Ancient paganism in a land of orthodoxy.

Athena and Poseidon fight to be Athens's patron deity.
Lynne Cantwell | Athens, May 2026

I'm back from my refreshing two-week break. Folks who follow me on Facebook already know that I spent most of it gallivanting on a ten-day bus tour of Greece (although "land tour via motor coach" sounds classier). Unlike the European river cruises I've been on, this one was sparse on churches, partly because the country is mostly Greek Orthodox (their churches don't seem to feature the ostentatious wealth of European cathedrals that Americans like to goggle at) and partly because the country is rife with ancient pre-Christian ruins.

We toured a lot of those ancient ruins. Like, a lot of them. It seems like you can't dig anywhere in Greece without hitting the remains of an old Greek temple or Roman villa or something from an even older culture. But at every site we visited, there has been an effort to save at least a semblance of a temple to a god or goddess. Clearly the gods were important to the ancient Greeks.

Which is why I was shocked when our guide at Olympia, the site of the original Olympics, baldly stated that nobody in ancient Greece ever believed in the Greek gods. She said that the gods embodied the virtues that each person was supposed to aspire to, but people didn't actually believe they existed.

Seriously? Then why go to the trouble of building all this?

The Parthenon in Athens, dedicated to Athena. Other temples on the 
Acropolis are dedicated to other gods.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

The temple of Hera at Olympia.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

The temple of Zeus at Olympia. Hera's temple was built first.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

Info about the temple of Athena at Sparta. There's not much of the temple left.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

Temple of Apollo at Corinth, one of two structures the Romans didn't destroy.
Lynne Cantwell | May 2026

These people went to so much trouble to carve, shift and stack thousands upon thousands of tons of limestone and marble to honor beings they didn't think were real? Are you crazy?

At first I thought maybe what our guide was implying was that the ancients were misguided and only the Christian god is real. But now I think she was coming from a Christian-centric view not of the gods' existence, but of the nature of religion.

John Beckett has said many times that in its broadest sense, religion is about what you do, who you are, and whose you are. Christians have their Bible, Jews their Hebrew bible, Muslims their Koran; those books lay out the official tenets of their religions. The ancient Greeks didn't have anything like that. For them, moral authority came not from a religious text but from artworks, stories, and plays about their gods. 

The photo at the top of this post is of a sculpture that once adorned the Parthenon. It tells the story of how Athens got its patron: Athena, the goddess of wisdom, strategy, and crafts, and Poseidon, the god of the sea, storms, and earthquakes, vied for the job. Poseidon brought up a spring of salt water, which the citizens deemed useless -- it wasn't like they could drink it. Then Athena caused to grow an olive tree. The citizens were thrilled -- they could eat the olives, use their oil for all manner of things, and use the wood for homes and tools -- so they adopted Athena as their goddess and named their city Athens. Using John's definition of religion, residents of the city were Athenians (who they are). Athena was their patron deity (whose they are), and so they honored her (what they do). They didn't need a bible to lay all that out; instead, they had things like this sculpture on the Parthenon. 

And they had theater. Although of the 1,000 or so plays written by Greek and Roman authors, only 83 survive, 46 of them Greek. Some we know about only because another author mentions them. 

Modern Pagans don't have a bible, either. What we have is what's left of the ancients' stories and plays about whichever gods and goddesses we follow. Like the ancient Greeks, we're not obsessed with what we need to do to get to heaven; instead, we're focused on doing the best we can in this world, right now.

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I am a Pagan polytheist and animist. I follow and honor gods and goddesses from several pantheons: Mokosh, the Slavic goddess of the earth and of weaving and spinning; Brigid, the Irish goddess of weaving, smithcraft and poetry; Lugh, the Irish god of light; Morrigan, the Irish goddess of sovereignty and war; Perun, the Slavic god of thunder and justice; Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and strategy; and Luna, the Roman goddess of the moon. 

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The only Greek god I follow is Athena. But I poured a little offering of water at each temple we visited anyway. It felt like the right thing to do. And I think the gods appreciated knowing that some folks still honor them.

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Three observations before I wrap up: 

1) I found it interesting that Athens, the ancient city-state that prized democracy and the arts, is now a metropolis of three million people, while Sparta, the ancient city-state that prized military order, has a population of only about 20,000 people today. The modern city is built atop the old one, and what remains of ancient Sparta is not well preserved; the Bronze Age site of Messene is better developed, and extensive excavations only began there in 2007. It almost seemed to me like the Greeks don't care to emphasize Sparta's violent past.

2) While touring all these ancient sites and seeing so many big chunks of temples in pieces, I thought of all the home-improvement TV shows in which some guy screws something to something else and says, "That's not going anywhere." I could almost hear the ancient Greek stone masons, echoing down the ages, saying the same thing. (In the case of the Acropolis, it didn't help matters that the occupying Ottomans were using the place to store gunpowder; the attacking Venetians lobbed a mortar shell into the building in 1687, blowing out pillars on one side and destroying the structures inside.)

3) The Acropolis Museum in Athens is worth a stop on its own. Of course, the topic of the Elgin marbles came up during our tour. In the early 1800s, the seventh Earl of Elgin "acquired" from the occupying Ottomans a bunch of statuary from Greece, including a haul from the Parthenon. He eventually sold everything to the British government, which put it on display in the British Museum. Our guide in Athens was confident that the marbles would eventually be returned. Negotiations over an elaborate swap of the marbles for other Greek antiquities have been ongoing since 2021, but the sticking point is that the Brits say they were legally acquired, while the Greeks say they were looted. Personally, I think the Brits are stalling.

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These moments of opinionated Greek tourism have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. C'mon, England, give that stuff back to Greece already.

Why I'm Pagan.

Warning: This post is not comprehensive. A better title would probably be something like, "Why I gave up on Christianity." 

Anyway, here we go.

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Jemez National Forest, NM
Lynne Cantwell | July 2025

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John Beckett, a Druid priest who I've been following online for several years, is offering a new online class called, "Unpacking Your Religious Baggage So You Can Live a Magical Life". The class is two weeks in -- the second module dropped this Thursday -- so there's still time to get in on it if you're so inclined. (Or take it later. The classes are on-demand.) I wasn't going to sign up -- I didn't grow up in a specific religious tradition, and I think I've done a pretty good job of exorcising from my head whatever Western religious thought I've picked up by osmosis. But then I thought, what the heck -- maybe I'll learn something. 

I have several friends who did grow up in religious traditions but who later turned atheist, and I thought the class might help them, so I've posted a time or two about it on Facebook. On one of those posts, I got into a discussion with a friend who has been following the Rev. Karla, an ordained interfaith minister who has made a name for herself on TikTok. My friend posted a link to one of the Rev. Karla's Substack posts: "The Kindness of Atheists and the Intolerance of Christians". In it, the Rev. Karla says she has been surprised at the number of Christians-turned-atheists who have told her they're following her. Here she is, busy helping people "heal from [their] religious trauma" and "deconstruct[] from the toxic theology of [their] religious heritage" (according to her website), and she's attracting atheists who appreciate what she has to say. (Her biggest target right now appears to be the patriarchy and attacking it from within the structure of the church.) 

So I read the post. One thing she wrote caught my eye: "[I]ntolerance is not inherent to religion, but it is deeply embedded in the systems that insist their truth is the only truth." I told my friend that I agreed with the statement -- but in my opinion, it didn't go far enough. 

The Rev. Karla -- just like nearly everybody else in the Western world, including atheists -- operates from the assumption that monotheism is the only possible religious framework. The only correct religious framework. Either God exists or He doesn't. 

Let's call it the "God/no God dichotomy" for short.

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Growing up outside of organized religion (save a couple of summers of vacation Bible school, courtesy of the well-meaning parents of friends) led me to spend some time in my late teens and twenties investigating various denominations to see where I might fit. In addition to several Christian denominations, I also looked into the Baha'i faith. But eventually I rejected them all and called myself agnostic.

At the time, I had a subscription to a magazine called Free Inquiry, published by the Council for Secular Humanism. They ran a column every month (and may still) that deconstructed some discrepancy or other in the Bible. It was always great fun to read.

But it eventually occurred to me that they were always fighting the same battle. Yes, a lot of Christian theology doesn't pass the sniff test. Yes, you can be a moral and ethical person without being a member of a church. It was all very rational: science good/religion bad (or if not bad, precisely, then misguided). The God/no God dichotomy.

But I knew there was more to the world we live in than science could explain. 

And I have since known a lot of atheists who reject all spirituality. They pay lip service to the idea that science doesn't know everything, but they dismiss ESP, Tarot, and so on as preposterous -- even when they've seen the woo-woo work. They know that trees are alive, but they're only grudgingly admitting that they communicate with one another, and they refuse to believe that trees have consciousness, aka a soul -- without recognizing the irony that for centuries, the same argument has been used by the Christian church against Black, brown, and Asian people; Native Americans; and anybody else who isn't "us".  That argument is what spawned the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, by which the Catholic Church gave the conquistadors and missionaries permission -- nay, the duty -- to capture, enslave, and "civilize" members of nonwhite societies.

I'll go further: Monotheism foments patriarchy. It encourages the control of ideas, especially those that conflict with religious doctrine (much of which was written centuries ago by powerful men). It puts fear into those who are tempted to believe that the paranormal is real: miracles are okay, but any other unexplained phenomena are scary because they could be the devil's work. (I once pissed off a Russian Orthodox guy of my acquaintance by observing that what his church called miracles, Pagans call magic.)

The God/no God dichotomy is the bedrock of Western culture. It's so deeply ingrained that a lot of the time, we don't even realize it's there. Why does the horror genre work? Because the villain is often stereotypically evil. What's the framework by which society defines evil? I'll let you work that out on your own.

Many atheists define their beliefs as no-God. That's fine, as far as it goes, I guess, but it seems to me it's a position in which it's easy to get stuck. You could keep poking holes in the Bible or your prophet of choice -- or you could do the work to define your own belief system, in which the Bible and its prophets are irrelevant.

I am here to tell you that the God/no-God dichotomy is bullshit. Quit fighting Jehovah and move on.

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Anyway, that's why I'm Pagan.

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These moments of bloggy dichotomy have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Doing what we can.

First off, I have good news about my post of last week, in which I was dismayed to discover that Czechs in World War II might have equated Perun, the Slavic god of thunder and lightning, with Hitler. I received two translations of the song from friends and family, and Perun is in fact not the bad guy. Here's the verse in question. The song is billed as being "Dedicated to Czech Brothers by American Sokol Members". This first translation is courtesy of one of my cousins. 

Let the voice of the Slavs be heard throughout the world!

Our homeland must be free!

Hitler and anyone who stands in our way

Shall be cast into hell by Perun.

Bohemia will live again!

 And here's the ChatGPT rendition, courtesy of my author buddy Chris James:

The world can already hear the Slavs' voices,
that our homeland must be free again.
Hitler and anyone who would stop us,
Perun shall strike them into hell,
"Bohemia" shall live again!

So! Two translations that make Perun a good guy. I was right! And Google Translate can suck it!

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I may still petition Perun for help with the current craziness in Washington, but it may not do much good. 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

As many of you know, I've taken a number of classes from John Beckett, a Druid priest. He posted in his blog at Patheos today that he's had a message from the Morrigan: "Lugh isn't coming to slay Balor." 

A bit of Irish mythology is in order. Balor was the chief of the Fomorians in the time of the Tuatha De Danaan. The Tuatha tried to live in peace with them, but eventually things became intolerable, and the Tuatha went to war to overthrow their enemies. The fight slogged on for some time -- until Lugh Lamfhada, the Irish god of light, broke free and cast a spear through Balor's single hideous eye, killing him. The battle was over quickly after that, and the Tuatha then made Lugh their king.

If only our situation were that simple. Our Balor is a many-headed beast; Trump is looking more and more (to me, anyway) like a figurehead, a puppet, with many other people pulling his strings, from Elon Musk to the Project 2025 gang to who-knows-who overseas. The Democrats would need a hero like Lugh to pull off a decisive victory, and let's be honest: we don't have one. Multiple people are attacking them on multiple fronts: they're calling their members of Congress; they're filing lawsuits; and so on. But the knockout blow has been elusive so far.

Really, all we can do is do what we can. For me, that means writing this blog, going to work every day, and trying to keep from reacting to the relentless onslaught of bad news.

I work for the New Mexico state legislature, which is in session right now. Working during session is pretty crazy anyway: the hours of daylight are short, the weather is cold and sometimes snowy, and the workload seems relentless (I could swear we had at least 897 rushes sent to us between noon and 1:30 p.m. today). Much of the legislation we see is well intended. We do see some wackadoodle proposals every year, but usually I can just shake my head and move on. This year, it's hitting differently, knowing there are so many people out there who think this stuff would be a good idea.

Another thing I'm noticing more this year is how much federal law is intertwined with our state laws. It's not just federal funding, although that's important; it's how so many of our state laws dovetail with federal law on the same subject. What happens if the rule of law crumbles in Washington? Will our state laws stand on their own? Will they be allowed to stand?

We are in a good place politically, here in New Mexico -- our executive and legislative branches are both controlled by Democrats, and our congressional delegation is all Democratic, too. But as we learned last fall, that can turn on a dime. 

Still, we're doing what we can. Our attorney general and 13 of his counterparts in other states filed suit in Washington on Thursday to have DOGE declared unconstitutional and its actions an abuse of power. There's a hearing set for tomorrow morning. 

This isn't the only ongoing court case. But as we've learned to our dismay over the past four years, lawsuits take a long time to resolve. And our view of the future isn't clear. 

All we can do is do what we can.

That's my plan. But I think I will approach Perun anyway. He may not be the hero we need, but He does have experience in fighting Nazis. And we need all the help we can get.

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These moments of doggedly determined blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.

When existential threats stop working, try joy. Weird, right?

The thing that's at the top of my mind right now is Vice President Harris's running-mate pick, but that's not what this post is about. I'm writing this on Sunday morning, and knowing what I do about the news cycle – not to mention Murphy's Law – I'm a tad concerned that any speculation I make might be moot by the time this hits the interwebz, and I'd have to junk it and write something else anyway. So let's talk about a different politically related thing. (I'll write about a non-political topic next week, I promise.)

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No matter who Harris picks, we have to give props to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for being the first to call the Republicans weird. "These are weird people on the other side," he said on MSNBC. Not only does former President Trump say weird stuff (sharks and batteries, whut?), but their platform is chock-full of weird ideas. And his running mate, JD Vance, says weird stuff, too: "My God, they went after 'cat people.' Good luck with that! Turn on the internet and see what cat people do when you go after 'em."

rogistok | Deposit Photos

Walz's phrasing has gone viral. Even the Harris campaign is calling Trump, Vance, and their minions weird.

This has been going on for a couple of weeks now. So of course the moderate-to-liberal punditry is trying to steer the conversation back to their favorite topic: Trump is way worse than just weird; his reelection would mean the end of democracy. The Washington Post has run two opinion pieces along those lines in the past week: one by Jennifer Rubin and one by Colbert King. Other papers' columnists are doing the same thing.

I mean, they're not wrong. But the chattering class has been warning us about Trump's existential threat to democracy ever since the guy first rode down his golden escalator in 2015. Every election since then has been THE MOST IMPORTANT EVER!!! And yet every election has seen democracy prevail. 

It's not that we haven't come close to losing it. It's that something has always intervened to save us. 

And so when Americans who don't live and breathe political coverage hear, yet again, that this year's election is once again THE MOST IMPORTANT EVER!!1!1!! – they might tune out. 

But "weird"? That's a concept everybody can relate to. Plus it's funny. And it's annoying the crap out of the other side.

We're all familiar with the story about the boy who cried wolf. When the wolf finally showed up, nobody took the kid seriously. Would the town have been saved if the boy had changed his messaging?

Marketers of all stripes know that emotions drive engagement, and fear is a particularly useful emotion in that regard. Both parties use it: Republicans use migrants and crime in their scaremongering; Democrats use The Handmaid's Tale and Project 2025. Whether any of those claims are true is beside the point. What I'm saying is that the parties use them as tools to get voters on their side.

Joy is another emotion – one that marketers don't often rely on. But we've all seen the power of joy over the past couple of weeks. Democrats are fired up for Harris. There's been a lot of laughter and dancing. And we've had a lot of fun by calling the other side weird.

I know some of y'all don't believe in woo-woo stuff. But back in 2022, Druid priest John Beckett wrote about a ritual he participated in at the Mystic South convention that year. In the ritual, a seeress channeled Loki, the Norse Trickster god. Loki was very clear that His messages needed to get out into the world. One of His messages was this: Cultivate joy.

As soon as He took over the Seeress Bergrune, Loki began laughing and dancing – including asking questioners to dance with Him. And then in a tone that was both light-hearted and deadly serious, He said:

"Joy! There must be joy and we must make sure in this time that is dark and growing darker with war and disease and death and all the rest, joy or else my son [Fenris] will eat the world."

(In Norse mythology, Fenris, also called Fenrir, is the wolf prophesied to kill Odin at Ragnarok.)

And now here we are, doing just as Loki asked, and making politics fun. Weird, huh?

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Pop quiz for my friends from Kevin's Watch: How does Foamfollower defeat Lord Foul in The Power that Preserves? 

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These moments of bloggy weirdness have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Cultivate joy!

My Pagan path in an elevator pitch.

Maroon Bells | Lynne Cantwell 2017

I got name-checked on the Patheos blog of a Druid priest this week.

I've mentioned John Beckett here before. I've occasionally used one or another of his posts as a springboard for a blog post of my own. I've also taken some of the online classes he has offered; I'm not a Druid, but his classes are all ecumenical, if I may repurpose the term to mean practices and beliefs that are common to all varieties of Pagans. I did my best to enumerate the types of Pagans in a blog post a few years ago. 

But I still get questions about what Paganism is. A lot of them come from folks who have quit one or another Christian sect (I seem to have collected a number of ex-Mormon friends) and made a 180-degree turn into atheism. As if there are only the two choices: believe in Jehovah or believe in nothing.

So I asked John how to talk to these friends about Paganism -- keeping in mind that Pagans don't proselytize (no, really -- we don't). His answer is in the post that I linked to up top.

He calls these types of folks "religiously ignorant." I think that's a little harsh -- I'd go for "religiously uninformed" -- but his blog isn't mine. Regardless, the point is that because of the ubiquity of Christianity in the West, for the vast majority of folks, that's their only religious reference. So, as he says, first people want to know what you believe, and second, they want to know what your holy book is. Alert hearth/myth readers will see the problem immediately: Paganism has no holy book and no single set of beliefs. 

The next thing they often want to know is what you have to do to keep from going to Hell. When you say Pagans don't have a Hell, it doesn't compute. Pagans strive to live morally, of course, but not because of some heavenly reward awaiting us. The reward is here, in this life.

I encourage you to read John's post for his overview. If you're looking for more in-depth info, I could recommend a book or two. But if you want to know what I believe? Well, I guess I'd better write an elevator pitch for you. Here goes:

I believe there are a whole lot of gods. I've spoken in meditation with several of them, and I am confident that they are separate persons -- neither facets of a single overarching deity nor figments of my imagination. I have relationships with a few gods, and if you've read any of the Pipe Woman Chronicles, their names may be familiar to you: Lugh, who can do anything; Brighid, blacksmith, healer, and poet; Morrigan, both a warrior and the personification of the land; and Mokosh, the Slavs' Mother Earth, who spins the thread of life.  

I believe in animism: that not just humans, but everything on this planet, is a person who deserves respect. I believe that none of these persons is more special than the other -- which is to say that humanity has no special, elevated place on this earth. Our job is to learn to coexist, not just with each other but also with animals, with plants, with the air and the water, and yes, even with the rocks. 

I believe that magic is a thing, and that it works. I've seen it work.

I believe that to believe in Hell is to live in fear. I look forward to going to the Summerlands when I die, and I know I don't have to believe a specific thing or live in a particular way to get there -- the Summerlands are open to all.

I'm happy with this path. It feels right to me. It makes my life richer. It makes it make sense.

If you've chosen a different path and you're happy with it, that's awesome. I would suggest, though, that you ask yourself how you found your path. If it's simply a wholesale rejection of the path you grew up following, then consider whether your former path is still controlling you. If that's your jam, then great. If not -- well. Maybe shop around for one that has no relation at all to the one you rejected.

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The legislative session ended at noon on Thursday -- right on time. I've been cocooning since then (other than a trip to the grocery store), readjusting to being retired, and I'm just about ready to rejoin the world. 

So I'm taking a break from the blog next week. See you back here in two weeks. Might have some new  pictures for you then.

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These moments of bloggy pathfinding have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get vaxxed!

Making the mundane sacred.

I usually agree with John Beckett, the Druid priest who blogs over at Patheos Pagan. But I had a problem with today's post from the get-go.

His post is in response to a question he received on a post-class survey: "How can we learn to see mundane activities through a sacred lens?" His TL;DR response: we can't. Because as soon as we consider the mundane sacred, the sacred necessarily becomes mundane.

That's going to be news to the members of certain Native American tribes, not to mention monks of various religious orders. 

It's easy, I think, for most of us to see how Catholic monks would consider day-to-day activities as sacred. They've pledged their lives in service of their Lord, so anything they do that helps the community thrive becomes a sacred duty -- even peeling potatoes and scrubbing floors. While Buddhist monks don't pledge their lives to a deity, they do separate themselves from the world in order to achieve enlightenment. Buddhists employ various types of meditation to reach this state, and enlightenment can strike any time -- even, say, when doing the dishes. 

Quasarphotos | Deposit Photos

As for Native Americans, the first thing I thought of was the Navajo Beauty Way. For the Navajo, as I understand it, beauty isn't just superficial; it's a way of life. It's living in balance with the land, with other people (including non-human people), and with their spirits. If a Navajo has somehow fallen away from the Beauty Way, whether by their own actions or through no fault of their own, rituals may be done to set them on the right path again.

I am broadly generalizing here. But the common denominator, as I see it, is in the attitude you employ as you go about your day. You don't have to be a monk or a Navajo to attain this, either: If you have settled on what you consider to be your moral imperatives, and you build your life around them, then everything you do that gets you to the goal of living your truth could be considered sacred. In other words, it's not the stuff around you that's sacred, although depending on how you believe it all got here, it could be; the important thing is how you interact with it.

Let's say you're a lawyer. What they teach you in law school is that everybody -- and I mean everybody -- is entitled to representation before the law. If that's your moral imperative, then you theoretically would have no qualms about representing a defendant who has admitted to killing multiple people in the most gruesome manner possible. Sure, your client is a horrible human being, but they deserve -- they must have -- a lawyer who will advocate for them before a judge and jury, and even plead for mercy.

That's one sort of moral imperative. But what if you're a lawyer whose moral imperative is that killing is wrong? Or what if you've been okay with representing killers for a while now, but something has changed? Maybe your latest client shot up a school, and you have kids who are the same age as the victims. (Full disclosure: I soured on being a news reporter when I had to cover a story about a scumbag who killed his three-year-old stepson because he wouldn't eat Thanksgiving dinner. He buried the boy's body in a truck toolbox in the Great Dismal Swamp. My daughters were toddlers at the time.) Now you have a moral dilemma. How do you resolve it? Do you move into another field? Or do you keep doing your job, even as you feel yourself falling farther and farther away from what the Navajo call the Beauty Way?

In The Pipe Woman Chronicles, Naomi Witherspoon resolves a similar dilemma by becoming a mediator. And then she meets a Lakota goddess and a hot Ute shapeshifter, but I digress. 

And I guess I've digressed pretty far from the point of this post, which is this: I believe that if you're working toward living an ethical life -- in other words, living up to your own standards of morality -- then every step you take toward that goal can be considered sacred. Even doing the dishes.

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These moments of moral blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Do the right thing: Mask up, maintain your social distance, and above all, get vaxxed!

It's full of stars.

yabadene belkacem | CC0 | Pixabay

I'm in taking an online course related to Paganism. It's being taught by John Beckett, a Druid priest who blogs on the Patheos Pagan channel. The class is called "Building a New Myth: Scientific, Animist, and Polytheist Foundations for the Future."

Come back here! It's not as weird as it sounds!

Did you notice the word "scientific" in there? You may be surprised to learn that unlike followers of certain other religions, Pagans have no trouble with science. Paganism is, after all, a nature religion (broadly speaking), and science defines -- or attempts to define -- things that happen in the natural world. We're good with that. Honest.

What we don't have, unlike those other religions, is a book of mythology that everyone adheres to. And here I'm using mythology not in the popular sense of myths being lies, but in the formal sense of myths being stories that underpin a religious or cultural tradition. Pagans don't have a shared mythology. Celtic Reconstructionists have Irish myths and the Mabinogion, Asatruar have the Eddas, and so on -- but we don't have one single book that tells us how to live. So the intent of the course I'm taking is to help each of us develop our own personal mythos, which we can then use as a touchstone for ethical behavior.

With me so far? Okay. So last week's module was about astronomy, among other things. For homework, we were encouraged to find an app that uses a phone's camera to pick out stars in the sky, even if they're not visible, and then go outside, observe the sky for a little while, and write our impressions of the experience. I really liked what I wrote, so I'm sharing an edited version with you.

La Casa Cantwell is in a very urban area. (Feel free to refer to my Facebook post earlier today of photos of our neighborhood.) Light pollution here is so bad that we regularly play the "Is that a star or an airplane?" game. About the only heavenly body we can reliably see is the moon. So the phone app was a revelation -- all those stars we can't see from here! No wonder modern humans tend to think of ourselves as the only thing that matters in the universe; we look up and see a vast blankness where the ancients saw billions of stars.

Although maybe it's not just modern folks. People in Galileo's time didn't have any problem believing themselves the center of the universe either, despite their lack of light pollution. Of course, they didn't know -- or didn't believe, or couldn't imagine -- that each star they saw was a sun, maybe with orbiting planets that were home to other forms of life.

Which brings me back to our modern world, in which we can imagine such a thing, but still we have trouble wrapping our brains around the vastness of space. Science posits that the universe began in a Big Bang, and we are still rushing away from that explosion. But what was before the Big Bang? Where did the matter that exploded -- the stuff in that infinitely dense point -- come from? What if the matter that makes up our universe has always existed?

"What's at the edge of our galaxy?" is a similar question. Does our galaxy have an edge? What is it like? Is it impenetrable or permeable? And if there is in fact an edge or boundary, what's on the other side? More galaxy? ("Moar galaxieeeee!") Or maybe -- shudder -- nothing at all? Or maybe -- bigger shudder -- it has always been here and will always be here.

Humans are linear thinkers, and our science demands a beginning point and an end point. Some of those other religions also require a beginning point and an end point. I'm thinking of one in particular, where God begins the world two different ways in Genesis (look it up) and ends it with an apocalypse in Revelations.

Modern Pagans haven't bothered with developing creation myths like the ones in Genesis. I think that's because our concept of time is different. We think of it as not linear, but as a wheel that keeps turning. We're okay with believing that the stuff of our universe was always here.

But back to science: It ain't perfect. Let's face it, the scientific method is useless for determining how the universe began. We cannot create an experiment to replicate the Big Bang -- we simply don't know enough about the variables that existed then. And what if the Big Bang is followed by a Big Squish, in which the universe snaps back like a rubber band to that singular point?

We don't know. Nobody knows. We're all just guessing.

So we make up stories about how it all went down. Or we write a poem. Or we create a myth. When faced with unanswerable questions, it's the best we can do.

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These moments of bloggy wonder have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

The Wheel keeps turning.

I'm feeling pretty good about our holiday preparations here at La Casa Cantwell. The tree is up and decorated, as I mentioned last week; the shopping is done; and most of the baking is done. I have one more batch of cookies to make tonight, and a gluten-free option or two later this week. And I still have to wrap all the gifts. But I feel confident I'll have everything done by Yule, which this year is Saturday the 21st in North America.

What a contrast to the current drama just up the road in DC. In case you've been living under a rock, the House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on two articles of impeachment against President Trump this coming week. The vote is scheduled for Wednesday, and it's a foregone conclusion that the House will impeach Trump. Then the drama moves to the Senate, which is obliged to hold a trial on the impeachment articles. A couple of the folks in charge -- namely Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senator Lindsey Graham -- have already made it clear they expect to speed through a sort-of trial and vote to exonerate the president.

This is not a political blog, so I won't express my opinion on any of that here. (I already spend more than enough time posting about politics on Facebook.) But I expect you guys have gathered my opinion of President Trump anyway. And like a lot of other liberals and progressives, I find it hard, some days, to be upbeat about it all. Some of my friends are wondering why the House is bothering to impeach Trump when the Senate is going to clear him anyway, thereby giving him carte blanche to keep doing what he's doing. It's easy to fall into a pit of despair, especially since the House vote is coming just after Britain voted to keep their Conservative Party in power, which means Brexit will happen now for sure.

It's easy -- and profoundly depressing -- to agree with Medium blogger Umair Haque, whose post last week was titled, This is How a Society Dies. He compares the death spiral of the Soviet Union to what's happening today in the United States and Britain, and suggests that we may never recover.

When the Soviet Union fell apart, it did seem to happen overnight. One day the USSR was the Red Menace, the Communist global superpower that could take us down as soon as look at us; the next, they were a third-world country with nuclear weapons, and we, the United States, were the lone global superpower left standing.

But in the years since then, income inequality has hollowed out our middle class, and our poor never had a chance. About a year and a half ago, the United Nations Human Rights Council declared the United States has the highest income inequality in the Western world. Forty million Americans live in abject or extreme poverty, according to the UNHRC report, and 40% of us couldn't come up with $400 to cover an unexpected expense.

We're the only developed nation without universal healthcare, and yet any proposal from the left to rectify that insanity is met with criticism from the center and the right about how it's too expensive and anyway it doesn't work as well as those deluded lefties would have you believe. Never mind that it was the health insurance industry that wrote the arguments against universal healthcare.

So is the United States just a third-world nation with nuclear weapons? Some days I wonder. Some days it feels like the smartest thing to do would be to escape -- to emigrate to some other country, maybe somewhere sunny, with a stable government and decent healthcare, and hunker down 'til it's all over.

I brought up Yule for a reason. John Beckett wrote a lovely column this weekend about the solstice being the real reason for the season. People on Earth have been celebrating the turning of the seasons since the Earth itself began turning. In the Northern Hemisphere, the days have been getting shorter since June. In North America, this coming Saturday will be the culmination: the winter solstice. The longest night. In ancient times, people would sing, pray, and light bonfires and candles to beseech the sun to return.

And it always does. The Earth turns, and the days begin getting longer again. The singing and the candles don't have anything to do with it -- time turns, and the Earth turns, and the sun returns.

A lot of Pagans rely on the Wheel of the Year for their spiritual observances, but I think time is really more of a spiral. This coming spring will and won't be like last spring. Summer 2020 will be like all the other summers we've ever had, and yet it will be its own thing.

Maybe Trump will still be president then and maybe he won't. When President Nixon faced impeachment, the smart money was on his removal from office -- until he quit. Maybe Trump's impeachment will be like that: he won't leave office until he does, abruptly. And he'll probably let us all know by tweet.

Bernie Sanders tweeted this last week:

At this moment in our history despair is not an option. I've got four kids and seven grandchildren. I can't give up. You can't give up.

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) December 9, 2019

It's far from the first time he's said it. But it rings especially true for me, in this season, when the Earth is turning and the sun will soon be returning. We can run, or we can stay and do what we can to make things better. I know which one feels right to me.

And now if you'll excuse me, I have one more batch of cookies to make tonight and they're not going to make themselves.

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These moments of Earth-turning blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

On forgiveness.

I'm just going to come right out and say it: I do not get this idea that we should all forgive the people who have wronged us.

Before I go any further, I guess I should remind y'all that my thoughts -- on this topic as well as on many others -- do not mirror the traditional Judeo-Christian mindset. I'm Pagan. Pagans don't believe in original sin, and we don't believe we have inherently fallen short of perfection. Or rather, we know we're not perfect -- we're all human, and humans aren't perfect. But we don't feel the need to beat ourselves up over it.

John Beckett, who blogs at Patheos Pagan, wrote a post this week about what redemption means to Pagans. He covers the points above (better than I could, to be honest), and goes on to talk about the Pagan concept of repentance and forgiveness. Basically, repentance involves not just apologizing, but being sincere about it -- no excuses and no qualifiers. You need to acknowledge that you've hurt the other person, whether intentionally or not, and that you're sorry for what you did. And then you need to fix it, to the extent possible. That's how you redeem yourself. That's how you regain your honor.

By the same token, if you've hurt someone, that person does not owe you forgiveness. They may choose to forgive you or they may not. They may never get over being hurt. And they don't have to forgive you, no matter how desperately you need it or how much you think you deserve it.

Contrast that with the popular idea that we should all forgive those who have transgressed against us, regardless of whether the transgressor is sorry, or has apologized, or intends to ever try to make it right. Refusing to forgive, we're told, cedes real estate in our heads to this person. We'd feel better, we're told, if we just let it go. We don't have to forget the transgression, but we do need to forgive the person who committed it. The transgressor doesn't even need to know what we're going through; for example, we can write them a letter and not send it.

I'm sorry, but what the actual fuck? How does this solve anything?

I agree that holding a grudge is unhealthy. Anger held for too long turns to bitterness, and bitterness will poison your outlook on life. And by the same token, seeking revenge is an exercise in stupidity.

But if some creep has hurt you, you're supposed to give him a pass? And that will make you feel better? How does that work, exactly?

I suspect this is resonating with me because of all the women, and some men, who have been coming forward lately to say they were sexually harassed and/or abused by powerful men. As some of you know, I've spent my life dealing with the fallout from emotional and verbal abuse at the hands of a family member. Should we all just forgive our abusers? Just to, you know, regain that real estate in our brains? How has that worked out for women in general over the past several centuries?

The rest of y'all can go on forgiving willy-nilly if you want. As for me, I forgive only the people who deserve it. That's how I keep my honor.

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These moments of honorable blogginess havve been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.