On demons and rattlesnakes and other things best left alone.

I took another unscheduled week off from the blog last week. (Did ya miss me?) I had a friend visiting for the week, so things last weekend were a little hectic.

It's too bad, too, because I had a topic all ready to go and everything. But it might even be better for this week, since today is the fall equinox in the Northern Hemisphere -- some Pagans call it Mabon -- which means we're progressing into the dark half of the year. Our attention may be turning not just to pumpkin spice everything, but toward ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night. Like, say, demons.

blueringmedia | Deposit Photos

Why am I using a graphic of a rattlesnake when I just said demons, you ask? I'm getting to that. 

My go-to Druid priest, John Beckett, recently wrote a post on Patheos about the Pagan view of demons. You can read his post here, but basically he says that demons exist in many cultures and religions around the world, not just in Christianity, and they take on different roles in other cultures and other religions than they do here in the West. But in general, he says, "demons are spiritual persons who are generally antagonistic toward humans." He says it's possible to do magical work with them, but it's best to do it from a place of mutual respect. Starting off, as many old texts advise, by puffing yourself up as a "mighty sorceror" and demanding that a demon appear and do your bidding is probably not going to end well for you.

I mean, think about it. Say you're a spiritual person, kinda crabby in general and an introvert anyway, especially when it comes to interacting with humanity, and some human gets hold of your name and insists that you appear before them and do whatever they want you to do. I sure wouldn't be inclined to play nice with the idiot. Would you?

This put me in mind of the way sane humans ought to treat rattlesnakes and other critters that can hurt us: treat them with respect, and don't rile them up if you can help it.

After all, snakes aren't evil. A rattlesnake in your path is just a snake doing its snake thing. Leave it alone, and you'll be fine. Same holds true for demons.

But Christianity has scared us into worrying about demons -- specifically, about being possessed by one. (Not to get political, but MAGA world has been freaking out, ever since Vice President Harris won the Democratic nomination for president, over the idea that she is a demon whose election would usher in the Apocalypse.) Beckett says the number of cases of actual demonic possession is pretty small historically, and we're talking centuries here. So the odds are that if someone is calling someone else a demon, they're just trying to scare you.

To sum up the Pagan view of demons: Yes, they exist. Yes, you can make one mad enough to give you trouble. But no, they're not going to possess you for funsies. Give them a lot of respect and a wide berth, and you'll be fine. Just as you would a rattlesnake.

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Fair warning: I may end up taking next weekend off from the blog, too. We'll see how it goes. I just don't want anybody to think the demons got me if I don't do a post next Sunday.

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These moments of reassuring blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Check your voter registration here! I just did!

Paganism as punching bag.

vova130555@gmail.com | Deposit Photos

One of the disadvantages of blogging only on Sundays is that if something I'm dying to comment on happens on a Monday, my choices are few. I could: break tradition and post early; yell about it on Facebook; or save it for the following Sunday's post, when the news has become kinda old and stale. 

This week was a prime example. On Monday -- Christmas Day! -- The Atlantic dropped an outrageously ignorant article by David Wolpe entitled "The Return of the Pagans". This opinion piece so angered thought leaders in the Pagan movement that most suggested linking to the free version reposted by MSN, to avoid giving it any more traffic (and The Atlantic any more revenue from clicks) than it deserves. So my link above leads to that free version on MSN.

Wolpe is the Max Webb Chief Rabbi Emeritus of Sinai Temple, a visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, and a columnist for New York Jewish Week and the Jerusalem Post. Newsweek has called him the most influential rabbi in America. He may be an expert on Judaism, but it's clear he's no scholar of religion in general, other than his own and perhaps Christianity. If he were a religious scholar, he would have known better than to conflate Pagan beliefs with the worship of wealth and idols like Elon Musk and Donald Trump. If he were a religious scholar, he would have known better than to write such howlers as, "Most ancient pagan belief systems were built around ritual and magic, coercive practices intended to achieve a beneficial result," without acknowledging that monotheism is also built around ritual and magic -- and that Christianity in particular, with its drive to proselytize and convert everyone everywhere, partakes of far more "coercive practices" than any Pagan -- or pagan -- belief system ever has. 

There's a big advantage for me to waiting until today to comment on Wolpe's article: I'm batting cleanup, if you will. A number of those thought leaders in Paganism have already published rebuttals. Sabina Magliocco, chair of the Program in the Study of Religion at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, posted on Facebook her letter to the editor of the magazine. She covers a number of points I was going to get to, chief among them this: "Wolpe distorts the fact that non-monotheistic and Indigenous religions tend to see divinity as immanent as well as transcendent. In other words, all living beings hold a spark of the divine; the gods are manifest in each of us. This idea is intended to inspire respect for all life forms. Indigenous religions, in fact, place primacy not on the individual, as he asserts, but on relationality and community, broadly defined to include other-than-human persons."

Magliocco would also like to inform Wolpe that paganism is not relegated to the misty past; there are several million Pagans in North America today, and a whole lot of us believe things that put us closer to Indigenous belief, particularly the part about immanent deity, than the strawman Wolpe has concocted and dubbed "pagan".

Others who have made valuable contributions to the discussion (so I don't have to!) include Manny Moreno at The Wild Hunt; Jason Mankey on Raise the Horns at Patheos Pagan; John Halstead on Medium; and Angelo Nasios on Hearth of Hellenism at Substack (who is not Pagan but whose area of expertise is Hellenism). Several of them point out that Wolpe is not actually referencing today's Pagans in his piece; instead, he's using the folkloric concept of ancient pagans that's popular with monotheistic apologists when they want to elevate their own belief systems and prove that their religion is so much better than what went before. Except of course that that romantic view of pagan bumpkins whose lives were brutish, nasty, and short is a myth, at least as far as philosophy is concerned (see the Greeks).

Too, Wolpe falls into the trap of Western hubris that insists that the evolution of civilization -- including religion and philosophy -- is more or less a straight line, with each step an improvement. These folks swear that hunter-gatherers died out when farming took hold, that the Industrial Revolution made everyone's lives better by getting workers off the farm and into factories, and so on. Never mind that the archeological record doesn't bear out the first, and the economic and ecological evidence right before our eyes puts paid to the second. What's more, Indigenous thinkers have been criticizing the Western penchant for this feel-good bullshit for hundreds of years (see The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow, which I included on my reading list a while back).

The longer the week went on and the more I thought about Wolpe's article, the more it seemed familiar. Then it hit me. Back in March, The Atlantic posted a similar piece, except that it was by a Christian apologist -- Timothy Keller, the pastor of a Presbyterian church in Manhattan. I even blogged about it at the time. Now, Keller's post isn't exactly the same as Wolpe's, but they do rhyme. Both authors believe that American society is going downhill; both blame it on the emphasis in popular culture on individualism; and both believe the solution is for everybody to turn back to some flavor of monotheism (in Keller's case, his).

So my response to Wolpe is the same as was my response to Keller back in March: The solution to society's ills won't be found in monotheism until you guys can acknowledge how and why your belief systems have alienated so many people. Once you've done that, come on back and we'll chat.* But in the meantime, quit punching "pagan" strawmen to make yourselves feel better.

And to The Atlantic: How about equal time for polytheists?

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*A chat with Wolpe won't be happening any time soon. He says he didn't mean to insult modern Pagans (as if that makes it any better) and is declining requests for interfaith dialogue. 

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And with that, we close out 2023. Here's hoping for peace and sanity for all of us in the new year.

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These moments of punchy blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy New Year! Imbibe responsibly! Stay safe!

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!

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.

What's a Pagan, anyhow?

I spent the day at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, which is always a good time. As usual, one of the first booths I visited was the one operated by Dancing Pig Pottery. The owner is a local potter who makes items popular with the RennFest and Pagan crowd. We've bought several of her pieces over the years, including serving bowls with the eight sabbats of the Pagan Wheel of the Year around the rim. Here's one of mine.

Copyright Lynne Cantwell 2019

While I was there today, I overheard one woman ask her friend, "What's that word?" She was pointing to the word Samhain on one of the bowls. Clearly the friend had no idea, so I piped up and told her. 

Then she asked, "What does it mean?" So I stumbled through a definition. I told her it was the name of the Celtic holiday that corresponds to Halloween. The women nodded politely and went their way. And I went mine, knowing that I hadn't done justice to the term. Because Samhain is the Irish word adopted by Pagans -- but not all Pagans -- as the name for the sabbat (feast day or holiday) that falls at the end of October. 

It's the "not all Pagans" part that makes things difficult. 

Someone asked me several weeks ago to explain the difference between, say, Paganism and Wicca. Greater mortals than I have tried to explain the Pagan movement and have walked away humbled. But let me take a whack at it.

Okay. So Paganism or Neopaganism is the big-tent name for a group of religions that...well, that don't have a whole lot in common, to be honest. Most of them are polytheistic. Some used to claim they were direct descendents of ancient little-p pagan religions that were stamped out across Europe by Christianity, but that idea has been debunked. Many are considered to be nature religions, believing the Earth and everything on it to be sacred and basing their holidays on the seasonal turns of the calendar -- hence, the Wheel of the Year. But there's no common liturgy and no single god or pantheon that every Pagan worships. 

The vast majority of folks come into Paganism through Wicca, mainly because it's the best known. Thanks to Halloween and Hollywood, people can get their minds around the concept of a witch pretty easily. But there are denominations, if you will, within Wicca. Some work with the Great Goddess, some with the Goddess and the Horned God, some with the Roman goddess Diana, and so on. Regardless, they all call themselves Wiccans and together they constitute the biggest group under the big tent of Paganism. Their commonality is belief in a Mother Goddess and that all of nature is sacred. (I'm a little nervous about making that declaration. Somebody's bound to come along and tell me about a Wiccan coven that doesn't worship any deity at all.)

Another is Druidry, which draws its inspiration and many of its beliefs from the priestly caste in ancient Celtic society. There are a number of Druidic organizations, including the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, founded in the UK in 1964; and Ár nDraíocht Féin or ADF, founded in the US in 1983. If any Pagan group ever succeeds in making the sort of Pagan religion that comes complete with brick-and-mortar buildings and a liturgy, my money is on the Druids.

A third is heathenry, or Germanic Paganism, which uses the Norse myths as a framework for its belief system. A host of smaller groups fall under this heading, including Asatru in North America. Some so-called heathen groups have been accused of being fronts for white supremacists, but certainly not all heathens are.

Wikipedia lists a number of smaller divisions within the big tent: eco-Pagans, who are often involved in Earth activism; the New Age folks, who may or may not be polytheistic; Reconstructionists, who try to make their worship as close to that of their pagan ancestors as possible (leaving out human sacrifice and other grisly bits); and so on. I'd say a lot of folks practice within these smaller groups as well as in one or more of the bigger ones. The Wikipedia article also mentions CUUPS, a group within the Unitarian Universalist Church that welcomes Pagans of all sorts.

And then there are eclectic Pagans -- the fence-sitters like me. Our beliefs don't align closely with any one group. Instead, eclectic Pagans dip in and out of several traditions, taking ideas that resonate with them and leaving the rest.

So that's how it works, kind of. I could also mention that Wicca was named the fastest-growing religion in America* in 2014, with an estimated 1.5 million "members" (which scares the pants off some folks). Or we could talk about why people are turning away from Christianity to Paganism (and to atheism, for that matter). But let's leave it here for now. Let me know if you have questions.

*The fastest-growing religion in the world is Islam. It's also the second-largest religion in the world, after Christianity.

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These moments of eclectic Pagan blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell, who puts a lot of Pagan gods and goddesses in her novels for some reason.

What White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman believes.

First, a little news:

• The cover for Seized is in the Cover Showcase this week at the Indie Exchange. That's pretty darned exciting for somebody who got a C in art in eighth grade....
• I'll be participating in the Orangeberry Summer Splash tour in August, promoting Fissured: Book Two of the Pipe Woman Chronicles.  I'll post locations and dates on the Tour Dates tab shortly. 
• Tentative publication date for Fissured has moved up!  It's now August 18th.  To that end, I've finished what I hope will be the penultimate editing pass on it, and sent it to my editor [waves to Suzu!].

Hokay then, on to the main subject of this week's post.

I'm starting to see a little push-back on the religious topics in Seized -- specifically, on White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman's speech to Naomi during the sweat lodge ceremony at the beginning of the book. This is heartening to me, in a way -- it means the book's getting noticed.  Any publicity is good publicity, right? ;)

Also, I'm not surprised.  I knew even before I started Seized that it wasn't going to be for everyone.  After all, the goddess says some pretty inflammatory things to Naomi about the Christian God, including this egregious bit:

“This day,” she continued, “is a new start for all the peoples who live on Grandmother Earth.  For too long, this world has been in the grip of an angry God whose only goal is to win as many followers as possible.  He has convinced His followers that He knows everything and controls everything.  He condemns His fellow Gods who require Their followers to sacrifice for Them – yet He sacrificed His own Son, and then twisted the story to make it appear as if it were an honor.  He calls Us demons, and worse.”  She paused, her visage twisted.  “His rule has been marked by jealousy and hatred.  By telling His followers they are His chosen people, He has led them to believe that they are better than all the rest of His Creation, and so they have raped Grandmother Earth and fouled Grandfather Sky, and treated their fellow beings with contempt.  By telling His followers that they were flawed from the start, He has instilled in them self-hatred and guilt.  And yet,” she spat, “He says He loves them.”

Many Christians draw a great deal of comfort from God's love, and from His omnipotence.  They are highly uncomfortable with the notion that God may not be infallible (even sometimes as they're questioning, for example, why a loved one had to die).  So I can see why this passage would turn those people off.

But the speaker here is White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman -- a goddess who has seen God's followers subject Her people to numerous indignities, including suppression of their worship of Her.  Why wouldn't She be angry about that?  And why would She be inclined to accept God's word as Truth?  Surely She would have a different viewpoint.

Some Christians might be upset that Naomi doesn't immediately denounce White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman and reject Her gift out of hand.  I guess she could have. But that would be a very different story than the one I'm telling.  And it wouldn't be in character for Naomi, either.  I think she's like a lot of kinda-sorta Christians -- the ones who fill the pews on Christmas and Easter and don't really think much about religion in between.  She sees what she considers some flaws in Christian theology, but she still considers herself a believer in Christ.  Before the series is over, she's going to have to confront that paradox in several different ways: she's going to have to broker an agreement between God and the pagan deities, and she's also going to have to resolve the discrepancies in her own beliefs.  I think that's a much more interesting idea to explore than "God is good and Evil's gonna get its due."

Do I personally agree with White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman?  Not entirely.  I think She's off-base, for instance, in her view of Jesus' life, death and resurrection.  But I do think humanity has done a lot of horrible things, to the earth and to each other, in the name of God.  I wouldn't mind seeing Him taken to task for letting those things happen.  And I bet there are plenty of  Christians (and Jews, Muslims, etc.) out there who would agree with me.

Have a great week, everyone.
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I'm Lynne Cantwell, and I approve this blog post.

Summer is icumen in.

GUENEVERE:
Tra la! It's May!
The lusty month of May!
That lovely month when ev'ryone goes
Blissfully astray.
Tra la! It's here!
That shocking time of year
When tons of wicked little thoughts
Merrily appear!
It's May! It's May!
That gorgeous holiday
When ev'ry maiden prays that her lad
Will be a cad!
It's mad! It's gay!
A libelous display!
Those dreary vows that ev'ryone takes,
Ev'ryone breaks.
Ev'ryone makes divine mistakes
The lusty month of May!

-- from the musical "Camelot"

I know y'all are going to think that I'm rushing the seasons here, but honest to goodness, the ancient folks in the British Isles considered May 1st -- also known as Beltane -- to be the first day of summer.  (That's why the summer solstice is also known as Midsummer's Day -- it's halfway between Beltane and Lughnasa, the first harvest, which is August 1st or 2nd.)

There are many charming customs associated with Beltane -- among them, dancing around a Maypole, burning a wicker man (with people inside, if Julius Caesar is to be believed) to symbolize the end of winter, weaving flower garlands, driving the livestock between two bonfires before taking them out to summer pastures, washing one's face with the dew (it's supposed to make you beautiful), and/or sneaking off with a special someone for some afternoon delight.

I can't help you with most of those, sorry.  But I did find directions here for how to make your own tabletop Maypole.  I modified the directions a little bit for mine because I am useless with a glue gun: I used a thinner dowel and drilled a hole in the wooden base, then used carpenter's glue to set the dowel in the hole. Then I used a nail to anchor the ribbons to the top of the pole, and put a candle ring at the base.

One other thing I can help you with is some free summer reading.  As I posted a couple of days ago, Seized and "Lulie" are both free at Amazon starting today and through Tuesday.  Enjoy, and happy Beltane.

Chickies, bunnies, and the end of time.

Seriously?  Nobody noticed that I snuck the cover for the new book into the slide show widget to the left?  Maybe I am talking to myself here....  ;)

I'm giving you a chance to redeem yourselves.  This here is the cover (isn't it awesome?) of the book that's coming out on Tuesday.  Yes, on the first day of spring.  It's my first-ever urban fantasy, and the first in a series of what will either be four or five books.  So I like the idea of releasing it on the spring equinox, which Neopagans call Ostara.

The spring equinox never coincides with Easter.  That's by design. The Council of Nicea decided in 325 C.E. that Easter would always fall on the first Sunday following the Paschal (Passover), or Ecclesiastical, full moon.  The Paschal full moon is the first one following March 20th (which was the date of the spring equinox in 325 C.E.).  The idea was to make sure that Easter always followed Passover on the church calendar, because Jesus' death and resurrection occurred after Passover.  But because the church fathers were estimating full moon dates, the Ecclesiastical date is sometimes a day or two off from the actual full moon.  Which is why, in some years, Easter is nearly at the end of April.  (Thanks to About.com for this information.)

Luckily for Neopagans, our holidays don't vary nearly that much.  We always observe Ostara on the spring equinox -- which, this year, is 1:14 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Tuesday, March 20. 

An Ostara observance looks a lot like your typical Easter observance.  We have the chicks and bunnies, and the eggs dyed pastel colors. That's because, just like the Christmas tree and the Yule log, chicks and bunnies started out as pagan symbols of the season and were co-opted (maybe tolerated is a better word) by the Church for its celebration of Christ's resurrection.  In any case, the symbolism hasn't changed.  At base, both Easter and Ostara are about new beginnings and fresh starts, about coming out of difficult times and into the light and warmth.

Maybe I should warn you, though, that Seized is not about light and warmth.  It's set at the winter solstice 2012, which, you may remember, is the date when the Mayan calendar (or one of them, anyway) is supposed to end.  Given that this is the first of four or five books, you might surmise that I'm not predicting the end of the world on that day.  And you would be right.  But in the world of this series, change is certainly coming....

Anyway, if all goes as planned, Seized will be available for the Kindle on Tuesday.  If you don't have a Kindle, all is not lost -- Amazon has free Kindle software available for many platforms, including PCs and smartphones.  (I've been reading Kindle books on my iPhone.  It's not as bad as it sounds.  No, really!)  I'll pull together a paperback version, too, if there's enough interest -- let me know. 

Happy spring!

Imbolc: Twofer #2.

February 2nd is Imbolc, one of the cross-quarter days on the Neopagan calendar.  Imbolc honors Brighid, who happens to be one of my matron deities.  (Readers with a sharp eye might spot her in a supporting role in SwanSong.  Hint: one of her other names is Brid.)

You probably associate February 2nd with a different holiday -- one involving either a rodent snatched from his warm Pennsylvania burrow amidst great fanfare, or Bill Murray, or both.  At one level, Imbolc and Groundhog Day have something in common:  both observances are pegged to the midpoint of winter.  Twelve weeks separate the start of winter at Yule (which was December 22nd on the East Coast of the US in 2011) and the start of spring at Ostara (which, this year, is March 20th).  Halfway between the two dates, give or take a day, is February 2nd. 

So that business about how, if the groundhog sees his shadow, we're in for six more weeks of winter?  Hate to break it to you, but we get six more weeks of winter either way.

But Imbolc has a deeper meaning for Neopagans.  In the British Isles, it's about the time when livestock began lactating in anticipation of the birthing season.  So it's confirmation from the natural world that winter is half over and spring is on the way.  It's also about the time when the sun begins coming up earlier, even though daylight has been lengthening in the afternoon for several weeks.  (In December, the Capital Weather Gang posted a terrific piece about why that's so.  I don't think I posted the link at Yule -- but even if I did, it's worth revisiting now that the days are getting longer, if only to see how far we've come!)

So what's the connection between Imbolc and Brighid?  For starters, she is honored as a goddess of hearth and home, and as a healer, so childbirth comes under her purview.  Given Imbolc's connection to lactation, you can see how that makes sense. 

But the hearth also provides heat and light, and Brighid is a goddess of fire, connecting her to the returning light of the sun.  For centuries, priestesses tended a perpetual flame at Brighid's shrine in Kildare, in Ireland.  When Christianity took hold, responsibility for tending the flame fell to Catholic nuns until Henry VIII suppressed the monastery system in the 1600s and the flame went out.  But in 1993, it was rekindled in Kildare.  And it is tended all over the world in the traditional twenty-day rotation:  nineteen people each take a day, and on the 20th day, Brighid tends the flame herself.

But that's not all.  Brighid is also a patron of those who use the creative spark in their work -- of poets and bards, of shamans, and of smiths.  She is also a goddess of crossroads.  Because of all her talents, many Wiccans think of Brighid as a triple goddess, or as one face of a Celtic triple goddess.  But I believe that a single goddess is capable of doing it all.

This Imbolc, I will light a candle for Brighid, and I will make a new Brighid's Cross to hang above our door.  I'll thank her for her help and guidance this past year, and ask for her continued help in the year to come.

BlogTalk Radio stardom, and pausing for the holidays.

Business first:  Over on the left and a little bit below, you'll see a link to BlogTalk Radio.  That's because I was a guest on Book Bags and Cat Naps blogger Donna Brown's Christmas show tonight.  Donna runs Adopt an Indie, and because I'm participating in AAI in February, I was invited to be on her podcast tonight to talk about SwanSong.  To be honest, I was a little surprised at how much fun I had; after so many years of being in control of the interview, it was kind of refreshing to be on the other side of the microphone.

Anyway, if you missed the show when it aired live, you can click the link and download it.  It's a two-hour show and my segment is near the start of the second hour.

Oh, yeah, so about Adopt an Indie:  Sometime next month, the site for the February event will go live.  I encourage you to stop by and look through the books on offer, and if you're so inclined, offer to "adopt" one for the month of February.  Basically, you're pledging to read the book, and then either blog about it or submit questions for an author interview to be posted on Donna's blog.  It doesn't cost anything (even your "review copy" is free).  The idea is to promote indie publishing -- to help dispel the mistaken notion that all self-published authors are so awful that they couldn't get a publishing contract to save their lives.  This is the last AAI that Donna's going to do for awhile, so now's your chance.  I'll let you know when the site is live.

And yes, all this is happening at the same time as the craziness of the holidays.  We are deep into the cookie-baking and gift-wrapping frenzy here at La Casa Cantwell.  I spent yesterday bouncing back and forth between the kitchen and my bedroom, where I was wrapping gifts on the floor.  (Why the floor?  More room, of course.)  At one point, my daughter said it looked like the wrapping paper container had thrown up all over my room -- which was not a bad description.

Anyway, Yule:  This is the name Neopagans uses for the winter solstice.  In some traditions, the old God dies at Samhain (Halloween) and is reborn of the Goddess at Yule, the son and the sun returning on the same day.  Other traditions consider Yule the day the Holly King ends his six-month rule and turns things over to the Oak King for the next six months.  But all traditions see Yule as a day of rejoicing for the return of the Light.  It's also a day out of time -- a day to pause, after all the preparations, and mark the turning of the Wheel.

I wrote this Yule poem a couple of years ago.

Traffic lights
Tarmac lights
Headlights
Stop!

Stop
Just for a moment
And savor the season.

Tree lights.
Hearth fire light.
Moonlight on snow.

Put out the flame
At one end of your candle
And
just
Be.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Shine, greed, and some stuff about the NaNo novel.

I am bemused by the effrontery of various People in High Places these days.  First, of course, is the reaction of the One Percent to the 99 Percent protestors currently clogging up the parks across from their high-priced-real-estate-type offices.  I'll get to that in a minute.

In addition, though, there's the brouhaha over at the National Book Awards.  The nominating panel for the Young Adult books phoned in its nominations, some poor secretary at the other end of the phone wrote down Shine when he or she should have written down Chime, and nobody caught the mistake 'til the nominations were announced.  A couple of hours after the announcement, Chime was hastily added to the list of nominees.  But that made six nominees when there were only supposed to be five.  That must have bothered some folks, because then ensued a public back-and-forth over whether Shine deserved a nomination.

You can imagine how Lauren Myrakle, who wrote Shine, must have been feeling at this point.

But wait, it gets better.  The head of the National Book Foundation then called Ms. Myrakle and asked her to recuse herself and her book, "to preserve the integrity of the award," as if the award had any integrity left by then.  Keep in mind, if you please, that Shine is about a hate crime against a gay teenager -- kind of hot-button stuff.

It's all kind of amazingly unbelievable.  But everybody's got a blog these days, including a YA author named Libba Bray, who also happens to be married to Ms. Myrakle's agent.  She tells the whole story better than I ever could.  Here's a link to her post.  (The link will take you to Tamora Pierce's reply to the post.  Just scroll up the page.  And if you don't know who Tamora Pierce is, you should.  Her Alanna books ought to be required reading for tween girls.)

Okay, back to the 99 Percent.  I said I wasn't going to get into politics on this blog, but I don't think I'm going too far down that slippery slope by saying that the One Percent, and the money behind them, are going to do everything they can in coming weeks to undermine and fracture the coalition that Occupy Wall Street is building.  The ruling class really likes ruling, and it's not going to give up without a fight.

I flatter myself that I've been ahead of the curve on this 99 Percent thing.  I've felt for several years now that a lot of us have gotten the short end of the stick on the American Dream -- that we did what we were supposed to, and the system betrayed us.

Now don't worry, the novel I'm writing for NaNoWriMo won't be a polemic.  But one of the underlying issues in this book (assuming it pans out the way I'm planning!) will be greed:  what it is, how it gets out of hand, and whether there's a way to stop it.

For Christians, greed is a deadly sin; for Pagans, it's not that simple.  Our one and only moral rule is "if it harms no one, do what you will."  And I tend to object on general principles to the sort of black-and-white thinking that proclaims absolutes like "Greed is Evil!"  I'm coming to the conclusion (with the help of friends at kevinswatch.com) that greed is the extreme end of a continuum that starts with healthy emotions like ambition and desire.  Which means there ought to be a way to bring the greedy back to a normal, healthy emotional state without threatening them with burning in hell (especially since Pagans don't believe in hell).

I've yet to figure out how to do it in real life.  But I suspect that in the book, I'll have to resort to magic....

Mabon: the second harvest.

Tomorrow is Mabon -- the fall equinox and one of the eight sabbats, or holidays, in the Neopagan calendar.  It's one of the two days each year during which the hours of daylight equal the hours of darkness.  So Mabon (along with the spring equinox, which is called Ostara) is about balance.  Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the days have been getting shorter since June, but we've only begun to notice it over the past week or so. From here on out, though, it will become more obvious that we're heading toward the dark half of the year.  But for this one day, we can appreciate and celebrate both the dark and the light.

Mabon is also, in practical terms, a harvest holiday.  Gardens are almost all played out now: tomato plants are taking on that spindly, overgrown look; the window box full of flowers that looked kind of sparse in May and filled out so nicely in June (assuming you remembered to water it!) is crammed with greenery, most of the blooms spent (or maybe you've already replaced the old plants with mums).

In sum, Mabon is about both balance and the harvest.  So Pagan celebrations tend to center on a balanced evaluation of our own personal harvests.  We look back at where we were a year ago and how far we've come since then.  We think about our accomplishments, and we vow (once again!) to let the bad things in our lives go.

A year ago, I was preparing for my first World Fantasy Convention.  The Maidens' War had been out for just a few months -- the paperback was released just before I went to WFC -- and I was excited to be spending a weekend with some Watch friends and with other writers.  I got to be on a panel and everything!  It was so much fun!  And then I came home and went back to my real life, and realized how much more fulfilled I would be if I could go back to writing for a living.  It took me awhile to internalize that realization, as it was something of a paradigm shift. But looking back, WFC was really my first step onto the road I'm traveling now.  The road switchbacks up a mountain, and I'm only just now entering the foothills.  Climbing to the top won't be easy, and it won't be quick.  But it will be worth it.  I know this because every now and then, at a bend in the road, I get a glimpse of the view.

Blessed Mabon, and may your harvest be bountiful.