. And not only do I choose to stay, I choose to progress: not on the sidelines, but as an active participant in a growing tradition. I could not be happier or more proud to be part of a tradition where disagreement is treated with respect, where I need not be afraid to say, “I’m feeling something weird about this and I don’t know why.” I could not be more blessed to have a space wherein I can examine my own preconceptions and let go of those that no longer serve me. And whatever my specific calling may be, whatever gifts I have that can be used, I will give those, freely, as my choice offering to the gods, and to the community.

That is my sacrifice.

About the Author:

Joyous Madness is a student in the Midwest. She has been a polytheist-pagan for 8 years and a devotee of Dionysos for 3. She enjoys wine, wit, and complex theological dilemmas. Her personal blog can be found at joyousmadness.blogspot.com.

Awe, Reverence, and Restoration

Galina Krasskova in Wyrd Ways

What is this thing called Heathenry? What is this body of religions that many of us are trying so avowedly to restore? I suspect if you asked ten Heathens, you’d receive ten different answers but I’m going to explore this question a little bit here, as I see it, because over the twenty – plus years that I’ve been Heathen, my understanding of the nature of these religious traditions has changed dramatically.

Note, by the way, that I try very hard to avoid referring to Heathenry as one religion. I don’t think it is, nor do I think it would have been so during the times of our polytheistic ancestors. Today we talk about religions having different denominations, each with different theological foci; in the past there would have been regional cultus. The way “Heathenry” was practiced would have varied, sometimes quite drastically, from locale to locale with different Gods taking precedence, different social mores, perhaps different ritual structures at the very least. This is a good thing too. It lends color and texture and vibrancy to a tradition. I think that Heathenry then and now is big enough to encompass such dramatic diversity; in fact, I think such diversity to be one of polytheism’s greatest strengths.

It’s also worth pointing out that neither would the word “Heathen” have actually existed as a specific religious identity. We moderns have taken a word that was used as an insult – Hæþen – hearth dweller–in much the same way that modern Pagans seized upon ‘paganus, a, um’ or country dweller.(1) These words weren’t always used in a derogatory fashion. Once they simply meant someone who lived in the country, but with the advent of monotheism, and the advance of Christianity across Europe (which went hand in hand with the scouring and destruction of indigenous traditions), those who had abandoned their ancestral ways for the new religion of Christianity needed a way to diminish and condemn those who held onto their traditional beliefs and so they called them the equivalent of hillbillies or hicks. It was an effective rhetorical weapon for transforming a complex religious tradition into silly, outdated superstition in the minds of the people. It was a means of erasing the power of a generations-old set of practices.

Moreover, until the coming of Christianity, there was no need for people to use any type of name or word for their religious traditions. This was what people did. It was what their parents did, their grandparents, their great grandparents. It was the natural way of being within one’s community and tribe. Differentiation of one’s sacred identity from one’s tribal identity happened only at the hands of the enemy. Today, living in a very different time and place from our polytheistic ancestors, the need for differentiation is a useful (I hesitate to say important, though I think in many ways it is) part of building, repairing, and restoring our traditions. Now, we seize on these terms to tear ourselves away from the dominant religious culture, the Abrahamic faiths, specifically in the US, Christianity. It’s a way of marking our territory and slowly but surely redefining space for these battered traditions to re-emerge. Words of self definition have become a tool, a lever by which the window to restoration might be cracked open just a little bit wider and I find this rather ironic, given how once the very same tool was used to crush our ancestral ways. But I digress.

When I think of Heathenry today, I recognize that I’m engaging with the modern permutations of what were once indigenous traditions. To be indigenous means to be native to a place. When most of us hear that word today, we think (not incorrectly) of First Nations Peoples. Each one of us, however, came from somewhere. If we look far enough back, before Christianity, before monotheism, we each came from a tribe and each tribe had its ways, its beliefs, its practices, the lens through which it engaged with the world. (2) All of those practices and shared worldviews that make up what we would today call “Heathenry” were once part and parcel of the indigenous traditions of numerous peoples occupying what is now Germany, England, Scandinavia, Iceland, and perhaps even parts of Switzerland.(3) The practice of these traditions was rooted in tribal consciousness, and tribal places. You see this with many ancient polytheisms: there was a certain geographic positioning to their praxis. The way a specific Deity was honored might change depending on where that Deity was honored. The way Odin was venerated in what is now England, for instance, was vastly different from the way He was honored in the forests of what is now Bavaria. The land was an important means of translating and ordering praxis for the people.

I personally believe that there is a certain amount of tension and anxiety within contemporary polytheisms in the US, perhaps most especially Heathenry, because we now lack that self-same tie to specific ancestral pieces of land. I have, over the years, come to believe that many of the more fundamentalist expressions of Heathenry have at their root a certain geographic insecurity. Whereas our ancestors’ practices would have developed in relationship with tribal lands, with the land itself an interlocutor for us and our Gods, contemporary Heathenry has developed in the United States, in uncomfortable relationship with US culture, at its heart, a fundamentalist, Protestant Christian culture. Nor do I see a resolution of this tension in the future though I think the key may lie in engaging deeply in ancestor cultus. I think our dead are able to bridge those gaps for us, as they likely did for those of our ancestors who traveled far from their native homes as well. We carry our ancestors with us, after all, bound to us through blood, bone, and DNA. That’s not a connection that can be severed, regardless of whatever other locational disconnect we might experience. Given that our presence in what is now the United States comes with a tremendous blood debt, it’s no wonder that there may be some unconscious and existential anxiety present in rooting our native traditions here.

As we work toward our restoration of our traditions, I think it’s important to keep these things in mind. All of us are coming to this work from modern cultures diametrically opposed to the mindset of our polytheistic ancestors. We have been patterned to respond to the world by means of that modern mindset. Part of that modern contamination is an unconscious positioning of the ins and outs of our ancestral religions as ‘primitive.’ (4) As we work toward restoration, I think we need to be very careful to explore how our culture has taught us to engage with the sacred, to position the holy in our lives, how we’ve been taught to respond to emotional experiences, and the idea that one may directly experience the Gods. It’s all too easy to respond in a way that makes us comfortable (condemning mysticism, fixating on the written word, i.e. the lore, holding to modern gender, racial, sexual orientation biases and so forth) but that would have been quite alien if not in direct opposition to the way our ancestors approached their world and their traditions. It’s all too easy to allow our comfort zones to become what determines overall Heathen praxis instead of having the courage and integrity to allow ourselves to be uncomfortable while at the same time looking past the lens of modernity for the way our ancestors would have actually related not only to their world, but to their Gods as well; and if that sounds like a challenge, it is.

Modernity after all has taught us to be very dismissive and exclusionary to our Gods. This has only been exacerbated by the Academy and social thinkers like Emile Durkheim (perhaps one of the most influential minds to the development of both Sociology and Religious Studies) who defined religion as little more than an expression of the social glue that binds a people together.(5) Religion has come to be viewed through a social lens rather than a devotional or pious one. Yes, religion can serve as the binding force of a community; yes it can bestow tremendous benefit on a community, and yes, religious festivals and observances are a chance for a people to come together in shared experience of the sacred but that is a far different thing from positioning the community at the apex of importance in things religious. This is one of the places where I think modern polytheisms, including Heathenry (perhaps most especially Heathenry) get things really, really wrong. As moderns we betray the authenticity of our traditions in so many ways, but none more egregiously than this.

In my opinion, putting anything but the Gods first in a religious tradition is a betrayal of that tradition, just like we see with the Christian right that pushes a conservative political agenda above the gospel message. That’s not to say that we can’t enjoy socializing and coming together in celebration and sharing our experiences. There is a difference though between focusing on the Gods during religious rituals (and not truncating those rituals so one can get to the socializing faster) and then socializing before or after, and using the time of a ritual as an excuse to socialize. It’s been my experience that little thought is given to what the Gods might want (and yes, one can know…that’s what your spiritworkers, your shamans, your diviners are for). A sense of respect, reverence, and awe for the experience of the holy is not cultivated amongst our folk. Perhaps because large swaths of Heathens (not all but many) look so doggedly toward the lore instead of toward the reality of their own devotional experiences as the be all and end all of their religion, the Gods for far too many seem to remain solely ideas in a handful of medieval tales compiled by a pissy Christian politician who happened to be a poet too and who did not want the poetic metaphors, stories, kennings, and allusions of times past to be lost for up and coming poets of his generation.

I think above all else, it’s important, no matter where we are in our faith: a newcomer, or someone who has put in twenty, thirty, forty years or more, to cultivate a sense of awe and reverence for the Gods, for the sacred, for the interactions that we are in fact able to have with Them. These things should be given priority over the lore because we are not, in fact, religions of the Book. We are religions of lived sacred experience and there is a vast difference in worldview between the two. At the heart of any viable and sustainable restoration must be the reclamation of that ancestral mindset, one that valued (and perhaps feared) the Gods, but never doubted Their presence, or the possibility of Their attentions.

We’ve lost our way in two thousand years of Christian hegemony. We’ve forgotten what it is like to live in sacred trust with our ancestors, our land, and our Holy Powers. The most important facet of restoration that we can do, over and above reconstructing any particular ritual, over and above almost anything else, is to work like hell to restore and relearn *that* once more and the way to doing that is not going to be found in the lore. It’s going to be found in the laughter and tears, the trembling and terror of our own devotional experiences, those moments when we connect in utter vulnerability with our ancestors, and hopefully eventually with our Gods. It’s going to be found when we are able to translate those experiences back into public praxis. The hostility toward the sacred, toward the mystic, toward ecstatic cultus is not something naturally ingrained in Heathenry itself; it’s an offshoot of the poison of our own entrenched modernity, a modernity poisoned by monotheism and a disconnect from our dead.

Notes

1. paganus, a, um: of or belonging to the country or two a village. May be used substantively to indicate villagers, peasants. It’s also used as a contrast to military life and in this case may be translated as civilian. See http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=paganus&la=la#lexicon. The etymology of “heathen” is not too different. A search of several etymological sources noted that it was of Germanic origin (Old English form is hǣthen) and as an adjective meant ‘inhabiting open country.’ Our word ‘hearth’ comes from the same root.

2. Native American activist John Trudell talks about just this thing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-qO4pIK1Bg

3. This in no way means that one can only be Heathen if one’s ancestors came from those places. Firstly, the Gods call whom They call; secondly, ancient polytheisms were phenomenally flexible. They by and large lacked the xenophobia that has crept into contemporary reconstructions (a response, I think, to the need to both wrench ourselves free of monotheistic oppression and to differentiate ourselves from various Paganisms and other polytheisms–we lack the regional ties, the binding locus of cultus that would have been integral to polytheisms of the ancient world. Instead we’ve substituted in many cases, a hostility and fear of “dual tradition,” something that would have been incomprehensible to our ancestors). One venerated the Gods of one’s people and ancestors, the Gods of the place where one might live (if that differed from one’s ancestral traditions), the Gods of one’s household (then as now, I’m sure blended households existed–Christianity certainly used this to spread its poison via maternal/wifely influence in mixed marriages), and then the Gods of whatever mystery cultus one might choose to initiate into. It was remarkably polyvalent. To use one’s Heathen identity as an excuse for racism of any kind is not only not supported by the lore so many Heathens love to deify, but goes against any polytheistic notion of piety. It’s a modern misunderstanding of the role of ancestor cultus, a misunderstanding rooted in the fractures, damage, and racism of the modern world.

4. I very much believe this is at the heart of such rabid, raving hostility toward devotional work, Deity possession, God-spousery, and ecstatic ritual of any sort — these things not only challenge the known status quo, but we’ve been taught, by a school system and culture infused with Protestant ethics and white privilege to view anything remotely outré (to Protestant Christianity) as ‘what those superstitious savages do over there.” and we believe at a gut level that we’re better than that. It is a triumph for the Filter that we denigrate and denounce the very medicine we need to do this restoration cleanly.

5. See É. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1965 [1912])

creating the old & borrowing the new

The Thracian in Featured Voices

James Hoscyns, Oct. 13, 2014

creating the old & borrowing the new

Language is undeniably an important facet of spiritual practice. As an aspect of simple communication, it lets us convey our beliefs to others. We raise words up to the divine through the shaping of intent and the molding of prayer. We lurk on web forums and set fire to the comment sections in defense and make war with trolls. No matter what, we are surrounded by and immersed in language at every point. Despite this envelopment, or perhaps because of it, I’ve noticed two particular questions on the importance of language in spiritual practice tend to be met by universal pauses. The first is “why is it important?” and the second is “how is it important?”

why?

Language is complicated. Language is big. And it connects us to something larger than ourselves, and even larger then. Languages old and new alike serve to connect us to the spiritual genetics of the gods we worship, connecting us with the people and places that have come before and to those who will yet, and in that way, we identify ourselves as being part of this same spiritual current. Our ethnic and national identity is inconsequential; our biological genetics erode away when we enter into this space where we belong, because we are made to belong there.

Of course, a language itself isn’t always the reason why. For us, Old High German and Latin and Thracian, among many others, are not our native languages, and the reason why becomes the act of acquiring a language itself. Through learning a language, we develop a deeper understanding of our own spiritual practices. In the same vein as crafting our own statuary or writing our own devotional poetry, learning a language of spiritual value itself becomes another way of ‘getting one’s hands dirty’ and doing a work which demonstrates our piety, respect, and love. Is it required? Is it a divine necessity? Not necessarily, but it certainly enriches the experience.

There are limitations to this question, though. ‘Because’ gives away our motivations and our intention, but can fail to recognize that our languages, like our faiths, while informed by the past, are also vibrant traditions that are exceptionally alive right now. So, if I’m an American-born Celtic reconstructionist, shouldn’t I be learning Old Irish instead of spoken dialect-neutral standardized Scottish Gaelic? Well, maybe not…

how?

Language may serve as a timeless highway connecting us to the past and future, but the scenery changes along the way, and language just isn’t the way it used to be, or will yet be. Things change. Constantly. Right now, I fight with different speech registers in my head and avoid all the easy colloquialisms that come first out of my mouth (languages, rawr!), and remain resolute to keep writing in English, despite all the other languages floating around me. Instead, I’m making a choice to write the way I am, because it serves to separate these words I have to say from the words I use when I lament the line at the self-checkout, because this deserves focus and respect, something very much the same as when we use specific languages to serve specific ritual purposes.

We switch forms of our language and the very language itself in order to mark the difference between the spiritual and the mundane. It is an alarm, reminding us that there is a different place to be, a different time to be, and one that reinforces our otherworldliness. This is not the grocery store, after all—this is holiness.

Assuming some givens, that gods = respect and mundane = supermarket, then why use a modern language? A Celtic reconstructionist from anywhere obviously should be using Old Irish, naturally, instead of any of the living Celtic languages, right? A native speaker of Scottish Gaelic, knowledgeable in the modern written form, may not use their regular speech for ritual purposes. It’s too close to the words for the self-checkout, and who wants to sound like that in the presence of gods? But for a native speaker of something else, it isn’t necessarily this way. The ritual use of standard modern Welsh is just as much an acknowledgement that this spiritual current has continued on as it is a sign of respect from someone identifying themselves as belonging. Simply because Middle Welsh doesn’t have a word for ‘computer’ and modern Welsh does (cyfrfiadur, for what it’s worth) is not of and in itself an indicator that a language is inherently any more or less holy or profane than another.

Language is not a single point in space; it writhes its way through the bends of time just as we do, conforming to fit at one period and bursting through its containment at others. The names of languages and the words we use change, the ideas we have and the ways we view and express them change, just as the historicity of names and words themselves do, but we continue to use them in every way we can: uninterrupted and heavily changed, frozen in time with no new speakers; others are resurrected, some forgotten, some borrowed, some blue. This is how we go about creating the old and borrowing the new. It is our fundamental method of demonstrating our capacity to form self-identity and connections. Language is a ritual tool, used properly and with respect, through which our individual selves fit into a community, both human and divine.

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James Hoscyns is a former recovering child prodigy and professional translator and language teacher who can be found at www.hoscyns.org. He lives in Seattle where he prefers his coffee hot and his rain falling.

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Digression #1

Segomâros Widugeni in Nemeton Segomâros

Digression #1

Driving out of the suburbs, on Highway 42, into the deep country, certain signs become increasingly visible to the discerning eye. Three crows in a field sit silently, giving no omens except their presence. Omen enough. Less than mile further on, three horses stand in a field, living signs of Who else is there. No telling what Her business is, except it doesn’t appear to concern me. A few miles further, a field of cattle, the wealth of the land, grazing placidly.

Late in the day, a great thunderhead is rising above the green landscape, the Sky God in His terrible power and glory. Everywhere about, the woods are deep green and filled with shadows. I can feel the Presence in them. The God of Pathways lives in there, opening the Way to the Otherworld, guiding the dead. From below, I can feel the God and Goddess of the Underworld, dark but nurturing presences, not frightening at all, givers of wealth. The Sun Maiden is setting to the West, glory and radiance.

The bright Sky above balances the dark Underworld below. The evening is still and fragrant. Lights of homes glow in the forest. Dash lights shine. The road is a ribbon of black, leading homeward into the night.

About the Author:

Segomâros Widugeni is a well-known leader in Gaulish Polytheism, having been practicing for almost two decades, and in other related communities for more than 30 years. He is a co-moderator of the Gaulish Polytheism Community on Facebook, as well. He has been active in the Celtic Reconstructionist group Imbas, and the Druid group Ar nDraiocht Fein. He is also the author, under the name Aedh Rua, of the book Celtic Flame, on Irish Polytheism. He hold two Master’s Degrees, in 20th Century German History and Library Sience, and speaks two Celtic languages, one of them very rusty. He lives with his wife, who has her own careers, in the woods of rural Central Florida.

Frustrations and Identity

The Dionysian Artist in The Dionysian Artist

I discussed some of my frustrations of being a polytheist ‘down under’ in my introduction post, but I’d like to continue that theme in this. I identify foremost with Hellenic Polytheism, I put particular empathise on classical age Athens, but in the last year I’ve been exploring other Hellenic regions, dates and cults for a basis of my personal practice.

But there is a dilemma. Regardless of where I look my faith is based on seasonal changes, time and location. It was never a global religion to the extent of latter monotheist faiths, so these paradigms were not corrected in its history. I’m stuck in a position of trying to keep my practice as close as possible to historical sources, but also unable to experience certain aspects of it because of the physical differences of my land compared to my faiths homeland. These issues are added to by the fact that I am a solitary practitioner and so far have no one else to rebound and discuss these problems with.

Obvious differences in the Southern Hemisphere: seasons are backwards to the north. During Greece’s summer it’s our winter, etc. Australia’s seasons seem to extend more than the north too, for example our summer starts in December and peaks between January through to late February, depending on drought conditions it can go on for another few months. Our native trees are evergreen, rarely do we experience extreme winter conditions like snow or below zero temperatures. The sun moves from a northward position from right to left, the moons crescents are inverted from the north and many northern star constellations are not visible from our side of the world. By time we are usually ahead of a day too, (compared to America) so I perform my rituals in advance to others.
These factors play a part in my personal practice. As of writing I’m not sure how to resolve the issues and usually practice rituals based on the Greek calendar (provided by Hellenion) or festivals organised by the Thiasos I belong to.

Over the years of my development I have found myself becoming more and more sensitive to my environment, with nature itself. For example: I find it awkward mourning the descent of Persephone when the flowers are budding up from the ground and the days are becoming warmer. In the last few years I have been disconnected from the idea that I’m a reconstructionist and felt a serious push to establish my own methods of worshiping the gods. This to me is where the term polytheism comes in handy.

Identity is a question. Why do I feel a need to identify myself as part of a particular faith? Why make a distinction from Neo-paganism, reconstructionist or polytheism?

For myself it is realising that under my circumstance it is impossible to reconstruct my religion outside of its homeland. Adapting and changing my worship titters between neo-paganism and reconstructionism. I have to play with UPG (Unverified personal gnosis) to honour my gods in a way that is appropriate for my environment. I wish to maintain as much of my faiths origins as possible, so I prefer to use the term Hellenic Polytheist to both give a boundary in my personal rituals and also a freedom.

This is why I think identity is important for me. Why I consider myself a Hellenic Polytheist. It places a structured and well organised constriction of my liberties, but also grants me the ability to change my practices without encroaching to far from its origins.

So what about history? What identity did the Hellenes have? Anyone with a basic grasp of ancient Greek history would know that the identity of the peoples changed depending on time and location. The names we now assign to people of certain periods of history were not the identities the people would have had while living. For example: the people of pre classical dark age are generally labelled as Mycenaean. It is possible that these people are those featured in the Iliad. Homer had a vast range of names of certain tribes in The Catalogue of Ships, so we can surmise that their identity was based on tribal and cities states. Each with their own traditions, practices and myths. Even names of deities became merged or were totally different from the next city along.

As these people became more prosperous they sent out colonies outside of the Greek mainland, establishing cities all throughout the Mediterranean. From the Levant, to Italy, North Africa, Spain etc. These colonies brought with them their myths and traditions but as they mingled with the indigenous people they adapted and changed. Identities became merged and traditions altered.

As far as I’m aware the Ancient people never had an name for their faith, certain terms like Hellenismos, Dodekatheism, Hellenism etc. were established in latter times to create a distinction from other cultures. Especially monotheistic cultures like the Jews who detailed their own struggle for identity in the Maccabees. In that text it describes this in detail, claiming that the post Alexander Hellenic Seleucid Empire attempted to convert Jews to the Hellenic way, which resulted in a Jewish revolt that separated their traditions. From my point of view the Hellenics would have no distinction themselves, religion was religion – faith is faith. According to some accounts Alexander actually visited Jerusalem and honoured the Jewish god at the Temple. Apart from political reasons, I doubt that Alexander would have had any religious or moral issues with doing this. He’s world view was polytheistic, he was simply honouring the local god. Worshipping or honouring one god did not mean you were converted to that religion or denying the existence of other gods.

In the same sense the term Hellenic is actually a generic term for the overall arc of cultures that lived in and around the Mediterranean that shared similar languages and culture. Again with freedom, this term allows me to look past from my Athenian roots and explore other regions around the area.

Ultimately the concept of identity is a human manifestation. I hold dear the traditions of the people I look at, but in the end it comes down to Polytheism and honouring the gods. Going by my UPG I seriously doubt that the gods are disconnected or disturbed at my changing of rituals to cater to the environment that I live in and simply appreciate the fact that I honour them. I’m constantly learning, adapting and changing just like the history of Hellenic Polytheism. I believe it is a blessing to have this ability in faith, I know so much but there is always so much more to learn and explore.

That is an honour in itself.

Uoxtlos Ambi Me – A Word About Me

Segomâros Widugeni in Nemeton Segomâros

This column is about Gaulish Polytheism, for the most part, though it will no doubt include the odd foray into other territory here and there. You can expect to find scholarly discussion of concepts and worldview, discussions of deities and spirits, both scholarly and not, rituals, calendrics, invocations, poetry and personal spiritual experiences. You’ll probably find the occasional look at the life of a Northerner living in the woods of rural Florida. The place I live, it’s history and incorporeal inhabitants, are a constant presence in my spiritual life, so I’m sure I’ll be writing about them. Assuming I write a column once a week, I have many months of material to cover.

The question of whether I am precisely a Gaulish Reconstructionist is a vexed one, which does not admit of an easy answer. In the first place, I agree with C. Lee Vermeers that “reconstructionism” is really a method by which religions are developed, and not a religion per se. Secondly, as we will see, while much is known about early Gaulish religion, enough is uncertain to leave Gaulish Polytheism on the outer edge of where reconstructionism is even possible. In the end, the state of our evidence is such that we must rely on personal intuition to fill gaps. Sometimes we must make choices among various possibilities equally supported by the evidence we have. So, it is perhaps most accurate to regard me as a Gaulish Polytheist who uses the reconstructionist method where he can.

I am a hard polytheist, in that I believe that the Gods are essentially individuals, that they are not all faces of the One God or the One Goddess, or archetypes, or anything of that sort. Nevertheless this must be qualified to some degree. I am open to the possibility that some deities may be the same as others on a case by basis, particularly where their iconography is the same, and the names clearly the same name in different languages. I have in mind cases like Odhinn, Woden, and Wotan, or Thorr, Thunor, and Donner, or Lugh, Lleu, and Lugus. I am also open to the possibility that they may be different deities, or even that some cases like the three Brigids may, or may not, represent different deities with the same names.

My journey to Gaulish Polytheism has been a long and complicated one. It began with my finding a copy of Raymond Buckland’s Witchcraft from the Inside on my Junior High School library shelf in 1978, when I was 13 years old. I already had the idea from somewhere, probably television, that witchcraft was a surviving Pagan cult, though I believed it to be a bloody and awful one. The book cured that particular misapprehension, but I otherwise found it less intriguing than one might suppose. Its duotheism did not seem to match well with the polytheism of the other mythologies I had been studying.

Still, over time I found more books on witchcraft and came to identify with it. I became an initiate of an eclectic coven when I turned 18, in 1983. Indeed, I have continued to practice Wicca and other forms of witchcraft down to the present day, though now I keep such rituals separate from my Gaulish practice, and fit them into a hard polytheist theology. At the time I began studying Wicca, I read that it was the ancient Celtic religion, and I did not as yet have any reason to doubt it.

During my later high school years, I began reading on Irish mythology. This was a natural outgrowth of my interests in mythology, and Paganism. I quickly began to notice a discrepancy between the books I was reading on Irish myth, and the ones I was reading on Wicca. At first, it was possible to paper over the differences, but after my (eclectic) initiation, and the Wiccan rituals I participated in, it became clear that there was a gaping chasm between the two. So it was that, in 1984, still 18 years old, wholly on my own, I began developing a version of Gaelic Paganism.

In 1985, I went to Pagan Spirit Gathering. There, I met with Murtagh AnDoile and various other people, discussing how to develop a genuinely Celtic version of Celtic Paganism, as we called it then. The meeting with Murtagh, in particular was formative, influencing my development and confirming me on my Celtic path. In 1986, I taught a class at PSG, on Celtic myth, which was well-received. At PSG 1987, I held a private, non-Wiccan ritual in honor of the Irish deity Lugh, which was attended by three or four friends. I was a member of the Druid group Ar nDraoicht Fein from 1985 to about 1987 or 1988.

From 1987 to 1990, I studied in graduate school and alternated Wiccan with Celtic practice. Starting in 1991, I began practicing fully as a Celtic Polytheist, mostly in an Irish tradition. In 1994, I wrote an unpublished book entitled Walking with the Gods, which described my Irish practice as it had developed up to that time. In 1995, I joined Imbas , and was a member for a couple years.

In about 1998, I got hold of Alexei Kondratiev’s The Apple Branch: a Path to Celtic Ritual. This was the book that really got me interested in Gaulish Polytheism, convincing me that a Gaulish revival was really possible, that enough was known. Still, at this phase in my life, I was deeply invested in Irish Reconstructionism, and convinced that there was not enough interest in the Gaulish path for it to be anything but a waste of time. I began practicing a mixture of paths, mostly Irish, but Gaulish in certain private rituals.

My interests waxed and waned. I developed close ties with various Irish deities, but something didn’t feel right. I felt very close to Them, but missed…..something. There was a sense of wrongness, a sense that my own deities were not as close to me as I thought, or perhaps were almost the deities I sought, but not quite. I was stubborn, and held to my course.

In 2004, my work, and my wife’s, took us to Florida, where we settled in the deep woods on the southern fringe of the Ocala National Forest. In 2005, I began to practice exclusively Gaulish, although my practice was still much inferior to what it would later become. In 2008, wanting to get some good from them, I rewrote and published the class handouts from a Gaelic group I had led, along with material from Walking with the Gods, as the book Celtic Flame, under the pen-name Aedh Rua. That book received mixed reviews.

From 2009 on, a new job led to my having the money to afford the latest research materials, and my Gaulish studies leaped ahead. I finally had reliable material, that could stand up to at least some scholarly scrutiny. My Gaulish Polytheism began to take the form you will discover here

In November of 2011, I was diagnosed with renal carcinoma. I had my right kidney removed on November 27, 2011, and endured a long and painful recovery from a surgery with complications. At least they got the cancer in one go. I returned to work after a couple months, but my heart wasn’t in it anymore. In October of 2012, I left my job and began managing my wife’s business. Over time, I again became active in online fora, and this has led me here.

My cancer diagnosis is directly related to this column. It made me far more aware of my own mortality, and the need to get things done in the limited time I have. No one, lying on their deathbed, remembers their career accomplishments. I want some good to come of my studies, of all the research I have done. I want to share my knowledge with you, help shape and develop the Gaulish Polytheist path. Information on Gaulish Polytheism is hard to get, and my column could be very useful to those who are called by the Gaulish Gods or Ancestors.

If you are so moved, I invite you to embark on this journey with me.