30 Days of Paganism, 2 – Beliefs: Cosmology

Right. I’m skipping day one (Beliefs: Why Paganism?) and leaving it till the end. My answer to that question is complicated, and I think the rest of the topics will help answer it. So, first things first. Cosmology.

J is for… Jigsaw Puzzles – and filling in the gaps

“It is in the story of your life that you will recognise yourself” – Brendan Myers

Photo by Pablo Nicolás Taibi Cicare (CC) – flickr

We all want to think of our lives as a coherent story. We re-write them again and again, re-shaping them in response to new experience, retcon-ing them around hindsight. We look for the missing puzzle pieces to fill in the gaps.

So we find Paganism, and suddenly we were always Pagan, and grew up in the woods and lived off the land. Even if, technically, we were staunch atheists who loved the city as much as we enjoyed our occasional visits to the countryside. That old woman next door who once showed us her herb garden becomes the witch who taught us ancient healing and magic. Our occasional flicking through books on Wicca is transformed into years of research into the Craft.

Or we find a band, or a type of music, that we love, and suddenly we always loved Garage/R&B/Manic Street Preachers – quickly acquiring their back-catalogue to fill in the missing pieces around that one song of theirs that we quite liked a few years ago, when it came on the radio.

Or we learn something about ourselves that we never knew – that we have a particular talent we never realised before, or we’re gay, or have a certain medical condition, or that the father we never knew was a spy with MI5 – and suddenly we always knew, on some level, and everything that happened was really all about that. 

And sometimes these things are true, or partly true, and we’re recognising something within ourselves that we never had a name for before.

And sometimes there might be a thread of truth to it.

And sometimes it’s an entire fabrication – an excuse – a metaphor.

But it’s the missing puzzle piece. The one we’ve been seeking for a lifetime. So if we have to hack it to bits so that it fits the hole in our soul, that’s what we’re going to do.

The story of my life is important. When I tell it, I need to recognise myself in it. And it needs a beginning, a middle and a now. But I shouldn’t forget that I’m not looking for an end yet. There are more pieces of the puzzle our there that will better fit the gaps.

Life/Re-doing ADF stuff/30 Days of Paganism

So. I’ve been working through ADF’s ‘Wheel of the Year’ book, which takes you through the Dedicant Path a week at a time – but I’ve been quite scrappy about some weeks. I think I need to go back over the weeks I didn’t do in enough depth. And also start the five months of meditation in earnest – as near to daily meditation as I can get.

I is for… Icon

(So here I am, talking once again about a Christian thing that, for me, merges with Pagan things. I should really give up and call this ‘Leithin’s Interfaith Blog’.)

I adore icons. Especially Byzantine and Russian ones.

Early Byzantine icon of Mary

Icon simply means ‘image’, but the term is generally used to mean sacred imagery, particularly of Eastern churches, where icons are painted in Byzantine or Russian styles^[1]. Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches are full of icons. If you’ve only ever been in bare, late modern churches, in their dull community-centre-like buildings with no pictures or representations of the Divine, you’re missing out.

Saint Sophia and her daughters – Byzantine (picture from Wikimedia)

There’s so much to say about iconography that entire books have been written about it. Here’s just one thing: images of Mary and the child Christ, probably based on earlier images of Isis and Horus ^[2].

Statuette of Isis nursing Horus – Late Period-Ptolemaic Period, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Isis nursing Horus. Penn Museum. Photo by Jocelyn Dale, Flickr (CC)

Mary and Christ – Byzantine icon

Protestant churches don’t like icons, or images of God in general. Their rejection of them is based on the second of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not make to you any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” In short: don’t make idols. There’s a long history of Protestant resistance to Catholic/Orthodox iconography that goes along with that. Anglo-Catholic churches (the ones I used to go to) have re-embraced iconography. And there’s always this tension there – this oft-repeated mantra of it’s not an idol, it’s an icon. But I looked at the statue of Mary in my church and didn’t see ‘something that points to Mary’. I saw Mary. To all intents and purposes, it was a beautiful, glorious idol to me.

And here’s a funny thing. In Christianity, I was a huge fan of icons, especially traditional ones, like those above. But when I started honouring my Gaelic gods, in a religion/spiritual path that’s all in favour of representing deities with idols or pictures, I suddenly didn’t want to. I was no longer forbidden from making a “graven image” of my gods – in fact, it was encouraged – but now, I couldn’t do it. I had pictures of the Morrigan and Arianrhod for a while, but they became… insufficient. It was like I was trying to capture a divine essence that cannot be caged in images.

I still have this picture on my wall above my deity altar:

Relief from the temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath. Photo by Mary Harrsch, Flickr (CC)

It’s from the shrine of Sulis Minerva, in Bath, but it’s not the goddess – it’s probably either a representation of local land spirits, or worshippers. For me, it captures the essence of Sulis Minerva – not in an image of her, but in the faces of those who honoured her.

And, yes, part of it is the difference between this and this. There are hundreds of years of tradition and spirituality behind each Eastern Orthodox icon. The artwork is some of the most beautiful that you will ever see. Each one says, my god (or honoured ancestor) is worth some serious craftswork. Now, admittedly, neopagans don’t get commissions of a lot of money from a rich church allowing them to spend months, maybe more, on each image they create of their god(s). And I’m sure there are some serious craftspeople out there, making absolutely beautiful images of their deities. I just haven’t seen the ones that call to me (yet). And I think that’s mainly because – well, how can a statue of Lugh compare to this?

Photo by ghewgill – Flickr (CC)

And how can a painting of Arianrhod compare to this?

Corona Borealis – by Cristóbal Alvarado Minic – Flickr (CC)

And how could an image of Cailleach Bhearra ever compare to this?

Healy Pass, Beara Peninsula, Cork

I find the gods in the things that embody them – the trees, the sea, the wind, the mountains, and the simple little candles that stand for each deity on my altar. So when I learnt, from writers like Miranda Green, that the Celts probably didn’t have much in the way of physical representations of their gods, at least before the Romans arrived, it all made a lot more sense. Ronald Hutton says it’s not clear whether or not the Gaelic and Brythonic tribes honoured the land as a manifestation of deity or the divine. And certainly, not all the Gaelic gods are land deities. But Cailleach Bhearra is a mountain goddess and Manannan is a sea god – and while they may not quite be gods of those things, they are those things. Bhearra is as much the mountains as the stones that make them up. Manannan is as much the sea as the waves and the gulls and the shoreline.

I suppose I’m talking about a kind of polytheistic animism. I’m good with that. My icons are in the world around me.

But I’ll always love the reminder of forbidden, illicit worship of the divine embodied in *things* that Christian iconography first pointed me towards. The icon was my first way in to understanding that the divine is creation, and creation is divine.

Statue of St Gobnait. Ireland

Statue of Mary, at the side of the road in Co Cork, Ireland. You can see these on every corner in rural Ireland.

 

[1] John R. Hinnells, A New Dictionary of Religions

[2] Victor Lasareff (1938), ‘Studies in the Iconography of the Virgin’. The Art Bulletin.

Doing the Work

Reblogged from Yew, Oak, & Apple:

It is putting one foot before the other that crosses
the sea. One step, one stroke of the oar, one wave
breaking over your head. It is the loss
of every precious thing you tried to save
but couldn’t hold. It is the opening out
of every hidden flow into the gaze
of those you’d love to love you. It’s the shout…

Read more… 66 more words

Beautiful meditation by Grace, of the Yew, Oak & Apple blog.

I is for… Incantation (and folk magic that uses it)

The Gaelic people really, really liked words. Spoken words – that’s what had power. Later, the written word arrives, with Ogham – which is about word-and-letter power, a lot like the runes. But it’s the spoken word that’s really powerful in Gaelic folklore.

We only have a few clues left about ancient druidic magic. Something that turns up in myth all the time is the rosc, which seems to get used for everything from healing to ensuring victory in battle^[1]. That’s what the Morrigan’s prophecy is, at the Second Battle of Moy Tuireadh – a rosc. Blind druid Mogh Ruith speaks one, too, in his satire on his enemies before battle (which is awesome – he wishes them an infestation of midges in their piddling little forests). And talking of curses, one cursing ritual from Ireland was known as glam dicenn, and it had a reputation for causing serious harm via the magic of the spoken word. Some modern druids (and Gaelic-influenced witches) talk about glam dicenn as the whole of curse-related folk magic, with spellwork done with someone’s personal effects as well as using the spoken word. Incantations do seem to be the key thing, though.

So. Have a few examples…

Incantations in folk magic with European roots

This is a charm for healing a sprain, from the Carmina Gadelica. It seems to refer to St Brigid the healer:

Bride went out
In the morning early
With a pair of horses
One broke his leg
With much ado
That was apart
She put bone to bone
She put flesh to flesh
She put sinew to sinew
She put vein to vein
As she healed that
May I heal this

And this is where it gets interesting. Some scholars think that this charm has Indo-European roots. Because there are versions of it found in other places and other cultures, too. There are several Christian versions – here’s one from the Shetland Isles:

The Lord rade, [rode]
And the foal slade; [slid]
He lighted.
And he righted.
Set joint to joint,
Bone to bone,
And sinew to sinew.
Heal in the Holy Ghost’s Name!

Here’s a Germanic version that names pre-Christian deities:

Phol and Wodan rode into the woods,
There Balder’s foal sprained its foot.
It was charmed by Sinthgunt, her sister Sunna;
It was charmed by Frija, her sister Volla;
It was charmed by Wodan, as he well knew how:
Bone-sprain, like blood-sprain,
Like limb-sprain:
Bone to bone; blood to blood;
Limb to limb — like they were glued.

And finally, here’s a very similar version from Braucherei, which is Christian folk magic from the Pennsylvania ‘Dutch’ (German) community in America^[2]:

Our Lord rode, his foal’s foot slade,
Down he lighted, his foal’s foot righted,
Bone to bone,
Sinew to sinew,
Flesh to flesh,
Heal, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  Amen.

And to go back to the Irish setting, a version of the charm is also found in the stories of the gods, the Mythological Cycle. Miach heals Nuada’s arm with the words “joint to joint of it, and sinew to sinew”.

ADF is Indo-European Druidry. Charms like these, with possible roots in common, show the importance of the spoken, magical word in IE cultures. I’m not sure I use enough spoken word in my spiritual work, and I’d like to start to try. (I do like of the writing, yes I do.)

…And in American folk magic

Hoodoo, African American folk magic, uses scripture like the psalms for similar purposes (though the roots of the practice are culturally very different, and they would not recognise the term ‘incantation’ – but as a term for ‘magical spoken word’, it works for me). I recently spent a lot of time working on a hoodoo-style spell for justice. (I’m only discussing this because the spellwork is now done and dusted!) I know the psalms quite well, and I decided to have a go at using Psalms 129 and 130 as my spoken words for justice. It would work even better as a curse, as that’s what it’s intended as. Here’s a bit from Psalm 129:

Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth, yet they have not prevailed against me.
Let them all be confounded and turned back…
Let them be as the grass upon the rooftops, which withereth before it groweth up.

Yeah. The Bible’s not all forgiveness and love. And it gets a lot stronger than that, in places.

“Why the Bible? Aren’t you a Pagan?” I hear my readers asking. Well, I think magical systems should be respected for what they are, rather than adapted wholesale to our own cultural needs. And hoodoo is Protestant magic. (From my observation, most folk magic is Christian.) I have a Bible that I bought and consecrated specifically for biblical magic, and it sits on my working altar when it’s set up for my (inexperienced, amateurish attempts at) hoodoo. There’s something very powerful about using the King James version of biblical passages in magic.

Here are some social reasons why Biblical Words Have Power:

1. It’s probably got a lot to do with the social power that our society has conferred upon biblical language, especially in its 17th-century English form – I never liked modern versions of the Bible very much.

2. For some of us, with Christian backgrounds, the Bible can also be what NLP calls an ‘anchor’ – a strong association that we have developed with something. I grew up hearing the Bible read from a distant, raised pulpit in sacred, ritual settings. Its words are literally associated with sacred power.

3. There’s also the symbolic value of psalms (and other passages) whose themes are about the concept that you’re working on, e.g. justice. Say the verses enough times, and they become a kind of mantra – where overall concept, not individual words, is the main thing.

4. And of course, hoodoo practitioners would say that the biblical words themselves have a sacred power inherent in them. I wouldn’t dispute that, myself, Pagan or not.

For me, even as a Pagan, it’s a combination of all of that. And, y’know, Christian esoteric practices do seem to keep calling me back.

Also? It works.

Incantation. Because Words Have Power.

I shall end with my favourite rosc – the Song of Amergin, where he announces himself to the land. (I am totally going to try doing that when I get off the plane in America in June.)

I am the wind on the sea.
I am the ocean wave.
I am the sound of the billows.
I am the seven-horned stag.
I am the eagle on the rock.
I am the flash from the sun.
I am the fairest of flowers.
I am the raging boar.
I am the salmon in the pool.
I am the lake on the plain.
I am the word of knowledge.
I am the point of the spear.
I am the god that makes fire in the head.
Who levels the mountain?
Who speaks the age of the moon?
Who has been where the sun sleeps?
Who, if not I?
- Song of Amergin (mythical Irish invocation – from several translations)

Isn’t that just the most awesome, self-assured thing you have ever read? I’m off to announce myself to my garden…

.

[1]  Woden’s Wandering Witch talks about the rosc in this excellent blog post on the subject.

[2] I never would have noticed this version if it hadn’t been for the wonderful folks at New World Witchery, who write and podcast about American folk magic traditions.

H is for… Healing (Etiquette)

I study healing and disability for a living (actually, mostly for student debt, but you know what I mean). If I ever finish my PhD, it will be about ideologies of disability, and normalcy, and about how Christianity has treated those who are different (physically and mentally) through the ages.

And modern Paganism has absorbed a lot of this ideology, without realising that it’s rooted in Christianity. I’ve experienced this imposition of normalcy from society, including from the Pagan community. I’ve lost count of the number of people who were praying for me to be “healed”, and of those who were “doing healing” on me – often without my permission. Why does this matter? For a couple of reasons.