Everyone Wants To Be On A Postage Stamp, But Nobody Wants To Die

Everyone Wants To Be On A Postage Stamp, But Nobody Wants To Die

I got ruminating on material culture because of some discussion of how people blow it off as unimportant compared to written histories. (The trigger was the Marilyn Monroe dress, for the record.) It’s just stuff, right? Not important. (Which is hilarious in the profoundly materialistic culture that I’m surrounded by but let’s just set that over there to side-eye for the moment, while keeping in…

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Grief and Kintsugi

A long time ago, I wrote about kintsugi and the Eye of Heru, and about how a central ethos intrinsic to Heru’s victory is this idea that the restored Eye, not the uninjured one, holds the most strength.

A different version of this can be found in the rituals around death.

Why is the heart the seat of intellect and moral discernment in Egyptian religion?

The heart is the unifying force of the…

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We Are All In Mythological Time

I was talking to people recently, about time in lockdown. Every day is Blursday, it is Day O’Clock or Night O’Clock, and it is always the fortyteenth of Maprilay.

And I just now realized a thing: we are all in neheh, more in neheh than usual.

In ancient Egyptian cosmology, there are two forms of time, which combine and spiral and produce our experience: djet, in which one thing happens after…

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I Actually Got to Go to the Service Today

I Actually Got to Go to the Service Today

The thing about teaching Sunday school is of course that it happens on Sunday, and more relevantly, at the same time as the service, so my church life this year has been, largely, ‘go to the announcements and first hymn, then head to class’, which means I haven’t had things to say about sermons.

But today I wasn’t teaching, so I got to actually stay for the sermon, very exciting.

“What can I, as…

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Lost At Sea

I lit a candle at the service today for Eri – who commented here as Crowess.

https://twitter.com/eriolcaw/status/1210431519086522368

I said I lost a friend suddenly, and I find myself contemplating euphemisms; on her blog, when I posted there to say she was gone, I used an Egyptian one, that she had turned her face to the beautiful West. I said she was brilliant – which she was – and often…

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The Other Dancer

(Welp, I’ve been pretty pants at updates for a while, haven’t I? Let’s fix that.)

Today’s service involved a sextet of dancers.

As I watched them perform, I was particularly drawn to watching one of them, whose brow was slightly furrowed with intense concentration as she paced out the steps on bandage-wrapped feet. Hers were not the poised toe-points of the younger women who seemed to have…

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Writing a Thing

Doesn’t really count as either “Sunday Reflection” or “Wolf-Work” but I’m gonna tag ’em in anyway: two Sundays ago the student minister gave her first sermon, which included a comment about evangelical universalism as a concept. Which gave me the opportunity to introduce someone else to Thiess of Kaltenbrun and the werewolves as those who have the sacred duty to go into hell to steal back what…

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A Hope In Hell

A Hope In Hell

[ This is another in a sequence of wolf-work posts and I have no idea how much sense it will make if you aren’t familiar with the rest of the tag. Be warned. Or read the tag. ]

I’ve been learning an awful lot about the techniques of the devil’s sorcerors.

It’s a lot to take in, and a lot to handle.

I mean, the actual sorcerors have an easy thing to understand: their desire to mound up riches in…

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We Talk Shop

This weekend, I attended a talk by Judika Illes, author of, among other things, The Element Book of 5,000 Spells. The thing that sticks in my mind about it was not the core topic – the history of African Diasporic spiritual and magical practice – but something that was almost a side point.

When practitioners of different magical systems hang out together, we talk shop.

When I was working on the…

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“The Roman religion consisted of worshippers holding disunified polythetic sets of beliefs. The overlap of these sets of beliefs might produce some beliefs that were more common than others, but the lack of an orthodox mandate for uniformity meant that the beliefs of an individual need not be affected by the variant beliefs held by another Roman. A man who believed that di manes had powers to preserve life in their own right and a man who thought they preserved life by posthumously invoking the help of other supernatural beings could both believe, on a practical basis, that honoring the manes could help preserve their lives. A Roman who thought the lares were another form of the deified dead and one who thought they were the children of a nymph could both believe that the lares were important guardians of the home who needed to be worshipped. Worshippers could disagree about the nature of the god Mars or the god of the Lupercalia while all agreeing that these gods existed and had powers that could benefit the lives or worshippers. Rather than searching for orthodox doctrines in the Roman religion (or seeing their absence as a weakness) it is better to study clusters of beliefs in the understanding that each individual variation could be important to the belief holder’s understanding of how to obtain the benefits that Rome’s pantheon of gods could offer the individual.”

— Charles W. King, “The Organization of Roman Religious Beliefs” (2003)

Awareness

Figured I’d write something for “autism awareness month”. Content warning: Third Reich; murder of disabled children. Putting in a cut out of kindness. I wish my brain had cut tags sometimes. (more…)

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Two Are One, Life And Death

(I guess I’m still pondering Le Guin, as one does, given I’m quoting The Left Hand of Darkness in that title there.) Someone had written us a new hymn, I discovered when I was scrambling into the balcony with the older kids, running later than usual for the service. I don’t recall what the hymn-name of the tune was, it’s one of those old traditional song tunes that comes around on the guitar…

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Embodiment, Theology, and Ursula K. Le Guin

I wrote about the passing of Ursula K. Le Guin over on the authorblog already, but of course there is always so much more to write, to say, to mull over, at times like these. I wasn’t going to write here, but then I was reading so many of the explosions of comments, of articles, of references to old speeches, and I read this: People crave objectivity because to be subjective is to be embodied, to…

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On Salvation and Werewolves

As a pagan, I have spent a great deal of time resenting the concept of “salvation”. I did not see a place for it in my cosmology; I did not perceive a fallen creation, or a need to expiate sins, and I had no fear of a supernatural damnation to meet me at the end of my life. (I have a number of canned rants on the subject that I can pop the lids off when appropriate, in fact. And have been known…

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An Autistic God

I have been thinking a lot, on and off, as part of my processing around placing myself on the spectrum after all this time, about Set as an autistic god. Not a “god of autism”, an autistic god. I think about it because of the ambivalence with which he is often treated in the mythologies: yes, he’s useful, he’s powerful, he’s potent, but he’s also Not Like Us, he’s the fringe one, the god of the…

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I’m guessing the blue there is for bonus celestial implications?  (If I’m remembering my Wilkinson color coding correctly, though I’m sure there’s other meanings to blue that I’m just not pulling up right now.)

Tomb of Bannentiu. First Jackal is Anup, the second is Heru-Anup (Porter & Moss, thanks to @bigbadjackal for helping me figure what this out and telling me about the identitiy of the jackals)

In the Cold There Are Candles

The sanctuary is bright, bright, the severe Puritan white of everything moderated by the jeweltone quilt hung in the front and the two immense squares hanging from the balcony windows on either side, two immense squares bearing names, remembrances, handprints, love expressed in pen and quilting, years of life. Most from the forties or fifties spanning to the nineties, one 1982-1990 with…

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