Pagan Every Day

From the Archives: Yom Kippur as Seen (With Respect) by Barbara Ardinger

This was originally posted on September 30, 2012

Back in the Stone Age, otherwise known as the early 1980s, I had jobs as a technical writer and editor in five different industries, including aerospace and computer development. Hey, I was trained as a Shakespearean scholar, but in those days—pretty much like today—there were almost no jobs in the academy for newly-hatched Ph.D’s. So I tried technical writing. At one of the aerospace jobs, I sat in the “bullpen”—me and nineteen middle-aged white guys—whereas all the other women slaved—on typewriters in that pre-computer age—in the typing pool. There was a major class distinction in that aerospace firm, and I was glad to be with the guys. (Yes, shame on me.) Those were the days of 9 to 5. As far as I’m concerned, that movie is nonfiction.

One of my tech-writing buddies at the aerospace company was a former Jehovah’s Witness who had been disfellowshipped because his beard was the wrong shape and he’d refused to correct it. Another was an older man who had studied with Earnest Holmes himself and had also known Manly P. Hall in earlier days. A third friend, the project librarian, was a Conservative Jew. All three of these guys soon noticed the books I was bringing to read at lunch. These included the works of Dion Fortune and Gerald B. Gardner, and numerous metaphysical authors, plus every book I could find on alchemy, the tarot, New Thought, reincarnation, trance channeling…well, you get the idea. I was exploring occult worlds and ideas. When we weren’t talking about how to help the engineers write gooder English and I wasn’t trying to figure out how a FLIR (Forward-Looking InfraRed) helmet works, my three buds and I had some majorly interesting conversations on comparative religion and the occult (the word means “secret, hidden”) aspects of religions in general.

One day the Jewish librarian brought me a book to add to my library. This was the 1973 edition of The Jewish Catalog. What a wonderful book! I still have it. It’s sitting next to my keyboard as I type this.

Back in those innocent days, I still believed the pagan myth of the nine million witches burned by the inquisition during the Middle Ages. Yes, it’s a myth—there were never that many witches on the face of the earth at the same time; such a holocaust would have nearly depopulated medieval Europe. I have since learned that it is shameful to compare a mythological holocaust with the real Holocaust of World War II. I read The Jewish Catalog from cover to cover and learned a great deal.

Now flash forward to 2002 when the owner of RedWheel/Weiser phoned to ask me to write a book for them. I immediately said yes. The book, which they titled Pagan Every Day, is not, however, a pagan tome. It’s a daybook, a year and a day of short essays on topics that include goddesses, gods, and old pagan festivals and philosophy, and also saints and holy days from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, plus less well known religions, plus interesting historical events…and then I also named Miss Piggy as The Goddess Of Everything. I get fan emails from people saying they reread the book, a day at a time, every year and still enjoy every page.

For September 24, I wrote about Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party, which was the most amazing exhibition I’d ever seen. The next day that year was Yom Kippur. I turned to my copy of The Jewish Catalog, where I learned about an obscure custom called kapparot. Here is what I wrote. Yes, I believe that we can borrow—but not pirate!—other people’s customs, acknowledge and express our gratitude to those other people and their religions, and then adapt what we borrow to a pagan perspective. After all, we’re all kin.

September 25: Yom Kippur

The Jewish Catalog describes custom called kapparot, which “entails swinging a chicken around one’s head as a…symbol of expiating sins. The chicken is then slaughtered and given to the poor….” Most people these days tie money in a handkerchief and swing that around their head, saying, This is my change, this is my compensation, this is my redemption.

Yom Kippur, the last of the ten days of Yamim Noraim, occurs at nightfall on the ninth day of Tishri. The rites for Yom Kippur are set forth in Leviticus 16.

No matter which or how many gods we believe in, thinking about what we’ve done wrong and how we can set it straight is useful. The Day of Atonement, the Talmud says, “absolves from sins against God, but not from sins against a fellow man unless the pardon of the offended person is secured.” People seeking recovery in Twelve-Step programs likewise turn their lives over to the care of “God as they understand him” (Step 3), make a list of people they have harmed and become “willing to make amends” (Step 8), and then actually make amends (Step 9).

Pagans can make amends before Samhain. We want to have a clean emotional field in which to rest over the winter and plant fresh seeds in when spring comes. Let’s revive that old Jewish custom. But not swinging the chicken! That’s cruelty to swinger and swingee. Tie crystals or red corn or other symbolic items in a clean white handkerchief and swing it around your head, reciting the blessing quoted above. Then go around and see the people you need to see. Speak heart to heart with them. Give them something blessed from your handkerchief. Get on with your lives, as friends or no longer as friends, but not as enemies.

BIO: Barbara Ardinger, Ph.D. (www.barbaraardinger.com), is a published author and freelance editor. Her newest book is Secret Lives, a novel about grandmothers who do magic. Her earlier nonfiction books include the daybook Pagan Every Day, Finding New Goddesses (a pun-filled parody of goddess encyclopedias), and Goddess Meditations. When she can get away from the computer, she goes to the theater as often as possible—she loves musical theater and movies in which people sing and dance. She is also an active CERT (Community Emergency Rescue Team) volunteer and a member (and occasional secretary pro-tem) of a neighborhood organization that focuses on code enforcement and safety for citizens. She has been an AIDS emotional support volunteer and a literacy volunteer. She is an active member of the Neopagan community and is well known for the rituals she creates and leads.

Let’s Celebrate a God and a Goddess for February by Barbara Ardinger

Back around the turn of the century when I was writing Pagan Every Day, I did a lot of research. I had to. I had to write something for every day of the year, including leap year day and a second January 1, i.e., a year and a day. I used real books. I stacked them around the chair in front of my computer. I had to step over books. Step around books. Wind my way past books to other books that had somehow landed across the room. Just like nearly everybody else who writes for Feminism and Religion, I wrote and thought and deleted and wrote some more. (Y’all know how that goes.) We writers have always had interesting adventures with traditional publishers. That’s one reason self-publishing is so popular today: we can maintain more control over our work. Twenty years ago, when I modestly (hah!) submitted my year and a day of essays, the publisher said, “Oh, you wrote too much. We only want 300 words per day.” They hadn’t mentioned that before. So I began editing. I threw away nearly all my nifty daily epigraphs and edited every day down to (cross my heart) 301 words.

Who did I find for early February? A Greek god who had secrets. A Roman goddess who is special to me to this day.

Apollo

Continue reading “Let’s Celebrate a God and a Goddess for February by Barbara Ardinger”

2019: Hopefully a Happier New Year by Barbara Ardinger

We’re nearly a week into the new year. I almost wish I were a prophet and could predict with assurance that 2019 will be better than 2018—less filled with hate, name-calling, lies, and all-round trumpery (pun intended: “trumpery” is “worthless nonsense”).

When I wrote my daybook, Pagan Every Day, here’s how I began today’s essay:

The Saxons of northern Europe called the first Monday after January 6 Plough Day and honored Freya, “the Venus of the North.” As a goddess who engages in indiscriminate sex, Freya is the spirit of the earth’s fertility. Like Persephone, she is in the underworld during the winter, but early in January we already see hints that she might be rising. We’ll soon set our ploughs into the earth and plant our crops.

We can think of planting our crops in both literal and metaphorical ways, but my best guess is that we’d best think of them metaphorically, at least in the so-called developed world, because our part of the world is mostly urban now and if there’s literal planting, it seems to be mostly done by agribusiness. If we’re not farmers literally broadcasting seeds, how do we plant metaphorical crops for 2019?

We can start with numerology, which I studied back in the early 1980s about the same time I was reading books on metaphysical and occult topics, learning the tarot, and reading every book about the Goddess I could find. (There were already lots of them.) As you no doubt know, numerology is based on the meaning of numbers. Whether we’re working with a name, a birth date, or a situation, we use a chart (which you can find online) to convert letters to numbers, then we add the numbers and reduce them to one number that becomes a kind of prediction. It’s important to remember, of course, that true divination does not forecast a fixed and permanent future. Instead, it notes what is likely to happen if things keep going along the path they’re on.

According to my numerology teacher, 1 means creation and individualization; 2 means love, gentleness, service, harmony; and 3 means self-expression, personal creation, optimism, inspiration. One is also the beginning of a new cycle (year, life, experience, adventure), and 9 is “complete expression,” or the end of a cycle, life, experience, or adventure. It’s interesting that 9 + 1 = 10 = 1. The end always leads to what we call a new beginning.

So let’s do some numerology with 2019. We add the numbers and reduce them to one number that will characterize the year: 2019 = 2 + 1 = 3 + 9 = 12 = 1 + 2 = 3. This means that 2019 is a “3 year,” which can (and may) lead to self-expression, optimism, inspiration, talent, sociability, friendliness, and kindness. (Note that there are two 3’s in the calculation; maybe they reinforce the idea of 3-ness.)

Self-expression, optimism, etc. are good crops to be planting this month! These are crops that need to be growing here. If we think politically, as so many of us have been doing for two years, we can hope that the new diverse and Democratic majority in the House of Representatives will grow and harvest these crops and bring an end to trumpery. What do you think might happen this year? Where are these metaphorical crops best planted? How will we feed and fertilize them? How and where will they grow?

Several years ago, I moved into what I call tarot numerology. Our new year’s 3 corresponds to Card III of the major arcana: The Empress. You know of course that there’s a nearly infinite number of decks with their own illustrations, but most of them show Card III as The Empress. She is the Earth Mother, Mother Nature, the Great Goddess. My tarot teacher said The Empress advises, among other things, “as above, so below,” and when we get The Empress in a reading, she’s usually telling us that new things will be born, there will be productivity and creativity, there will be good crops.

Our reading of 2019, therefore, is that we are possibly entering a new year of good crops—those metaphorical ones I listed earlier: self-expression, optimism, inspiration, talent, sociability, friendliness, and kindness. A couple months ago, we elected 100 women to a U.S. Congress that is more diverse than any Congress has ever been before. Can these women, perhaps individually, more likely collectively, embody the Goddess?

I’m going to stop writing now because I want you all to finish this post for me. Give me—give us—your ideas and plans for planting new crops in 2019. How can we bring self-expression, optimism, inspiration, talent, sociability, friendliness, and kindness into our weary society? We can keep voting, of course, but what else? Organizing? Marching? Writing? Please think about this new year and then tell us what you’re thinking. What’s gonna happen??

Note: The cards are from the Tarot of Meditation, drawn by Marty Yeager; the Motherpeace Tarot, created by Karen Vogel and Vicki Noble; the Gaian Tarot, drawn by Joanne Powell Colbert; and the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, drawn by Pamela Coleman Smith (who did not receive any credit for her work for nearly a century. Oh, look—it’s the patriarchy in action again).

Barbara Ardinger, Ph.D. (www.barbaraardinger.com), is a published author and freelance editor. Her newest book is Secret Lives, a novel about grandmothers who do magic. Her earlier nonfiction books include the daybook Pagan Every Day, Finding New Goddesses (a pun-filled parody of goddess encyclopedias), and Goddess Meditations. When she can get away from the computer, she goes to the theater as often as possible—she loves musical theater and movies in which people sing and dance. She is also an active CERT (Community Emergency Rescue Team) volunteer and a member (and occasional secretary pro-tem) of a neighborhood organization that focuses on code enforcement and safety for citizens. She has been an AIDS emotional support volunteer and a literacy volunteer. She is an active member of the Neopagan community and is well known for the rituals she creates and leads.

Happy New Year by Barbara Ardinger

Here we are, beginning a new year. Let’s hope it’s a good new year. I grew up in a working-class family in St. Louis. We were Calvinist and Republican. I’ve escaped from the last two, but I still claim my working class background. My father was a lithographer, my mother, a housewife. And I will never forget the advice given every year (actually, more than once every year) by my Dutch grandmother: Whenever you start something new, start clean. Take a bath, brush your teeth, wash your hair. More than that, she meant clean your house. Wash dishes. Dust. Vacuum. Pick up stray books and pet toys. Gramma put the fear of god in me, at least about cleaning. Every time she took the bus down to visit me while I was in graduate school, I spent two days cleaning my apartment.

It’s thanks to Gramma that when I wrote a daybook titled Pagan Every Day, I started the year writing about home. Here’s the page for January 1:

Usually, we invoke Janus on this first day of the year. He was the Roman two-faced god of the doorway (ianus), the transition point between the safe indoors and the outside world, where anything could happen. Roman weren’t alone in believing that this opening needed to be protected. The mezuzah, which holds verses from Deuteronomy, is affixed to doors of Jewish houses, the façade around the doorway of a medieval cathedral is as elaborate as the altar, and nearly every pagan is taught to cut a “doorway” into the energy of the circle. As the doorway stands between inside and outside, so does the turning year stand between an old year we knew and a new year we don’t yet know. Janus gave his name to January and the Romans honored him all month. Before he came to the city, however, he was Dioanus, an Italian oak god whose consort was the woodland goddess, Diana. Continue reading “Happy New Year by Barbara Ardinger”

All Saints Day and All Souls Day by Barbara Ardinger

In the Roman Catholic calendar, today is All Saints Day, tomorrow, All Souls Day. The following slightly edited paragraphs are from my book Pagan Every Day (RedWheel/Weiser, 2006), which is obviously not just about Pagan topics. (I couldn’t find goddesses for every day of the year, so I widened my view.)

November 1: All Saints Day

All Saints Day

During the persecutions of Diocletian (245–313), the number of martyrs became so great that separate days could not be assigned to honor them. They were given common memorial days. All Saints’ Day, the Catholic Encyclopedia informs us, was instituted in the fourth century when dioceses began to divide up and exchange the relics of martyr-saints. At first, only martyrs and St. John the Baptist were recognized, but in 609 Pope Boniface IV consecrated the Pantheon to the Blessed Virgin and all martyr-saints. The vigil for All Saints’ is Hallows Eve, which was also first celebrated in the fourth century. By the 13th century, All Saints’ Day was solemnly celebrated to honor “all saints known and unknown” and to remedy any deficiencies by the faithful in remembering the saints on their proper days. In other words, it became a sacerdotal catch-up day. If a saint was neglected on his assigned day, he could be honored today.

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Scholars of Mythology by Barbara Ardinger

Barbara Ardinger Here’s how my mind leaps around. I was mooning about and trying to figure out what I wanted to write for this blog when I picked up one of the books in the stack at the other end of the couch. I bought The Mythology of Eden by Arthur George and Elena George because I’d read the thoughtful review by Judith Laura, a Goddess scholar I know and respect.

In their introduction, the Georges present a paragraph by biblical scholar Millar Burrows that explains that myth is:

a symbolic, approximate expression of truth which the human mind cannot perceive sharply and completely, but can only glimpse vaguely, and therefore cannot adequately or accurately express. … It implies not falsehood, but truth; not primitive, naïve misunderstanding, but insight more profound than scientific description and logical analysis can ever achieve. The language of myth in this sense is consciously inadequate, being simply the nearest we can come to a formulation of what we can see very darkly. … The procedure is quite legitimate if [we] understand what is being done (p. xii). (Burrows’ book is An Outline of Biblical Theology, published in 1946.)

Mind leap: Wow, I said to myself, does this describe the revisionist fairy tales I write? I try to see through that dark glass more clearly and recast old ideas in new ways. (I hope this doesn’t sound too pretentious. I don’t mean it to.)

Mind leap: And, I further said to myself, we scholars who write for Feminism and Religion often write about myth, though we don’t always acknowledge that our religious stories are indeed myths. It’s like the old joke—“If I believe it, it’s religion. If you (or they) believe it, it’s myth.” Even though we sometimes call our myths the inerrant word of this god or that goddess, the stories in all of our holy books are our instructive myths. Read Burrows’ definition again. Continue reading “Scholars of Mythology by Barbara Ardinger “

What’s Good About Good Friday? by Barbara Ardinger

I grew up Calvinist and Republican in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri. My parents belonged to—but rarely attended—Immanuel Evangelical & Reformed Church in Ferguson, Missouri. When children reached the age of twelve, they were “confirmed” in the church, which meant taking a Bible class taught by the minister, Rev. Press, and then going through a ceremony that made them eligible to take communion, which in that church was grape juice and tasteless crackers. Transubstantiation? I learned what the word meant, but I had (and still have) no idea if it really happens.

Ascension by John Singleton Copley (1775)

I’ve always been one to ask untidy questions, so of course I asked a lot of questions in confirmation class. God tells us half a dozen times in the Old Testament, for example, that he is a “jealous god.” How, I asked Rev. Press, can a jealous god be a loving god? What’s good about a jealous god? (A couple decades later, when I was studying the Aramaic Bible as translated by George M. Lamsa from the Pshitta manuscripts, I learned that the correct word is “zealous.” That was no help. I still don’t see much good in either jealousy or zealotry.) A week or two later, I asked Rev. Press, “What’s good about Good Friday?” Shortly thereafter, my mother advised me to stop asking questions in confirmation class. (Can we assume she’d received a pastoral phone call?) Continue reading “What’s Good About Good Friday? by Barbara Ardinger”