PAGAN MUSINGS

[Tony Kelly of the Selene Community in Wales wrote this
piece in l970.  It was published in l97l in the British
edition of The Waxing Moon under the title "Pagan Movement."
 Under the title "Pagan Musings" it has passed from hand to
hand and group to group all over the United States.  Tony
Kelly was one of the founders of the Pagan Movement in the
British Isles, which, with the Pagan Way in the United
States, began as a single group of researchers into ancient
goddess cults. They later divided, agreeing that each
country required a different approach in bringing back
Paganism.]

We're of the old religion, sired of Time, and born of our
beloved Earth Mother.  For too long the people have trodden
a stony path that goes only onward beneath a sky that goes
only upwards.  The Horned God plays in a lonely glade for
the people are scattered in this barren age and the winds
carry his plaintive notes over deserted heaths and reedy
moors and into the lonely grasses.  who know now the ancient
tongue of the Moon?  And who speaks still with the Goddess?
The magic of the land of Lirien and the old pagan gods have
withered in the dragons breath; the old ways of magic have
slipped into the well of the past, and only the rocks now
remember what the moon told us long ago, and what we learned
from the trees, and the voices of grasses and the scents of
flowers.

We're pagans and we worship the pagan gods, and among the
people there are witches yet who speak with the moon and
dance with the Horned One.  But a witch is a rare pagan in
these days, deep and inscrutable, recognizable only by her
own kind, by the light in her eyes and the love in her
breast, by the magic in her hands and the lilt of her tongue
and by her knowledge of the real.  But the wiccan way is one
way.  There are many; there are pagans the world over who
worship the Earth Mother and the Sky Father, the Rain God
and the Rainbow Goddess, the Dark One and the Hag on the
mountain, the Moon Goddess and the Little People in the
mists on the other side of the veil. A pagan is one who
worships the goddesses and gods of nature, whether by
observation or by study, whether by love or admiration, or
whether in their sacred rites with the Moon, or the great
festivals of the Sun.

Many suns ago, as the pale dawn of reason crept across the
pagan sky, man grew out of believing in the gods.  He has
yet to grow out disbelieving in them.  He who splits the
Goddess on an existence-nonexistence dichotomy will earn
himself only paradoxes, for the gods are not so divided and
nor the magic lands of the Brother of Time.  Does a mind
exist?  Ask her and she will tell you yes, but seek her out,
and she'll elude you.  She in in every place, and in no
place, and you'll see her works in all places, but herself
in none.  Existence was the second-born from the Mother's
womb and contains neither the first-born, nor the unborn.
Show us your mind, and we'll show you the gods!  No matter
that you can't, for we can't show you the gods.  But come
with us and the Goddess herself will be our love and the God
will call the tune.  But a brass penny for your reason; for
logic is a closed ring, and the child doesn't validate the
Mother, nor the dream the dreamer.  And what matter the wars
of opposites to she who has fallen in love with a whirlwind
or to the lover of the arching rainbow.

But tell us of your Goddess as you love her, and the gods
that guide your works, and we'll listen with wonder, for to
do less would be arrogant.  but we'll do more, for the heart
of man is aching for memories only half forgotten, and the
Old Ones only half unseen.  We'll write the old myths as
they were always written and we'll read them on the rocks
and in the caves and in the deep of the greenwood's shade,
and we'll hear them in the rippling mountain streams and in
the rustling of the leaves, and we'll see them in the storm
clouds, and in the evening mists.  We've no wish to create a
new religion for our religion is as old as the hills and
older, and we've no wish to bring differences together.
Differences are like different flowers in a meadow, and we
are all one in the Mother.

What need is there for a pagan movement since our religion
has no teachings and we hear it in the wind and feel it in
the stones and the Moon will dance with us as she will?
There is a need.  For long the Divider has been among our
people and the tribes of man are no more.  The sons of the
Sky Father have all but conquered nature, but they have
poisoned her breast and the Mother is sad for the
butterflies are dying and the night draws on.  A curse on
the conqueror!  But not of us, for they curse themselves for
they are nature too.  They have stolen our magic and sold it
to the mindbenders and the mindbenders tramp a maze that has
no outlet for they fear the real for the One who guards the
path.

Where are the pagan shrines?  And where do the people
gather?  Where is the magic made?  And where are the Goddess
and the Old Ones?  Our shrines are in the fields and on the
mountains, in the stars and in the wind, deep in the
greenwood and on the algal rocks where two streams meet.
but the shrines are deserted, and if we gathered in the arms
of the Moon for our ancient rites to be with our gods as we
were of old, we would be stopped by the dead who now rule
the Mother's land and claim rights of ownership on the
Mother's breast, and make laws of division and frustration
for us.  We can no longer gather with our gods in a public
place and the old rites of communion have been driven from
the towns and cities ever deeper into the heath where barely
a handful of heathens have remained to guard the old secrets
and enact the old rites.  there is magic in the heath far
from the cold grey society, and there are islands of magic
hidden in the entrails of the metropoles behind closed
doors, but the people are few, and the barriers between us
are formidable.  The old religion has become a dark way,
obscure, and hidden in the protective bosom of the night.
Thin fingers turn the pages of a book of shadows while the
sunshine seeks in vain his worshippers in his leafy glades.

Here, then, is the basic reason for a Pagan Movement; we
must create a pagan society wherein everyone shall be free
to worship the goddesses and gods of nature, and the
relationship between a worshipper and her gods shall be
sacred and inviolable, provided only that in her love of her
own gods, she doesn't curse the names of the gods of others.

It's not yet our business to press the law-makers with
undivided endeavour to unmake the laws of repression and,
with the Mother's love, it may never become our business for
the stifling tides of dogmatism are at last already in ebb.
Our first work, and our greatest wish, is to come together,
to be with each other in our tribes for we haven't yet grown
from the Mother's breast to the stature of the gods.  We're
of the earth, and sibs to all the children of wild nature,
born long ago in the warm mud of the ocean floor; we were
together then, and we were together in the rain forests long
before that dark day when, beguiled by the pride of the Sky
Father, and forgetful of the Mother's love, we killed her
earlier-born children and impoverished the old genetic pool.
 The Red child lives yet in America; the Black Child has not
forsaken the gods; the old Australians are still with their
nature gods; the Old Ones still live deep in the heart of
Mother India, and the White Child has still a foot on the
old wiccan way, but Neanderthaler is no more and her magic
faded as the Lli and the Archan burst their banks and the
ocean flowed in to divide the Isle of Erin from the land of
the White Goddess.

Man looked with one eye on a two-faced god when he reached
for the heavens and scorned the Earth which alone is our
life and our provider and the bosom to which we have ever
returned since the dawn of Time.  He who looks only to
reason to plum the unfathomable is a fool, for logic is an
echo already implicit i the question, and it has no voice of
its own;  but he is no greater fool than he who scorns logic
or derides its impotence from afar, but fears to engage in
fair combat when he stands on his opponent's threshold.
don't turn your back on Reason, for his thrust is deadly;
but confound him and he'll yield for his code of combat is
honorable. so here is more of the work of the Pagan
Movement.  Our lore has become encrusted over the ages with
occult trivia and the empty vapourings of the lost.  The
occult arts are in a state of extreme decadence, astrology
is in a state of disrepute and fears to confront the
statistician's sword; alien creeds oust our native arts and,
being as little understood as our own forgotten arts, are
just as futile for their lack of understanding, and more so
for their unfamiliarity.  Misunderstanding is rife.
Disbelief is black on every horizon, and vampires abound on
the blood of the credulous. Our work is to reject the
trivial, the irrelevant and the erroneous, and to bring the
lost children of the Earth Mother again into the court of
the Sky Father where reason alone will avail.  Belief is the
deceit of the credulous; it has no place in the heart of a
pagan.

But while we are sad for those who are bemused by Reason, we
are deadened by those who see no further than his syllogisms
as he turns the eternal wheel of the Great Tautology.  We
were not fashioned in the mathematician's computations, and
we were old when the first alchemist was a child.  We have
walked in the magic forest, bewitched in the old Green
Thinks; we have seen the cauldron and the one become many
and the many in the one; we know the Silver Maid of the
moonlight and the sounds of the cloven feet.  We have heard
the pipes on the twilight ferns, and we've seen the spells
of the enchantress, and Time be stilled.  We've been into
eternal darkness where the Night Mare rides and rode her to
the edge of the Abyss, and beyond, and we know the dark face
of the Rising Sun.  spin a spell or words and make a magic
knot; spin it on the magic loom and spin it with the gods.
Say it in the old chant and say it to the Goddess, and in
her name.  Say it to a dark well and breathe it on a stone.
There are no signposts on the untrod way, but we'll make our
rituals together and bring them as our gifts to the Goddess
and her God in the great rites.  Here, then, is our work in
the Pagan Movement; to make magic in the name of our gods,
to share our magic where the gods would wish it, and to come
together in our ancient festivals of birth, and life, of
death and of change in the old rhythm.  We'll print the
rituals that can be shared in the written work;  we'll do
all in our power to bring the people together, to teach
those who would learn, and to learn from those who can
teach.  We will initiate groups, bring people to groups, and
groups to other groups in our common devotion to the goddess
and gods of nature.  We will not storm the secrets of any
coven, nor profane the tools, the magic, and still less, the
gods of another.

We'll collect the myths of the ages, of our people and of
the pagans of other lands, and we'll study the books of the
wise and we'll talk to the very young.  And whatever the
pagan needs in her study, or her worship, then it is our
concern, and the Movement's business to do everything
possible to help each other in our worship of the gods we
love.

We are committed with the lone pagan on the seashore, with
he who worships in the fastness of a mountain range or she
who sings the old chant in a lost valley far from the
metalloid road.  We are committed with the wanderer, and
equally with the prisoner, disinherited from the Mother's
milk in the darkness of the industrial webs.  We are
committed too with the coven, with the circular dance in the
light of the full moon, with the great festivals of the sun,
and with the gatherings of the people.  We are committed to
build our temples in the towns and in the wilderness, to buy
the lands and the streams from the landowners and give them
to the Goddess for her children's use, and we'll replant the
greenwood as it was of old for love of the dryad stillness,
and for love of our children's children.

When the streams flow clear and the winds blow pure, and the
sun never more rises unrenowned nor the moon ride in the
skies unloved; when the stones tell of the Horned God and
the greenwood grows deep to call back her own ones, then our
work will be ended and the Pagan Movement will return to the
beloved womb of our old religion, to the nature goddesses
and gods of paganism.