P is for Preparation

Sometimes, the hard work in magic, in ritual, in whatever, is heavily in the groundwork.  In the preparation.  Not in what one does, but in getting ready to do things.

For the last few weeks I have been doing preparatory work for a ritual.  The ritual involves my maternal grandmother, the child of Polish immigrants, and, among other things, her troubled relationship with her own heritage which has led to me not having a sense of my own.  There are important things in here, in my religious practices, in my personal life, in my arc of healing, in my own becoming a mother: and Little Foot has, as a middle name, this grandmother's name.

I tend the shrine.  Not as regularly as I perhaps ought, but I light the candle, I offer water, I burn incense.  I cultivate mindfulness of this particular thread of bloodline, even as I give blood to the medical personnel who are analysing it for traces of this particular heritage.  I think that I do not have enough in my shrine for this piece of heritage, and wonder where the jewelry boxes are that have this grandmother's gifts in them, the costume-jewelry pins in the shape of cats and a few similar things.  (We are still not moved in to the new house, and so many things are hidden away in storage.)  I spent this morning going through photographs from my childhood, pursuing the names of relatives, reawakening old memories, coming to new understandings from moments caught in time that I was too young to read, before.

There is something deep working here, as I look through the photographs, as I see things and have the context of an adult to bring to the occasionally blurry moments in time long ago.

My father is visiting.  He had been planning to visit a few weeks ago, but changed his plans because he had to take a business trip.

To Poland.

He brought me the usual collection of oddments and endments, and, almost as an afterthought, asked me if I would like some Polish coins.  I said yes. (I have an odd collection of international coinage, mostly brought from his business trips, though I did once startle someone immensely in a hotel room in Minneapolis when he said to me, in a bit of an in-joke, "You are [...] and I claim my five pounds" and I promptly fished through the pockets of my jacket - which I had brought with me on a trip to the UK a couple of years before - and eventually managed to produce five pounds in miscellaneous loose change.  This was perhaps not the expected joke result, to be four thousand miles from home and presented with a punchline in one's native currency.)

He handed me a pill bottle's worth of coins, reserving one of them, a little thing about the size of a dime.

"This one is special," he said.  "They're pretty rare, and it's said that they're lucky."

"Because they're the equivalent of a penny?" I asked, turning the coin over in my fingers and attempting to read the back.

"More like a quarter penny."

I studied my Polish farthing for a moment, and thought about magic.  As I reach back towards my Polish grandmother, speaking of peace, speaking of connection and continuance, I am given a little piece of luck from Poland.

Preparation can also come with signs, I suppose.

Infinite Space Bounded in a Glass Ball

This evening I started to inscribe Little Foot's name in glitter and glue on a glass ball. She has a lot of letters, so I merely did the first four, and will wait until it is safe to turn the ornament without smudging to write the rest.

Her name will join the names thus written on other glass balls in past years: the other three adults in my family, the cats' names, and the snake. Come this weekend, my father and his wife will also get to write their names in glue and pick a colour to sparkle in. This way is in its fourth generation at least, now: my grandmother, my father, myself, my child. As generations of humans before me have done, I take the trappings of my old religion with me when I convert. This is the meaning of my Christmastide.

Meaning is a delicate thing, and one does not always take away what was intended.

Perhaps my northern European bloodline appreciates the placement of an abundance festival in the dark of the year - before the worst of the cold, yes, but in the hints of the return of the sun. Perhaps this is so.

Perhaps I am so marinated in Christianity that I cannot give it all up. I would not be the only one.

But: I come back to the ornament, carefully written upon in glue.

If you spend the dark of the winter with my family, you get a name ball. Your name inscribed in glitter, on a glass or satin-coated ball. This is how it has always been, it was so before I was born, I hope it will be so after I go West. A catalogue of names, a litany of memory.

If you will be back in the dark of the next year, your ornament is set aside, awaiting you: none will put it up but you, for it is yours, the token of our collective memory, the sigil of your welcome. If you do not return - if the travel is too much, if the circumstances do not align, if you will come no longer - then we will put it up for you, and remember the times you were present.

I will make cookies and cake for the season, the one a matter of holiday duty, the other a thing of more general celebration, for when my father comes, because it is hard to be properly festive when it is just us and the constant onslaught of baby requirements, but for my father who raised me to these traditions I can go to the effort. Perhaps I will make a roast, I believe we have one kicking around somewhere. And these will be my offerings of abundance for the season more than anything else, the barest essentials, more important than wrapped-up objects to be presented as offerings to the other: I offer food and the promise of the memory of a name.

To be with my family at Christmastime is to be always remembered, to always belong. To always have a place. When I strip away everything else, I am left with this offered universe, written upon in glitter and glue, held always in company and community. That is the holiness that is written upon my heart in the chill dark of the year, when it might be easy to trip into solitude and isolation. This is the community that I build over time, out of fragile glass balls and glue and memory.

For your ka.

Inauguration Day

My patchwork heritage
Of Puritan blood on thieved land
New York millers
German soldiers
Migrant Irish workers
Polish woman driven from her heritage by hate
Painters and poets and patriots
Ministers and madmen
Scientists and subversives
Buried in Arlington
Stones and bones and old silver
Alcohol and backroom deals
Hardworking union workers
Ivory-tower elitists
Sewn-together pieces of history
Quilted by this land
Extending from then into now and beyond
And with the child resting beneath my heart
Conceived the fourth of November
We've all come to look for America.

Scale to Skin

There is a snake on my leg. A winged snake, coiled to protect an egg.

She is wrought in blood and ink and time, from my initial vision and the skilled hands of an artist who knows how to work flesh.

She is a sacred snake, a royal python, who guards her eggs when she lays them. She is a sacred snake, winged like the uraeus, the guardian of the king (though the uraeus is a cobra).

I was born in her year, the Snake, though just at its transition; my summer boyfriend when I was sixteen, four days younger than I, was born a Horse. When I was a child, we caught a garter snake once, kept it in a jar a while to study it and learn to have no fear, released it in the stump at the bottom of the yard, into which it wriggled and vanished like a mystery.

She is wise, is the snake, a liminal creature. She knows the mysteries of rebirth, shedding her skin to be made anew over and over again, many times in her life. She is a primordial, one of the first gods, guardian of secrets. There were times she bargained with people, to live in their homes and keep them free of vermin, in exchange for the warmth of their hearth, the protection of their children. She gave oracles, sometimes in the dangerous edges of the effects of her venom. Her reputation as a healer is multicultural, touching many worlds, many serpents.

She spreads her green, feathered wings widely, wrapping my leg in a gesture of benediction; green for life, living, birth, rich against her fertile browns. She can freely move in any direction she chooses, and chooses to mantle protectively over one egg, tucked luminous dark into her coils.

The egg she protects is a pisanka, an egg of old, old tradition among certain of my ancestors. An egg now marking and celebrating the mysteries of life and death, the shedding of the skin, being born into salvation. Blue for breath, breath for soul, ruach the colour of sky; the starburst sun in white and gold, pure and joyous and the brightness of the laughter of children.

She is my ancestor mark, my protector always with me. She is my memory of those who came before, my promise to those who come after. She is wrought in flesh and bone and blood and breath, etched under skin, holding close and gentle.

When the healing skin peels away, it will look and feel just like snakeskin.


(As I started writing this, some weeks ago before the work was done, Stephen Bodio's Querencia linked to this post at Atomic Nerds about ink and the shapes and meanings thereof, and what people will see.)

The Only Thing That We Done Right Was The Day We Begun To Fight

I was just reading this article about being multi-ethnic and thinking of the shape of things. Not just the overt play of racial politics in this election, though that's a part of it. Thinking of the people I know who get called "biracial" (some of whom object to the term because they are more than bi), my cousins who straddle the Yankee blueblood heritage I know with black kin who still bathed in a tin tub in the kitchen with water boiled in a kettle when I was a kid, my friend who taught me how to take care of her hair so that I could write about it, the intersections of intersections. The fact that had I been born to parents like mine a hundred years ago, I would be "multiracial": white and Irish and Slav.

My family watched the movie Across the Universe last night, which was full of many things, and I find myself thinking of the sequence that began with the 12th Street Riot, with a black boy singing, softly, "Let It Be", as he huddled behind a car. And the flow of it, the song taken up by a gospel choir for the twinned funerals of that boy and that of a soldier killed in Vietnam.

And I'm too young to know that turmoil personally, but I knew enough to tear up. Knew enough in my soul steeped as thoroughly as it is in Keep On Walking And We Shall Be Free, in Long Time Passing, in How Many Ears Must One Man Have Before He Can Hear People Cry. I know the music, at least, well enough to have a passing familiarity, and the movie's cosntant backdrop of violence was the more real for it.

And it's with that in my mind that I read the speech Barack Obama made, addressing the issues of race, of black church, of so many other things. And I think of Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés writing "Michelle Obama: Those Who Say: "I Ain’t Voting For No Nigger"", and of Orcinus's refutation of the Obama campain as a "cult" as the insidious drivel that it is.

And I get to the part of the speech, after all the pain and broken lives and the memories and legacy thereof that's in my head to think about today are cited, this:

Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

And more like it, but education was first listed and so utterly dear to my heart, my pet issue.

And I say, from the depths of my heart: Hold on. Hold on.

I think, also, that I'm here because of Ashley.

Under the Surface

So among the many, many places I lurk is a mailing list for Slavic reconstructionism -- people who are interested in reviving/recreating/whathaveyouing the polytheistic religions of the Slavic peoples.

I only lurk there because it's not the path I'm called to, and because many of the people there come across as assuming that it should be the path I'm called to because of the blood of generations before me -- or, if not that one, one of the other potentially legitimated-by-heritage paganisms that I can claim by chasing lines of ancestors back to pre-Christian times.

Recently, someone came up with a word-phrase -- in Russian -- for this family of religions. And raised it as a possible thing to use more broadly than in their own personal use. And this went around a little bit, debating the usefulness of more ethnically-specific phrases and whether or not other people might object.

And someone in there made a comment about how maybe some people would prefer something in their own language, say, the Poles, and wonder if that speaker knew about the attempt by the Tsar to obliterate Polish language and culture in the late 1800s. I can't say that it read as aware to me, but maybe it was a thrown bone to mention the Poles as people who might maybe want a word for their thing that wasn't in Russian.

What awareness lurks under the surface? What blood descended from subversives who loved their home and their language enough to risk being murdered for preserving it lurks under my surface?

The past is another country, which sometimes invades this one with old bitterness and old wounds.

For Your Ka

It's an interesting and complicated thing, being non-Christian but from a Christian background, this time of year. Not just because of the prevalence of the pop-Christmas stuff, starting earlier and earlier every year, but because living in a family context means that the family markings of the holiday keep coming up. Not really the religious aspects (the in-laws no longer ask if we want to attend Mass with them), the cultural-social ones.

And some of those are important to me, as part of the continuation of my ka, my family soul; there are traditions that are resonant for me, meaningful for me. The keeping of the names, some recipes handed down from my grandparents to my parents to me; these things matter, are a part of the flavor of meaning, are places that are where I came from.

Which means I'm coming around to the feeling that Christmastime is something I mark as a major ka festival, and an ancestor festival; it's undeniable that my ancestors for quite some time were, after all, Christian. And this time of year is resonant with established traditions, and a time that my family marks with family gatherings as it is.

So in that sort of mode, I went into the season with a round of making the traditional family dishes, and making a traditional Polish dish, and some Scottish gingerbread, all the old family lines. Building up my own tradition of family traditions, bloodlines, heritages, where I came from.

In ancient Egypt, a gift was presented with the phrase: for your ka. For your family-soul, your heritage-soul, your lifeline.

Merry Christmas.

The Shipwrecked Sailor Considers Sinuhe

So one of the things that I think about a lot is the threads of cultural appropriation potential in religion. On a number of different levels.

I'm on this mailing list for discussing forms of Slavic paganism, for one. And ... I don't post to it, really. I skim information as it comes by, but I don't post, because I don't feel welcome there. Because every time someone mentions, say, Wicca, they get hit with at least three, "Remember Wicca is not a Slavic religion and while you can do whatever damnfool thing you want on your own time this is for Slavic discussion, you hear me?" Maybe less strident than that, a little, but they all run together into this silencing morass.

But mostly because it's full of language about how the people there are all giving due attention to The Folkways Of Their Ancestors. (To the point that asking a question about how one goes about actually doing anything in the religion gets a, "One follows the folkway!" Without, y'know, actual information about stuff like ritual structure. And I'm a liturgy addict.) And the assumption that the only people who would be interested in Slavic gods are those with Slavic ancestry (as opposed to, y'know, the far more plausible "Slavic gods are so goddamn obscure that someone who is, say, tapped by Perun may never stumble across the right set of search terms to discover His name").

Folkways of the ancestors, eh?

Okay, so, I have Polish heritage. And German heritage. And English heritage. And Scots heritage. And Irish heritage. (And if I have anything else, it's not in the Official Genealogies.) I'm a northern European moggy, half-Yankee (because damnit, when a chunk of the family's been in New England since the 1600s, Yankee culture is overwhelmingly more important than which handful of European nations supplied the genes), and any sort of majority ruling on what my ancestral folkways might be would require the construction of a coalition vote. (And I think the only two-party combination that manages a majority would be the Irish and the Poles. Uh.)

And, as the blogger handle might suggest, I deal with ... the gods of Egypt.

Which is not in any way northern European, to say the least.

But there's this sort of moral weight that gets put on The Folkways Of The Ancestors in some conversations, a sense that this is one's natural home -- or that falling outside of that is probably appropriation, though it is probably acceptable if one's dealing with a European culture (because all of that is White People Stuff, I guess, so drifting within White People Stuff is okay). (Never mind the whole process of ethnic differentiating among those groups, and "How the Irish Became White" and all. And my Polish grandmother tried to obliterate her ethnicity and just be American -- anti-immigrant sentiment, ethnic bigotry, and all of that. I think that's the only basis I have for a coalition: immigrant groups who were treated like shit just outside of living memory ....)

Someone on a pagan discussion forum I read started a thread recently asking if there was a stigma on black pagans, a sense that they shouldn't be involved. And someone raised a point that I think is accurate, and goes back to the ranting that was my first post on this blog at all, the sense of who has "a culture" and who doesn't. "Why would you want to go outside the religions of Africa?" has this strange privilege-encoding of, "But you have a culture, you have a history, you have a background; you don't need to seek elsewhere for fulfilment." And I know a couple of pagans-of-color who have said, straight out, that the gods of their apparent ancestors don't speak to them -- they are called by European gods, or the gods of other peoples-of-color. Or, from that thread, someone who is mixed-blood with ties to a particular tribal reservation, who takes flak for blending the practices of her tribe with those of miscellaneous modern pagans -- when people don't know she has status there, as an appropriator; when they do, as someone who should be content to be the exotic.

And there are groups who deeply resent the exoticisation of their culture, especially when it comes with the assumption that their faith can be truly adopted without being adopted as a member of the tribe and steeping themselves in that culture. And that's a real concern, and one that is often masked by the number of colonising group members who fancy that a few shiny toys from those faiths will make them authentic. And at the same time, cultures blend; a homage to other people's practices that seem to speak to the soul or meet a particular need is almost inevitable in someone's space, and the line between inspiration and theft is not a clear-cut one.


Egypt sat, historically speaking, between the Mediterranean and Africa and alongside the religions of the Middle East, and it partakes of the cultural expectations and theologies of all of these. It was an insular nation, and its artwork emphasised ethnic differences between its people and outsiders -- but its reality was racially mixed, ethnically complicated with all the flows of population of the region. The Greeks and later considered it the paragon of the exotic and mystical, and reinterpreted it to suit their beliefs about what that meant. But those first appropriators are gone, culturally, almost as much as old Egypt herself.

There are Egyptian stories about finding gods elsewhere and bringing word of Them back to home, so that more people could partake of Their worship. And there are stories about Egyptians living in foreign lands who, when they grew old, desperately wished to return home to be buried with their people. Always, this sense that there is a place where people belong, to which all valuable things return: Egypt, in that cultural setting, the homeland and center of things.

Mostly, when I think about this, I wind up feeling uncertain how to judge which people are mine. My personal tribe is full of people who are called by a variety of gods. (My personal self, likewise, as I also deal with a particularly American religion, with its own questions of appropriation and appropriateness as shaped by a culture that assimilates and recasts everything it sees into something more like its own self-image.) In my home, I honor a goddess Who I do not serve because She looks over another member of my family. I am mongrelised, my faith is mongrelised, and when I consider "the folkways of my ancestors" I am torn in a dozen directions.

The gods Who called me are the gods Who called me; in the end, I put my trust in Them.

The Casual Stupid

So someone I know on LJ posted about the whole Polish officials investigating whether Teletubbies have teh ghey thing. And homophobia is a big problem in Poland at the moment, getting all tangled up (back to intersections) with some of the difficulties eastern Europe is having with the whole post-Soviet identity thing. Nationwide strike a possibility, fears of energy dependency on Russia, constitutional issues with the EU, ... and that's just the first page of hits on news.google.com.

The person who linked the article added a comment about how, y'know, he thought about making a Polack joke, but it's not worth it.

And gee ... how nice that it's not worth the effort to make that sort of display. Because responding to one bit of bigotry with another is so chic and enlightened.

Not just speaking, you know, as someone whose grandmother's surname was Jeranonek.