Paganism

Column: The Goddess of Freedom

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Back when I was a little kid, something like 20 years ago, my mother took me on a trip to Paris. For about a week, we wandered around the city of lights, visited friends, took the metro, ate crepes, climbed the Eiffel tower and more. On the morning of our last day there, my mother told me we only had time to visit one more place before going home and that I’d have to choose between Disneyland or… the Louvre.

Paganism

Column: the Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

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23.439281 degrees – that’s the reason for the season. Or rather, it is because of it that we started to promote symbolic and ultimately religious meaning to the path of the sun across the sky. It is an astronomical event co-opted by just about every religion that emerged north of the 23rd parallel, if not worldwide. The returning of the sun was marked in Rome as Sol Invictus with the co-occurring festivals of Brumalia and Saturnalia. The Christians would later fold those holidays together to mark the Nativity as the birth of light in the world.