(no subject)

The thing is a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy, really. Because I absolutely am resistant to paying £50 to attend a talk at my local spooky shop. In part, because I'm flat broke. But in part because that model of being a customer paying for a ticket really, really turns me off.

So long as we lack infrastructure, the only people doing this kind of work will be those charging large amounts for one-off sessions. And additionally, teachers will be those with the ambition (not always a good characteristic) and also the privilege to cover shortfalls (so some voices are silenced). There are no other options.

It's not exactly that I think information or teachers time should be free - although I'm a librarian and teacher, so I guess I kinda do. It's more about what that money exchange looks like. I don't like the dynamic of being a customer attending a one off talk, because it puts me in the mindset of "is this value for money?". And it rarely is. Hence what Shauna has noticed about people buying books, but grumbling about the cost of classes. Yes, this is me! It's because I can flick through a book and check I like the author's style, they cover topics I want to learn, and don't go off on one about dolphins, The Jews, Atlantis, UFOs, or any other dumb nonsense. It's because I can check a book is "value for money" in a way you really can't with a teacher.

(And infrastructure would help with that too)

(no subject)

Ok, initial publication of Fencraft stuff coming in the next month. Anyone got resources for how to wrangle a lot of ideas and papers into a single coherent form?

I've been typing some up this afternoon and just hit 34 pages - and I know I've got a similar number of words published on my old website, and the same again on my husband's laptop, and I really think in need an initial "it's finished" to help me spot the gaps, and stop re-doing work. And to move onto the next stage of, ok here's the cosmology, let's write a liturgy.

(And maybe also like the bit where other people participate? I feel complex things about that.)

I think once I've got it all assembled, with an initial version printed that I can hold, I'll feel like...This phase is done, and I can go on to living it & writing more in depth reflections on the spirits and values implied in the original texts.

What if Beltane Was Gay Beltane

When you try and fix problems like Beltane being the festival of ambient sex pressure, and decide that its actually Mabon which is the explosion of sexual freedom and delight, in contrast to Beltane which has - among its correspondences of spring maids and young lads - the association with thst sexual pressure; Beltane's story of innocence and girls in white dresses in the grass only really makes sense, makes full sense, if the reality of this experience ia acknowledged; and we can't fetishise innocence within a ritual context without acknowledging that this fetishisation has a viewpoint, and it's the viewpoint of a man who is *looking at waifish white girls*.

No, Mabon is the date. Mabon's the festival for old, fat women who've figured out what they like and what they don't like, and have ownership over their desires; Mabon, long linked to Persephone, is the festival of survival, and part of that is reclaiming what you are and what you want. Mabon is our happy Pagan sexfest - or the most asexual day of the year - because it's freed from the Beltane baggage, and is about freeing yourself from that baggage too.

I excitedly texted to my husband, "what if Mabon was gay Beltane?" To which he replied "what if Beltane was gay Beltane?". I mean, the point is that it isn't. It could be, but it's not. It could be reclaimed that way, but I can't quite split off the traditional Beltane correspondences and ignore them. That imagery of maidens and a maypole is really strong.

A possibly controversial bit of Fencraft is how it deliberately encodes the shitty bits of life, so we can use these correspondences with care. For example, (broadly) seeing heterosexuality as Solar - normal, state sanctioned, orthodox, what everybody else does - and homosexuality as Lunar - against the grain, unorthodox, criminal, hidden, unspeakable. I guess I want my correspondence system to reflect my experience; and though there are more and more gay people who can claim a Solar part of the world, with their marriages and families and rights, I still feel like...that division is there. And so, I want to consciously notice it. Like, I don't feel Solar - do you? I feel Lunar. I feel like a societal outsider whose desires are lumped in with everything on a spectrum from "bit unusual" to "criminal perversion"

And so with the Beltane, there are like two approaches. The one I tried for years was like Beltane is for everyone, reclaim Beltane, and reclaim it metaphorically too for people who don't like sex but do like making things. This didn't work for me and wasn't satisfying. This is evidently what does work for my husband; but somehow he's survived with a lot less tangible shame issues than me.

But my Beltane/Mabon cycle - associated with Snow White, Labyrinth, the Company of Wolves, Sleeping Beauty, Blodeuwedd and Persephone - kinda...puts the complexity of sex front and center. And the complexity of women's sexuality and women's spirituality-of-sex, which has in many ways been defined by men (I guess this is no exception to that rule)

It feels intuitively correct to me to celebrate Beltane as it is, but acknowledge that this framework of desire is one which makes some people uncomfortable; and follow that up with a myth and a cycle and a festival which is in some ways the anti-Beltane, and in other ways it's strange mirror.

In part, I think as well, because I do like and enjoy what Beltane represents. I just don't feel included in it.I do kinda like the heritage of innocence/experience, may queens, phallic maypole and other virginally pervy Beltane lore. There's nothing wrong with the spirituality of male-female sex, nor even is it wrong to celebrate it if that's not a thing you personally enjoy or do. But for that to work, you kinda need an alternative.

And while I'm not planning to shut other forms of sexuality out of my Beltane, I guess I do want a...

...If Beltane is a festival about sex being nice and ok, then Mabon is in some sense about sex not being nice or ok, and surviving that, and thriving, and carving something of your own. Which may be different sex, lots of sex, or nothing at all, art or healing work, or just being a badass. I get that this is Beltane's energy for most people, but that doesn't work. The heavy heritage of Beltane and it's cumulatively generic nature makes that difficult for me. If Beltane is the festival of being looked at by men, then Mabon is the festival of ignoring them or staring straight back. If Beltane is innocence, then Mabon is experience - be that one we need to retreat and heal from, or an orgy of our own designing.

This, at least, feels sensible to me.

(no subject)

(The other thing is, we have one specifically very lesbian myth and consequently a festival day. We've got a myth of heterosexual pairings which is moderately romantic; and another myth of them going horribly, perpetually wrong. We still don't have any equivalent for gay dudes, and there's part of me that's kinda on the look out for an opportunity? But it doesn't seem to have presented itself yet. I'm trying to let as much of this writing come from within, rather than imposing ideas on it consciously, so I don't want to add one deliberately. But I would rather like one to be there, you know?)

(no subject)

Anyway, it's silly bevause a key thing is that our Powers tend towards gender fluidity -they can appear in appear in all sorts of forma. But in practice, I've only got so much time, and so unless I go through writing dual myth sets and multiple liturgies, what's going to happen is that Deities are closely associated with a gender; it's not really a solution to take a heterosexual myth and rewrite it with all the gender pairings, nor a good use of time.