Spring and Stone

Spring and Stone

Tess Dawson
Tess Dawson

With over fifteen years of experience, Tess Dawson is one of the foremost specialists in the field of revived Canaanite religion. She enjoys spinning, weaving, doing odd stuff with string, and making up silly songs about objects around the house.

Politics and Polytheism

You can have politics, and you can have polytheism, and you can have them both together; but, it is folly to mistake politics as polytheism. The term “politics”, to be very brief, has to do with the day-to-day governance of human activities and human-to-human relationships. The term “polytheism” has to do with the religious regard of many gods as individuals—which is more of the realm of deity-and-human relationships. Politics and polytheism are two different categories,…

Seeing the Trees for the Forest

Sometimes, even among us polytheists, there is still a tendency to reduce to a few that which numbers the stars. This tendency is an internal artifact of ingrained patterns, an unconscious bad habit from generations of living with the insistence that there are no deities, or that that there are only one or two deities. We know that there are more than none, one, or two. We know there are several. But sometimes, because of…

It’s Ok to Pray for Paris and Beirut

It is troubling to see how some folks are turning the tragedies of Paris and Beirut into a platform to oppose religion in all stripes and forms. I want to be very clear here. These tragedies are not the result of one particular religion or of having a religion, or of religions in general. These tragedies are the result of malevolent people who have warped their own religions in their human pursuits of power, domination,…

Defacing Sacred Images for Fun and Profit

There has been a matter on my mind for a long time; a grievance that has long needed addressing and it’s been one that to my knowledge no one has touched. Before I get to that, I would like to talk about a holy image, displayed above, which holds many layers of meaning, many depths, many mysteries and Mysteries. Words do not wrap well around the splendors in this image and it is an image…

The Horror of Palmyra

I have wanted to write about the matter of Daesh and their hostile takeover of the ancient city of Palmyra for days, but I have not been able to write about it. Summer solstice, a time of celebration for many, was the day I heard the worst of the news so far about the ancient Temple of Baʽal Shamem (Belshamin). No polytheist wants to hear of the planting of mines in an ancient temple to…

WD-40, or On Praise

When I was a kid going to Sunday School I used to hear the word “praise” get tossed around quite a bit. Even today, the word “praise” evokes in my mind an image of a beaming older woman happy to be at church, bringing her potluck tuna casserole in tow, and praising her god. Sitting there in Sunday school, I had time to wonder about the idea of “praise.” For years, I kept thinking, “Why…