Part 11 of ARDA 2 SECTION TWO A - Student Organizations ...

A Druid Riddle
On the table are eighteen odds and ends. You sweep
seventeen of them off. Quickly now, what’s left on the table, an
odd or an end
Pagan Parents and Kids—Can You Help
My son, age 9, has declared himself: he is a pagan, and he
especially loves “The Lord of the Beasts and the Woods.” The
only other pagans he knows are adults, or at least too big to
remember very much about being 9 years old. Our neighborhood
is sort of remote, and I don’t know whether he’ll ever meet many
of Mother’s younger children out here. How about a pen pal
network for kids in the same boat If anyone else out there has
declared him or herself at an early age, and would like to write,
please let me know. I would also be willing to keep a list of
addresses, and match penpals as to age-mates or disciplines, if
enough people are interested.
—Olin Stoltz (age 9) and Leslie Craig (age 37)
Box 215, Myers Flat, CA 95554
The Heathen on the Heath:
The Heathen on the Heath Babbles on
about Patronage
I recently had a very dear brother tell me that my life in the
woods had a romantic mystique of being more genuine than a
pagan life in the town. May I say, hogwash The only thing the
Heath has managed to impress upon the Heathen and make it
stick, so far, is how un-genuine a life she usually leads, next to
her other brethren of water, beast, and tree. Oh, close-up
adoration of the gods is a very moving experience. But there’s
more to a god or goddess than loving him or her, and it’s all
much too big for us, and I suspect that the energy of our natural
comedy is a better feast for the immortals’ table than any amount
of praise and sacrifice.
One thing that I’m sure inspires a veritable salvo of godly
giggling is how we deal with our patrons and teachers, both in the
other world and in this one. Most of you probably know your
patrons, and have at least some idea of who your totem beasts are.
Some of you may know a departed of discorporate spirit who
teaches you, or uses you to speak to others. Some of this stuff is
very recognizable; other times, you may shake your head, check
whatever resources you use to identify the “real” archetypes, and
decide that you’re simply crazy.
Totemism, for instance. I’m not going to get into whether
our forebears practiced any precise or organized form of
totemism, although Cuchullain’s relationship with the hound
(killing one, then having to fulfill its function, and thereafter
being forbidden to harm the hound or eat of its flesh) sounds a lot
like totemism to me. But we Neopagans are balanced between
two influences: What is born into us from our ancestors And
then, what do the gods and the beasts do to us in the here-andnow
For instance, I sit at the feet of the entire canine tribe. Wolf,
dog, coyote, fox—all bitches and vixens are my sisters. Elder
sisters. A totem is a teacher, a giver of omens, a bridge between
human anomie and the solidarity of nature. I don’t know anyone
else whose attachments are so general. I do not know that for me
to ignore the call of any pack-running nightsinger means disaster.
It puts me in quite a dilemma, because a country homestead, with
its deliciously helpless ducks and chickens and its panicky
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newborn grazers, is an even worse place to interact with large
number of canines than a house in town. So in a very undignified,
non-ritual way, my totem is constantly teaching me the difference
between genuine love and respect and the phony human construct
of charity. We are not the gods. An ordinary housedog knows the
gods better than I do.
It can be a pretty harrowing relationship. There’s you, and
there’s your teaching-beast, and there’s the rest of the world. Are
you brother or sister to a beast that the neighbors regard as
property, or a menace, or a running larder I listen to the song of
the Grey Brethren on the ridges with an entirely different emotion
than do the sheep-ranchers a little further down the valley, though
we meet on the common ground of wishing dysentery and poison
oak on the morons who dump unwanted dogs “out in the wilds”
to seek out their niche as incompetent pack members and stock
killers.
Sometimes an animal relative will come to you for its death.
Fub that one, and you’re in big trouble. I know.
Then there are the creatures other than your totem who
show up here and there with messages or lessons, or just to make
your day, There was the king stag of our hill, laughing at me.
There was the squirrel crossing the road, to show me the
consequences of letting faster drivers (or anything else which is
simply more aggressive or socially acceptable than I am) push me
around. There are the white cranes that feed in the pastures north
of here, whose mere presence lights up my heart for no reason
that I can name, and the river otters who join me for a dip:
“Screw it; this is playtime!”
You can’t put your life in a pattern, or make a pretty pattern
with the wild things in all their rightful places: not and know
anything about yourselves. Nonhuman logic is not going to make
sense to you. A brave man can find himself chosen by a grazer; a
timid woman might have a totem that hunts to survive. There is
more to any animal or spirit than one human can know.
To the sparrow, the sparrow was himself; to the raven, he
was dinner, Definitions can be a real bitch sometimes.
Plants will choose you, too. What kind of wood is your
staff made of I don’t have one. I kept waiting for a branch of
madrone to wave yoo-hoo at me. Meanwhile, the bay tree at the
head of my garden, that I had talked to and cried on and rested
under for the last dozen years, dropped a branch in this winter’s
snow. It’s about ten feet long, and as thick as my 1eg and finally
today it occurred to me that my staff is smack in the middle of it,
waiting for me to get my lazy butt in gear and whittle it out. “Hey,
is anybody awake here”
I suspect that the gods sort of meet us in the middle,
choosing us when we most need them. Perhaps we look harder
for our gods, because religion makes such a blatant difference
between us and the rest of the world, and the gods are such an
obvious feature of it. We meet with blessings, opportunities, and
quest. Eventually, we find the gods who are our patrons. When I
was younger, I always thought that my patroness would be the
goddess who ruled over my purpose in life, or my identity. Now I
know better: my patroness is the goddess that don’t cut me no
slack.
Paganism is not a TV set, and the teachings of gods and
beasts are not a spectator sport: our patrons and our totems will
all want something from us. Our laughing disclaimer at the
beginning of services may remind us to respect reason, but the
praise and sacrifice that follows is just as necessary, to keep our
end of the bargain up until we find something better to offer.
Wherewith, I offer this praise:
Who loves you
Whose laughter caresses your departing back
Beneath whose cloak of midnight do your eyes adjust to the dark,