Paganism

Column: The Time Of Your Life

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In the 2011 sci-fi film In Time, Justin Timberlake plays a factory worker in a dystopian future where each person is born with a set allotment of time-currency. The poor work to buy more time from their bosses, while paying their time to others for rent, or food, or other necessities, constantly checking their time-balance (a digital clock embedded into their flesh) to ensure they have enough to survive the next day. In the constructed world of the movie, when you are out of time, you die. Elsewhere in this future world, others have plenty of time–the wealthy hoard hours and days from the masses of the poor, living long and opulent lives. Their own days seem near infinite; their worries minor compared to the workers in other ‘Time Zones,’ who scramble constantly in time-debt trying to have enough minutes to feed their children.

Paganism

Column: The Revolt of Remembering

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When we tell the story of modern Paganism, we tell a history as we understand it. But all history is only selective memory, a collection of what we choose to remember or what we know to include. The sum total of humanity’s experience cannot be recollected except by the sum total of humanity. History’s an exclusion, as much as it is a narrative, and tells us more what we think about ourselves now than what happened in the past. To recount the tale of myself to you would take my entire life, and that life is not yet over.

Paganism

Column: Fetishes and Sticks – The Sorcery of Capitalism

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Thin pale hands clutch a wand bound with a crystal and bundled herbs. The fingers of the practitioner are delicate, lithe, adorned with pewter and silver rings; a thing gossamer fringe from her sleeves or her dress drapes down, and she lights cones of incense in spaces prepared for them upon a painted-stone. Magic seems to stream through the soft-lighting of the image, and we are left to wonder: Is she casting a spell? Invoking long-quiet spirits? Divining the threads of wyrd woven around a supplicant?

Paganism

Column: The City at the Gates of the Dead

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I. I was looking for my cat, but I met him instead, there on that blasted hill in the Otherworld. I wake into the city, the city which stretches from borough to borough, neighborhood to neighborhood, downtown to downtown across the earth. I wake into a city that does not know my gods, the Singers in the Dark. I am a foreigner, though I’m ‘from here.’

Paganism

Column: The Fires of Brighid

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I celebrated Imbolc before a hearth-fire with a Christian. Not a ‘pure’ Christian, mind you. One learns in Druidry that purity isn’t something that can exist within Nature, let alone human belief. What’s purity anyway, except a violent stripping away of flesh and bone to get to the very ‘pure’ and perfect core of existence? And by then, all you’ve got is a pile of shredded skin and muscle and hair and no life left.