Another World, SEPTEMBER 2021 Edition
Welcome to the eight edition of our supporters’ journal, Another World!
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Upcoming courses include:
Five Principles of Green Witchcraft, with Asa West (starts 11 September)
Being Pagan, with Rhyd Wildermuth (starts 2 October)
Land: Loss and Reconnection, with Alley Valkyrie (starts 1 November)
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In this month’s Another World
THE PAGAN MUSIC LIST 13
This edition features three bands: Heilung, Annwn, and Vas.
Also, the full archive of previous public editions is now updated here.
EMPIRES CRUMBLE 27: The Graveyard of Empire (video and Audio)
In Episode 27: The Graveyard of Empires, Rhyd Wildermuth and Alley Valkyrie discuss Afghanistan and the misuse of human rights and identity concerns that the US government employed then—and will again—to elicit support for imperialism.
“Here be monsters,” our maps read, held upside down and read in a mirror, while outside the closed windows of our minds breathes and sings an entire world we are afraid to ever visit…”
An audio version of Rhyd Wildermuth’s essay, “Here Be Monsters.”
“to speak about ancestry and ancestral traditions, we must first understand that the way these concepts are lived and experienced are much more real and present than the way scholars, academics, activists, and others speak about them. What is inherited from those who came before isn’t some abstract idea or material benefit, but rather a tapestry woven from still-living threads of memory, story, and ways of being in the world that cannot be contained in scientific or political categories.”
BEING PAGAN: OF GODS & SPIRITS
“ancient peoples took gods and spirits as a given the way we now take wind, rain, and storms as a given. We know such things exist, but unless we are a sailor, a farmer, or a meterologist, we rarely actually think about them except when the wind, the rain, or a storm is particularly strong and affecting us directly.
Pagan peoples appear to have looked at the gods and spirits in the same way. Priests, druids, shamans, oracles, mystics, and poets gave their time in contemplation of such things, but the majority of others only ever thought about the gods or spirits unless there was a problem, or they had particularly profound or disturbing dreams, desired a blessing for something they were about to do, or needed help with something they could not resolve on their own. At most, the “average” person tended a small shrine in the home, or visited shrines to ancestors on special days, or made prayers or offerings to a god a few times a year, and participated in community rituals that were often also festivals where the religious significance of the event blended seamlessly with the cultural “entertainment” aspects like drinking, feasting, and meeting potential sexual mates.
That is, the existence of gods and spirits was part of the cultural fabric of life itself, rather than a question to be complicated or a philosophical matter to be unraveled.”
Other Notes
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