Guest Contributor

Who Turns the Wheel? Gender in the Modern Pagan Year, part 2 by Myriapath

Part 1, yesterday traced how the eight-festival Wheel of the Year was assembled in the middle of the twentieth century from older ingredients, some surviving only in a line or two of medieval writing. It began with a blessing. Writing for this site in July 2017, Carol P. Christ closed a post with words that name no gender at all: “As we bless the Source of Life, so we are blessed.” We return to it at the end.”

The divine couple, and who was told no

The gendering was there from the beginning. Hutton describes Gardner’s earliest seasonal rites as pairing a god and a goddess, “a divine couple who were intrinsically linked to the annual cycle of winter and summer”, the god predominating in the cold-season festivals and the goddess in the warm-season pair.

The seasonal love story that many readers first meet as something ancient is a modern liturgical pattern, not a preserved pre-Christian myth. That does not make it less meaningful to those who keep it; it makes it datable.

The pattern also carried an exclusion. The World Religions and Spirituality Project, in its profile of the Minoan Brotherhood, describes Gardner’s Wicca as a “fertility religion” organized around male-female polarity, God and Goddess, high priest and high priestess, and records that “Gardner was homophobic and refused initiation to anyone whom he thought was homosexual”, noting that Alex Sanders and Doreen Valiente rejected that exclusion. A framework built on a heterosexual pair puts pressure on those it does not fit, and some people built elsewhere.

Who Turns the Wheel? Gender in the Modern Pagan Year, part 1 by Myriapath

A blessing, and a calendar younger than it sounds

Pick up almost any introduction to the modern Pagan festival year and you will meet a couple: a goddess of the growing season and a god born, crowned and cut down at harvest. Writing for this site in July 2017, Carol P. Christ described Lammas as the point at which “the young male God identified with the harvest … is sacrificed.” She closed the same post with a blessing that names no gender at all: “As we bless the Source of Life, so we are blessed.”

The eight-festival Wheel of the Year and its divine-couple story were assembled in the middle of the twentieth century by people whose names, meetings and dates are known. That recency is exactly why the wording has been open to revision, and revised it has been, in public and on the record. What follows traces that rewriting rather than judging it.

How the eight festivals came together

In a 2008 study in Folklore, the historian Ronald Hutton traces the eight festivals to two separate modern sources. The solstice and equinox feasts descend from Edward Williams, better known as Iolo Morganwg, who invented four Druidic solar festivals between 1792 and 1826. The quarter days come from Margaret Murray’s now rejected account of witch festivals.

God Is a Woman by Michael Aaron Cody

Why does calling God a woman sound more outrageous than calling God a man? For thousands of years, we’ve said it without questioning it: The Father, the Lord, the Almighty. We assigned a masculine identity to the supposed creator of existence, reflected in Matthew 6:9. But look at the biology of human reproduction and the answer gets uncomfortable fast. If God is responsible for life, why assign that responsibility to a male when bringing human life into the world is overwhelmingly feminine? Who decided God was a man in the first place?

I have believed for many years that God, if such a being exists, is female. Because of biology, every human being who ever lived developed inside a woman. Every king, scientist, philosopher, pope, rabbi, imam, and religious authority owes his existence to the female reproductive system. Yet somehow, the ultimate creator is male? Human embryos begin with sexually undifferentiated reproductive structures. In typical male development, the SRY gene activates a pathway involving SOX9, initiating testicular formation. Female development involves WNT4 and RSPO1. Both sexes develop reproductive anatomy from common embryonic structures, indicating no universal masculine starting point, no biological throne reserved for men.

Gloria Naylor: Redirecting the Spotlight, American Woman Writer (1950-2016), part 2 by Maria Dintino

part 1 was posted yesterday

Mama Day

By the time Gloria Naylor wrote her the third novel, Mama Day (1988), she was a master, able to infuse the story with such richness, connection and love that the reader is enveloped in a state of amazement while reading. This spell involves the “spiritual vision, or more accurately, third sight, that empowers Mama Day” (51).

The manifestation of the matriarchal lineage in Mama Day creates a dizzying suspension in time, with dubious connections to the past, tied to current happenings, along with the struggle and hope for the future. Sometimes it is hard to decipher exactly what is going on and you are left to decide for yourself what you see, hear, understand and believe. As the narrator says, “Truth is never fixed”(38).

This novel is set on Willow Springs, a fictional rendition of one of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, “a uniquely maternal island paradise that defies geographic limits”(38).

Gloria Naylor: Redirecting the Spotlight, American Woman Writer (1950-2016), part 1 by Maria Dintino

The Gloria Naylor Archive

I am beyond thrilled to learn of The Gloria Naylor Archive!

This extensive repository of Naylor’s work has been a joint labor of love, respect, and honor between Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut (where Naylor was awarded an honorary degree in 1994) and Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Suzanne Edwards, associate professor of English and director of the Humanities Center at Lehigh, explains:

“It’s this incredible resource, but it was also a resource that I didn’t see people engaging with in scholarship on Naylor. The materials weren’t easily accessible, and Sacred Heart didn’t have the staff or resources to digitize it.”

As a result, Edwards recommended a partnership that would “make the archive more accessible to fans of Naylor’s work, to teachers who are teaching her novels at the college level, on the secondary level, and to scholars who might find it difficult to make a trip to Fairfield”(Hochbein).

The results: a rich and expanding digital archive, as well as an invite to those doing research involving Naylor to schedule an appointment if they would like to engage with materials in person. (Before scheduling a trip, know that the physical materials belonging to the archive are back at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut as of 2023.)

Soil Stars and Sexuality: Regeneration as an Embodied Spiritual Practice by Toya L Walker

The garden gives me a place to ask what it means to belong to a living world. In Boston, where my growing space occupies roughly 1,000 square feet, that question takes practical form. There is soil to tend, water to carry, a season to understand, and a body doing the work. My grandparents cultivated land in Jamaica. Returning there helped me recognize how deeply that relationship mattered to my life. Growing in the city became a way to carry it forward under different conditions.

In my book, Growing in a Concrete Jungle: From Soil to Soul, I approach gardening through food, cultural memory, everyday wellbeing, and seed stewardship. Here, I extend those concerns into a spiritual question: What changes when regeneration includes our bodies, our relationships, and our capacity to receive care? I understand regeneration as an embodied spiritual practice when tending life teaches us to attend to the conditions that sustain it. Soil, stars, and sexuality offer different ways to examine that attention.

Soil and the foundations of care

This reflection begins with one garden and one family history. Its spiritual meaning emerges through interpretation and practice. I do not assume that every grower shares my beliefs. The garden offers experiences through which I can ask about the sacred while respecting other understandings of life.

Becoming the Elder I Hoped to Be by Rabbi Nadya Gross

I have always been old by association. My husband is nine years older than I am, and so for most of our life together I have lived a little ahead of my own age, attending to the questions of the next decade before I reached it. I never minded. In truth, I think I was born looking forward to growing old.

I grew up surrounded by elders who were accomplished and gifted people, men and women whose wisdom shaped the way I saw the world. Chief among them was my Savta, my grandmother. She initiated me into a Kabbalah tradition that had been passed down through her mother-line, from woman to woman, across generations. I watched her and I knew what I wanted: to grow up to be just like her, wise, kind, gifted, and fully present to the world as it is. With elders like her around me, aging never looked like something to fear. It looked like something to anticipate with joy.

Two Poems by Darlene O’Dell

Quiet, Piggy

Though the slur also concerns chickens
and eggs and which came first—
did the master create the puppet
or the puppet the master?

suppose, for instance, one posits
an argument for compassion—
the bare minimum, as in let’s not
disappear people and torture families

a few crumbs under the table
hardly enough for a dog and a widow—
let’s not torment the targeted
and call it Jesus

Executions of Women in Iran in 2026: The Human Cost of State Violence by WNCRI

Today, October 10th, 2026 is World Day Against the Death Penalty

Mothers, Child Brides, and Victims; 54 Killed in 12 Months

As the World Day Against the Death Penalty is observed, the situation of executions of women in Iran presents a horrifying picture of the scale of structural violence against women.

According to information documented by the Women’s Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, at least 28 women have been executed in prisons across Iran since the beginning of 2026. Over a twelve-month period, from October 2025 to October 2026, the number of women executed in Iran reached at least 54. This shocking figure underscores the continued use of the death penalty against women.

These figures have been recorded under circumstances in which, following the nationwide protests of January 2026, months of widespread internet shutdowns, severe communication restrictions, and extensive censorship made the flow of information from inside Iran to the outside world extremely difficult and, in many cases, virtually impossible.

How I Have Been Influenced by Poet Ellen Bass by Charlotte Donlon

“When You Return” by Ellen Bass

Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
and reassemble on the table.
Plastic raincoats will refold
into their flat envelopes. The egg,
bald yolk and its transparent halo,
slide back in the thin, calcium shell.
Curses will pour back into mouths,
letters un-write themselves, words
siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair
will darken and become the feathers
of a black swan. Bullets will snap
back into their chambers, the powder
tamped tight in brass casings. Borders
will disappear from maps. Rust
revert to oxygen and time. The fire
return to the log, the log to the tree,
the white root curled up
in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly
into the lark’s lungs, answers
become questions again.
When you return, sweaters will unravel
and wool grow on the sheep.
Rock will go home to mountain, gold
to vein. Wine crushed into the grape,
oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in
to the spider’s belly. Night moths
tucked close into cocoons, ink drained
from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds
will be returned to coal, coal
to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light
to stars sucked back and back
into one timeless point, the way it was
before the world was born,
that fresh, that whole, nothing
broken, nothing torn apart.

This poem appears in Ellen Bass’s book “Like a Beggar” published by Copper Canyon Press in 2014 For more information on Ellen Bass and her poetry go to her website https://www.ellenbass.com/ Poem posted here under “fair use” guidance.

While warming up beside an enormous stone fireplace with a dozen other writing workshop participants in western North Carolina, I listened to an instructor read the poem “When You Return” by Ellen Bass. I had come to the retreat wrung out from church trauma and the ache of not knowing where I fit in anymore. As the flames crackled and spit, the reader spoke words that singed the edges of longings I hadn’t yet noticed—longings for crooked paths to be made straight, for broken things to be made whole. I was crying by the time he recited the last few lines— “the way it was / before the world was born, / that fresh, that whole, nothing / broken, nothing torn apart.” The tears surprised me; a snowmelt after years of frozen longing that finally began to thaw.