Gavin and Yvonne The Dancing Wiccans

Progress Report

2012-01-21T10:10:00.000-08:00

Greetings, one and all. This is an update on (a) Gavin's state of health and (b) the School of Wicca and its status. First the School of Wicca.

We are gradually getting the School's incoming mail back into a current status. Please be patient with us. We expect everything to be up to date by February 1 or thereabouts. The forecast is complicated by the fact that the city of Hinton wants to buy the School's building, so we will be moving its offices to an old house further along Temple Street. When your name is Frost, nothing is simple or straightforward.
The post-office box number will not change.
This year we hope to be able to attend at least Sirius Rising and SummerFest, and maybe in the autumn we will get to FPG, an observance of the Temple of Earth Gathering in Florida. Much depends on Gavin's strength as it returns incrementally day by day. To our very deep regret, Kaleidoscope Gathering is probably beyond our present abilities.
On the health front, Gavin has one more surgery scheduled for the end of January, to fix the ever- present threat of maturing men, kidney stones. Apparently the back surgery (three sessions so far) has gone very well and the rods and screws of October are in place to keep the spine in line and to reduce the pain. He is now walking part-time on a cane, gradually weaning himself from the walking frame as his strength returns, aided by a crew of physical therapists. This last operation is scheduled for the end of January and is not supposed to be life-threatening, although it counts as the fifth in a series since April and each one seems to knock him back further. For the procedure in October, he was on the table for twelve (12) hours. Still, at 81, what can you expect?
We look forward to brighter days ahead, as long as we do our share of the physical work.
An inexpressible debt of gratitude is owed to everyone who has been sending thoughts of healing and strength in our direction. Don't stop now.

To each one who has thought of us, Blessed be, and thank you again. Gavin and Yvonne

Subject Excruciating Pain in the New River Gorge

2011-10-01T14:39:00.000-07:00

Here's the latest update on Gavin's health situation as of October 1 2011: the latest episode in an ongoing adventure with a steep learning curve.
We apologize to readers of our blog as well as to students of the School for delays in communication. Gavin's back decided that it needed more work, and made us aware of that decision in no uncertain terms. After three weeks of intensive testing, including X-rays, sedimentation tests, and an MRI, we have learned that a deep-seated infection began at the time of his surgery in early May and has been simmering ever since: first silently, then only too emphatically.
Having started in May, the thing has progressed into the actual vertebrae that were first damaged so very long ago. After the outpatient tests, Gavin was re-admitted to the hospital in Princeton, West Virginia, where they used a hammer and chisel to take bone samples from the area of infection to culture and identify the specific creature at the bottom of it all. At the same time they introduced a bypass tube into the upper arm so that antibiotics can be administered directly into the bloodstream. He is making daily visits to Summers County's hospital at 8:15 a.m. for an hour or two to receive intravenous addition of curative solutions.
Until the villain is identified, then, the experts are treating for the two most popular creatures in this field: staphylococcus and streptococcus. Once they have identified the exact disease and thus the best antibiotic to address it, he will continue treatments for the next six weeks, followed by a new series of tests.
Meantime controlling the pain with appropriate painkiller(s) presents yet another challenge. In the course of this aspect of it, unsuspected allergies have manifested just to make things more interesting.
We are doing what we can to keep the School running, and student dues and membership end dates will be fine-tuned in light of the delays occasioned at this end. Please understand, though: It's going to be slow. Knowing what is actually causing the pain has been a great relief.
Keep us in your thoughts, and please send healing energy if you see fit. Thanks.

Blessed be. GY

Legal Molestation of Children

2011-09-14T14:49:00.000-07:00

We use this title deliberately because there has been the usual upsurge of innuendo and pointless discussion of "The Witch's Bible". A few people baselessly claim that the book encourages child abuse. It clearly does not.

However, the United States government subsidizes and supports legal child abuse with our tax dollars. In 2007 CE in Prince George's County, Maryland, the school board decided that they would enforce the 100 percent vaccination program that would allow them to get more federal dollars. The school board issued summonses to the parents of 2,300 children who had not had all the seventeen (17) immunizations alleged to be vital to child health and safety. The summonses were delivered in the usual militaristic way by the sheriff's department, commanding the kids and their parents to show up at a central school location so that the kids could be duly vaccinated ... or to appear in court and to suffer unspecified consequences--including jail time and being expelled from school. Effectively this meant that the kids in question were forcibly vaccinated under the glare of gun-toting sheriff's deputies who doubtless wore all their clanking, polished symbols of power, along with de-personalizing sunglasses. This caused lasting trauma to the children and a new and powerful reason to hate the police.

Now we need to look at the known--the proven--effects of vaccination. It has been proven time and time again that such vaccinations cause autism. In the last ten years, according to the Department of Health and Human services, the occurrence of autism in this nation's children has quadrupled. By 2032 it is projected that all male children in the United States who are vaccinated will be autistic. During the Reagan administration public law 99/660 was passed protecting Big Pharma from the results downstream of poisonous vaccinations. You cannot sue Big Pharma if a vaccination legally required happens to cause autism, disability, or death in your child. That is the law.

The Amish population have gotten a blanket exception to the vaccination/immunization program on religious grounds. In the Amish population, there has not been a case of polio or smallpox in thirty (30) years, and the Amish children have little or no autism. What we are wondering is whether or not Wiccans can come together to save their children from the results of vaccination, by getting our own religious exception to the law. Such an exception could be worded in such a way that if parents wanted their children to be vaccinated, they could be. Parents and their kids would have a choice instead of being coerced. As any thinking parent should know, though, these mandatory vaccinations are dangerous and are purposeless.

Can we Wiccans come together as a group to fight this real menace to our children? Wouldn't it be great if we all worked together for once? Reflect on what is at stake. Ask the parent of an autistic child how that parent's life differs from yours. How would you like to live with a child whose body is present but whose mind is missing?

The public law mentioned above sets up a special office of masters to judge whether or not a child has been damaged by a vaccination. To date it has paid out over $2 billion in compensation --from tax money, not from Big Pharma.

We need a title for this effort. What about
Wiccans against Forcible Immunization--WAFI?

State Your Complaint

2011-09-08T17:49:00.000-07:00

First let us apologize for not keeping everyone up to date with our blogs. Trips to the hospital, doctor visits, and three half-day physical therapy sessions a week--as well as trying to keep the School current--have kept us busy. Gavin is doing better but still having a lot of pain; we do not know whether a third back surgery will be required.

Locust plagues occur predictably every seventeen years. In a similar fashion, though perhaps a little less regularly, in an event that has become almost a ritual, the Christo-pseudo-Wiccans get up in arms about "The Witch's Bible" (republished as "Good Witch's Bible") with rumors of unarticulated complaints. People just attack us and our work because of some vague discomfort we're alleged to be causing them. So now, as the Walrus said to the Carpenter, it's time to talk of many things: of shoes and ships and sealing-wax ... and of natural endorphines.

Since earliest times it has been known that orgasm while under the influence of psychedelic substances creates the possibility of visiting Nirvana. In the ancient Hindu Tantric tradition this was accomplished by drinking something called soma--honey mead with psychedelic additives-- and then having multiple orgasms while ascending a path made by combining opposite-natured gods and goddesses. Under Indira Gandhi the Indian government sponsored a college's efforts to reconstruct this very ancient knowledge that probably dated from earlier than 20,000 BCE.

Gavin was allowed to attend that college in the Indian Punjab. As a result of his experiences in the time he spent there, we wrote "Tantric Yoga", published in 1989 CE by Samuel Weiser. The book contains adequate instruction on how to climb the path to Nirvana and how to enter the secret chakra. It includes information necessary to bring you safely down again to the earth plane. The final day of raising the kundalini serpent requires multiple orgasms, one every 2 hours and 4 minutes, for a total of eight.

Every time we have tested the path, it has worked. Only in the 1990s, when Professor Candace Pert wrote "Molecules of Emotion", did we realize in objective scientific terms what was actually happening. Her work was further enhanced by the discovery of the ligands that entered the opiate receptors at the cellular level. These ligands, actually a naturally occurring form of morphine, were called endorphines. The more endorphines you have in your bloodstream, the stronger will be your chance of reaching dramatically altered states of consciousness.

Of course endorphines can be raised in many ways. Punishment such as being whipped raises the level of endorphines. An early work of Gerald Gardner's included sex and whipping in the third-degree initiation. An easier and more pleasant way to raise endorphines is to eat dark chocolate and drink red wine. Endorphines are also raised by bodily stress such as is experienced in a sweat lodge. So this is the first aspect of sex magic that is scientifically proven to change your state of consciousness.

In our books we have scrupulously avoided encouraging the use of psychedelics. Such use is illegal and thus would bring you into conflict with the Wiccan principal guideline: "If it harm none, do what you will." The revelation that Professor Pert's work gave to the world showed why ancient covens had all done sex magic. And not only covens: In early Rome the reports of early Christian sex-magical practices are well documented.

A second aspect which has not been so widely explored is the level of adrenalin which occurs during any form of excitement. The higher the excitement, the more energy seems to be raised. One way to raise the level of excitement is the promise of sexual release after a short spell of celibacy (perhaps three days). It has also been found that changing partners dramatically increases the amount that a group can raise. Many years ago in festivals (first in Minneapolis and then in Connecticut) we had volunteers of mixed genders work both toward Nirvana and in healing. The rates of success were truly dramatic. All this information is easily available to the researcher in our book "Bible of Sex Magic and Enlightenment" published in 2007 CE.

Now if we switch back to the infamous "Good Witch's Bible"--written before the knowledge of endorphines and other methods of raising them was known--we Frosts described and recommended a Tantric method.

If a coven is going to practice sex magic regularly with changing partners, then obviously during initiation partners should be changed. We admit that there may be some confusion about the initiations. We did state quite clearly in "Good Witch's Bible" that no one under the age of eighteen (18) should be initiated; now we want to add that the coven's most recent initiate of the appropriate gender should be the one to initiate the incoming neophyte. This approach obviates any power play by a senior priest or priestess in the form of grabbing all the newbies--all the fresh meat--for him/herself.

We Frosts have frequently been criticized as well for not answering questions. All your questions can be answered if you simply read the books on the subject that we have published; the most recent is "The Bible of Sex Magic and Enlightenment." The book contains 300 pages, so it should be obvious that your questions cannot be answered in a tweet or a facebook paragraph. Further we want to say this: If you can't be bothered to read the published material before you ask your questions or start your carping, you cannot expect and do not deserve a coherent answer.

We have a question of our own for people unhappy about us Frosts and about our work:

What is the title of the most recent work you have published in the interest of promoting Wicca, instead of tearing down its founders and denigrating the book on which the court decision recognizing Wicca as a religion was founded?

Dualism

2011-08-01T17:07:00.000-07:00

From the dawn of written history, from the time of Zoroaster and Ahura Mazda in the district called variously Mesopotamia, Persia, and Iran, through the Bogomils, through the Cathars, through today's religions, especially those that adopt a rigid mindset with no room for slack of any kind, the unfailing symptom is this: Leaders urge the idea of either/or: Either Behavior A is good, or it's bad. Either it's black, or it's white. There is nothing in between.

Our recent blog on Othering versus Togethering got some of you really going. We'd like to continue in this vein for a little longer, today applying the concept specifically to the religious or spiritual plane of experience.

Many of the early sects were dualists in that they thought of the spiritual world as wholly good and the materialistic earthplane world as wholly evil (sound familiar?). The Cathars*, whose religion was violently suppressed in southern France, were perhaps extremists in this regard: they would not eat anything that was the result of copulation, because copulation involved the physical body. Even such things as milk and cheese were off their diet plan. Further, they denied that Jesus ever was born in the flesh, because flesh was evil: He was only a spiritual being. Thus they were, if you like, a 12th-century forerunner of a vegan's vegan.

At that time the all-powerful church was reaping the benefits of what is called the Medieval Warm Period (when farm products exceeded the needs of the populations, and churchmen of the day took advantage of the surpluses to live in corruption and luxury). Cathars striving for purity presented a visible reminder that the way of poverty and asceticism was more Christlike and less self-indulgent than the decadent path of the Christian church of that day; consequently they had to be eradicated.

This is an extreme illustration of othering. The Cathars were a good people trying sincerely to live by their beliefs, yet they were killed by the thousand because they believed in dualism and strove to live more humbly, as they imagined Jesus had lived.

Why was it impossible for people to meet halfway? In a Monty Python feature, inside Castle Perilous Michael Palin's character begs, "Can't I have just a little peril?" If the Cathars had been willing to bend their rules just a little bit and the churchmen of the day had been willing to forgo some portion of their great greed, somewhere between there could have been common ground and people would not have had to be tortured and killed ... though it was always done in a pious way, of course, "for the good of your soul". (Lady, deliver us from centralized power!)

Today the Taliban's following of strict religious rules is an example of those who cannot adjust by even so much as a gnat's eyelash. And consequently we have world war. As St. Jimmy Buffett might say, "Lighten up."

As we Frosts drive around our little sphere in West Virginia, we see sprouting on increasing numbers of lawns little signs resembling those signs that appear during political campaigns. Instead of doing a fanfare for a candidate, though, today's signs display something called Ten Commandments. Yvonne can't resist composing her own Eleventh Commandment, worded to this effect:

You run yours, and I'll run mine.

The same principle might well be applied to good effect in such cases as assisted suicide, gay marriage, abortion, stem-cell research ... you get the idea. Optional is not mandatory.

* Cf Greek catharsis: a purification.

Othering/Togethering

2011-07-30T12:04:00.001-07:00

It looks as if othering is becoming the most popular sport in the world. "Othering"? It's the art and practice of emphasizing differences between people, groups, nations ... you name it, to create artificial barriers and manufactured hatred: "They're not like us! They're the others!" Shylock protested othering in "Merchant of Venice". Dean Jonathan Swift described it in terms of Big-Endians and Little-Endians. Sam Keen described it in "Faces of the Enemy". Teofilo Ruiz described it in "The Terror of History" offered through Great Courses from The Learning Company.

Sometimes othering is done by governments as a pretext to declare war and grab the oil or other resources of another nation. Sometimes it's an attempt to pull people together into a larger and larger group of haters so that the in-group can get more contributions and a bigger head-count, and can raise political capital (look no further than Washington DC).

Othering causes a great deal of pain and hurt. Families get broken up; and those who were loved are suddenly found to be ... other: untouchable, unspeakable creatures whose unclean shadow must not fall on the righteous sanctified ones.

One example: something presented as an ostensibly light-hearted book, "Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus". Personally we think it's great that women are different from men. This world would be a very boring and much less entertaining place if the genders were not different--if they didn't dovetail so beautifully--at least, when left to their own devices without manipulation by someone with an axe to grind. If there is conflict between genders, might it not be inflicted by the culture? Too, too often we disregard the culture in which we live and ignore its assumptions, thinking no more about it than a fish thinks about the water through which it swims.

But when such othering is taken to extremes, it can become destructive. We Frosts have many Christian friends, and by the way we have Muslim friends and Buddhist friends here and there; friends of different racial backgrounds; we're blessed with a whole boatload of assorted friends. The diversities among them are an enriching influence in our lives. Discussions with them, perhaps over a Beverage, can be pretty entertaining--but it doesn't occur to us to think of them as others. We think of them instead as friends whom we would be sad indeed to lose. The one very good thing about such inventions as Facebook is that they bring people together. Yet even here we see almost violent attacks against people with opinions that vary only in the slightest degree.

Some people don't seem to realize how much trouble the poor of the world are in. Time and again we've heard people say, "They're poor because they don't want to work" or "They're just lazy." It may be true that a handful of people don't want to work and are lazy; but that is no reason to put the whole category (stereotype) into some sort of quarantine or (as they say in England) send them to Coventry, where no one even bothers to talk to them about their problems and possible solutions.

Recently a Unitarian Universalist attendee at Summer Institute called another person "poor white trash". Let's bring back the Inquisition and get rid of people with this type of attitude from among us. Or are we just othering at a different level? Gavin grew up in a class-conscious society--but, at least as he remembers it, no one would thus have insulted a poor woman with many children doing her best.

And while we're on the subject, let's stop listening to those people who say "He's a devil-worshipper" or on the other hand, "She's a fundamentalist Christian who's already had 13 kids". Can we not for a few minutes think of the positive benefits of togethering as contrasted with knee-jerk thinking about the negatives associated with othering?

Instead of othering, then, why don't we think about all the things we have in common?

"Earth-Based" Religions?

2011-07-06T09:01:00.000-07:00

Last Sunday at the Unitarian-Universalist fellowship in Beckley, the presenter talked about earth-based religions. In the discussion that followed, someone suggested that "earth-based" was not necessarily a good label or an accurate one for Wicca and for other self-styled pagan or alternative groups.

We know now that pagan comes from the label in Latin for a division--a political ward or a district--of Rome. Thus we can say that, in the loosest sense, pagan does indeed equate to land. The question is, though, whether the spirituality of the Community's current religious revival is genuinely earth-based. Yes, of course you'll find many groups who are ecologically aware, doing all those good things that help conserve the planet; but are they earth-based?

When you look at the spiritual side of their belief system, you will find that most of them have quite advanced ideas about God/Goddess and about Self and the First Cause.

The more the physicists try to explain the purported Big Bang and the time before its purported occurrence, the more inextricably they tangle themselves in their own underwear.

If E = Mc2, then energy is everything; the solid wall you look at isn't really solid; it is just a bunch of energy units that seems to us to be solid. If energy is everything, then perhaps we can equate it to God/Goddess ... or perhaps not.

"Earth-based" certainly does not fully describe our spirituality. Sure, we're eco-conscious; but we're also spiritual-conscious and conscious of the movement of the planets and stars in our universe. They're a good excuse for pleasant get-togethers. But there's more.

So what the Community needs is a new descriptor for our spiritual path or religion.

How about some suggestions?

Reflections from Hospital

2011-06-25T07:13:00.000-07:00

Being in hospital and being immobilized gives time for meditation and contemplation.
Sometimes we tend to get away from the realities of real life and of pain. The first thing I want to say is that living in a small town with a cottage hospital and larger hospitals within easy driving distance is amazing. The interconnection of people--friends of friends, if you will--is just beyond belief in this environment. The man who drove me (Gavin) in ambulance to the hospital is also one of the lifeguards at the state-park pool that we regularly visit for our self-directed aquarobics. My regular physician's niece plays in the jazz quintet that my neurosurgeon runs. The head of the local physical therapy group has a daughter who plays in band class with our grandson, the reigning saxophone king of southern West Virginia. We can discuss with our doctors their problems, not just our own. One of these doctors is counting his fifth year of being free of cancer. It's a wonderful, caring relationship. The other day one of the physicians was, as the saying is in these parts, "covered up" with patients. Because of the pain in Gavin's back, we elected to leave rather than wait. That doctor phoned to see how desperate was Gavin's need; later he looked in on Gavin's physical therapist during an actual session, so that he didn't have to drive way out to the doctor's office a second time.

These caring relationships exist despite the fact that they all know we are Witches ... and they are not; indeed, many if not most of them are fundamentalist Christians.

It gives one pause to think that these very caring people have been brought up in a religion which we tend to denigrate. I believe that because of my experience I will be more gentle in my future criticism.

Of course neighborliness comes into play as well; here we should mention one very busy forensic-psychologist friend of ours who took the trouble twice to drive for over an hour with large pots of soup involving chicken and rice and with fresh vegetables from his garden. Thank you, Randy.
Even this experience of rather drastric measures and of healing has a good side.

School Update

2011-06-25T07:06:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce that last week we signed up the 40-thousandth student of the School. It has been a long road that started in early 1969. In blazing that entirely new trail we made many decisions. The chief one, that seems to have frustrated many students, is that we were not in the instant-gratification business. To complete the course in Basic Witchcraft requires persistence and the use of the the good old U.S. Postal Service--what has come to be called snail-mail. We thought long and hard about going electronic and decided against it. The completion of most of the course's lectures required the reading of outside books and we felt that a slow and steady progress was better so that people could obtain a more thorough understanding of Wicca. The ideas in the basic course are radically different from (a) the Christian matrix in which most westerners have been brought up and from (b) the gossamer-wings thinking and the blue balls of fire that the alternative community apparently expected from us.
This month the School chartered its 17th church: Mystic Moon Church of Wicca near Jacksonville, Florida.

Again the policy of the Church was diametrically contrasted with that of many organizations in the Community. We did not wish to build a pyramid of churches reporting to a central authority; that's been done. So all charters issued by the Church of Wicca bear an explicit expiration date that allowed them time to get their own independent charters and federal recognition.

As the popularity of Wicca has grown, and the amount of information on the internet and in books has logarithmically increased, so the number of enrollments in the School has decreased; and with the decrease the number of staff has also diminished. Hence currently we are back almost at the beginning with Gavin and Yvonne handling most of the mail, printing, and the rest. With the multitude of courses now offered through the School, this is a complex task. We are pleased to note that the mail still flows through rapidly; but certain things, such as the website, are in need of updating. We apologize for that. We will get to it eventually. Meantime, have no doubt that the School will continue serving those who want an in-depth study of Wicca as a religion and as a spiritual path.

Blessed be all seekers.

Freedom

2011-06-15T10:57:00.001-07:00

The Arab uprisings in search of freedom have had us considering the whole concept of freedom. I (Gavin) may be in a unique situation, having visited most of the nations currently in turmoil. For many years I worked as sales rep in the field of electronic devices with military applications, with quite a high security clearance, and in that assignment traveled most of the world outside the then Soviet bloc. Of course I lived largely in a western bubble, isolated from the general population--but being an inquisitive sort, I frequently got into the various bazaars, temples, and marketplaces and talked to any local person who had any English, or sometimes (as in Japan) with an interpreter.

The interesting thing was that nobody seemed to be oppressed--or for that matter, poorly clothed or fed. I had seen more what we would call ragamuffins in markets in England than I did in (for instance) Libya. (Ragamuffins are those kids who are poorly dressed and are begging at every turn. Think Oliver Twist.) Yes, the beggars in Egypt and Iran were more prevalent, but they were a happy-go-lucky lot. They didn't really need the money that they were begging for, and would go away laughing if you set them a problem in getting the money and they failed. I suspect that it's those same kids who are now getting shot in the streets in their quest for that will-o'-the-wisp, freedom.

In the United States we think that we are free. Certainly we hear the claim repeated often enough. And yet we follow a pretty rigid set of laws so that the traffic flows smoothly--and we (city-dwellers at least) huddle in our houses at night for fear of going out and getting mugged or shot. You think that last thought is an exaggeration? Oh, no. There's a story I am fond of telling of an elderly lady who annually goes to Madrid and wanders around in the middle of the night. She usually gets lost, and the police have to take her back to her hotel.

"Why do you wander like that, Señora?"

"Because I can't do it at home."

Yet Spain has one of the most visible police presences in Europe in its Guardia Civil. But you can go to parades; you can walk about at night and not even think about having your camera stolen or your pocket picked.

In England now almost every street has its surveillance cameras and pattern-recognition software is in continuous use. There is no main road without cameras at its intersections.

In the United States we think that because we get the occasional chance to vote we control our destiny. What utter blindness. If we control our destiny, how come the laws make it ever easier for businesses such as Big Oil and Big Pharma to rip us off--with a happy smile and a few more billion dollars going to the fat cats?

Why don't we revolt? What is it that keeps us drugged into passive tolerance? This nation has more people starving and lacking medical assistance than the entire population of Iraq or Yemen. Why are they in revolt and we're not?

You may think this is a weird blog--and it is. But recall the words from Aradia:

Ye shall all be freed from slavery,

And so ye shall be free in everything;

And as the sign that ye are truly free,

Ye shall be naked in your rites, both men

And women also; this shall last until

The last of your oppressors shall be dead.

Are you free?

Health update, early June

2011-06-11T13:43:00.000-07:00

Again greetings, everyone.
Gavin has now entered the stage of long recovery. Although the leg muscles seem strong enough, they are not yet fully obeying commands that travel along the nerve paths. The neurosurgeon tells us this is fairly standard, and that things will very gradually improve ... not quite the American dream of everything coming true at the snap of a finger or at the press of a button on a keyboard. Action figures we ain't.
At this stage "very gradually" means three sessions of physical therapy a week and we hope early next week to get Gavin into the pool at Pipestem State Park to resume the self-directed aquarobics we've been doing for so long. I (Yvonne) have to say that our health would be far lower on the scale than it is if our life had not included very frequent aquarobics.
Meantime we are not traveling, although we hope to go to our local coffee shop on Saturday evening and maybe even to Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (40 minutes away in Beckley) on Sunday morning 06 11 (though that looks less likely right now in light of the persistent heat wave).
The current prognosis is: almost normal in three months, fully normal in about a year--provided Gavin keeps up his commendably determined regime of exercise. The pain is just about under control, but it still takes a bunch of narcotics and electrical stimulation. If you talk to him, you may get some weird answers--but you're used to that anyhow. Thank you all again for all the healing energy you've sent. At times it becomes very palpable in the house.

Onward and upward (sigh). Blessed be all. GY

When Will We Learn?

2011-06-04T10:02:00.000-07:00

Words from Yvonne-
This spring and summer we're witnessing natural disaster piling on natural disaster world-wide. Sendai/earthquake/tsunami/nuclear fatalities; the Mississippi and its tributaries behaving in ways inconvenient to human beings; tornadoes deleting acres upon thousands of acres, shanties and mansions alike, with scrap lumber and sheetrock in fragments as far as the eye can see. Here in Hinton we wonder whether it's all our own fault, whether it's the wrath of "God" (woo-hoo), or whether maybe it's the natural way nature behaves.

Humans stubbornly build structures in areas prone to earthquakes that can sustain some level of quake. As has been clearly shown, though, the standards given lip service have not been tough enough, certainly not in Japan.*

Similrly, we build houses alleged to be "hurricane-proof". Again: woo-hoo. Whose blame is greater? The designer's, the builder's, or the sucker's who buys them? The hottest hurricane-proofing gimmick today is (get this) itty-bitty precious little metal straps purported to hold the roof rafters to the upright members so the roof won't blow off. That would be laughable if it weren't so pathetic. And of course we build square box houses close together so that the wind can funnel between them and suck the walls out in what physicists call the Venturi effect. The rectangular box shape so ubiquitous in houses is old, though. It's traditional--what everybody is used to seeing. It's convenient. The furniture fits it.

Of course the wind loves a flat surface to push against! The Little Pig's house gets blown down again by the Big Bad Wolf, just like in the bedtime story ... but it's real.

We still make such houses of nominal 2 x 4s (which have shrunk over the years to 1 3/4 x 3 1/2--if you're lucky). We cover that with sheets of board made from scrap wood and glue--and we expect it all to stand up. When North American culture switched from timber-frame construction to 2-x-4 construction, house designers and builders contemptuously (but accurately) called the 2-x-4 mode a balloon frame because it was so lightweight and flimsy.

Many years ago Bucky Fuller decided that a dome was a better, stronger, more sustainable shape than a rectangular balloon frame of 2-x-4s and pressed wood--but a dome is inconvenient to build. The carpenters, poor dears, have to figure some odd angles: for example, 72 degrees instead of 90 degrees; and the furniture doesn't fit right. Oh gasp. There is a shape, though, documented as tracing back at least to the days when Norsemen told tales of Valhalla, that stands up in the fiercest gale. It is easy and inexpensive to construct, and it contains the furniture very well indeed; it is called a quonset hut.

Quonset huts dating from World War II (that happened in the 1940s, children) are still found all across the Pacific islands. After monsoons and typhoons and hurricanes have swept those islands clear of all else, the huts still stand. They're rusty, but they are still serviceable. No, you can't stack them into fashionable condo towers or into beehives, but we can't imagine that people enjoy living in hives or in fragile multi-story structures that in the end are tall matchboxes. Nor can such structures be accurately described as healthful, let alone safe. A magazine called Southern Living ran an interesting feature on page 100 of its issue dated May 2009. A couple bought a quonset hut in situ with a footprint 25 feet by 48 feet, and refitted it to be their home. The photos tell the story; ask your librarian, or see their piece at www.southernliving.com/home-garden/idea-houses. Another way in: southernhomeawards-quonsethuttransformation. One of these titles or a variant on it will show you the piece.

Such structures may not conform to current building codes or zoning restrictions or historic-building decrees from city planners or county commissioners or historic societies. If that's the case, what a shame. The last we heard (though we've seldom seen this principle exercised), laws that got passed could likewise get unpassed. It isn't the buildings that need changing; it's the codes. How difficult is that to grasp? And if you lose your home in a tornado because you built it to comply with the fiat of some historic commission or county council, try going to that body to get funding for replacement of your dwelling.

How much would it be worth to you to have a home that withstood tornadoes and cyclones and earthquakes? Haven't we seen enough destruction and grief and loss to reexamine our assumptions? What is tradition worth?

Many years ago an episode of Star Trek had the crew seeking a source of some radioactive element that was obtainable only from nuclear stations. Mr. Data suggested how to find such a station: "Look along any tectonic fault line. That's where the stations are all located; that or at least on the seacoast."

It can't happen here. It can't happen here. It can't happen here ... is the mantra. Well, it can and it probably will ... if it hasn't already. To protect yourself and your family, think about where you live. Think about the building you live in. Make appropriate changes. That is known as rational behavior.

It is true that recently this continent has been experiencing storms with a frequency and number statistically above normal. That may be traceable to humans' continual burning of fossil fuels, which burning raises the temperature of the planet on two counts: the actual heat generated and the resultant greenhouse effect--pollutants retaining heat that, left alone, would escape into space.

Climatologists now tell us that we're actually lucky (read: living on borrowed time), because the pollution in the atmosphere causes dimming that holds temperatures down, preventing the full effect of the sun's rays coming to earth. Apparently without such dimming, most land presently arable would be arid and desert-like. Then the population would be drastically reduced through starvation, and the planet would re-correct itself: With lower population, there would be diminished burning of fossil fuels and the planet would cool again.

Malthus was right:

Over and over again human populations reproduce themselves

to levels unsustainable by the planet's resources.

Look around you.

The real question, then, is this: Are we doing anything about it? The real answer is: No.

- - - - - - - - -

*See Wall Street Journal of May 10 2011 page D-7 on designing for earthquake areas.

Gavin Progress Report, Late May

2011-05-31T14:21:00.000-07:00

Greetings, everyone.

In late April the initial surgery on Gavin's spine corrected a stenosis and removed some fragments of a broken disk. That surgery revealed that the dura (the membrane enclosing the spinal cord) was badly damaged. The damage was duly repaired in a procedure that essentially ended up lasting three (3) hours. He seemed to be recovering from it all right--but now the broken disk protruded on the other side of the spinal column so his left leg became paralyzed.
After another MRI and an emergency operation on May 18, the left side was corrected. This second procedure went very well, taking only about 20 minutes, in contrast with the 3-hour first one.
He spent close to two weeks in a rehab hospital, where they made sure everything could be exercised. The pain varies now between horrendous and excruciating, so he is on heavy medication and not necessarily with it all the time. We are discouraging visits and calls from anyone except close family members. The prognosis is that in a couple of months the pain will diminish and he will gradually regain full mobility.

This means that we have had to cancel all our summer traveling and teaching commitments.We will sadly miss seeing you troops.

Yvonne has had to learn all those logistical support functions from a cold start. The School of Wicca is necessarily on hold. We hope we'll be able to do some work, but we can't promise very much.
Your healing energy is very welcome, of course. Maybe next year everything will get back on schedule again and we'll see your happy smiling faces.

That's all for now. We appreciate e-mails; but don't expect replies.

Occasional updates will appear on this site as matters progress.

Blessed be all.

Yvonne writes:

There are those who travel to Lourdes seeking a miracle. There are those who travel to Macchu Picchu expecting same; to Lhasa; to Fujiyama; to Beaupré; to Loreto ... pick your favorite spot. We Frosts experienced our miracle in Princeton, West Virginia, at the hands of Gavin's neurosurgeon, the entire staff of Princeton Community Hospital, and the people at HealthSouth (the rehab center). If we can get their consent, we will reveal their names to people who inquire via this blog site.

I cannot praise highly enough every blessed one of the individuals who touched our lives with their skills, their patience, their compassion. Who would prefer a big city to what we've known here?

Lack-of-Progress Report

2011-05-11T17:06:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, May 9, Gavin had a discussion with his neurosurgeon. The doctor handed down a decree that we Frosts had both dreaded but had been unwilling to face: Doctor G. wanted Gavin grounded: a minimum of walking, a minimum of traveling in a car, and a minimum of meeting people. Gavin had been counting on having such restrictions lifted.
Troops, this means for starters that we will not be able to attend the Blue Ridge Beltane Festival. We're heartbroken because we had been immensely looking forward to the event. We don't know what the future holds. (Maybe that's a good thing, owing to the merciful nature of the Guides. If we knew ... ) We still hope we'll be going to Michigan Pagan Fest outside Detroit, scheduled for the end of this month, as well as to Sirius Rising and SummerFest in New York State, though we have no written guarantee. Either way, we'll keep this site updated as we learn firm information.
Many of you have offered healing energy, and we accept such energy gratefully. A couple of people have been surprised when Gavin said, "Don't send energy for pain relief; stay with the healing energy." Why his declining? Pain indicates that there is a problem; relief is just a band-aid temporarily covering up the signals of a Situation and encouraging the sufferer to do rash behaviors. So Gavin prefers to stay with the pain. When it goes away, then he can feel confident that everything has been healed.
We're heeding Doctor G.'s skilled, trained counsel, and heeding it gratefully. What do we get in these capers? One chance. That's it. No second-guessing, no rehearsals, no winding Time backward. We'd be stupid and obstinate beyond the English language to express if we disregarded skilled advice, put our heads down, and set out to prove something. Instead we'll leave that to the people who suffer from testosterone poisoning.
That's all for today. Again, thanks much for your kind words and for the energies you're sending to us.

A Progress Report on Gavin's Health

2011-04-27T14:40:00.000-07:00

It's a week today since Gavin's surgery, that turned out to be more severe than any of us had expected. The recovery process feels quite slow ... though in our adrenaline-saturated culture, anything longer than instant is grounds for fidgeting. He is not allowed anything that might cause severe vibration or shock in the back, because the repair to the damaged dura will take time to heal properly. He can hobble around the house, though; and with the current cocktail of medications the pain can be controlled. Today's shower was a happy milestone. Also, we're feeling optimistic because the equinoctial storms seem to be subsiding at last and the weather is warming up.
Since we are now in hold mode and the jungle outside where a garden used to be is forbidden, as are travel and even meeting with groups of people, we're having to work on our long-delayed new book project. This may elicit groans from the community, but the work might contain a few new and different thoughts.
We're most happy with our neurosurgeon; without his swift and very delicate action, Gavin would probably be in a wheelchair instead of making a nuisance of himself. Your continued healing efforts will be appreciated. In a couple of weeks we expect to be on a reduced regimen of medications that will mean Gavin's immune system will be fully functional again and he can meet people..
That's all for now. Thank you all again. Progress continues, and the weeds are growing.

Blessed be all.

An Update on Gavin's Health

2011-04-24T15:24:00.000-07:00

Greetings, guys and gals. This hasty message is to thank you for all the wishes and healing energy that you've sent to Gavin. It must be working, because he's already getting ornery again.
Some of you have asked to come and visit. Not only is he strictly limited in travel--no riding in a car for a month--but he is restricted in meeting people because the cocktail of drugs he's taking has temporarily compromised his immune system. The one thing we don't want him to get is flu or anything like that, that would cause him to cough and break open the very delicate stitching in his spine. What an age we live in ...
Afterthought: He also is forbidden to lift any weight more than five (5) pounds. Not even a gallon of wine, Incredible. Booze is off limits too! But the tradeoffs don't bear thinking about.
We'd love to see you. We're happy to talk by phone or e-mail, but that's about it for now.
From the festival point of view, we've had to cancel FPG; but as things stand currently, we're still planning to make it to the Blue Ridge Beltane observance. And of course up to Detroit and to Sirius Rising and SummerFest ... all on tiptoe, of course.

Thank you again, every one of you, for all good wishes and healing energy.

Update on Gavin's Health, April 22 2011 CE

2011-04-22T07:31:00.000-07:00

Hello, tout le monde.
     Some of you know by now that Gavin underwent spinal surgery on April 20. The MRI findings had led us all to believe that it would be a fairly simple and straightforward operation. Unfortunately it turned out to be more complicated than anyone expected, even our brilliant neurosurgeon (Life, Health, Prosperity, as they used to wish Pharaoh). Apparently a low-down disk had been out of alignment for some long period of time and had been rubbing against the dura, the casing (that may resemble a membrane, tissue-thin) of the spinal cord. The fluid contained in the dura surrounds and floats the main nerve bundle. Actually the misaligned disk had partially shredded the dura; so the dura itself had to be reconstructed during the operation.*
     Thus Gavin was actually on the table for 2 ½ hours; whereas the procedure would normally have been expected to take half an hour. Further, it meant that he had to stay in hospital an extra day. At 80 years old, a single extra day isn't all that bad ... compared to some of the cases we saw while we were trotting up and down hospital hallways.
    So now a problem crops up. To wit: Gavin is forbidden to ride in vehicles, let alone drive them, for the next four weeks. After that time, we're just trying to keep our expectations loose and to assume nothing. This means that the Frosts will not be able to attend even simple events such as our accustomed weekly Unitarian-Universalist meetings, only 40 miles away. Events more distant, such as Florida Pagan Gathering (one of our favorite annual events), have also got to be cancelled, much to our disappointment and regret--purely on a selfish level. Since we're going to be confined to the house, we may post a few extra blogs or something, or even get the next book under way.
    Don't worry. This event is not contagious. You'll have your own challenges to face as those ol' sands of time pour through the bottleneck. But if you feel like mentioning our names to your Friends in Management, we'll be grateful to you and to Them for thinking in our behalf.

- - - - - - - - -

* All the above is Yvonne's attempt to describe medical matters of which she has the scantest knowledge and understanding.

A New Definition of Wicca

2011-04-13T09:49:00.000-07:00

People keep asking, so here we go again. In Appendix 2 of our Solitary Wiccan's Bible we tried yet again to define of Witchcraft (Wicca). Here it is for your comment and development.
In trying to define a religion or a spiritual path, it is instructive to look first at other religions. Note: Under ‘religion' here as a courtesy we include various personality cults such as Christianity along with real religions that are ways of spirituality. Let us see, then, whether we can find the underlying essence, the message or whatever, of a few world religions.
1. Christianity - Christianity is a religion "of the book". Various interpretations of the book in its myriad translations result in various sects; so Christianity is an approach to the sacred through the written teachings of one sacred book and one avatar. Its purpose may be summed up as a religion of sacrifice which leads to salvation. The sacrifices expected of its followers are many and varied, from the giving of money to the church to living unnatural life styles.
A religion of salvation through sacrifice
2. Judaism - Judaism too is a religion based on the book. Here the book contains a great deal of civil law. The religion teaches its adherents to live safely in an unsafe world; therefore it has many different laws of behavior and diet, many restrictions, and many rituals that bring strength to the family and to the kin.
A religion of learning salvation through civitas (civilized behavior)
3. Islam - The message of Islam may be the simplest and the most stark of any of the major religions. It is simply that if one submits to Allah, one receives salvation. The very name of the religion means "submission to god". The tribal culture in which it flourishes is of the desert and of the stark reality of nature as a threat to life. A religion of salvation through absolute submission
4. Taoism - This religion--which some say is not a religion--relies on the balancing of opposites. It tries to get its adherents into harmony with the primal nature of things. It differs from Confucianism in this way: Confucianists try to use reason and learning as a guide; whereas a Taoist guides himself by intuition. Thus the Tao instructs people to be humble and accept life as it comes to them.
A religion of salvation through harmony
5. Witchcraft (Wicca) - The great thrust of the Craft is that it encourages spiritual development in all people they intuitively feel is right for them. On its social side the Craft teaches connection with nature and the idea that one should progress through harming no one. That leads to a very simple definition: an ethical path that encourages its members to progress in their own way and in their own time to greater spiritual understanding.
A path of spiritual growth through learning and ethical exploration
6. Hinduism -
This is the oldest and largest religion (by temple or church attendance) in the world. It relies on the idea that what you do in this lifetime affects what you will become in your next incarnation: an idea known as transmigration. The aim of many of its adherents is to live in such a way that they will get off the wheel of continuous reincarnation (samsara).
A religion of salvation through right living.

Addenda to several ongoing topics:

2011-04-08T08:52:00.000-07:00

1. We want to thank everybody for the healing energy they've been sending to Gavin, and to give an update on things. Gavin's problem is associated with a stenosis in his spinal column. We suspect that this challenge traces back to a day years ago when he fell off a steel boat we were building in Pamlico County, North Carolina. Apparently that fall has pinched the motor nerves that control the muscles for walking. The neurosurgeon believes that the nerve pathways, which run through the plexus in the hip, will retrain themselves--that is, learn new pathways--provided Gavin walks every day.
There is a little pain, but it is easily controllable; and there is no weakness in the muscles themselves. It's just that they don't work right.
We don't want to blow all this out of proportion, but (again) we do appreciate all the healing that people have been sending us.
2. We are now scheduled to go to the Blue Ridge Beltane observance May 13 through 15, in Greenville VA. See www.BlueRidgeBeltane.org for details. It looks like being a great festival. Not far away geographically, in the autumn we are going to
3. Mountain Mabon Mysteries September 16 through 18, outside Stanardsville VA (north of Charlottesville). See Community@Mountain-Mysteries.com or http://mountain-mysteries.com/Mabon.htm.

So what about the visits we posted earlier on this site? That information, those plans, remain valid. Choose a date and a site that fit your life, and drop in to press the flesh; it's your chance to see our fangs and our hairy palms yourself.
4. More later. It's sunny today, and it almost looks as if winter is over. Dare we put away our Dr. Dentons* for the season?
* For younger folk, these are one-piece jammies of flannel in which the feet are all of a piece with the legs and the drop-seat body. So fetching ... and so provocative. d#%n.

Whither?

2011-04-07T05:58:00.000-07:00

Cultural anthropologists generally agree that religions go through three distinct stages of development. As Max Weber wrote in "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", these are the stages:
1. Visionary - Someone has a vision of a better explanation of all that is; through charismatic leadership he promotes that path. Many other people with similar thoughts join, each usually following slightly different visions. Squabbling and argument and schisms ensue. If the visions are strong enough, a movement develops and moves to Stage 2.
2. Festival - The groups hold festival-style meetings offering a lot of attractive freedoms. The main freedom is that of thought, but other freedoms from socially accepted behavior are encouraged. Yes, even the Christians were sexual, excessively and immoderately--free enough that they shocked the Romans--to such an extent that men and women were not allowed to worship in the same building. In following centuries, though, they must have managed to get over it ...
3. Institutional - Here the movement grows up and becomes accepted by the general population. It loses its freedoms. Now its new leaders--who are usually in it for power, not for the original vision--insist on political correctness.
Frost musings:
Centralized power - The next step in the inexorable progression is the setting-up of positions or "offices". The set of offices has titles and hierarchal structures such as ministers, bishops, archbishops, and so on, who are charged with keeping the doctrine "pure". What is a church without an organization chart, anyhow? The word for bishop, episcopos--one who oversees or who takes the overview--indicates that clear sight was held to be necessary. Then, instead of a person deciding what was or was not orthodox, the office fulfilled the function. Centralized power--that's the key.
Since time immemorial earth-centered religions have had many charismatic leaders. As founders of Wicca in the late 1960s, we dare to count ourselves among modern charismatics, perhaps comparable (shudder) to many others in the frothy time of new ideas and paths that most or all movements undergo. Many of those ideas and paths were modeled on ancient ways. We all had a clarity of vision and an energy which the movement may be losing. It seems clear that the Community is now at Stage 2, Festival, moving away from Freedom. Since the Church of Wicca is a "church", we probably should have expected it. The question becomes: Are we going to follow the rest of Weber's narrative, eventually, inexorably morphing into a massive institutionalized monolith?
We Frosts see signs of it, and we will fight it by encouraging independent forward-thinking charismatic movements. At the same time, since many of you seem to want the movement to grow, we must face the fact that a large percentage of the Community would like it if the movement did become institutionalized ... though of course promoting their own particular favorite path over the promotion of other paths, and probably with themselves as leaders, fostering power that grows ever more centralized.
As the pagan/Wiccan community expands, it will inevitably follow the examples from history. That's the assumption. But at the same time, the Community must keep its independent autonomous forward thinkers.
The point surely is this: If the Community criticizes its leaders into obscurity instead of listening to the vision, we are doomed. Progress will take a back seat to control, and growth will be judged by how big and fancy we build our campgrounds and temples.
Personally, I (Gavin) like the Hindu attitude: You toe the line through the early years of life, but in old age you're allowed to venture into any spiritual path you like. Thus when people who are, for instance, hard-working householders kick at the religious orthodoxy, they are told simply, "Wait. You will have your turn at changing the rules."
So what is the Community to do? Must it too set up a religious hierarchy with a basic orthodoxy (decreed by who knows whom?? the loudest? the richest? the meanest?) allowing for free thought in some areas but requiring that a majority of people adhere to the official line on certain basic precepts or axioms? It's no use hoping it won't happen, because it will. If we don't learn the lesson of history, we will all fail.
The bottom line, perhaps: If you don't like the thoughts articulated above, start your own letterhead. If you just sit and piss and moan, nobody can get anything done. It will all sink of its own weight and, like the worm Ouroboros, eat its own tail.
So surely our first basic axiom must be that taken from the charge to the Goddess. Here it is as it was first uttered, before it got politically correct--that is, before it got smooth below the waist:
To show that ye are free,
ye shall be naked in your rites
and afterward make the game of love.

Evolution, the Bible, the Zohar, and Our Own Thoughts

2011-03-16T06:04:00.000-07:00

Greetings,
How strongly do you believe in evolution? If you think about it, the chair you're probably sitting on evolved from a flat rock or a log that was conveniently placed for some neanderthal bottom to rest on.
One of the perennial questions is: What was the First Cause of this amazing multiverse in which we exist? Physicists and mathematicians have gone back in time to amazingly near that point that we've been trained to call the "Big Bang". Of course the so-called Big Bang theory depends on (a) a bunch of esoteric math and on (b) believing that light is both a particle and a wave form, needing only the Higgs Condensate (something as yet undiscovered) to travel through empty space.
How did the monstrosity called M-theory develop from six or seven string theories? Every time the string theory du jour was proven wrong, it got changed. That's neat. It's kind of like your computer programs getting ever more complicated to overcome goofs by the programmers (apologies to Apple).
To our way of thinking a purported scientific hypothesis or theory should predict the unknown, not be adjusted to fit, it's neither a hypothesis nor a theory if it doesn't work and if it needs changing every few weeks. Come on, people!
Have you ever thought that Adam might have been something like an amoeba? If the great Juju made something in Its own image--something which contained both male and female--maybe the great Juju itself was an amoeba. Though of course the great Juju evolved from it's own beginings into something with which to keep children and gullible adults in line. Okay, so did these very complex theories develop from something like 1 + 1? I'm not sure an amoeba can do even that addition.
You're all supposed to be good meditators. Let's go on an imaginary trip. Meditate on the railway line that runs dead straight for 700 miles, curving only for the curvature of the earth, across Australia's Nullarbor Plain. At its western end there stands upright across the very railroad line an extremely complex domino. This domino represents the multiverse as it is now. As we start there and travel ever so slightly eastward in our meditative state, there is a domino quite close to the first which is barely less complex, (yesteryear's multiverse). The further eastward we move, the less complex and the smaller become the dominoes until at the far eastern point (because we all know that everything must start in the east) there is a domino you can hardly see with a microscope. You can see how the dominoes evolved from this ultra-small, completely elementary and simple transparent wisp. (There is no mathematics in the wisp.)
So along comes a big-booted hairy-chested outbacker in a safari hat and kicks over the wisp. The resulting cascade effect represents evolution. From almost nothingness we evolve into the horror we see around us today ... and into the good stuff too. There are many side branches to the track across the Plain. If you pursue them, you will find that some of them have branches on branches and others fall into ravines, never to be seen again; and yet others rejoin the track further down toward its western end.
You don't need us to tell you that the branches represent all those false starts and stops that have occurred in the course of the evolution of the multiverse.
So what does our metaphor tell you?
"God" could have been an amoeba or even something smaller and more rudimentary: perhaps something as fleeting as a thought. If God is so rudimentary, It clearly cannot interfere in our life today. It cannot be an interventionist deity. Of course this may be why God, when "He" came into the Garden of Eden, couldn't find Adam, let alone Eve, and had to clothe them in skin before they could enjoy sex and populate the world.
Notice skin, not skins. The problem of plurals in translating from the Aramaic is well known: When it was convenient, the translators made nouns singular--whereas in other places the nouns arbitrarily came out plural. And remember that the word for God, HaShem, also translates officially as The Name or The Names. Today we your authors have used the word God with a capital G to mean some form of First Cause or Ultimate Deity--a duo-gender concept--as is our amoeba.

The Four Worlds

2011-03-10T18:14:00.000-08:00

In the five worlds of the Kabbalah the four-worlds concept is easy to understand. The fifth world is generally accepted to be the concealed world of the Spiritual Creation. In the work of life it is good always to remember the four.
1. The physical
2. The mental
3. The emotional
4. The spiritual
Let's consider the work of a personal friend of ours who makes musical instruments--such as harps and dulcimers--from recycled wood.
The physical work, perhaps the reprocessing of, say, a piece of salvaged cedar into the soundboard of a guitar, is obvious.
The mental effort--visualizing the result of measuring, planing, cutting, forming, etc, to get the pieces perfect--is extensive and comes only after long discipline and practice.
Emotion comes in as the pieces go lovingly together and the strings are first tuned. Then some friend takes the instrument and makes it live. At the beautiful sound, the emotion is so heavy that it sometimes reduces Bob to tears.
So where does the spiritual come in?
Bob listens to that inner voice that tells him in the first place to move out of his comfort zone and make a musical instrument. Then he continues on that path, often giving up other pleasant pastimes such as eating, to finish the job. He is driven by his inner spiritual voice.
Yes, we know we're simplifying.
In all the millions of words written on spiritual development, we've found very few that consider the concept of the four aspects of the Work. We Frosts have come to believe that anything undertaken using only one of the four will not lead to a genuinely satisfying end.
Today everyone seems to concentrates on the physical; yet in even such a mundane pursuit as simply beating out a dent in the fender of a car--even this--can call for all the four aspects of the Work your soul/spirit is here to do. If the worker is a trained metal-basher, he has learned to make the physical movements required: to bash the metal not too hard and not too soft to achieve an ideal result. If a recalcitrant dent causes him problems, he will need to maintain an emotional calm. He can achieve such a calm through mental control, just through past knowledge that losing his temper will not lead to a better result. His mental effort may be almost automatic, but it is still there, especially when it comes to, for instance, mixing the color necessary to achieve a perfect match with adjoining undamaged parts.
You may not think there is much of a spiritual aspect in work such as this; but do you not think that when he admires a perfect result he feels a little spiritual uplift?
Now how about circle work?
Casting a complete Church of Wicca triple circle is a chore. Crawling around (often nude) on the floor or in a field is outside the physical comfort zone of many people. It takes mental effort to get the sizes right and the signs aligned. Preparing for the circle with the requisite fasting and celibacy, even making the tools and robes: It all takes mental and physical effort.
As we enter the sacred space of the Circle, emotions run high, especially if there is a neophyte to be initiated. Then they are pushed higher with the sealing of the Circle and perhaps dancing and chanting. At the interlude, everything becomes grounded so that we can move into the spiritual phase of meditation and astral travel. When everything is over and we restore ourselves with a feast, many of us feel empty and washed out. Thus we sleep soundly, knowing that we have operated in all four worlds--and maybe even touched the fifth.
What we are saying here is this: All too often the fact of the four aspects of the Work is overlooked. And very few people seem to teach that, if you want a fulfilling experience, you need to work with all four aspects in everything you do.
The Kabbalah is not the only place where this belief in four aspects appears. An intriguing thought comes through popular crime novels based on beliefs of this continent's First Nations, as made available to us by author Tony Hillerman. He shares with us the idea of a one-legged Sacred Buffalo. That is what life is like today, emphasizing only the physical aspect of activities, especially entertainment, instead of a stable four aspects. A one-legged buffalo--a world that excessively emphasizes one aspect of four--cannot long endure without crashing.
Why don't you try moving out of your comfort zone and entering the four worlds?

Miscellaneous/schedule

2011-03-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

To all those who inquired,

Gavin is experiencing a disk problem in his lower back. So far the neurologist's injections have not helped, so it looks as if a replacement disk will be in order at some time in the near future. This means that he has some pain, which is controllable. More importantly, though, at the present he cannot dance, though he can still teach dance.
This gets us, then, to upcoming festivals to which we have been invited.

Date           Event                                                                                                     Website
03 20        Ostara                                                                                          unitarians@frontier.com
3 p.m. - 5:30 520 Kanawha Blvd, Charleston WV: Unitarian Universalist church
04 02 Book signing 1 p.m. The Book Worm 1057 E. Main St, Radford VA
                                                                                                             Suzanne Chrysalis on facebook
05 05 - 05 08 Florida Pagan Gathering                                                                            flapagan.org
                       Ocala National Forest
05 27 - 05 30 Michigan Pagan Fest                                                      mipaganfest.org                  Belleville, MI: Wayne County Fairground
07 11 - 07 17 Sirius Rising                                                                                      brushwood.com
Brushwood near Sherman NY
07 18 - 07 24 SummerFest                                                                                      brushwood.com
Brushwood near Sherman NY
07 27 - 08 01 Kaleidoscope Gathering                                                      kaleidoscope-gathering.ca/
Raven's Knoll    50 miles west of Ottawa in Ontario Canada
09 16 - 09 18 Mabon Mountain Mysteries                                                   mountain-mysteries.com
Heavenly Acres Campground, Stanardsville, VA

Troops out west, we're sorry; it looks as if we won't be making it this year. Nor will we be carrying a vast variety of books to festivals. Watch this site for updates of a happier tone.
About the School of Wicca
Yes, the Church and School is still teaching its courses and signing people up. No, we have not updated the website. The only way to sign up today is to download the application form from the website and send it with check or money order to the School via snail-mail. For a variety of reasons, the School is not handling credit-card transactions.
Faithful students and friends already know full well not to expect prompt replies to their e-mails. The volume of such messages incoming is simply too great for us to reply this minute to that e-mail. We do a lot of humility here in Hinton.
Of course students come first; but the students too know that we do not teach by e-mail. After trying out the net, we believe that the good old USPS allows more time for contemplation and for meditation on the themes and ideas than the instant turnaround of the e-mail system.
You must find your own answers through meditation and not be satisfied with the shallow answers, the glib one-liners, and the blue balls of fire you may get from other sources such as occult books and on the web. Craft precepts are radically different from the sick, twisted ideas in this western culture; thus they need time and re-reading and pondering to sink in to any meaningful depth in your mind.
Yes, we're old-fashioned. But to offset that you have the fact that the School has had some 60,000 students internationally and that it has been around for a very long time ... so deal with it.

Forgiveness

2011-02-26T08:41:00.000-08:00

Forgiveness is often touted as a solid and positive plank in the otherwise often negative platform of Christianity. To our jaundiced view, though, it is one of the most negative (and in some ways despicable) elements of an often dangerous and negative set of teachings.
We all know and recognize most of those teachings. The ironic thing is that in this nation's "red" states--where fundamentalist Christianity may be at its densest--such patterns as repeat pregnancies among unmarried teens are at their highest. You see, the girls often find Jesus; at least they profess to find him when they learn they're pregnant. Then they're forgiven. And then, of course, once they're washed in the blood of the lamb, they can go out and "sin" again ... all on the tax dollars that you, and we, work so hard to pay.
Some questions occur.
1. Who decided that sex between consenting people was a "sin"? A search of their black book reveals no prohibition against copulation between consenting people who are not otherwise under contract.
2. Are we to believe in parthenogenesis, or are we to trust the word of a smart Jewish girl who found herself in trouble? Was Jesus simply a bastard, born out of wedlock?
We would probably all agree that it's not nice to cause death and mayhem; however, in the American justice system oftentimes death sentences are commuted and even paroles granted to those who claim with gasping to have "found Jesus", especially if the gaspers make noises signifying remorse. The forgiveness gene is switched on--and now that same criminal can go out and kill with impunity.
Can there be a little bit of forgiveness, or is that like being a little bit pregnant? Where do we draw the line? Doesn't that same old black book call for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? Or is this just another anomaly? --just another of those squirming non sequiturs: "But that's different!"?
Given a book purportedly written by "God" "himself" (note: him, never her) of which no word can be changed, Yvonne's persistent question nags: Which god? I've got a list of gods reaching from here to the intersection. "God" is the conventional translation of HaShem, which means "The Name". Remember what the Zohar says: "No created intelligence can know the name, so call It what you will. My god does too wear lipstick occasionally."*
How do such guidelines as "forgive your enemy" and "turn the other cheek" sit with Celts--and for that matter, with Jews? These two groups among many others reflect, "If you turn the other cheek, you are likely to get clobbered again."
That's all for now. You know we're weird and deviant; so don't expect us to forgive if you insult us. We're like the traditional Yorkshireman who has been said to carry a stone of insult in his pocket until he sees the opportunity to use it on the insulter. Just once in a while when things get beyond tolerable, we're not above doing something ... educational. And we encourage you: If you're not angry now, get angry. Aren't you paying attention?
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* The book God Wears Lipstick is free from the Kabbalist Center

To Heal or Not to Heal: That Is the Question

2011-02-09T08:06:00.000-08:00

Psychic power exists. One of its popular uses is in healing. We Frosts believe that in most cases the body heals itself, but that psychic power somehow affects the mind, which controls such things as the hypothalamus, the pituitary, and the adrenals to cure the body.
In new-age, Wiccan, and pagan discussion groups, you will often hear discussions on the ethics of healing: "They need their disease to complete their learning cycle on this plane of existence," someone claims; "and if you cure them, they'll have to come back and do it again." We don't look at it that way. We think you should do everything you possibly can to help human beings, animals, and plants. If someone does have a repulsive disease and you cure it and they immediately get another equally loathsome disease, then you know that you are addressing the surface symptom and not the cause of the disease; you know you'll have to delve further and help them adjust their thinking if the real cause is to be addressed. Illness can be a very effective manipulative device; who or what is the patient manipulating, and why?
If you saw someone slip on an icy sidewalk, fall down, and break their leg, would you call for help, or would you leave them lying there? Of course there is the current non-involvement fad to overcome, but we believe that most people would seek to help.
If you had an extra hamburger and a panhandler asked you for it, would you give it to him? We hope your answers is "Yes".
Almost everything you do interferes with the life of other people. You spend money on something, someone makes a little profit, someone gets some pay; people's lives are affected. You squash a mosquito, it doesn't suck someone else's blood; it doesn't pass on a disease.
A drowning child can't ask for help, but you give it. You resuscitate her. So why wait to get someone's consent before you attempt a healing? (Never mind what What's-his-name did on the shore of the Sea of Galilee!) Why not quietly do an anonymous psychic healing? That's far better and far less dangerous to your karma than if you go in and say, "I can heal that". To be super-safe, take Yvonne's approach: Volunteer energy in behalf of the patient, but don't specify what body part it be directed to. Make your bottom line, "Let the will of the Elder Ones be done."
If you live and breathe in this world, you are part of it. When you think about doing a healing, think about it in simplistic terms, not in terms of long-range karmic debt and spiritual growth. The more you practice healing, the more adept you will become at it and the more light you will bring into the world.
Personally, I think that many self-styled psychic healers are so unsure of their craft that they will use any pretext not to try healing. When the drowning child is pulled fom the lake, she cannot ask that you do CPR. (By the way, any self-styled healer who doesn't know how to do CPR is surely worth less than doodoo.)
Recently at one of the great campout conventions, a child stepped on a piece of glass but told no one. The wound became infected. One of the ‘healers' attending took her to her tent, and piled crystals on the injury. When I saw the foot, I saw the telltale thin red lines running up the leg, the sure symptom of blood poisoning. I rushed her to the nearest emergency room. They managed to save her foot and probably her life.
If you're not sure--absolutely positive--of what you are doing, don't offer to help. If you want to help, do it privately and anonymously. Nobody's karma will be involved. If you want to be a healer, put your money where your mouth is. High on your priority list put an EMT course or a nursing course.
I know that these ideas will go against the grain of many. Let me leave you with this thought: When St. Jerry Falwell refused to heal at a gigantic meeting in Argentina, the locals ran him out of town.
As always, we invite your comments. We are not trying to offend anyone or scorn their tradition, so please be constructive. Our hope is that we may all arrive at a shared understanding of what we are doing. If you know a better way and can articulate the reasons behind it, please share that better way with the community.

Blessed be. GY

Missing an old friend

2011-01-28T08:17:00.000-08:00

During this holiday season, as in the season of 2009, we received a post card from an old colleague and co-conspirator. I'll call him just Frank so we don't out him in case he can't afford to be outed. Anyhow, in 2009 he mailed us from somewhere in Ohio; in 2010 it came from the greater Chicago area. We welcomed those messages so full of meaningful bulletins. The drawback? He showed no return address whatever.

Hey, Frank, where are you? We'd love to resume auld acquaintance--not in New Bern but from here in Hinton. Do please let us know a return address so we can pester you as of old, won't you? Old friends can be cherished friends.

So for now, blessed be. Know that we are eager to exchange updates. GY

History (not as wished for)

2011-01-27T08:21:00.000-08:00

Reference blog titled "To Every Thing There Is a Season, and a Time to Every Purpose under the Heaven"

Source Science of Metaphysical and Occult Philosophy -- smopblog.com/?p=81
We urge everyone to read John R. deLorez' blog referenced above. de Lorez has given us a survey of where the thing loosely called "the community" finds itself today. As he points out, the community has become (to use a courteous euphemism) eclectic.
As often happens, there are two sides to the coin. The good side is that everyone is enjoying themselves without too much mental effort. The bad side--in our curmudgeonly opinion--is this: A lot of people are skimming some kind of surface without realizing the harm they can do to themselves and to others when they play Witchy-Poo. To put all this into perspective, we ourselves often give a presentation we call "99 Ways Good Witches Go Bad" based on our book "Good Witches Fly Smoothly."
Gavin received his training in England from an old-line coven in Cornwall. It took a small group of neophytes almost two (2) years of quite rigorous training to qualify for initiation. That training required attendance at various lectures both in London and in the provinces, given by noted figures in many fields, as well as other assignments fine-tuned to each student personally.
The quality of those lectures was amazing. Some were held at the British Psychical Research Society's quarters; some were at colleges and universities. He cannot remember any that were held in someone's living room. Thus he witnessed from the get-go the value of learning from people who had been specialists for years in their respective fields.
In the United States in 1968, when we first founded the Church and School of Wicca, there was a high level of genuine interest in exploring a spiritual path. We rapidly went from zero to an international student body of 2,000 enrolled in the School's correspondence course. About 70 percent of them dropped out when they found that we expected them not only to read a lot of obscure books, but also to do experiments. The books were so difficult to obtain that we imported many from Europe and started a School lending library from which students could borrow the texts we recommended.
As the years have passed, fewer and fewer students are willing even to read the required texts. So we simplified the course by allowing two tracks: one for those who sought to earn initiation, one for general information. Today about 70 percent of the students do only the general-information sections--that is,with the notable exception of foreign students and American inmates. They still want to learn everything they can. In the United States the instant-gratification phenomenon has (at least in our curmudgeonly opinion) ruined what had been a good thing with a high level of esoteric scholarship.
Today every self-respecting bookstore has a shelf of easy-read paperbacks explaining multifarious "Wiccan" "traditions" and how-to books on the occult, often from authors who have had maybe one minor spiritual experience. This means that many good people never do much experimentation and rarely dig deeper. In working with groups at our presentations, we are repeatedly dismayed when attendees simply don't know even the most axiomatic of basic procedures and guidelines.
When we founded the School of Wicca, we made a conscious decision that Wicca was for everyone and thus should be, if you will, hidden in plain sight. The Craft should not be the sole property of a self-appointed aristocracy of occult "leaders". That meant we advertised in widely-read media ranging from Cosmo magazine to the National Enquirer. We summarized our thoughts on this topic in the last lecture of our correspondence course, that became the nucleus of Chapter 12 in our infamous book "The Witch's Bible". That chapter is essentially a rant. It asks, "Whom can you believe? Surely not the people who make a profit from having you kowtow to their almighty will." The rant included priests/clergy paid by one conventional church or another; it included physicians paid by Big Pharma to push new products; it included publishers; it included many other people who, though they purport to be sincere, in fact make a profit from keeping you in the dark and by using "innerspeak", the jargon of the inner circle, to maintain their precious us-over-you situation.
For all of recorded history, there have been persons who manipulated others by claiming, "I know something you don't know" and "You're not ready to know that yet." The ploy works on the second-grade playground, and it works all too well in the field of spiritual/magical/occult pursuits.
Based on this statement, any thoughtful person can see immediately that people should be very suspicious of our words; and we told seekers that the only person whom you can trust is yourself. Then we quoted Mohandas Gandhi:
"Divine knowledge is not borrowed from books; it must be realized in oneself. Scriptural texts cannot supersede reason. The principal books are doubly distilled: They come from a human person and have now been interpreted and translated."
So you might think that we immediately condemned ourselves and our thinking. In response as our defense we have to say that
(1) our work is not just our work but also the work of over 40,000 students and
(2) the School has never made a profit and
(3) indeed we live under a vow of poverty.
Recently we have been encouraged when people whom we meet on the festival circuit ask for some of our older presentations. Those seekers are highly interested in such topics as Hinduism, the Sephiroth, multifaceted meditation, and astral travel. Perhaps more people will continue with their eclectic path but will add time for experimentation and having their own epiphanies without longing for whiz-bangs and blue balls of fire, or for thumb games.
Regrettably another phenomenon has seemed to overtaken part of the community. It can be variously described as smooth-below-the-waist or Christo-paganism. We see it in people who have failed to distinguish between reality on the one hand and on the other hand the cultural assumptions in which so many are trapped.
In time past much of the community followed the old ways and had great success with astral travel and with sex magic (the use of natural energy to affect future events); though now, of course, to be politically correct we should call that force "gender-difference" energy--and even this term doesn't work for our GLBT friends. Ay de mi! Sorry, troops.
This current trend has gone way too far. Currently many Wiccans are so smooth below the waist--so politically correct--that they have changed even the Charge to the Goddess, removing politically incorrect phrases such as "Ye shall be naked in your rites and ye shall make the game of love."
How often do Yvonne and I have to sit in lectures which are quite frankly trash? Those self-important utterances include such blatant falsehoods as these two:
(1) Jules Michelet's book "La Sorciere" was titled "The Sorcerer" and
(2) Wicca was founded by Gerald Gardner and i am a member of the oldest Wiccan group founded in 1975.
Because of our objections to these most glaring of the "mistakes", many people decided "those Frosts" are dangerous and should never be invited back.
There's no market for truth.
As Yvonne and I sit here in our living room dictating these thoughts, without even standing up we can look around and see hundreds of books, ranging from shelves of dictionaries, to philosophy, to maps ancient and modern, to a whole shelf of our own books. None are trash. All are dog-eared from continuous use. Unless there comes an upsurge in scholarly and experimental work, then the community has lost it. Do we want that to happen? Or are you willing to ditch the yellow-press books and the woohoo internet sites, and listen and try things?
We have hopes. We are seeing some small groups around the country who will listen and will strive; but they're few and far between. In fact we two can successfully do more experiments with Christians, in their church basement meetings which are alternatives to the official service, than we can with many self-styled pagans. What a sad state of affairs.

You Too Can Make a Difference

2011-01-24T06:45:00.000-08:00

Did you know that the American industrial complex regards the mountains of eastern Kentucky and southwestern West Virginia as just an inconvenience, a nuisance? We've all heard about mountain-top removal, and most of us have seen the moonscape photos of the land after its rape.
It's not only the coal companies who have that attitude. Last year we Frosts visited Logan in the center of the moonscape. We found that Walmart had calmly removed a mountain and filled in a valley for a new store. If anyone downwind from the site had raised any objection, we certainly had not heard about it. Why should a tyrannosaurus rex bother about a ladybug, anyway? Just squash it and get on with things.
The arrogant raping of the mountains is poignantly illustrated most recently by the attitude and activities of Arch Coal Company. Arch gained a permit form the Corps of Engineers to take over 2,000 acres of mountain top (what they call the overburden) and dump it into several handy streams. Various groups in West Virginia, notably the Highlands Conservancy, had been protesting such action since their formation in 1965. In more than 50 cases the EPA had negotiated with coal companies to ameliorate the damage that they were causing; but this time the coal company (again arrogantly) refused to change their plans by so much as a comma. The EPA finally got enough cojones to cancel the permit.
This was to be the largest mountain-top removal mine ever permitted, involving as it did the burial of miles of high-quality stream under a minimum of 110 million cubic yards of waste. The waste would have poisoned not only the remaining water downstream; the poison would have gone all the way down to the Mississippi River and eventually out into the Gulf, resulting in large areas where no fish swim and no birds sing. It's enough waste to bury downtown Washington thirty feet deep--There's an idea.
Once in a genuinely Zen moment, late on a sunny morning, we had the privilege of watching a mother pelican floating maybe ten feet out from a pleasure beach. The hatchling that sat on her back frequently hopped off under her prompting to dive and catch some version of a mini-fish just below the surface. As we watched, she coached it several times through the skills it was developing to support itself as it matured into autonomy. We wished them both well: simple creatures of Nature, doing what they were designed to do, harming nobody but three or four of the millions of fish in the school.
The coal companies are already protesting (quelle surprise!) to this effect: "You will lose 250 jobs!" Yeah, and how many lives will we save? Charleston on the water downstream is already popularly known as Cancer Gulch.
Coal companies have such little regard for human life that they are the highest eradicator of it in the mining industries. They have such a clamp on governmental agencies that they routinely ignore mine safety regulations, resulting in such catastrophes as the one of Massey's last April at Upper Big Branch. Eventually that one meant 29 fatalities. Each of the individuals lost had an extended family, had responsibilities, had lives that would have gone on. The official death toll was 29; but the loss and grief extended far, far beyond that stark number, and will not diminish for decades.
Arch Coal claimed that West Virginia will forgo $250 million in investment. Of course the industrialists will weep into their champagne about the billions of dollars in profits that they stand to lose from the sale of the coal--which at the present time is at its highest price in history. Of course little or nothing of these profits will flow to West Virginians except perhaps as political bribes.
The companies will also weep into the laps of the congressmen whom they've bought fair and square. The companies will foot the bill for government/congressional/agency employee tours to far-away places (maybe Australia in Australia's summer which is our winter) "to see how coal mines work there"--and by the way, just peripherally influencing the outcome of this vote or that. It's all insultingly transparent. This is what our tax dollars are paying for.
Just now, we taxpayers have in Congress two opposing factions. One faction wants to castrate the EPA and take away its veto powers; another wants to stop mountain-top removal. The EPA has clearly shown that mining companies willing to work with the agency can redesign their operations to make them more sustainable, and can eliminate most of the impact on streams--while at the same time they increase production.
The fight is not over yet, and we should remember such people as the late Judy Bonds, whose voice has now been stilled. And we should gratefully congratulate the Highlands Conservancy and thank them in the way most of us know best: send them a (tax-deductible) donation: wvhighlands.org. An e-mail of thanks should also go to the EPA: jackson.lisap@epa.gov. It won't take you a moment, but it will add to their file of interested protesters for the future battle in the courts and in Congress.
You can make a difference. This arrogance has got to stop. It was bad enough when James Watt, once Secretary of the Interior, said, "Don't worry about global warming. The second coming is at hand."
By the way--this is kind of a PS--burning raw coal causes vast areas of pollution, causes mercury poisoning with its accompanying birth defects, and causes acid rain. That's old news. But coal producers have known since the 1700s how to prevent these problems. It's called coking: heating coal in closed containers, tapping off the fumes, turning them into various chemical products--useful products--and using the clean-burning by-product--the coke--as fuel. Additionally we know how to capture the flue gases from a coal-burning generator, pipe them back through the flame, and reburn them, making the furnace more efficient and removing the pollutants. We can even burn the coal underground if we really have to, and leave the mountains essentially alone.
Wake up, people out there. You know how to do it.
We wrote this blog after listening to the rant of one knowledgable person. Thank you, Marilyn.

Superbaby

2011-01-15T18:04:00.000-08:00

Onward
     Start with a fanfare of trumpets, or perhaps with the opening bars of "Send In the Clowns", to herald the invention of EnviroChicken, now replacing EnviroPig in the news headlines.
This GM chicken supposedly cannot get avian flu--yet, we are again told, its meat and eggs are "indistinguishable" from that of real/natural/traditional/unimproved chickens. Again, let us echo Michael Pollan's finding*: Chickens raised semi-wild on open pasture rarely get diseased; whereas those kept in close confinement on factory farms do have problems.
     The question now arises: How long will it be before we have EnviroBaby? Surely in a lab somewhere--though of course not in the United States--someone is genetically modifying the human genome so that the baby will be ... will be ... you name it. Taller, a future NBA star? More brainy, a future super-Einstein? Courageous, fodder for the military? A little girl succulent to see, to win pageants and live out the dreams of the frustrated "mother"? A boy (if a boy is what's on the order form) born pre-circumcised? Of course all such babies will be immune to every loathly disease currently known (emphasize currently).
    Maybe Hitler just didn't know enough to get it right; otherwise we would all be his version of Aryans--blue-eyed blonds.
      How long will it be before would-be parents demand the latest modification in their child? How does this differ from the computer age, where it is but a short step from latest-and-best to obsolescence?
   We can imagine some white-coated scientist somewhere getting it "right". Then the question will be: Should he or she be allowed to continue down that path?
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* Pollan, Michael Omnivore's Dilemma

The Gasper du Jour

2011-01-13T08:15:00.000-08:00

     Today's gasper centers around the question of the consequences of meddling with animal genetics. The Enviropig has its genes manipulated, we are told, by the addition of a mouse gene and a piece of E.coli bacteria. The amended pig is able to convert more of the phosphorus* in its unnatural grain-only feed so that it doesn't have to be fed extra phosphorus when kept in a confined environment. Thus, we are told, its feces don't smell bad and don't put extra phosphorus into the groundwater from the huge containment ponds--the ‘lagoons'--that are an essential part of the environment at pig-factory farms.
    The meat is said to be indistinguishable from real pork. We've heard that before:
                 "Genetically modified soy and corn are indistinguishable from the ‘real' grains."
    Awkwardly, tests have shown that they are not. In a case in point, GM soy fed to mother rats resulted in a 10 percent reduction in brain size in the babies. Even U.S. chain restaurants such as Taco Bell and McDonald's refused to use GM corn in their products, so it is either shipped overseas or used as animal fodder. (See rats above.)
     For three years spent on a steep learning curve, we Frosts kept hogs, on open pasture. Their feces don't smell that bad. Their feces don't contain high concentrtions of phosphorus. So the only purpose of the Enviropig is to make pig factory farms tolerable to individuals who find themselves downwind from the farms.
                                                  In my head I hear a squealing of brakes.
What if, just for the novelty of it, we started at the right end of things and stopped twisting our hankies about shortages of food and water and habitable land, about conflicts over international and ethnic boundaries?
    What if we put all that on hold while we thought instead about limiting human reproduction? What if we addressed the real cause of the destruction of the planet: blind, purposeless overpopulation? What if for once we were to emphasize quality--not quantity--in breeding more like ourselves? There's radical novelty if ever I've heard it.
    Stop the mad, insane, self-destructive pace of reproduction. If China can do it by imperial command, decreeing flatly, "this is how it will be", even a gentler method might work. And in the case of world populations, even something is better than nothing.
I mean it.
    And a further thought: What if government agencies were to say, "If you're too feeble or too disabled or too indolent to support yourself, okay, we'll give you welfare--up to two children ... though Goddess knows why we should. More than two kids? Tough. Feed 'em yourself. It's not the taxpayers' problem." Might we not then see a change in population curves?

* Phosphorus does several things, we are told: It prompts the growth of algae, encouraging death of fish from anoxic conditions. It degrades the quality of water in the world's aquifers.

Randy's Rant

2011-01-11T18:28:00.000-08:00

At the Unitarian Universalist fellowship we often attend, some Sundays are given over to open forums: perhaps on a named topic, perhaps completely free-ranging. On such Sundays everyone gets to express their opinion. The other day Randy talked about inequality in the world; he mentioned specifically the rising influence of China and the effect China is having and will have on the economy of the United States. His point was that the tremendous famines of the 1930s and onward, and the terrible poverty of the peasant classes in China, are gradually being alleviated, and that this alleviation may cost everyone in the United States something in their opulent standard of living.
In the United States, even the poorest of the poor have a standard of living far above that of the majority of the hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants. But the peasantry is being lifted out of that grinding poverty.
Should we as human beings and as members of a world community feel shortchanged? or jealous? or fearful that because those millions of people are being helped we will have to lower our standard of living a trifle?
Yes, we all realize the vast inequality that is getting worse between the rich and the poor in the United States. And we realize that our cost of living continues inexorably to climb out of sight. Where are our priorities? If we were to stop buying Chinese products, our standard of living would automatically drop because many products would then become more expensive.
There is a balance that we must think about when we criticize China for its trade policies and for its treatment of its people, especially its dissidents. We Frosts have been following with interest a series presented on BBCAmerica's evening news. A rural Chinese community called White Horse Village is the subject. A government fiat decreed that the entire village be razed to make a new town. The villagers were promised a better school and new apartments. Sure enough, the apartments were built, but were so shoddy that many villagers refused to move into them and tried building their own houses; but those houses have been demolished, leaving the villagers with essentially nothing. Still the government has sent word down the chain: the new town housing tens of thousands of people shall be called a "success".
At the time of writing, China is Number 1 in world population. Because of its one-child-per-family decree, though, it will shortly be overtaken by India. Then Hinduism, essentially a pagan religion without centralized power, will have the world's biggest head count. Fortunately it has been an article of faith for Hindus for more than 5,000 years that God-ess is in everything and that therefore you should not critize or denigrate anyone's spiritual path.
Unfortunately Judaic, Christian, and Muslim leaders will try their best to denigrate Hinduism and convert its followers to monotheism.
Where will the spiritual balance come to rest? It may not be pretty. But it's going to happen and it's going to happen within in the lifetime of most of us. Can we as a group be joyful at this time of year for the emergence of the Chinese peasantry and for the rise of the Hindu ethic and of pagan spirituality? Or must we criticize and strike a negative attitude?

DEATH as GRADUATION

2011-01-05T06:26:00.000-08:00

    The physician has just told her she has two weeks to live. People may assume she will display anger, perhaps terror, perhaps despair. But many of us in the Craft envy her and wish her well. For in the Craft, knowing so surely that reincarnation is a rational, orderly sequence of learning and of increasing wisdom, we can feel only happiness for those who are judged complete, those who leave the rest of us behind to continue our learning and our assignments. What a joyous day it is when the spirit is allowed to lay aside the worn-out body and rise weightless to join those who wait on the other side.
    Should she cut short the last few days and commit a deliberate suicide? No. Suicide is equivalent to playing hooky; it will inevitably result in another lifetime in another body. She would have to learn all over again how to tie her shoes, how to blow her nose, how to discipline the untidy human emotions. She accepts serenely the fact that her time of discomfort is finite now. However unwelcome it is, the discomfort is the means to her desired end: Graduation.
   The assignments of this lifetime are completed, and those who guide our path have approved her work. She is cleared to go on.
   Soon, soon she will be reunited with friends whom she has missed keenly during her separation from them. Soon she will talk freely with the Guides, gaining understanding of all she learned through the sorrows, the pain, the discomfort, the plain hard work she experienced in the body. Those who witness her transition may feel sorrow; it is only natural to do so. Their sorrow is for themselves, for the vacancy she leaves behind, for the silence when they used to hear her voice. Their happiness is for her who will depart for the place she longs to be. When they weep, they know their tears represent healing. They reflect on the little verse first written in German:

Just as a leaf falls from the bough,
so goes a life from out the world.
The birds cease not their singing.

   As usual, we invite your comments. We are not trying to offend anyone or scorn their tradition, so please be constructive. Our hope is that we all may arrive at a shared understanding of what we are doing. If you know a better way and can articulate the reasons behind it, please share that better way with the community.

Blessed be. Gavin and Yvonne

Four, Six, or Seven Directions?

2010-12-29T18:19:00.000-08:00

Greetings.
When we were young and innocent (in the days when Jesus walked the streets of Chicago), we used four directions in our circles: east/air, south/fire, west/water, north/earth. Pretty soon, after some gentle guidance from Native Americans, we added above/Grandfather Sky, and down/Mother Earth.
Now we had a problem. To wit: If earth is down, what to put in the north? We decided that Time was appropriate. Chronos is the elder god of the Greek pantheon, and Father Time with his snowy-white hair seemed fine. After all, if there is no time, nothing exists.
That's how things went for years and years. In the center of our circles was a seventh position: the fire in the stone fireplace (the pentanfaen) representing the Spirit in the stone (that is, the mineral) of our bodies. We thought of the smoke as Self or soul in the act of ascending.
Then we traveled to Korea. We learned that at the center of the Korean circle too there was a position--it was You, the center of your universe. Here You is actually composed of a triplet, as depicted on the Korean spirit fan painted in the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. The colors are said to represent body, spirit, and Deity; or earth, sky, and human.
We always questioned what element is appropriate for which direction. Obviously in Australia, for example, fire is better in the north. If you are working on the east coast of the United States, surely water should be in the east. Remember that east is the direction of new beginnings; and we all began and begin in a fluid environment. Since for most of North America the winds blow from the west, well, now we can put air in the west and everything seems to balance.
But, but---TRADITION! Well, where did the traditional directions come from? The more we study the roots of most old religions, the more we become convinved that the Indus Valley and their adaptation of the Vedic religions is the root. Basically we are considering the Punjab or five- rivers area.
Now we know that several of the characters who put together Witchcraft and other occult traditions were retired British administrators of the Raj.
In the Punjab, the prevailing wind is from the east; that the Himalayan massif is to the north. Hence the reasoning of those administrators, natural enough, in assigning traditional directions. But we are not Hindus and we're not working in the Punjab; therefore we think it rational to honor air in the west and the earth in the below.
Because we believe a Wiccan should always maintain awareness of where he or she is, and because it's only rational to work in terms of the real-world environment, we are attaching a new circle calling: for your amusement, your education, and perhaps your use.
As usual, we invite your comments. We are not trying to offend anyone; we do not scorn any tradition. Please be constructive. Our hope is that we all may arrive at a shared understanding of what we are doing. If you know a better way and can suggest the reasoning behind it, please share that better way with the community.
Here is a specific example of a circle and its dimensions, designed and adapted for group work. We owe this to a friend whom we meet at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Beckley WV, Al Youmans. Thank you, Al, for creating something we all can share.

Directions

Below Below our Mother Earth sustains us and gives us life. May we honor the Earth. May we be ever vigilant to protect her from pollution and from rape of the land.
All:- Hail to our Mother Earth. May we always remember who gave us birth. May we always protect Her from harm wrought by humankind. Let there be peace on earth.
East In the east we see the sun rise and we know a new day is beginning. Each day is indeed a new day and a new beginning for the rest of our lives. May we all give thanks for the blessings of the east, and may we forgive the mistakes of the past as we begin this new day.
All:- Hail East, and hail this new day. Let there be peace in the east.
South Here in the northern hemisphere the sun is southward. From the south come warmth and heat and fire. May we all honor the blessings of the south. Let us rekindle and strengthen the fire of passion and the commitment of our spirits for the just work of this fellowship.
All:- Hail South. May we strengthen our commitment to what is just. Let there be peace in the south.
West Here where we are, the prevailing weather arrives from the west. From the west come the air and the healing waters that fill our wells and rivers, waters that enable our crops and forests to thrive. May we give thanks to the west. May we share new air with them, with all those here today, and with our neighbors, that we may all have good health.
All:- Hail West. We give thanks for healing powers. Let there be peace in the west.
North To our north the jet stream moves with the seasons and brings us cold and sometimes snow. Here in the Appalachians we live in four-seasons country. Beauty is all around us. As the seasons circle round, so do our lives. We are reminded of time and of our mortality. We are reminded that we must use this time to live our lives to the fullest.
All:- Hail North. We recall the passage of time and we express our gratitude to the north. Let there be peace in the north.
Above To the great Above we have the sky and the heavens. Traditionally the sky represents our Father. From the sky we seek knowledge. May we honor the great Above and our fathers, and may our knowledge grow and serve us well.
All:- Hail to the great Above. May we be ever mindful of knowledge given from above. Let knowledge bring peace.
Center In our center resides Spirit. Spirit dwells within each of us and in all things. Thus are we connected to all things. May we always remember how we are interconnected and that we thus must not do harm to others but must promote peace.
All:- (Here do not speak in unison. Instead turn to someone near you. Give them a hug or a warm handshake. Say to them, "Peace be with you." Or, if it is your tradition, use another phrase that has a similar sentiment.)

Blessed be all. Gavin and Yvonne.

The True History of Wicca

2010-12-24T06:45:00.000-08:00

      December 26 1968 - The newly formed Coven of Boskednan in St. Louis, MO, decided that the course Gavin and Yvonne were then teaching should be called Wicca and that the letterhead of that course should be the Church and School of Wicca. The course was based on what Gavin had been taught in England and on his initiation by the Coven of Boskednan in Cornwall in 1950.
     The original roots of Wicca thus come from a single source: that Coven of Boskednan. Apocryphally the coven was founded by one Henry Wilcox. In 1925 he retired, either as a civil servant in India or from the British Army. (Or of course it may never have happened.)
     Another retired British civil servant, one Gerald Gardner, had talked about Witchcraft (note: not about Wicca) and had used the word wicca once in a book of his; however, no one had theretofore written a description of the new religion and spiritual path.
Wicca had absolutely no direct connection to Gardnerian Witchcraft or to any of the multifarious Gardnerian roots: Kellner, Reuss, Masonry, the Order of the Golden Dawn, the Ordo Templi Orientis, the Folk Life Society, Leyland, and (last but not least) Doreen Valiente.
Despite rumor and innuendo, and despite what Wikipedia thinks or claims, the above is a true statement of what occurred. All else is history-as-wished-for or simple creative fiction.
The course was advertised. Thousands of neophytes amost immediately signed up for it.
In December 1971 the Church and School of Wicca applied to the Internal Revenue Service for exempt status as a religious association. By December 13 of that year By-Laws and Articles of Association were written and approved. It earned its status as a religious association in 1972, in the form of a Letter of Determination dated August 31.

    In 1976 and 1977 the IRS carried out an extensive investigation of the Church and School of Wicca. The IRS found the Church blameless of any wrongdoing. It reported that fact in the Senate, giving the Church of Wicca the imprimatur of federal approval.
    In 1985 inmates in the Virginia penal system petitioned the state system to acknowledge their right to have Wiccan robes and books, and to have Wiccan holidays recognized. That request was rejected; it went into Federal Appeals Court in 1986: Dettmer vs Langdon 799 F.2D 929. The appeal finally led to the landmark decision in the Federal Appeals Court of the Fifth District, confirming Wicca as a religion. In the judge's words,
"The Church of Wicca is clearly a religion for First Amendment purposes. Members of the Church sincerely adhere to a fairly complex set of doctrines relating to the spiritual aspects of their lives, and in doing so they have ‘ultimate concerns' in much the same way as followers of accepted religions."

    Both in Lecture XII of the School's original course and in the last chapter of "The Witch's Bible", the Frosts explicitly opened Wicca to all people who were on a positive path. That openness and the conscious sustained avoidance of centralized power have since enabled the wonderful, enriching diversity within the Craft that we all enjoy today. Diversity allows anyone to follow any spiritual path that they see fit to follow, so long as it is a positive path and so long as they do not seek to inflict their path on anyone else.

    What more is there to say? The rest is merely froth and insubstantial gossip and someone's Disneyland-type creative fiction.

                 Thou shalt not denigrate another religion -- yea, verily, thus saith the IRS.

We are delighted beyond words to have met a whole group of new friends and fellow pilgrims during Yule in Louisville. Traveling toward the meet, we said to a waitress during a pit stop, "We're celebrating solstice tomorrow on the full moon."

"What's solstice? I've never heard of it."

Who among You Is Moral?

2010-12-15T14:56:00.000-08:00

The title of this blog may sound downright biblical; in fact many definitions of morality include obedience to custom and acting in accordance with "sacred" texts, especially in matters of sexuality. For many years the Church of Wicca has had its sacred writings; thus we can claim that when we act exactly in accordance with our own sacred writings, we are by definition moral.

We Frosts do not believe that many "sacred" writings are actually moral. The Koran requires that a person convicted of theft has at least one hand cut off. The Bible requires that if a child tells a lie, (s)he shall be taken to the city gate and be stoned to death. The Old Testament is full of mayhem; indeed, Richard Dawkins writes of Jehovah's policy of scorched-earth ethnic cleansing.* Nor was Jesus above blasting a poor fig tree that didn't fruit when he ordered it to.
One of the freedoms of the Church of Wicca is in matters sexual. (Remember "If it harm none"?) For years we have been using the acronym DUPED to define what we mean. Sorry the internet doesn't faithfully follow our idiosyncratic spacing of this business, but just line up the capital letters to get to DUPED, and things will assume the place we intend. So anyhow, what do we mean when we talk of getting DUPED? We mean

no D isease

not U nder contract (as in a marriage, for example)

no unwanted P regnancy

no E xpectations

no implication of D ebt

So from the sexual point of view, if you act in accordance with our acronym, in our opinion you're sexually moral.
Yet that leaves 90 percent or so of our readers' actions still questionable by conventional standards. The Hindu word dharma may be defined as taking the right actions in your life--right actions consistent with your position in society. What this has to do with abusing children or beating your spouse is a mystery to us. Here abuse and beating are not necessarily the physical act of applying a rod it where it hurts the most. They can also mean mental cruelty.
How then do we define a moral person? Is (s)he simply a decent person, honest and fair in their actions? We believe that it is rational to evaluate people by their life style and their actions: When they commit an act, the act has consequences. When you yourself act decently and honorably, you will eventually gather around you people who are motivated in the same way--as explicitly articulated in the Wiccan tenet concerning the Law of Attraction. Thus the morality of a person can easily be estimated according to the morality of their friends.

What say you? Is decent or honorable or something else a better term than moral?

* Richard Dawkins The God Delusion

Musings on the Axial Age (how women lost their groove)

2010-12-13T08:48:00.000-08:00

     The Axial Age is defined as occurring around 800 BCE to 200 BCE. This is the period when women's position in society--worldwide--was degraded and (male) gods were assigned a new dimension of morality and "goodness", of power and control.
      It doesn't matter where you look: ancient Greece or China or even India. All the thinkers of the time handed down the same edict: the (male) gods demanded that everyone be "good" and "moral"--good and moral as defined by mouthpieces of the newly supreme male juju. We look at the laws of Hammurabi from a somewhat earlier age, and find that 75 percent of them deal with controlling women. We look at classical Greece, and find that the only women allowed to own property after 400 BCE were the hetaerae or courtesans. Further east, geisha were typical of the women who retained a place in society. The story of Tiamat being overcome by her son, the "good" god, is yet another example of the effects of the Axial Age.
      Here is the question: Why did this happen? One theory suggests that old men with ED* wanted the young men to quit having fun. Another says that centralizing authority in the various priestly classes demanded some way to control the people. You couldn't starve them of food or deprive them of sleep, because you wanted them to work--but you could deny them the pleasure of sex. You could make it a moral issue and control people with the eternal trinity: guilt, shame, and fear.

Ayn Rand got it right in Atlas Shrugged; here's a paraphrase of her thought.
     If you tell a man that smelling spring flowers is wrong, and he smells spring flowers,
he's guilty. You've got him.
     This business of the hetaerae and the geisha and their position in society is interesting. As we Frosts drive southward in our frequent travels, as we get into the "red" or "Bible-belt" states we see a higher density of euphemistic "gentlemen's relaxation clubs" and sex shops offering porn films. Apparently the men of the region assume that they "need" these services and are entitled to them; but in using such services they degrade the position of women, tending to treat them as non-persons, merely conveniences for sexual relief. One such term for the setup is sexual toilet. Still, here's something--at last--that even they can dominate.
        We can only hope, and work, for things to revert to a culture with parity between the genders, but it's almost 3,000 years since the beginning of the Axial Age; in other words, this dominant-male mindset has had a long time to dig in. The culture needs a complete purge. Perhaps we can dream of a Free Age in which people are moral--make that ethical--because the nation's leaders are moral; when we behave decently and ethically because we want to be decent, not from fear of the law.
- - - - - - - - -

* ED = erectile dysfunction

Religious Freedom

2010-12-01T06:17:00.000-08:00

You know, it seems to us that people--especially those in the Wiccan/pagan community--don't understand the term that serves as the title of these thoughts. Religious freedom means that you have the one and only right and true path ... for you. And it means that you are allowed to pursue the path of your choice without let or hindrance--so long as you obey the secular laws of the land.

It means as well (here's the corollary) that you do not have the right to criticize anyone else's path or to try to amend it. You've got freedom? They've got freedom. Yet we witness such leaning-on behavior ad nauseam; it seems to be a pervasive culturally-inflicted trait in luckless individuals whose minds have been twisted into knots. Leaning on other people is not a duty and it is not a right. Such a mindset is an intrinsic part of the duality attitude of ethnic monotheism. Black and white, good and evil, either/or, no gray scales, and (god forbid) no color. Yvonne sometimes wishes (vainly, of course) that freedom of religion could also mean freedom from religion.

In India there are literally thousands, if not millions, of gods and goddesses. A famous sage once said there are 330 million gods and goddesses in India because, given 1 billion Hindus, you can imagine that a few of them have overlapping ideas of "god". In other words, throughout the length, width, breadth, height of India there may be three people who share the same or a similar idea of what a god or a goddess is.

You can contrast this with Pakistan, where a Christian woman is due to be hanged next week for "insulting" the memory of Mohammed. She stepped out of bounds by criticizing someone else's high mucky-muck. Granted, hanging is a little severe; such an offense normally earns only a public whipping. In a state where true religious freedom reigns, she would not criticize somebody else's sacred icon but instead just follow her own path in perfect freedom. Of course her sentence of hanging offends our American standards and we decry such severity. By the way, in Pakistan there are almost ten percent Hindus and two percent Christians.

These thoughts apply to Wiccan/pagans because every day we hear of some new attack by one group on another group. God(ess) damn it, good people! Follow your own path. Take pleasure in it. Know it and know its natural follow-ons well enough to know why you follow it. Look at other paths and see whether there is anything you like--even if they do it differently. Whatever you do, don't criticize them. After all, they may be right ... Another famous Hindu belief teaches, Everyone is right.

Regrettably India itself has been polluted by the disease of monotheism, so now you can find Shivites who criticize followers of Vishnu. In classical times this would never have happened because Shivites are polytheists. (Shiva has many varied aspects.) So if I say "Shiva is not the dancing god of creation and destruction ..." in a presentation, and someone in the audience says, "Oh, no! He is." My response should be "That's right." Then there can be no argument.

birthday greetings and travel plans

2010-11-24T08:01:00.000-08:00

Hi,
Just a quick blog to say "Thank you!" to all those hundreds of people who wished Gavin a happy 80th birthday and inquired after his health. Yes, he still has all his bits and pieces and it all seems to be in reasonable working order. Nothing has actually fallen off yet.

On another subject: We're visiting the Mystic Life Sanctuary in Louisville to celebrate winter solstice with them on December 21. Come one, come all (as the saying goes). It's your opportunity not to drive so far to meet us; and of course we greatly enjoy meeting you.

We want to thank Mystic Life for sponsoring this trip and paying our travel expenses.

Have a wonderful thanksgiving--br grateful

Happy Hallowe'en?

2010-11-19T08:22:00.001-08:00

Yvonne muses:

In a popular presentation that we do, "Ninety-Nine Ways Good Witches Go Bad", we make a point of how dedicated (or not) the fictitious group are. Example: we find more and more that self-styled pagans don't bother with the real dates for celebrations of the Craft's sabbats and esbats.

What did our spiritual forebears fight and die for? Don't we care? Can't we be bothered?

Everything on this planet--its earth, its waters, its living creatures including humans--everything is influenced by the pull of the moon. We all know (at least I hope we do) not to go out partying on full-moon night; rather, that's the night to stay home and do our own house or coven rituals, our own form of observance.

The Hindus say that we in the west have it wrong: that we ought properly to be observing our holy days three days after the appropriate phase of the moon.Why? Because thousands of years ago they observed that the tides of the oceans demonstrate what is called a hysteresis; that is, the tides lag the moon's actual position. Hindus compare the concept to sitting in a bathtub and sliding your bottom several times, toward the back end of the tub, then toward the front end, then toward the back end again. A watch with a second-hand will prove that there is a perceptible lag between (a) your bottom's reaching its most forward point and (b) the bathwater reaching its highest point on the front wall of the tub. The hysteresis between the moon's position and the ocean tides, then, takes three days. Currently, then, we are saying, "Any day between the full (or new) moon and three days after is okay for a ritual." Of course the ritual should be done as the moon is crossing the zenith at your location; that is, about midnight for full moon and about noon (standard time) for new.

As a double Aries, I get really upset when people fail to understand the importance of doing rituals on or near the best day. It curdles my insides. Why else would anyone keep an Old Farmer's Almanac in their bathroom?

So, pagans, Wiccans, and anyone else who cares, you don't want to do that to me, do you? If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. Think back to our early spiritual ancestors, who watched the heavens as a matter of survival. When they honored Nature's gifts, they didn't time the occasions by a calendar devised by some pope in Rome. They scheduled their reverent observances by the real--the visible--positions of the heavenly bodies. It makes my insides churn when someone says to me, "Happy Hallowe'en!" I'm not yet to the point where I can just scrape it off my shoe and get on with life. What are our traditions worth, anyhow?

Blessed be those who think. Yvonne

Idols and Avatars - Rita and Triloka

2010-11-12T10:28:00.000-08:00

Greetings,
    With the growing interest in India and Hinduism, it behooves us all to try to understand a little more about the Hindu religion, which by sheer number of temple adherents* is probably the largest religion in the world.
    From the Vedic religion(s) Hinduism took two basic principles:
1. Rita: Everything must be ordered; everything and everyone, including the immortal gods, must       obey the rules of order. Related words: rite, ritual, right (as in the right and proper way of       behaving, and in human rights).
2. Triloka (literally three places): Here we learn that the earth/cosmos is divided into three planes:
    a) the earth itself and the sea;
    b) the air and sky;
    c) the heavens, where the immortal gods and goddesses exist.
    The only immortal god who moves among all planes is Agni, the god of fire and lightning. The other immortal gods cannot function in planes other than their own. This means that they cannot be interventionist gods on the earth plane, and they cannot be human. Thus images of them make them clearly non-human by (for instance) giving them lots of extra limbs and sometimes multiple heads or faces.
    When you go to a Hindu temple and see images of Shiva and his goddess-partner Shakti, you do not pray to them. You meditate on their meaning and on how you can gain enlightenment to get off the wheel of samsara (reincarnation) and moksha (escaping the wheel).
   We all occasionally need a little help in our lives; to get that help Hinduism uses idols and avatars, accessible on the earth plane. Since they are on the earth plane, they can act in the earth plane. Such an idol is what we Wiccans call a stone god or a container of energy. You put your energy into it by "worshiping" it, and you can get the energy back out when you need it.
    An avatar, in contrast, is the earth plane counterpart of an immortal god. Probably the best-known avatar is Krishna. He is connected to Vishnu: he is an earth-plane avatar of Vishnu. Another avatar, one popular in the pagan movement, is the monkey-god Hanuman.
    When the Christian asks his bishop, "Why does ‘God' allow evil on earth?" the bishop often has no real answer. The Hindu, on the other hand, has a very simple answer. Idols and avatars on the earth plane are human constructs; they have all the positive and negative attributes of humankind. It is not the immortal gods in their heaven that cause evil on the earth; it is the people.
Blessed Be    G&Y

- - - - - - - - -
* Adherents: people who attend temple or church services on a regular basis

The Electric Car

2010-10-29T08:38:00.000-07:00

To Gavin the physicist, the electric car is just plain stupid. The new Nissan Leaf has a battery that costs Nissan, the car manufacturer itself, $15,600. The car has a range of 100 miles, costs $33,000, and requires the owner to install a $2,000 charging station in his home garage, where the car will be plugged in for 8 hours after going its 100 miles. Contracts have been let for the installation of thousands of these charging stations in the United States.
The equivalent-sized car would be the Nissan Versa, which costs less than half the Leaf. Not only that, but the carbon footprint of the Versa is smaller than that of the Leaf by a factor of 2.
Rare earths, today's hottest topic, figure in as well. The rare earths that go into the Leaf's battery are in short supply. China, the main producer, is threatening a set of severe export restrictions. Surprise. ("What a golden opportunity! We'll hold the world ransom while we can.") No recycler in the United States is yet handling such batteries, so they will end up in the landfill; and the rare earths in them will be wasted.
The much-ballyhooed Chevrolet Volt, at $41,000, has given up being an electric car and has put in a gas engine--to make it just another hybrid. Why "just another"? Because it goes only 50 miles on battery power. Gavin's favorite program, Top Gear, tested a Nissan Prius against an 8-cylinder BMW 5 Series at highway speeds. The Prius got 17.6 miles to the imperial gallon; the BMW got 22.

If all this sounds rational to you, raise your hand.

Meantime throughout Europe and in California there are hydrogen cars. The hydrogen itself is made at the gas station, so it does not have to be transported in tanker trucks along crowded highways. The Honda Clarity has been available since 2008, going over 300 miles on a fill. Its price tag is higher than the standard Honda, but it is available in this nation on lease for $600 a month. 2010 marked the tenth consecutive year the Clarity was the pace car for the Los Angeles Marathon. The effluent from hydrogen-fueled cars is water.

Iceland has decided that in the near future all its vehicles shall run on hydrogen. Its fleet of public-transport buses are already converted.

The key to the hydrogen car is the fuel cell and the availability of hydrogen. If the United States spent as much money on fuel-cell research as it is spending on battery research--$15 billion--we could all be driving hydrogen cars. How long will it be before a smart inventor makes hydrogen car rechargers for home use? It ain't rocket science!
Bash head here,

Trends that Make Us Crazy, or When Technology Sucks

2010-10-28T14:39:00.000-07:00

Yvonne writes : Malaria

Sometimes we are so frustrated with today's life that we could climb the walls, so you troops are gonna get the brunt of our thinking.

There's yet another annual malaria-spasm going on in the World Health Organization and all the other hand-wringing letterheads. Recent reports worldwide show that there may be a half-million malaria deaths per year in India and Africa. For a time the use of bed nets had a dramatic impact on lowering the malaria rate--however, the mosquitoes have learned; now they're waking up to bite earlier in the evenings and even later in the mornings. Hence the advantage of the bed net technology, simple though it was, is fading fast.

The other main technology against malaria is the spraying of powerful insecticides--toxins--that kill all insects, good, bad, and indifferent. "Malaria is a bad thing," the hand-wringers all lament, "so let's throw poisons everywhere to kill the naughty mosquitoes that carry it from one person to another. What the heck? If the poisons kill all the good insects: the pollinators, the butterflies, the bees, everything within reach, so what? We can do big drama, spend big bucks, grandstand and strike attitudes full time, all to show what virtuous, important, essential, crusading heroes we are. First things first."

And yet.

Here's today's reality smack: That same heroic spraying reduces the population of bats and birds that rely for their very survival on the vast variety of insects.

Have you heard of bats? Of hummingbirds? Of purple martins? Of swallows? Of frogs and toads? Of dragonflies? Of gambusia minnows--surface feeders that think larvae are nummy?

All these creatures and many more are eager--eager--to find mosquitoes and eat them. Such creatures do not need annual renewal. They do not spread toxins. They do not demand benefits. They do not march for early retirement. They simply want (and deserve) to live as part of the Mother's natural cycle.

The suits, on the other hand, under whatever letterhead, seek to justify their bloated paychecks by trumpeting their strenuous activities in the anti-malaria effort. How stupid can you get? Instead of killing off the bats and birds and other creatures with toxins, how about having massive breeding programs for them and constructing inexpensive bat- and bird-houses?

Update Witch's Ball

2010-10-13T14:14:00.000-07:00

After the disappointing cancellation of the ball in Radford, we are now able to confirm that we will be attending a Witches' Ball at the UU in Charleston WV on the 30th of October.
There we will be teaching Argentine Tango and giving a short workshop.
It's a dress-up affair with prizes for costumes.
SEE YOU THERE.
Gavin and Yvonne

schedule

2010-10-13T06:36:00.000-07:00

Hi, guys and girls.

We will get back to work on blog-think eventually. This is just to tell you that the Witches' Ball in Radford VA, set for October 30, has been canceled. You'll just have to do what we do : dress up like Christians and go trick-or-treating. Have fun. Don't do anything we wouldn't do. BB GY

Yvonne's PS If you have scheduled on October 31 a spiritual-type event in observance for Samhain, don't come within range of my sticklerism and codger-hood or I'll give you a real reality-smack. You're scheduling your observance by some pope's calendar??! Do what I do. Consult the Old Farmer's Almanac in your bathroom and observe that this year's full moon nearest October 31 occurs on October 22. THAT's when the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest. That's when I hope you will open your spirit to whatever the Guides and Elder Ones choose to let you have.

Do have pleasure in the spiritual experience that may come. BB

When is enough enough?

2010-10-02T16:56:00.000-07:00

It seems to us that American culture reached its optimum point in about 1960. There was no need for any household to have two jobs: a small house with 2.2 children and one car seemed adequate. Since that time the god Mammon has gradually eroded our lifestyle and the American dream has become ever more swollen. Now we feel denied, underprivileged, if we don’t have

* two cars, one of them a monster battlefield weapon,

* a pantry jammed full of synthetic obese-making “foods”,

* at least two computers per family member ((not to mention all those little personal devices including death-dealing thumb games, obsolete or replaced in a week, flogged by the electronics empires, and

* a wall-filling TV 8 feet by 10 feet and ½ inch thick--whose offerings consist largely of mind- numbing drivel.

All this together with a multi-bedroomed house on a green quarter-acre of perfectly groomed lawn.

Paying for such a lifestyle requires at least two working adults per family, though with each passing year those two adults are earning less and less in real terms. The separation between incomes of the middle class and of the rich has widened to such an extent that (in our opinion) the United States has passed what is called the tipping point.

It looks as if it will continue to get worse with more people demanding more and more, though less able to afford it; paying for it all over a lifetime with the “aid” of broken financial institutions that will charge higher and higher percentages if you are to support your self-indulgent, over-consuming life style.

It may be difficult for you troops to believe this, but we Frosts live on Social Security, on less than $1,300 a month. We occupy a pleasant little house 100 years old and drive a reasonable car that’s only four years old. Our estate, “Gingerbread House”, is a city lot measuring 44 feet by 150 feet. At least one third of it is given over to a vegetable garden. Yes, it has trees--fruit trees. Yes, it has some grass, but not much; and we’re replacing more and more of the “lawn” with purslane for salads.

So look around you. Look at your life style and decide for yourself: When is enough enough?

Blessed be Y'all (we just got back from the ozarks)

Out of the Woodwork - a Frost Rant

2010-09-23T06:28:00.001-07:00

As we Frosts travel around the country, we meet many small groups and a few large ones. Even when the small groups have connections with other groups, they tend to look inward, concentrating on their own ritual practices and on studying such things as history, herbal practice, astrology ... you name it.
Some questions come to mind then:
1. Why do groups break up?
2. Why are there still Witch wars?
3. Why are we not expanding into the general community, even though we know that more people than ever are in favor of our Craft way(s)--especially when the green movement and spirituality are of growing interest to the slightly better educated populace?
And it occurs to us to ask a further question:
What advantage is there for someone to join a pagan/Wiccan group? Meeting friends of like mind? Being able to discuss ideas with them without much fear of being put down? And... ?
The downside of this is: Joining such a group may even now cause problems with relatives and with the general populace.
We can learn from other groups such as naturists and the gay community that we need to offer more in the way of support for each other.
** If we think about a Christian church, we find its members naturally working with each other in the temporal world, using their peer group as resources. We in the alternative mindset tend not to do that. How many pagan/Wiccan groups have a list of their members' qualifications, their occupations, their abilities, their skills? If you want to get your car repaired, whom do you go to? If you need a lawyer, whom do you go to? If you want your kids sat for an evening or your house painted, whom do you go to? So we urge you to compile a business directory and encourage your members to support each other in the temporal world. The gay community calls this idea the gay Mafia list.
** The second whole area that we think is being sadly underserved is helping local police and sheriff's departments. We two have both been members of the North Carolina state chaplain's board serving inmates; and we served as a resource for the state juvenile officers' group.
When we address groups we often ask, "Do you know the name of your sheriff? of your police chief?" Too often the response is a totally blank stare. Yet law-enforcement people run into occasions when (especially young) people have wanted to do something bad. ("Woo hoo. See me being naughty!") Law enforcement may simply not know where to turn, how to find someone to serve as an information booth. That could be you. In local elections the sheriff often wins by just a handful of votes. A little political activism on behalf of the candidate you like can pay infinite rewards. Even if he loses the election, the other side will have learned that there is a power bloc they need to address.
** A third task that you can do for your group is to write grant applications. Your local college may offer a course on this skill. We have been involved in such things as writing an application for our local hospital, seeking a grant for an electrically operated sliding door.
** Or how many of you are into prison ministry? We don't mean just visiting the occasional inmate. We mean getting involved in such things as taking in a Thanksgiving meal to one of the low-security prisons with the aid of local restaurateurs.
** How about solstice packages? Many chain stores will donate to you the canned and dry goods necessary to package small donations at solstice time.
** What about an exchange of children's outgrown winter clothing? A lot of children are coming to families of the community, and coats and things grow more expensive every season.
** What about starting a pagan library or book swap? The School of Wicca runs its own library, lending the books suggested for our courses, because many of those titles are a challenge to find.
** And finally, how about a half-hour TV program every week on your public-access channel? It doesn't have to be a glossy sexed-up production; just standard digital camera work on local events, speakers, herbal hints, interviews, mention of solstices and equinoxes and full moons ... You can do it. Yes, it's a commitment; but it gets the group together in a worthwhile project. If any church gets access to your public-access channel, then you too qualify and cannot be denied-- that is, if you have done the paperwork with the IRS. And when you do it, you will find that inward-looking, tightly contained frustration and anger with one another will go away. Many pagan/Wiccans are highly qualified. The FBI finds that pagan/ Wiccans are the most highly educated group in the nation.
When we two present at a college, we think nothing of pulling in 300 or 400 attendees. The history department, the religious studies department, in fact all the humanities departments are prime targets for you to address. At residential colleges, the resident advisors like evening programs. (Make very clear to liaison people that you are not there to urge, but simply to reveal. They can make what they will of the facts.)
Pagans and Wiccans have a lot to offer. We can change hundreds of lives, just by being visible. We can answer lots of questions; and at the same time we can help ourselves. Because the one thing teaching does is crystallize and clarify your own belief system.
** These things are being done by Greenleaf in Springfield MO. We thank them both for their work and for the ideas.
Okay; we've beaten on you enough. See you. Blessed be.

Another Precinct Heard From

2010-08-20T08:19:00.000-07:00

Our continuing wish is to make Wicca a true and valid representation of ancient wisdom restored to modern life. To that end, we are encouraged by reports that people who enjoy a good sex life are less prone to debilitating diseases. The science behind such reports flows directly from Professor Candace Pert's work on cellular receptors and endorphines, published as "Molecules of Emotion". When receptors of cells in the human body are occupied by ligands, as happens through pleasant sexual activity, disease pathogens can not enter those receptors: The receptors are already full.
In Marie Jakober's wonderful book "The Black Chalice" we found the passage below, and thought we'd like to share it with you. Jakober masterfully contrasts claims and truth. As well as this thought, the book offers many others as well on the dominator-religion paradigm, and is well worth finding.

The Christians were quite right about it, and so were those pitilessly reasonable Greeks: the body was dangerous. The body interfered with the orderly obsessions of philosophers; it broke the icy mind-nets of priests; it rebelled against the endless war-mongering of kings. It reminded people that the world was here, and life was now, and if they had no rights over their own flesh, then they had no rights at all.
Worst of all, perhaps, the body remembered that once, not very long ago, sex had been a holy and magical thing. It was not sinful but sacred; it was the power of the gods in the world. Its fire was their hunger to connect and to create; its lawlessness their endless trying out and making new. And its wild and driven ecstasies were the measure of its sacredness; something so exquisite and so forceful could come only from the gods.
That was why the Christians hated it so much. How could lust be the work of their own Lord--their Lord who was not of this world? It was of the old gods, just like the people believed; and it was demonic, just like the gods were.
So it was forbidden, in every way it could be, and what the churchmen could not forbid they wrapped in shame. They said it was the most dangerous of sins, more to be feared than cruelty or violence or war. They said in Eden it never existed. They said God intended men to breed as they laced up their tunics, matter-of-factly, without a throb of passion or a thought of carnal lust. Only a fallen human being, rotten with sin, could possibly desire that.
They were terrified of sex, and they had reason to be--they knew its power.

we are all fortunate

2010-08-17T10:45:00.001-07:00

Within a short driving distance we are fortunate to have the crown jewel of the West Virginia state park system, Pipestem State Park.* It's where we do our self-directed aquarobics twice a week and where we occasionally enjoy a program of music or something at the open-air amphitheater. There too we have become acquainted with a man whom we have come to admire, the Park's naturalist, who does bird walks, hikes to lookout points, and similar programs. A recent "chance" encounter with him led to this information.
On a bird walk, Jim told us, he updated a hiker who gasped at the "joyous" birdsong. No, the birds don't always sing because their little birdbrains are happy or because the sun is shining; they sing to establish territory. "This branch is mine. You make your nest somewhere else. We can stay out of each other's faces."
A very young boy remarked, "Why can't countries do that? Instead of killing each other when they meet at their boundaries, they could sing at each other."
Need I say more? What a sorry travesty, when a four-year-old has keener insight into this tortured world than the "educated" "statesmen".
- - - - - - - - -
* So named because pre-Christian Native Americans valued the Thunbergia shrubs that grew locally. The shrub's stems were hollow, and thus served ideally with clay pipes when Natives wished to smoke tobacco.

We're back

2010-08-10T08:43:00.000-07:00

Okay, troops. We're back home, just returning from three (3) wonderful festivals.
1. Sirius Rising
2. SummerFest
3. Kaleidoscope Gathering
Sirius and SummerFest occur at the back end of New York State at the site called Brushwood, between the towns of Sherman and Clymer. Kaleidoscope Gathering happens west of Ottawa, Ontario. If you live anywhere in the northeastern quadrant of the US, any one of the three can be a life-changing experience for you. Take off those whalebone stays or that celluloid collar, and dive in. You'll never look back.
To us it seemed that this year they all three exceeded themselves in being more loving and with far less friction than we have known in earlier seasons.
In some respects Kaleidoscope, at its new site of Raven's Knoll, is more of a family affair than the others. It's 60 miles west of Ottawa, Ontario; and of course being in Canada they don't have the problems we face in the States with raucous fundamentalist thinkers from an assortment of franchises, Baptist and other. Because Raven's Knoll is in a piney forest (with a river running past it), and because the summer has been very dry, we could have only one small fire. But everyone gathered around and had a good time anyway. Yes, Virginia, such an event is possible.
The fires at Brushwood more than lived up to expectations; and the very sight of 500 to 600 pagans dancing around while the Dragon burned was awe-inspiring. They broke another world record for the Guinness people, by the way: the most couples hugging for a full measured 60 seconds. This follows on with their earlier world record-breaking event of the most body-painted people on a single site in a 24-hour period.
This year everyone enjoyed the labyrinth, and the weather was good to us, in that the candles of the labyrinth did not get doused.
So what do we recommend to our readers? Wherever you live in the USA, make it your business to go on a pilgrimage and visit all three festivals. They follow week by week after one another. If you can visit only one in the US, go to Sirius itself. If you can visit only one in Canada, Kaleidoscope is a must. Each event has its own character; each is worth a visit ... or many visits as summers come and go.
Their respective contact sites:
Sirius camp@brushwood.com
SummerFest camp@brushwood.com
Kaleidoscope Gathering www.kaleidoscope-gathering.ca
We'll look forward to seeing you there.
Blessed be all. GY

Paths to awarness - The mysteries

2010-06-21T14:45:00.000-07:00

This is the final installment of our series on Road Maps to Awareness.
As a part of Gavin's initiation in England many years ago, the Coven of Boskednad assigned him to walk around the coast of the Duchy of Cornwall. He is not a conspicuously athletic person. All this occurred before the days of cellphones and other electronic gizmos. At that time the track was far less polished and civilized than it is today, and was essentially free of direction signs. He was forbidden to read newspapers, nor was he supposed to go to any restaurant or café along the way; instead for provisions he was supposed to go only to grocery stores. He had to camp out--using only such equipment as he could pack with him. In other words, he was expected to undergo the absolute minimum of exposure to any distracting contact with the temporal world.
The walk took him a little over a week. On each day he met different people who asked him a variety of questions and then left him. It was a typical journey of a mythical hero, designed to allow solitary contemplation of the questions that he was asked, in most cases to contemplate each question for 24 hours as he labored along the rough track following the cliffs.
Various groups call such an experience by various names. We like the name that FireHeart uses for spiritual journeys of this type: The Mysteries. Among paths to Enlightment, it is one of only a few that takes a group to set up and run so that you can travel it. You travel it as an individual, as you traveled the other paths; though this one is not entirely free-form but a preset path, usually through a wood or another mysterious landscape. Along the way you will meet various archetypal guides at what are called Stations. Stations can be compared to the Lights of the Sephiroth, or to the gods and goddesses in Tantra, or to the tarot cards. You can think of them as milestones that prompt epiphanies along your path to awareness. Each Station houses an Archetypal guide. In The Mysteries, as in Gavin's initiation, a path is set for the candidate with a specific end point. However, it is the individual interactions with their guides and archtypes which determines what they receive from the quest.
The group sponsoring and organizing the candidate's journey assigns members to serve as archetypes. In this context archetypes are comparable to stereotypes or the essence of a concept. They appear everywhere, particularly in such diverse places as folklore and literature, and in prehistoric cave artwork. The Native American Vision Quest is another such initiation utilizing fasting and solitude come into contact with spiritual guides.
Comments
In our opinion, the longer such an assignment is stretched out, the better. There needs to be plenty of time between encountering one Station and the next; and the more complex the route, the better. In case there are more than one candidate, participants must be forbidden to talk to each other along the way. They must talk only to the various archetypes that inhabit the Stations.
Carl Jung suggested the essence of universal forms that could be used to channel emotions which would result in stereotypical patterns of behavior. One modern example of the use of archetypes is in the original Star Wars series--a typical hero's journey. Representations of archetypes are limitless. Familiar to almost everyone are the Goddess, the Mother, the God, the Ruler, the Lover, the Hero, the Sage, the Sibyl, the Trickster, the Mentor, the Innocent.
Let us look for a moment at some guidelines concerning archetypes.
1. If you like, you can turn to the tarot or to various pantheons to find your archetypes; or you can simply invent them out of the whole cloth, from your memory, from imagination, or from personal experience.
2. The archetypes for any initiatory walk should have a continuity. In other words, if you are thinking of a Celtic path, each archetype should fit somehow into a Celtic theme. Base them on a Celtic pantheon, and be careful that the questions asked by each one are framed in Celtic terminology.
3. There should be quite startling differences among the archetypes, and it is quite permissible to have gates so that there can be parallel archetypes for different genders. As an example of Stations, somewhere along the way the Mirror comes into play. One very powerful greeting archetype we have seen was the Sibyl seated behind an imperfectly silvered mirror. You could vaguely see her but could also see yourself.
4. In some pathways, it is important for anyone who shows up well dressed and made up to surrender their jewelry, particularly any closed rings; that they lay aside their fancy clothes, and thoroughly wash off any cosmetics as a preliminary to following the Path. All binding garments, all fragile garments, and all clothes constructed from parts of dead animals should also be left behind, before or at the first Gate. Yes, candidates can wear simple robes; but they must be stripped of all status symbols and all masking disguising cosmetics. You may recall how Inanna was stripped of all her symbols and clothing as she descended into the Underworld to visit her sister Erishkegal. It is critical that one is first removed from mundane space with its requirements, distractions and energy drain and is kept apart from it for the duration of the initiation.
Labyrinths and Mazes
Two very ancient methods of arranging a pathway through various epiphanies to Awareness are the Labyrinth and its sister the Maze. Depictions of the Cretan Labyrinth occur throughout the ancient world; it is permanently set in stone in the floor of Chartres Cathedral. A most interesting vertical labyrinth is carved into a pathway ascending Glastonbury Tor.
As you go through any Labyrinth, at each turn you pause for a moment and contemplate a different level of awareness and reorient yourself. Eventually (in most case after seven layers) you arrive at the center.
It is noticeable that the original shepherd's crook design represents the center of the Labyrinth, with an opening so that you can attain the center. The Christian church, though, made the open center into the chi rho with its closed center. In their new theology the only way to gain awareness is to accept their Jesus paradigm.
The Maze with its many dead ends is another way of thinking about awareness. Many of your life's paths end up in dead ends. Accept them as an opportunity for more exploration, and realize that no knowledge is wasted. Even Death itself, which some people think of as the ultimate dead end, is only a stop on the way to the Center. Yvonne has come to regard the milestone we call "death" as a graduation.
Be prepared for the unexpected.
Whatever you do, realize that some people will be dramatically affected by such a journey as this. Compressing the journey from a week down to a few hours emphatically raises the stress that some people go through. You need to have someone accessible who is educated in formal psychological counseling. If the counselors haven't undergone Initiation of this type themselves, at least they must be sympathetic and well briefed beforehand. It is also advisable to have an exit strategy for those who are unable to complete the initiation. This is especially important in the case of multiple initiates, otherwise the failure of one could result in the remainder being unable to complete their personal journey.

Here endeth the journey toward Epiphany, with our gratitude for comments and additions from FireHeart.
We are always interested in any personal experiences that you are willing to share with us. Give us feedback on these ideas.

Tarot path to Awareness

2010-06-10T14:33:00.000-07:00

This is the third blog on paths to awarness.
Thousands of assorted tarot decks are available, ranging from the James Bond deck to the Mickey Mouse. By now there is probably a Barbie Doll deck as well. Some are extravagantly illustrated and others austere. You need to pick a deck that speaks to you. Once you have chosen your deck, throw away the guide tht comes with it. All tarot guides attempt to put into words thoughts that are beyond words.
Our own favorite deck, the one Gavin grew up on, is the classic Rider Waite deck, one of the oldest. That one was illustrated in 1920 by Pamela Colman-Smith. She was a well-traveled American living in England; and both she and Arthur Waite were long-time members of the Order of the Golden Dawn. In predictive work he often uses the Grand Etteilla Gypsies deck as it has a different take on the major arcana.
The cards have some Egyptian overtones because at that time Egyptian magic was all the rage. Echoes of Napoleon's conquest of Egypt still lingered after crossing the Channel from occult circles in fin-de-siecle Paris. Howard Carter and King Tut's newly discovered tomb were headline news as well. The symbology is elemental and simple. It depicts things you already know which should hold no fear in your mind.
In using the cards to explore spiritual enlightenment, only the 22 cards of the major arcana are used. Two layouts are popular. The one we will use follows the Sephiroth. More on this in a moment, but for now we will look at the simplest layout of all.
A. The simplest layout
In this method, The Fool ( 0 ) is placed at the "bottom". On your right side a column of cards is placed starting with The Fool nearest you, going directly away from you, through ( 9 ) to form a column one card in width.
The Wheel of Fortune ( 10 ), considered to be a crossover card, is placed in the center position between that column and the one consisting of cards ( 11 ) through ( 21 ). The remaining cards progress upward from ( 11 ) to ( 21 ) in a stack or column on your left, parallel to the stack formed by ( 0 ) through ( 9 ). The final card at the top of the left-hand column is The World
( 21 ), where everything is known, including the four fates. In this layout, then, you start with the Fool who knows nothing and is stepping off a cliff into the unknown.
B. Now to turn to the simplified Sephirothic layout. For this you need a diagram of the Tree of Lights, the Sephiroth. Several Trees have been developed, ranging from the traditional to the modern. We like the simplified rectified diagram we show on Page 70 of our book "The Solitary Wiccan's Bible". Remember: you need a diagram in which the paths are numbered from 0 to 22. The major differences between the various Trees is in the number of paths and lights, and the depiction of the female on the right or the left. We will use the version that has five paths leading from the lowest light upward. Each path is represented by its own card. We will spend a few minutes considering the five cards representing those paths.
You can either ascend the Tree or descend it. Most pagan/Wiccans will ascend because they believe that everything we are starts at Mother Earth and our incarnation allows us to ascend. Abrahamic religions tend to start from the top, leaving everything behind, and ending up as earth.
Remember that the following words are only illustrative. What carries the most weight is your own understanding of the meaning of the cards.
1. The World ( 21 ) - Here you think of it as leaving the world behind. The egg shape of the central pattern is taken to mean rebirth. The elemental essences will support you in your quest.
2. The second path open to you, very close to the World, is Judgment ( 20 ). This is a judgment on your own life. You must recognize when it is time to make changes in your life style, though change can be frightening. The blast of the trumpet awakens you from your present situation of non-growth. It awakens you from the box you are trapped in.
3. The central path of the five, represented by the Devil ( 15 ), is gender-neutral. Here you must give yourself over to a higher power, even if at first that power appears negative. You must cast off restrictions, misguidance, and the package of guilt / shame / fear of the abrahamic religions.
4. The fourth path shown to you is Temperance ( 14 ). It is one of controlled and temperate progression. You stand in water, and water is being passed from cup to cup; in other words you still need to be connected with the earth as you ascend through the paths to Enlightenment. This path calls for steady, careful, self-controlled progression, and for the reconciliation of the apparent opposites in your life.
5. The fifth path is represented by the Moon ( 18 ). Occultists often interpret this as representing the most dangerous of the paths. The card shows the pathway leading away between towers and
over a distant mountain. You do not know where it leads; you know only that you cannot come back, that there is no return, because the scorpion will sting you.
Here you have to decide whether the energies pulling you onward can overcome your primitive left-brain activities. To choose, spend two days meditating on each card in turn, 15 minutes a day. In meditation keep the card before you. When the mind wanders, pull it back to the card.
It is best to start at new moon. On day 12 through day 14, try to meditate on all five cards at once as they lie before you in a fan pattern. On day 15, under the full moon, make your first decision.
Then you will proceed, meditating to the next Light on the Tree and its onward paths. Usually there will be many new paths opening to you. One of them will take you across the whole Tree. There will be many opportunities to change direction. Each time such a change occurs, lay out the cards showing possible directions and meditate on them. Finally after perhaps three months of continual card meditation you will be ready to try understanding the Fool ( 0 ). You will attempt to get completely out of your body, and the Fool will be your guide. He is stepping off a cliff in full knowledge of his danger. The little dog warns him, yet he is sure. New life springs from his left hand; and though he still carries some baggage, he is leaving this world to experience the Ultimate and to gain the knowlege that we all seek: the reason for our being.

revised Frost schedule

2010-06-09T15:02:00.000-07:00

Hi again, troops.
Many of you have asked about where we will be when, so we are revising this blog to update earlier information. Here's what we know today. It's still prudent to see individual sites for full information.

07 12 - 07 18 Sirius Rising Sherman, NY camp@brushwood.com

07 19 - 07 25 SummerFest Sherman, NY camp@brushwood.com

07 28 Kaleidoscope Gathering north of Ottawa
kaleidoscope-gathering.com.ca
09 11 Pagan Pride Day Russellville, AR gypsie_dawn@yahoo.com

09 18 Pagan Pride Day Little Rock AR kremtvidje@gmail.com
arppd.arkansaspagans.com

10 09 Nature Spirit Alliance Day Princeton WV
www.naturespiritualityalliance.ning.com

10 31 Witches' Ball Radford VA shanti@chrysalisctr.com

Again: Watch carefully for updates; some of this stuff is still coalescing.
BB GY

The Sephirothic Path

2010-06-02T08:20:00.000-07:00

This is the second in a series of four blogs discussing roadmaps that will help you gain awareness through a series of enlightenments.
In many ways the Sephiroth is the most complex path among the roadmaps we are considering; thus an illustration will be helpful in finding your way. There is one such simplified illustration in "Good Witch's Bible", Frost and Frost, page 229. (At the time we published that work, we were a little negative about the Kabala; given today's greater understanding, for that attitude of some 35 years ago we apologize.)
Looking at the illustration, you see nine circles containing words in either Hebrew or English. The circles are called Lights because each represents an area that will illuminate your understanding.
Be warned that the Hebrew words are not easily translatable directly into English. It's not a matter of simple one-on-one, straight-across translation. For instance, the Light at the bottom in Hebrew is Malkuth, often translated as The World but sometimes as Wholly Remembering. The one just below En Soph is often called Kether or The Crown or God-ess, and is said to mean "I am that I am".
As you meditate on each Light in turn, a clearer understanding of each one and its relation to the others should come to you.
The central Pillar of Lights leading from The World all the way up to En Soph is considered to be gender-neutral. It represents Balance. Some Sephiroths have a Light between Beauty and Goddess; its label in Hebrew is Da'at; that is thought of as Knowledgable Balance.
One side of the Sephiroth's vertically arranged Lights is female. It stands for Severity, Water, and Blood. Sometimes it is placed on the right, but it lies on the left in traditional depictions. The male side stands for Mercy, Fire, and Milk (or seminal fluid).
It is interesting to note that these three male Lights have Endurance at the bottom, Love in the center, and Wisdom at the top. The center one, Love, is actually called Chesed, translated alternatively as Kindness. Here in this very old pathway you can see that the female side has more power than the male side, just as we found in Tantra that the goddesses were active whereas the gods were contemplative. It is interesting to see this attribution of lesser power to the male in a society that produced the most dominant male god ever known to the western world.
If you use the traditional Sephiroth omitting Da'at, you have nine Lights in the lower section. Wiccan tradition customarily starts at the bottom with Malkuth and moves upward meditating on each Light and on how you get from one Light to another. Everything comes from the Earth or the Great Mother. As you move upward the blank slate of your understanding comprehends the various attributes of the Lights.
In Judaic tradition you move from En-Soph the Ultimate Deity downward, releasing various emotions and human attributes as you go, so that you are pure and unsullied when you arrive at the base. Everything here comes from the Deity.
In each case you now go through the cycle again, in one case descending and giving up what you have gained, and in the other regaining in a purer form that which you had released.
Many workers regard the numbers on the paths as comparable to the archetypical images of the tarot's major arcana. We will address the tarot in the next blog.
Meditating on the Lights requires a commitment of a half-hour daily. The time may be divided into 15 minutes before breakfast and 15 minutes after supper; or it can be done as a half-hour after supper (provided you are not too sleepy). Some say that you must spend a whole week's worth of meditation on each Light. We have found that you can shorten this time if you develop mind keys or aides-memoirs in your mode of understanding for each Light. We get in touch with our subconsious in accordance with which sense is predominant. If you are clairvoyant (that is, if you psychically "see" your impressions), you will make up pretty brightly colored patterns; if clairaudient a piece of music or a particular sound, and so on for each sense.
There are nine Lights in the lower section. If you spend seven days in each of them, that comes to a total of 63 days. In Wicca we prefer to work in a moon cycle similar to the one in Tantra, spending a total of 27 days on a cycle (3 days per Light and two days of assimilation).
After completing your meditations, you are ready to move out of the lower area and try to get an understanding of En Soph by moving your meditation upward.
The first line of the Torah in Kabalistic tradition reads:
With a beginning It created Elohim. They created the World.
Interpretations of the Sephiroth and methods of using it are as numerous as grains of sand on a beach. You need to develop your own techniques, and to approach it with an open mind unburdened by the finite nature of most of modern thought regarding it. This is not a one-plus-one-equals-two task.
The Sephiroth cannot be comprehended solely through the intellect. Instead the mind must be free and must move into realms where everything is fluid and everything is possible. The work is about as far from a literal so-called left-brain approach as any psychic effort can be.
Once you get into the rhythm of meditations, your life will change and you will begin to interpret experiences differently. You will bring a new level of awareness to every act. You will think before you speak, and will contemplate the words that you say and every thought that arises in your mind. The Sephiroth will change the way you live your life. It will encourage you to integrate mystical study into your daily meditative contemplative exercise(s). This leads you to a stronger connection between yourself and the Great Unconscious, and will give you more understanding of the meaning of Life.

A caution: "Upward" is just a convention. Clearly, En Soph is not necessaraily upward in a literal sense; it is everywhere.

For those who would go further, we recommend David A. Cooper's "God Is a Verb". The copy on our personal shelf is from the Riverhead division of Penguin.

Road maps to Epiphany

2010-05-22T07:41:00.000-07:00

We want to share some thoughts, probably in four blogs, on "Paths to Epiphany" or "Spiritual Development".
On any journey, whether temporal or spiritual, you need a road map. There are many road maps to help you with your spiritual development. Most spiritual journeys require an ability to go into deep meditation. Several of our books give detailed step-by-step instructions. All of our guidance calls for only a comfortable chair, a safe place, and fifteen minutes a day of uninterrupted personal time. It is not sitting on a mountaintop and learning to disregard the cold, or sitting cross-legged on a bed of nails. It is inner meditation, not outward meditation looking for guidance, not outward meditation leading to astral travel. If you drift into either of those other modes, you need to constantly come back into yourself
The oldest road map to spiritual epiphany, then, is probably ancient Tantra; that is, Tantra before the Axial Age, that 500-year spasm when male gods supplanted the earlier goddesses. After the Axial Age, Tantra became chauvinistic, as can easily be seen by anyone reading the Kama Sutra.
Gavin was privileged to live in a Tantric house that was trying to recover the old pre-Axial ways. This was in India, under the auspices of Indira Gandhi. The procedure they used would have been easily understood by anyone who comprehends the ideas of the chakras (psychic centers).
In order to meditate on the classic concept on each successive day of the cycle, one's endorphine level is adjusted with orgasm.
You start at new moon in the base chakra. You spend two days understanding and comprehending everything about the base, your shadow-self, and the negativity involved, as well as the fact that the most beautiful lotus grows in the most malodorous muck.
Pictorial representation of the base is the goddess Dakini, a violent, primitive woman born out of the swamp. She is a typical multi-armed Hindu goddess who holds in her respective hands a skull, a bloody knife, a whip, and a fractured cube representing the World. Her animal is the berserk elephant, the most feared and dangerous creature in India. A pictorial representation of Dakini is shown on page 156 of our own "Tantric Yoga". The same book offers illustrations of all the goddesses and gods in the Tantric system. Page 250 illustrates the progression through the goddesses toward Nirvana and back through the gods toward the new moon. The book contains detailed mind keys for each goddess and each god, as well as dietary practices and the progression of sound mantras (page 256) and symbols (page 257).
As you progress upward with the waxing moon, spending two days in each successive chakra, you begin to understand yourself in more and more detail. Only when you pass the heart chakra with the goddess Kakini or Kali do you begin to move into more spiritual and intellectual levels.
Eventually you go through the final non-physical chakra at the top of the head (represented by the thousand-petaled lotus) and move out, trying to imagine what it is that you wish to become. Reaching this point requires the entire cycle between new moon and full moon.
Notice that all the ascending chakras are active and represented by goddesses. After the full moon, you descend the chakras; in this stage of the Journey they are represented by gods who are all contemplative. You contemplate what you learned as you ascended the chakras, again spending two days in each area, until in the base chakra you finally arrive at the most contemplative god of all, Brahma.
Then after the new moon has passed, you go through the cycle again. Each successive month for at least six months you continue the process. When you imagine an overview of it all, you realize that it is not a repeating loop but an upward Spiral.
The task is quite an onerous one, requiring a deep commitment; but even in the first cycle it is very rewarding. You learn things about yourself and about your place in the world, about your desires and needs, that sometimes cause a complete revision of your lifestyle and your attitudes.
We encourage you to try it, even if you can make it through only the first month.

Next time we will examine the Sephirothic Tree as another road map.

Pride and Self Esteem

2010-05-19T05:56:00.000-07:00

Two years ago we Frosts attended the Festival Interceltique* in l'Orient, Bretagne, France. Among the marchers in the traditional parade of Sunday morning, a woman who was clearly the village Witch and Wise Woman walked tall and proud between the Avocat (the lawyer) and Monsieur le Maire. She was a handsome young woman clad in the traditional hooded cloak.
One thing that we have always noticed at the several annual Festivals we have attended in Brittany is the pride of the people, whether marchers, dancers, pipers and drummers--or the cheering attendees who line the sidewalks eight and ten deep and hang from every window. Everyone has an important role to play in the honoring of their Breton/Celtic heritage. The elders checking on the costumes distinctive to their village and on the produce or artifact that is their signature product; the participating marchers; others helping tune the pipes (bagadou); and in the parade itself the gentlemen heads of households in their black waistcoats, on their arm their ladies in their long skirts of heavy black wool with gold embroideries. Again, each village has distinctive coifs (a white cap or bonnet, starched into something that could serve as a weapon). Many of the woman marching in such family clusters bear small children in their arms; others carry the wicker basket in which prudent homemakers bear homeward the items they buy on market day. Whatever their age, the women wear gloves or mitts of ecru lace that they have themselves knitted or tatted.
It doesn't matter whether the group is from an upscale city or from the smallest farm village; all have that same pride and knowledge of their place in the scheme of things. In other words, no matter what their job or status, they all have tremendous self-esteem.
Recently we watched as our daughter offered a presentation on self-esteem and faith. As a math teacher, she talked about the self-esteem the kids required if they were ever to become able to complete the math problems successfully. She felt that one of her primary jobs as a teacher was building self-esteem : a genuine sense of self, not something candy-coated and spread all around whether earned or not. She was asking the questions : Does faith--any faith--increase self-esteem? How much do certain faiths tear down the self-esteem of their adherents?
When we attend pagan/Wiccan festivals in the States, we don't find that pride and self-esteem that we saw in Brittany. It seems to us that the community had it in the past; but today it seems to have gotten lost.
How can we get it back? We think it is time for more serious competitions, perhaps for costumes, perhaps for dance, perhaps for drumming or story-telling ... you name it. It's all very well to enjoy party time; but surely we might as individuals or small groups invest some effort and set new--higher--standards.
During one Festival Interceltique we watched the dance-off. Michael Flatley's Irish Riverdance didn't place! The group that won had documented their dance back to 1270 CE. They grew the flax and wove the linen for their costumes. They made their own musical instruments and their sabots (the wooden shoes traditionally worn by workers in fields).
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* Now nearing its 30th anniversary, the Festival is held during the first two full weeks of each August in l'Orient on the Gulf of Morbihan and (we can vouch) is a life-changing experience. See celtic-world.com. If the site comes up in French, look across the top of the screen and click on the tiny Union Jack. That will put you into the English-language pages.

Travel Plans 2010

2010-05-12T05:35:00.000-07:00

Hi, troops.
Many of you have asked about where we will be during this summer season and when. We post this blog to answer those questions. Here's what we know today. See individual sites for really firm dates of beginning and end of each event. ... and life being what it is, we reserve the right to add and to amend. Heck. If it were all predictable, wouldn't life be dull?

07 12 - 07 18 Sirius Rising Sherman NY camp@brushwood.com
07 19 - 07 25 SummerFest Sherman NY camp@brushwood.com
07 28 Kaleidoscope Gathering north of Ottawa kaleidoscope-gathering.com
09 11 Pagan Pride Day Little Rock AR kremtvidje@gmail.com
09 18 Pagan Pride Day Conway AR arppd.arkansaspagans.com
10 09 Nature Spiritual Princeton WV willscatt@yahoo.com
Alliance Day
10 31 Witches' Ball Radford VA willscatt@yahoo.com

Watch carefully for updates; some of this stuff is still in the process of coalescing.
Blessed be those who live an examined life. Gavin and Yvonne

Pagan/Wiccan Fundamentalism

2010-05-07T13:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, we're back. We had a wonderful trip to Florida, speaking to several groups around Tampa, including the very active Tampa U-U with its CUUPS group. Then we went on to the Florida Pagan Gathering, which lived up to its reputation as being the highlight of our Spring travels. There we enjoyed sharing time with Judy Harrow and with the Grimassis.
We formed the impression that people are finally getting past our own fangs and our hairy palms and are even listening to some of our ideas. Of course teaching dance in 94-degree weather and high humidity was not a lot of fun, but everyone seemed to enjoy it. Further, we were delighted to sense a lot less inter-group friction this year. Maybe--we hope--the fundamentalist pagan movement is losing momentum.
We've had a huge response to our earlier blog on that subject. Everyone agrees, there's got to be some way to get back to freedom and to honest debate and discussion without the ad hominem attacks. We who think "alternative" thoughts are beginning efforts to stop the witch wars, efforts to get people to do more than fight each other. Why? Because we can envision those fundamentalist Christians laughing and doing high-fives when we get into that sort of family bickering.
Years ago some self-appointed inquisitors put us Frosts "on trial' in Minneapolis (here Yvonne is chortling while she dances on graves). As that caper wrapped up, everyone ostensibly agreed to subscribe to the precept, "I have the one and only right and true path ... for me." Would we could get back to that, because there are lot of people out there whom we would enjoy counting as friends but apparently have lost the idea that spiritual development requires freedom. "You run your path and I'll run mine" belongs on the wall of every pagan living room in cross-stitch. To become more spiritual, then, you must be free, not subject to a dominator paradigm.
The idea is not a new one. The 18th century philosopher Hegel wrote,
The nature of Spirit may be understood by a glance at its direct opposite--Matter. As the essence of Matter is gravity, so, on the other hand, we may affirm that the substance, the essence, of Spirit is freedom.
Decades ago the Guides gave to Yvonne three verses of a song. Here is a clip from that.
" ... Gather we friends together and dance all in a ring.
Glad Witches, come gather, to the old true ways returning :
To freedom and to truth and light, and ne'er again the burning."
Call us biased, but it looks to us as if every time some new writer wants to sell a book, they can find no better way to get onto some Top Ten list than to attack us Frosts or other prominent people in the community. These are just shabby cheap shots, of course; but they sell books. All we can do is refuse to buy the (frequently crap) stuff they put out. It's a sad thing when trees die for such purposes.

That's all for now. We're trying to catch up on hundreds of e-mails and even find time to cut the lawn. A la prochaine, blessed be. Gavin and Yvonne

A View of the "First Cause"

2010-04-21T06:39:00.000-07:00

The "First Cause"--the question of who or what made our present universe--is cherished by religionists as the ultimate putdown argument against those whose paradigm does not include an all-knowing, all-powerful Deity. Here we offer an alternate way of thinking about that alleged First Cause. To some people it may sound as if we are only examining an age-old fallacy and criticizing fundamentalist religionists who take their paradigm as "gospel" fact; but clearly it's time for an objective look at a cultural assumption.
We are not fundamentalists, not even Wiccan fundamentalists.*1 We believe in letting the inquiring mind fly free, and we look for explanations that satisfy a rational paradigm without insulting human intelligence.
Several years ago we came across a felicitous construct in Free Inquiry magazine. For our present purpose we have expanded it :
Let's think about the rail line that runs across Australia's Nullarbor Plain, perfectly flat and perfectly straight from Watson to Coonana for over 500 miles. Let's imagine that at the western end there stands a very large domino, beautifully and intricately carved and painted. Let's imagine that this exquisite domino represents the universe*2 in all its complexity as we know it today. As we move eastward the dominos standing on the line get gradually smaller and less complex until, millions of dominos later, we arrive at the eastern end of the line with the tiniest domino imaginable. The progression from the eastern start point to the big western domino represents the passage of time and the evolution of everything from time before the questionable Big Bang to the present.
The infinitely tiny first domino, perhaps a sub-sub-atomic particle or waveform, is such a weightless speck that the merest presence of a thought will knock it down. It is so small that even if it had tried to interfere with the later dominos, it would have had no discernible or perceptible effect. It could therefore not intervene to make positive or negative changes in the later larger dominos. Yet it causes a domino cascade. Thus the First Cause may have been something so amazingly insignificant as to be immaterial to our present thoughts and life. Many may say that this is just another manifestation of the Infinite Mind that created that universe. Alternatively mathematical philosophers, noting the vagaries of time, are wondering about its cyclical nature and proposing a never-ending cycle of existence. Regrettably, that only puts the First Cause back in time.
We can see that as everything evolves, so the dominos get larger. Each domino gets more complex moving westward toward today, which is an almost infinite time after the beginning.
There are many side branches along the rail line. Some have other dominos coming in to augment the evolution of the main line; at others, dominos have branched off to go their own way. Those moved into the adjacent-possible solutions and petered out. At still others, dominos lived on and devolved back into forms less advanced. Still others went around a loop, developed, and rejoined the main line. The possibilities are endless.
What if the junctions also allowed other lines of dominos from different start points and with slightly different characteristics to join the main line? Many possible--nay, probable--solutions could have been tried until the right combination occurred.
"Aha!" the fundamentalist pounces in that triumphhant "gotcha" tone. "But you forget : the First Cause was not all that long ago! And besides that, a train coming along the line could smash all your dominos down!"
Indeed, we have seen times when many of the dominos were smashed. Haiti is just a recent small-scale example. This might explain how our particular universe--the one some call a Goldilocks universe--to come to its present fruition. We live on a Goldilocks planet, they say : not too hot, not too cold, so far just right.
Scientists tell us that six critical numbers define our whole of the universe;*3 that if any one of those numbers were different, the Universe as we know it could not exist. Of course that is not to claim that other universes do not exist where the numbers are slightly different.
Thus, although we may need a First Cause, it has certain (possibly overlooked) characteristics:
1. It could be infinitely tiny, a slight discontinuity in the void.
2. There could be several first causes.
3. There could have been many attempts that failed.
4. It has no power to change the present universe in any way. Indeed, it must surely be indifferent if it is anything.
In her girlish way Yvonne tells the story of Mother Jehovah doing the supper dishes in her kitchen while loud banging and an occasional small explosion are audible through the open basement door, along with the customary noises and smells that accompany woodwork, metalwork, and chemistry. She sniffs the air, dries her hands, and advances to the basement door to call, "Will you stop already with all your precious trial universes, for pity's sake?! You're smoking up my clean curtains! And the cat's spooked! hiding under the bed again!"
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*1. Fundamentalism is synonymous with the dominator mind-set : "Believe this or else!"
*2. We should more correctly say multiverse, for we know there are many universes. But today we'll stick with the conventional jargon.
*3. Rees, Martin, "Six Sacred Numbers"

The Devolution of Spirituality

2010-04-20T06:44:00.000-07:00

We can imagine that when our remote ancestors explored their universe in the distant past, they recognized the beauty and (if you like) the spirituality of certain places. Other places grew to be perceived as dangerous. They learned that edible plants grew better in certain areas than in other areas. They learned that water from a specific spring was better for their health than any other water. Thus both positive ("sacred") and negative ("tabu") places developed in the clan's shared heritage. It was but a short step, then, to the appointment of someone to tend such areas. Whatever the criteria for selection, gradually that person(s) became the shamans of the site and of the tribe. *1
Many abrahamic religionists deride the ancient ways and the spirituality of the older cultures. Fashionable moderns tend to think of the older cultures as deprived; indeed, early folk lived without many of the attributes (both positive and negative) of a modern technology-driven society that has lost most of its humanistic sensibilities. We often refer people to Sir Arthur Evans and his description of the Mycenaean civilization he found in the eastern Mediterranean:
"It represents a civilized refinement that has not been equaled since : which I would like to fix firmly in place, by way of a challenge to the high claims of those proudly phallic moral orders, whether circumcised or uncircumcised, that were to follow ... There were no walled cities in Crete before the coming of the Greeks. There is little evidence of weapons. Battle scenes of kingly conquest play no role in the setting of the style. The tone is of general luxury and delight, a broad participation by all classes in a genial atmosphere of well-being, and the vast development of a profitable commerce by sea, to every port of the archaic world and even--boldly--to regions far beyond."
Personally we think that the world he uncovered sounds a lot better than our present world.
From various studies of early cultures such as that at Catal Huyuk (in present-day Turkey) and the Vinca culture in what Gimbutas calls Old Europe*2 and even the later Cretan studies, it is clear that many of the shamans were women. Then came the axial age, when the nomadic horse herders of the steppes, with their male-dominance paradigm and their sky gods, overran those benign cultures. Shamanic power became vested solely in the male; male deities forcibly replaced the earlier female forms. The power of the shaman was dramatically increased, and the old spiritual site became the center for the new religion. The very word religion comes from binding, and we see how people were bound into obedience.
Those male gods seem to have been associated mainly with negative sites where the local god had to be appeased with various kinds of sacrifices or offerings. We see this most clearly in the continuity of the volcano god Jehovah. Unfortunately he retained aspects of his origin, becoming the master negative juju of the gods. Jehovah is well summarized by Richard Dawkins, Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University :
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction : jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."*3
It is an interesting mind-exercise to speculate why the ladies gave up their power. The transition didn't happen easily. But when agriculture and settled farms became the norm, the stronger males controlled the distribution of food; to protect their children and to gain access to that food, the women became subservient. The loudest and meanest (males) overran everything peacable that had gone before. Even today that status quo exists--although there are encouraging signs that in countries with a high standard of living and, would you believe, state-run health care, the women are beginning to look to the more gentle males for a mate.*4

This very brief story of how we got to where we are shows how spirituality devolves into religion, which then devolves into a controlling threat system. In Wicca we reject that devolution. We prefer to go looking for the spiritual and for the sites where we feel at one with the universe. We recognize that named gods and goddesses are generally either the names of tribal leaders or of ancient tenders of shrines, human beings who have posthumously grown legends and through campfire retellings have become heroes and then gods.
These are all constructs of the human mind and have only human types of energy. Divine they ain't.
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*1 It is unfortunate that the earlier word shama has become shaman. The -man ending is not masculine; it's just, shall we say, a dialect form of the earlier word. Nonetheless English-speakers may have a natural tendency to think of a shaman as a male and of the plural form as shamen. Wrong. Shaman is not gender-specific, and the plural form is shamans. Take it from Yvonne, the obsessive word-freak.
*2 Gimbutas, Marija "Language of the Goddess", Thames and Hudson, New York 1989
*3 Dawkins, Richard "The God Delusion", Bantam, New York 2006
*4 Wall Street Journal March 27, 2010 "The Masculine Mystique"

Our Job Here Is Not Done

2010-04-09T17:07:00.000-07:00

Yvonne and I come from two entirely different family backgrounds : she from a fundamentalist Baptist family, and I from what might best be called a default agnostic family. Our childhoods were very different : her family was poor, whereas Gavin's was what might be described as upper middle-class--certainly what the French call confortable or aisi. She was expected to go to the Baptist church regularly for her dose of piety and guilt; he went, though rarely, to the handiest Anglican franchise for marryin's, buryin's, and harvest festivals. In fact Gavin's Welsh grandfather was so anti-Christian that he didn't want his descendants walking down a street with a church of any denomination in it.
When we two came together in the 1960s, we found a common ground of understanding : the civilization we lived in was broken and was getting worse. Yes, we are of an older generation than many of you; and many of you seem to think that we don't understand that good Christian homes can be friendly and nurturing. We deny that we are carrying scars that Christianity inflicted on us in childhood. In fact, a child of today gets more scars than we were ever likely to experience. We decided that a new religion--a new spiritual path--was sorely needed--a path of freedom and of spirituality but one that recognized the possibilities inherent in belief structures encompassing both (a) an unknowable Ultimate Deity and (b) what the Welsh called hearth gods and goddesses (Latin lares and penates). The key was freedom from rigid fundamentalism of any stripe. In our minds, fundamentalism means a group (affiliated with one of a variety of conventional religions) with a set of rigid dominator rules that are enforced through peer pressure or through actual physical punishment and through guilt, shame, and fear.
We know many of you were raised in happy, supportive homes--but many others were not. For those scarred souls who are still in pain and don't know why they hurt, we articulate these thoughts.
To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, we two sought Evidence for spiritual belief, declining to base our ideas on Authority, Revelation, or Tradition. (Thank you, St. Richard!)
Unfortunately, some people assumed that Wicca and Witchcraft traditions were inherently fundamentalist. Thus in Wicca today we have a giant split. When people think they have left conventional paths behind--but carry over the dominator mindset into their "new" beliefs without examining their assumptions, they make Witchcraft into just one more package of rigidity. A big thumbs-down to that!
The only way this split can be healed is through honest debate, through honest, objective examination of "tenets" and "principles". The way to heal that split is to join forces with other like-minded people to battle the fundamentalist rape of the world and soon of the universe. And healing is what we need, if the Craft and the Community are to survive the relentless, pervasive, well-funded, creative 24/7 water torture of conventional fundamentalists.
Let us quote from Thomas Flynn, editor of the magazine Free Inquiry (800) 458-1366) :
"You and I are currently under an attempted psychological siege by fundamentalist religious control fanatics. The world is under assault today--more than at any time in the last 70 years--by religious extremists who invoke their particular notion of God to try controlling how we think, what we read, what our kids are taught in every class from civics to science, how we vote, and even when and with whom our nation goes to war.
"The rise of hatred-encouraging, fear-inducing propaganda in best-selling 'Christian literature.' Fundamentalist leaders like preacher/novelist Tim LaHaye are preparing readers for the emergence of 'the Anti-Christ,' preparatory to the eventual destruction of the world. Nor is fundamentalist-encouraged hatred limited to Christian fundamentalists. Muslim clerics have issued a fatwa against one of our contributing editors, a genuinely ominous event in southern Asia, where this editor then lived."
We are going to risk Bertrand Russell one more time with his immortal words :
"Religion prevents our children from having a rational education; religion prevents us from removing the fundamental causes of war; religion prevents us from teaching the ethic of scientific cooperation in place of the old fierce doctrines of sin and punishment. It is possible that mankind is on the threshold of a golden age; but, if so, it will be necessary first to slay the dragon that guards the door, and this dragon is religion."
Please, please, Gentle Readers, wake up and smell the outhouse! We are in the hands of, and at the mercy of, fundamentalists who care little for human pain and suffering, and apparently could not care less for the fate of this planet.

Salvation ?

2010-04-06T07:48:00.000-07:00

This recent Easter, we have been inundated by presentations on something that people call salvation. In Europe such topics are called the "lollipop" gift. The lollipop in question is the sweetie given to children who behave in a tidy manner. Early on, "Church" rulers must have realized that continuous threat systems didn't work, so they needed some sucker--some lollipop--as a reward for "good" behavior; that is, for marching in lock step. Good behavior here means acceptance of the paradigm decreed from On High to keep everybody accountable for every gesture, every thought, and every moment of their time--no unauthorized thoughts, no unauthorized deeds.
Then they came up with a brilliant scheme : "We'll sell you indulgences that give you automatic salvation." Boy! Any snake-oil salesman would have loved it. Hold the huge threat of hell over the masses, then tell them, "For a few dollars you can get this patent medicine that will get you out of it." Of course those untidy ones among us who don't believe in a place called hell naturally don't need indulgences--and of course that meant less income to the Church. Such skeptical thoughts had to be stamped or burned out.
Eastern religions didn't sell indulgences as such, but they had an equivalent threat system. In that version, you would come back as a loathly beast if you didn't toe the mark. By the way, you could buy candles, give food, or even buy little birds that would be set free ; you could go on pilgrimages, and do a thousand and one other things that would let you step outside the boundaries at will and still be reincarnated at a respectable level, maybe even as a prince or a shah.
It is interesting to look up the original derivation of hell . It comes from "to hide or cover up". Maybe the grave was intended here--but the grave is no inferno ; so the grave on its own would not do as a threat system. It had to be ratcheted up with fires and tortures.
Another threat in some of today's thinking on reincarnation is that hell is actually living on the earthplane in the totally screwed up culture with which we are all so familiar. So if you don't complete your assignments in this incarnation, you will have to come back and live here--in hell--again.

By the way, one and all, we are going to Tampa on April 24 and will be at the Tampa Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship to attend Sunday service on April 25. Too, we will address the CUUPS* group through that same fellowship on Monday April 26. From there we go on to FPG (Florida Pagan Gathering).
See uutampa.org and flapagan.org
Blessed be those who investigate options. Gavin and Yvonne
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*Covenant of Unitarian-Universalist Pagan ... somethings (Services?)

Spirituality - Installment 4

2010-03-31T07:35:00.000-07:00

As usual, the comments on Spirituality 3 were better than the blog itself. They ranged through the topic and anticipated part of what we had been going to say here in Installment 4. Several of you protested about our referring to fundamentalist morality. We felt compelled to mention it because we look upon it as a continuum--the same continuum that Ayn Soph pointed out. In that continuum the parental stick or slap is replaced with religious control in the form of a set of "morality" rules--a dead giveaway to the string-pulling of the dominator mindset that Riane Eisler articulated with such brilliance in "Power of Partnership" and "Chalice and the Blade".
It seems that very few people grow beyond that stage ; but those who do, including all our commentators, feel that they are responsible for their own ethical set and their own behavior, not responsible for what they have been threatened with in the name of religion or the dominator juju. For us, the thoughtful ones, the morality rules are replaced with our own innate sense of ethics. (Here we use "ethics" as that which applies to a single person, as contrasted with the more general term morality--behaving conventionally because of some religious belief and/or threat.) Thank Goddess that Plato is not dead, so that some of us are fortunate enough to live examined lives.
This brings us back to our own mind and to what is loosely termed the soul or spirit, which may indeed be a construct of the mind. Many researchers think in terms of the mind being a fragmented or extended network in which consensus is reached when all the pieces come together.
We are not very familiar with the exact Egyptian elements of spirit ; but we are quite familiar with the idea of a fragmented soul and of soul retrieval. ("Soul" here is essentially synonymous with "spirit", except that the soul still dwells within the body.) We have witnessed several quite startling soul-retrieval healings, ranging from (a) a girl in a coma who instantly woke ; to (b) mild cases of depression alleviated in, for example, widows.
We've all felt the same hollowness of our essence, as though something is missing. Our Native American friends say that sensation comes when we have given away part of our spirit--or when it has been stolen from us. "When he died, I feel as if part of me died with him." The simple explanation is : When two people are in love and one dies or departs, the one left behind needs to retrieve the piece of spirit given away in all innocence. This simple concept seems to work in practical terms. Indeed, we are not prepared to say that it's not all simply a game we play within our own minds, especially given the assumptions of the culture in which we live. If the mind can be fragmented, then surely the spirit can be as well.
So where do you get your ethical set, if not from the combination of the pieces of your spirit (or your mind) that come together to give it to you? Like much of life, though, the set can be either positive or negative. It seems to us that those epiphanies of oneness that most of us have from time to time, through deep meditation and through astral travel, pull the glimpses together and make the whole. Thus they change our worldview in a positive way.
Does that mean that the "whole" adult is spiritual? Regrettably, not necessarily so. We ourselves do not feel that a one-to-one correlation can be assumed. This leads us, in turn, back to the question : What is a spiritual person?
Some of you know that when Yvonne or I try to read aloud a particularly meaningful piece of poetry or prose, we often have to pause to fight off the tearful response--the meltdown--that the words elicit in us. Yvonne is susceptible, for example, to the work of A. E. Housman, especially "Loveliest of Trees". This is vividly true with pieces that address the pain of others. We believe that this very awareness of pain and the wish to reduce it in the world is an early symptom of becoming a spiritual person.
In ancient Celtic thought the Web of the Wyrd, the interconnectedness of every living being, was of prime importance, and was sometimes thought of as Deity. The vision of yourself at the center of a network of people where they are all trustworthy friends, no matter what their affiliation or physical attributes are, is a vision that we can aspire to. Today, though, it seems to be slipping away from us, losing ground to the throngs of self-centered people who no longer think of the general good. We feel as if the truly spiritual people are few and far between. If our lips look warty, it's because of the huge number of toads we've had to kiss.
We thank each blog responder for your responses ; your thoughtful comments encourage us to continue.
Of course the final question is : How do you judge a person to be truly spiritual? What symptoms do you perceive as meaningful? This is the last installment of the spirituality blog, except that we will review and share comments ... gratefully. Please, you who are participants in the discussion (or just reading without participating), respond to the blog itself, not through facebook. Then everyone will see the comments.
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P.S. Next time, Goddess willing, we expect to branch out into thoughts about the Ultimate Deity, evolution, and the First Cause.
P.P.S. Dawn Godess, I can't resist telling you the Unitarian-Universalist cat story.
A little girl sits weeping on the steps of the U-U fellowship building. A good Christian lady walks by. "What on earth is the matter, dear?"
The weeping girl points to the fresh smear on the street and howls, "A truck squashed my cat Timmy!"
"Well, never mind. Timmy is with Jesus now, in a better place."
"What the hell would Jesus want with a dead squashed cat?"

Sorry, DG - Gavin

Spirituality 3a

2010-03-29T07:58:00.000-07:00

The concluding part of our long blog on spirituality is delayed. We would very much like those who have been following the blog to read the comments of Ayn Soph on Spirituality 3, because s/he summarizes a lot of what we were going to say in Spirituality 4. Thus we are going to rewrite Installment 4; but in order to understand it, you really will need to read Installment 3 and the comments thereto. Give us a couple of days.
Meantime tremendous gratitude to Ayn Soph. Yvonne says,
The words may be simple, but it's heavy s**t.

Spirituality - Installment 3

2010-03-25T08:11:00.000-07:00

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. Interesting, especially Amber, Brian, and Ayn Soph. Your feedback means a lot.
First let's say we are getting closer to scientifically investigating spirits. Ghost hunters regularly use magnetometers in their detection, and those same magnetometers detect our healing emanations; e.g. ch'i or prana. Apparently both are a similar form of energy.
If every living thing has a spirit, then is our spirit an agglomeration of the spirits of all our selves?

Anyway--onward.
If causal determinism is correct, then we have only limited free will. When you have one of those what we call "oneness" epiphanies, where for a few moments everything makes absolute sense, does that make you become more spiritual, or must there be a more traumatic event? Such little epiphanies and events in your life change you; but in your nurturing and in your genes you are trained to a repertory of responses beyond which it is difficult for you to act. Acculturation may be stronger than we realize, so that what we assume is natural ("Doesn't everybody?") could be simply a matter of training. Perhaps these are the "root causes"of your being.
Fundamentalists tell us forcibly that we cannot be spiritual unless we accept Jesus, or Allah, or Manu the Law-Giver; or go on pilgrimage or do something else to demonstrate that we have bought into their paradigm. Yet if I am resentfully following the list of rules posted on someone else's clipboard, how can I be spiritual? Remember Hegel from the other day. If I run my life by somebody else's rules that are not spiritual, can I be spiritual? Was le bon sauvage (mis- translated as the noble savage) more spiritual than we "civilized" individuals are?
The question then is:
What do you have to give up in the way of rules to be spiritual?
We can't get away from it : Spirituality is obviously denied by the monster of fundamentalist middle-class "morality". We start from the premise that fundamentalism is inherently a threat system. For instance, they don't teach sexual love as a beautiful sacrament; they teach : Just say 'no' or go to hell. (Of course the weary mother of eight or ten cannot use protection against a husband infected with AIDS; there is no abortion and little divorce allowed).
Is there any connection between (a) sexual freedom between consenting adults and (b) fundamentalist-style morality? Yvonne and I think we are very moral people, yet we have an open marriage. When consenting adults enjoy a sexual experience with a non-spousal partner, that's what is called a victimless crime--a pure invention of the self-appointed moral police, who wouldn't know good sex if it hit 'em between the eyes (so to speak).
Here's a little mind game to entertain you. What if Tiger and Elin Woods were to announce that they were pagan and had an open marriage? Would there have been all the wasted gasping and salacious headlines that have gone on ad nauseam for lo, these past months? How would matters have played out differently? If they had announced such a thing some months or years ago, way early in his career, would he ever have been allowed to show his face on camera? to set foot on a golf course? let alone to endorse commercial products or events? He'd have been a non-person from Day One.
Fundamentalism always uses the big three : guilt, shame, fear, to keep the sheep in line. As Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) wrote,
The essence of the concept of righteousness and morality is to afford an outlet
for sadism by cloaking cruelty as justice.
An American reporter asked Pope John Paul whether he wouldn't like to make people happier by allowing divorce and contraception. The Pope replied, "The object of morality is not happiness. It is to prevent people going to hell."
Our Wiccan morality relies on "If it harm none." That specific Rede comes to us from the French:
S'il ne nuis pas, faitez ce que vous voulez.
Indeed, that was the motto, taken from Rabelais, used by the Hell Fire Club (of which Ben Franklin was a member).
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) said, "People should be endowed ... with all those rights acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness which are not injurious to the natural rights of others."
This seems to be a basic human value that has been with us throughout recorded history.
Today's question is easy and obvious : What do you base your morality on?

Spirituality 2

2010-03-22T06:15:00.000-07:00

Thank you for your responses to the earlier question on the subject of spirituality. It seems that most of you believe in spirits. I was particularly amused by Cindy's parental (or chaperonish?) spirit who questioned her when she got home late.
Many dictionary definitions of spirituality link it to ecclesiastical activities. We need a new definition for everyday use, because people whom we all know naturally demonstrate spiritual behavior without necessarily being part of a church hierarchy.
"Spirit" comes from the Latin "spirare", which means literally breath. It is the root of such words as inspire and aspire, as well as conspire and expire. If we think of the spirit as altruistic, and if in a specific person the spirit is more to the fore than the body is, then that person can be thought of as spiritual--or at least more spiritual than others who are more focused on temporal concerns.
Yet spirits we have dealt with can be very negative, especially possessing spirits. This can be a problem when pagans and Wiccans "call down the moon", inviting spiritual entities--of whatever nature or disposition--to inhabit their very body. In controlled situations such as those that occur in Voudun, where there are people fully trained to deal with such activities, this may present no problem since exorcising the spirit is part of the training. On the other hand ...
Remember the case from Spirituality 1 of the old smuggler and the table. Ask any army psychologist what happens when a possessing (enemy) spirit of one killed in battle tries to make the body of the possessed commit suicide.
If we use "spirit" as the root of "spirituality", we can go to the philosopher Hegel (1770 - 1831).
The nature of spirit may be understood by a glance at its direct
opposite--matter. As the essence of matter is gravity, so, on the
other hand, we may affirm that the substance, the essence, of
spirit is freedom.
Is it possible for us to follow this quote and say that the opposite of spirituality is materialism?
Can materialistic people be spiritual? Is it easier for the rich to be spiritual? What about people like Elton John? At last count he had given $157M for AIDS relief. We might think of Mohandas Gandhi as being spiritual. Then we learn, though, that he insisted his wife clean out the latrines at the ashram where they lived--but would not clean them himself.
What about Mother Theresa? If you listen to her nuns, she was a harsh bully. Can a Jew be spiritual? He does not love his neighbor, nor does he turn the other cheek. A Jewish friend told us, "Spirituality is something we keep in our back pocket. We pull it out when we're in trouble and become holier than thou." Can you be half-spiritual? Is spirituality a learned behavior?
Causal determinism argues that every act we take is the result of a set of causes, and that we have no option but to react in response to those causes.
Every event has a cause.
If every event has a cause, there is no free action.
Therefore there are no free actions.
Ipso facto, you have no free will.
We all believe we have free will--but think about buying a Razzmobile. Advertisements, friends, price, salesmen, etc etc; many factors influence your "free-will" choice. Pagan, Wiccan, and Unitarian-Universalist groups accept all seekers, or at least profess to. Most conventional groups do not. Which type is free and hence more spiritual?
So today's question is : Do you have enough free will to become spiritual?

Spirituality 1

2010-03-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

We want to thank several of you for the thoughts on spirituality that you have shared with us, especially Dr. Dark and Harp Raven.
On Sunday March 14 2010, Gavin gave a talk on Spirituality. The talk lasted a little over an hour, in a semi-workshop format where attendees responded to specific questions. We have decided to give you the gist of that talk and to ask those same questions of the facebook audience. Thus the next three or four blogs will not be about the cat's hangnail or the weather in West Virginia; they will address a topic which we think is of more importance.
After due consideration, Gavin started "I don't know what spirituality means in a modern context. Specifically I don't know how to gauge whether or not (in public opinion) a specific individual is deemed spiritual. We all know people whom we think of as spiritual. I should probably be the most likely to have a gauge in my head; but I don't.
"This next bit is kind of a 'This I Believe', and here is my resume on the subject. I lived for a couple of weeks in a monastery in Thailand, going out with the monks in the mornings with begging bowls and spending approximately six hours a day in meditation. We ate only the food that came back in our bowls. Since it is considered an honor to feed the monks, there was always plenty of food. By the way, the bowls were sections of human skulls lined with silver. As most of you know, I also spent a couple of weeks in a Tantric house in the Punjab.
"I have been a manager of International Operations for a major electronics firm.
"Also, after founding the Church of Wicca, Yvonne and I have worked and spoken with people of every nationality and every religious persuasion. We have worked on radio shows with fundamentalists such as Bob Larson, and had conversations with more conservative Christians such as the Bishop of Durham (North Carolina). Among a tour group I met and talked with Pope John Paul when he was trying to figure a way of getting pagans 'back' into the Roman Catholic Church. I know Jake Swamp, the Peace Chief of the Mohawk Nation. And I was initiated into the Seminole Nation as Red-Tailed Hawk : One Who Sees at a Distance.
"Of course through the School of Wicca and its international student body of over 60,000 students, I have learned from the students as much as I have taught them.
"Lastly, I have seen spirits and entities and actually photographed them. In St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, the film showed a ghostly lady looking at the Pieta. And once after some of us had cast an extraordinarily beautiful circle for a full-moon observance at the Whaler Inn Beach Club in Atlantic Beach, North Carolina, two of us took photographs of the circle with two cameras from two different locations in the room. A seated spirit form turned up in the negatives.
"Yvonne and I attended a large conference of ghost hunters outside Pittsburgh. They showed us hundreds of photos of ghostly emanations, ranging from vague clouds to fully dressed people and even the occasional nude person. Interestingly, we found that ghost-hunting groups are now using magnetometers to detect these presences. (You need a sensitive magnetometer, more sensitive than those available through Edmund Scientific.) More thoughts on this point later.
"In ghost hunting through meditation we hvae communicated with resident entities. In one case, a little girl in Boulder, Colorado, had been told at some time in the 19th century that she could not go to heaven until she learned her 12-times tables. She had died of cholera before she had mastered the multiplication tables. We told her in a loving manner just to hold still, that someone would come and help her with her learning. By the time we meditated the next day, no spirit was perceptible in the house. By the way, the homeowner was angry with us for taking away the cachet he had enjoyed from boasting about his haunted house.
"In an entirely different instance we investigated strange events happening in a cellar in East St. Louis, a cellar with access to the Mississippi River. We received communication from a long-dead smuggler. He said he had buried money in the side wall of the brick-lined tunnel leading down to the river. We found loose bricks where he indicated; but no money behind them. When the cavity was exposed, an iron-base table with a glass top was picked up and thrown across the cellar with such force that the cast-iron base shattered. Then again the haunting stopped. It seems as though the lingering spirits have some important message to impart, and that once the message is imparted they can go on. Yvonne sums it all up under the heading 'unfinished business'.
"As many of you know, we have tested circles of various sizes, and circles made of an assortment of materials, against a very sensitive magnetometer. We have found that circles of a certain size, as long as they are electrically conducting, stopped the flow of energy to the magnetometer, but that without the circles, power-raising groups could send the magnetometer off the scale. That is, a circle cast to very precise measurements in very precise materials stops and contains the energy. When workers scrupulously follow known information, things go well.
"We know that certain people can read the impressed emotions in rooms and in objects. This leads us, then, to the question as to whether the ghosts or spirits that we are sensing are real or are heavily impressed emotions. Since the spirits are detectable, and power output from a group is detectable on mundane (real-world) equipment, are spirits real?
"In Wicca we think of a three-legged stool in balance. The three legs are
(a) body, (2) mind, (3) spirit. In my own reality, the spirit tends toward altruism and the body tends toward materialism, with the mind serving as the mediator between the two."
For the skeptics among you, all this may be rubbish. So the question for this little section is :
In your reality, are spirits real?
Another blog on the subject will be forthcoming.
Blessed be those who dare to think outside the box. Gavin and Yvonne

Congress and Health Care

2010-02-27T07:43:00.000-08:00

Dear fellow taxpayer,
We Frosts have experienced health care in four different nations: England, France, Canada, and the United States. Our experience has amounted to something like comparison shopping. We have to say that, given Medicare and Medicaid, we are more than pleased with the American system. We think the Brits have a slightly better one, but we much prefer to live in the States.
To complement the professional attention, we actively pay attention to our own state of health, with particular attention to nutrition.* This feels like responsible adult behavior : not to trash our bodies with reckless, irrresponsible behaviors and then drag ourselves to a physician afterward and say, "Here I am, Doc. Heal me (on taxpayer dollars). Wind me up and turn me loose so I can trash my body anew."
The current health-care debate seems to be focusing on cutting the heart out of Medicare. Consequently we are convinced beyond all doubt that Congress has no idea what they are doing. Clearly they have forgotten what it's like to be a citizen taxpayer out there defenseless, as we ourselves wer for many years. Some of the present rules are extremely weird but ostensibly liveable. We ahve recently learned of one such taht is interesting, to say the least : Even though it is well known that no level of X-ray is safe, and that sonograms are just as good at detecting breast cancer, still if Medicare is to pay for it, you have to have an X-ray before you can get a sonogram.
When it comes to the matter of abortion adn teen pregnancy, we could write reams. The government--paid for by your taxes and mine--refuses to fund real-world, practical sex education for the kids. Then when they get pregnant, Congress proposes not to pay for abortion. This has to be pure grandstanding, not to mention the legislation of religious belief into federal law. Are you as grateful as we are ?
In this nation, teen pregnancy is presently running at 42.5 pregnancies per thousand in ages 15 to 19. Compare that rate with the Netherlands, where sexual freedom adn education are required. There the teen birth rate is 3.8 per thousand--less than 1/10 the U.S. Surely any sensible, rational person can understand that on any sort of cost curve education is the cheapest; abortion is the second least-expensive--and welfare is off the graph. It makes absolutely no sense for Congress to hold up the much-needed health-care reform act for something that would really save billions because of some ancient fundamentalist principle. By the way, copulation is not forbidden in their black book.

Spirituality?

2010-02-27T07:37:00.000-08:00

We want to thank everybody for their various definitions of love, especially Raven, who pointed out that the Greeks had so many words for different aspects of love. Now we have another request of you.
Gavin is scheduled soon to give a presentation to the local Unitarian-Universalists on spirituality. What makes a person "spiritual" ? How do you know one when you meet them if you can'tsee their aura ? Someone who is very materialistic is not spiritual ; that's clear enough--but then we see people like Bill and Melinda Gates spending millions of their money on various projects around the world, and we wonder. Also we have humanist and atheistic friends who seem to us to be very spiritual in their dealings with the world. Yet by basic definiton, since they don't believe in spirit, how can they be labeled spiritual ?
Any thoughts ? Help.

Some Thoughts about an Ill-Defined Word - Love

2010-02-17T15:18:00.000-08:00

The other day at lunch we went around the table having people offer definitions of "love". No two definitions were alike. We started by saying that we didn't mean lust. When you're in lust--a perfectly valid condition to be in--it's a matter of one endocrine system calling out to another. Thanks especially to popular songs and to Disney animated features, the two sets of symptoms are often mistaken one for the other. What we wanted to define was long-term love : the sort that happens between a parent and a child, perhaps, or between a mature married couple who have worked through most of the prickly topics.
One definition we liked was : It is the feeling that makes me smile inside when I see either "it" or another person.
Our long-term definition of love runs something like this : It is my wish for the loved person to develop to their full potential, my wish for their well-being; no matter what the cost to me.
We realize that this does not cover the love for an object, a sculpture, a painting, a poem, any inanimate object, or even a puppy or a kitten.
So what is your definition of love?

Thinking about Initiation

2010-02-04T08:40:00.000-08:00

At the full moon of Imbolc we did a couple of initiations. As usual after initiations (call it afterglow), we started to reflect on (1) the real reason for initiation itself; (2) what elements such a meaningful rite of passage should contain; (3) how it will change the life of those who attend.
It is our opinion that initiation into the Craft has always meant becoming a member of a very select "in" group. The group consists of other individuals who have met certain standards and who are further along the chosen path. The incomers are required to meet those standards so that the group can be comfortable and confident with their membership. Incomers are those sufficiently knowledgeable of the group's practices that they will live up to such commitments as these:
(1) They will not mess up when the chips are down.
(2) They have demonstrated their willingness to discipline themselves to meet challenges that may come.
(3) They are willing to break societal / cultural norms, though always within the law, to join the group. In such cases, the only individuals involved would be consenting adults, and the occasion would be an extraordinary one.
(4) Candidates are willing and able to state clearly where their allegiance lies. Is it to their family? their group? their country? and so on. (At time of crisis, they may be expected to subordinate allegiance to family temporarily to the needs of the group.)
(5) They can be trusted with inner secrets of the group, including knowledge of identities and memberships.

Though these points seem relatively simple and straightforward, too few groups make them part of the initiatory practice. Initiation is more than a matter of "Drop in Friday night and visit the drive-through." It is a life-changing milestone implying a deep, deep commitment to the spiritual path of the Craft. In our opinion, preparation for the ritual and the life change should take at least a year and a day.
Nor is the initiation a signal to stop growing. To each initiate will come a day when s/he pauses to think, "I thought I knew it all on the day of my initiation--but, boy, how far I've come and how much I've grown since then!"
The actual words of the rite can be in any format the group likes, using any pantheon and any circle-casting or other element of the rite of passage the group desires. In Gavin's case, it was in fact not only a sex-magic ritual; it was also a blood ritual. (He can show you the scar.) Currently the blood ritual is usually omitted; if the group is not going to practice sex magic, that part too can (optionally) be omitted.
It is up to you, pagans and Wiccans, but please do not cheapen any initiation which you perform. Make it a deeply significant rite of passage. It should be designed to change the person's perception of reality.
Blessed be those who live the examined life. Gavin and Yvonne

Marching to the Bank

2010-01-26T08:11:00.000-08:00

We agree with the comments on our recent blog, that pointing the finger without suggesting a better way is not the most helpful thing we can do. However. We continually point to a better way. All our work for the past 40 years has been an effort to articulate a different, non-materialistic, partnership-not-dominator, path. To that end, here is another highly critical blog. It's time somebody pointed out the Emperor's unmentioned absence of attire.

Marching to the Bank

An old song quoted by Bishop James Pike goes,
"Onward, Christian soldiers, marching to the bank!
Dum, dum, dum, DUM, dum, hear the shekels clank."
If you have wondered why the abrahamic religions are able to make so much money so easily, you need only recall three little words :
Guilt Shame Fear
The religions get an awful lot of mileage from those words. Let's look at each one in turn.

GUILT
Way back in its earliest days, the Emperor Hadrian ordered his agents to study Christianity. His conclusion was, the religon was "so strict that it leads automatically to hypocrisy".
Christian religions make no allowance for our poor human foibles and failures. Instead they require that we show up punctually, pay our dues, and get forgiven. Time and again, we have seen politicians and now sports stars busy confessing their "sins" and paying their dues.*
A couple of years ago a very good friend of ours in our little town, well-known as a generous and friendly restaurateur, died of cancer. At the memorial service the minister berated the sheep with the message, "You too will die of cancer if you don't straighten up your act and attend regularly." This probably happened because the memorial service was the first time that church had been full since the Civil War.
Such Christian guilt-thinking recently reached a new low when Pat Robertson announced that Haitians deserved their earthquake because their ancestors had made a pact with the devil to get them out from under French rule. (No, we're not making this stuff up. We couldn't.)
In the past the Christian church simply sold indulgences. It didn't matter how you had sinned. Buy an indulgence, and it was a pass through the pearly gates--your own get-out-of-hell-free card. The more you paid for it, the briefer the time you'd spend in purgatory getting purged.
It was interesting to see the memorial service in Haiti where the church deacons passed among the attendees with their collection plates.
So let's move on to the second biggie.

SHAME
This is probably akin to the ancient shunning that many religions visited on their parishioners unless they came back to church and confessed their "sin". Essential parts of the confession were an appropriate contribution and a maximum of groveling, spiced with juicy detail.
We don't really understand why you have to be ashamed of natural behavior, provided that natural behavior does not harm any one. Can you say "victimless crime" ? Can you say "manipulation" ? Of course natural behavior is usually forbidden by the inhabitants of pulpits. Many such people are too old to enjoy it anyway. Remember St. Augustine? When venereal disease (today's STD) made him impotent, he raged unremittingly against all sexual activity.

FEAR
We have a friend who counsels sick and elderly--terminal--patients as part of an in-home and in-hospital service. He is a pagan with Druidic tendencies; he calms the fears of these poor people about where they will go when they "die". Of course the counselees also receive regular visits from the cucarachas (as Spanish-speaking nations call priests; cockroaches are black and creep around after dark). He often finds his counselees after such a visit literally terrified of what is going to happen to them and trying to figure out whether they should sign away their property to the church rather than to their natural heirs. If they sign it all away, the promise goes, they can at least get a pass to spend some time sitting on a cloud playing a harp rather than being roasted in eternal flame.
Of course eternal flames do not work as a threat to Eskimos. To Polar peoples, hell is a cold place; living somewhere that's eternally hot doesn't sound all that bad.

So that's it, boys and girls. Live a natural life. Have fun. Pay your religious taxes. You'll be all right. It really is a crock, you know.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
* Yvonne: I think I'll get addicted to something, go through rehab (making sure it's an ordeal), and sell my story to the National Enquirer. I could retire.

Deadly Combination

2010-01-18T08:50:00.000-08:00

Of course we are all concerned and dismayed by the devastation in Haiti. Experts knew that the capital, Port-au-Prince, was on an active fault line; the area had had bad earthquakes before. But the grinding poverty of the country and the corruption in its government have combined to mean that building codes have chronically been ignored; this has combined with overpopulation, caused mainly by the Catholic Church's no-contraception policy, to create a situation that has contributed to the disaster.
In among the aid being given out, we don't see anything from the much-vaunted Catholic charities. The aid may be there, but it certainly isn't very visible. Now Vatican city is a state unto itself, and it has the highest income per capita of any state or nation. Yet we don't see any vast pledges of money or help coming from Vatican City. And further, we are told apocryphically that the Church is still charging standard fees for masses for the dead and for burials. How two-faced can you get? (a) Don't send aid--and (b) profit from the death toll.
When will these people who call themselves compassionate Christians wake up to what their church is doing every day? Take one of Yvonne's one-liners for your own use, if you like:
Good people, bad leaders.

Life versus Death

2010-01-13T08:30:00.000-08:00

Two large shrubs bracket our front door--two witch hazels. Today, just apres-solstice, one of them is sporting an actual bud. Such a sign of life returning is more than welcome, especially since the little fellow is peering from a heavy blanket of snow.
Wiccans are fond of saying that Wicca is based in Nature. It is true that we respect Nature and are more than happy to see its repeated cycles; but we (Frosts) think Wicca is based in Life, as contrasted with Death.
The abrahamic religions have made a good thing out of Death--a good thing for themselves. They have taught people to be deathly afraid that even the most minor "sin" in this world will get the "sinner" consigned to an everlasting hell. Provided you follow the rules and regularly attend church, though, it will be all better. Whee. Your reward? You will sit on a cloud and play a harp while you grovel eternally to a neurotic deity of insatiable vanity.
Recall Jonathan Swift's words:
It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death
should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.
Death is as natural as being born. One birth, one death for each of us. That's what we are assigned. It's up to you, then, to pack between those two milestones everything you possibly can so that you don't have to keep coming back, going through the diaper stages and learning it all over again.
Life equates to survival. As soon as we are born, we start on a path of personal survival. As we pass through puberty, we begin to work hard on gene survival : first by producing children and then by trying to make sure that our name will not be lost. Many people are driven to acquire wealth, thinking that materialistic toys and buildings will survive with their name attached. (Donald Trump comes to mind.)
That's not for us, though we think some of our worthy thoughts may survive.
We ask and challenge you to live life and if possible to do something by which you will be remembered. Seek your own immortality.

What to Show What You've Got?

2010-01-07T08:34:00.000-08:00

As the holiday season settles down and we all get back into harness to deal with the real world, some old familiar patterns linger. Religious right self-appointed victims of persecution are claiming (yet again) that they are being injured. How? Because they can't put up on public land their precious creche or their precious artifact of one kind or another. Pick an artifact. In Arkansas this all took a refreshing turn: A group of people calling themselves the Arkansas Society of Freethinkers volunteered to put up their own "Box of Knowledge" display on the grounds of the capitol building in Little Rock. The booth featured such books as Richard Dawkins' "God Delusion" and other publications by atheist and (gasp) non-Christian thinkers. Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, John Lennon, Thomas Jefferson ... Recognize any of those names?
Oh, the screams. Oh, the howls of pain. Oh, the stalling and the balking and the hair-splitting. Verily I say unto you, it throbbed in the night.
Eventually everybody got to put up their display, and the dust settled ... until next year. It will be interesting to see what the persecutees present for their rationale as 2010 winds down. It may become a whole new chapter in their career victimology.
Meantime some thoughts come to mind:
1. If you've got something you feel inclined to display, what happened to displays on private property? On private property, people can do a lot of things they'd better not do on public property. (A suggestion: try to make it all look less like a yard sale of plastic imitations.)
2. We who don't march in lockstep--we pay taxes too. Get your trappings off the land we've supported with our tax dollars. (See 1 above.)
3. If you really believed your claims, you whiners, you'd go quietly about your business and your celebrations without having to flaunt your act all over town to the boredom of everyone else within range.

Happy solstice. We pay taxes too.

Sacred Places

2009-12-22T14:01:00.000-08:00

If you are like us, by this time of year you've reached the saturation point with all the gasping of conventional religionists about "sacred" spots and "sacred" places. The recent BS about a house found in "Nazareth" is just the latest gasper, one more example of a manufactured tourist trap. It's no better than the "graves" of Arthur and Guinevere, "discovered" when a big ol' church had a fire and decided to bait a lot of tourist/pilgrim revenue. Don't lose sight of the fact that Nazareth itself is an invented town; no such town existed in What's-His-Name's purported time.
Anyway, the question now is : What spot is sacred to you, and why aren't you (and we, for that matter) putting pictures and descriptions of pagan/Wiccan sacred sites on the web? There are hundreds of thousands of them. The Wells (Red and White) of Glastonbury, the Bend of the River Boyne, the tombs of Brittany ... everywhere you go there are places eligible to be called sacred. In fact, of course, the tree in your front yard or the one growing alone in the forest is also part of a sacred place. The very grass and foliage all make up the Sacred.
Think only of Britain's New Forest, site of the Rufus Stone; Glastonbury; the whole peninsula of Cornwall. The tombs of France; Carnac with its stone alignments; Gavr'inis; Beziers and Montsegur, where Cathars died in their thousands for their spiritual beliefs. In North America Yucca Mountain and Illinois' Cahokia, just for starters. Peru's Machu Picchu and the Nazca Lines.
What occurs to you? Where have you felt connected to the spirituality of times past?
Recently we saw the film Avatar and were pleased at the tremendously powerful message it portrayed from beginning to end, of a people who held their natural environment sacred in every way. How vividly their mindset contrasted with that of those who would destroy the planet to get at deposits of an important metal, here called unobtainium.
- - - - -
As you know, we Frosts are continually criticized for our honest and basic real-world attitude to gender relationships. Of course the majority of people can think of "deviant" relationships only in terms of the pejoratives applied to sex by the culture in which we life. How about considering that those relationships should be sacred and that sex done to produce children should in fact be a sacrament carefully thought out and reverently performed?
Identify for us your favorite sacred sites. We'd love to learn about them.
Blessed be those who hold themselves open to the sacred. Gavin and Yvonne

Politicizing Science

2009-12-10T14:05:00.000-08:00

Important people are gathering in Copenhagen just now to discuss global warming. We have learned that scientists doing real-world work on the topic have exchanged e-mails that discuss altering their respective findings. Who knows what those scientists now believe about the effect that greenhouse gases have on global warming? A firestorm has erupted as various interests horn in with strenuous efforts to (a) manipulate or (b) discredit the findings.
The hot air over global warming (all those portentous utterings themselves are surely contributing to the total output of hot air) is very frustrating. Global warming is an obvious fact. Polar ice and vanishing glaciers bear witness to the reality. The ice has never in any recorded history been so scant. The question then becomes : Whether greenhouse gases cause global warming. Are they simply parallel events, or is there a cause-and-effect scenario here?
Most mysteriously of all, the thing no one is willing to talk about is the finding on
global dimming.
This seems to be a deep, dark secret. It was first noted when air traffic was halted abruptly after 9-11, when all civilian air traffic was grounded. In those two days of silent skies, temperatures rose in the northern hemisphere by an average of 3 degrees. Other scientists had quietly been working on the problem for many years, and now there seems to be a veil of secrecy and a world-wide conspiracy of silence on the topic. Without the particulate absorption in the upper atmosphere, there would probably be no polar ice at all.
The efforts are only the latest in a long string of gradually intensifying situations in which hard science is being manipulated for the good of Big Business, Big Pharma, or Big Government. Attempts persist to get genetically modified food into Europe; though we can be grateful that resistance too persists.
Sometimes these attempts go sadly awry.
Because Big Business thought it could buy off a British investigatory panel, bribes were offered, bribes were taken, and the bribes were revealed. The hard science is there. Professor Arpad Pusztai of Edinburgh University unequivocally proved that GM soy led to brain damage in young rats. He was politically fired for his work--but then was hastily rehired when other universities, to which he had sent his findings, backed his position.
In other places politicized science has won the day.
Today in the United States we can buy hardly a product that is free of some GM content. Is the stuff safe? Probably not.
Millions of bottles of tap water (no, that's not a misprint) are sold despite the fact that mold-release chemicals in plastic bottles cause cancer. And we haven't even mentioned BPA that keeps the bottles flexible and soft. The water in the bottles is not separately tested. The bottlers shrug that off, claiming that they use just ordinary tap water from a municipal supply, which they say has been adequately pre-tested.
Two recent cases of immunization drugs are enlightening. (a) One drug is claimed to reduce incidence of cervical cancer--even though tests showed that it had little or no effect, and indeed could be deadly. (b) Recent tests of the H1N1 vaccine* revealed that it contains formaldehyde, antifreeze, and mercury. (There is strong evidence connecting mercury to autism. We have yet to learn what formaldehyde [an embalming fluid] and antifreeze can do down the road.) All this quite apart from the fact that the vaccine is grown in eggs and consequently is an allergen to some individuals.
More recently, the United States government came out with a new recommendation: Women should avoid mammograms. When they said this, they gave no reason; naturally enough, there was a tremendous outcry. When pushed to the wall, the panel admitted that, yes, mammograms cause cancer. They quoted quite high numbers for the number of cancers caused; yet the statistics are very suspicious. It looks as if the panel took the numbers for women who are genetically disposed to getting breast cancer with the BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene. British studies of 2004** showed lower numbers than the US on the number of caes of breast cancer--but they still strongly urged that mammograms be replaced with sonograms, or, if really necessary, with an MRI.
The industry that manufactures mammogram equipment and processes mammograms is hanging on tooth and nail. It is a multi-billion-dollar industry and they don't want to lose their income. We believe they will lose this struggle, especailly since if a mammogram does show a shadow, the next step is often a sonogram. Why not skip the mammogram entirely and go directly to a sonogram? Would that be too rational? Insufficiently dramatic for the bragging rights and the hanky-twisting of the woman involved? Would it cause discontent in the stockholders?
As with all these matters, we look to science for the impartial, objective truth. We look to them to tell us the tradeoffs. Does the autism-causing mercury in the H1N1 vaccine negate the thousands of lives that it would save? Yes, the labs used the mercury because they had to make the vaccine hastily, but does that justify making it dangerous?
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* GlaxoSmithKline H1N1 According to the package insert itself, the influenza vaccine contains formaldehyde, polysorbate 80, squalene, thimerosal, mercury, egg protein, sodium deoxycholate, and DL-a-tocopherol.
** Lancet, 1 February 2004

The Teenage Baby Problem

2009-12-02T05:56:00.000-08:00

The self-styled pagan/Wiccan community has severely criticized us Frosts, we hear, for (among other activities) advocating sex education and the introduction of teenagers to (oh gasp) sex. Indeed, at one point the right-wing fringe elements of the Wiccan community threatened to burn us in effigy (gasp again) because of our beliefs. Despite such foot-dragging, we still firmly believe that this nation is in deep trouble because of its head-in-the-sand attitude to realistic sex education for teens.
So guess what. That attitude of denial has come to bite authorities and all the abrahamic fundamentalist religionists firmly in the ass. Teenagers have rebelled against the just-say-no paradigm, which they (rightly) view as absolute hypocrisy. They can see for themselves adults or near-adults enjoying sex in TV and on the web.
We learn that the lowest recent teen birth rate occurred in 2005. In 2008 it was up an average of 7 precent. That may not sound like much--but it means over 40,000 extra actual live birth to teens. Nearly 90 percent of teen girls are now single mothers. Apocryphally, from talking with high-school teachers, we suspect that the birth rate will climb another 10 percent in 2009--meaning almost 100,000 extra teen births. Of course this does not include twice that many abortions.
You may not be aware of some recent trends in teen attitude to sex.
* Pregnancy parties - Groups of boys and girls meet and do all the sex they can stand. The girls' aim: to get pregnant without being able to attribute the pregnancy to a single partner.
* Sexting - The use of cellphones to receive and transmit sexually explicit pictures and to arrange copulation dates and pregnancy parties.
* Juicing - This expression may be less crude than the f-word; however, it has an additional dimension: It means totally unprotected sex. At today's teen pregnancy party, we are given to understand, the girls try to get juiced by several different partners.
Of course juicing also means that American teens have the highest level of STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) of any developed country in the world. The rate is some 30 times higher than in Germany and 20 times the level of EU nations as a whole.
* Babydaddy - Today's expression for the unknown father of the child--not lover, not fiance, not even steady or boyfriend--and never by name. With this approach the pregnant young woman cannot tell Social Services who the father is. Everybody gets a free ride.
Questions arise. Why are teens engaging in these activities? What creates this mindset in them? They know full well that they can have protected sex and get most of the enjoyment without the resultant baby. It seems, though, that it is not raging hormones; instead
1. Many of the girls do it for simple and straightforward economic reasons. Their family, and they themselves, are often starving, or at least living on the breadline. Fortunately for them, many high schools are now running baby-sitting services; and HUD will provide an apartment, medical care, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program--SNAP.
2. It may be also that some of the pregnancies are jailbreak pregnancies--anything to get out of the repressive family context. Even though they are in dire economic straits, many parents, including some who call themselves pagans, will have nothing more to do with teen daughters who have "sinned".
3. Sociologists tell us too that some of these pregnancies--pregnancy as revenge--are to shame the parents. Revenge for what? Maybe for perceived wrongs, or for the "gratitude" the daughters feel they have never received.
So long as there is stubborn silence, there can never be anything like a full and satisfactory resolution of the reasons.
The highest ratio of births is in the southern tier of "red" states, where fundamentalism rules. The top state, by the way, is Nevada, running 77 births per 1,000 teenage girls. These births are highest in non-hispanic whites.
The situation is dire. Apart from encouraging what might be called a French attitude to sex, in which contraceptive measures, abortion, and the morning-after pill are all available and free without tattling to parents, we can see that the situation will not improve if the root cause is economic. It looks as if we are going to have to face up to some kind of a federal allowance for teenagers.
Do you have feelings about these topics? We'd like to hear from you.
Yes, apple pie and motherhood are an essential part of the Norman Rockwell-type American dream. But (here comes Yvonne's reality smack--you knew it was coming, didn't you?) even when the babies have lost their entertainment value, even when the Cute Factor plummets to zero,

you can't take 'em to the pound.

Plan B

2009-11-29T18:19:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, Gavin studied mathematics in college. Because of that study, and perhaps because he listened to the family's nightly dining-table discussions of their galvanizing business, he runs his life with what we call a Plan B approach. What that means is this: Any given project or life decision must include an alternate plan that can be put into action if the original plan does not work out.
During the time he worked in the Autonetics Division of North American Aviation in California of the 1960s*, that attitude drove his engineers completely crazy. When the group was assigned to design some new and different piece of electronic equipment, his constant question to the engineers was, "If it doesn't work, what do we do then?" Instead of waiting till rollout through the long schedule of some projects, it was better to work a Plan B in parallel. Thus when an engineering failure did occur, a backup system was ready.
For almost everything you do in life, there is a possible Plan B, though sometimes it takes quite a bit of thinking out. In some cases the approach might be considered redundant; but in other cases it can literally save your (ahem) center of gravity.
Take a simple example. The pressure inside Gavin's maturing eyeballs was too high. If it had stayed that way, the result would have been glaucoma. The doctor recommended that he use Travatan drops. Those drops seemed to work ... but they had several possible side effects, ranging through depression, chest pain, slow heartbeat, and yes, death--long odds, but nevertheless possible. Discussions with the doctor revealed that laser surgery on what is called the angle of the eye could achieve the same result as those drops without the risks implied with the prescription; but to do the surgery, the surgeon had to go actually inside the eyeball. Gavin asked, "Why not combine two things: cataract surgery (since you estimate that work is probably something like one year in my future) and the laser work on the angle?"
In the School of Wicca we had to consider way back in the 1960s what would happen if the School failed. The answer to that was to work out a second source of income. At first that took the form of raising hogs and then turned into writing books and finally, upon retirement, into Social Security.
Always have a Plan B. Two examples: (1) If you don't like the ingredients of the vaccines for swine flu, you could think about strengthening your immune system. This is known as approaching the matter from the Other End. Get your immune system up to speed with more exercise; perhaps taking some oregano-oil capsules and natural Vitamins E and C will prevent a bad attack of flu and probably many other illnesses too.
(2) You and a companion are waiting to check out at a row of checkout registers. Let one partner stand in each line. Whichever line moves the faster, that's where the person with the shopping cart will move to.
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* That's where he and Yvonne met.

Peripatetic, but Now Home

2009-10-29T08:30:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, we have just returned from a series of trips to various Pagan Pride Days and other meetings and festivals around the nation. Instead of writing numerous letters to each individual person or group that hosted us, we want such parties to be widely known and acknowledged for their generosity. We have deliberately not mentioned surnames; it's not our place to out anybody who feels they can't afford to be outed. Please, every reader, know our boundless gratitude. Face reality:
Together we are changing the face of this nation.
Here is some of what happened.
1. Cindy and T.J. in Erie arranged for us to attend the Erie PPD and to visit the Unitarian-Universalist fellowship for a presentation. Here we must also thank Diana and Rich and all the four-legged beings who opened their dwelling, for their hospitality and for the comfortable bed.
2. We move to the Mountain Mabon Mysteries near Stanardsville VA. Our thanks to Deb for inviting us and for all her effort in our behalf, despite the imminent arrival of Evan; to wonderful Catt for feeding and looking after us. We are getting old, after all, and do need a certain amount of logistical support to get around. Indeed, everyone on site was kind beyond the demands of politesse. What a variety of skills they demonstrated.
3. On southward to Little Rock AR and meetings with pagans from the area, at El Paso Community Center, and then a wonderfully successful presentation at the Unitarian-Universalist fellowship of Little Rock. Our choreographer here was the Egyptologist and our warm hostess Fran, and we slept at Krystina's residence. We owe both these good people, and their associates, a great debt.
4. We spent a couple of pleasant days down in Hot Springs with David and Bryen and Pa Don, and got a chance to meet (too briefly) Tii and Ra and their front-door greeter. Then it was on to Conway for another really wonderful session with the departments of Religious Studies and Philosophy, and the heads of both departments, at University of Central Arkansas. They told us that no speaker earlier had had such a numerous attendance; somebody figured that about 85 people came in. Then it was on to a potluck meet-and-greet supper with Werfriends at the home of Beth and Stephen (or Steven? sorry), organized principally by Uni.
Many of the people we met had really never had a chance to see for themselves what pagan/Wiccan fangs and hairy palms actually look like. We were as open as we knew how to be, in the hope that any reflexive adrenalin would be calmed down and stabilized.
Throughout all this caper we owe thanks to Krystina for giving us her own bed and space in her dwelling despite her busy schedule; also to Bryen and David for transportation and bed.
4. Then it was northward to Fayetteville and Springdale AR (near the foot of the great Walmart shrine in Bentonville) and to Debra, who hosted us for a week while Gavin had the flu for the first part and she herself had flu the second part. Debra, Cody, Mitch, assorted schnauzers, and a Maine Coon cat all played their roles in keeping us stable. We gave a presentation at Passages book store, did a book signing at Hastings, and presented at the Pagan Pride Day in Fayetteville.
5. The trip northward into Missouri brought us up to our old friends of Greenleaf Coven, a coven led by Pat and HP Bill for more years than they or we can remember. They held a Witches' Ball together with what we call the Samhain Seminar : a series of talks of which all were not just highly enjoyable but also thoroughly informative. Praise to the scholarship that enriched us. A self-effacing lady with a French name shyly got introduced and then left. After her departure someone told us she had left us a mind-bending gift appropriate to the Craft and to the season of the year : mead, a beautiful wooden bowl, and tea towels. Come on, Lady. We can't have reticent, indeed furtive, behavior of this nature. Next time our paths cross, let us thank you properly! Fair is fair.
Again, Pat hosted us to a room at the very comfortable Lamplighter Inn in Springfield.
6. So we're home once more, after nearly three weeks on the road. Three weeks is a l o n g time. Gavin seems to have recovered, whereas Yvonne is now fighting a bronchial manifestation of some kind. But as she says, a few days in her own matrix, with her own washing machine and her own bed, should fix her up, especially if we can summon the resolve to do our customary self-directed aquarobics.
We have mentioned many generous people. Numerous others worked more behind the scenes so that we were less aware of their efforts. This is not by any means to disregard them. All we can say is, thank you all enormously. We hugely enjoyed your company and the exchange of ideas, and one of these years we'll do some of it again.
So beware. We walk among you and you know us not.
Blessed be those who remain true to their considered path.

Tradition versus Reality

2009-10-01T06:01:00.000-07:00

A certain piece of tradition is believed to be older than the sutras. It dictates the directions that many use in casting Circle(s).
Once we had the pleasure of participating in a circle held outside Bateman's Bay on the east coast of Australia. We had thought we were well above the high-tide mark, there on the ocean sand, and were patting ourselves on the back for putting Fire in the North--but when we called the traditional Air in the East, a rogue wave came in and simply wiped the circle out. Okay. We didn't think too much about it, but simply did it all again. Another rogue wave wiped out that second circle. Hmm.
It came to us that possibly we hadn't gotten the directions right. Since we were in Australia and had already cleverly relocated North and South, we decided simply to rotate the whole circle (the circle to which we northerners were accustomed) clockwise 180 degrees.
That put Earth in the South, Air in the West, Fire in the North, and Water in the East--where the ocean was.
We had a very successful circle.
Back in the US, we began to discuss with others what should realistically be represented in each direction in the real world. The first and most obvious point was that we were standing on the Earth--so why imagine that North represented it? In India with the Himalayas at the north, it might make sense; but on the flat plains of Kansas or Missouri it surely did not.
Then we thought about East, the direction of new beginnings, symbolized every single day by the "rising"* of the sun to begin another day. Science tells us that all life began in the primordial oceans; so new beginnings should be associated with water and with such concepts as amniotic fluid or, back even further, with seminal fluid. Fire in the South, the direction of the sun at noon, seemed reasonable--except that some might argue that we are casting the circle at midnight ... We broke our pick thinking about this one, and left Fire in the South.
In North America the winds come from the West. Watch any broadcast from the Weather Channel. Therefore quite simply it seemed that Air in the West was a natural pairing.
That left us with North. Since we had already called Earth as Down/Below, we had several choices. They ranged from Wisdom or Intelligence through Ice. Finally we settled on Time; for without Time, none of this work or even ourselves would exist. As a sixth direction to complement Earth, we decided that Spirit should be Up.
These correlations fit our own group. If you live on the west coast with the ocean to the west, or you live south of one of the Great Lakes--or, for that matter, if you live on the gulf coast--where would it be best to put Water? There is an old admonition that the Witch should work her tasks in tune with the environment of her habitation. Many abrahamic religions follow tradition without question, whatever the cost to their integrity or the compromise of their common sense ... It's all too easy to see the effects of that mindset.
So what say you? Do you prefer the tradition or the real world? Which works for you and your group?
Blessed be those who question. Gavin and Yvonne
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* If we draw back to get an overview, of course, the sun does not rise. The earth sinks.

Sexual Freedom, or, If you don't like it, you can't have any

2009-09-25T05:35:00.000-07:00

The nature of spirit may be understood by a glance at its opposite, matter.
As the essence of matter is gravity, on the other hand we may affirm
that the essence of spirit is freedom. -- Georg Hegel (1770 - 1831)

Starting in the late 19th century, people all over the world began to search for a new religious freedom. They looked to nature, to the classical early cultures, and to the Orient for clues with which to form a new religious path. From that movement arose many of the great philosophers in the history of Wicca. This was the time loosely called the Enlightenment.
In the 20th century, whether it be Gardner in the New Forest, or Victor Anderson on the west coast of the United States, or Bertrand Russell, all were seeking freedom.
In the 1950s those early underground trickles became a flood--especially for the ladies, when the high-dose Pill was approved in 1957. Suddenly there was no penalty to having intimate relations with whom you liked. And we all took advantage of it.
It was the time of Hair on stage. The Canadian National Ballet permormed nude. In England the Lord Chamberlain even allowed nude figures actually to move on stage. Such breakthroughs were the mood of the time. Sexual encounters were free in a way that has now been lost. There was no hidden agenda. If a couple wanted to do it, they did, not expecting anything more than a pleasant interlude with smiles all round. Pantyhose replaced stockings and garter belts, making mini-skirts possible. Tight trousers of knit fabric left little to the imagination. Groups of consenting adults participated in open marriages. We often joke with some of the ladies whom we knew back then that it's a wonder the heads of their beds didn't collapse, given the number of notches carved on them. So you think basketball players and rap stars make out a lot? You missed it.
The coming of AIDS put a blanket on all that activity. The moralistic abrahamic faiths milked the hell out of that fact--not daring to acknowledge their envy. The "sin" of free sex was now linked with a horrible disease or death.
We miss the bad old days. People were much kinder and friendlier, and crime rates were lower, than today. People were too busy. Relations between covens were excellent. Of course we had our wrangles, but they were on serious matters of liturgy and content and optimum techniques for gaining enlightenment. We didn't scrabble in the garbage for ad hominem attacks on other members of the community. "Live and let live" was the general lens through which we viewed the world. One specific book publisher thought to benefit by breaking the atmosphere of friendship through "putting the Frosts on trial". It never came off, though; instead that meeting developed a saying " "I have the one and only true path -- for me!" Would that we could live by it today!
Somewhere in that dim and distant past of free-wheeling creativity Yvonne came up with an acronym for guidelines in sexual relations in that mindset : The word is DUPED.
No D isease
Not U nder contract as in a monogamous marriage
No unwanted P regnancy
No E xpectation of commitment
No implication of emotional D ebt

Neither party should be DUPED.

Additionally, we need to point out that the control paradigm--the eternal trinity--of the abrahamic faiths is
guilt, shame, and fear.
The sooner you can get past the idea that copulation is a sin and think of it more as a loving sacrament, the quicker you will be able to say "Up yours" when some moralistic churchman self-appointed guardian of the public virtue (virtue according to the terms he's been taught) says "You're immoral."
Optional is not mandatory, Reverend. Surely good, valid real-world morality (that is, ethics) teaches that kindness to each other is a first principle. Surely people would be better off to hear "If it harm none" than "Aha! Gotcha now!" Think of the charming film Chocolat.
You want to pass laws that make it illegal to (fill in the blank) ? Such an act would incorporate your religious belief and inflict what you've been taught into my behavior.* Hey! I'm a taxpayer too. You can tattle to your god and feel all righteous, but don't try to claim the moral high ground. Restriction is not freedom. Just get your nose out of my crotch and let me quietly go my way.
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* Examples: same-sex marriage; stem-cell research, abortion, assisted death

Hot News

2009-09-23T14:26:00.000-07:00

We're back--for a short time--after spending Mabon at the site called Heavenly Acres near Stanardsville VA. What a great celebration. The leader of the festival, Deb Striker, even though eight months pregnant, had a great organization and everything went off in real time rather than in eastern pagan time. Praise to every individual who supported her and helped to make this such an enriching experience.
We ourselves did seven presentations and workshops. Word must have gotten around : successive workshops were attended by more and more people. We owe special thank-yous : Catt, for feeding and looking after us so well; Deb's husband John for building the stage on which we enjoyed teaching Argentine tango and then watching such events as the fashion show and the dancers and bands.
We confidently expect this festival to grow, especially since it is one of the least expensive three-day observances in the nation. The site is aptly named : beautiful second-growth forest, with facilities here and there, and showers and toilets that actually worked. About 4 o'clock one morning Yvonne heard an owl rehearsing its riffs; and squirrels and other furred ones abound.
Now to other business. Tomorrow we expect to put one of our more thought-provoking essays on this site. Meantime here is some more scheduling news.

09 26 NRUUF's Nature Spirituality Alliance Day at the Southern Appalachian Folklife Center,
just a spit and a holler from West Virginia's Pipestem State Park in Summers County off Highway 20. 9 a.m. until sunset, for a donation at the gate.

10 9/10/11 Little Rock Arkansas arkansaspaganpride.thestoremore.com

10 17 Fayetteville Arkansas Heart of the Ozarks Pagan Pride Day
Northshore Pavilion 10:30 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Lake Fayetteville Road, Fayetteville AR 72702
information@heartoftheozarksppd.com

10 24/25/26 Springfield Missouri Greenleaf Coven's 31st Samhain Seminar
3 p.m. Friday through the weekend : speakers, readers, vendors, drumming on site
http://www.myspace.com/greenleafcoven

Lamplighter Inn reservations@lamplightersouth.com
[mention Frosts or ORPA (Ozarks Regional Pagan Alliance) or Greenleaf]
1772 S Glenstone 417) 882-1113

We'll see you at one of these events. If you are a newby to the Craft, or if you just want to see the weirdos at play, or if the itch of curiosity just won't be quieted, drop in and see what it's all about. Yes, we're deviant, but not necessarily dangerous. And anyhow, you've seen normal (shudder). How will you ever know unless you see for yourself? In-person conversation is so infinitely more satisfactory than brief, hasty questions on the web.
Blessed be those who hold out for first-hand experiences. Gavin and Yvonne

Our Immediate Future

2009-09-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

Again, we're back from visiting friends out of town, for a day at home to catch up on laundry and e-mail. We've just been to Erie PA for their Pagan Pride Day, a mind-blowing event. The spirit there and the sense of community were a joy to experience.
The trip was arranged by Reverend Badger and Cindy, to whom many thanks--more than we can express. We stayed in the home of Diana and Rich, to whom even more thanks. Their various cats and two dogs were kind enough not to complain even when we wore their fur thin.
While we were in the neighborhood, on the Friday we took the opportunity to lunch with Frank and Darlene Barney at Brushwood. Darlene was her usual feisty self, much to our pleasure; and Frank seemed stronger than when we had seen him in summer. Maybe it was the lower population density. Sending energy to Frank would be much appreciated--certainly by us Frosts. We confirmed our invitation to Sirius Rising next July; so you troops be there; you hear? See
camp@brushwood.com.
At the Pagan Pride Day we gave three presentations. The one that seemed most popular was "99 Ways Good Witches Go Bad", based on our book "Good Witches Fly Smoothly". We offered some of our books for sale; interestingly, no one bought a "Good Witch's Bible" (the update of "The Witch's Bible"); so maybe nobody is interested any longer in what it really says ... as contrasted to what the web says it says, or maybe wants it to have said.
On the Sunday we had the great pleasure of giving a presentation at the Erie Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship after their annual Blending Water service. That service occurs at this time of year, when people returning from vacation and travel bring with them a little water from memorable places. Glastonbury was well represented, as were Northern Ireland and many other sites.
Our plans for the immediate future? They include the festival in Springfield MO, now set for October 30 at the
Lamplighter Inn (417) 882-1113 reservations@lamplightersouth.com
172 S. Glenstone Springfield
For reservations, mention
ORPA (Ozarks Regional Pagan Alliance) or
Greenleaf
Anyhow, off we lurch. Until next time, blessed be all. Keep fresh batteries in your b**ls**t detector. Gavin and Yvonne

Syncretic Monotheism

2009-09-07T05:43:00.000-07:00

One of the things that the pagan/Wiccan community seems to find disturbing about the School of Wicca (among so many other things) is the School's espousing the paradigm of a monotheistic, unknowable Ultimate Deity. Of course most of the community cannot be expected to be familiar with the fine esoteric distinctions essential to scholastic anthropology and philosophy; these are specialist fields.
If there is postulated an Ultimate Deity beyond being "known" by the left-brain intelligence, that instead is something beyond "Nothingness" and is indescribable, one that can be comprehended only through the right brain, one that is at an entirely different level, that is beyond our simple comprehension at this stage of our development, then people who believe in such an Ultimate Deity are ipso facto monotheists. They are what is defined as syncretic monotheists. Since the Ultimate Deity is incomprehensible, a deity of any type and any gender, described in any terms, is acceptable to a religion/spiritual path that espouses such a Deity construct.
The monotheism taught by the abrahamic religions is defined as ethnic monotheism with its exclusive "My way or die" mindset. In such a monotheism only one god--a definable god (or goddess, for that matter)--is permissible; nothing else. All other deities are beyond the pale and are labeled evil, illegal, or satanic.
The Church and School of Wicca teaches syncretic inclusive monotheism that allows all types of gods and goddesses to be part of your personal pantheon. These lower-level gods and goddesses are often thought of in anthropomorphic terms and are comprehensible to our finite left-brain minds: They're a lot like us, though maybe more powerful. These are subordinate deities, of course--stone gods, jungian archetypes, devas, elementals, "entities", jujus, thoughtforms, ethnic specialties of every stripe. Call 'em what you will, they are creations of the human mind. In other words, without human attention, they would never have existed and would cease to exist.
We urge you to expand your awareness, to look up the scholarly definitions from original sources, and to understand that the right-brain undefinable idea is just as real, just as valid, as that of the left brain. The two categories are simply in different dimensions.
Now. If we have not insulted you and your beliefs, raise your hand. We'll get to you just as quickly as we can.
Blessed be those who question. Gavin and Yvonne

Who Founded Wicca?

2009-09-03T07:37:00.000-07:00

Fact Wikipedia, Ronald Hutton ("The Triumph of the Moon"), and many others claim that
St. Gerald Gardner founded Wicca and some claim thta Raymond Buckland brought Wicca to New York.
Fact They are all wrong. Although Gerald Gardner did a great deal to publicize Witchcraft, in only one place in all his writings did he use the word wicca--and he was not referring to a spiritual path or to a religion.
Whee. Let's have a schism.
We well remember the occasion in 1968 CE when the Coven of Boskednan gathered after a circle, each with a glass of Beverage, to discuss whether the thing they were working on should be called Wicce or Wicca. The final agreement was that it should be Wicca (the male form of the noun). Thus in 1968 the Church and School of Wicca was born. The Church earned its Letter of Determination from the IRS on August 31, 1972.
Many people have contributed to the formation of Wicca.
Gerald Gardner popularized his form of Witchcraft and with the help of Doreen Valiente formed Gardnerian Witchcraft. Later--posthumously--at some time in the mists of history, someone declared that it had now become Gardnerian Wicca.
Raymond Buckland brought Gardnerian Witchcraft to New York in 1964. In 1966 he wrote "Witchcraft the Religion". In 1971 June Johns wrote "King of the Witches"; Stewart Farrar wrote "What Witches Do"; and Leo Martello held a "witch-in" in New York City's Central Park.
Our (Frosts') first use of the word Wicca to identify a spiritual path and a religion was welcomed and embraced by the community, especially the community's feminist side. Raymond Buckland formed Seax Wicca in 1973; in that same year Reclaiming Wicca, a Feri tradition, was born based loosely on the teachings of Victor and Cora Anderson.

It is amusing to see how Wicca has moved back in time. Indeed, one could now easily believe that there was an ancient Roman religion called Wicca and perhaps even one in Catal Huyuk in, say, 14,000 BCE. Of course there may well have been elements of the modern reconstruction in the thoughts of those earlier peoples. Certainly we find glimmers of them in old Tantra and in Jewish mysticism, particularly in the concepts of timelessness and oneness associated with Nirvana and the indescribable, unknowable Ein Sof. And goodness knows, there was a time before Pope Gregory dealt with the calendar, when people timed their festivals by the movement of heavenly bodies, not "on the first day of calendar month X."
We think it behooves self-appointed people who lecture, people who write, people who otherwise discuss this new vibrant spiritual path, to get their facts straight. If they can't be bothered, then their whole set of claims becomes equally suspect.
Historic sources, like the virgin, need to be immaculate.

Our Immediate Future - Frost Travels 2009

2009-09-02T10:48:00.000-07:00

The following events and presentations are scheduled firm. If you want to meet the Frosts in person, if you'd like to see their fangs and their hairy palms for yourself, come to one or more of the events listed here. Final updates will be posted not on this website, but at the websites listed with each entry. Completing websites will appear here as they arrive on our own Incoming.

September 6 Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship(UU), Beckley WV 11:00 a.m.
"Toward Enlightenment" newriveruu.org
September 12 Pagan Pride Day, Erie PA board@U-N-C-L-E.org
10:30 until dark St. Nick's Grove, Erie PA
September 13 Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship, Erie
"Megalithic Monuments"
September 17 - 20 Mountain Mysteries Mabon, Stanardsville VA
www.Mountain-Mysteries.com/Mabon.htm
September 26 Nature Spiritual Alliance Day, Appalachian South Folklife Center
Pipestem WV http://naturespirituality alliance.ning.com
www.folklifecenter.org
yurya2@yahoo.com
October 9, 10, 11 Little Rock AR arkansaspaganpride.thestoremore.com

October 17 ff Fayetteville AR

October 24 Springfield MO
Witches' Ball

PS PaTpl Thanks for your attention. You know who you are. Are you willing to divulge at least what state you reside in?

Supernatural? Paranormal? Abnormal?

2009-08-29T08:18:00.000-07:00

Okay, we're back--temporarily, at least. This season we're responding to more and more requests for presentations. Florida Pagan Gathering, Sirius Rising (New York State), and Kaleidoscope Gathering 20 in Ontario : all were wonderful festivals. Those who do not attend miss a lot of spiritual growth, a genuine glimpse of an alternative reality, a chance to kick back for more than the 20-minute downtimes of the workaday world.
Soon we will be running off in all directions again. The season is far from over.
Looking over recent mail, we get the impression that people are once again getting confused by the words the conventional religions use to promulgate their paradigm and their agenda. In that paradigm there are lots of things that you are not allowed to investigate. Such experiences are labeled, for instance, supernatural, paranormal, abnormal, or even mental illness. For endless centuries, ever since the Axial Age when dominating male gods took over from goddesses, we in the western world have been taught that we must avoid all those terrible devilish manifestations--although such manifestations occur in every culture of the real world.
Now here's what we call a reality smack.

There is no such thing as paranormal or supernatural. Everything in the world is natural. Do not fall into the trap of avoiding investigation of these valid experiences because some authority figure has told you they are off-limits.
This is exactly the problem we experience with the abrahamic gods and creation. "You must not investigate that. It's God", we're told. The off-warding hand is accompanied by tone and expression of chin-trembling piety.
Hmm. Pardon me. Why can't I investigate it? The juju will smack me down if I look behind the curtain?
You owe it to yourself to explore possibilities, and to develop your own faculties to accomplish that exploration. You should welcome experiences that allow you more comprehension of the mundane and the spiritual worlds in which we live : both the physical / temporal world of the here-now and the altered-state world of astral planes. We urge you to pay attention to impressions you receive in meditation. Most of them will be helpful; though occasionally, if your Guide is of a different era, you may want to avoid such suggestions as washing your clothes at the river bank. Recall, though, that the Guide has gone to great trouble to get the information to you. I'm afraid they probably must drink themselves to sleep at night when we behave as we do and tangle ourselves in our own underwear.
If we declare our personal independence from the influence of dominator priesthoods, if we open our minds to the guidance available, we can more closely approach the ideal of getting through the currrent incarnation with maximum growth and minimum pain.
Blessed be. See you at a festival. We'll publish the autumn itinerary next week.

Raw Materials

2009-03-20T07:59:00.000-07:00

Yvonne writes:
When we lived on the coast of North Carolina, we found the water table to be about three inches below the surface of the soil. Geologically, the entire coast might accurately be described as a wetland (the local word is pocosin). The word basin has locally been shortened to bay as in Bay River. Anyhow, natives claim the mosquito as their state bird. Humans in their wisdom have seen fit to dig drainage ditches everywhere to fit the land to serve for agricultural purposes. Indeed, it has become almost a rite of passage among a certain social stratum of high-school males to drive a vehicle into one ditch or another before graduation day.
Anyhow, this is all to set the scene for my real thought here. It concerns water lilies and silt.
The muddy bottom of the ditches is a fertile place indeed. Much, much material comes to rest there. The investigating shovel may find simple saturated earth, runoff fertilizer from the potato fields, waste from careless septic tanks--any amount of assorted material, all of it rich in nutrients. We city-dwelling humans are likely to scorn the material if we are thinking stereotypically; yet there is a class of life form that regards it as desirable. That is the life form that we call water lilies. Such plants put out hungry roots and ingest the material gratefully.
What do they do with it? They convert it into blossoms of unsurpassed beauty. Recall the Buddhist mantra, "Om mane padme hum!"--"Oh, God, the jewel in the lotus!" The lotus or padme perfectly symbolizes the upward-striving spirit in every human--yet its roots are nourished in substances labeled filth.
There is a metaphor here.

Greetings, Gentle Readers.

2009-02-20T06:24:00.000-08:00

We are delighted to receive a request for input regarding the Craft from a representative of MTV. She is looking for people between ages 14 and 25 who have discovered the Craft as an alternative spiritual path and who now may be uncertain how and where to follow up. Such seekers naturally feel the need simply to ask questions--but where can they do it safely? What source is (a) safe and (b) valid and (c) non-condemning? This when their family may not be exactly encouraging of their desire simply to gain information. And the seekers need to know they are not alone.
Anyway, here is the question the MTV rep has sent us.
We are casting for an upcoming episode of the award-winning series True Life. For this episode, we are looking for people who are involved in Wicca. We are focusing on the relationship of how hard it can be when a young person believes in something their parents don't understand. I would really appreciate if you could mention this on your blog, or at your group meeting. We hope to have the show cast by the end of the month.
If you could have people email their situations to Parents@mtvnmix.com with their name, age, location, phone number, and recent photo of themselves I would really appreciate it. The age range is 14-25. end message from MTV rep ...
This could heal lives, boys and girls. Please do respond with offers of help and with contacts from real-world individuals who are somewhere along the path to and within Wicca. Goddess knows, this sorry nation needs some kind of alternative option. Just look around you and weep.
Anyhow, each of you, be true to yourself. Those who don't like it can take it to the "lord" in prayer, no?
Blessed be each one who reflects. Gavin and Yvonne

A New Product Line for eBay

2009-02-13T05:36:00.000-08:00

In the Wall Street Journal of February 6, 2009, Ms Bari Weiss describes two cases of autonomous women taking steps to assume charge of their respective futures. Her title: "Putting Herself on Sale." These are Ms Weiss' gasping horrors.
Gasping horror No. 1: A 22-year-old woman is offering her virginity for sale. At press time, the top bid was $3.8M. Bari, is this woman claiming that because she has decided to sell hers, you must sell yours too? Repeat after me: "Optional is not mandatory." Does the term "consenting adults" convey anything to you? Clarify for me, please: How does her action hurt you?
Gasping horror No. 2: An educated, cultured woman is offering her ova for sale to people who want them. The same questions occur in my mind. Does she insist that you must imitate her? Are these not consenting adults making a rational decision in which they all can share? How are you hurt? And have you advertised your own ova for sale? Let me guess again--given your mindset, on a good day they'd get maybe $2.50 each.
Still, isn't it nice that you can hold the moral high ground and quiver with righteous indignation while you curl the lip at individuals who you claim have "sold out"? Let me guess--that you sleep with a Bible under your pillow; that you haven't yet caught on to the tired old eternal trinity of the dominator culture: Guilt, shame, and fear.
So how about this for a fresh idea? You run yours, and I'll run mine.
If you don't like my thinking, take it to the Lord in prayer.
Blessed be those who think.

"Must" Reading

2009-02-03T08:42:00.000-08:00

Many of you know that we "believe in" *
1. a pantheon of deities, of which all are human constructs;
2. a syncretic monotheistic Prime-Mover-type deity that set this existence off and then retired.
The other day in reading Richard Dawkins' "God Delusion", we came upon this description of the Abrahamic god of what is often called the Old Testament. We repeat it here for your amusement and perhaps your enlightenment. Do read the book, for one thinking man's take on a conventional path.
Our hope is that you will find as much validity in Dawkins' description as we have found, as one recovering Anglican and one recovering Baptist. Here's what he says.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

We urge you never, never to let a young person read a single page of the Bible without close adult supervision.
Blessed be! Gavin and Yvonne
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* Yvonne says, "Wait a minute! 'Believe in'? Sure, I acknowledge that lots of jujus-on-sticks exist; that lots of Jungian archetypes exist; that there are thought forms or (gasp) the idea of unseen specialists, if you will, in this or that aspect of human experience and longing. But believe in? Thanks, but I'm voting with my feet. Give me Guides and Elder Ones any day. Them I find credible, indeed essential, to my own spiritual path. Others need to find their own way.

Lonely at the Top

2009-01-26T10:32:00.000-08:00

We've recently joined a small book-discussion group in Beckley WV. We thought of the members as very open-minded--that is, until we played for them a portion of the School's tape "Walk through the Bible", a talk by the late Reverend Ron Parshley. At that point we found some of them were not at all open-minded. In his inimitable fashion, Ron the trained Jesuit priest showed that the Bible consists mostly of plagiarized folk stories concerning a tribal war god, cobbled together into some kind of narrative. His piece on the exodus and on the ark are classics of their kind.
We had thought that most people were aware of these flaws in the purported holy book, even those people who in their inquisitorial role caused millions of individuals to be burned in the middle ages. We were wrong. If you would like to explore these topics and to understand why we think what we think, we suggest these four books.
J. Robertson Pagan Christs
C. Hitchens God Is Not Great
R. Dawkins The God Delusion
R. Friedman Who Wrote the Bible?
Why the "normals" (and even these thoughtful authors whom I list) persist in calling Jehovah "God" is really beyond us. He's the only game in town? Come on. Without even trying, we've got a list of gods as long as our arm. If someone tries to lean on you and tell you about their juju-on-a-stick, insist at least that they stipulate which god they're talking about; otherwise, you don't have time to waste.
Be true to yourself; keep your mind in gear. Blessed be. Gavin and Yvonne

Frost Schedule '09

2009-01-15T14:53:00.000-08:00

Greetings, Pagans and assorted fellow Alternatives.
We have not really abandoned this blogspot; it's just that after our research trip to Europe things got a little out of hand. Our office secretary left, and the office is only now catching up.
Now we're in a paralyzing cold and (wouldn't you know?) we've both got flu or bronchitis or something that's making us flatline. Anyway, today's lunch included frozen snap peas from last summer's backyard garden and canned plums ditto. Some of the seeds we've ordered for summer '09 have begun to arrive. Everything will soon be back on track.
Please make sure to check the websites of these tentative dates below, and reserve the dates to cross-pollenize with like-minded people. If you have never done so, you will be wide-eyed at the spiritual boost it can give you. We're looking forward to seeing you at one or more of the festivals.

Here are our travel plans, current with what we know through 01 13 09 CE.
1. Florida Pagan Gathering (FPG), April 30, May 1/2/3, in Ocala National Forest FL. flapagan.org

2. Sirius Rising, Sherman NY, July 13-19. camp@brushwood.com

3. Starwood, Sherman NY, July 22-27. rosencomet.com

4. Kaleidoscope Gathering, Whispering Pines, Rockland/Plantagenet, Ontario, July 31 - Aug 4. www.kaleidoscope-gathering.com

5. Mabon, Little Rock AR, Sept 12. kremtvidge@gmail.com

6. Mountain Mysteries Mabon, Stannardsville VA, Sept 18 - 20. http.www.mountain-mysteries.com

7. Nature Spirituality Alliance Day, Pipestem WV, Sept 26. ning.com

8. Fayetteville PPD, Fayetteville AR, 10 17. www.arkansaspagans.com

9. Samhain Ball, Springfield MO, 10 24. wushih980@yahoo.com

See you there. Blessed be all. Gavin and Yvonne

HTSG Festival

2008-10-21T08:49:00.000-07:00

We're back home again (emphasis : again), this time after a trip to the Highlands of Tennessee gathering. We've learned to call it HTSG - Highlands of Tennessee Samhain Gathering.
What a wonderful time we had. Lady Amythyst is one of the most welcoming of any festival organizers; and for you troops who are in a financial squeeze, the price for the gathering--including food!--has to be the lowest in the western world.
We felt no negativity there at all. Everyone shared the intent to have a pleasant time, and maybe grow spiritually and experience some healing, in one of the most natural settings we've seen. Everything was very positive and forward-looking.
The site, Avalon Isle, offers camping space and some cabins (cabins for those who book early). It's well away from other habitations. So we'll see you there, won't we. Access is really easy from almost anywhere in the southeast, in the Knoxville/Asheville/Gatlinburg triangle. The campsite is open year round so you can get away from the mad rush by renting a cabin there in any season.
Avalon Isle's website avalonisle.org

2008-10-21T08:47:00.000-07:00

Home again, home again.

2008-10-14T08:31:00.000-07:00

Greetings, Readership.
At last we're back, and we promise to deal with individual e-mails as quickly as we can. Yes, we're still reeling, spiritually and physically, from the tight-packed month of experiences we've just enjoyed.
We had a wonderful trip and hit Europe at the height of an indian summer. The Guides must have put in a special order in our behalf for beautiful weather. Sure, there was a day or two of overcast and rain in England; without them, Yvonne would have asked for her money back. Brittany (Bretagne) did us proud; visits to Mont St-Michel, the Bayeux Tapestry, the ancient tomb at Gavrinis, and Point du Raz were just some of the many highlights.
In the normal French way there are many suggestions, both thoughtful and tongue-in-cheek, about the significance of the alignments at Carnac. We'd like to add one more: they were installed by a syndicate of Kodak and the makers of digital cameras as a giant photo-op.
In England most of the party were very taken with Glastonbury with its amazing spiritual energy and with our B-and-B hostess Koko, a leading light of the Avalon group. Local lore grows
by the day. Imagine the traffic cop pulling you over and giving you (a) a ticket and (b) an aura reading. Anyhow, Koko's group have just bought the church hall and turned it into a shrine to the Lady.
In Cornwall, finally finding the circle where Gavin was initiated was a high point for him. The circle now labeled on all the maps as the Nine Maidens of Boskednan is in fact not the Nine Maidens of Boskednan. It was originally a circle of 21 stones, or maybe 23. On-site inspection led us to surmise that nine of the stones had been moved to form another adjacent nine-maidens circle with one large rock serving as the hunch-back fiddler outside the circle itself.
(You probably know the story, found at this site as well as at the Jungfraujoch in Germany. A circle of women is dancing on a holy night, probably Beltane. A hunch-back fiddler comes upon them by accident. "You play for our dancing, and we'll straighten your back." Everybody goes away happy at dawn.)
At one semi-secret circle Yvonne the apprentice dowser dowsed for whatever would manifest, and was able to pick up a known ley line bisecting the circle north-to-south. Huge gratitude to the family who owns the land, and who cherish and guard the site, admitting only respectful people who (somehow) find it by word of mouth or by other means. Y's thanks to Lauren, her mentor in the skill of dowsing.
We spent just a couple of days in London and were fortunate enough to hear the Master of the Temple, Robin Griffith-Jones, give his Monday talk in the Temple Church. His presentations happen only twice a week and we ... just happened ... to stumble across it on our way to another meeting. Imagine. What staggering erudition he enthusiastically, generously shared with us. He summarized the history of the Templars and pointed out that the little cobbled road down which we walked from Fleet Street to the church had lain undisturbed since the 1200s when the Templars actually constructed it. The Master had several rather cutting remarks about Dan Brown's "The da Vinci Code." Because of our earlier commitment to a 2 o'clock appointment, we had no chance to ask him about Picknett/Prince's "Templar Revelation."
We were overjoyed and grateful beyond words that we had earlier read both Baigent/Lee/ Lincoln "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and the Picknett/Prince. Their information made the whole experience even more enriching and meaningful.
The low point of the trip undoubtedly was sticker shock. If it hadn't been for our good, generous friends who paid for the fares and covered many expenses, we could never have afforded to set foot on the eastbound aircraft, let alone to enjoy one experience after another. We have not obtained their permission to reveal their identities, but will long be indebted to them. Breakfast coffee at a mid-range restaurant costs $4 a cup (actually a mini-Cup, by Frost standards)--and there are no free refills here. You're still lucky, too, to get theatre tickets at $100 a seat. On the other hand, food in supermarkets is not unreasonably priced.
In St. Ives, life is a lot kinder and less pricey if you simply resign yourself to using a bike. A car? Forget it. Parking is literally impossible; and town councils seem consciously to make it more of a challenge than it actually might be.
We took hundreds of slides, and learned a lot more about stone circles and alignments. The pre-Christian community owes a tremendous debt to the many people who quietly make it their
responsibility to cherish the early sites and protect them from stupid people who would disrespect and even deface them.
If you want to see our slides and hear about the very unusual characteristics of the crystalline rocks that form the circles, come to our new presentation on megalithic monuments, scheduled for FPG in Florida and for Sirius Rising, as well as for several other gatherings with smaller audiences.
Off for another installment in the home-again laundry mountain. Blessed be all. G Y

Pagan Unity

2008-09-02T06:43:00.000-07:00

Greetings, patient readers.
Just a quick thought before we depart our matrix : How about if we label pagan meet-and-greet events Pagan Alliance Day -- PAD -- or Pagan Friendship Day -- PFD?
See you soon. Keep a light in the window. Blessed be all. Gavin and Yvonne

Pagan Unity Day

2008-08-26T14:51:00.000-07:00

It's probably a good thing that we two are retired. Our life is chronically so busy that even writing a blog keeps falling off the end of the schedule. And since we're leaving next weekend for four weeks in Europe, this blog will be the last utterance for another extended period.
What we want to do today is claim precedence for the title Pagan Unity Day. Notice the date of this publication and compare it with the dates of other claims.
Why? Apparently the title Pagan Pride Day has been taken over and cannot be used except with the gracious royal approval of some central authority--an attitude diametrically, violently at odds with the way we believe pagan/Wiccans should act toward each other. With an approach like that one, who needs Pat Robertson? After all, freedom is what we loudly tout in our actions toward each other; non? Yes, of course some people might actually have made a couple of bucks from using the name; though surely such an experience is unique in the world of alternative spiritualities that we Frosts are acquainted with.
So we hereby propose that everyone who wants to run a full pagan/Wiccan information-booth, meet-and-greet kind of day call their event a Pagan Unity Day, or Wiccan Unity Day. After all, our paths are not supposed to decree marching in lockstep, are they?
So who do we think/propose can use "Pagan Unity Day" as a title for their event? For now and forthwith, the answer is: Everyone. And we mean everyone.

The other day we had an interesting discussion abaout anti-discriminatory "statements" along the line of "This letterhead does not discriminate against ... " Well, against what? Against people who don't enroll in the same credit union we might belong to? Against people who don't use the same brand of ketchup we use? Against people who butter their toast north-to-south instead of east-to-west? Is it an act of discrimination when we say, "We will not discriminate against gays"? or "lesbians"? or "people with freckles"? Surely the very act of distinguishing and naming such stereotypes means we are ipso facto discriminating, exhibiting an attitude that says, "I'm so desperately tolerant that I won't discriminate even against those guys, though they're clearly sub-human and (gasp) different from me"? Whew--what a humanitarian attitude. Let's all be awed and grateful.
That's all for now; we'll see you in October. Or (wow) au revoir jusqu'a l'octobre. Blessed be.
Gavin and Yvonne

Walking Your Talk

2008-08-07T14:18:00.000-07:00

We're back from Sirius Rising at Brushwood. Some 1,200 or so assorted pagans, Wiccans, new-agers, had a wonderful time. The weather cooperated, mostly; and the Saturday-night bonfire, where we burned the Thunderbird of Communication, was as enormous as usual.
The idea of the daily community meeting ("village meeting") is to pool ideas for making things even better. There was much discussion on our joint carbon footprint and what attendees could do to "green" Brushwood. The final conclusion was that each person should bring such things as solar-powered path lights and solar panels for any electronic requirement at their own campsite.
The wood burned in the bonfire is generally scrapwood and offcuts from sawmills; still it makes a significant addition to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The unspoken mantra is, "My bonfire is bigger this year than yours was last year, so ha ha!" We've heard the concept verbalized as a dick-waving contest.
If you didn't see the PBS special last week on global dimming, you should endeavor to see a rerun of it; or go to the PBS website and see what you can call up. Anyway, the gist of it is this: Throughout the world significantly less radiation from the sun is reaching the earth's surface than reached it even ten years ago. In Israel, for example, monitoring instruments show that over the last 12 years radiation has diminished by 30 percent. Why should you care? Sunlight is the only source of photosynthesis for all the crops of the world, and the pattern extends worldwide. Experts estimate that we would be experiencing something like 2 degrees more global warming than is currently happening if the dimming weren't going on.
The principal sources of dimming are jet contrails, vehicle exhaust, and smoke. The question is, What can you do?
One morning at Brushwood as we walked away from the community meeting, we had to step over a pile of discarded soda cans thrown into the grass with a sprinkling of butts. This from professed earth-loving pagans.
Okay. You know what would make us happy--or happier? Congress, you pass a law (and occupant of the White House, sign it!) stipulating the following:
1. If you want to buy 20 cigarettes, you bring in 20 filters.
2. Any filters found abandoned on the face of the earth must be (a) recyclable or (b) compostable
Prove to me that I'm wrong, or offer a better choice of dispositions, and I'll withdraw my suggestion. Meantime, I for one am heartily sick of what smokers do to themselves, to me and my descendants, and to the face of the Mother. I am heartily sick as well at the thought that my tax dollars may be going to repair the ravaged bodies of individuals who have knowingly addicted themselves and now expect me to pay for their rehab.
And how about a federal law (not piecemeal state by state) mandating, say a refundable deposit of $1--that's not a misprint--on every aluminum can and every plastic bottle that passes by a merchant's cash register?
Who else feels the same way?
Sure, in some states you already get money back for the cans anyway--but people still can't be bothered to pick them up.
Ah well. We're just a couple of cynical old grouches after all. In another few years it won't matter to us. But if you have (or expect to have) descendants, don't forget. It could conceivably matter to them. Let us know.
Blessed be those who walk respectfully on the earth. Gavin and Yvonne

Researching Festivals

2008-07-10T13:59:00.000-07:00

We're sure that by now you're getting used to the erratic schedule on which we write blogs. Stay tuned: It looks as if it's going to get a lot more erratic. The middle two weeks of July we'll be at Brushwood Folklore Center (Sherman NY), the first week attending one of the best festivals in the northeast, Sirius Rising. (Remember Orion's dog Sirius? He's the reason we call this warm season dog days. In mid-July, the dawn sun rises between earth and Sirius.) The second week we'll be on site basically meeting old friends who will also atend Starwood: ACE's* massive festival and party.
Festivals and festival speakers seem now to us to fall into definite categories: Some festivals, those that refuse to pay speakers or even reimburse them for honest travel expenses, are only a money machine for the promoters. Other festivals pay to get good speakers and musicians but have a hard time breaking even. These, though, are definitely much more worth attending.
Speakers and presenters as well fall into two distinct categories: The "big names" who charge the earth and are pushing the same old tired message; and those who have a new and different view (which they have thought through past the point of ego-stroking blither). Here the pattern is to charge very little if anything, and to be well worth listening to.
With both speakers and festivals, then, we ourselves perceive a strong negative correlation (note: negative) between sincerity and profit.
So how can you tell which gatherings are worth attending? You really can't, unless you can psychometrize the announcements they publish. You pays your money and you takes your choice. After once or twice researching Festival X or Speaker Y, you'll at least have something to push against; you can review the experience and say to yourself, "Not this!"
We can promise that at the ones we attend, the organizers are not making much if anything in the way of profit. We ourselves ask for expenses but never an honorarium.
Meantime, get out and sniff around any festivals you can get to. Do your research. Look at the attendees and listen to them. Where do they fall on the Flake/Weird Index? Look at the program. Is it too bizarre or too hackneyed or too gasping to fit your interests?
By the way, has anybody got any ideas on ways we can compensate for the carbon footprint that we incur with the bonfires?--ways beyond making attendees pay for carbon credits.
We hope to cross paths with you at one or another of these gatherings.
Blessed be. Gavin and Yvonne
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* The Association for Consciousness Expansion