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Big happy announcement: Version 1 of my Bumper Pagan Reading List is now Done.

Do you like folklore? Want to learn about the history of magic? Enjoy 1970s pastoral weird counterculture or creepy children's television?

Are you absolutely horrified by the immensity of the ocean and want to prod that feeling with a stick until it starts creeping up on you as you walk down the street unexpectedly, the knowledge that the sea is just there, fathomlessly deep and impossibly cold, and more mysterious to us than the moon?

You'll fit right in! ~200 recommendations for music, movies, and books, of interest to pagans of all kinds (and people who just like some make-believe)

(and on a personal note, what a relief - what a relief - to get this weight of work out into the world, just a basic and incomplete thing but enough to say "this is what i have been doing, this is what i can gift to the world, i am not ready to Run My Own Religion in any substantial sense but you can do it for yourself with this, everything I've looked at to form what I do; and my responsibility for it is now discharged". I need to set up a compassionate update schedule for myself; because the website version is, of course, already out of date, but I need to make time for my own self as well - to be reading and reflecting without the mass scrutiny of the internet and the implicit judgement of strangers eyes and my desire to perform in front of them; to just be alone with the gods, once in a while; or alone with my books, at least. Also yes, the physical bookshelf on which I store all these things are a beauty to behold; and I daydream about having a pretty living room and an open door, and people just dropping by to read and borrow them all. A webpage is the next best thing.)

On Ambiguous Grandmotherliness

Spiritual thought for the day:

I'm gearing up to write another gods post on the Fisher, and the phrase that keeps jumping to mind is "ambiguous grandmotherliness". The Ambiguous Grandmotherliness of baba yaga and the calleach and witches in the woods in fairy tales. its a striking experience, of both comfort and danger; and perhaps interlinks with Bob Fisher's evocation of the haunted generation, to be a child and both cosy and afraid.

but then it occurs to me that the Landmother, as I experience her, is nothing if not ambiguous motherliness - this is not the Goddess as Mother, it's uncertainty and placation, coldness, and a desire for motherliness which will not always be fulfilled. And then I contemplate the Sun King, and i think about the things he represents - law and order, religious institutions, nation states and monarchies - and how those are forms of ambiguous fatherlinesses, our childlike desire to be protected by something (be it our father or our priest or our police) and our inability to rely upon these things, no matter how deep the desire or urgent the need.

It occurs to me that I might have some family trauma to work through.

but this is, perhaps, a good thing all in all. A key theme in Fencraft is how vulnerable we are before the world - before the power of nature and the immensity of whirling stars and the strangeness of ancient, wordless gods - and there's always been a human response to this, to set up structures like the nuclear family, or the army, or the king, as comfort-blankets against the dark. Under the Solar, we embrace it (we cannot live by nihilism; we have to make up stories of support and have hope in them, and build to make what we imagined real). In leaving the village, we reject and fight against it to create something better - we recognise the flaws within these things, but believe that change is possible. And under the Stellar, we submit to the infinite and comprehend the smallness of all things.

And the nuclear family, no more or less than other things, can be an illusion or a danger. I think it's revealing of how I see both people and the divine, something more in me than in others: an uncertainty about how far they can be relied upon. But when i see the flooding in the valley and fairy laughter in the forest, this is not an untrue way of relating.

Oh God, watch over me - for your sea is so big, and my boat so small.