Working toward a world in balance.

So here's the topic I skipped over last week. Might be a little stream-of-consciousness, since I've run across a couple of other points this week that are still gelling in my brain, but I think it hangs together pretty well. Here we go. 

yuliaglam | Deposit Photos

(I know it looks like a scales-of-justice, but it's not in this instance; it's just a plain old set of scales.)

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I'm studying up on that time the Inquisition came to New Mexico and left, after blaming a Franciscan friar for all the commotion. I'm reading a book on the topic called The Witches of Abiquiu by Malcolm Ebright and Rick Hendricks. I'm still working through the first few chapters, which describe the setting and the cast of characters. But in the introduction, on page 7, there's an initial discussion about fray Juan José Toledo, the Franciscan father who was eventually blamed for the trouble. Fray Toledo was conversant with the Malleus Maleficarum, which I've heard of but never read; it's described here as a witch-hunting handbook. But this is the part that struck me (emphasis mine):

Missionaries in Central Mexico and beyond learned to depict the Devil and his realm of Hell in vivid detail to convince the Indians to repent their sins. The Indians, however, held a different worldview in which creative and destructive forces existed side by side in their gods. They had no deity like the Devil and no word for evil. The Nahuas of Central Mexico and the Incas of the Andes believed in concepts of order and disorder rather than good and evil. In the Andes, for instance, the serpent did not embody evil as it did for Christians, but rather a destructive force attempting to re-create balance when relations of equilibrium had not been maintained." (page 7)

In other words, the missionaries had to teach the Indians what (in the church's view) Good and Evil were. Pre-contact, these Indians were interested in living in balance. I believe this is similar to the Navajo philosophy of hózhó, which you may have heard referred to as the Beauty Way; the idea is to live in balance and harmony.

Then there's the relationship between the Slavic gods Perun and Veles, which I know I've talked about here before. Perun is the thunder god; Veles is the god of the underworld and also of the forest. They have an epic battle every spring. But they're not enemies; they are not the embodiment of Good and Evil. Their battle is aimed at bringing the world into balance.

I dunno, man. Does it sound like Good and Evil are absolute concepts to you? Because it doesn't sound like it to me. Too many cultures around the world operated under a different philosophy for centuries -- probably millennia -- before Christianity became dominant. But there's danger in giving all your power to a single deity: the message of that deity can be misinterpreted at best and abused at worst. So we get things like the fear of the devil. And the patriarchy. And the concepts of Good and Evil, which are then used to categorize and stereotype people (men Good, women Evil; white folks Good, folks of every other color Evil or at best misguided and must be "civilized"; our political side Good, their side Evil; and so on).

Yesterday I shared a Facebook post about Rebecca Solnit, a feminist author and activist who identified the phenomenon of mansplaining (although someone else named it). The post calls this her most devastating line: "Men invented standards they could meet and called them universal." In other words, in our culture, the patriarchy assigned Good to men and Evil to women. Rationality is a male quality, emotion a female one (and guess which one is prized and which is dismissed?). There's no continuum in this worldview, no shades of gray -- everything is either one or the other.

That prompted me to comment: "I begin to think that men in ancient times invented every dichotomy that permeates Western thought because they were uncomfortable with ambiguity."

Men can be emotional and women can be rational. Other cultures' philosophical systems can also be legitimate.

As for politics in this country? I hope that someday we can have conversations with the other side again, to find areas of agreement and work toward a better nation. But we have a lot of work ahead of us. I hope we're not doomed to fail.

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Oh, here's an update on my whiny post of a couple of weeks ago: 

• Session proofer training ended on Friday, and we all survived; we're having a meeting this week amongst the trainers to talk about how it went. 
• As for the condo board, it looks like nobody else wants to be secretary, so I may keep the job for another few years. I'll know more after the annual meeting next Saturday. 
• And as for the Pagan group, I decided that I don't need to make a decision right now. Kicking that can down the road, baby!

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

Why I hate the word "deserved".

As I mentioned last week, we're heading into our busy season at work. This year, it's coinciding with Trump's second inauguration and all the crazy-making stuff that we know will go with his return to power. During the first go-round, I was working in an office building two blocks from the White House; I am not the most empathic empath, but to me, the dysfunction and insanity seemed to seep from the White House and permeate the air around it. One of the reasons I decided to retire when I did, in mid 2020, was to escape that madness.

Now the madness is returning to power, and I'm hoping I'm far enough away from it that I won't feel that same ol' anxiety creeping back. 

Here on the blog, I don't plan to comment a lot on the day-to-day craziness. Instead, I'll probably write about peripheral or tangential stuff, which is what I did last time with my several posts on gaslighting. 

Today's post is in that vein. It's not about gaslighting; instead, it's about this idea that people get what they deserve.

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lightsource | Deposit Photos

I have two problems with the word "deserve". First, it's often deployed as a way to part you from your money. Marketers bait the hook with "You deserve this!" to convince you to spend money on things you don't need. I put it right up there with "pamper yourself" (which always brings to mind an image of swaddling one's bottom with a disposable diaper, but maybe that's just me). We can all think up justifications for impulse buys and impulsive actions: we had a hard day/week/month/lifetime, we need to complete the set, just one more won't hurt, whatever. But the shiny thing we're convincing ourselves that we need might have hidden within it a painful hook in the form of a price we won't want to pay.

That brings me to my second problem with the word "deserve", and it's wrapped up in being judgy.

Every morning for several years, I was sprinkling Penzey's Justice seasoning on my morning eggs and chanting three times, "Trump in prison." It wasn't much, as spells go, and the fact that I was asking for something that I had no direct effect on made it unlikely to succeed. But spellwork sometimes acts as a nudge to make a thing happen. And it seemed for a while like Trump going to prison really could happen; he was facing dozens of criminal counts, after all -- surely some of them would make it through to a conviction. 

Then one by one, each of the four cases bogged down in legal challenges. When Trump won re-election in November, I stopped casting my little daily spell; the chances that he'd face any sort of penalty for his actions, I figured, had pretty much evaporated.

But then, at the eleventh hour, Justice Juan Merchan of the New York Supreme Court came through. As a practical matter, he couldn't sentence Trump to jail time, house arrest, or even community service. But he made damn sure it was on the record: Trump was a convicted felon.

It's not the perp walk and orange jumpsuit I was hoping for, but I'll take what I can get. I'd given up on getting any results. Oh, me of little faith.

But did he get what he deserved? 

The temptation is to say no, right? He should have gone to prison. Others guilty of far less have done time. Our system of justice is skewed to favor those who can afford high-priced lawyers and who can buy, one way or another, their own Supreme Court justices. And so on.

But that way lies bitterness and anger. Is that any way to live? 

Or would it be healthier to acknowledge that the outcome was the best one possible, given the circumstances? Especially since I had no control about any of it from the beginning. I don't work for a prosecutor; I don't work for any court system; I wasn't on the jury. All I had was a jar of Justice seasoning.

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I've said before, although maybe not here on the blog, that I don't see any point in seeking revenge because people do themselves in by their own actions, and sometimes the Universe even lets you watch. That last part is kind of tongue-in-cheek; I've come to believe that "the Universe" is as much a construct of Western thought as Jehovah or the Force. I'm not a Buddhist, but my ideas may actually be closer to the Buddhist concept of karma, which has less to do with "you get what you deserve" and more to do with the results of the choices you've made in this life and the actions you've taken in response to those choices. Karma also speaks to the intent behind your actions. There's no Sky God of any sort judging you as Good or Evil; whatever happens is just the consequences of your intent.

Donald Trump is a convicted felon. He'll have to live with that for the rest of his life. 

Did he get what he deserved? I can't say. For one thing, it's not my place to judge. 

For another, his life isn't over yet. He won the blue ribbon he was after, but he's still on that hook.

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These moments of karmic blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Pace yourselves, guys -- it's gonna be a long four years. 

When your gut gives you a feeling, do you believe it?

So a friend who's an indie author posted a little story on his Facebook business page this week that gave me a *headdesk* moment. It was about a weird thing that actually happened to him several decades ago. The incident could have been a disaster, potentially with lives lost, except for some quick action on his part.

The *headdesk* moment? Here it is, with some edits: "Those of you who know me, know I am a cynic to all things supernatural. But, that day ... I heard a very calm voice say, "[Friend], get in the truck and drive it away ..." When I looked around, I was alone. To this day, I have no idea where that voice came from, but I heard it." Bottom line: He got in the truck and drove it away, a safe distance from a crowd of people. Shortly thereafter, the truck went up in flames.

Well, it's his page and he's trying to sell his books, so I restrained myself in my response. Basically I said I was glad he'd listened to the voice.

But this is my blog, and I don't have to restrain myself here. So here's what I wanted to say: "My gods, man! Even after that, you're still cynical about the 'supernatural'? How much of a sign do you need???"

The whole thing reminded me of an article in a women's magazine I read a few years ago -- I wish I could find it now -- in which the author was determined to discredit anything occult-related as airy-fairy twaddle. As part of her research, she received a Tarot reading that mentioned some things in her life that she wasn't happy about and even made suggestions for making them better ... and she blew it off. As a coincidence or something. (I really wish I could find that article.) The cards gave her useful advice, but she could not heed it because she could not break out of her preconceived idea that all of it was bullshit.

Christianity has a lot of answer for, in terms of how it has warped Western thinking. But one thing that really frustrates me is how it insists that there's only one real god, and anything weird is either a miracle or evil. That dichotomous model has so permeated Western culture that even people who aren't Christian, or who used to be but aren't anymore, employ it -- except for them, anything weird can be explained away by either science or psychology: Either the thing has a rational explanation, or your brain is playing tricks on you.

Apparently my friend has never rationalized away this incident, but also, apparently, he's not comfortable with saying he hallucinated that voice, either. So maybe those aren't the only two possible explanations.

Just as a thought experiment, let's consider what a third possibility could be. Now, alert hearth/myth readers know that I don't believe in the Good vs. Evil dichotomy; I've written about it at least three times. Y'all also know that I'm not Christian (I hope that's not a spoiler for anybody), and it follows that I don't believe in the Christian concept of the devil. So the third possibility I'm proposing has nothing to do with Satan or demons or Hell or any of that stuff.

Here's my third possibility: What if other entities exist in our reality? (This is a thought experiment, remember -- you're not allowed to laugh it off.) What if other beings exist here, or have access to our reality occasionally? What form might they take? 

How about a gut feeling? Or a Tarot reading? Or a calm, disembodied voice that gives us really good advice?

Did the thought of that give you the shivers? I would suggest it's because you've been conditioned to believe, by religion or society or both, that such an entity can mean you nothing but harm. But that can't be right. Modern Christianity actually has a name for a helpful entity: a guardian angel. 

Now, I don't believe in guardian angels any more than I believe in the Christian devil. I don't think any of us is important enough to merit individual attention from a supernatural being on a regular basis. But I do believe that gods and spirits step into human affairs when it suits their purposes, and I think our ancestors sometimes pass along their wisdom to us. And I don't think there's anything weird or scary about it. I think it's as real as biology or physics. It's just the way things work. 

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Here's a further thought experiment: Why would someone want to convince you that messages "from beyond" are either scary or impossible? What would they get out of controlling your beliefs in this way? 

My answer to that, my friends, forms a big part of why I quit Christianity. Maybe I'll write about it sometime. 

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These moments of supernatural blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe! And listen to your gut!

A bad guy who wants to do good.

I was hoping to have exciting news for y'all on the Atherton Vampire front. Alas, I got going on editing and uploading the second book later than I'd planned. So I can't give you a link to the ebook edition of The Atherton Vampire: Out of the Coffin just yet. However, unless something totally awful happens, it should be live tomorrow. I'll post the news when I get it, including in the Woo-Woo Team group on Facebook. (What do you mean, you're not a member yet? Click the link and join!)

Here's the cover, anyway, so you know what to look for at Amazon when the book goes live:

I was also kind of hoping to give you an awesome report on progress for the third book, but I didn't write anything yesterday and I've been too tied up with prepping book 2 to do any writing yet today. That's next on my list after I finish this post. And by the time I go to bed tonight, I'm hoping to be pretty close to 25,000 words.

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I've been talking a lot about Good vs. Evil for the past couple of weeks -- and it's not just because I'm writing a series about a bad guy who wants to do good (and probably for all the wrong reasons). Although come to think of it, that's not a bad place to start.

Jerry Atherton was a good guy, if somewhat naive, before he was turned. I'm not giving away too much to say that he had a privileged but troubled childhood and fell for the wrong woman. Now he's undead -- a freak who exists on blood and who cannot stand the light of day. In other words, he's Evil. 

At the end of book 1, Callie Dailey suggests that he could rehabilitate his image by becoming "the bad guy who does good." The idea appeals to him. Who wouldn't want to be redeemed after such a massive fall from grace?

But here's the thing: Capital-G Good, like Capital-E Evil, is defined by society, and in the case of Western civilization, those definitions are built on the framework of Christianity. Pure Evil is apparently attainable; start a discussion on this topic and witness how quickly Hitler's name comes up. (I don't know what happened to the internet rule that whoever first mentions Nazis automatically loses the argument, but it seems to have gone by the wayside.)

But is it possible to be purely Good? It seems like as soon as popular opinion anoints a saint, somebody discovers they have feet of clay. It happened to Mother Teresa in 2007. 

The epitome of Good is God. Of course we can't be God; ergo, we cannot be perfectly Good. We are human, and therefore imperfect, because we are not God. Right? But how Good is good enough?

I believe this idea that humans are necessarily imperfect has run amuck. We've all known exemplary people who beat themselves up because of imperfections they perceive in themselves. They worry that they're not trying hard enough. They question themselves and their behavior. They wonder whether they're not Bad, deep down.

And on the other side, we've all known folks who refuse to question their attitudes and beliefs -- to the point of denying reality outright -- because they're scared of finding out how imperfect, and therefore Bad, they actually are. 

None of this strikes me as mentally healthy. But our society is built on this framework. It's not enough to be "good enough"; we must strive for perfection, which isn't attainable because we're inherently imperfect. But if we don't strive to be perfect, then we're Bad.

And before you know it, we're not only judging ourselves as Bad, but we're comparing ourselves to other people and judging them to be more Bad than we are. From there, it's a short step to judging others whose skin color or native language is different from our own -- and deciding they're less than human.

I reject this framework. I reject the idea that humans are inherently imperfect. I reject the idea that we are inherently flawed. We are, period. And we all deserve kindness and respect. Including from ourselves.

Jerry Atherton, vampire, isn't ever going to be able to become Good. But he can be good enough. And so can we.

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

More on why I don't believe in Good vs. Evil.

A couple of weeks ago, I said I'd probably write a post on why I don't believe in Good vs. Evil. I listed one reason for my belief in that post (you can read it at the link): it's that Evil is defined by the observer, not the actor. The people that society perceives as Evil never think they are. They believe their cause is right and just. And sometimes later on, society comes around to their point of view.

I saw an ad for this Christmas ornament yesterday, and it reminded me of another reason why I don't believe Evil is a real thing. I hope Hallmark doesn't sue me -- I lifted this photo from their website. It's one of this year's Keepsake Ornaments from their Disney Villain line. The bad guy depicted here is from the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence in the original 1940 movie Fantasia. Hallmark is calling him Chernabog.

I was much younger when I saw the movie. While I remember the scene, I had no idea what the character's name was until I saw this ornament for sale. 

Even if I'd known this guy's name, it wouldn't have meant anything to me back then. Now it does, though, because in the intervening years, I've done some reading on Slavic mythology. 

Chernobog -- that's the correct spelling of his name, or anyway it's one of the correct spellings (Disney got it right when they released their own Fantasia ornament) -- is reputedly the Slavic god of darkness. His name literally means "black god." He's usually paired with Belobog, whose name literally means "white god." And it's a pretty good bet that real, actual Slavic pagans never worshipped either one of them.

The only account of Chernobog and Belobog comes from a German scholar named Helmold in the 12th century, several hundred years after Christianity had come to the Slavic lands. Helmold casts Belobog (who he never actually names) as the Good Guy and Chernobog as the Bad Guy -- concepts that were foreign to the ancient Slavs. Sure, there were dualities in Slavic belief; perhaps the best known of these is the annual archetypal battle between Perun, the thunder god, and Veles, the god of the underworld. Veles rules the dark half of the year, you see, and Perun rules the light half, and there's a big fight every year when they switch off. But Veles isn't a bad guy; he's also the god of forests and cattle. He's not Evil, any more than Perun is Good. Those concepts were imposed on the Slavs by Christianity and its insistence on the Good/Evil dichotomy.

It's pretty well accepted today that the villainous Chernobog comes from that same wellspring. The Slavs didn't have a devil in their mythology, so the Christian conquerors had to impose one on them.

This may be the biggest reason why I don't believe in capital-E Evil -- even moreso than the spectrum of behaviors I talked about a couple of weeks ago. Half of my lineage comes from a people whose original belief system didn't have devils or demons. Tricksters, sure -- but devils? Creatures that were purely evil? Not 'til Christian missionaries showed them what it was (ahem).

Other ancient belief systems also lacked the Good/Evil dichotomy. But at this point, we'll never know how widespread that lack was; Christianity did its best to smother these "incorrect" ways of viewing the world, and in the case of the Slavic lands, what the Christians didn't eliminate, the Soviets did.

Anyway, as tempting as it would be to have a Slavic god on my Yule tree, I'm probably going to pass on the "Chernabog" ornament. I might re-watch Fantasia, though, just to see him in action. Plus the music is really cool.

Oh, what the heck. Here's the scene.

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Not-Na-No report: I'm closing in on 15,000 words on the first draft of the third Atherton Vampire book. I'm not keeping track as avidly as I do when I'm actually doing NaNo, but I think I've written pretty much every day this past week. I probably won't finish book 3 by the end of November, but I won't miss my just-before-Christmas deadline for publication. 

In the meantime, the second Atherton Vampire novel will be out of its exclusive period with Kindle Vella a week from today, so the ebook version will definitely be out before Thanksgiving. Let's call it November 24th for the release for book 2. I'll post here when it's live, and I'll send a newsletter, too.

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

Samhain musings.

 

bigdan | Deposit Photos

Blessed Samhain! Happy Halloween!

Here's a reminder that Jerry Atherton requests the pleasure of your company this Halloween. The Atherton Vampire is featured at Book Doggy today -- and it's still just 99 cents. 

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For the past few days, I've been watching some of the Dracula movies I've missed over the years. The 1977 BBC production with Louis Jourdan was...not good. Jourdan didn't do either menacing or sexy very well. 

Somehow I missed Frank Langella's Dracula when it came out in 1979. It was appropriately scary, and more overtly sexy than the original novel by Bram Stoker. I didn't like Langella's pop-eyed stare, but everything else was good.

The third movie I watched was Mel Brooks' take on the story. A couple of people have told me that it's their favorite, and I can see why -- Leslie Nielsen is a better Dracula than I expected him to be, and Brooks himself is hilarious as Van Helsing. 

But the common element of all these books is Stoker's original story. And it hasn't aged well. For starters, there's the obvious sexism -- both Mina and Lucy are victims (no matter which one Drac targets first, and why do screenwriters feel the need to swap them? Or combine them into one character? But I digress), and it's up to the manly men to save them. Just as in Stoker's novel, the women in these movies have no agency. At least in The Lord of Cries, the opera I saw this summer, Lucy actively chose her destiny. She made a lousy choice -- it wrecked her life as well as those of everyone around her -- but still, it was hers to make and she made it.

The other thing that bothered me about the legend, particularly in the BBC version, is its reliance on that old dichotomy of Good vs. Evil. This probably deserves a post of its own; maybe I'll get to it later this month. But I don't believe there is such a thing as capital-E Evil -- or capital-G Good, for that matter. Briefly, it's because the bad guys never think of themselves as bad. They always have what they believe is a good reason for what they do. Maybe they're mentally ill, or maybe they've just talked themselves into believing that what they plan to do is justified -- or someone else has talked them into believing it. 

The January 6th insurrectionists are the most glaring example of the latter; a number of them have asked the court for mercy, saying they believed former President Trump when he claimed the election was stolen from him and that they were convinced they were righting a grave wrong by invading the Capitol. (Now, whether you believe Trump himself is Evil or a narcissistic sociopath or just the sorest loser ever is a separate thing, and not where I want to go in this post. For this example, let's just stick to the mindset of the insurrectionists.)

My point is this: Even those we perceive as Evil usually have one or two good qualities, and those we perceive as Good often turn out to have bad qualities. Nobody is perfectly Good or perfectly Evil -- except in myth. And by "myth" I mean the stories that underpin religious beliefs of all stripes, even those of the Christian faith. One of the things that bugged me about the BBC production was that the Catholic Church had the power, through the crucifix and communion wafers, to combat Dracula. Interestingly, though, those talismans couldn't kill a vampire -- only sunlight or a stake through the heart could do one in. If the Church was so powerful, why did the cross merely scorch the vampires? Why couldn't it utterly defeat them? And why was that final power left to Nature, via a plain wooden stake or the light of the sun?

In the Dracula stories, the vampires are capital-E Evil and the church is capital-G Good. But in reality, we know the church isn't capital-G Good: witness the modern-day revelations about pedophile priests, to say nothing of the Inquisition. Farther back, we can see the cunning the church used to convert pagans to the new Christian religion, such as absorbing Samhain into a three-day church festival honoring the saints and the dead when the peasants refused to give up their end-of-harvest fire festivals. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I guess.

I suppose you can make the argument that the Church is made up of humans, and humans are imperfect by nature. I acknowledge that humans have flaws, but I don't believe we are fatally flawed. 

And keep in mind that it was the ancient pagans who knew how to handle a vampire -- and their solutions actually worked.

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I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year, but I'm not signing up for the official event. Here's why.

Alert hearth/myth readers know that the goal of the November event is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Unlike the Camp NaNo events, you can't set your own goal in November -- the 50,000-word thing is immutable. And my project for this month is the third Atherton Vampire book, which I know isn't going to be that long because the others have been in the 40,000-word range and I'm aiming to keep this one in the same ballpark. Besides, I've won NaNo every time I've entered; I have nothing to prove by signing up this year and setting myself up for failure thereby. So I will be keeping y'all apprised this month of my word totals, week by week, and I'll share the cover for the third book when it's ready. But I'm not going to do the official event.

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These moments of hallowed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. And a reminder that COVID-19 is scarier than any vampire -- so get vaxxed!