Pimp My Altar

As usual, September has been a whirlwind of activity. My best friend and my parents visited, I redecorated my livingroom and bought myself a new bed for the bedroom and I dug more seriously into my Irish Gaelic studies again. And I finished my altar.

This is the first non-formal altar I've ever had; when I started practicing seriously I worked out of fairly traditional books, and that and my love for Victorianism in all its forms meant I had a really, really stiff altar that never did see a lot of use. It was very proper and thorough, though. It had a wand, and an athame, and a Goddess candle, and a God candle, and a pentacle, and a cauldron, and a bowl of salt and a bowl of water, and all those other things it's supposed to have. I'm pretty sure it looked exactly like the diagram in Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner, actually.

So I went a bit more freeform this time. I knew I had to keep the three-pronged candlabra; my grandmother bought it for me, probably without knowing really what it was for, but it was the first piece I acquired specifically for my altar and I love it. And since my patroness is Brighid, one of the Celtic triple goddesses, that suggested a layout. The altar is kind of roughly divided into three sections, for Brighid's three aspects as Poet, Smith and Healer, and everything else I felt needed to go on there got put wherever it seemed right. The candles are in the colors of fire -- red for the warmth of the hearth-fire, blue for the middle heat of a cooking fire, and white for the power of the forge. The gold chain is for Ogma, who according to legend invented the Ogham alphabet which continues to annoy archaeologists to this day.

And most of the rest of it just feels right. I no longer really remember where the shell came from, but it's always been on my altar and it wanted to stay there. I always buy new pencils in September, it's like a disease; I'm using them for wands. And...I'm wandering over and touching it every day, not necessarily working with it in the way I used to think of working with my altar, but just going over and saying hi. And that's great.

Starting Over (part two)

Last month, in a fit of frustration, I tore down my old altar. (The fact that I haven't much missed it in a month is not a good sign, I think.) Today, I got me a new altar table.

It didn't cost me anything; I got it from Freecycle, an amazing email barter system. Have something you don't want, you send an email to the list. See something you want, you email someone about their post. Need something in particular, send an email, go out two days later to pick up your brand-new altar table. My old altar table is getting scrubbed down and moved to the living room, and the table it's replacing will go back on Freecycle. It's the new urban ecosystem -- take something out, put something back in.

It's round! I've never had a round altar before; I'll have to rearrange some things. I've always had quite a formal-looking altar, actually, and I think it's time to mix it up a bit. And what shall I do with the top? Shall I paint it? Finish it? Engrave it? Cover it with an altar cloth? Oh, I have so many options, for my current plan is to have it ready for its first dedication on Samhain. It will (hopefully) see use before then; I see no point in making a commitment to something you haven't tried out first.

I'm looking forward to remaking it immensely, actually. I remember the first time I put an altar up properly, and how wonderful it was, and how it felt like an entirely different world from the rest of my bedroom in my parents' house in the middle of nowhere. But I'd been basically moving that altar around ever since; I'm far from the same person I was when I was sixteen. It's definitely time for a change.

If you can see the fire, the meal was already cooked a long time ago

Some days I think I should go into the business of koans. I mean, the little bits and pieces I scribble all over my work papers and write "Essaie!" next to don't quite qualify as bumper-sticker wisdom, and they certainly aren't blog posts on their own. Then again, they're probably not confusing enough for koans either.

I have, for instance, the sentence fragment "As an anthropologist, I know that meaning is acquired, not inherent" written on one page of my little notebook that I carry with me everywhere. (Yes, I do sometimes think in words like that, to my own unending astonishment.) These notebooks remind me a little bit of the diaries of my grandmothers that my mom kept lying about, tiny leather-bound records of weather, births and deaths, and occasionally something a particularly notable calf born. My grandmother was a farmwife; she didn't have the time nor the inclination to write pages about her thoughts every day. She kept track of what was important. Okay, so my books are more self-indulgent and certainly less orderly than her diaries, but I like to think of my relations in future years looking back on them and thinking..."Why would you write all this down? And then why would you keep it?"

I know that meaning is acquired, not inherent. I remember surprising myself when I thought that, which must be why I wrote it down. I must have been reading Crowley at the time, then, because I wouldn't be surprised by that thought if I was reading something anthropological. It's a controversial statement in the magickal world, though. Why else all those charts of correspondences? Why lists of the properties of herbs and stones? It's become more popular of late to say that correspondences are what is meaningful to you -- Crowley says the same, actually -- but there's still a niggling sense in the back of my brain that surely some things really do mean something, on their own.

Meaning is acquired, not inherent. Anthropology says yes. Hard science says no, but only for concepts like "one" and "zero," which are not particularly useful in day to day life. Religion says a loud no -- but everyone disagrees on what that meaning is, and which parts of it are important, so that's not extremely helpful either.

Acquired, not inherent. I do believe that, I guess (and I must have believed it when I wrote it down, or there'd be huge question marks all over the page next to the sentence). And not just in a scientific sense, but in a theological sense, too. Life is a journey, not a destination. Stop and smell the roses. A soul is made, over lifetimes, not born and then done. And yet somehow, it still seems contradictory to me. Contradictory to what, I'm not sure. To something.

Obviously I shall have to think on this more. Also, I need a new little notebook.

So the second part of my paganism and feminism post is taking a little longer than I thought it would (that's always the way, isn't it; the rant comes easy, but the thinky bit is hard) and then I also realized that I had read Patricia Monaghan's The Red-Haired Girl From the Bog ages ago and never properly wrote a review of it like I intended to.

It's a hard book to classify; part travelogue, part memoir, part mythology and folklore. It's very much a book about Ireland, but at the same time, she covers a lot about how we relate to our world and how people live their lives and their religion in general. It was also hugely moving; I only have notes on the first half of it, because by the second half I was so wrapped up in the stories she was telling and the images she was invoking that I just completely forgot. (I had to stop reading it at work because I hate crying in front of people.)

Monaghan divides the book into five sections, one for each of Ireland's provinces, and digs into the local mythology, history, politics, and people in each one. A couple of months later, many of the details of the stories are escaping me, but I remember two very vividly -- her chapter on Brigid and the Brigidine Sisters of Kildare, with the story of how Brigid's Flame was accidentally relighted at a Candlemas ceremony, and the mention of this stone in Loughcrew Cemetary.

That stone right there -- the pointy one in the middle foreground. The memory of the afternoon we spent at Loughcrew came back with a really shocking vividness at her one-sentence description. I could pick out the stone she mentioned immediately; I remember sitting next to it to take pictures of the cairn. (I also have a picture of a Goth girl standing in that stone circle that's one of my favorites from that trip, just for what it represents.) I remembered hiking up the long hill path, observed by uninterested sheep. I remember looking out over the countryside, modern farms on one side and old stone fences on the other, trying to spot the Hill of Tara. I more than remembered it, it was like a gut-punch, a flood of emotions and a sense of connection -- we had touched that same stone, she and I, and wondered about the people who put it there. This must be what the big deal is all about, I thought.

The main focus of The Red-Haired Girl From the Bog is locality -- what it means to be from a particular place, to know it intimately enough to recognize that particular stone from one sentence on a page and a year's distance in time, and not just that stone, but every stone and tree and hill. In Ireland, Monoghan describes, everything has a name. That bend in the road, that tree on the hill, that stone circle, that well, that grassy spot that doesn't look like much of anything to outsiders. It makes the landscape...not bigger, but more. It gives it depth and shape in directions that storyless landscape doesn't have.

I've never really felt that way about a place. Oh, I get a little thrill of recognition when people mention my hometown, and for a week I told everybody about the Harlan Ellison story where he mentions the town I went to college in, but it never really meant anything to me. I think that's why I've always been a little blah about this talk of connection to the land that crops up so often in Paganism. I understand it intellectually, but it doesn't have a lot of emotional resonance for me.

Except, apparently, for Loughcrew Cemetary.

Monoghan actually confronts that issue reasonably well; she talks about how Americans -- or rather, all non-Native-Americans -- have a tough time relating to land in that way because we don't always feel like we really belong here. We don't know the stories about every nook and cranny of land, because they've never been told to us, and even if they were, they would be slightly alien, because stories that old come from a culture that is not ours. She skips a point that makes me feel uncomfortable about both her book and my reaction to that Loughcrew stone, though. Modern Irish culture is, quite possibly, just as alien to me as pre-colonial Native-American culture. To say that I "naturally" have a stronger connection to the Irish landscape because my great-great-grandfather emigrated from there is nonsense. I know more about it, and I know it in a way that makes sense to me, but that's all.

Besides, I'm not so sure a lack of that kind of deep connection to the land is an inherently bad thing anyway, or a thing that is lacking in spirituality. There is something to be said for abstraction, too. No, not abstraction -- I'm looking for a word that isn't liminality, but it's such a good word, you'll have to keep it. :) A state of not-belonging, of not-knowing, of being questionable and questioning and having one's relationship with the Universe being constantly negotiable. When Victor Turner first coined the term he didn't think it was possible to exist in a liminal state for long periods of time, but he's been shown to be wrong. (Maybe the time frame is off and we're looking at a society in a liminal period?) But I have that kind of emotional connection to liminality that so many people seem to have to land and place and locality. I can't articulate it, but it makes me happy, and it makes the world seem like a bigger place, in much the same way Monoghan describes that kind of locality doing for land-based people.

Religious Insomnia

At nearly two in the morning, in the middle of a blizzard, after reading some very challenging things entirely too late in the evening, I think I've managed my very first round of religious-anxiety-induced-insomnia.

Questions keep chasing themselves around in my brain. Am I for real? Do I really believe all this? Am I the only one; is my religion really horribly passe and everyone else has moved past it into something more "mature"? Am I really just a fluffy bunny at heart (and is that just a word we use when we're too attatched to our scientific viewpoint to give it up) (and who am I to be dismissing a scientific viewpoint, anyway)? Am I turning into some kind of mad Pagan fundamentalist who other people look at with a combination of awe and surprise and oh-my-god-sane-people-aren't-like-that-are-they?

Does it really matter what anybody else thinks? (Of course it does. And of course it doesn't.) Am I really just doing this to watch what other people do? Do I really believe any of it myself even, or is this all some kind of grand wish-fulfillment that comes of reading too many fantasy novels as a preteen? And what's so wrong with that, anyway? Why do we all have to take ourselves so seriously all the time?

Rinse. Cycle. Repeat.

I read somewhere once that skepticism and self-doubt are a sign you're doing magic right, that it's just your empirical training kicking in in self-defense, which seems a little pat to me. And I read somewhere else once -- it was Harlan Ellison, I'm sure -- that you never like the people who make you ask real questions. Which is true. I don't like anything about this right now.

I'm Back! & Devotion part 3

Two weeks later and I'm finally all wired up again -- the move has been exciting, exhausting, overwhelming, all those things and more. I have job leads; I've found the grocery store, the post office, and the library; I've even been fairly successful at figuring out the bus system. My favorite thing about Madison so far, though? The gigantic year-round farmer's market. For the first time in my life, the hundred-mile diet seems not only feasable but very attractive, too.

So now that I've caught up on my Pagan blog reading, it's time to contribute to the pool again, with my continuing series on devotion. I started off this series by talking about the difference between magic and religion and last time went on to my literary expectations and disappointments in Paganism. Like I said last time, though, I am trying to move away from the idea that devotion has to be something that's done with words. After all, words hold all kinds of power, but in Western civilization the liturgial word has all too often been solely the property of the leader or priest, creating barriers between the divine and the people trying to access it. I certainly don't believe that this is the only way an authoritative text can work, but I respect the fact that modern Paganism has moved away from that idea in reaction to its misuse in other traditions (even while I continue to be confused and frustrated with the lack of coherence and external direction).

Modern Paganism is hardly unique in this respect. Last fall I took a religious studies class to fill out my senior-year schedule; it was a surprisingly fulfilling experience, focusing less on the facts and history of religions than I'm used to such classes doing and more on the experience of living within a religion. When we addressed Hinduism, we talked a lot about it being a religion of orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. Doctrines vary -- name and number of gods, nature of the universe, afterlife and how to best prepare yourself for it...all those things are negotiable. But everyone gives offerings. Offerings are huge. Everyone venerates images of the gods, because those images are a means of focusing and manifesting their power. Everyone, in other words, does something.

Which, hell, is one of the reasons I went for Paganism. It involves more doing than just going to church on Sunday. Unfortunately, the variability in Paganism is even bigger than that in Hinduism, and there isn't even any orthopraxy. There are no sutras to write as acts of merit. There are no scrolls to bind to your body in prayer. Especially when working with Irish/Celtic dieties as I usually am, there are no images to venerate or traditional offerings to make. There is no daily cycle of prayer -- no prayers, period.

It's one thing to decide, intellectually, that what you want out of the Universe is a mystery religion, like Paganism, where the scripture is not in a book but in your own experiences. It's another thing to struggle with finding ways of having those experiences when all you've learned how to do is the liturgy and structure of the United Methodist Church. I don't doubt the path I've chosen, and I don't doubt my need to continue as a Solitary before I try to find a group or coven to work with. But by the Gods it can be hard.

Which is, of course, why I've been running this devotion series in the first place; wandering around the idea of "how the hell do I get there from here?" I've always been a little surprised, actually, at the lack of Hindu-inspired traditions and practices in modern Paganism. After all, Hinduism is pantheistic, polytheistic, relatively uncentralized, and has endured for thousands of years. It's also almost entirely reliant on community structure, which might be one of the reasons it hasn't taken off in modern Paganism: we still lack that kind of community cohesion. Which means, really, that borrowing from the Hindu tradition might not be a bad idea right about now. (Besides, doesn't a devotional celebration this big look like a hell of a lot of fun?)

For myself, I've been experimenting with the idea of offerings. In our mostly European-inspired traditions, offerings outside of formal ritual are usually associated more with lesser spirits like the faerie than with the gods, but in Hinduism offerings, mostly of food, are the key to devotional practice. (Another offering is of clothing; statues of the gods are dressed in bright scarves and flowers. When I find the statuary I'm looking for, I'll be all over that one, too.) The wonderful thing about offerings of food is you'll never forget about them; you eat at least twice a day, and with a little mindfulness, the presence of food becomes a reminder that devotion is necessary, and stimulates mindfulness on its own. (To tell the truth, I started wandering down this line of thought with Alestair Crowley's list of devotions; he borrowed the Buddhist concept of mindfulness to inspire a great deal of his own tradition's requirements.) It's no different, truly, than the offering given in formal ritual, but if I waited to acknowledge the gods until I performed a formal ritual....well. Let's just say that technique hasn't been working well for me the past couple of years.

(Next time around: stealing borrowing from other traditions, the physicality of devotion, and Adventures with the Rosary.)

Word and Will: Devotion Part 2

One of the reasons I'm making some changes in my life right now is that I've realized that I seem to have different standards for Paganism than for other religions; or at least, that I seem to think of them in different ways. As a rule, I tend to think of most religions in terms of what practitioners do. Followers of Hinduism have large community rituals and food offerings and truly lovely devotional altars. Followers of Judaism keep kosher and the Sabbath. Followers of Christianity go to church and evangelize and tithe, either to the poor or to the megachurch. (Yes, to a different degree depending on the individual, but considering the devoted.) For my own part, though, I have been content to define myself as Pagan based on what I believe -- I believe in many gods, in the immanence of divinity, in magic and reincarnation and all those other things that Pagans believe.

Oh, I still associate Paganism in general with covens and group workings and events like Pagan Pride Day, but I've been isolated from the opportunities to participate in such things, and I've allowed that to become an excuse for my own lack of practice and devotion. (One of my first books was Cunningham's Wicca for the Solitary Practitioner; despite the general emphasis on covens in most witch books, I have very little excuse, really.) To be blunt, I haven't done anything in far too long. So I've been thinking about devotion.

Partially I blame my Religious Studies class; it was the first class outside the anthro department I took on religion since high school, and it gave me a lot to chew on, mostly concerning the day-to-day practice of many religions. It also really made me feel the lack of Pagan religious texts. There's a lot of history, ancient and modern, questionable and well-researched; a lot of magical theory, ancient and modern; plenty of basic introductory texts. There is not, however, a core holy text, or even a set of texts.

And I love words. I love the concept of the Jewish Tefillin, holy texts bound to the arm and forehead during prayer -- I find the idea of binding very powerful, and that of physical contact. I'm significantly lacking in holy texts, however. (I am toying with the idea of ogham and names, actually.) I love the power of words in the Buddhist tradition, where even one letter taken from a sutra has the power to perform miracles. I love the respect accorded to a Muslim who has memorized the Koran, because doing so preserves the Word of God.

I know, I know. I write; why can't I do it myself? Well, it's not the same. Other people have written often quite stunning pieces; why not use those? I'm not sure what the difference is between knowing that something was written by an unnamed poet five thousand years ago by the inspiration of God and knowing that something was written by Doreen Valiente forty years ago by the inspiration of the Goddess, but it exists in my mind nonetheless. I struggle even more with the genericness of so much Pagan writing: because there are so many gods, and because of the Wiccan tradition emphasizing the unity of all gods as the God and all goddesses as the Goddess, specificity is hard to come by. And, let's face it, a lot of Pagan writing can get pretty cheesy, and it's hard to feel properly worshipful when you're being distracted by your own cheese.

I have been trying to drag myself away from the idea of devotion as inherently tied to words. In the bible study group I went to in high school, we were encouraged to pray even if we had no words, but I have found that, for myself, this gives me even less structure than meditation does and in the end does nothing for my sense of connection with the divine. I have also been struggling with this idea that connection with the divine is something that happens only at a particular time, when you sit down to pray/meditate/what have you. As a Pagan, I know this is not true, but in real life, I often find that I wish I had that devotional ritual to re-focus my mind, remind me that whether or not my internet connection will be hooked up by next week is not the be-all and end-all of the Universe, that getting out of the house is good for the soul and the body, no matter how much of a nuisance it seems. I need a devotional ritual -- and since I've signed on for the type of Paganism that is, essentially, a massive do-it-yourself project, I have to come up with one.

That's the rest of this series, then; my wanderings through the potential of devotion and how I'm going to come up with something that makes me feel genuine, worshipful, powerful, and not full of cheese. Unfortunately, although the status of my internet connection is not the be-all and end-all of the Universe, it does affect blogging -- and since it might not be up for a week or two, posts might come a little farther between than I'd expected. I will try to get down to the library, though, when I have Part 3 ready.

Tomorrow I move my life up one state and to the right. And after that -- who knows.

On Being an Intermittent Pagan (Devotion Part 1)

(Playing blogroll tag the other day, I found Never Say Never To Your Traveling Self, a UU blog that makes me very happy. Huzzah, new blogs!)

I really thought I'd be able to keep up with the blogging in July, despite the fact that I'm preparing to move away from home and packing up my life into lots of little boxes. As it turns out, I've been completely mentally and emotionally incapacitated by the whole thing. (I'm marathon-watching Star Trek Enterprise, for cryin' out loud.)

The fact that I've realized that marathon-watching bad scifi is as emotionally unhealthy as living on TV dinners during the move has been physically unhealthy hasn't stopped me from doing it, of course. I'm doing them both for the same reason: I'm drained, and I don't want to put the effort into making/doing something that would be good for me, even though I know I'll feel better once I do.

I seem to treat religion in the opposite way from the stereotype; it's something I do when I feel good about myself, when I feel centered and happy and prepared. When I'm having problems, I knucle under and deal with them myself, usually without much of a support structure. It's a problem I've been working on in my social life, but it couldn't hurt for me to start working on it in my spiritual life as well.

Part of my problem, I think, is that I have a tendancy to confuse magic with religion. And given that magic is more associated with Paganism than anything else, and that I don't subscribe to a brand of Paganism particular enough to separate it in my mind from the broad spectrum of Pagan beliefs, I suppose that's understandable. It isn't what I want, though, not by a long shot. I think that magic and devotion should be interconnected, balanced, and mutually supporting, but that hasn't been a reality for me, not for a long time, if it ever has been.

This seems to have turned into an introduction to my devotion series without my intending it, so I'll go ahead and announce it now -- quite a while ago I started working on a long post about devotion and the practice of religion, and it's turned into something that will go better as more like half a dozen posts, which I hope to start posting on Monday. A little cross-cultural comparison, a little theory, hopefully something really productive by the end of it all. We'll see how it goes.