The Land, Sea & Sky

If you guessed that it’s time for another one of my ADF DP Virtue Essays, you’d be right. This time, I’ll be trying to tackle Integrity.

“The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be; all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.” – Socrates

Integrity is a virtue of consistency. When we speak of individuals who manifest integrity, we mean that his or her words and actions are consistent, that he or she is predictable in keeping oaths, and that he or she makes a sincere effort to live up to their own expressed values. A person of integrity might not always be perfectly successful at that effort, but she or he would consistently work with intention toward that goal.

We can cultivate Integrity as a personal virtue as well as a community virtue. As individuals, we do this when we strive to develop consistent values, understand them well, and act on them effectively. In community, we cultivate Integrity by being fair and just to others, and by acting lawfully. Integrity in community does not necessarily mean conformity, but it does mean making a good faith effort to coexist according to mutual expectations of behavior.

Integrity is an important virtue for leaders, because an unjust leader damages the community and its members, and corruption and hypocrisy damages the public trust. A warrior’s integrity is also crucial, since it both helps the warrior adhere to the values of his or her role — “to protect and to serve,” for example — and empowers the warrior to know when an order is unjust or in violation of the values of the community. Producers and merchants who cultivate integrity develop good reputations for being fair dealers, which both benefits them and the the communities that support and benefit from them.

This week I found myself in a surprisingly animated conversation about littering, sacred sites, public spaces, and material offerings.

My surprise wasn’t about the passion with which people engaged the question, but in the diversity of opinion. I think all of us agreed on the basic premise that littering littering — carelessly leaving trash on the ground — is to be avoided, but the question of whether material offerings left in parks or at sacred sites could be litter, and what that might mean turned out to be much thornier than I could have imagined.

Most of us associate leaving litter behind with laziness and disrespect, both for others and the land. If there’s a polar opposite of leaving an offering, littering may well be it. Making offerings is an act of spiritual expression and devotion. We do it intentionally and with respect or reverence, and we tend to think of the items we give as offerings as being special. Things left behind aren’t garbage. They’re sacred gifts.

The idea that things left behind are special is not a new one. While there were specific protocols among the Romans about which items were legally considered “sacer,” the law generally held that items given to the gods outside of official civic worship were treated as if they were, with the provisio that they could be cleared away if the situation became unmanageable. This allowed the people to maintain their own personal relationships with the gods, while allowing priests to maintain temples.

This points us to one of the ways the question of offerings v. litter becomes a practical one. While the act of offering may be central to the practice, those offerings don’t disappear when we’re finished making them. Consider the case of the Hindu community in Queens, and the challenges caused by offerings left in a local waterway:

As the Hindu population has grown in Queens over the last decade, so too has the amount of ritual debris — clothing, statues, even cremation ashes — lining the banks of the bay in Gateway National Recreation Area.

But to the park rangers who patrol the beach, the holy waters are a fragile habitat, the offerings are trash and the littered shores are a federal preserve that must be kept clean for picnickers, fishermen and kayakers. Unlike the Ganges, they say, the enclosed bay does not sweep the refuse away.

Other offerings mentioned in the article include coconuts and flowers, both of which may seem relatively benign in the sense that they biodegrade, but park rangers express concerns about them too, since the impact of even organic objects can be damaging to the local animals and ecosystem.

There is also this example from Singapore, in which a group of people made an offering at a roadside. The offering, which included food in containers, was immediately set upon by birds. “They enjoyed the feast which included rice, beans, drinks, milk and kueh,” the contributor writes, but “After their feasting the road was in a mess.”

Now, neither the Hindus of NYC nor the roadside worshipers in Singapore are engaged in an act of littering per se. They are not carelessly leaving garbage in the water or on the roadside. They are engaging in meaningful, reverent acts of offering, and the objects they leave behind are left with specific intentions. Still, regardless of the intent with which they are left behind, these objects may become litter. The reason a thing is left doesn’t change the fact of its presence, or negate the impact of its presence, or what happens to it when it’s left behind.

When the worshipers leave, the coconut returns to the shore. Food and containers are scattered.

When we make offerings at home, the disposition of those offerings is part of the practice. Some offerings, like praise offerings, actions, or incense, might leave little or no trance and not require disposal. A perishable offering might, depending on tradition, be returned to the earth or consumed. Some non-perishables might also be given to the earth or kept on the shrine. We have to think about where things go because we are doing the work in our homes.

To prevent our offerings becoming litter, we should try to think about those sites we’re working on as homes as well: homes we share with other people, local flora and fauna, and spiritual beings. When we return offerings from home to the earth, or when we make offerings on-site, we should be mindful of our impact, and do our best to respect others. Some ways to do this might be:

- Know and respect the rules of your site, and remember that the laws of Hospitality are in effect even (or even especially) at sacred sites. If you aren’t sure, ask ahead.
- Make moderate offerings (a pinch of bread, not three loaves), offerings that can be absorbed by the earth (water or cider), offerings that are minimally processed and ready to decompose (flowers), or offerings that leave minimal or zero trace (incense, praise offerings).
- Consider the potential environmental impact of your offerings. Don’t leave anything which might pollute, grow invasively, draw colonies of vermin, or harm flora or fauna.
- Ask yourself what the site would be like if everybody using the site did what you are doing. If the result would be untidy, damaging to the site, or unpleasant, consider alternatives that would cause less disruption or harm.
- Take organic offerings home for disposition in your household compost.
- Give back to your community with clean-up efforts. Reducing mess overall is a great way to honor your community, the land, and the Kindreds, and is a great way to gain some perspective on why “leave no trace” is good advice.
- Never, ever do something like this. Disturbing an archaeological or heritage site is Not Okay, even if you really, really want to.

I’d be curious about what others think on this topic. For those of us who practice what I affectionately refer to as “religions of accesorization,” I’d be curious to know how others practice, and what other ways folks are reducing their impact.

I mentioned on Facebook the other day that I’d begun reading Brothers of the Sun: Pagan Men Mysteries [sic] by Rev. Terry Riley, and was feeling a powerful urge to critique it.

Well, I’m here. And my seven pages of notes and I are ready to get critiquing.

Brothers of the Sun is a book that is meant to fill a void in Wicca and Paganism with regard to men’s place in Goddess spirituality. In his book, Riley tries to contextualize masculinity within a Wiccan context, lay out a Triple God concept to reflect the Triple Goddess concept, and establish a series of rites of passage for men. It’s a good and useful idea, and it’s something that does bear working on.

When Riley sticks his subject — Wicca, rites of passage, and the Triple God concept — his work is quite good. The Rove-Father-Sage triad makes a lot of sense within the context of modern Wicca, and the rites he shares in Brothers of the Sun for celebrating those stages, as well as other major life changes, are very practical and not beyond the reach of a working group who wants to adopt them. Likewise, he’s created an interesting system of symbols and tools for each life stage. While I’m not Wiccan, I can appreciate the beauty of these systems, and the lore that Riley is hoping to add to his tradition.

Unfortunately, when Riley steps away from those subjects, things kind of fall apart.

For a start, Brothers of the Sun would have benefited immensely from stronger editorial oversight. The text is plagued with preventable spelling and grammatical errors, as well as numerous bizarre factual errors about etymologies, biology, and history. Some examples:

- His “Universal Law of Gender,” for example, ignores that binary gender, sexual reproduction, and dimorphism are not universal phenomena among living things.
- “Masculine” does not derive from a French word for “witch,” “female” is not derived by adding “fe” (meaning “property”) to “male,” and “human” and “humus” do not share a root.
- While women did enjoy more rights among the ancient Celtic language speaking peoples, it’s a stretch to say that they were fully equal, and families were not universally matrilineal.
- The god Belenos isn’t the historical brother of the historical Brennus (though in fairness to Riley it’s likely that Geoffrey of Monmouth didn’t know what he was talking about either).

The way gender is presented in Brothers of the Sun is also problematic. The feminine is, Riley proposes, a sort of static default in contrast to the masculine’s role as an agent of change. The feminine may birth life, but the masculine must plant that life first. He also writes that “The Goddess is the wheel of life and the God turns the wheel.” Masculinity, meanwhile, is “animalistic,” and men in certain life stages are inclined to “hunt” animals and women. He also reinforces the women-as-healers stereotype (a vagina apparently makes one more compassionate), and appears to conflate gender with biological sex. There’s also some weird homophobia in an early chapter which I’ve discussed in an earlier blog post.

Also, there’s an inexplicable rapey cow story that appears about halfway through the book, and which is never, ever contextualized or explained:

So, yeah. The book has some significant problems.

Overall, I think Riley has some good ideas here. While I’d likely substitute the “Youth” for Riley’s “Rove,” and make him a more neutral figure of youthful energy and curiosity in order to be inclusive of all young men, the overall concept of rites of passage for boys and men is a fine one, and giving men more archetypes within the Wiccan tradition to identify with can only be a good thing. Unfortunately, in order to get to the chewy center, the reader really does have to trudge through some incredibly broken stuff.

With that in mind, I really don’t feel I can recommend this book. I wanted to like this book, and to find some beneficial tools in it. Instead, I’m trying to figure out how to get rid of this paperback without releasing it back into the wild for some newbie to stumble over. It’s a terrible shame, since the good in it deserves to be developed, but the signal-to-noise ratio in this one is way too out of control.

Sometimes I feel lucky that when I came out as FTM and began transitioning that I didn’t do it in a Pagan community. When I did come back, one of the first things I did was to make sure that the things I was interested in would welcome me, and that my gender and sexuality wouldn’t be an issue. For me, that meant finding paths (like CR, Feri, and ADF Druidry) that weren’t centered on gender polarity.

Let me follow that up by saying that my intention isn’t to insult Pagans or our communities. More often than not, I feel like people respond to me in ways that are meant to be positive or friendly. Inclusivity and awareness are popular topics, and many organizations identify themselves as welcoming to trans* folks. Still, being willing to welcome us is different from successfully including us.

That kind of inclusion can be actively difficult to find in paths whose ritual liturgy and beliefs are built around the idea of gender polarity or a gender binary. Wiccan groups in particular can be troublesome. Most (but not all!) forms of Wicca are duotheistic, centered on a female Goddess and a male God. During the liturgical year, the two of them move through the stages of life, and the God fathers himself and is reborn by the Goddess during the annual ritual cycle. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, theologically or otherwise.

What becomes tricky, though, is how that theology seems to trickle down into community attitudes that foster gender essentialism and simplistic beliefs about sex and gender that can create a hostile environment for LGBTQ and intersex participants.

While I think a lot of would-be allies in the Pagan community think that they are welcoming and understanding, many biased attitudes still exist. In his book, Brothers of the Sun, Rev. Terry Riley both describes same-sex attraction as “both an urge and a choice” and outlines what he calls the Universal Law of Gender. He writes:

“…for anything to be created, whether it is human, animal or plant life, the male plants a seed inside the female and after a period of incubation, the product is brought forth directly from the female aspect. This applies through all levels of manifestations even down to the atomic level…”

and

“…but what about Homosexuals? You might ask. Well, I believe even in a Homosexual relationship, one takes on the role of the masculine aspect and the other takes on the role of the feminine aspect.”

Riley’s got some apparent blind spots in terms of biology (hello, asexual reproduction) and chemistry (can Hydrogen even be gendered?), but it’s possible he’s writing more from ignorance than animus. Still, it’s not harmless ignorance. By propagating offensive stereotypes and bad science and integrating it into spirituality, he’s potentially compromising his students’ understanding, as well as the ability of his community to be a safe space.

More disturbing is the transphobia espoused by Z. Budapest, who responded to criticisms about a ritual at Pantheacon in 2011 excluding transwomen by writing:

“This struggle has been going since the Women’s Mysteries first appeared. These individuals selfishly never think about the following: if women allow men to be incorporated into Dianic Mysteries,What will women own on their own? Nothing! Again! Transies who attack us only care about themselves.
We women need our own culture, our own resourcing, our own traditions.
You can tell these are men, They don’t care if women loose the Only tradition reclaimed after much research and practice ,the Dianic Tradition. Men simply want in. its their will. How dare us women not let them in and give away the ONLY spiritual home we have!
Men want to worship the Goddess? Why not put in the WORK and create your own trads. The order of ATTIS for example,(dormant since the 4rth century) used to be for trans gendered people, also the castrata, men who castrated themselves to be more like the Goddess.
Why are we the ONLY tradition they want? Go Gardnerian!Go Druid! Go Ecclectic!
Filled with women, and men. They would fit fine.
But if you claim to be one of us, you have to have sometimes in your life a womb, and overies and MOON bleed and not die.
Women are born not made by men on operating tables.”

Budapest’s animus and bias are clear, but so too is her ignorance with regard to the priesthood and worship of Attis. While she’s a far cry from Riley, what she’s saying ultimately arises from the same kind of gender essentialism that Riley espouses in his book. This should tell us something pretty critical:

If Pagans working in gendered paradigms want to be inclusive of all people regardless of sexuality or gender, our community needs to learn about and begin to appropriately address the realities of human biology, sexuality, and gender identity without imposing inaccurate or biased religious attitudes on participants.

We Pagans frequently criticize other religions — often Christianity, but sometimes others — for imposing outmoded ideals on practitioners about gender and sexuality, but that’s only so much empty posturing if we don’t apply that same sort of critical eye to our own communities and traditions.

This doesn’t mean we should not offer gendered mysteries, or have gendered spaces in our work. Instead, what we should be doing is looking at the assumptions we make in how we construct that work, and how we can create these spaces and implement these practices in a thoughtful and creative way.

To do this, Pagans need to begin by addressing ignorance and bias in our communities. When elders and co-religionists teach misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and ignorance, step up. Educate yourself. Listen to people whose genders and sexualities are different from yours. How does the path affirm them? What do they struggle with? What makes them feel included? Excluded? What do they want or need from you? Learn to be a good ally.

Pagans working in gendered paradigms also need to look long and hard about how the implications of that paradigm are being applied, and how to approach that work in a more inclusive way. While the Goddess and God in Wicca may be a perfect divine polarity, neither the natural world nor human beings manifest in this way. If one believes all things are born of their union, and that all things are a reflection of them, then taking into account the realities of our material world and how we manifest in it should be part of that work. The idea that one can force human-shaped pegs into theologically and philosophically ideal holes neither affirms the people involved nor honors deity. In fact, I’d say it does a disservice to both while reinforcing bias and privilege.

Practitioners need to begin looking at ways to make the practical work more inclusive. As I said before, this doesn’t mean an end to Men’s or Women’s mysteries. On the contrary, this work is both important and affirming to many in our communities. What it does mean is that we need to examine how we do the work, how our techniques exclude or affirm, and who is welcome.

A basic group ritual in which the script calls for certain lines to be spoken by men, with other lines to be spoken by women may seem benign, but such a script may exclude someone who identifies as genderqueer, or put someone who is closeted or questioning in a difficult position. It’s not difficult to revise a call-and-response chant to call for individuals on one side of a circle to say a line, or for individuals wishing to connect with the masculine to say a line, etc.

Likewise, gendered mysteries and rites of passage should be tailored to participants or communities. After all, which is more preferable: making a trans* boy undergo a rite of passage that proclaims him a woman because he’s begun to menstruate, or offering him a rite that helps him connect with the body he’s in while marking his transition into manhood?

Also, communities can include and affirm the sexualities participants in gendered mysteries by shedding the heterosexism and transphobia that so frequently crops up in gendered mysteries — seriously, if I hear one more men’s mysteries guy talk about the desire to hunt animals or women, I’m going to have opinions — and making sure that the lives of LGBTQ people are reflected in the language and lore. When groups plan events like Goddess Weekend or God Weekend, they need to consider: how are we including people whose bodies, sexualities, and identities don’t fit into a heterosexual cisgender binary? How are we creating spaces that are safe for everyone? When we hold women’s or men’s rituals, are we including all women and men? Are we making space for people who might identify as both? Neither? And when we as Pagans do make space for them, are we making certain that we’re really welcoming them to gendered work, and not just relegating them to the unisex rite ghetto?

Finally, the community needs to let people who who are LGBTQ or intersex define themselves. Our spiritual leaders and co-religionists are not the gender police, and they do not get to define the nature of other people’s relationships for them. If we’re talking about trans* people, for example, and you start to correct me about my own experience, or how being trans* works? You are doing it wrong.

Further, labeling LGBTQ people with culturally-specific or indigenous terms like “Two-Spirit” without their consent is never okay. Not only is that appropriation, but it also erases the identities we’re trying to express. I am not a Two-Spirit person. I am not a third-gender person. I’m a queer-identified transman with a complex gender, and if you don’t understand what that means to me so that you can include me, you’re going to have to sit down and listen so that you can work with me as an individual instead of making things up or telling me what my “real” gender or sexuality is about.

So yeah. Pagan community? Do better. I know we’re capable of it.

More fun with Dedicant Path double-dipping! This time, some thoughts about the virtue of hospitality. I’m experimenting with format a bit this time around, breaking loose of some (relatively arbitrary) features I’ve been trying to include in each short essay. I think this one feels more natural, and anticipate I’ll be doing some revision on the others before I submit my DP work this summer.

“Three preparations of a good man’s house: ale, a bath, a large fire.”
- The Triads of Ireland, Kuno Meyer

Hospitality, in the strictest sense, is the etiquette that defines the *ghosti relationship between host and guest. While it is generally the host we mean when we talk about hospitality in the modern sense (which includes not just domestic hospitality, but a constellation of service industries as well), there is still a consciousness in our society that one should be a gracious guest as well as a good host.

We see examples of hospitality in ancient literature. One example appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which he retells a Greek story in which an elderly couple, Philemon and Baucis, are visited by Jupiter and Mercury. Where they are turned away by others, Philemon and Baucis welcome them and share their meager food and fire. When the wine vessel fails to go dry, Jupiter and Mars’ identities are revealed. The couple is taken to safety, the village destroyed, and a new temple raised in its place. Baucis and Philemon ask to be made keepers of the temple, and not to outlive the other, and at the end of their lives are rewarded by being allowed to become trees together.

Hospitality wasn’t just about avoiding the wrath of a disguised deity, however. It was a community value that helped build friendly relationships and promote survival among neighbors, and it protected both travelers and hosts. For ordinary people, travelers might be one of the few sources of news about affairs going on elsewhere, and traveling storytellers a big event for the community.

There are two arenas in which hospitality is important to modern practitioners. First, cultivating hospitality in day-to-day life helps us form positive relationships with our neighbors and communities. By welcoming others and treating them with respect, we help set a standard of positive interaction, and create bonds with those around us. Second, by cultivating hospitality in our spiritual practices, we build and reinforce *ghosti relationships with the Kindreds. In both of these areas, all parties benefit from the joint efforts of the community.

Where can we practice hospitality? Virtually anywhere! When we’re at home, we can practice hospitality by being good hosts to visitors, and building good relationships with our neighbors. When uninvited guests and strangers arrive, we should be gracious to them, even in situations when we don’t invite them in. When we’re away from home, we practice hospitality by being gracious and courteous guests, whether we’re in a friend’s living room, or a restaurant, or even a public space where one should try to respect the space (which likely has a caretaker!) and the experience of others present. We can even practice hospitality on the Internet by trying to interact in courteous ways in various online spaces.

Yesterday was the first day of the Megalensia, or the festival of Magna Mater (or “Great Mother”), who may be more familiar to some readers as Cybele.

The cult of Magna Mater didn’t join the religions of Rome until the Second Punic War (around 200 BCE), when the Sybilline oracle indicated that adopting her would grant Rome victory over Carthage.

Cybele started out as a major goddess among the Phrygians before being adopted by the Greeks (who associated her with Rhea) around the 6th Century BCE. Still, the Romans were old hands at importing foreign deities, both gently and by force. They also had a war to win, and with a bit of negotiation, Rome secured a major cult artifact: a black meteoric stone from the city of Pessinus, Cybele’s primary cult center.

The stone was turned over to the Romans, and was housed temporarily in the temple of Victoria until Magna Mater’s own temple on the Palatine Hill was completed in 191 BCE.

Rome did ultimately triumph over Carthage, but the religion of Cybele turned out to be a bit much for Roman decorum. The priests of the cult of Cybele, the Galli, were eunuchs who wore their hair long and adorned themselves profusely in ways that are reminiscent of (but not to my knowledge connected to) South Asian hijras. Their rites often included self-flagellation, raucous music, and ecstatic dancing. Not ideal in a culture centered around masculinity and dominance, or in one in which piety was a matter of precise right action. Even the priesthood operated differently than Roman priesthoods: the Galli begged for alms and read fortunes for money, and their priesthood was a vocational one, unlike most Roman priesthoods which were generally maintained by householders, members of government, and practitioners of other professions.

But, as with all foreign cults absorbed into the Roman religions, the cult of Cybele was revised to better serve Roman sensibilities. The Galli were left more or less to do their thing with the plebian classes, while the upper classes cultivated another version of the cult — the cult of Magna Mater — with a focus on her as a benevolent, protective goddess, and as a patron of ideal Roman femininity. Thus, the patricians were happy, the folks who wanted to indulge in a bit of ecstatic mystery religion were happy, and Cybele/Magna Mater got her due.

The Megalensia, which runs from April 4 until April 10th celebrates the anniversary of her arrival in Rome and the consecration of her temple. The Galli would likely have originally celebrated in with wild music and ecstatic rites, though the Romans seem to have co-opted it into something more akin to a festival of theater and gracious living (e.g. feasting, parties, etc.) and dispensed with the Eastern theatrics.

As a modern practitioner, I’m fascinated by the contrast between wild ecstasy and conservative “good taste.” While I’m far from patrician, I definitely enjoy a good meal and entertainment. However, I also really like ecstatic dancing, drumming, and play. During the Megalensia, then, I’ll be trying to find some opportunities to enjoy the pleasures in life while also making offerings to Magna Mater at my shrine.

Last night was my regular trip to my massage therapist. Other things I’m likely to do are find a film or television show I’ve never seen, see if there’s any interesting community theater going on, find an opportunity to go drum, and take time to dance. If I can squeeze in a couple of good meals, so much the better.

May you all be blessed by the Mother of the Gods!

I’ve been thinking more of late about how I tend the flame in community, and thought it might be nice to blog my shifts now and again. No idea how often I’ll do this, but here goes.

Yesterday, before my shift, there was a shooting in my neighborhood. This is less unusual than I would like. While nobody was hurt, the circumstances of it were pretty scary, and so I was grateful for the calm and presence that I usually experience during shifts. I lit the flame at dusk and, with the exception of two times that I had to switch it over to a battery candle, kept it burning until I passed it on at dusk tonight.

One thing I add at the end of the liturgy I use is giving offerings and drawing omens. My blessing for my shift was Gort, while my lesson was Dair. I think I got a pretty good helping of both.

For the last few years, I’ve been resisting change with regard to my living space, in spite of the fact that my current circumstances are not at all positive. Last night, my roommate and I started talking seriously about the kinds of changes we’d like to make, and how to prepare for them. While those changes do scare me, I am ready to move toward them in a constructive way instead of pretending I can continue on with the way things are.

I spent lots of time today thinking about this and looking for concrete ways to begin. I’m trying to make peace with the things I’m afraid to lose, or that I’ll feel sorrow over leaving behind. And you know, I may be able to do this. It’s possible I can be okay. But wow, some of this is scary and hard. Even if the change could be really positive, there’s certainly a part of me that digs its heels in and says “don’t wanna!”

Well, Brigid’s going to help me, because I’ve gotta.

So a couple of years ago, a friend linked me to this TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert about genius. Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, talks about her experience of doing the work of a creative, particularly in the face of that success:

Gilbert’s answer to some of the anxiety and difficulty is to reclaim the concept of the genius as a way to partially externalize the creative process in an effort to reduce the pressure of the work, and to honor the strange nature of creativity itself.

While this is a tremendously useful idea, and one that I particularly like as an individual on many levels — there’s a great Tom Waits story in there! — it’s not quite what the ancients meant by it when they referred to a genius or the genii.

In An Introduction to Roman Religion, John Scheid writes (emphasis mine):

“The genius (in Greek, daimon or tukhe) was the personification of the active force of a being, a thing or a place, as it was constituted at the moment of its birth or creation. To judge by the lararia of Pompeii and according to certain stories, the genius of a place or person could be represented by a snake; but it was also represented as a man dressed in a toga, sometimes carrying a horn of plenty and a patera. In a domestic context, people swore by the genius of the paterfamilias and honoured that genius on the birthday of the master of the house. Around the beginning of the Empire, it became customary also to revere the Juno of the mistress of the house, the feminine equivalent of a genius.”

The Romans, in a sense, were animists. Genii — that’s plural for genius, incidentally — were everywhere.

Places had genii — the genii loci — as did each gens. Organizations and groups were often said to have genii. The Roman People had a genius (the Genius populi Romani) as well. Mountains, rivers, and so forth had genii. During the Empire, the genius of the emperor could be publicly venerated during his life. An individual’s genius wasn’t the same entity as that individual exactly. Think of it as being something like an affiliated spirit or vital essence.

In my own practice, I sometimes think of my genius as being a personification of the stream of continuity that makes me possible, and to which I contribute, and which will continue after me. My morning and evening prayers to my genius acknowledge the way that my genius is a force in my life in the sense that I ask for its guidance in my affairs and in my dreams. That first bit is maybe a little heretical, but given that I live in a society where each social unit no longer revolves around a central patriarch, a little bit of heresy is probably appropriate. There have been times when I’ve been distressed that I’ve taken comfort in my genius, acknowledging it as a being who has been where I have been, and is going where I am going, and will help me play things out as they need to play out because its well-being is bound with mine. It’s a little like having a time machine, and seeing that the future can exist, and using that knowledge to overcome a crisis.

While I like Gilbert’s idea that we can use the idea of a genius to externalize the creative process, I’m not sure I’d articulate it quite the way she does. Certainly, we would look to our genii (who Gilbert seems to be confusing with other beings in the Roman domestic cult and then associating them only with artists instead of everyone) to guide and support us in our work in the sense of bringing us success and leading us to be our very best selves. However I think other beings like deities of poetry or handicrafts, as well as the various muses, might be better equipped to help with a specific project.

Still, if this works for her, more power to her. I’ll just be doing it a little differently.

This past September, I founded an ADF Protogrove.

Frankly, this is probably one of the very best things I have ever done for myself with regard to my spiritual practice. It’s given me an opportunity to do the work in community in a way I never have before. It’s opened me up to the work of others. It’s made me accountable in ways I sort of intellectually predicted but didn’t understand in an experiental way. It’s incredibly worthwhile. I love that it’s a thing that worked, and that we have people in my town who want to participate in this. I love that we have free, open High Day rites that anybody can come to and participate in, and then sit down and share food and conversation afterward.

That said, it’s also kind of expensive.

See, we’re not an incorporated entity yet. That means we haven’t got a bank account. We’re also still developing bylaws, so we don’t have a dues structure (and, depending on how things go with the bylaws process, we may choose not to go that route). While I suppose we could use somebody’s back yard, we’ve so far preferred to use public spaces, like city parks, the library, and a space at the local Unitarian Universalist church. With the exception of the library — which is free — all of these spaces cost around $35-$100 to rent. Ritual supplies cost money as well. While the space for our Winter Solstice rite was free, the other supplies (including a table-sized evergreen, offerings, table cloths, and other celebration gear) cost me nearly what I’d have paid for a rental.

Before you get the wrong idea, let me say up front that I’m not complaining. I knew, when I envisioned the sort of work I’d like to make possible, that it would require a material investment on my part as well as the emotional, spiritual, and temporal ones. The goal of a Protogrove is to become a Grove — and White Hawthorn is progressing at a marvelous clip in that regard — and a Grove exists in part as an entity to provide the local community with infrastructure. Infrastructure, as we know by observing the world around us, isn’t free.

Case in point, another group I’m an officer of — Hearthfires — is a local, pan-pagan support and networking organization. We do a lot of local PR, referrals, have a weekly meet-up, sponsor and table at various events, etc. You know. Community infrastructure. And a lot of our work we do for free. Our officers are all volunteers, our meet-ups are free, and anybody can participate without being a dues-paying member. Which, frankly, is pretty awesome since we genuinely want to be inviting, open, and helpful to anyone who is interested.

But, you know, we have expenses. Sponsoring and tabling costs money. Our web hosting and domain name cost money. Promotional materials cost money. Maintaining and replacing our tabling gear in particular is going to cost a pretty penny this year. We’re trying an online fundraiser, and we’re planning to sell things at our booth on Earth Day to raise funds as well, but sometimes we really do rely on our core members to make additional donations throughout the year to make the work possible.

The Pagan community is, I think, kind of allergic to thinking about this stuff. Many Craft traditions actively teach that training (and sometimes service, such as spellwork) should be free, for example. We also — quite rightly, I think — believe that everyone should have access to spirituality, and that imposing a literal or figurative price of admission is wrong. And, of course, many of us in the community are poor.

Personally, I can get behind the ideological argument that everyone should have access to the Work, whatever the Work may be. But I think we as a community do need to warm up to the idea of investing in infrastructure with the same vigor that other paths do. None of the physical churches I’ve visited have a cover charge, but they do pass an offering plate around during the service, and ask members to tithe or contribute to fundraising campaigns.

If everybody who came to Hearthfires regularly chipped in around $5 a month via PayPal, we’d be significantly better off. Yeah, we’d still encourage folks to give more, but we wouldn’t have to do it as often, or as urgently. Likewise, once White Hawthorn is ready to try and take on funds as an entity, that kind of support from our core members would go a long way toward paying for what we’re already doing, and open us up to doing more.

Thinking bigger, how cool would it be to have a Pagan community center where people can hang out, hold rites, etc? How awesome would it be for us to be able to sponsor community events and service on the kind of scale that more traditional churches do? How great would it be for our teachers to have the time and resources to teach because our communities help support them?

The legitimacy of the Pagan community in the public square has grown tremendously in my lifetime, and I hope that this trend continues. An important part of making that happen, though, is going to be for us to put our money where our mouth is.

Everyone’s ability to do that is different. For some of us, that $5 a month isn’t always going to be easy. For others, well, one less latte isn’t going to kill us, right? And really, a lot of us doing community organizing are always going to be volunteers, genuinely happy to work for free. All we ask is that the community remembers now and again to give us something to work with.

A couple of weeks ago I posted about my thoughts on Courage, one of the nine virtues we’re asked to work with and write about on the ADF Dedicant Path. This time, I’d like to share my work writing about Fertility.

“You give the Food of Life unfailingly, in fidelity, and when the soul by necessity departs, in You alone do we find refuge. Thus, whatever You give, in You all will be returned. Deservedly are You called Great Mother of the Gods. Piously then are all the celestial powers distilled in You. The One and True parent of all living things, human and divine. Without You nothing could be born, nothing could grow, and nothing mature.”
– Antonius Musa, Precatio Terrae

While the way we use the word “fertility” in the modern public square tends to relate to matters of human reproduction (e.g. fertility treatments), the word “fertile” has a constellation of meanings, only one of which is “capable of breeding or reproducing.” A fertile thing is simply a thing which is able to sustain or create. The result may be material or metaphorical; a field may be as fertile as a train of thought. In ADF, the virtue of Fertility is also taken to include an appreciation of the processes by which acts of creation and fertility occur, be it in the sense of agricultural cultivation, personal development, or physical intimacy.

Cultivation remains essential, but the ancients appreciated Fertility in the sense of cultivation in a more immediate way. While we as moderns may observe agricultural cycles in a ritual or nostalgic sense, the failure or success of a season’s planting had a direct bearing on survival, and ritual was employed through the year to protect crops and animals and to ensure their health and productivity. Creativity, meanwhile, was prized not only because storytelling, lore-keeping, performance, adornment, and art are central to material and social cultures, but because ingenuity brought forth new techniques and technologies with which to improve cultivation and other areas of life. We know, too, that the ancients valued the creation of families, and sometimes ritualized physical intimacy, both within personal relationships and in the context of sovereignty. Many of the IE cultures had a concept of sacred kingship, which required marriage to or intimacy with a sovereignty goddess. The fertility of the land was seen to be a direct reflection of the state of that relationship.

We can cultivate Fertility in three ways. First, by understanding and developing our relationship with the Earth and the seasonal cycles around us, we become better able to respect, protect, and participate in the natural processes which sustain our lives. Second, by cultivating traits like creativity, nurturing, and industriousness we benefit ourselves, or families, and our communities. Finally, by embracing our physicality, we not only find new ways of expressing ourselves alone and with one another, and connecting with physical generative powers, whether or not we are able or interested in producing biological children.

Sacral fertility would include navigating matters of sovereignty and ritual cycles, while martial fertility might be more focused on industriousness. While fertility in the producer function seems to be a very simple matter — material fertility is what they do! — intellectual fertility is still critical in terms of devising the best way to bring about a harvest.