Longest night. Darkest day. A bleak time to be sure. But once it is the longest night, then nights are shorter. Once it is the darkest day, days become bright.

Since the wheel last turned this way, my life has been touched by death, cancer, lay-offs, failure, and loss. It’s been, in short, a fuck-all year.

But I am happy, and I have hope, because the Sun is reborn, and so are we all.

Celebrate rebirth.

Blessed be.

Honor your dead, and celebrate the living.

Find a place within where you recognize these two are the same.

Blessed be.

I have just learned that Marion Weinstein, author of Positive Magic, has passed into the Summerland. May she be born again, at the same time, and in the same place, as those who love her.

Positive Magic was a sweetness-and-light book that I have often criticized, but there’s one kick-ass spell in it that I have recommended many times.

On a personal note, it was through Marion’s help that Isaac was able to get diagnosed with the chronic illness he has. This was in 1990, when we were still married and the parents of a really cute new baby. Isaac had been getting a run-around from doctors who were uninterested in his very weird symptoms, when we read an article about a rare disease in Marion’s newsletter. The symptoms matched Isaac perfectly. He called Marion and she connected him to the author. The author had this sort of tone that I could hear from across the room; doctors can’t love getting calls from hypochondriacs who think they have whatever disease they’ve read about most recently. Clearly she thought this was just such a call, but because it was Isaac Bonewits, and because it had come through Marion, she listened. And listened to the point where she realized Isaac was really sick and gave him the information he needed to take to an MD and get diagnosed.

Maybe that isn’t such a big deal, but it meant a lot to us and I’ve always felt fondly towards Marion since then. I am sad to hear of her passing, and hope sincerely that her sojourn in the Summerland is delightful, and that her loved ones find comfort.

Zsuzsa talked a lot about the meaning of the firewalk being a release from fear. Once you’ve walked on fire you can do anything; that sort of thing. Fear wasn’t on top of my list, though.

Someone asked about what it would mean, how to know what it would mean to them. And I asked, what if I don’t want it to “mean” something? Like, if I want it to live in a place in me beyond words that can condense into “meaning.”

Which is a lot of what I got, in truth, and I think where my deep sobbing came from — that place beyond meaning within.

A lot of what it meant for me was the move past cynicism. I tend to sneer at a lot of things. Which is, hello? I’m a witch! So why make fun of crystals? Why make fun of anything without first giving it a fair hearing? But I do, I do. I sneer and am cynical and think a lot of things that people do are silly. And doesn’t that hold me back? Doesn’t that leech into my magic? Well, certainly a thing I laughed at was firewalking, but now I’m not laughing, and maybe that changes me.

I used to long, long for visible manifestation of magic. Blue light shooting from my athame. Levitation. All that fancy stuff. And at some point I gave up that wish. I got reasonable. Sane. Witchcraft worked without all that Hollywood stuff. But firewalking? Pretty frickin visible.

But a big thing was about releasing trauma related to fire. I realized, after I signed up for this, that I had a major trauma about this. Arthur walked on a Starwood firepit when he was nine years old. He thought it was cool ash, but there were hot coals underneath the ash, and he absolutely trashed his feet. Trashed. Spent the summer in a wheelchair. We were, in fact, investigated by Child Protective Services for possibly abusing him (our doctor told CPS he thought we were forcibly initiating children by making them walk on fire — nice!). So I knew I had that trauma, and I didn’t know how that would play out with this ritual.

But I’d utterly forgotten an earlier trauma. About fifteen years ago, there was an incident involving a person at a festival jumping into a fire. Deranged, drug-and-alcohol addled leap into the fire, pulled back by two people, fought them off, jumped back in. And this was someone I knew fairly well and liked, a stable and gentle person before and after (he ultimately recovered from his burns), not some dingbat crazy person. I was standing no more than six feet from him when it happened, and I gave an eyewitness report to the police. It was, let me say, a bad night. Worse for him than for me. Bad night all around.

And the day after the firewalk, I suddenly remembered that, and was full of feeling. And I though, how did I forget that and not think about it around the hot coals? How did I do that?

Beyond words. Beyond “meaning.” But the meaning is there.

I haven’t seen any movies this week, and, while I could review movies I’ve seen but not reviewed, I’d rather not. I just got back from Wic-Can Fest and talking about movies is just not where I am today.

I want to talk about firewalking.

I cannot say for sure why I signed up for the firewalk. I saw it was offered, and I guess that I wanted to make a chink in my own armor. I am such a cynic, after all. I mean, I’m a witch, and a psychic, and I know this isn’t other people’s definition of cynicism, but within the context of the magical community I am high on the snark side of things, and have great disdain for people I perceive as too credulous. And firewalking? That’s crazy. That’s impossible.

Somewhere in there I thought “But.”

But they’re offering it here. But people here have done it and report being blown away by it. But what have I got to lose (burnt feet!)? But what if I’m wrong? Well, my friend assured me that you don’t have to walk the fire if you attend, so I signed up.

Continue reading Fire. Walk.

In addition to pluralism, I think the other core value of Paganism is immanence. And, like pluralism, I think it stands in strong contrast to the monotheistic society in which we live, and I think it provides us with an ability to shape values that the larger culture can easily mistake for having no values at all.

Let’s define two basic ways of viewing deity: Transcendent or immanent. Transcendence means that deity is outside of and apart from ourselves, and immanence means that deity is within and a part of ourselves. Although this is a binary, we can believe in more than two ways: We can believe that deity is transcendent, is immanent, is both transcendent and immanent, is neither transcendent nor immanent, or is unknowable. So I count five variations, and maybe I’ve missed some.

But we can still talk about the binary, because the binary is this: Either a belief in immanence is present or it’s absent. Every variation I talked about can be fitted into that binary, and that’s really important in terms of values. (I would say that most atheists and agnostics believe a form of immanence, in that they believe non-deity values are within.)

Fundamentally, if God is outside of us, then the rules of good behavior must come from outside of us. They are handed to Moses on stone tablets, or derived from Gematria, or received through divine inspiration. We can receive messages in prayer or study Scriptures or find some other method, but if you believe the gods are not within, then you believe that right and wrong cannot be found within.

Without immanence, people aren’t trustworthy. They will do the worst possible thing the minute they allow God’s Law to loosen its grip on them. That’s why Christians don’t, in general, trust atheists.

But if you understand the gods to be within us, in whatever way you understand that, then people have the innate capacity to be good. People can be good without Law! Now, that is not to say people will be good, or that there is no need for laws, but I am talking about values, not governance. Maybe at some point I’ll write about evil (maybe not). Right now, that’s not the point.

Okay, I’ll digress for a moment. Pagan religion is behavior that places us in touch with the gods. Through our ritual life we do things that allow us to experience closeness to deity. Because obviously, we don’t normally, day-to-day, get the I Have the Goddess Within Me feeling. We mostly get the I’m Stuck in Traffic feeling and My Kid Freakin’ Ignores Everything I Say feeling. So having a ritual life places me in a better position to have an experience of immanence (and transcendence). Many people who are atheists also do things that allow them to enhance the experience of inner goodness or wisdom, just without the deity part.

But okay, where was I?

The point is, the entire book on doing the right thing is within you and within me, and within every human being, because the gods are in there, inseparable from us.

That allows you and I to have different values. We aren’t going by an external rule book, after all, so we won’t necessarily find the same answers when we look.

Which brings us back to pluralism again, doesn’t it?

And again, it doesn’t mean there are no rules. It just means that the rules can vary, can be situational, and don’t have to be written down or handed down to be valid.