THE WONDER: Science-Based Paganism

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S3E43 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host, mark, 

Yucca: and I'm the other one, Yucca. 

Mark: And today we are talking about all things related to the winter solstice and youe. Happy Yule, everyone, or whatever you choose to call it. Yep. Happy solstice.

Yucca: It's it's amazing that we're here already. I think we say that about every holiday. Really? Yeah. But we, 

Mark: we do, we just can't believe we're getting older. Is is what's happening here? 

Yucca: Yeah. Well, December thing seems like it just started and yet here we are already. So, yeah. But speaking of that, this is something that we've been doing for a really long.

I think that's a good segue into our first section here is let's talk about what this holiday is because it's based on something very real. This isn't just a day that we randomly assigned some random meaning to. It's something that humans. all over the world have been observing as far as we can tell, for thousands and thousands of years.

Yes. 

Mark: Yes. The, I, I just learned of a new New to me, archeological find in the wheelchair plane, which is where Stonehenge is and so forth. There was apparently a gold plate found with a a v incised on it, a large v, and the V is exactly 82 degrees. The angle is 82 degrees, which is the difference between the summer solstice and the winter solstice on the.

Hmm. So apparently this plate was. used as kind of a portable observatory in a way where you could shoot the sun on the summer solstice and say, okay, well it's gonna be over there on the winter solstice. I mean, for all we know, it might have been an engineering tool used to help build stone head . Yeah. Because Stonehenge lines up perfectly with the winter solstice, right?

With the sun rising on the winter 

Yucca: solstice. Right. And that, that kind of structure, something that we see again all over the world, we see that in the Americas and in Eurasia and, and really all over. That's right. And sometimes it's the winter solta, sometimes it's the summer. But it's the same ideas that we have been paying attention to.

What the, the relationship between where the sun is in our sky or the it's apparent position and what that means to the rest of the ecosystem that we're in. It'd be very important to. 

Mark: Right. Yeah. Right. I mean, we were talking about this before we recorded. I mean, in the, in the case of the wintertime where food is becoming very scarce, not only that, but there are fewer hours in the day to go look for it.

Mm-hmm. so. You know, noticing when the hours were going to start to get longer again would be a really big deal in terms of your survival. As we get later into history, we see that this is the time when all of the, the harvest that had not been preserved in some way by pickling or drying or smoking or salting or, you know, whatever.

Had to be eaten because things were starting to go bad. Mm-hmm. . And we need to get all those calories into ourselves so that we can survive the lean months coming up before eggs start to become available. And some of the earliest greens start coming up and the lambs start being born and all that kind of stuff.

Mm-hmm. , right? Yeah. . So it's a time That is it. It has kind of an internal paradox in it, right? It's the time to have a big party and eat a lot. So it's a time to get together, celebrate with our loved ones, share food, share, drink, share company in, and sort of keep that light alive through the darkest time of the year.

But it's also confronting the fact that things are gonna get tough. coming up in the next few months. These, these are not gonna be a lot of fun. So this is sort of the last hurrah in a way. Mm-hmm. , before we get to some very, you know, before the advent of modern supply chains and agriculture, these were times when things, things can get pretty 

Yucca: dicey.

Yeah. It's what you've been preparing for all. . Right. Really? Yeah. Right. This is what you've been cutting the wood for all year. Mm-hmm. , this is what you've been raising the food for. This is, this is it, right? Yeah. To 

Mark: get through this gap Yeah. Of the next couple of months, next three months, you know, depending on where you are, maybe even longer.

Mm-hmm. , that. Where the natural world is not going to produce easily available food for you. Mm-hmm. . And you've gotta rely on your stores. And I mean, that's an inherently anxiety producing phenomenon, right? Watching your stores get lower and lower and lower every day as you eat to survive. And trying to kind of eyeball, well, are we gonna.

are we gonna make it to the season when the birds are laying eggs and we can start to get some calories? 

Yucca: Right? So it has that, all of that around it. And I think there's also a bit of in a celebration of the darkness as well, right? Yes. There's a celebration of the light in the darkness, but also that.

Quiet darkness. This is, we haven't done an episode on the dark in a few years. We did a few years back. I think that might be one we should revisit. That's true in the next couple months while we are still in this dark period. And the, in the importance of that quietness and that time of reflection and that time of the waiting and the rest, that really comes with the dark of the year.

Right. And that's the. The time around the solstice is quite literally the darkest time of the year if you aren't lighting it up with, with artificial lights, right? Mm-hmm. . 

Mark: Yeah. And when you think about it in kind of grand cosmological terms The darkness is the source that the light kind of blooms out of, right?

Mm-hmm. , I mean, we start, we, we start with an incredible burst of explosive light, but very quickly everything cools off and we have this sea of undifferentiated particles at first, but as stars begin to kindle, light begins to come back into that darkness, and so it becomes, , it becomes a, a powerful metaphor for how things are born in darkness.

Mm-hmm. and, and then evolve into the the waking world. The daylight world, yeah. 

Yucca: Hmm. Well, let's talk a little bit about how, what, what that means to us personally as pagans. What is that in our practice? 

Mark: Sure. Would you like to go first? 

Yucca: Sure. So we use the framework of the wheel of the year in our household and the winter solstice.

This is the time where we're, we're thinking about those things that we've just been talking about. But we also, this is when we're honoring the forests as. So there's a lot of, of imagery for us and smells and things like that that have to do with the forest, especially the evergreen forest. And this also happens smack in the middle of just.

So many holidays, , there are just so many holidays this week that we're going into. I don't know how my kids are gonna make it through all the holidays because we have the solstice happening right in the middle. The Hanukkah starts . So we're recording this Saturday. So Sunday night, Hanukkah starts.

So they'll do that on my side with their softa. They'll do Christmas with their grandmother on the other side. And it's just this, this, all of this activity and bustling and just the celebration and the, you don't have 

Mark: an aluminum pole for celebrating Festivus. 

Yucca: You know, we don't, but I think that if I suggested that to my partner that it would show up , I'm pretty sure it would, we would have it.

But the, the solstice itself in the middle of all of that is a if. , we, we do secular Christmas and solstice is separate for us. Mm-hmm. than that is. Although on the other side of the year we do do presents with summer solstice as well, but the, the presents are, are Christmas presents. But the, the solstice is more of a moment of reflection.

Right. It's a, we'll wake up and watch the sunrise and watch the sunset and be. And spend a little bit of time going out. We'll run out if there's snow, we'll run outside barefoot in our little barefoot feet and come back in and sit in front of the fire and, and have that kind of reflective moment that you were talking about earlier.

That that reflection that, that comes along with this time of year that I think is something that isn't really emphasized in the secular. Approach to this time of year. 

Mark: So, yeah, I agree. I agree. I, sorry to interrupt you. Oh no. Please, please jump 

Yucca: in. Yeah. 

Mark: I mean, obviously the commercialization of the holidays has meant that.

it's become very much around stuff and accumulation of stuff, purchasing of stuff, distribution of stuff as well as lots of, you know, rich food and drink. Mm-hmm. , , and that seems to be MO and family, certainly family is a theme. Mm-hmm. , you know, for, you know, people gathering together, at least in the ideal mm-hmm.

Conceptualization. But it is true that the whole.

I'll, I'll come at this a little bit sideways. I'm, I'm an, I'm a singer and I'm, I've done a lot of singing of early music, medieval and renaissance music, and a great deal of what that, what the liturgical music of that period is about. And of course, it's all Christian. Mm-hmm. , but it's this, it's this contemplation of the great mystery, right.

The. The incredible thing that happened that, you know, where God made Mary pregnant mm-hmm. and, and it's a contemplative thing. It's a, it's, you know, sort of trying to grasp the mind of God in a way. Mm-hmm. , I think we, pagans have something very similar. We, we naturalistic non-theistic pagans since we're not thinking about gods at this time.

Right. 

Yucca: If some, some people do have this as the birth of of whoever their God is that, you know. Right. That is part of some pagan paths. Yeah. Yes. 

Mark: But I do think that in our tradition, This is the time of year when the natural world comes as close as it ever does to stopping. because of the cold temperatures, everything slows way, way down.

And what is implicit or potential for the coming cycle is only just starting to be conceived. Mm-hmm. And that's something that we can, can meditate on as naturalistic pagans. As atheopagan, because we can focus on what. Imagining for the coming cycle, what we're aspiring to in the coming year? For many of us, this is the winter solstice is the beginning of the new year.

Mm-hmm. , that's how I consider it. And so in many ways it's this sort of birth moment and at births we, we have a lot of dreams. for, for our children. We have a, a lot of things that we hope for for them. We wish them the best and we have pictures in our minds about what that might work out to be. And I think that that can be true of the coming cycle of the year as well.

Mm-hmm. ? Yeah.

So. . But you were talking about celebrating the forests and the evergreens particularly and the millions of holidays. 

Yucca: Yes. So, so 

Mark: many, so, mm-hmm. . So at, at a deeper level, what, what does this, what does this holiday mean to you, Yucca? What does it, what does it encourage you to do in your practice?

Yucca: This really is, this is a time. of reflection and being and I know you were just talking about the dreaming portion, but for me, that comes a, that comes a little bit later in winter. Oh, this is more of a, just being in the now. Here we are. I'm not, I'm not getting ready for anything now. Right. Got ready for the winter.

The winter is here. The wood is stacked. The, the, our water tanks are full. The our pantry's full and now, and in my work cycle too. You know, I just taught my last class for the semester. I'm not teaching well for, I do have some international classes, but I'm not teaching any of the, the North American kids until we're back in the, the new Year.

Right. So it's like, uh, no, I just get to be, just to hang out, to be, to exist, to kind of look at what, where, where I am right now, really just take stock, not in a. Planning for the future, because that will come, right? Yes. But how, but I can't really plan for the future until I'm very clear with where am I at right now?

And that's just what's mm-hmm. like on emotional level. And of course there's the practical too of, you know, don't, don't go to the grocery store without checking what's in your fridge first, you know, . So, but, so that's on a, but take that and. To for life. But this is like on an emotional level. So that's emotionally what we're doing.

But that theme also, you're talking about a family and just, just enjoying life right now. You know, it's really about that. Just enjoying, and here we are and you know, this is what we 

Mark: got. That's, that's great. And, and as you mentioned it, it's, you know, I, I, I feel, I guess that I do a lot of the same. I mean, it's a time to enjoy the pretty lights and the holiday traditions and.

not particularly to do work. Mm-hmm. or or even much planning for the future. When I, when I talk about dreaming and imagination, it, that's a very pre-planning Yes. Sort of state. It's just really sort of blue skying. Kind of what, what can we imagine possibly happening over the course of the next year?

Yucca: Right. think of it kind of like still being under the blankets in the early morning. Mm-hmm. , right? Where you haven't really started to make your list of, okay, what do I actually have to do for the day? But you're kind of in that like, oh, here I am, I'm okay. I'm awake when I'm in the soft blankets.

Just thinking about everything. Dreaming about everything. Huh. 

Mark: Yes. Warm and comfortable, which is so much a, an aspect of of what this holiday is supposed to be about. Mm-hmm. , , know, so many of the rituals that we do for Yule or mid-winter or, you know, whatever you call it, the winter solstice, have to do with experiencing cold and darkness.

Mm-hmm. for a while, just to really kind of rub it in, make sure that we Yeah. That we know, you know, what's really going on out there and just how harsh and and bleak, it can really be out there. And then bringing that light back into the home, back into where it's warm and sheltered and the wind doesn't get to you, and the precipitation doesn't fall on you.

And coming back into warmth and comfort again. Mm-hmm. . 

Yucca: Yeah. Hmm. So what are, what is it for you? . 

Mark: Well, let me see. To start with yes, there certainly is a flurry of holidays and we do have an aluminum pole on the 23rd. On the 23rd, we erect the aluminum pole and air our grievances in, in the time honored tradition of the Seinfeld Festivus.

Mm-hmm. . It's just so funny and we happen to have this old floor lamp with. Upright, that's a pole, so we just couldn't resist doing it every year. . But we do a lot of the, the sort of Christmasy yule traditions, like a yule tree and eating well and Let me correct that. Eating, eating richly heavily.

Yeah. Heavily. Yeah. Richly not necessarily. Well, although ne mayo's pretty good about making me eat my vegetables. . The, but the time of year, there's a, there's a. It's ironic because for many people this is a very stressful time of year and they feel the tremendous pressure to buy things for everyone and to deal with the financial stress of that and to do all those things.

We don't do gifts. . We would, if we had children in our lives, we would give them to children because it's really unfair to ask them to watch all of their peers getting gifts at this time of year and not getting any themselves. That would just be cruel. Right. 

Yucca: Oh, and especially if, if the, the peers are doing the Santa thing where like, it's a magical, it's a magical being who's bringing you these gifts, you know?

And, and you know why I Marcos next door, get a, you know, this, the. PS five or whatever they're on. I don't know what they're on now. Right. Why do they get that? You know, and, and you know, this magical being can't even bring me anything. Yeah. Or, you know, he brings me socks. Although socks are fantastic. We're big sock 

Mark: fans here.

Yeah. Boy, I, I love socks. . So, so because we don't do gifts, we're not really under those kinds of pressures and. Work stuff fades away because the whole. Commercial world other than retail, kind of takes a breath around this time. Mm-hmm. . Although that's certainly not true for many of the nonprofits that I've worked for, which are cranking out services like crazy for people who desperately need them.

Yucca: Sure. Yeah. Because people, people need housing and food and medical care and all, you know, that doesn't, in fact, much of that when it comes to medical care and things like that, that increases during the wintertime. Yes, 

Mark: it does. It does. Yeah. Yeah. So, but we just enjoy doing all of our traditions and having time to, as you say, just kind of be in the moment of the season enjoying our circumstances and enjoying We, we still have a few trees that have beautiful leaves on them.

Most of them are bare by now, but some of the very late changing ones are just kind of coming into their colors now. Mm-hmm. , And we've had a few rainstorms come through, which are always a delight to hear on the roof and go out and feel on your skin. Watching the sky a lot. Mars and Jupiter have been brilliant recently.

Wow. Yeah. And, 

Yucca: So many meteors 

Mark: too. Yes. Yeah. I, I heard that there were a lot of geminis. I, I didn't go look for them, but I heard that they, there were a lot of meteors. Yeah, 

Yucca: we spotted a couple, but it gets down into the single digits or the teens at night for us here. And Uhhuh, then Fahrenheit, so.

We, we limit the amount of outside time at, in the early morning ? 

Mark: I would think so. Yeah. I mean, our our low temperatures have been mid twenties. Mm-hmm. . So not, not too bad. Bad for the plants outside, but not so bad for for but not, not nearly as bad as single digits. Yeah. So, and it's also because there is that sort of generalized.

Cultural agreement that we're all going to do this together now. Mm-hmm. , what in, in whatever flavor that might happen to be, there are a lot more opportunities to see friends and so forth. I was mentioning before we recorded I have six Yu gatherings this year. We did quite a few Saturday.

We did the Saturday Zoom mixer, Yule ritual this morning. I'm going to meet with my ritual circle this evening. Then tomorrow the Northern California atheopagan Affinity Group meets. And then after that I'm going to The, the gathering of the Spark Collective, which is a ritual collective that I used to work with a lot in the East Bay east Bay area, San Francisco region, and then on Wednesday, The Solstice, the local Unitarian, the solstice itself, the local Unitarian Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans group.

is doing a winter solstice as well, that I have a roll in and then I'll come home and naia and I will build a Yu log and burn it and do a bunch of our things. So, Six distinct celebrations and I'm, I think I'll feel thoroughly ued by the time it's all over. 

Yucca: Yeah, that is, that's quite a lot. So, Hmm. And we were just talking about the actual time of the solstice itself.

So in, I'm in Mountain, so on Wednesday, that's 2 47. So for Pacific for you, that's 1 47. 47. Yeah. Yeah. And we like to set the, in our house, we set the alarm. And it's nice when it happens in the middle of the day. And when it goes off, then we'll all cheer because sometimes it does not happen in the middle of the day.

Sometimes it happens at three in the morning and you gotta wake everyone up to go, whoa, , and go back to sleep . But that's a fun thing to do, especially if you've got, if you've got kiddos, but I think kids of any age, sure, then enjoy that. 

Mark: Absolutely. I think if I were going to do that and it turned out to be three o'clock in the morning or something, I think I would re combine that with the midnight Margaritas tradition from Practical Magic and do that as well, which is a lot of fun.

So, mm-hmm.

So where are we? What, what else have we got to talk about here? 

Yucca: Well, it's always nice to talk about some suggested ri suggested, ah, that's a hard one. Suggested rituals and you know, kind of little traditions that people can try or share things that we do and see what kind of sparks people's imagin.

Mark: Yeah. Okay. Sure. Well, I am very fond of the eLog tradition. I, I think for one thing, I think it's very old. Mm-hmm. . I think the idea of decorating a special log and throwing it onto a bonfire at this time of year is probably something that people have been doing for many, many centuries. . If you don't have a fire pit that you can burn something outdoors in, or a fireplace indoors or a wood stove, you can drill holes in the top of the log and put candles in instead, and let those tapers burn down as a part of your tradition.

Mm-hmm. . But I really like to use the bottom part of last Year's Yu Tree. Oh. And. and I saved that for all year. Mm-hmm. . And then we bind it to a piece of split Oakwood so that it's big enough because the, the yield trees are only about three inches. Yeah. Mm-hmm. . So we used Twine to, to bind that to a, a piece of, you know, a third or a quarter of a log and then.

Evergreen branches and holly branches and pirate kaha with all the berries and missile toe and all those kinds of things into the, the twine to decorate the, the log. All with natural stuff that will burn. Mm-hmm. . So nothing plastic. and then we write our, our hopes for the coming year on little notes and tuck them underneath the evergreens and so forth.

Mm-hmm. . And then we take it out to burn mm-hmm. and let those wishes go skyward to wherever they will. And it just feels like, it feels like setting something in motion. Mm-hmm. , which is. . Just a really lovely feeling, I think. 

Yucca: Yeah. That's beautiful. Yeah. I've seen some just beautiful U logs that people have done.

Mm-hmm. , it's just a mm-hmm. . That's not something that we've done very much, but it's, it's something that we're interested in. Right. , 

Mark: well, you certainly have the circumstances for it. I mean, you, you, you use firewood for your, for your ordinary fuel, and you've got a fire pit outside and mm-hmm. , you know, all that.

Or you could burn it in your hearth if. Do you have a wood stove or 

Yucca: is it fire? We, we have a wood stove. But it's got a, a glass front to it so we can Oh, we can see. I like seeing the fire, so every day I clean the sit off of it so that we can see the fire in it. Oh, . So it'd be lovely. Yeah. And we do have the, the pit outside, so, yeah.

And all of the firewood stuff is a big part of this, this year, this time of year for us. Right. The kids, I'm sure. That was something that getting ready for the year that we had them do is make the little Kindle bundles. Oh. So as we were getting into fall and, and they're, they're so little right now.

There's not really a lot of things that they can do yet to really be uh, Significant contribu contributors to the, like, happenings of a house, right? They're four and six. Sure. But they're, they were great at tying these little bundles of sticks together. And every day when we use one of those little bundles because we also have a greenhouse that heats the house, so we don't have to have the fire going constantly.

So we do have, but we'll, we'll run it usually at night. So we start the fire up and we'll use the little bundle of sticks. They, their Kindle bundle and they get to go, oh, here's the, the bundle that I made, and, and they get to, you know, help light that up. 

Mark: That's great. That's great. Yeah. I mean, engaging, engaging children in, in the industry of the house.

I think is a really wonderful thing. I, I mean, so long as it doesn't turn into an endless list of chores that are just drudgery and, you know, sort of child labor. Mm-hmm. , 

Yucca: Yeah, we don't want like Cinderella type of scenario. . Yeah. . 

Mark: But you know, giving them an opportunity to feel like participants in all the stuff that makes the house go, I think is just a really wonderful.

Yeah. 

Yucca: Well, I think that's really important for, you know, just our sense of, of belonging and port and importance. And I think that that's something that we can extend to when we're talking about the holidays, right? Is that everybody get to have something that they feel that isn't too stressful, right?

Because sometimes people don't need more on their plates if they already have a lot to be doing. But something that is important that doesn't just feel. That they get to be part of that, that, that they're responsible for and that, you know, they bring this to the table I think is something lovely to do with them.

Yeah. With anyone. Yeah. Absolutely. So one thing , you were just talking about the eLog. One thing that we do is we make a lot of sew it for the animals. Oh. And we have little silicone molds, which are they look like little trees . And, you know, you can, you can find recipes online for Sue it, but it, it's really not that, that hard.

Right. You. You know, we use lard or tall and you get your fat and then you mix in your seeds and your berries mm-hmm. and all of that. But we'll make these little ones that, you know, they're a few inches across. Mm-hmm. , and then we'll hang the twine from it. And we had tried putting ornaments in our trees.

Before, but the birds just so they attacked the ornaments and it didn't work out. Oh no. So now we're making them the little seit blocks and hanging it up in the tree as our decoration, like our outdoor, that's tree. 

Mark: That's great. Yeah, I could see they actually use Mylar tinsel in the vineyards here to help keep birds away because apparently they don't like it.

Little flashes of light. They, they, they don't like the little flashes of light. So I can understand why they were attacking the ornaments. Get that thing 

Yucca: outta here, . Yeah. Well, and, and we have a lot of bird. We're a little like a bird oasis here, but it was the J's in particular, they were like knocking them down and could see they didn't like 'em at all.

So, uh, and I didn't want to put anything like tinsel out cuz I was, I was worried they might try and take that and use it for testing or eat it or choke on it. Right? Yeah. Wanna make sure that there's nothing that would be dangerous to them. . Right. And then I don't want the, those little pieces getting in the wind and mm-hmm.

Getting, messing all over the place. So I think whatever our celebrations are, it's important that we're being respectful and responsible to, to all the other life around us. Of course. Yeah. And that's another thing we try and do is, is not by a bunch of junk that is just gonna get thrown out, right? Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. , . So, so making little things for the gifts, you know, making little clay things and smell this time of year, I think smell any time of year, but I really associate. Some of the smells of like the Cinnamons and like frankincense is another. The cloves. Yeah. All of those are just so wonderful.

And the pine, we'll take we'll actually go and take needles cause we have a lot of, of pinon. Pine is the main tree that we've got here. It's like this little pygmy pine and we'll bring in the, the needles from it and sometimes the sap and you put, put that in boiling water on the stove. And you could do this with your, with your kitchen, you know, your electric or or gas stove as well.

It doesn't have to be a wood stove. And that just Fills the house with that smell. You can put other things in as well. If you have a little bit of cinnamon from the kitchen or your clothes, any of those, like pumpkin spice ones, those are gonna work really well in, in that. Yeah. 

Mark: Nice. Very nice. Yeah.

What was I going to say? There was something that went along with that. 

Yucca: Was it smells 

Mark: or were we back on the birds? No, it, it was back on the birds. Yeah. We, we have a lot of takers for our bird feeders at this time of year too. Mm-hmm. , the, the birds that don't migrate. It's it's not nearly as sparse here as it is where you are, I'm sure.

Mm-hmm. , but still we get a lot of customers this time of year. Yeah. We have a regular feeder that we put sunflower seeds in and then we have No. Is it sunflower seeds? Yes. It's sunflower seed pieces. Mm-hmm. . And then we have a hummingbird feeder as well that we put sugar water in. 

Yucca: Oh, so you still get hummingbirds this time of year?

Mark: We do. Yeah. We have hummingbirds here that don't migrate. Oh, wow. Because it's, it's mild enough that they can, they can take it through the winter. So 

Yucca: yeah. Ours are all in Costa r already. Uhhuh , 

Mark: they're, they're long gone. We have, we have pretty large populations of Canada geese here that don't migrate either.

They just hang out. Annoy everybody and eat amphibians and do what they do. , 

Yucca: I love birds. Me too, so much. They, they, they give us so much in entertainment. . 

Mark: Yes. That's 

Yucca: very true. Yeah. We have birds and, and we've got chipmunks that live around here. And on the warmer days, I think the chipmunks, they don't do like a full hibernation here.

They, they kind of wake up and come out in the warm days and, and they have like little wars with the, the birds around here. They'll chase each other back and forth and fight over who gets what, you know, what seeds and Oh. And we will also, we have we'll sprout some seeds for. Our animals too. A lot of bird seeded.

You can just take it and the same way you would sprout, you know, anything else that you would in the kitchen. You just mm-hmm. , soak it in the water and change the water out every few days. Or you could put it in a little bit of soil and we'd take that out and give them a little bit of green in the winter.

Um hmm. And so now we've got, that's. We've got a whole variety of folks who come to visit, 

Mark: so probably gives them more sugar too. Once, once the, once the plants germinate, they start generating more sugar, whereas the, the seed is largely fat. 

Yucca: Yeah. You know, it's definitely gonna change what the composition is.

We'll, we'll do a mix, so not just the sunflower, but like the millet and the all kinds of things for them. Yeah, we like, we, we spoil our birds. , , so 

Mark: I'm sure they appreciate it. 

Yucca: Oh yeah. But water is actually the most important one. Oh, I understand. Depending on where you live, where we live, water is, is not easy to get.

This time of year it might be a little bit different where you are, you're in a wetter, I mean, you're just coming out of your dry season though. But, but giving them fresh water, that's really the tricky fine thing to find this time of year. So that's another one of the kids' jobs is they go out with the you know, we clean out the bowl every day so that we're not letting any, we're not spreading any.

Diseases between the animals. So they go out and change the, they bring out a new fresh bowl of water, and then they take in the old one. We wash it up and get it ready to take out for the next day. So that's something that they can do as well. 

Mark: Wow, that's great. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's a simply a lovely time of year.

Mm-hmm. , I, I really enjoy the, the, the yule season. The many, many Solstice traditions that have grown up around it. And of course, we've only scratched the surface of all those traditions, you know, throughout the world that people have celebrated as a part of observing this important moment when the days start to get longer again.

And there is some prospect that eventually there will be more food. . Yes. Uh uh and. I don't know. In, in a way it sounds when, when you compare this sort of romantic dramatic story that Christianity has about Christmas and the meaning of the birth of Jesus and all that kind of stuff, the, the idea of describing this holiday as one that's basically about the food supply.

Mm-hmm. sounds a, it sounds a little. A little dull by comparison, but a little underwhelming, to be honest. Yeah. But realistically speaking, that's what's going on. We're, we're organisms and we, we like to eat. We don't do well when we don't, and this is the cycle that we're born into. So, I think it's a, a wonderful thing to reflect on years past and the conditions that people managed to survive through, um mm-hmm.

in order to bring us here. 

Yucca: Right. Yeah. And, you know, that's, that's what our great, great, great grandchildren are. You know, it's just gonna keep, hopefully keep going. So 

Mark: hopefully, yeah. Yeah. 

Yucca: and it's, it's lovely to think about that connection to all the other humans that have been, right, right. That have gone through something similar.

I mean, when you're at the equator, it's a little bit different, um mm-hmm. , but the higher and higher your latitude is, whichever way you're going. The more, the more and more noticeable, the bigger and bigger a deal the solstice 

Mark: becomes, Yes, I was watching a YouTube video yesterday by a woman who lives in the north of Sweden and winter winter's intense up there.

Yeah. I mean, there's very little light and she, at one point she put a chair outside and sat in the sun and she said, you. . You know that feeling when you're very thirsty and that first sip of water hits your mouth. Mm-hmm. , that's what it's like when the sun hits my skin at this time of year. Mm-hmm.

It's. You know, you, your body is just so starved for, for the sunlight. Yeah. And of course she takes vitamin D supplements and all that kind of stuff, which they do as well. But there's nothing quite like sunlight. We're, we're built to like it. 

Yucca: Yeah. Yeah. I was actually just talking with one of my students earlier today who's from a same part of the world, and he was saying that that day, is four and a half hours long for them when they get to the winter solstice.

It's about nine and a half for us, which feels short. Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. , but four and a half hour day once. Wow. 

Mark: Yeah, it's about nine where I am. I'm, I'm considerably north of where you are. 

Yucca: Yeah. I'm just about 36, 

Mark: so yeah, I think I'm, I think we're at 42. You're that 

Yucca: far north? I think so. Oh, 

Mark: okay. , maybe 40.2. I don't know.

I haven't looked somewhere that, yeah, . Yeah, somewhere. Somewhere in there. So, yeah. And my hope for all of our listeners is that you have meaningful observances if that, if that's what you want. And if not, that you have a good long break. Mm-hmm. , and a, a relaxing and restorative time because I do think that this can be a restorative time if we don't drive ourselves crazy with busyness.

Yucca: Right. If you have cats, make sure to get some cat snuggles in Oh, time of year 

Mark: for that. . Yes. My cat is sleeping just over there, just like four feet away from me. Mine's 

Yucca: on top of my keys. left the keys on the table. He's right on top of them. So . 

Mark: So listen everyone, we have really enjoyed spending the last it's, I mean, we're coming up on three years now of doing this.

And thank you for taking this journey with us around the course of the Wheel of the Year for 2022. It's been, it's really been a great cycle and we've had wonderful comments and feedback and input from listeners and we're really looking forward to doing more of this coming up, starting next week.

Yucca: That's right. So happy solstice. 

Mark: Happy Solstice.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at [email protected]

S3E42 TRANSCRIPT: ----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca,

Mark: And I'm the other one, Mark.

Yucca: and today we're talking about surviving the holidays as a pagan.

Mark: right?

Yucca: Yes. So welcome to December . Here we are. There's, there's a lot to go into with this, and later on in the month we're gonna come back and talk about the different traditions and projects and things that you can do.

But today we're gonna start with the, the kind. The, the more secular approach to the holidays and all of the family expectations and all of that cultural stuff that's going on. They kind of, everybody shares regardless of whether they're Pagan or Christian or whatever they are.

Mark: Yeah, exactly. One of the things that is very weird about the mainstream culture is that it, it seems to load nearly all of its holiday festivity into a five week period or six week period at the end of the year, when historically there would've been. Celebrations around the course of the year, you know, harvest holidays and, and so forth.

And there would've been. You know, several days taken out to celebrate those things. And so it seems as though with all of this ology compressed to this very short period of time, it can just be very overwhelming for people and it can give them a sense of never quite doing it well enough,

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: right? That that feeling of the obligation to make it perfect and that it never is quite

Yucca: right? It's supposed to be special. It's supposed to be this magical, but, but, but, but, but, but yeah.

Mark: right.

Yucca: And whenever I hear people talk about it, There's almost always this underlying, there's this exhaustion behind it, right? There's this, there's an excitement about it and there's so many wonderful things, but people just seem so exhausted just because of what you were talking about.

Trying to get all of that in, take a whole year's jolliness, and stick it into those few months or few weeks, excuse me, not months.

Mark: Yes. And I think, you know, some of that is this sort of set of unfair expectations that we put on people to, you know, to create this. Event

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: set of events. But I also think that there's other stressors that go into that, into that mix. You know, it's like you're gonna have to deal with your family more if you, if you do that, you know, for most people it's like, okay, I'm gonna have to deal with my family more.

Well, there are usually, for most people, there are stressors around that.

Yucca: Right. Even if you, even if you dearly, dearly love your family, there's all of those dynamics I find getting back together with my siblings. You know, we're adults. We've been adults for decades, but instantly it's like we're children again with this. Same, you know, picking on each other and all of the ridiculousness, you know, and, and we have a, a pretty decent relationship.

But that's even with a decent relationship that, you know, there's still all of that, all of those emotions.

Mark: Sure, sure. And I think that, you know, with parents particularly, you know, parents will treat you like a child for your whole life. Un unless they're really pretty together, parents

Yucca: Well,

Mark: figure out that you've, you've finally grown up.

Yucca: but it's hard that all kind of blurs together. Right. You know, it was yesterday. They were changing your diapers.

Mark: Right, right. And you know, this brings, you know, it brings you into engagement with philosophies of parenting, right? Because maybe the grandparents just want to indulge, indulge, indulge, indulge. And you as a parent have to put some breaks on that and say, no, I'm sorry. You know, candy for breakfast doesn't work.

Yucca: Or enforcing that the kids get to have boundaries. The kid gets to say no, you know, or things like that, you know,

Mark: Yes, you do not.

Yucca: particular thing is that

Mark: do not have to hug Weird Uncle Ralph

Yucca: Yeah. So, and then, you know, on top of that, in, at least here in the Northern hemisphere, the weather has changed. We're in a colder time of year.

People are indoors. There tends to be more illness, and we're not even taking into account, you know, covid or anything like that, but just people are, there's, people aren't always feeling good this time of year, and we're encouraged to be eating all of these sweets and foods that we normally wouldn't eat.

And so, We're putting ourselves in these, yeah, more alcohol. We're just in a more vulnerable place emotionally and physically and asking so much of ourselves at the same time and so much of others,

Mark: Right. Right. And that Then, oh,

Yucca: buy everything. We're being asked to buy everything and be told about how it won't be magical without it, and you need this and you need that, and you're getting tricked by, by companies that spend millions and millions of dollars to get your attention.

Mark: Yeah. And that of, I mean, the, the financial stresses, you know, that's a whole other level of stressor that, you know, that happens with

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And

Yucca: And this year particular, right? That's something that happens every year, but there's a lot of challenges right now with all of that, just, you know, on a global level.

Mark: Right, right. Yeah. So there's all that. And then if you were of an a. Religion. Then there's the layer of, okay, well how do I then live in a a way that I find fulfilling and meaningful? And not run a ground on somebody else's judgments. Right. Whether it's that you're weird or that you're evil , it's, you know, because either of those are pretty, yeah.

Either of those are pretty unpleasant to wear, honestly. And so that's this sort of brew that the holidays is, right? It's all those kinds of things. The long list of. Tasks that have to be done and the decorating and the the buying and the just everything. Plus. You know, wanting to be as a non theist pig and wanting to say, you know, actually it's the winter solstice for me.

That's, that's what I consider most meaningful. And here's what I'm gonna do to carve out some time to observe that on top of Christmas or Hanukkah or, you know, whatever, whatever more mainstream holidays you may be going to celebrate.

Yucca: And I wanna pause this here for a second and say, it might sound like we're sounding a lot like wrenches right now. We are both Mark and I adore the holidays, and this time of year we're just starting with the, okay, how are we gonna address the, the self care and the balancing? And again, next week we're gonna get into here's some fantastic traditions and things you can do.

But, but that we do really need to look at it from lots of different angles, right? And underst. , there is stress and we do need to take care of ourselves during this time period, as well as the, the more joyous side of it all.

Mark: That's right because the hope, of course, is that we come out of the holidays feeling fed, right, feeling energized by all of the, the festivity that we've had. Even if it's tiring we can catch up on sleep, but you know, to feel as though we've had these meaningful kind of golden moments in the course of, of going through the holidays.

That's, that's really the goal. And in order for that to happen, you gotta take care of yourself in the meantime. Otherwise, the current of the holidays will just sweep you along and That's a very out of control feeling, and it's not good for you.

Yucca: Yeah, so why don't we start with the kind of commercialism side, right? How, what are some strategies that people can have to be more aware of that and more intentional with it?

Mark: Okay, well the first strategy that I think is really important is to broaden the definition of gift. Because capitalism obviously wants to sell you a product. They wanna sell you a thing in a box. and that thing is made of resources that were carved out of the earth and may very likely end up in a landfill in not too short order.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: So it may not be the most, it may not be the, the, the best choice to choose a thing in a box. Now let me, let me put a caveat in. When it comes to children, you know, to to smaller children, my philosophy is let them have the equivalent of the, the secular winter solstice, holiday, the Christmas, because they will feel terribly deprived and terribly sad.

If they don't have that experience, that doesn't mean they have to be mountain with gifts, but, I, I believe that in the case of children, you give them

Yucca: of it. Yeah.

Mark: And you give them things in a box.

Yucca: Yeah, we do both. We'll talk more about this, but my family, we do, we do both Solstice and Christmas as separate holidays.

Mark: right? Right. So, broadening the definition of what constitutes a gift means experiences. Experiences can be gifts. And that can be. Tickets to a concert. It can be a date night. It can be you know, we're gonna go dancing in this particular place. It can be you know, let's just go get coffee and talk for two hours.

When do we ever get a chance to do that? It can be, let's go for a hike. There are lot, and, and many of those things don't have to cost much or any money depending on your relationship with the person. It can be. How about a massage or there are just, there are a lot of different things that you can do that will be in many ways, more memorable for people and don't involve the purchase of a thing in a box.

Yucca: right?

Mark: So broadening the definition of what constitutes a gift, I think is really important. In some cases, broadening in some cases, a gift can be something like, here's three hours of free childcare, right? I'm gonna, I'm, I'll watch the kids. You, you go and do whatever you want to do. Believe me, that's a very, very welcome gift for a lot of people.

Yucca: is. I will wash the kids and wash your dishes if you want. Extra. You know, a bow on top there. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, these are things that are tremendously kind when someone, you know, opens an envelope or you can put the, a little gift certificate for whatever it is in a box, right, and wrap it, and all that kind of stuff. People will gen generally be very warmed by the fact that you want to put personal attention and time into your relationship with them. Excuse me

Yucca: things that you create. I mean, one of my favorite gifts I ever got was a,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: I mean, brother-in-law wrote us a poem and it was just so thoughtful, and you can tell that he really worked on it. And it, you know, I, I have it up. I don't put a lot of things on the wall. I've got it up on the wall because it just has stayed with me for all of these years, just how amazing it was,

Mark: How lovely. Yeah, and people are creative in all kinds of ways. I mean, the handmade gift. Not to be confused with the Handmaid's Tale, the hand hyphen made gift is a wonderful thing. You know, whether, whether it's a piece of writing or a piece of music or a compilation CD of music that you think the person would like or a Or, or something from, from a local artist,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: because I mean, to me there is a categorical difference between an artwork that was created by a local artist that is trying to sustain themselves through their art and something that was manufactured in a factory in China.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: They're, they're just, they're not the same. You know, supporting your local producers of beautiful objects, right? That's a wonderful thing. If, if, if the kind of person that you want to make a gift for is the sort of person that appreciates that kind of thing, then by all means, you know, do that. And I should say, now, I, I mentioned kind of the, the first part of my formula earlier, which is about making sure that children have.

Gift receiving experience. What we do is we don't do gifts as adults.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: We really don't. I mean, when, when we need something, we, we get it.

Yucca: Mm.

Mark: and so what we have done in the past is we put up a, we put up a yule tree, a mid-winter tree and decorated and all that great stuff, and we put treasures underneath.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Things that we have that we just love, that are really cool. Like I have an antique uranium glass slipper that that phosphorouses under ultraviolet light because it's uranium glass, right? They used to make that and it's just this very beautiful little thing. So it's one of the things that goes under the tree and it gives us a sense of kind of wealth.

You know, look, look at the cool things that are in our life. You know, objects from nature to appreciate, you know, antlers and bones and skulls and abalone shells and, you know, all these wonderful things. So we, we don't do the gift thing for adults. And we might make an exception once in a while if there's something that seems like particularly needed or wanted on the part of some adult that we love.

But the amount of stress that is taken off of you by not having to buy a thing for this long list of recipients. Is profound. It will make a huge difference in your experience of the holidays.

Yucca: Yeah, it really does. And I, I wanted to add on a little bit with what you were saying. You talked about the different types of gifts and then also for the children. You know, giving them the, the traditional kind of box gifts, but that's something that you can do both of, and as time goes on, the ratio of which kind of gift they're getting as they're becoming teenagers, as they're growing into adulthood, it shifts what, what you're doing with them,

Mark: Right.

Yucca: And so then it's just a natural thing and it's not, it's never. Being deprived. It's about just what this is really about, is about the, the love for each other and the gratitude and the giving and the, you know, to use the to be stereotypical, the spirit of giving, right. It really is. Right. And, and being about that and not the, the object right now there is also, there are a lot of, of practical things that this time of year.

You know, coming out of harvest, being about to go into the, to these very cold times of year when there's not a lot coming out of the garden, there's not a lot being produced, of being ready for the cold to come. So there's, there's some practical part about, you know, the giving the socks, the, that sort of thing that just.

To being prepared materially for what's to come there. There's an element of that as well, which I think is important just to keep in mind that that's one way that we do show love is to make sure, hey, you've got, you've got your warm socks for the year, right?

Mark: Yeah. You're, you're, you're gonna be comfortable.

Yucca: yeah.

Mark: Yeah, that's, that's a, that's a great thought. In Iceland, it's traditional to give books for Christmas, and Christmas Day is a day of sitting around in warm socks, drinking hot chocolate and reading books.

Yucca: Oh, wonderful.

Mark: The,

Yucca: Cuddling with kiddies too. I, if they've got cats, right? Cat cuddling.

Mark: Yeah. You know, those kinds of traditions they make for some very warm memories. They really do make for some super nice times. And having downtime like that in the holidays is another thing that's really important. When we talk about when we talk about self-care that's certainly one thing to be considering is when am I doing nothing?

Yucca: right?

Mark: know, it's, it's, it's hard to imagine that it's possible, but you gotta do nothing sometimes.

Yucca: Or at least. Have nobody else's mind in yours. Cause we've really lost solitude, especially in the last decade or so as, as the social media and smartphones and all of that stuff has just kind of invaded into our personal lives. So there's so little time that we're ever simply alone with ourselves, and I think that that's essential, right?

I think we're social animals. We need to be around other people as well, but, , but especially in the dark of the year,

Mark: Yes.

Yucca: to be alone a little bit is, is just vitally important,

Mark: I, I completely agree. And ironically, the inverse is true as well because you, it's a time for gathering with loved ones and for, you know, celebrating the fact that we have people that love us in our lives and, and all that good kind of stuff. But you can go overboard with that. People, people, especially introverted people, or neurodiverse people who get overwhelmed by too much social stimulus really need their, their alone time.

And so it's important to, to plan for that and make sure it happens.

Yucca: Yeah. And thinking about both, it's kind of like in the dark of the year. We we're celebrating the light as well. I mean, that's a lot of what the Christmas tree with the lights on it is about, is bringing that light into the dark. But we're recognizing and seeing both. It's a celebration of both. So I think that that's one way to look at it with the, with the family, but with self as well.

Right. Solitude and company.

Mark: So wanted to talk a little bit about a couple of other gifty sorts of ideas. There's always food, know, baked goods. I mean, an incredible gift would be, you know, cook dinner for people and bring it to their house, you know, the week before. Before the big event, you know, something, you know, just when things are going super crazy, you know, give people a meal that they don't have to think about. You know, just, just being aware of what people's needs are and, you know, thinking about your own, you know, your own. You know, where are the places where you get really exhausted and you think, oh God, I wish I didn't have to do X. Well, if somebody else did X for you, wouldn't that be amazing?

Yucca: Mm-hmm. right.

Mark: Yeah. So, I really encourage that, that the incorporation of that, that personal touch into gifting Either through experiences or through handmade things or through which includes baking and cooking and all that good kind of stuff. And then also because there is there's a guilt factor in in. Commercial acquisition as well. Just really being mindful, you know, of where things come from, who you're buying from. There are, you know, there are tons of Etsy stores, there are tons of indigenous sort of. Internet based stores that you can order things from, you know, figure out who you really want to be giving your money to.

Is it some international conglomerate with shareholders, or is it, you know, just somebody who's trying to, trying to get by? 

Yucca: Hm.

Wonderful. Well, why don't we, why don't we talk about the second part of this which is the family gatherings or the social gatherings. Maybe not necessarily family, but maybe the office gatherings or whatever it is because it's a big one, right? There's a big one in terms of whether you are of the same religion or not, but also just dealing.

The various personalities when people are in this kind of heightened place to begin with.

Mark: And I, I think a great place to start with that is the recognition that in those circumstances, everybody is under a certain amount of stress,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: except possibly the most garous extrovert, the. Pretty much everybody else is feeling some level of what are people gonna think of me? You know, how this is the office party.

How is my boss thinking of me? You know, there's, there's weird Uncle Ralph his weird opinions. How am I going to avoid getting reigned into a long conversation with him? All those, all those things, right? So under having a little compassion for the other people in the room is very helpful in, in my experience.

It is, it is so challenging for us as people, and this is a weird thing to really get that the other people around us are fully fleshed out human beings with internal lives and, you know, their, their own.

Yucca: story.

Mark: Their own journey, their own aspirations and their own internal voices that nag at them and all that kind of stuff.

There's a, there's a term for that, that realization called Saunder which when I heard that, I was glad that there was a word for it, because I think it's really important that people have that experience of others. It makes them more compassionate and more humane. Sa, S O N D E R.

Yucca: Mm. Okay.

Mark: And I'm not sure what language it's in.

The, so that, that's a place to start is understanding that everybody may be a little bit on edge, a little bit keyed up because they're. At, at some level, when you're doing social engagement, there's a performance aspect to it, right? know, I, I wanna make sure I'm acting appropriately. I wanna make sure I'm, you know, not displeasing the people around me, all that kind of stuff.

Yucca: Right. Reading everything correctly and Yeah. And responding and, and, and just being compassionate for those people. Yeah. And for yourself too, right? Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, so, so now you've got these social engagements that you've gotta go to. Well, how do you take care of yourself, especially as someone who practices aio paganism or non theist paganism, or some other variety of naturalistic earth honoring path. You know, as someone who is an outlier.

Philosophically and spiritually, how do you kind of stand in the truth of yourself while at the same time not picking fights with others that may have strong opinions about that? And I guess my first answer to that is that if their opinions are strong enough, you don't.

Yucca: great.

Mark: You, you, there's no point in, in, you know, trying to win an argument with some rabidly, right wing, evangelical Christian who just wants to tell you that you're going to hell.

Yucca: Right. So the, so the first step is, is this something that you're going to engage with or not? Right? And in many cases, you may simply choose not to, but in the situation, in the event that you do choose to, right? Then thinking about before you go into that, how are you going to prepare and how are you going to respond for it? You know, you, you might choose something like doing some sort of, you know, shielding ritual before you go in, maybe doing some. Premeditation on role playing of likely scenarios that are gonna come up. Practice, practice some of your deflection techniques or expressions that you're going to use. If it is, if you've decided that it's really valuable and worth it to you to be there for whatever that reason is, right?

Cause it's not our. Job here to be telling you what you should or shouldn't do. We're not, you, right? We have no idea what it feels like to be you or the shoes that you're in, but we're just encouraging you to think about how to protect yourself in that situation and still get the, what you're trying to get out of it.

But no, at the end of the day, you're, you can't control anybody else, right? You cannot control the outcome. You can work on trying to get the outcome you want, but know that you're not, you can't control.

Mark: Right?

Yucca: Right? And if you're gonna go into this situation, you've gotta be prepared for that possibility.

Mark: Yes. So part of thinking about that, how you're gonna protect yourself is how disclosive do I want to be with this particular group of people. It's your office party, for example. If the subject comes up, you may wanna say, well, my family celebrates the winter solstice. You don't need to go any further than that. You have a right to have your religious beliefs in the workplace, just like everybody else does. But, so you may want to sort of express this is, you know, this, this is what me and my family do. And then there may be questions, well, how does that work? And what's that about? And you can explain as much as you're comfortable with in

Yucca: Or not, you don't.

Mark: or not. Yes, exactly.

Yucca: And here's the thing, depending on how you feel about it, you don't, you don't owe them that. You also don't owe them the truth. Right.

Mark: true too.

Yucca: That's, that's up to you. If you don't feel like that's something you wanna get into, oh, wonder how was your Christmas? Oh, great. You don't need to say, oh, actually I don't practice, you know, I don't believe in Christmas or

Mark: I don't

Yucca: like that.

Mark: Christmas.

Yucca: You know, you don't owe 'em anything, it's fine. It's however you wanna handle that.

Mark: Yep. Yep, that's true. And that's, that's an example of where, of where, you know, being literally truthful can actually be a lot more harmful than, you know, applying the, the, the social lubricant of the little white lie. That just lets things keep clicking along smoothly. And of course we have to be very judicious about deciding when those things apply, but it bears saying that A lot of people would be a lot lonelier if they were fully candid about everything in their lives. with everybody around them.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. And so, you know, we've been talking about the context of an office party, but that may also be the same, but you have the same things to think about with the family gathering whether you're the one organizing that or the one attending it, or, you know, And again, maybe it's not just one gathering.

Maybe you've got three gatherings and you're going to the in-laws and yours and all, and then all of the different sides, you know? So this is something I would encourage kind of sitting down, like literally sitting down and just having a little strategy party with yourself, right? If you do journaling or something like that, it's a wonderful time just to maybe make some, just write down some of the.

Possibilities and the strategies that you wanna have and what, what are your values and, and what do you hope to get out of it, and what do you wanna protect yourself from? And, and just be, go into it being aware because once when you're aware, you have a, a better chance of being able to respond in a way that you want to respond when you're not caught off guard.

Yeah.

Mark: right. Yeah. And the other thing to remember is that. And this is something that may not leap immediately to mind for people that come out of traditions like Christianity that require that you only be a Christian and not anything else, naturalistic, paganism is not like that. You can go through all of the rituals of, of a Christian Christmas gathering and no harm, no foul.

You haven't offended anybody or betrayed yourself or hurt yourself or anything.

Yucca: Yeah, there's

Mark: You can.

Yucca: gonna be mad at you about it.

Mark: That's right. You, you can, you can have and still do all of your own celebrations and rituals on the solstice or as close to the solstice as works for you. And there's nothing wrong with that. So there's nothing hypocritical about it.

So you don't necessarily need to, you know, lead the, the prayer to Jesus. But you can bow your head and just sort of be there. That all that's up to you. And it's, it's perfectly okay to play along in order not to create conflict.

Yucca: Yeah. As long as that feels good to you, right? If it, if, if that doesn't feel good to you, then you don't need to be, you don't need to put yourself in this, that situation, right? So,

Mark: Yeah. And, and that really is important to say because there are, I mean, I know there are a lot of people for whom it's like, I couldn't not go to my parents' Christmas. Gathering. Right? I couldn't not go to that. Even though they know that they really need to betray themselves deeply to be there. And when confronted with that kind of a paradox you really need to think seriously about whether you're gonna go.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: You know, it might, it might actually be the, the better part of Valor to just say, I, I can't come this year. I, it just, it doesn't feel like it would be right for me.

Yucca: Mm.

Mark: And you don't have to go into any more detail than that.

Yucca: And here's the 10 of cookies that I baked for you,

Mark: Yes,

Yucca: Or whatever, whatever it is that might smooth it out.

Mark: Uhhuh

Yucca: Yeah, so we actually last year we did a, a full episode specifically on this. So if this is something that people are, are kind of wanting more of definitely check out our episode from last year on, on this.

Mark: was that a year ago?

Yucca: It was a year ago. Yep.

Mark: Oh man.

Yucca: right. We would've talked about this early December maybe, maybe even late November. So it just flies. But why don't we transition now to some of the things that we can do during this. Time period in preparing for the holidays, throughout the holidays in terms of self care.

Right. And again, we'll get later into some of the traditions and stuff that you, we can do the specific holiday celebrations. But but is there something that you would suggest to start with Mark?

Mark: Well, I start with the body.

Yucca: Mm.

Mark: I mean there's all the psychological stuff that we, that we go through at this time of the year, and there are all the techniques that we have for working with the psyche, but getting enough sleep,

Yucca: Absolutely.

Mark: eating, eating some semblance of a decent diet, even if it's a little heavier in sugar than it usually is, it's sugar and fat.

Don't worry about that so much, but make sure you're getting protein. Make sure you're getting a vegetable

Yucca: whatever it is that, you know, works for your

Mark: for you. Yeah, exactly.

And get that sleep. Be aware of how much you're drinking.

Yucca: mm-hmm.

Mark: Because it seems like all of these gatherings in, in many cases, there's, there's alcohol going on. So if you do drink, just really be aware of, of how much you're drinking and if it starts to feel like that's not what you wanna be doing pair it back.

You know, tell people, and you can facilitate that for yourself by bringing something to drink for yourself to a gathering. Right? There's wonderful like. Sparkling cranberry ciders and pomegranate ciders and things like that. There are some really delicious things now and I'm gonna put in a plug for my, my local brewery, Lagunitas Brewing Company, which has a great beer called a n a, which is it's, or I P n A.

It's like an ipa, but it's na, which is no alcohol. And it's delicious. It actually tastes like a beer, but it doesn't have any alcohol in it. So, it's worth checking that out if you need to. So, you know, enough said about that. If you don't drink, this can be a very challenging time of the year. So, take care of yourself.

If you go to meetings, go to meetings do the things that you need to do in order to keep all that in.

Yucca: right. And just a little tip with our bodies, if you can get a little bit of sun early in the morning, that just, just even if it's a couple of minutes where you're outside and you. Kind of turn your face towards the sun. It really does make a big difference in terms of resetting your clock and, and kind of helping you out with that, with the sleep patterns and just getting your body to be doing the things that it needs to be doing at the right time, because this time of year it can be really.

Really tricky on our bodies and our rhythms as and as we have the lights on all the time and later on, and when is it dark and when is it not? And, and our, we are, first and foremost, we are physical creatures, right? We are animals with, you know, millions and millions of years of adaptation to a certain environment, which we are not living.

Mark: Right.

Yucca: We, we are animals in captivity, right? We're, we're. And so just trying to be aware of that a little bit is a, is a good start.

Mark: Yes.

Yucca: So, yeah.

Mark: that brings us to the, the psychological things that we can do in order to support ourselves and. To me, the number one thing there, if you're taking care of your, your physical self, the number one thing there is to go back to that first principle of, of naturalistic paganism, which is pay attention, right?

If there's snowfall, watch the snowfall for 15 minutes. Listen to the rain on the roof, crack the window open so that you can smell the smell of the rain.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Go for a walk in the snow. Notice what birds are around, if any. Just, you know, notice what phase the moon is in.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: There's so many. There are so many simple things that we can do to keep ourselves re-grounded in the fact that, okay, I'm on a, I'm on a physical planet that's going through a physical set of processes and all this culture stuff is fantastic, but I'm still just on a physical planet doing physical processes and it's all gonna work out.

Yucca: Speaking of the moon December has the mites, which is one of the biggest meteor. There's two really big meteor showers a year. And if you get clear skies pretty much for the rest of the month even if you don't get it on the night that it's peaking, you've got some good chances to see some really beautiful meteors.

So if you get a chance just to be out there and, and right now, Mars and Jupiter are both really bright up in the sky. Even if you're in a city, those are, are probably gonna pierce through that light pollution and just be really beautiful. Just to take a moment and just take a look,

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. So other psychological things and it, I, I put this in the psychological category, even though it's a physical thing. Take a shower.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Especially if you go through any kind of a stressful experience, take a shower, there is something about, and there's literally something physical about it. It's not just the sensations all over your body that create more of a grounded sense of being in your physical self.

There, there is a way that splashing water creates negative ions that tend to kind of ground out the the, the kind of zazi feeling, the jed feeling that you can get from having From having social interactions or being in a crowded store or any of those kinds of things. So that's really a go-to as far as I'm concerned.

Yucca: I don't know about the ions, but I know that it, that for me, the rush, the sound of the rushing water and that just being able to control those, that that sensory input is just, is really amazing. Like, I'll do a shower and then a bath, right first the shower to kind of wash it to like to, to do like, okay, the feeling like I'm washing it all away and then, The bath of just getting to just feel like melting into that water and

Mark: Soaking in the heat.

Yucca: And I, I like to actually run to be in the tub while it's filling, so it has that, that sound, that rushing waterfall sound and it's filling up. And that's one of the favorite things that we do in. In the holidays because I don't have a tub where I live. We don't actually have hot water either, so we, we just heat our water up on the stove to like do dishes or something like that.

But we go into town to my mother-in-law's. She's got the big bath tub with water heater and it's like, oh yeah, we can do some nice relaxing for a long time.

Mark: nice. Very nice.

Yucca: yeah. That's a wonderful thing about the holidays, but there's other things too. Like a shower is a really wonderful one. But if you don't have access to that, right, there are other types of things that you can do that feel like you are transitioning, that you're switching between these.

You know, you're getting away from some of that stress. You're letting go. I mean, there's the shaking, there's the dancing, there's the stepping into a ritual space, and we've talked a lot about this on, on the podcast. And you can do things like going into a, the dark room, right? Turning all the lights off, and then things like that.

Mark: right, right. Coming back to yourself psychologically is very important at this kind of time because it is so easy to get to be what we call ungrounded. You know, it's easy to get your thoughts spinning if you're dealing with family. It's easy to get all the old messages from the family going again, right about ways that they criticize you or that they don't respect you sufficiently, or that they haven't recognized how you've changed.

Yucca: And all the things they do that are just so annoying that drive you crazy. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: All those things that you feel about them.

Mark: so all that stuff can be going in your mind, and if you just let it keep going, then you can become increasingly stressed and more and more kind of separated from yourself. So. Sit down and just breathe for five minutes. It doesn't have to be a super long time. 

Yucca: Off. Take the, the earbuds out of your ears.

Mark: yeah. Get, get away from the gadgetry for a minute and just, you know, the other thing that I find is very, very helpful, and this sounds. Like, sort of brute force magic making. But get a big rock you know, a rock that weighs 15, 20 pounds. Sit it in your lap, sit on the ground, or sit on the floor and just sit cross-legged if that's comfortable for you, and just sit that rock in your lap. And.

Yucca: just ground with it.

Mark: Just wait.

Yucca: Wait. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. You'll, you'll be amazed at what a difference it makes, just feeling that gravity pulling you back to the earth. And it, it clears the, clears all the spinning stuff out. It's, it's it's a powerful technique.

Yucca: Mm. Yeah. Love that one.

Mark: S. I I discovered that, or, or innovated it or whatever it was. My, my former wife was in a really kind of panicky space. She had I don't even remember what the circumstance was, but she was in this very hypermanic. Very anxious space and you know, was telling me about all the reasons that she felt that and that this was so, and she wasn't a pagan.

And so I said, well, you know, we. We, we do stuff with things like that. So have a seat, you know, sit on the ground. And I put this big rock in her lap and she immediately began kind of to giggle. It was like, . That's great. That's so great. And sure enough, you know, given 10 minutes or so, her consciousness had really sort of changed.

But yeah, so that's why I keep a big rock around.

Yucca: It's great. Yeah, so this, this really can be such a lovely time of year and a really, really meaningful time of year and, and, You know, getting ready, ending out this year and getting ready for a new one and, and all of that. And so it's just a time that can also, you know, can be stressful. And so it's a good time to be aware and just really be present with ourselves and, and really honest with ourselves about what it is that, that we need, what's feeding us what's not.

And thinking about. You know, what do we value and what obligations do we or do we not have and, and how to handle that. So, yeah.

Mark: And if there are things that we feel obligated to do that we really don't want to do, are there alternatives? Is, is there some other way to get at that? You know, is it possible to. I don't know. I, I, I don't know what the example is. If, if the holiday meal with the family is a nightmare, maybe a restaurant, you know, there, there are, there are other ways of coming at this.

If, if it's

Yucca: Yeah. Just some creative thinking about it.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: Yeah. So. So we hope that you all have a wonderful intentional holiday season

Mark: Yes. And may cramps come, but not take you away in his bag this evening. Because in, in, in Bavaria it's Crumps knocked. So, hope that you don't get whipped with Bert's twigs too much or hauled away in his bag.

Yucca: That's great. All right, well thank you everybody. We will see you next week. 

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at [email protected]

S3E41 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm Mark, one of your hosts.

Yucca: and I'm Yucca.

Mark: and today we have a really exciting episode. We have an interview with a member of the Atheopagan Society Council, Michael, who is joining us today, and is gonna tell us about his journey and what this community means to him and his vision for the future and all kinds of cool stuff.

So welcome.

Michael: Well, thank you very much for having me.

Mark: I'm delighted to have you here,

Yucca: Thanks for coming on.

Michael: Yeah, no, I'm excited.

Yucca: Yeah. So why don't we start with so who are you? Right? What's, what's your journey been to get here?

Michael: Gosh. Well, I kind of have to start at the very beginning. So my name's Michael and you know, I've, I start, sometimes I go by Mícheál, which is my Irish, the Irish version of my name. And that's something I've been using more as I've been involved in the Pagan community. My parents are both Irish and.

They moved to the United States in their early eighties cuz my dad got a green card working over there

Mark: Hmm.

Michael: and I was born in America. And then they decided they want to move back to Ireland then in 1991. So already I had this kind of dissected identity. Was I American or was I Irish? I never really lost my American accent.

When I, when I moved to Ireland my sister who was born in Ireland, she actually has a slight American accent just from living with me. So she never people always ask her, are you, are you American? And she's like, I've never lived there. So it's funny that it's kind of stuck with her, but I moved to Ireland and I suddenly was kind of got this culture shock at the age of five and moving to this new country.

And my mother has a very large family, so she has like, two, two brothers and seven sisters, and then I've got like 30 cousins. So , it was a big, a big change from AmeriCorps. It was just the three of us. Moving back to Ireland and. It was a very, you know, Ireland, you know, is, would've been considered a very Catholic country, and it's been kind of secularizing since the nineties up until now.

But back then it was still quite Catholic. Like homosexuality was only decriminalized in 1992 and divorce was only made legal in 1995. So, I guess the first kind of sense of, of what I meant to be Irish back then was, You know, you learned Irish in school, you learned to speak Irish in school, and this was very it wasn't taught very well, I would say, and I think most Irish people would agree with that.

It's kind of taught like almost like Latin or something as a dead language rather than as a living language. So you're spending time learning all this grammar. And you don't kind of develop that love of it that I think you should. I did go to like Irish summer camp in the Gaeltacht . The Gaeltacht  is the Irish speaking area of Ireland, and I kind of became aware of my Irishness, you know, just through being part of all this and also. I would've introduced myself as American when I was little but people didn't really like that. It was kind of a, like a weird thing to do. So my mom eventually told me, maybe you should just stop paying that. And so throughout my I, you know, as I mentioned, it was a very Catholic country.

And when I was in the Gaeltacht in Irish summer camp one of the kids said they were atheist. And I was like, what does that mean? I'm like, I don't believe in God. And I was, and in my head I was like, I didn't know you could do that, I didn't know that was an option. . So I kind of thought about it for a while.

I became, we started studying the Reformation in school when I was about 14. And then I learned that Catholics believed in transubstantiation and nobody had really mentioned that before. They didn't really teach the catechism very well, I guess. I'd done my communion and my confirmation, but nobody ever mentioned that.

We literally believed that the, the body and blood, you know, was that the bread and water? Oh, sorry. The bread and wine actually became literally, And the body. And I thought that was a very strange thing, that that was a literal thing. It wasn't just symbolic. And then we also studied Calvinism and all that stuff. And I was like, then I started to read the Bible and I was like, then it fun, it finally just dawned on me that I didn't believe any of this, and it was kind of liberating.

But it was kind of a way of being d. In a very homogenous society too. You could be a bit of a rebel. So I think I was one of those annoying teenagers who was always questioning everybody and having, trying to have debates with everybody about religion and they didn't enjoy that . And so I went through school and I just remember hating studying the Irish language until eventually when I left school.

On the last day, I actually took all my. My Irish textbooks and burnt them and I feel I . Yeah. I mean I feel so much guilt and regret about that and I think about that how important it's to me now and that, that was a real shame that, but I didn't, partially I didn't put the work in, but also I just think the structure.

Was not there. I mean so many Irish people come out of outta school not really know, knowing how to speak the language, you know, and I think it is an effective col colonization as well, where, you know, you consider English is a useful language and learning French or Spanish, that's a useful thing, but there's no use for Irish in people's minds, which is a, and I find that a real shame and I. could go back and change that. In university I studied anthropology and history because I was very interested in religion. All throughout my teenage years, I was obsessed with learning about world religions, you know, there was a world religion class in, in secondary school. I didn't get into it, but I begged the teacher to allow me to.

Into it because I was so interested in the topic. And he was like, fine, fine. And he kind of thought he'd humor me in one class one day and he was like, well, Michael, maybe you could talk about satanism. That's the topic for today. And I was like, well, let's start with Al Crowley. And he was like, okay, maybe he actually knows what he is talking about So, I went, I. I went to the university sorry, national University of Ireland, Minuth Campus. And it's funny because that used to be known as so it's actually, it's two campuses. They're St. Patrick's college, which is like a, a seminary for priests. And there's the I, which is like the secular version, and they're both, but they both share the same compass. So it's funny, it used to be the, the biggest seminary in Europe. They call it the priest factory cuz they pumped out so many priests that sent, sent them all over the world. And it's when you go out and you walk down the corridors, you see all the graduating classes. So you go back to 1950 and you see a graduating class of like a hundred priests.

And every year as you're going down the corridor, it gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Until I think the year I graduated, there was like two people graduating as priests. Yeah. So that was, that was a, I decided to study history and anthropology at n Y Minuth and one of the books that I read. Was kind of a gateway into thinking about land and language, which are two things that are really important to me in my, when I think about Paganism.

It's a book called wisdom Sits in Places by Keith Bato, bass by Keith Bassell, and. I'm just gonna read a little bit here from the book because he was an anthropologist working with the Apache, the Western Apache, to try and remap the land using the Native Apache words rather than the, the English words. So trying to make a native map and working with Apache people to find all the true, the true names of all these. so this is the quote, but already on only our second day in the country together a problem had problem had come up for the third time in as many tries. I have mispronounced the Apache name of the boggy swale before us. And Charles, who is weary of repeating it, has a guarded look in his eyes after watching the name for a fourth.

I acknowledged defeat and attempted to apologize for my flawed linguistic performance. I'm sorry, Charles. I can't get it. I'll work on it later. It's in the machine. It doesn't matter. It matters. Charles says softly to me in English, and then turning to speak to Morley. He addresses him in Western Apache, is what he said.

What he's doing isn't right. It's not good. He seems to be in a. Why is he in a hurry? It's disrespectful. Our ancestors made this name. They made it just as it is. They made it for a reason. They spoke it first a long time ago. He's repeating the speech of our ancestors. He doesn't know that. Tell him he's repeating the speech of our ancestors. And I'm gonna just there's another section here, a little, a few pages. But then unexpectedly in one of those courteous turnabouts that Apache people employ to assuage embarrassment in salvage damaged feelings, Charles himself comes to the rescue with a quick corroborative grin. He announces he is missing several teeth and that my problem with the place name may be attributable to his lack of dental equipment. Sometimes he says he is hard to underst. His nephew, Jason, recently told him that, and he knows he tends to speak softly. Maybe the combination of too few teeth and two little volume accounts for my failing. Short morally, on the other hand, is not so encumbered though shy. Two, a tooth or two. He retains the good ones for talking and because he's not afraid to speak up, except as everyone knows in the presence of gar women no one has trouble hearing what he. Maybe if Morley repeated the place name again slowly and with ample force, I would get it right. It's worth a try, cousin. And then he, I'm just gonna skip forward a bit and he successfully pronounces the name, which translates as water Lies with mud in an open container. Relieved and pleased. I pronounce the name slowly.

Then I, then a bit more rapidly and again, as it might be spoken. In normal conversation, Charles listens and nods his head in. . Yes. He says in Apache, that is how our ancestors made it a long time ago, just as it is to name this place. Mm-hmm. So this became important to me when thinking about the Irish language because something similar happened in Ireland in the you know, we have all our native Irish place. But in the 1820s the British Army's Ordinance survey came and decided they were gonna make these names pro pronounceable to English ears. And so they kind of tore up the native pronunciation and kind of push an English pronunciation on top. So you have these very strange English Anglo size versions of Irish Place names

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Michael: Soin in is is probably better known in English as dingle, but doesn't really have anything to do with the Irish.

And there are plenty of, there are so many examples of this and I think when you're trying to learn about a landscape in your relation to a ship, to a landscape, it is important to know the native place. It's something that I think about a lot and I try to learn. One of my favorite writers is named Tim Robinson, and he's well he died in 2020.

But I had the opportunity to meet him in 2009 and he was an English cartographer. But he moved to the west of Ireland, to the Iron Islands and also to Kamara. So he kind of moved between those two places. He lived there for more than 30 years, and what he actually did was he went out and mapped the landscape and talked to local people, and he was able to find some of the place names that had been lost over the years that weren't on the official maps, and he was able to help recreate a Gaelic map of those areas. I think that's a really kind of religious or spiritual activity to go out onto the land and walk it. And to name it and to name it correctly. And I think that's what I think my pagan path is in a way. It's to go and walk the land and learn it, what to call it. Cause I think language is the most important tool we have as pagans.

Mark: Hmm.

Michael: So those are, that's kind of when I started to think about this stuff. I've always been interested in folk. It was actually funny. There was, it started with a video game one of the legend of Zelda video games called Major's Mask

Mark: Hmm.

Yucca: Yep.

Michael: in, in the game, they actually have like a mask festival and they dis they discuss the the history of the festival.

Anna was just like, wow, I didn't, I ended up making masks with my sister and we kind of pretended to. A little mask festival of our own

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Michael: that you're, you're familiar with that? Yucca?

Yucca: Yes. Yeah, I played a lot of it.

Michael: Yeah. So, but I guess I really started to think about folklore when when I watched the Wickerman as um, as a teenager. I was probably at 16 when I watched it, and it kind of opened my eyes completely. And we've talked a lot about this in the group. And I. It's watched as a horror movie in a way, but 

 I think I really got into the, the paganism idea of, of paganism as a teenager because of watching the Wickman and just the symbolism and the pageantry. And I also just like the idea. These island people turning on the state in the form of, of the policeman.

So that's kind of been something I've that I've really enjoyed over the years, watching that every every May as part of my, my, my annual ritual so, you know, after university, I, I moved to South Korea to teach English, and, but at the same time I was quite into Buddhism. I had been practicing some Zen Buddhism from about the age of 18, and, but not like, more as just a practice rather than believing in any of it.

Not believing in reincarnation or anything like that. I just found the ritual of it very beautiful. And I ended up going and doing a temple stay in a, in a place at, at a temple. Up in the mountains and it was very beautiful and really amazing. You know, something you'd see in a movie because the monk, the head monk actually brought us out into a bamboo grove and we sat there meditating just with all surrounded by bamboo.

And it was waving in the wind and it felt like a correction, tiger Hidden dragon or something like that. And one of the powerful events that happened on that trip. Doing the Buddhist meal ceremony where we ate in in the style of a Buddhist monk. And the idea is that you do not leave any food behind.

After you're, after you're finished eating, you've, you eat all the food, and then when you wash the bowls and they kind of put the communal water back into the, the, the waste bowl, there should be no no bit of food, nothing. It should just be clean water. That comes out of, after everybody finishes washing all their bowls.

So we followed all the steps to do that and, you know, some people really, really weren't into it. They didn't wanna do the work of, of being extremely thorough. And there were a few rice pieces of rice in the water at the end and the head monk said to us oh, that will now get, you're, you're gonna cause pain to the hungry to ghost.

Because the hungry goats ghosts have holes in their throats, and when we pour the water outside for the hungry ghosts, the rice particles are gonna get stuck in their throats. And a lot of people were like, what? What are you talking about

Mark: Hmm.

Michael: But I thought that was beautiful because it doesn't, not, you don't have to. It's a story that has a purpose, and that's why, you know, It made me think about the superstitions that we have. And I don't know if I like superstition like these, calling it that. Cause I think a lot of these things have purpose and you have to look for the purpose behind them. And the purpose of that story of the honky go story, maybe for him it is about not causing harm to these, these spirits, but it's also about not wasting food. And I think it, it has more power and more meaning. And you remember. More thoroughly when you have a story like that to back up this, this practice. So I think it kind of made me rethink a lot about the kind of folkloric things that I, in my, in the Irish tradition and that, you know, I think about things like fairy forts, which are, you know, the, these are the archeological sites that you find around Ireland.

Like, I think there's like 60,000 left around the country. These, these circular. Homesteads that made a stone or, or saw, or saw that you find all over the country and people don't disturb them because they're afraid they'll get fair, bad luck. The, if you, if you disturb the, the fair fort the ferry's gonna come after you , or if you could, or if you cut down a tree, a lone tree.

Lone trees that grow in the middle of fields that don't have a, a woodland beside them, just singular trees. These are known as fairy trees and it's bad luck to cut them down. But I feel like these folk beliefs help preserve the past as well, because, you know, farmers who don't have this belief, they don't have any problem tearing down fray, forts and that kind of thing.

They just see it as a, something in the way of them farming, especially in the kind of age of industrial agriculture. Yeah. So it just made, that was when I started to think about how important it is to keep folk belief alive. And I've really, and I really started to study Irish folk belief after that point. And I lived in South Korea as I mentioned. I met my wife there, she's from Iowa and she was also teaching in, in South Korea, and we moved to Vietnam after that. And we lived there for a couple of years, and I might come back to that later. But fast forwarding, we moved to Iowa then in 2013, and I'm teaching a course in Irish.

At a local community college, but I always start with this poem by Shama Heini Boland. And I just wanted to read two extracts from it. So the first stands out is we have no prairies to slice a big sun at evening everywhere. The eye concedes to encroaching. And then moving downwards. Our pioneers keep striking inwards and downwards. Every layer they strip, they, every layer they strip seems camped on before. So I, I started with that initially, kind of trying to, as, it was almost like a gateway for my students to kind of look at. Look at Iowa with its historic prairies, which don't really exist anymore. It's all farmland. There's very little prairie land left. I think maybe 2% of the state is prairie. But that idea, that idea of our pioneers strike downwards, and I've been thinking about that a lot as well, that that's kind of a, a colonial look at the land because this land, the American land has is just as camped. As Ireland, and I've been kind of experiencing that more and more. I have a friend who's an archeologist here and just hearing them talk about the kinds of fines that they have. You know, we lived in a town where there was a Native American fishing weir was a couple of hundred years old. It you could kind of see the remains, but it mostly washed away by the time we had.

But I did see an old postcard of it from the seventies, and you could see it very clearly. And so just make, and then we always it's become a ritual every every autumn, we go up to northeast Iowa to these, to these effigy mounds, which are some Native American mounds up there on a bluff, just overlooking the miss.

Mark: Hmm.

Michael: And that's really amazing to look at that and experience and experience that. And you know, I'd love to go back, unfortunately, Shamus, he died more than 10 years ago now, but I'd love to go back and ask him if he would consider rewriting that line, you know, because this land is just as a count on

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Michael: and I'm trying to, trying to make sense of that and what it means. As an Irish person living in America,

Yucca: Mm.

Michael: Cuz we, Irish people are victims of col colonialism, 

Mark: Hmm. 

Michael: Irish people, when they moved to America, they just became white as well and had the same colonial attitudes as everybody. And I'm trying to kind of, but you know, there's, there's, there's kind of stories of reciprocation as well. Where during the famine, the Irish famine the, I think, I believe it was the Chota Nation sent Emin relief to the AR to Ireland. Even though they didn't have much themselves, they still saw this. People in need across the water and they sent money to help. And, you know, there's that connection between the Chta nation and the Irish has continued to this day. But I am just trying to figure out what it means to be an Irish person and a pagan living in this country.

And that's kind of where I, where I am right now. But to get back to how I got into Ethiopia, paganism I mentioned earlier that I was really into the Wickerman and I found this group called Folk folk Horror Revival on Facebook. And somebody one day mentioned that there was this group called Atheopagan. And so I decided to join and I found a lot of like-minded people.

And I've been kind of involved in the community for, for, I think that was maybe 2018.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Michael: And I've been involved in the community since then and maybe on a bigger, I've been much more involved since Covid started and we started doing our Saturday mixers. And I think I've made maybe 90% of those

Mark: something

Michael: and we've, yeah, and we've been doing that for the last three years and it's just been. It's a really amazing, it's one of the highlights of my week to spend time with with other people in that, in that hour and 45 minutes that we spend every Saturday.

Mark: Mm.

Michael: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Yeah, I, I really agree with you. That's, I, it's a highlight of my week as well. Such warm, thoughtful people and so diverse and living in so many different places. It's yeah, it's just a really good thing to do on a Saturday morning for me. And. We'll probably get into this more a little bit later, but the idea of creating human connection and community building I know is really important to you and it's really important to me too.

I think there have been other sort of naturalistic, pagan traditions that have been created by people, but they just kind of plunked them on the internet and let them sit. And to me it's. That would be fine if I were just gonna do this by myself. But when other people started saying, I like this, I want to do this too.

To me that meant, well then we should all do it together. Right? Let's, let's build a community and support one another in doing this. And so the Saturday mixers, when we, when Covid started, I think. I mean, to be honest, COVID did some great things for the Ethiopia, pagan community. 

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: yeah. Kind of accidentally, but that's, that's

Yucca: Well that's the silver linings, right? That's one of the things we, you know, life goes on. We have to find the, the, the benefits and the good things, even in the challenging times.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. 

Michael: yeah.

I think. I'm just thinking back to when we started. So it's kind of, we have maybe six or seven regulars who come to every meeting maybe. And then we have other people who join now and then, but I'm just trying to think back to the first meeting. I think we, that's when the idea of doing virtual ritual began as well in that first meeting.

And we were trying to figure out how to do. 

Yucca: Was that was the first meeting before Covid or was it as a response to Covid?

Mark: You know, honestly, I don't remember. I think it must have been in response to Covid because everybody was shut in and, you know, everybody was kind of starving for human contact.

Michael: I think the first one may have been March or April. 2020,

Yucca: Okay, so right there at the.

Michael: Yeah, right at the beginning. Yeah. And I think, I remember in the first meeting we were talking about ritual ideas and I think the first suggestion I came up with was like I'd love to somebody do like a, describe what an atheopagan temple might look.

Mark: Oh yeah.

Michael: Yeah. And I left, and I think you were recording the meetings at that time, but we don't record 'em anymore, just so people can feel free to be themselves and not have a recorded recording of themselves out there, . But I know that, I think James who you interviewed recently he, he was listening to that one, I believe, and he came the next week and actually had prepared a guided meditation.

Of what a pagan temple would be like to him. And it was a walk through nature. I think that was the first, our first online ritual together.

Mark: Yeah, I remember that now. Yeah, and it's been, it's really been a journey trying to figure out how, how can you do these ritual things over a, a video conferencing platform. In a way that makes everybody feel like they're participating and engaged. Right. So that there's a, a transformation of consciousness.

But I think we've done pretty well, to be honest. I mean, some of the rituals that we've done have been really quite moving.

Michael: Yeah. And I think the ritual framework that you've worked at translates very well to. A Zoom conference as well. I dunno if maybe, if he wants to describe that, what the usual atheopagan ritual would look like.

Mark: Sure. We've, we've talked about this before. The, the, the ritual structure that I proposed in my book is basically a, a five step process where the first is arrival, which is sort of, Transitioning into the ritual state of mind from the ordinary state of mind, and then the invocation of qualities that are a part that we'd like to be a part of the ritual with us, which is sort of the equivalent in Wicca or other pagan traditions of invoking spirits or gods or what have you, ancestors, what have you.

And then the main working of the ritual, which varies depending on what the purpose of the ritual is. But it can be, well, we've done lots of different kinds of things. We've braided ribbons and then tied, not tied magical knots in them. We've made siles, we've we've done just lots of different kinds of things.

And then gratitude expressions of gratitude. The things that we're grateful for. And then finally, benediction, which is sort of the closing of the ritual at a declaration that we're moving back into ordinary time.

Yucca: So how does that look in, in a meeting, like a Zoom meeting In a digital format?

Mark: Michael, you want to take that one or should I?

Michael: So you know, you have maybe, I think usually when we have a ritual more people attend that and so we might have 12 people there and

often 

Yucca: cameras on.

Michael: Camera's on. Well, it's optional. Yeah. If you don't feel comfortable having your camera on, that's completely fine and you don't even have to speak.

We do encourage people just to you know, leave a message in the chat so you can just listen in. You can engage as much or as little as you want. And you, you, so. We have all the people on in the conference, and maybe we'll try and get some more of the senses involved as well. So sometimes we'll like candles and everybody will have a candle in front of them.

I do know for for some of our sound rituals. Mark, you've used two cameras where you, you aim one camera at maybe a focus, like what's one of the examples of that that you.

Mark: Well we did that both at Sown and at Yu. So both the Halls ritual and the Yule ritual where I would create a focus or alter setup with thematic and symbolic things relating to the season. and then I would point, I would log into Zoom with my phone and point my phone at that. And then, and then I'd log in separately on my laptop for myself as a person, and then I could spotlight the focus so that it's kind of the centerpiece of what everybody experiences on their screen and sets the atmosphere.

Michael: Yeah. So just a virtual focus that everybody can, everybody can virtually gather around.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Michael: Yeah. And I think we've also used a Pinterest board in the past as well for people. I think it was at Sound again, we had that Pinterest board where people could put up notes about. Their ancestors or loved ones that they were That's correct, isn't it?

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Or pictures of people that had passed recently or.

Yucca: mm.

Michael: yeah. So yeah, there's a lot of digital space that you can use for this ritual. We also try not to involve too many props as well. Because we wanna make it as easy as possible for people of all abilities. And just if you don't have the space for something, for a large proper if you don't wanna make a lot of noise, you know, we're not gonna have you using chimes or things like that.

So we try and make it as easy as possible. Sometimes we do invite you to bring some food to eat as well, because, you know, a lot of these are feasting rituals. So we maybe, if you feel comfortable bringing some refreshments, you might want to do. And just have a friendly meal with people online. For example, we're actually gonna start doing I'm gonna be leading full Moon meals every month on the, on the, so the first one's gonna be December 7th.

And I'll post, post about that on Discord, and I think Mark will post about that in the Facebook group. Yeah. And so the idea is everybody just comes. Joins the Zoom meeting and everybody should have their meal. Whether you're, whether that's lunch or if you're in a different time zone, maybe there'll be dinner or maybe it's just a snack.

And then we'll spend a minute just thinking about the providence of the food and then we'll eat us and maybe people can talk about the food that they're eating and what it means to. And I'm hoping to make that a monthly event that we meet every full moon to share a meal together

Mark: That

sounds. I, I, I really I have pagan guilt over how little I pay attention to the full moon. I'm, I'm always, I'm always aware of what phase the moon is in, but I, I don't do a lot in the way of observances of the phases of the moon. And so, I'm excited to have this added in to something that I can attend.

Michael: Mm-hmm. . But yeah, as you can see from that format, it's very simple. And again, you, if, if people listening would like to attend as well, there's no obligation to keep your. Your camera on, there's no obligation to speak. You just, you can just listen in and just feel part of the, part of the community that way.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. So in the mixers sometimes ritual, are there discussions or what else do the mixers.

Michael: Usually the mixer is kind of a freeform thing.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Michael: Maybe we'll have a topic sometimes, but usually people just come and do a check in and talk about how they're, how they're getting on that week and if there's anything they wanna discuss, we just open it up to that. Depending on the size of the turn, we may require some kind of etiquette stuff.

So if there are a lot of people and we don't want people to. Shut it down or have spoken over. So we'll ask people to raise their hands if they wanna speak. That's, that really is only when there's a lot of people and, and often I, I know I'm somebody who likes to talk, so it's a, I think raising hands also gives people who are less confident, or, I'm sorry, not less confident, just not at, don't feel like interrupting.

It gives them an opportu. To to have their say as well

and be called on mm-hmm.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: Mm.

Mark: I think it's really good that we've implemented that. It, it's, it helps.

Michael: Mm-hmm. I think one of the really cool rituals we had recently was for like the ATO Harvest, so that was when was that? That was in September or October. In September, yeah. Yeah. So. We were trying, I mean, usually it's, you could do some kind of harvest related and I think we've done that in the past.

But I have a book called Celebrating Irish Festivals by Ruth Marshall. And this is my go-to book for, for, for ritual ideas. And this is, and I like to. Kind of some of the traditional holidays and maybe just steal from them. . So Michael Mass is is the holiday around that time in Ireland? It's a Christian holiday, but it's also it's

a 

Yucca: were older.

Michael: yeah, yeah,

Yucca: Christians took for the older

Michael: yeah, yeah, yeah. you know, it's about St. And he's known for slaying a dragon as just as St. George was known for slaying a dragon. But I thought, well, let's turn this on this head and let's celebrate our inner dragons. Let's bring our dragons to life. So it was the whole ritual was about dragons. And we actually drew Dragons, drew our inner dragons and shared them.

Talked about what they. And kind of we were feeding our inner dragon so that they could warm us throughout the coming winter.

Yucca: Hmm.

Michael: Mm-hmm.

Mark: as well as watching the home. Star Runner Strong Door, the Ator video,

Michael: Oh yeah,

Mark: which you, you have to do if you've got dragons as a theme. It's just too funny to avoid.

Michael: That's an old flash cartoon from the early two thousands. That was pretty popular.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Michael: Yeah. Track toward the ator. Google it, and in fact, I did a, I did the hot chip challenge as part of that ritual as 

Mark: That's right. Yeah. 

Michael: where I ate a very, very hot tortilla chip on camera. And. It was it was painful, but I'm sure, I don't know if it entertained other people, but it was, it was fun

Mark: Oh yeah. It was fun.

Michael: So, yeah, they're like, I mean, these rituals aren't all, they're, they're fun and they're kind of silly and goofy and but I mean, I thought at the same time they're very meaningful because people really opened up in that one 

Mark: Yeah. 

Michael: and shared some really profe profound truth. That was one of my favorites actually, and I hope we do another, another dragon invoking ritual in the future.

Mark: Maybe in the spring

Michael: yeah.

Mark: you do it at, at both of the equinoxes.

Michael: Mm-hmm.

Mark: so you've joined the Atheopagan Society Council, which is great. Thank you so much for your, your volunteering and your effort. What do you think about the future? How do you, how do you see where this community is going and what would you like to see?

What's, what's your perspective on that?

Michael: Yeah, so just before I discovered the Pagan Facebook group I had attended A local cups meeting. So that's the covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. And so it was just a taro reading workshop and, you know, I was, I, I like kind of using these kind of rituals just for their beauty and, but not, for not, not seeing anything supernatural in them. I was, it was amazing to, to find a group that was interested in these kind of things too, but without the they weren't incredulous. So I guess what I'm hoping for is that as we, as we kind of find more people who are, are, are aligned with us, maybe we can have more in. Experiences. That was one of the great, the great highlights of, of last year was attending the Century retreat and meeting all, all these amazing people in real life and being able to spend time together in real life.

And I hope that as we kind of, as the word gets out about this group, more and more of us can meet in person or as we are able to,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Michael: That's what I really hope for the future that you're finding your, your people that we are, we are being able to get these local groups together and then spend time on these important days of the year.

And I believe the Chicago Afu Pagan group was able to do that not too long ago. And I know Mark, your local group meets quite regularly as well.

Mark: We, we meet for the, for the eight holidays, for the eight Sabbath. So yeah, we're gonna get together on the 18th of December and burn a fire in the fire pit and do a, a ritual and enjoy food and drink with one another. And yeah, it's a, it's a really good feeling that that feeling of getting together is just You can't replace it with online connection, but online connection is still really good.

So that's why, that's why we continue to do the mixers every Saturday. And Glen Gordon has also been organizing a mixer on Thursday evenings. Well evenings if you're in the Americas. And. Yeah, there's just, there's, there's a bunch of different opportunities to plug in and it's always great to see somebody new.

Michael: Yeah, I think that would be another hope as well that, you know, if you've been on the fence about coming to a mixer I hope that what we've described today maybe entices you to come along. You know that there's no expectations and you can, you can share, you can just sit in the background and watch, or you can participate.

There's no expectations and it's just a nice way to, to connect with people, so,

Yucca: how would somebody join in? They find the, the link on the Facebook discord.

Michael: that's right. Yeah. So I think, mark, you post it regularly on the Facebook group, and it's also posted on the disc. As well. So, and it's the same time every Saturday, so it's 12:15 PM Central for me, so, and that's like 1115 for you, mark, on the,

Mark: No, it's 1115 for Yucca.

Michael: Oh, okay.

Mark: It's 10 15 for me.

Michael: Okay. Okay.

Yucca: one 15 for Eastern. Then 

Michael: one, yeah, that's right.

Yeah.

Yucca: Hmm

Mark: And.

Michael: and it's always the same time, and I think we've, I think we've only missed one week, maybe in the last three years.

Mark: Yeah, I think that's right. I wasn't available and I couldn't find somebody else to host or something like that, but yeah, it's been very consistent. And I see no reason to think it isn't gonna keep being consistent. But yeah, we, you know, we welcome new people. And if you're not in the Americas, that's fine too.

We've got a couple of Dutch people that come in all the time. There's a, an Austrian woman who lives in Helsinki who participates. So

Yucca: E eight nine ish kind of for Europe,

Mark: Yeah. 

Michael: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We've even had on the Thursday night mixer, we've even had Australians join occasionally too. So

Yucca: That sounds like that'd be early for them then, right? 

Michael: yeah, 

Yucca: getting up in the.

Michael: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. But I'd I'd love for some of the listeners to come and join us on one of the mixers and then cuz you know, you bring new ideas. And I we're always looking for new ritual ideas,

Mark: Mm.

Michael: That kind of bring meaning to our lives and to everybody else's.

Mark: Mm-hmm. Yeah, cuz that's, I mean, that's what we're doing, right? We're, we're create, we're, it's a creative process for us. We've got these sort of frameworks like the Wheel of the Year and the, the ritual format that I laid out. Although people can use other ritual formats too. That's fine. But it's, it's an ongoing process of creation and of taking some old traditions and folding them in where they fit but creating new stuff as well.

One of the innovations that we, that we've been doing for the l past year or so is if people want to be done with something, if they want to be finished with something in their. They can write it in the chat and then I take the chat file and I print it on my printer and I take it and I burn it in my cauldron.

So it is actually being burnt physically. But it just takes a little bit of technical processing before that happens.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: And it's those kinds of innovations that are really useful for online rituals. And boy, if you have new ideas about things we can do for online rituals, I, I would love to hear 'em.

Yucca: So thank you so much for sharing your story and your visions or the future with us. This has been, it's, it's really been beautiful to hear and to get that insight. Thank you, Michael.

Michael: Well, thank you for having me on.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: It's been delightful hearing from you and, and I, I gotta say, I, I feel like our community is very lucky. You've been exploring religion and and folklore and ritual for a long time in a lot of different frameworks and I feel really fortunate that you've landed with us cuz I like you so.

Michael: Okay. Well thanks very much. I like you too,

Mark: Okay folks, that'll be all for this week. And as always, we'll have another episode for you next week on the Wonder Science Based Paganism. Have a great week.

Yucca: Thanks everybody.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at [email protected]

S3E40 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca, 

Mark: and I'm the other one Mark. 

Yucca: And today is very exciting cuz we are actually going to be interviewing you, mark, about a project that you've been working pretty hard on and has just passed a a 

Mark: m. Right. I've been writing the, the second atheo paganism book.

And, or, or, well, I'll get into details about exactly what it is, but I've been writing that for a year and I just completed the manuscript and I'm ready to submit to Llewellyn the publisher. Mm-hmm. . Which is good cuz it's due on November 30th, so it needed to happen pretty soon. Hey, you're. Yeah, a little bit.

Yucca: That's, that's impressive. Yeah. . So let's start with you know what, well, first of all, this is your second book, right? It's 

Mark: actually my third. Your third, okay. I have a collection of poetry that I published in 2020 called A Red Kiss. Mm-hmm. . But this is my second nonfiction. 

Yucca: Okay, so can you tell us a little bit about what it is?

Does it have a set title? 

Mark: It has a working title. Okay. I, I hope that Llewellyn will find that to be an acceptable title. It's called “Round We Dance: Joyous Living Around the Year and Throughout Life.” Mm. Okay. And so it's a little bit different than the first AOP Paganism book. In the first book, there were essentially two sections, and the first one was kind of about my exploration of what a religion is and what it does for us and the science behind that and kind of leads up to.

Leads up to the question of, okay, well if we were gonna create a a religion tomorrow, what would that look like? How would we incorporate all scientific knowledge and critical thinking and still have those beneficial effects, those good feelings that come from rituals and celebrations and community and all that stuff?

So that's the first section of the first. And then the second section is about an implementation of those ideas, which is atheism. Mm-hmm. . So it explains about the principles and the four sacred pillars and the wheel of the year, and a ritual format and all that kind of stuff. So that's the first book, the one that's already out and that I'm sure a number of our listeners have this book is a little bit more general in its audience.

Okay. The i, the idea here is that, You know, there's this flood of people who are leaving institutional religions. Mm-hmm. , the, the number is just climbing with every passing year. The number of people that self identify as Christian in the United States plummeted by 12% over the last 10 years. Wow. So, and, and what most of those people are becoming is not some other religion.

They're becoming what are known as nuns, n o n E S. Mm-hmm. , not, not nuns, like Catholic nuns, , nuns. Like, I'll have none that, yeah. Right. And. The nuns subdivide into several categories, some of whom are kind of hardcore anti theists. Many of them feel very burned by their religious experience and angry and heard about that.

You have other people who are just disinterested and feel like the values of institutional religions like Christianity don't resonate with themselves. They don't, they're not into the, the biases and the mm-hmm. . Shaming and all that kind of stuff, and many of those folks are looking for something else.

They're looking for something that adds meaning to their life, that builds community that they can share with. That's something that they can share with their families. That gives them a sense of purpose and focus and the kind of pleasure that comes from having rituals in your life. Right? Mm. and Atheopagan is an answer to that, but this book is more about, the book talks about Atheopagan is a lot, but, and it explains the Atheopagan ritual format and the Wheel of the Year.

Mm-hmm. . But it's really meant for that broader category of people who. Feel something's missing and are working to find something that will infuse their life with more of that sense of meaning and specialness and wonder. 

Yucca: Mm-hmm. . Okay. So do you feel that it would be something valuable to people who do identify as Aio Pagans as well?

Mark: I do, because it's a much more how to kind of book. Mm. The the first book was much more theoretical. This book has sections on, you know, examples of different kinds of healing rituals and different kinds of rites of passage and different kinds of ways to celebrate the holidays of the Wheel of the year.

And A, a section on ritual arts, which includes things like making siles and talismans and spell jars and handle magic and all those kinds of things as well. So there's a lot more sort of practical roll your sleeves up stuff in this book that I think will really be of use to people in the Atheopagan community.

Hmm. 

Yucca: That sounds like so much fun to write. 

Mark: It was, it was, and that section that I just mentioned was particularly fun. Mm-hmm. , all the, the different, you know, the, the different sorts of witchy, ritual arts that people use in the course of implementing their, their ritual practice. Right. Because they're fun even when they're even when.

Meant to observe something very solemn. There is a pleasure in implementing those kinds of practices. Mm-hmm. , which is part of why we do them right, and why I offer them to people that don't have a ritual practice now as an example of things that they could do. Mm-hmm. . 

Yucca: Hmm. So you mentioned that Atheopagan is mentioned quite a bit in the book.

Yes. But do think this is a book. Somebody could give to a relative or a friend who has a religious practice that isn't necessarily agonism, but still benefit from your 

Mark: book. Sure. So long as that person's religious path isn't one that is exclusive mm-hmm. , there are a lot of religious paths out there that say, you have to follow our path and no other path, but that, right.

Mm-hmm. and, you know, it's sinful or wrong, or, Erroneous or whatever it is. If you do anything else. I think there's a lot of activities in here and a lot of ideas in this book that can add to people's enjoyment of life. Mm-hmm. , and I think anybody who is interested in kind of a deeper inquiry in living as a human.

Could enjoy this book. 

Yucca: Mm. Okay. So maybe the, the friend that is a Pagan, but you know, they're kind of into the God thing or the fairies or that sort of thing. They still have a lot to to get out of your book. I 

Mark: think so. Yeah. You know, there may be a couple of parts where they kind of bristle a little bit because I talk about critical thinking and, you know, I have my own position on that.

Right. But but by and large, you know, The, the tutorial on how to make a si that'll work for anybody. Whatever they believe about Gods. So, yeah. You know, I, I think all that stuff could, it, it, it'll still be a, a helpful compendium of information for people, I think, to kind of a one stop place to go and look at how to do these things.

Yucca: Hmm. Okay. And so was there a favorite section of 

your. 

Mark: You know, I have to say that ritual arts section was really fun to write. Just all the different cool witchy things that we like to do, you know, making potions and working with You know, with written messages and ceiling them with ceiling wax and, you know, or burning them in a cauldron, cauldron, magic, things like that.

That you don't have to believe in anything supernatural about. And I'm very clear, like in the section on divination, I, I say at the outset, we have no evidence that fortune telling really exists. Right. But we do know that our subconscious minds exist. Mm-hmm. , and we can learn a lot more about the current situation, the present by using complex symbol systems to sort of tease out what the thinking underneath our thinking is through the process of using these divination tools.

And once again, it's a really cool, evocative aesthetic thing to do. But it also can have a. A real emotional and spiritual value. Mm. So writing that section was a lot of fun. 

Yucca: Nice. Well, it seems like a pretty, a pretty big process to write. Not just that section, but all of the sections. Was there, were there any insights that really ended up surprising you that you had in your process of creating this 

Mark: book?

Yeah, I'm, I'm wondering about that. One of the things that I realized is that in talking about the Wheel of the Year mm-hmm. , you know, there's a, there's a little section at the bottom of the discussion of the Wheel of the Year for people in the Southern Hemisphere mm-hmm. , because everything's flipped by six months.

Right. Their winter solstice is in June. Right. And what occurred to me is that in the course of describing the names that I've given to the stations on the Wheel of the Year for, if you're in the Southern hemisphere, it really doesn't make any sense to call the 31st of October Mayday. Yeah, that's, that doesn't work very well.

So, so I renamed it Summer Tide for the Southern Hemisphere Summer Tide. Okay. Which I think can work a lot better. Yeah. and I also renamed in, in the first Atheopagan book and in, in the writings on the blog and all that kind of stuff, I've referred to the winter solstice as u mm-hmm. , which is a no word meaning wheel.

Mm-hmm. and I decided that, you know, I already made this decision that I'm not gonna draw stuff forward from other various cultures. Maybe it would just be better to call that mid-winter. Mm. In this book, I've called it Mid-Winter instead of ull. It's a small chain. Yeah. Yeah. And there's, there's not, there's brief descriptions of the principles and the four pillars, just so that people understand what Athe Paganism is.

But this is really a book about rituals and so it's much more, you know, implementation. How do you do this stuff? How do you get yourself in the right mood? What is the ritual state? How can you cultivate the ritual state? What are the various phases that we go through in implementing a ritual?

How do you prepare yourself before and, you know, ground and, and reestablish yourself after a ritual? , lots of, of those kinds of things. It's a very practical book. 

Yucca: Mm. And what was your process like writing it? Did you, did you use any ritual to write or create the book? 

Mark: Well, it, it's, it's kind of funny.

We were talking about this in the Saturday Zoom mixer this morning we're recording on Saturdays. We usually do. What I ended up doing is I have a drop front desk an old antique secretary that you, you drop the, that you lift it down? Yeah. That, yeah. You just, you lower that down and then it becomes the shelf that you write on.

Mm-hmm. and I was writing there with my laptop on the shelf. So what ended up happening was that opening, that desk became the ritual beginning of my writing periods. There were times it was very hard to make myself, you know, barricade myself in my room for four hours at a pop and just write right?

But that was what was required. The book is currently at something over 56,000 words and the specs for. Turning the manuscript in were between 55 and 60,000. So getting there required a lot of effort. Right. A lot of just sitting for hours and writing things, and then editing and editing and editing and editing.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. , tens of thousands of words. I mean that's, 

Mark: yeah, that's a lot of words. It's a lot of words. Yeah. It really is. Yeah. I mean, this, this is, this is a book so that that ritual opening of the desk became the, the symbolic moment when I clicked into, okay, now I'm a writer, now I'm writing mm-hmm. mode.

Now that the, now that the work is done, I haven't opened the desk since . I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to recalculate my my thinking. About what opening the desk means. 

Yucca: No. Now you haven't worked with this particular editor before, right? So you don't really know, you know how much they're going to revisions they're gonna want, or, or things like that.

Mark: I have no idea and I'm nervous. You know, for all I know, I'm gonna get back, you know, 300 edits and I'm gonna have to read through everyone, decide if I agree with them or not. Fight over the ones that I'm really willing to fight for and so forth. Yeah. I, I honestly, I just have no idea of what that process is gonna be like, but the book is projected to come out in the second half of 2023.

Mm-hmm. , so there is plenty of time yet, which. I mean, that sounds like a lot of time, but it's really not that much time when you consider, you know, that we've gotta get cover art together and finalize the whole manuscript, get it all laid out properly and then start the marketing process. You know, because promotion starts before the book actually gets published.

There's pre. Re release sales and all that kind of stuff. Right. And because I self-published the first book, I'm really not familiar with those parts of the process at all. I'm really interested in finding out how that all works. 

Yucca: Right. Yeah. So that's exciting cuz it's a very different process than, than what you've done before.

Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Yeah. , 

Mark: yeah. Mm-hmm. . I, I think I've talked about this maybe, maybe on the podcast before. I'm not sure. I will probably not make as much money on this book as I did on my self-published book. Sure. And the reason for that is that I actually get eight bucks for every copy of my book that gets of my first book that gets bought.

I'll probably get something like 80 cents . Mm-hmm. , from these, but hopefully the, the promotion and marketing and all that kind of stuff that the publisher will do will mean that a lot more copies get sold. Right. I made a deliberate decision that I wanted my ideas to get a lot broader distribution.

This. And, 

Yucca: and there's a prestige that goes along with being published through a traditional publish. 

Mark: Yes. Right. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And now I'm kinda locked into them because in my contract is that they have right of first refusal of my next book. So , they'll, they'll get to decide whether they wanna publish that one too.

I can't get myself out quite that easily. 

Yucca: do you, so that was gonna be one of my questions was what's next? Do you have another book on the. 

Mark: Do not have any idea about another book? Can 

Yucca: you even think about it right now? 

Mark: I mean mm-hmm. No, I mean, my guess is that if I were gonna write another book, because this one has been really exhaustively practical.

Mm-hmm. probably be much more of a mythopoetic book. Mm-hmm. that would be poems and stories and you know, kind of. Kind of a walk into an atheopagan world. Mm-hmm. of wonder and joy and experience and meaning. But that's a long way off. And I'm, I'm certainly not going to open my desk now and start working on that I'm I'm taking a break for a while and, you know, dealing with these edits, I, my work is by no means finished.

I'm still gonna have a lot of work to do, but this phase at least has been completed, so that's exciting. Yeah. I'm so, I appreciate that you were willing to, Do this kind of prequel, promotional thing on the podcast. Yeah, it's I mean, I'm sure we'll talk about the book again as it comes closer to publication time.

Yucca: We will, it will let everybody know, you know, when that, when that's happening and you know where to, where to pick it up when it happens. Do you know if there will be an audio component? Was that part of your discussion or contract? 

Mark: I know Luellen does do audio books, and I think it's probably a function of how many copies they sell.

Of a given book to see whether they would do an audio version or not. I know that they do that for some of their other better known authors. Right. I don't know. I, I think they have the option to do it in my contract, but it's not guaranteed. 

Yucca: Would this be a format that would work very well with audiobook since you have a lot of instructions?

Kind of recipe type 

Mark: things. Yeah. And actually there are a bunch of recipes. There's a whole section in the appendices on, you know, with recipes for the different seasonal holidays. Mm-hmm. , you know, things. Would go well at that time of year. Yeah, I'm not sure. I, I don't know that that's necessarily the, the best way to absorb this information because listening to someone reading recipes is probably not the best 

Yucca: well, I ask most motivating kind of time.

I love books and I suspect a lot of our listeners are on a podcast right now, you know, may enjoy that as well. So it's always interesting to see if that's, If that's a possibility, if that's standard, you know how that works. Right, 

Mark: right. Yeah. I would still very much like to get my first book in audio book form.

Mm-hmm. . I don't know how I can do that. I mean, I don't know. Maybe that's my next project. Maybe it's just I. You know, me, me sitting with Audacity reading my first book and getting that into shape where it can be released as an audio book. I do know that there will be digital versions of this book released as well for the Nook and the Kindle 

Yucca: and all that.

It's available as an ebook then. Okay. Yes. So people don't have to get the physical book. They can just. That's right. Get it on whatever device they're more most comfortable with. Uhhuh. That's great. 

Mark: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm pretty excited. Two months ago I was sick of it, , I was just, oh, I was so ready to be done with the writing, but I, I got another spurt behind me and And now it's done.

So I'm pretty excited about that. 

Yucca: Well, congratulations, mark. 

Mark: That's amazing. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah. And I want to thank everybody who's encouraged me to write it too. You know, a lot of folks from the community have really urged me to write a followup that's more hands on. Mm-hmm. . And that's this book.

So I'm, I'm excited about that. 

Yucca: So, so the book is no book on the, no book on the immediate horizon. No. Fourth book. But what else? Cuz you're, you're a busy person. 

Mark: What's, I have a job, which is kind of scary because when I do get a job and it is a, when it's not an if the Then I'm, I'm really gonna have to be very careful about my time management in order to juggle everything that I've taken on.

And of course, you know, in the Atheopagan community we welcome volunteers to help with stuff. You know, the volunteers we have are wonderful people and they're really, really helping things. Sort of blossom in our, in our community. What we, what we're doing on the Ethiopia Pagan Society Council coming up in January cuz we meet quarterly, is we're going to do a strategic plan for the organization for the next three years or so.

Years. Mm-hmm. . And I think that's really gonna focus down the priorities. I need to work on and what other people need to work on. In order to advance the goals that we set. Yeah. And I don't know what those goals will be yet. I imagine a lot of it will be about, you know, reinforcing various kinds of support for the existing community rather than a lot of focus on expansion.

Mm-hmm. , 

Yucca: We've done a lot of expanding in the last few years. We really grown so 

Mark: much. Yeah. Yes. And I wanna make sure that people have. The training, the classes, the materials, the resources, the the stuff Yeah. All that support. Yeah. That, that will help support them as they develop their practices. So, so that, that's my idea of a, of a main goal.

But we'll talk about it in January and see what we all come up with. Yeah. 

Yucca: Which is just, Just around the corner. 

Mark: It it is. Yeah. I sent out an outline about how the strategic planning process works to the members of the council maybe 10 days ago. Mm-hmm. , something like that. Yeah. And hoping everybody gets a chance to take a look at that before we start in, so we don't have a five hour meeting.

Yucca: Yeah. And so here on the podcast, we have a few more interviews coming up, and then we're right into the solstice season, so we'll have a lot right about that. 

Mark: We're gonna have interviews with members of the a Pagan Society Council, sort of, they'll be interspersed amongst. Episodes. Mm-hmm. . Next week we're talking with Michael Hallon, which should be a great conversation.

I'm really looking forward to that. There are other folks who are too busy until after the holidays, and so, you know, we'll be talking with them probably in January. Mm-hmm. . So, you know, stay tuned. We'll, we'll, we'll get around to, to most of the council members at one point or another. Just give it a wait.

Yucca: Yeah. And of course, along with all of the seasonal and holiday and Yeah. Yeah. Dark and cold themes of the year and all of that Good stuff. So, Uhhuh. 

Mark: Yeah, so the book is called Round We Dance. I always, I, I changed it. Early on, joyous living around the year and throughout life. So round we dance, joyous living around the year and throughout life. A book about spirituality and rituals by Mark Green. That's, that's what the book will be. Beautiful. . Yeah. I'm, I'm excited. It's I can't believe it's my third book.

Yeah, that's 

Yucca: just, that's in a very short period of time you've been. Right. Yeah, 

it's 

Mark: true. I started in on the first book in 2018. Mm-hmm. . So, yeah, not so long. I mean, the poetry book was easy to pull together cuz I'd already written all the poems. Nemea had already taken all of the photographs that we used to illustrate the book.

Mm-hmm. . So it was basically just a matter of doing the layout and then the self-publish. But the other two have been quite a lot of work and yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm looking forward to working with Luellen and seeing how that process goes. Yeah. So, shorter episode this week, folks. But thanks for listening and I hope that you're sufficiently interested to, to anticipate this book being released.

And we'll be back next year with no, next year. We'll be back next week. It feels like . 

Yucca: And it does . Yeah. , we'll be back next week. Yeah. To talk with you more. So thank you every. Thank you, mark. 

Mark: Thank you.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at [email protected]

S3E39 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark,

Yucca: and I'm the other one. Yucca.

Mark: and today we have a very special episode. We're interviewing James Morgenstern, who is on the Atheopagan Society Council.

And so, along with Yucca and myself and a bunch of other people. And so it's just an opportunity to get to know him and ask his ideas about where he sees the community going and how he came to be a part of this community and all that good kind of stuff. So, welcome James.

James: Thanks for having me.

Yucca: We're really happy to have you, so Well, why don't we get started with. you know how, how you found or came to agonism.

James: So, it's kind of a, a, a long journey that started back in like the late eighties like 87, 88, somewhere around in there. And I, I was, I, I was an, an avid reader back then. And I remember coming across like a group of, at a garage sale, this collection of encyclopedias called Man Myth and Magic.

And it was like everything supernatural in the cult from A to Z And I got made fun of a bit in grade school and called Encyclopedia Brown and stuff like that because I like, I, because I read encyclopedias. And so I came across these, bought 'em for like a quarter a book with my allowance and read them all.

And that really sort of piqued my interest in, in the cult and whatnot. And there were there were articles in there about like, Paganism and, and Witchcraft and Wicca and, and what have you. And so I started seeking out books all of this under, you know, the cover of secrecy because I, you know, grew up in the Midwest, in central Illinois.

And all of that stuff was a big no-no. So I. With, I had gone to you know, I grew up in a tiny little town, so we had gone some friends of mine and I had gone with one of their parents into this town, and there was this store in the mall that I went into, I think it was like, it might have been a b Dalton book Sellers, you know, one of those book sellers that's not around anymore.

And I found a copy of Raymond Buckland's, Complete book of witchcraft. And I went through that whole thing. It was like a series of lessons. Anybody familiar with, you know, witchcraft from back in that area is familiar with the big blue book. But it went through the whole self initiation ritual thing that they had at the end of that.

And that was sort of my start on that path. I started reading a lot of Scott Cunningham. He had, you know, a lot of good material for like solitary practitioners and and whatnot. And later on in my, you know, in my adult life I got involved with a this was shortly after I was married, I got involved with a group in Springfield, Illinois called the Edge Perception Collective.

And we put on seasonal public rituals, you know, for the, for the community there in central Illinois. And from there I got involved with the Diana's Grove Mystery School and which was, those folks were fantastic. There's just some really good, you know, kind nice people. And the. It was interesting.

They had like a 200 acre property in the Ozarks and, you know, it was beautiful. Had this, it had been a cattle ranch at one point, and so like the edges of it were forested and there was this big meadow in the center with like a seven circuit labyrinth mode into it. That was huge. And they had all these cabins that had built, had been built on the property by the Amish.

And you know, they did week long intensives and, and weekend you know, seminars and things like that on all sorts of different topics. I took several like drumming classes there with lane Redmond and, and whatnot. And the you know, the whole time though, like, looking back, I, I realized that.

With, in terms of like the belief in like DA and things like that. I was really sort of going through the motions on it. Like, I don't know that I ever actually really believed that, that there were these beings out there. I think a lot of it was me looking for an alternative to what I was in the middle of and sort of, you know, inundated by, and that was, you know, conservative Christianity you know, Midwestern Bible country, you know, kind of kind of folks.

And so I, I, I sort of, I moved to St. Louis in like 2000 and really sort of drifted away from all of that and had this big. Spot in my life, you know? A lot of the stuff that I had done previously, even, you know, even being part of the, of this group and that that community all on my own, you know, was all solo stuff.

Mark: Mm.

James: And a lot of that, you know, took place primarily in, in, in my head. You know, it's the whole like, you know, you develop like a mind palace or whatever they call it these days where you've got this sort of sacred space in your own skull. And that some of that was coping mechanisms and things like that for, you know, mental health issues and, and whatnot.

But but I had this big hole and, and, and that lasted a long time. And I moved to California in like 2013 or 2014. At the beginning of 2014. And I remember like, I don't remember the exact year it was, but I was online and on Facebook, and I don't remember if it was like a suggested group or if I was searching for, you know, some sort of online group to join.

I've got a lot of, I've got friends out here, you know, on the west coast that are all part of this sort of like spooky dark, you know, like, you know, witchy, woodsy, you know, forest people type community musicians and artists and whatnot. And so, lots of pagan stuff being posted by them and, and you know, that whole aesthetic.

So it may have been a recommended group but I found the Athe O Paganism one and I clicked on it and looked at the about page. Read the description and everything, and that seemed like that's, like, that was really kind of where I was at. Like, I wanted, I wanted all the pagan stuff, but I didn't want all of the praying to God's goddesses or offerings to forest, you know, fairies and, and, and things along those lines.

so I joined the group and was just sort of a, a lurker for a while. And then I don't remember exactly how I met you, Mark. I think I, it was, you had posted something about where you lived or something along those lines, and I was like, Holy crap. Like, that's, that's, that's, you know, 20 minutes away, 30 minutes away or whatever.

and I don't remember if I sent you a message or if it was in a comment or something. Like I don't, the details of all that are

Mark: I think he sent me a message as I recall, and we decided to meet for coffee.

James: Yeah. But that was fantastic. And then I read your book and like your whole story of how you came to all this. A lot of that resonated with me cuz I'd been involved with similar groups, you know, in the past, the whole church of all worlds. And you know, I wasn't involved with them at all, but I, I was well aware of them and, and things going on with them.

And then, you know, I wanted to I wanted to take a more active role in the community because. I don't know. I feel like, I feel like everybody should want to take a more active role. You know, you gotta participate in community, you know, on some level. At least that's how I feel, you know, for myself.

And so I, when a call went out for moderators on the group, you know, I, I stepped up to that and and then was a moderator on and off for a couple of years, I think. 

Yucca: A few. Yeah.

James: yeah, recently, recently, you know, stepped down from that again. And then when the Atheopagan Society started coming together, you know, and, you know, we decided to put together an actual, like, council of people, you know, I, I.

Felt the need to be a part of that, you know, on the, on the ground floor.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

James: don't know cuz I, it's, it's really given me a lot in terms of like, helping sort of fill that hole that I had in my life for so long with not having any sort of like, ritual, you know, or spiritual life, you know, it was, I dunno, it was like, I struggle with I struggle with a fair amount of mental health issues, you know, depression, things like that.

And when having that, having a spiritual life and even in my own head now using words like that is, there's a little bit of dissonance because I don't believe in like a spirit world, but I, when I tend to use the word spirit or spiritual, I'm, it's more in the sense of essential.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

James: spirit being the essence of a thing.

You know, and so a spiritual life for me is an essential life. It's a thing that, you know, it's something that's

Yucca: mm.

James: Um, and the, the, a paganism group online and just the, you know, approaching spirituality from that standpoint has, has helped me out a lot. And so I, I wanted to, to, to try to give back on some level as much as I'm able anyway.

Mark: Well, that's great. Thank you for that. Yeah, it's, it's been great for me because you, you are local to get to know you and, you know, become friends. And now of course we have the Northern California Affinity group the Live Oak Circle, and we've been having in-person meetings with a little group of folks.

And to me that's just been wonderful. I've, I've really enjoyed sharing rituals with, with a group like that. 

James: In person is definitely, at least for me personally, is far more rewarding than, you know, online. So if there's a certain, there's a certain distance that I feel, you know, with online interactions and they, they just doesn't feel as personal and meaningful to me. Other people get a lot out of it, you know, I know that we have like the the mixers and things like that, you know, on Saturdays and like on Thursdays or whatever online.

And I know that there are a lot of people who get a lot out of those, and that's fantastic. You know, I think you should get, you should get that community interaction however you can get it. But yeah.

Yucca: well, I really love that we've been able to start building both of those kinds of, of interactions right now as, as we're, we're growing and able to do in person gatherings. Both like we did earlier this spring with the retreat and then with local groups and then the mixers and the text communication, which is what mostly the Facebook discord is.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: So it's, it's lovely to see that diversity and people being able to kind of plug in, in the way that fits in in their life and, and their particular needs.

James: Yeah.

Yucca: and it seems like James, you've, you've been a big part of a lot of that kind of looking out for and caring for and participating in that online component.

James: Yeah. Like, I feel, I feel very, and one of the reasons I wanted to be like help be a moderator and stuff for the, for the Facebook group was that I feel like I tend to get protective of, you know, the groups that I'm, that I'm part of. It's all, it's like chosen family kind of, kind of situation. And I felt like being a moderator helped, like, put me in a role where I could be more effective at doing that.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

James: because there's a lot of folks that aren't able to sort of stand up for themselves and you only have so much, aside from just blocking people online you've only got so much that you can do in a group if you aren't a moderator. You know, you don't have the ability to, you know, to shield other people from, you know, abuses and things along those lines.

And not that we've had a huge problem with. Folks like that in the, our fa I feel like out of all of the Facebook groups that I've, that I've been a part of and all of just the social media groups in general that I've been a part of, the Atheopagan group is definitely by far the most friendly and problem free group that I've, that I, especially with, you know, now we've got well over 4,000 members.

Like, it, it, it shocks me on some level that

there wasn't, that there wasn't a lot more moderation issues than there, than there was. We just don't get the trolls. I think a lot of that is, is due in part to like our screening process for people, you know, and and just the, you know, vigilance and the community themselves, like, you know, that even aren't moderators stepping up to, you know, Sort of take charge cuz it's, it's, I feel like it's all of our responsibilities to make sure that we've got a nice, you know, safe, accommodating, friendly community, you know, to be a part of.

You know, and every, every group is gonna have issues, but I feel like our group is, is always working on those, you know, when something comes up, when someone brings something to our attention, something was problematic or something that we, that needs to be addressed that we're, that we, we work on it.

I feel like that effort is an honest one and that, you know, and that's important. But but yeah, it's by far the, the best group I've been a part of. And I, and I think that speaks a lot for the people that are involved.

Mark: I agree. Yeah, I mean, I've, I continue to be amazed by the quality of the community that's come together online, around aop, Paganism, and As you say, with more than 4,000 members, you would imagine that there would be more conflict. And it's not like there's group think because we have really interesting conversations about lots of different things and people have varying perspectives on a variety of different things.

But there's a civility and a a fundamental assumption of good intention on the part of one another that I think is really rare for Facebook. I mean, I don't even go to my main Facebook feed anymore. I just hang out in the atheopagan.

James: yeah, yeah. And it was, it was really great for me at the retreat to get to meet some of those folks in person. you know, cuz you see a name, you see a name and like an icon on online and I don't know, for me that's

Yucca: A real animal person 

James: Yeah, 

Yucca: really right there in front of you.

James: cuz like online there's a, like, I feel like there is sort of a certain degree of anonymity that's necessary because it can just be a dangerous place.

So I don't fault people for not putting pictures of themselves up as like their Facebook photo or whatever. You know, I didn't do it for the longest time. Uh uh, now I don't really care. So it's whatever. But but it's nice being able to put a face to, you know, conversations that I've had with folks and, and things along those.

Mark: So, I have kind of a two part question, I guess, for you, James. The first one is so what do you see your role as being on the Ethiopia Pagan Society Council? What, what do you see as, you know, what are your responsibilities there? What is, what do you see yourself as doing for the community there?

And then the second part of the question is what about the future? What, what sorts of things do you see the society being able to do to foster this community or support it or train it or, you know, whatever. What, what's your vision there?

James: I think in terms of my, my role, like, I feel like I, I try to represent the, the greater community as a whole.

Mark: Mm.

James: Take into consideration, like when we're making decisions and things like that, the needs of, of, of the community as it's been sort of represented to me by my interactions with people on Facebook, you know, in the Facebook group.

And, and to a far, far lesser degree, the, the discord sort of, cuz I, I, I started the, that Discord server I don't, a couple years ago or whatever. And Discord is not my, it's not my thing. It's, you know, it's some people that's totally their jam and that's, and they prefer that over everything else and that's totally fine.

It's just, it was never really my thing, but there was a call for it online and so I just, I had used it previously for like some gaming. And so I was like, well, you know, I'll start a server and we'll see how that happens and how that works. And now it, you know, it's got a, I think a couple hundred people on it.

Mark: I think about 500

Yucca: Yeah,

James: is it really?

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: It's got some great stuff. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

James: I, yeah, like I said, it's, it is wasn't really my thing. I am not a tech savvy person, so, you know, there were got all these people that jumped on it, that were doing Discord stuff all the time and asking me as a, you know, as like the admin there, you know, Oh, can we do this?

Can we do that? And it's like, I have no idea how to do those things. So and I don't have a whole lot of time to learn how to do those things. So like, I, that's a, yeah, that's a whole nother change. But in terms of like my role and what I, you know, what I seem like my responsibilities being like, I, I don't know.

I. I think everybody, I think every group and, and it hasn't been a thing that I, that has been something that I feel like I've needed to worry about because our, our group and our organization has, it's worked a lot differently than a lot of other groups that I, that I'm aware of in the Pagan community and not so many that I've been a direct part of in, in terms of like decision making groups and whatnot.

But I don't know. There was sort of this idea in my head at one point of like, being kind of a watchdog and making sure that things didn't start going down like a hierarchical you know, sort of problematic path. Often happens with those sort of council type groups in various PE communities.

Like I said, I'd been a member of a group in the past. The, the edge of perception, which, you know, all we did was really put on public rituals. That's all we did. We weren't like a, we weren't sort of guiding a community necessarily. So all of our meetings dealt with what are we gonna do for the next, you know, for the solstice or whatever, and you know, who's gonna do what roles.

And you know, how is, you know, how much did we spend on supplies for the last one? How much money do we have in the account for supplies for the next one? And you know, and that sort of thing, we were, we were a not for profit five. I think we had, you know, our 5 0 1 3 c, you know, thing or whatever. So we had to, you know, keep track of receipts and all that good stuff for taxes and but There weren't, so, there weren't really any issues in terms of like power struggles or anything along those lines, you know, people wanting to take control of things necessarily.

At least none that I was aware of, but I definitely know that there are groups that are like that. You get like an individual who is, and that's one of the things like I, I feel I really sort of commend you for Mark, because you, that's, you have not being sort of the founder of, of this whole thing.

You have made, I feel like you've made great strides to not put yourself in a position of. Power and or a position of authority or anything along those lines. You know, you've been pretty good about when people try to appeal to you as an authority on something and say, Well, Mark says this, or whatever.

You're very much, I feel like you've done a pretty good job of, of the whole, like, you know, I'm just like, I'm just another member of the community like you, you know, just because my name's on a book or whatnot, that doesn't mean that, like what I say is, is law sort of thing. And I know that's been an issue.

So there was an, at one point in my head there was this idea of like, kind of being a watchdog for the community if that sort of thing started to happen, to try to be a bull work against that. But that's, but it's never come up. So, that quickly faded into the background as something unnecessary. So I, so mainly I think I, I feel like I'm just there as support. Like I, like I said before, I, you know, I struggle with a lot of mental health issues and what have you. So my, my ability to do things is, is relatively limited. But I do, I, I, you know, I want to do whatever I'm capable of, you know, and take a more active role other than just seeing posts online and hearing about things and, you know, listening to the podcast and whatnot.

And as far as going forward, I'd like to see a lot more opportunities like that provided for the entirety of the community. You know, it's a big community and I think a lot of those opportunities should be like on a, on local levels. You know, like you mentioned before, we've got our local live Oak Circle.

Here in Northern California, which, you know, we've had like, what, like almost a dozen people

Mark: Yeah.

James: I think involved, you know, that have that at least, you know, I've seen, you know, active, we've got our own little discord server

Mark: Mm.

James: and whatnot to help coordinate stuff. And then you know, we've had Facebook members who have posted things about their local meetups, you know, one in Chicago that looked like had a fantastic turnout.

And I like seeing it. It makes me happy to see things like that happening because I, community is something that's really important to me. And I think it's, I think a lot of the reason it's really important to me is, is because of how little direct access I have to it. You know, I'm, I'm sort of isolated out in the redwoods, you know, and So, and community interactions are, are, have become far more important to me.

They're more meaningful to me because I have them, you know, so rarely. So that's an important step going forward, I think, is helping to foster those local communities

Mark: Mmh.

James: to build a greater, you know, broader, you know, general community. The, I thought that the Sun Tree retreat was a, was a fantastic success in terms of like turnout and whatnot.

So I'd really love to see more events like that going forward. Like maybe regional regional ones and then, you know, a like a main sort of national one or whatever here in the States. And it would be fantastic to see. Because we've got members of the Facebook group from all over the world, you know?

And we've got affinity groups for larger affinity groups, for like regional affinity groups for some of those areas. But it'd be great to see them putting together, you know, events and it, and I think a lot of people think if the, if like, Oh, we, if we're gonna do that, we're gonna need all of these things and we're gonna need this awesome space, and we're gonna need, you know, speakers or we're gonna need, It's like, you don't really, you just get together, get together and have a meal, you know, and make it a ritual, you know, be, be mindful of the various parts of the meal that you're, you know, as, as they're, as they're served or consumed or whatever.

Or get together and, you know, if you're into drumming and stuff, you have a drum circle or sing some songs together or, you know, just do some, do something. As a community and it'll grow from that. You don't have to have like a fancy convention space or, you know, retreat center to go to or something along those lines.

But I think building those communities is important because we, we do better together. You know, we, we move forward better, faster, more stronger together than we do, you know, as individuals. And some people, you know, social interaction is not a thing for them and they don't do well in groups and that's fine.

You can totally do it by yourself. But, you know, I feel like as a, as a community though, moving forward, like these smaller local localized groups are really.

I think that the next best step forward.

Mark: Hmm. I think that's really well said about community and humanity as a social animal. You know, we, we get e even those of us that are very introverted will usually get something out of social interaction. They may not be able to take very much of it. But there's a, there's a sort of a, an energizing or a charge that comes with interacting with other people who see you and are authentic and open and kind and, you know, fostering that kind of a climate is, it's super important to me and it seems. That's what people are gravitating to in, in the online communities is like, wow, these people are nice and they're thoughtful and they're interesting and they, and they're rational and and they are open to the idea of secularizing the world in, you know, in ways that are moving and impactful. So, yeah.

Yeah. That's very cool. I didn't realize that you had joined the council with the idea of being sort of a watchdog on, you know, on the power dynamics, but I'm, I'm glad to hear that you haven't felt that was necessary.

James: Yeah. I mean that was sort of, it wasn't like a main reason, you know, the main reason was like, I, I wanted to be a part of it. I, you know, I wanted to be a part of, I wanted to give back, you know, cuz I had gotten quite a bit out of, you know, the online community and, and whatnot. And wanted to give back beyond just being a moderator on the Facebook group.

And the, the whole like watchdog thing was sort of a secondary, a secondary thing, you know, one of those creeping things in the back of my head. And it was like, Oh, I've, like, I've seen groups like this come together before with really good intentions and then a cult of personality forms around one person.

And and then it all falls apart. And I didn't wanna see that happen. You know, like I said, I, I feel, I feel kind of protective of our community. , which can have its own drawbacks because I, I, there are times when I'm feeling probably too protective and might see threats where there aren't any. And that's, you know, that's, that's my own shoot to deal with.

The yeah, I think other things that we could do, like I, I, I think I probably mentioned previously about you know, we've got members of the community who probably are a little isolated and not as able and like some sort of like, outreach program or something along those lines, you know, to bring resources to those people.

You know, I think this, this podcast has obviously been a great. Because you know, like you had mentioned to me previously about like the number of new members coming to the Facebook group because they heard the podcast which is fantastic, you know, but that's one of those things that like is of, it's available to everybody all over the world, you know, You know, you don't have to be on a specific social media platform or whatnot.

This podcast is available on, you know, numerous different podcast platforms and everybody's got, and I think network, maybe possibly networking more with other similar like-minded groups.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

James: You know, I think that might be a good step in the right direction. Cuz you know, In the end to get sort of philosophical, we're all in this together.

Yucca: Yeah.

James: that's not just like the a o paganism group online. And that's not just, you know, our, our local circles. It's, you know, everybody we're, and you know, we might not all completely agree on things all the time, but we, none of us get out of this alive. So we should all work together to make, to make the experiences as, as as pleasant as possible.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: Yeah.

James: and that, you know, and that in that involves a lot of work. And not, not necessarily like physical footwork type stuff, but like personal work, you know, for each of us. Things like Like dealing with issues of racism and ableism and things along those lines. You know, that's, that's stuff that has to be worked on, on a personal level.

And you know, we all have a lot of, I think a lot of us the vast majority of us have a lot of internalized, you know, issues with those things. Things that have become normalized for us because it's just, they're, they just are things that have never been an issue. You know, it's a thing we've talked about in the Facebook group.

Paganism in general for the, for a long time was a primarily white thing,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

James: And and so I think a lot of people of color and whatnot really felt it was inaccessible to them,

Mark: Yeah. Or that they were unwelcome.

James: or that they were unwelcome. Exactly. Because there's still this huge trend, and that's why I'm I really. One of the things that I really like about Atheopagan and that that drew me to it, is that it's not based in a culture, a preexisting culture. It's not based around a preexisting set of traditions. You know, it encourages, you know, a DIY approach. You know, create your own rituals, create your own traditions, you know, start new ones. Don't, you know, like we, it's not the goal to recreate some lost civilization or culture, or to live in, you know, a a, a pretend past that never really existed.

Cuz that's what most of these groups, you know, I feel like to some degree do. And it's not about escapism either,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

James: Which is a thing that I found. I've gotten a lot of flack in the past for, for bringing the issue up in groups that I've been a part of that I feel like a lot of people were, you know, they'll be a part of a group that espouses like, you know, justice or something along those lines.

I'm not gonna name any groups in particular. But they'll espouse values like justice. But then when issues of justice are brought up, people, you know, start going on the whole, like, why do you gotta make this political? It's like,

uh,

how is it not, How is that not like everything is political. If it involves people, it's

political.

So, You know, every aspect of our lives is affected by politics. You know, nobody lives in a.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

James: from the rest of the world. So literally every aspect of our life is, has been affected or is constantly affected by politics. Whether it be the laws that we're living under or the regulations we have to abide by when doing things to our homes or you know, our yards, you know, down to like HOA organizations with how tall your grass can be and crap like that. Um, it's all politics, you know, And so, and I understand like people who get tired of hearing about hearing all the arguing

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

James: what have you, and I think that's primarily, it seems to be primarily an American issue, you know, a US issue. But you know, everybody knows what's going on in this country, you know, right now and has been for a while.

So, you know, the whole world knows the sort of situation we're living in. So I think it's understandable that people are burnt out. . And, but most of those people who are like, Why do you gotta make it political, are the ones who aren't really all that negatively affected by politics.

Mark: Right. They're 

James: tired of hearing people argue about it because it interrupts their peace and quiet and they come into these groups because they're trying to escape rather than, you know.

But for me, like I said, a spiritual life is an essential life and as an essential part of life, it's politics is unavoidable

Mark: Mm.

James: cuz that's an essential part of life. You can't exist in the world without, with other people, without politics. So, you know, that's I think working on those issues on an individual level is important.

And working on those issues as a community, you know, supporting each other. You know, I, I feel like our community has been really good in like the comment sections and stuff on Facebook of offering up resources when issues come up

and someone says, Well, I don't know how to do that, or I don't, you know, or where do I go to find that information?

There's usually always someone who's got a list of links or books to read or, you know, or, or YouTubers to follow, or, you know, something along those lines that are, you know, resources. And then it's incumbent upon us to take personal responsibility then at that point, and read those things, you know, or, you know, or, or, or look up those papers or, or what have you.

And you know, it so yeah, I the whole escapism thing, that's

Mark: Yeah, we've, we've talked about that here before. I mean, it's, it's tricky because you can use sort of fantastic language and, and framing to. Make your life a lot as a tool to make your life a lot more enchanted. Right.

James: Oh yeah.

Mark: But you need to keep in mind, you know, it's that ability to recognize the difference between metaphor and reality.

You know 

James: And I, I'm a, I'm a big fan of like, the myth poetic, you know, as, as a tool, you know, for, like you said, re enchanting, you know, your life. But there's a, it be, it starts to become escapism when that becomes the, your preferred realm to exist in. Cuz it's not a real place. And you live in the real world and there's no getting around that.

Mark: sure. When you start blaming fairies for things,

James: Or

Mark: It's a problem.

James: right, or you know, like a thing you had mentioned, and I think you had mentioned it in, in your book, you know, with people like excusing behaviors, because you know, it's the will of the gods or, or whatnot. And the spiritual bypassing that takes place, you know, where people are like, Oh, well the reason this bad thing is happening in your life is because, you know, maybe you've angered some spirits or something along those lines.

And, which is really just a fancy way of victim blaming at that point. 

Yucca: It's a way of not taking responsibility,

James: yeah, exactly. And so that's, that was going back to like the first question. You know, that's, that's another thing that sort of drew me to Athe o Paganism, was that, that that wasn't a part of all this. There was no, there was no road.

For that sort of approach to things, you know, personal responsibility and and, you know, taking steps in our own sort of growth and development, you know, are are built in. And that's that's very appealing to me and I think needed, you know, in.

Mark: Yeah. One thing that I've really appreciated about many people in the Pagan community, I certainly wouldn't say all of them, but many people in the Pagan community, is that there is this kind of dedication to personal growth, you know, to, to doing the work to become the best people they can and. I just see that as essential.

You know, it's like if, if the goal is excellence in how we interact with one another in the world that we create in our engagement with the rest of the natural world in all of that, then it, you know, it starts with the wrestling that's happening in your head and, you know, figuring that stuff out and getting as clear and as kind and as balanced as we can.

And so it, so that was one of the things that drew me back towards Paganism. And after I got sick of it, you know, there were those people that were living in a fantasy world and were, you know, causing harm out of that. But then there were these other people who were just amazing. Humble, fantastic, incredible people.

And I wanted those people . I, you know, I, I wanted to go back and get them. So that's, that's been part of what this has been about.

James: yeah. I've had, and like, you know, I, I skipped over in my story about how I got to aio Paganism. I skipped over a lot of the stuff that I got involved in, looking for ways of like making meaning in the world. That were more solo like, I got into Chaos Magic, and I got into the, you know, I was involved in the Lima for, for a while,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

James: you know, joined some initiatory orders and, and what have you.

And know, it was all, you know, brain hacking, trying to figure out how to make myself that better person, you know, that you just mentioned. And doing it on your own by yourself is often very difficult. And so I, I think having a community that's all also working towards that. And like you said, not everybody involved in those groups was good.

But there were definitely some jewels, you know, that stood out. But for some of them, like the, the, the, the Leic community there was a lot of just. I, I pretty much left all of, I left the Lima because of a lot of the just really horrible, toxic stuff. And I've always been a proponent of the idea that whatever it is that you're championing, whatever cause that you're standing behind, whatever beliefs that you are espousing, look around at the other people who are going, Yes, that's what that I'm on, pa on.

I'm right there with you. I'm on the same page as you are. You believe what I believe and I absolutely support you. And if those people are neo-Nazis, and if those people are, you know, just you know, white nationalists and racists and terrible people, then you need to, you need to rethink these ideas that you're championing.

Cause if they're saying, Oh, no, no, I totally agree with you, I don't think that's a good thing. and, So, you know, I, I, I've had these conversations to get political. I've had these conversations with folks who, you know, espouse like conservative values and whatnot, and they're like, Yeah, but you know, I don't agree with those guys, but yeah, but they agree with you.

Like you don't agree with those guys cuz you don't, because they're on, you're just sort of cherry picking, you know, the things of their ideology that they, that you don't agree with. And I don't know that you're actually looking at, at what they believe and what you believe with an unbiased, you know, viewpoint.

And I think that your ideas and their ideas line up far more than you're willing to admit to. And because on some level you do agree with them because if they're agreeing with you, how is that not the same thing? You know, if you say XYZ and they're like, Yes, xyz, and then you say, Oh yeah, but I don't agree with their xyz, but it's it's the same xyz.

Then, you know, I think that needs some reflection and some rethinking. And so, yeah, I don't know where I was going with that. I've got my mid-afternoon coffee, caffeine hitting my, hitting my head and it's sending me on spirals. Yeah. What were we saying?

Yucca: We had been talking about the gyms in the community, and you'd said that you'd kind of skipped over some of the, the,

James: yeah,

Yucca: the various groups that you'd been involved in and stopped being involved in.

James: yeah. Cuz I think when, when, for me it was like a matter of percentages, you know, if there's like three or four people in the community that are absolutely wonder. People and the, the overwhelming majority of the community is not, then that's, then you, you can't, you can't it, I personally can't stay in a community like that.

I can't stay involved with a group like that. Like I, it, it's always terrible to have to sort of leave a group because you know you're gonna miss those people probably, especially if you developed any sort of personal relationship with them. And you can always stay, you know, connected with those people outside of that group.

But being part of the group itself is just not an option any longer. Again, I think, I feel like you gotta look around at the people who are, who are standing behind you and chanting along with you and see what sort of flags they're waving and, you know, if those are flags that strike you as you know, bad things, then maybe you should think about.

You know why it is that they're chanting along with you. And I, and it's mostly been like, you know, events that have taken place here in the US over the last, like six years or so that have really sort of brought that sort of idea to a head for me. You know, or also if you don't, the people who are on your side are championing ideas that actively seek to harm or impede the lives of people you care about, then maybe you should rethink those ideas also, because if you really care about those people, why would you want to promote the things that are going to hurt them, you know?

And I feel like in our, to bring it back to, you know, our community, I feel like we are, I feel like we're, we can always do better, but I feel like we're doing a pretty good job. And that is, and that's not to sort of say, you know, to let us off the hook in any way, shape or form. The work is, the work is constant and ongoing and not quick.

You know, there is no fast like flip a switch and suddenly you're not racist, you know, or you flip a switch and suddenly you're not ableist anymore. You know, those are, they're patterns of behavior that come about from living in a system that promotes all of those things and oftentimes rewards those things.

So, you know, working out of those situations, those methods of thought and whatnot is a. It's a lot of deep work, but I feel like as a community we can support each other in that work. And that's what part of what I was saying about when conversations like that have come up on the Facebook group, you know, people offering up resources, you know, books, you know, books to read and things along those lines.

I know we've got, there's like a book club like an atheopagan book club and I think that they've read some, some pretty good books, you know, in, in that regard on some of those issues. I definitely, I'm not a part of it cuz reading books for me is a, it's a whole thing that's gets too complicated to get into right now.

But but I definitely encourage them to read more of those books that help work on those issues. You know, everybody likes to read, you know, the fun books. Things like gathering loss is a popular one. Or what's the other, the

Mark: reading Sweet Grass.

James: Yeah. Braiding, sweetgrass. Those books, those books come up a lot in conversations.

and those are great. Yeah.

Yeah, they're great. I, I'd like to, you know, I'd like to see more opportunities for for unlearning the sort of problematic tendencies that, that, you know, the overwhelming majority of us tend to have.

Mark: Mm.

James: cuz that makes the community more accessible to the folks, you know, like I mentioned before, that felt it, you know, this sort of spirituality inaccessible before,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

James: Yeah. And, and build your own tradit. You know, around that sort of thing cuz that can help reinforce all of that and

Mark: You know, I, I need to put in a word about that. I, I wrote a blog post probably four or five months ago now. In which I agree for myself, I, I want to create new culture. But I can see how for people of color, they might want to draw culture from their ancestors forward. Um, and so, you know, when I talk about, when I talk about Ethiopia, Paganism being a modern thing that just got started in the early two thousands, and it's not rooted in any culture that really comes out of the fact that I just designed it for me and I'm this white guy you know, this sort of Mongol American white guy.

And I think. I've, I've since done more thinking about that, and I think that it's really important for us to acknowledge that there's a place for drawing indigenous traditions, drawing traditions of African ancestry, you know, drawing those, those pieces forward into the ritual practices of people that come out of those, those ethnicities.

James: I, I absolutely agree. I think on, on a personal level, I think, you know, for your own like personal ritual and spiritual life, I think drawing on, on, on your heritage is, is absolutely, although I don't like using that word, heritage I

think drawing on that is Backgrounds. is, is, is important and can be really sort of empowering and enriching and whatnot.

I think it, where the issue comes in is when the overwhelming majority of a group comes from a particular background

Mark: Yeah.

James: and they try to make those aspects of their background, the primary focus of the community's background. So like, you know, taking a recent holiday for example. So that's an Irish thing, you know, that's a Gaelic culture cultural thing.

Yucca: Mm.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

James: so everybody's like, everybody talks about sow and it's like, I mean, it's not, it's not like a solar festival, you know, it's not one of the cross quarter you know, holidays that is tied to an astronomical. Or anything along those lines, like the solstice and equinoxes. So it is a very sort of culturally specific thing, and not everybody celebrates that.

And so when everybody's almost sort of insisted be called that because Halloween is too much of a, I mean, it's, it's even got its own cultural sort of baggage, you know, in terms of like all Hall's Day being, you know, kind of a, a, a more Christian centric holiday and the whole, the whole co-opting of, of, you know, pagan holidays by Christianity idea and those sorts of things.

But I think a lot of people, when, when the community, when the greater community refers to it as a specific cultural thing like sa, those people who did not come, did not grow up in that background. Feel isol, you know, separated

and they feel like they're not able to take, they feel excluded. So I feel like as a greater, you know, sort of global community or whatever, coming up with new non culturally specific things is great.

And then incorporate in your own personal rituals and whatnot, and even your own local group rituals, incorporate aspects of the, of, of your own background into that. And then your group can each, each person can bring their own cultural background into the mix. And you have this, you know, lovely bouquet of, of mixed flowers, you know, that everybody can enjoy.

The but yeah, I think that when people lean into those sort of traditional ideas of the holidays, You know, of our, like, you know, that can be one of the things that isolates people who have traditionally been sort of excluded from these sort of circles, and it makes us less inclusive. You know, I personally celebrate sound because

That's my background.

You know, I'm 93% Scottish and Irish and with a smidge of, you know, other, you know, I'm a, I'm a American mut, you know, with a blend of, of European backgrounds. And but I wasn't raised in any of those cultures, you know, that's a, so that's a thing. One of my.

I don't wanna say pet peeves cuz that's not what it is. One of my issues that I struggle with a lot of times is I don't believe that for the most part Americans have in general, white America doesn't have a recognizable, consistent culture or cultural background to draw from. Which I think is one of the reasons why so many folks look to, like Ancient Ireland and Ancient Scotland or ancient Germany and you know, or Scandinavia, they look to Asat true, you know, because of their roots and their heritage and they, or they look to, you know, like the Celtic sort of stuff because of their, you know, their ancestry.

It's like, that's great, but you likely weren't raised with any of those traditions, assuming those traditions are real at all. And so, In a way that's sort of a, it's a hot button topic and I'll probably get flack for it and people will talk about me. But I feel like in a way that's sort of still a matter of cultural appropriation cuz you weren't raised in that culture and there are people who legitimately went through terrible things because of their connection to that culture. They were prohibited from practicing just like here in the United States with the, with, you know, indigenous peoples being legally prohibited from pr, from practicing, you know, you know, uh, their, their ancestral traditions and what whatnot to step up.

Having not gone through any of that and just adopt those things and say, Well that's, you know, that's my, that's, you know, my heritage. It's like you're, I. I guess blood wise down the road, always, you've got that connection to people who participated in that. But you, you never did. You're, you know, that's not part of your, your culture for the overwhelming, not for everybody.

Obviously there are exceptions. People who are like first generation Americans and whatnot. They may have relatives who who carried some of some older traditions and stuff forward. But this idea of participating in these like ancient traditions, like, I mean, it's,

Yucca: I think it doesn't necessarily just have to be first generation either. I mean, there, you know, there's a,

James: but those traditions have to have been carried forward. Like, I feel like you need to have been raised in the culture to, to really, because otherwise you're, you are participating in a thing without, without any sort of, you know, you're participating in a thing that other people were punished for without.

The threat of punishment, you know, and without having gone

through those 

Yucca: I, think it's really very specific to different ones. I mean that some, some times when those ancestors were forced to stop, Doing tho having those traditions. You know, my, my father's first language, he was not allowed to speak that outside of the home. And his, you know, his, his mother wasn't allowed to speak it.

So I wasn't, I didn't get that language from him. Right. But, but there's still a connection that I have to that culture, right? Or, you know, and, and so for instance, my, my child is relearning the language even though there's a generational gap between, you know, what she was, how she's been raised, the culture that she was raised in, and, and wanting to like to rebrace, right, to reclaim and rekindle some of that.

James: And I think as long as, as, as those things are being passed down with the knowledge of, of the struggle that people went through regarding those things, like how the, how the, you know, and that's, you know, the reason that you're doing it. But I think a lot of that is disregarded when people just sort of pick up a book on Celtic paganism or something along those lines, and they think that they're participating in these like ancient Celtic rituals and whatnot, which is

Yucca: My personal pet peeve around that is when it gets all lumped into one culture, it's like, wait, but, but we're a lot of different cultures, you know?

James: I've been involved in Drewry and things like that, and there's this idea of like this Dr. Reconstructionism and whatnot, which I think is. The fact of the matter is, is we don't know what any of the, there was nothing written down and

we don't know what was practiced. So these like ancient rights or ancient rituals, they're not ancient.

They're all new modern inventions. And there's that zero evidence that, you know, and there's a lot of hearsay and people are like, Well, no, this was passed down. Word of mouth. It's like, yeah. And we've all played telephone, we've all played that game. And there's a good chance that the way that you're doing things is absolutely nothing like what people did then.

You know, and you've got the influence of Christianity and things like that. And to think that, to think that, like, I don't know. I think the assumption that, like the monks that wrote down a lot of this stuff, when they were encountering these new cultures, you know, as they were, were coming into the areas that they weren.

Repainting and reinterpreting and just straight up lying about things. I think I, I don't think that's an honest approach to, to what that is. So, 

Mark: Well, and, and James, this also goes to the lionization of the ancient, right? I mean, there's that whole idea that because something is old, that it's got a deep validity to it. And that's, that's one that I just. Honestly, I don't go with, I mean, to me, cultures are valid just because they're valid and it doesn't matter whether they started recently or, and then, then there are cultures that aren't so valid, like Joseph Smith's arrangement that has now taken off and has many followers all over the world that you know, the values of, which I find really problematic. But just because something is new doesn't make it invalid. And just because something is old doesn't make it valid. But particularly for people where there's been genocidal effort to extinguish the culture, I think it is really important to be able to say to someone who's, you know, grandfather and father were, you know, grandparents and, and parents were not allowed to speak their native language, that they are still entitled to relearn that language and restart those cultural traditions again.

James: Sure, I think. But I think that a lot, and I think a lot of it is for me personally, that's it. It's all continued upon intent.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

James: if you're, if I think if you're going to do that, then you need to be learning about the struggles that they went through. You need to be informing yourself about the reasons why this is an issue, you know?

It's like, you know, the, it's, for me, it's like the, the whole like, you know, When it comes to, like in, in indigenous folks, you get the person who does their 23andme DNA test and they get the thing that says, Oh, you're 0.05% Native American. And they're like, Oh, cool. Well, I'm just gonna start practicing Cherokee, you know, traditions or, or whatnot cuz you know, well I'm part, you know, I'm part Native American and what, and, and not learning why that's a, why that's a problem.

Mark: Yeah.

James: It's like if you're, I, you know, because in all likelihood, you, you, you really, the only connection you have is a genetic, is a genetic connection to those, you know, to those folks because you've not, you know, I don't know. It's a, it's a, it's a complicated. It's definitely not cut and dry. There are definitely, you know, exceptions to the rule and, and, and all of that good stuff. There's, I come from a, you know, a line of people who are very, very far removed from any of that. I, the, the research that I've done on my own family, you know, I got as far back as like the 15 hundreds to some, you know, Sept of SCOs who, you know, the, the, the McCulloughs or, or whatnot.

And they were like a, they didn't have their own tartan, which was a, which was a pretty modern invention. They didn't have their own, you know, sort of clan, steel and motto or insignia or anything. There were like a vassal clan of some other larger clan, but. I wasn't raised with any of that. My grandparents weren't raised with any of that.

My great grandparents weren't raised with any of that. You know, if anything, there's more Appalachian you know, traditions and culture, which is a mishmash of, of, you know, a number of things. Because the farther you get from the source, the more diluted those things sort of become, the more integrated with other, you know, cultures and, and, and traditions and whatnot.

Those things become and they become their own thing, you know? So like, I feel like for me, like I've, I've, I've tried to educate myself on the struggles of those people from my background who were barred from like my Irish ancestors who were barred from speaking Irish, you know, by the English in my.

I try to educate myself about that. And I try not to just take it for granted that I'm just allowed because my, you know, my grandmother's last name was Bailey, you know, and I think that there's the overwhelming majority of people that I have encountered in the Pagan community. That's really the sort of approach.

There's this romanticized like idea of like ancient Celtic Ireland, you know, that people pursue. And and it goes, it goes back to the whole escapism thing for

me. And you know, I think a lot of people are what draws a lot of people to modern paganism. And the new age movement is a dissatisfaction with the way the world is right now and a lack of sort of, Lack of meaningful internal life you know, to to help give them a sense of comfort and whatnot in, you know, the, the sort of times that we're having. And I think that there's that appeal to, it's the reason we read, you know, that's the reason we read fantasy books and things like that, you know, So for a brief time we can live in a world that is not this one.

Mark: Yeah, but this one is so amazing.

Yucca: Yeah.

James: it really is. You open your eyes and you look at the world around you and you see like really look and see the various processes taking place on the.

Smaller levels, you can just keep going. You know, like, Oh, well why does that happen? And there's a whole process involved and it's like, and then you can take a piece of that process and say, Well, why does that happen? And there's this whole other process involved, and it's this like fractal rabbit hole that, you know, winds up down in some quantum, you know, wormhole thing

Mark: Some probabilistic. Weird.

James: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah,

James: until we're just speculating, because we really don't know, because we are physically incapable of seeing any more detail from that for now. And you can do the same to the greater scale, you know, because the immensity of this universe and reality in general, as you know, is astounding and incredibly humbling.

For me to contemplate. I've spent many a night lying on my back as a kid. I had, I built a skateboard ramp for myself, and there would be times when I would lay down on the deck of that skateboard ramp and living in rural America, there wasn't a lot of street lights and things like that to obscure my view of the sky.

And spent a lot of time laying, just looking up at the stars in the moon and whatnot, and

always feeling that sensation of sort of being held to the earth.

Mark: Hmm.

James: Like at any moment I could fall off of it

Yucca: Hmm mm.

James: into the, you know, the sky, you know, up into the, that vastness, because what is up

Mark: Mm-hmm.

James: that's arbitrary you know, it's in relation to where, you know, to where the ground is. That's up.

Mark: Yeah.

James: But in the, in the schema things, there is no up.

There's no down. It just, we have to put these sort of descriptions on things to help us make sense because of how limited we are in, in our, in our perception. But I think going back to yet another thing that drew me to a, the o paganism is that whole idea of like, that's, I'm, I'm part of all of that. That's, that, that craziness, that just overwhelming levels of complexity. And like we talked you know, yesterday, mark, about the human brain

and how, how little we really know about how it operates. This chunk of fat and water and whatnot that sits inside, you know, this bone on the top of our head or our bodies.

Excuse me. Throat thing happening. The, the overwhelming, like, I don't know the awe that sets in

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

James: the, you just, there are times when it just takes my breath away. And it's the appreciation of that and knowing that every other person who's part of the, you know, not just part of our community, but every other person in the entire world is also part of that.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

James: And if there's anything that connects us, that's, it's that, you know, we're all part of this sort of greater mechanism. I don't know that like, I guess you could call it an organism if you wanted.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

James: You know, I guess it all depends on per. , but we're all tiny, tiny, tiny little pieces of this huge thing that operates in a relatively specific manner.

Mark: Mm.

James: even though it seems like, you know, at times all of the stuff is so random and whatnot. That's sort of the point, is that that's how it works, is that there's no sort of predetermined path. No one has laid it all out, you know, and mapped everything out. Like what's the point of that? You know? Excuse me, my throat.

So

Yucca: Yeah. Well, I'll, Yeah.

James: having me on. 

Yucca: Yeah. So thank you James.

This has been, This has been amazing.

Mark: It has, it's the, I mean, we've wandered into all these really essential subject matters about, about our path and about our community, and it's just been a really great conversation. Thank you.

James: Yeah, thank you for, for tolerating my, my ramblings. 

Yucca: Well, thank you for sharing them with us. We really appreciate it. Oh,

James: my pleasure.

Mark: And we'll see you all next week. Everybody. Have a great week.

 .

Discussing the most important and exciting aspect of Life: its ability to deconstruct what is no longer alive into assemblable parts for new life.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at [email protected]

TRANSCRIPT:

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Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca,

Mark: And I'm Mark the other one.

Yucca: and today we are talking about decomposition and death

Mark: Yay.

Yucca: and I've been really, really looking forward to this one. So this whole season we've been talking about kind of the autumn themed things, right? We talked about ancestors and our own deaths and hollows, and now we get to talk about it on the college side.

Mark: Right. And both of us are big fans, so, you'll, you'll find out why and you'll hear how excited we are about all the incredible. Things that have to do with death and decomposition?

Yucca: Yeah. So let's start a little bit with why. Why we're thinking about it this time of year, because this is relevant all year round, but why are we focusing on it today?

Mark: Well, it seems to me, yeah, it seems to me that there are kind of two reasons, right? One of which is, Kind of obvious. And the other one of which is not obvious at all. The first one is that this is the time of year when we acknowledge mortality, right? With the skulls and the bones and the blood, and the monsters and the ghosts and the

Yucca: All of that fun stuff. Yeah.

Mark: all that stuff that is part of our psychological complex around our mortality.

But the other part that isn't as evident is that this is actually the time of year in the temper zone when decomposers are going crazy with activity. I mean, they, they, they work all year round, but

Yucca: This is their spring,

Mark: yeah, with all the leaves falling and, and, you know, you know, some, some moisture coming to help kind of speed the process.

They're all out there going, Yum, yum. Yu yu yum. Yu Yu performing their function.

Yucca: All right. And they'll keep that up all winter long, right underneath those, the leaves with the, that nice, wonderful blanket of snow on top in the temperate forest. But this is happening to a certain extent in grasslands and, and most of the temperate. Northern hemisphere right now, and farther north as well, right as we get into the farther polar regions, so,

Mark: Right. And when you think about it, when you think about the, the deciduous. Forests of the Northeast and the north and southeast, that whole huge band of deciduous trees in the, in the Eastern United States as an example.

Yucca: mm-hmm.

Mark: When you consider the sheer volume of leaves, that falls off of all of those trees onto the ground, it.

A miracle that that stuff, that we aren't buried in it up to a 15 foot level every spring. Right. But no, it's all gone. It has all been consumed and transformed.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. There's our reasons, right? So we're thinking about it from this ecology perspective, but then also we have the, the kind of wheel of the year when this is a time where we're focusing on the, the death side. Now the decomposers are kind of interesting because they, the, this is their life, right? This is life and food and yum for them, but they're taking what has died.

They're taking the death and they're transforming that into the new life. And we live in a point in Earth's history where we're, we have these incredibly complex systems that are built on literally billions of years of.

Mark: Mm.

Yucca: And so if you think about the individual number of deaths, that's trillions and trillions of deaths that have, that have all added up to be able to make the soil that supports these systems to be able to make these ecosystems, to make our bodies

Mark: Right. I, I, I was gonna say this is this is not an academic exercise. This is very personal

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Those trillions of deaths were and are necessary in order for us to function, you know, at this very instant in the body of you, listener cells are dying. Living creatures are being disassembled because you, you consumed them and either your immune system is attacking them or your digestive system is dissembling them.

And so there is, there is a deep inter penetration of life and death as mutualistic functions that enable the process of life to exist on earth.

Yucca: Right. And this is a, this process is continuing, right? And that's something we talked about in the, the past few weeks about our own death, but our. Our many deaths, the deaths of ourselves, and eventually the death of the whole of us as a pattern is part of that cycle, which then is going to continue on to allow for the new lives, on and on into the future.

So it's, it's quite, it's quite awe inspiring really

Mark: It

Yucca: to think about.

Mark: It is, and because we are life and because we're not actually decomposers primarily in our orientation to the ecosystems that support us We tend to focus on life a lot and how important life is and how wonderful life is and all that kind of stuff. But the, the miracle of life is that it is able to assemble from materials that used to be alive, organic materials, and you know, mostly those car, those carbon based organic materials, but other stuff as well.

It's a life is able to take those dead pieces and snap them together and communicate this spark of lifeness to it. And

Yucca: still trying to figure out really what that is,

Mark: exactly, but

Yucca: it's there.

Mark: But it's still working.

Yucca: Yep.

Mark: It's still working. And. I mean to me at this time of year when I'm contemplating my mortality, I'm also contemplating the miraculous fact that at some point an egg and a sperm connected and started spewing out. Genetic instructions and snapping together those molecules at a ferocious rate in consuming all of this non-live stuff and assembling it into me.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: That's really a hell of a thing.

Yucca: Right. Well, and, and here's another thing that you, none of the, the, the actual atoms involved in that are the ones that you are today.

Mark: No.

Yucca: You've changed all of those out.

Mark: Right.

Yucca: gets into, we get into this really fun realm of thinking about, you know, what's person like, What is it to be me? Right? Am I still the same me I was when I was 10 years ago or 20 or 30?

And where I Billy the same me and 50 and, and all of that, but we're these pieces, they keep moving around and we are rearranging them. I like to think of it like, like Legos really. Like, we have a, like the stuff that makes us, our little Lego blocks are like pattern blocks, and we stick 'em together in different ways and then we rip pieces off of 'em and we get rid of those, right?

Because we're always doing that. Whether that's in the bathroom or sweating or breathing out or you know, all of that stuff. And somebody else grabs onto that and then they use it to build part of themselves, and then somebody else grabs that, right? Somebody eats. Now they have all those pieces that they rip apart and they put together in different ways.

And so we're just these patterns, these bits and pieces of earth that have self-assembled themselves and are, you know, sharing and grabbing from each other and rearranging in new ways. And it's just, it's just delightful. What's this? Yeah.

Mark: it's so cool. I, I like to think of people the way I, I think of a river.

Yucca: Mmm.

Mark: know, when you think of a river, you think of a, you know, there's the Mississippi River. It's a thing. It's gotta, We have a noun that we've applied to it, but a river isn't a thing. A river is a process. You know, the, the same molecules of water are not flowing by every day when you go down to the river and take a look at it, and the river itself, unless it's been damned by the Army Corps of Engineers in inappropriate and ecologically unsustainable ways, is moving it's footprint all over the place

Yucca: wiggling back and forth.

Mark: responding to the conditions that change in, in its surroundings. And we do the same thing. We are patterns

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: much more. We are processes much more than we are. Things,

Yucca: right? We're wiggling patterns.

Mark: Right, right. I mean, I, I'm, I'm looking at a rock that I have. That rock is pretty much gonna be the same rock for a very long time. It will eventually erode down into much, much smaller pieces of rock. And then when they're small enough, maybe some of those will get incorporated into some sort of life process, or they may be compressed into sandstone and take a new form, become metamorphic. There's all kinds of possibilities there, but, It's not moving in the dynamic kind of way that we're talking about with life or, or with other dynamic systems like hydrological systems like rivers and aquifers and oceans.

Yucca: Well, and and life is just quite amazing in that what it does is it does take that aio.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Right. We do take biotic things too, but that's what the producers are all about. They, they take the, a biotic, like some carbon dioxide and water, and then we get glucose from

Mark: They make sugar out of it, and then we eat the sugar.

Yucca: right. Or Yeah. Or the things that ate the sugar, right?

And, and then, then it goes into the system and we all pass that around. This thing That wasn't life, but now it is life.

Mark: right.

Yucca: And, and our planet. We started as a big ball of lava

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: right there. There wasn't any soil to start with or just a big ball of lava. Now we've gotta go from basalt to us, and that's what life is doing, right?

And that, and without the death in there, there is no life.

Mark: That's right. That's right. And that, and that's why the, the very simplistic philosophy of trying to minimize death

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: in the context of ecology makes absolutely no sense.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, because the, the logical conclusion to that is just to end all life, and then there's no more death, Right? Because life has to have death.

Mark: and there is a certain logic to that in a very weird, twisted, sort of abstract way, but in a real way, given that we are living beings and value the fact that we're alive most of us,

Yucca: I mean, that's like a marvel, like villain logic though.

Mark: it,

Yucca: like, that's like the comic version of Thanos, right? Like that's not, you know, But we, we, since we're alive, we don't. There's, Well, it's built into us to wanna stay alive, right? Because what it, Our ancestors, Well, we didn't have the ancestors that it wasn't built into.

Those ones didn't make it

Mark: That's right. The ones who didn't care about staying alive didn't.

Yucca: Yeah. So here we are, right? And, and there's so much, anything that you could possibly care about in order to care about it, you have to be alive. Right. Whether you value the music or art or education or you know, whatever, progress with a capital P and quotation marks are, whatever that stuff is, you, you've gotta be, you've gotta be there and alive to be able to, for that to exist,

Mark: And, and for you to enjoy it or benefit from it or find it of value. Right. You know, there's, there's gotta be unlike in quantum mechanics, there actually does have to be an observer in order for that in order for that to exist.

Yucca: In some. In some interpretations. Yeah. And wow. Does that get into a whole fun, mind-boggling, soupy world?

Mark: it really does. And let's, let's not go into that because we'll never get out. People, people who spend their whole lives studying this never get out so. You know, one of the things that sometimes people propose is this idea that to minimize suffering, you need to minimize death. Or actually, there are some people who argue that to minimize suffering, you should maximize death, everything should die and then nothing will suffer.

Yucca: Well, and then there's a limited number of deaths, right? Because there has to be life for there to be death. Yeah.

Mark: Right. So it ends up being very tail chasing. But I have, you know, there's this thing called the philosophical problem of suffering, which is only a problem if you're looking at things through a monotheistic lens with the assumption that you've got this beneficent deity. And how can you have all this suffering if there's a magnificent deity?

Well, fortunately we don't have to grapple with that much because we don't believe in a deity.

Yucca: you're right.

Mark: So we don't have to believe in an all powerful beneficent deity and figure out why there's so much suffering in the world. So when I look at this question of, you know, is minimizing death, minimizing suffering as we've established, minimizing death is minimizing life. And life is filled with a lot of joy.

Yucca: right.

Mark: Life has a tremendous amount of celebration in it. I mean, to me, the hard I, If you want to ask yourself, you know what? What's the problem of suffering? Why not flip that on its head and instead say, Well, what about the maxim, the maximization of.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Why shouldn't that be our yardstick for deciding what the best thing to do is?

And that could have its own problems because maybe you would decide we need as many people as we can possibly have so that they can be enjoying themselves as much as they possibly can.

Yucca: Right. And then you get into caring capacity. But you know, so all of this. This is why slogans don't really work , because once you think past, you know, thought, you know two thoughts past that, you go, Hmm, okay, maybe there's a, there's some nuance here. Maybe there's a whole system we gotta balance this out with.

But I don't think that the world is guided by moral ideas and

Mark: No, I don't either.

Yucca: So I think this is, a lot of, this is random. To start with and then life assembles itself and we don't know if there is other life beyond Earth. I would personally be absolutely shocked if there wasn't.

Mark: I'd be stunned if

Yucca: I I mean it just, Yeah.

Mark: and honestly, I think that in my lifetime, which is not that much time left in my lifetime, we are likely to discover signs of life outside the earth.

Yucca: Yeah, I think so.

Mark: It's, it is very likely and, and it will be, you know, primitive, rudimentary life. It won't be, you know, it won't be us, but

Yucca: maybe though, right?

Mark: maybe,

Yucca: I mean, I would, I would guess that probably more simple life is more common than more complex life, right? In the same way that we, you know, see, More small planets and we see large planets, we're probably gonna, and we look at the own history of our earth, right? We had simple microbial life, which we shouldn't actually pass off as being too simple.

There's a lot more complexity to it that we forget because it's not the scale that we exist on, and we don't see it in that way. But, but that's been the majority of life on earth. So I think that that's, we're more likely to find more of that, but. I suspect that there's a lot of quite complex life out there as well.

Mark: Oh, I agree. I just don't know that we're ever gonna see signs of it within the next 20 years or so, that I have to be alive.

Yucca: Yeah. I mean there, it depends, right? It depends on what we're looking for. And if anyone wants a rabbit hole to go down, go ahead and look up iOS, internal Water, Ocean Worlds. These are places like Europa, Pluto, and Salus. These, these we're an xw, right? Water our oceans on the outside, and the fact that we're even here is, is strange and bizarre given.

Like, hazards there are to living on the surface of your planet. So one of the places that we would expect to find life would be in these eye wows where it's a much more protected environment that they don't have to deal with things like the dinosaur dead. Right. But they're harder to detect cause if they're there because they're under 60 kilometers of ice.

Right. So anyways, that's a, that's a fun. Fun rabbit hole to go down if you're looking for something fun. So, but yeah.

Mark: we've, we've kind of gone into, well we, we ended up sort of trailing into. How abstract philosophy can often collide with the very shaggy nature of nature, right. Because nature is very complex and it's, it's complexity is fractal. It has repeated patterns, but every one of those patterns is somewhat different than its previous iteration.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Every case is a unique case and it becomes very, very difficult to make grand philosophical statements in that, that simplify those things when there are so many special cases about the nature of life and the nature of nature.

Yucca: Right. Okay. So why don't we zoom in a little bit and talk about some of these. These folks that are doing the decomposition. Right? Because we've been talking about 'em kind of on a philosophical level, but at least as we have it here on earth. The big stuff like us, were exceptions. Most life isn't big like us, right?

Most life is single cell. And many of the decomposers are right. 

Mark: We're carrying them around with us. I mean, the people tend to think of the decomposition process as something that invades. A body when, when the organism is no longer alive, and there is some of that, but a lot of it is just the bacteria that are inside the organism continuing to multiply and kind of take advantage of the fact that there's no longer an immune system to keep them in check.

So they just grow and grow and grow and grow and they emit gases and the body bloats and all those kinds of things happen.

Yucca: Right. Yeah. They're, they're everywhere. Right.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: And the most of the, the microbes in us are they're in a mutualistic relationship with us, right? We often associate microbes with. Pathogens because the ones that we know the most about are the very, very few ones that can cause us harm. But we were very incentivized to study them, right?

Same thing with viruses too. We're absolutely full of viruses, but the ones we know about the most about are the ones that can har harm us. And so over time, I looked forward to seeing where that whole field goes with our exploration of the roles that they play in, in genomes and all of that.

Mark: Yeah, we're learning a lot about how viral genetic material has inserted itself into our genome at many, many points, and there's recognizable working viral genetic material now that is a part of us.

Yucca: Right. And we come at this from this human perspective, but it's everybody else.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: It's the sunflowers, It's your cat, it's the hydros at the, you know, bottom of, of bodies of water. You know, all of that, right? So we've got, we've got different groups of our microbes, which may look very similar under the microscope, but, but behave very differently.

And our genetically very different. But we've got our bacteria as one of our major groups, right, in terms of our G composers. Then we've also got our fungi. So the fungi, they are really good at breaking down woody material that nobody else can really break down. And with our, our plant kind of material, our, our cellulose I know the woody material is, but in terms of the, the main cell wall, which is cellulose animals don't break that.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: The only things that do are the microbes and any animal that can break it down is breaking it down because it's got microbes inside of them doing it.

Mark: it's hosting microbes that are doing that work for it.

Yucca: Yes. Whether that's, you know, whether that's your bison in the field or whether that's your termite, they've got their little partners in there. And we often think about the decomposers on the outside, right?

Like you were saying, we think about them in the compost pile, or we think about them in the leaves. But in a lot of systems, they're inside of animals. And the animals bodies are part of the, the. Food, web, the soil, food web as well, and part of that decomposition.

Mark: Right. Well, and, and just as an example of this somewhere between a third, between 30% and 50% of any given bowel movement of yours

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: is bacteria.

Yucca: It's just the,

Mark: Is, it's just de, it's just decomposing bacteria. It's not food. It's not stuff you ate. It's cells that reproduced like crazy eating that food

Yucca: That you fed them?

Mark: that you fed them and that now you have excreted out of your body and they're going to continue going.

Yum, yum, Yum, yum. Yu.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: On the remaining food material and other creatures will come along to join them in that. But it's, it's so important for us to recognize that we are hosts to, and basically factories for these decomposing bacteria and other organisms.

Yucca: We are their habitat. We are very literally an ecosystem, right? Just if you just even look at the definition of an ecosystem, and it makes sense because it all started. That scale, right? And the evolving into these, these bigger organisms. Again, we think of this as being normal, but it's really, really weird for earth's history and for the, the number of, of different species.

It would make sense that as we evolved and got bigger, they would just move into the new habitats that were opening up and we would've been those habitats, right? So we look at our own bodies and we're full of microbes.

But you look at the tree's body, and they're full of microbes too, and that they're doing, some of those microbes are producers, some of them are decomposers, some of them are both at the same time, right?

Mark: Right.

Yucca: So they're just at work taking this, this stuff usually dead, sometimes not breaking it down, and then they're eaten by somebody.

Most of them aren't just leaving it politely out for somebody else, right? Microbes don't really poop. They get eaten by something larger that gets eaten by something large and something larger, and then that might excrete. It, it takes a lot of steps of it going from one body to another to another before it gets back into the soil or back into the body of a plant or the body of an animal.

Mark: One of the things about. Microbes is that they tend not to have a surplus, you know, they absorb what they need and then they just get bigger.

Yucca: and then they split in half into two new ones.

Mark: well, exactly. Yes. But, so instead of excreting, although they do excrete to some degree, but not very much

Yucca: terms of, yeah, we're gonna have different biofilms and things like that, but, but typically you're not gonna see like micro pellets, , the way you'd have like rabbit pellets. Right? Like, they just, they don't, they don't have the same kind of structures that we do to produce that. Mm-hmm.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah, that was my point.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: So yeah, there's this amazing, remarkable incre. Going on in us and it's going on around us, and it is the means by which we are able to exist. And so this time of year is a time when I really like to contemplate all of that and to be, just to be super aware that that is the nature of what we're doing here.

And because much of it is in. It doesn't make it any less true or any less important.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: You know, one of the things that's very weird about humans is that we're gigantic.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: I mean, e e even when you talk about the average size of an animal on earth, the average size of an animal on earth is about the size of a wood tick.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: That is, that is the average size of an animal on planet Earth, and we are these gargantuan creatures by comparison. And what that means is that the scale that we see things on is not fine grained enough to be able to see the microbial world where most of the action is taking place.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Of course things are happening at other scales.

Of course they are, and we see that. But this. This microbial scale is so fundamental to the nature and fabric of life here on earth. That drawing our attention to it and paying attention to it and being aware of all that it does for us, I think is just a really important part of my paganism. Right.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: You know, because as we've talked about so many times before, a lot of what being a naturalistic Pagan is about is learning to see and paying attention to the processes that are happening around us in nature.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. . Agreed. Yeah. So around this time in episodes, we often bring it back to how can we incorporate this or practice this sort of thing in our paths. And it sounds like you're talking about how important just the understanding is for you.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Are there any. Kind of ritual or daily practices that you do along this?

These lines?

Mark: You know, other than just acknowledging my mortality, that I as a, as an operating system, am gonna stop functioning

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and that my awareness. The awareness that arises as a result of my functioning is going to stop.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: That I acknowledge, you know, in my daily practice and all that kind of stuff, because keeps me on my toes, right?

Keeps me aware that time's a was and, and, you know, we need to, we need to do the things that we want to do because we don't have infinite time to do them in.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: But in terms of an actual ritual enactment of that, not so much because I mean, I suppose I could put a Petri dish on my focus and, you know, cultivate some decomposers.

But I haven't done that.

Yucca: Mm.

Mark: I'm just

Yucca: Well, you mentioned you do compost though, right?

Mark: Yes, Yes. It's actually the law in California now. You have to they, they haven't started enforcing it yet, but

Yucca: well, do you have compost pickup alongside with your, with your, you know, trash and recycling? Is that

Mark: do, we hit, yeah, it's it's yard waste, which then is industrially composted.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: The idea is that you do your domestic composting. You use that locally, and then yard waste is picked up. And taken to an industrial composting facility where they can do very high temperature composting that will work on those like plant-based plastics and things like that.

The so-called compostable

Yucca: that you just have to have your real thermoy compost for. You just gotta get 10 really high temperatures. Yeah.

Mark: Humans can't, or you know, domestic people can't really get to those temperatures very easily.

Yucca: Yeah, you'd need to have a larger pile to be able to get those temperatures. So you might be able to pair up with some neighbors to be able to get that kind of bulk, but it's gonna be tricky.

Mark: Yep. And then you need to make sure that your compost piles are far enough away from all structures, because they'll burn them down.

Yucca: they do do that. Yeah.

Mark: light itself.

Yucca: If, if you're doing the, the Thermo Fillic, there's a lot of different composting techniques. So this is this time of year I'd really encourage people to look into composting. So if you do eat plants and you've got leftover materials, you've got all of the, you know, tops, carrot tops and the this and the that, and you're, you know, little breadcrumbs and all of that, there's lots of different ways to compost.

And even if you're in a. . Let's say you're in a high rise apartment. Some a little worm bucket is fantastic. Worms are just microbe factories basically, and they'll eat

Mark: full tubes full of bacteria,

Yucca: That's right. Yeah. And and even if you don't have a garden to use it, then in your potted plants would love those worm castings or you.

You can make a little bit extra money on that too because that sells for a lot. So if you haven't done composting, this is maybe an interesting time just to look into that and see what the options are. Cuz you certainly don't have to do your, you know, big pile where your turn in every x number of days and that can make compost fast.

But that's not the only way,

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. When I lived in the country we had a compost bin out in our upper garden, and we would throw our. Vegetable scraps and all that kind of stuff in there. And we ignored it. We didn't I mean, I would water it once in a while, but other than that, I, you know, we didn't turn it, we didn't do anything.

Yucca: Yeah,

Mark: I

Yucca: you got time, it'll do it. Mm-hmm.

Mark: yeah, it, it'll do it over time. But the, the funny story is that my wife at the time who was not a Pagan and. Had grown up in a city and had a very sort of different spiritual orientation. She was a Buddhist and Had a much more sort of theoretical relationship with the world than a kind of nature based relationship with the world.

She went up to the compost pile at one point to throw a bunch of stuff in and came back and said, Somebody has shoveled a bunch of dirt into our compost pile. And of course the dirt was the compost. The compost had been, had turned into soil, which is what it does.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: and it looks just like any other dirt because that's where dirt comes from.

Yucca: But yeah.

Mark: And so it was really funny. I was like, No, nobody has been vandalizing our compost pile. That's just what compost does.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that brings up a really, a really interesting point though that. Many much of human society is in cities where we have purposefully isolated ourselves from the rest of nature and the cycles of nature. And so when we're coming from those backgrounds, we have some extra education to to do for ourselves, right?

Because why would she have known that? Right? She didn't need to know that in the context that she grew up in. And. can, can lead to a lot of misunderstandings that, that people can make, and especially when we're trying to do the best job we can to help take care of our world and manage the world that we are, that as we talked about in, in recent episodes that we're so ingrained in, right.

Every choice that we make influences the rest of our planet, we're so disconnected from these systems.

Mark: And that's true, and I think it's also true that there is more of a requirement of us to be connected now because of the crises facing the planet. The earliest archeological sites have middens. They have places where people threw stuff away. They threw bones away, they threw they, they threw excrement away.

They just humans for as and, and even pre-humans for as long as we've been around, have either dug a hole or made a pile or thrown things away from wherever we were eating without much regard for what was going to happen to it. And that was fine until we started devising stuff that doesn't naturally decompose very well.

And

Yucca: and our population increased. Right? There were many points in our history where, you know, there weren't a lot of us.

Mark: Yeah, we couldn't put a dent in nature even if we wanted to.

Yucca: Yeah. But that's a, We have a very different, a different situation now. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. Which is why it's important to get excited about decomposition and the Now it's tricky and we should acknowledge this because we have. Reactions to the process of decomposition that lead us to revulsion. And the reason for that is that we are not animals that can eat stuff that's decomposing and it, it makes us sick.

Yucca: Right when it's gone too far, there are some, I mean, when we talk about our fermented foods, that is actually on the path there, right? And that's how we could take certain things that wouldn't normally be very nutritious for us and kind of. Work with them a little bit, get a little bit more nutrition out of them by having the, helping, having the microbes kind of process us for us first.

But when we're talking about something that's put, that's, that's beyond what we can do, right?

Mark: we don't like the smell. We don't like the taste. Our noses wrinkle up and we, we get it as far away from ourselves as we can. And I, and that obviously goes directly to our experience of death and mortality. I mean, not only is it terrible to have the loss of someone that we love, but then to have them turn into something putrid.

that disgusts us is another fundamental piece of how hard it is for us to grapple with the fact of our mortality.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: So a lot of our responses to that have been various kinds of preservation approaches to bodies attempts to sort of put them away, wall them away you know, put them somewhere where we don't have to look at them or deal with them.

All of that. Absolute logical sense in terms of what kinds of creatures we are and how we react to things that are, that are decomposing. But we need to step beyond that to understand how many good things decomposition is doing for us and is doing for the world all the time.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. . Right?

Mark: where are.

Yucca: Well, We were kind of talking about ritual and it, and it seems like there's, it's one of these things that is maybe a little bit more just about awareness, but I could certainly imagine someone bringing composting into a ritual space. Or just awareness, doing some reflections, meditations on it, or maybe going for a nature walk.

And looking for every point where you can find. This happening. In fact, you'd probably spend walk about five feet and then spend about an hour there,

Mark: Right? Yeah. Oh look, there's a fungus. Oh look. There's leaves that are decomposing. Oh, look.

Yucca: Yep.

Mark: you know, one thing that occurs to me that could be done as part of a ritual cycle around the course of the year is you could gather a month of bunch of autumn leaves and compost them, and then. Come the spring equinox or so plant, you know, do some planning right earlier than that about what kind of plant you want to have and why.

Maybe plant a corn plant or two in the compost around the spring equinox, and then put it in the ground after the freeze just sort of shepherd that through the whole process, starting with the compost and harvest at the end of the year. And then you'd have.

Yucca: Mm.

Mark: That would be, that would be I, I, I like the idea of it.

I don't know whether I'd have the discipline to actually keep that going all year round, but

Yucca: You might wanna try with several seeds at once if you are,

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: Because , they don't always make it. But, but that's so lovely because it's starting before the planting of the seed. Right. Which is where we usually think of it as starting, but at that point you already have a, a living plant, right Seed. Living beings that have been around for a while already that came from their mother plant that is growing in the soil.

Like we keep, we can just keep going back. Right. Where we started is, is really very kind of arbitrary.

Mark: Right. Un unless you're talking about biogenesis which we're not even entirely sure is the way that life got started. You know, if you're talking about the very beginning of life on earth You know, was it, was it long chain molecules learning to self-replicate? Was it some sort of panspermia thing where it happened somewhere else and reigned in on meteorites and and then got going here?

There are, there are a bunch of possibilities.

Yucca: multiple events, which then developed in a similar way, but were somehow able to have horizontal transfer between them. Right. We don't know.

Mark: Yep. Right. And nature does to all of those things a lot. So it's, it's very hard to, you know, to make a, a judgment call about what we're gonna choose to believe. I'm, I myself, am extremely agnostic about the origins of life on earth.

There's a bunch of different proposals, all of which seem reasonable to me, and there's not enough data available to make a call, you know, to select one to believe in, right? So until we have more information to me it's just, well, life started on earth.

We know that. And

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, it's here. So, you know, we'll, we'll just have to take it for granted that it got started somehow.

Yucca: Yeah, I find the whole, the whole field which this is the field of astrobiology, right? To just be absolutely amazing and delightful to think about and try and piece that together. But as you're saying, we really just don't have very much data for, from that time period. But also, again, this is the only example that we have at the moment.

We've barely begun to start looking for it in other places and even in places that we're supposedly looking right on Mars, we're not looking where we think that there actually would be life If life's there, it's, it's not, it's quite certainly not in the places that we happen to have our rovers.

Right? It's gonna be underneath the ground or in the ice caps, or the sub training lakes, things like that. Right?

Mark: Right. And we just don't have the means to get to those places right now.

Yucca: We don't, but that's also and this is a much larger discussion, but we purposefully are not yet looking for life in those locations. And that's kind of a larger discussion to the strategy that NASA's taking with that and planetary defense which is. Again, larger discussion on, on whether I agree with that or don't with it.

But there definitely are some concerns around that. And then there are other places that, you know, there's good chance that Europa seems like a great place to find it, but we're pretty far off from being able to actually go into Europa and look for it.

Mark: Right,

Yucca: So there's a lot of of technical challenges and just time challenges because it takes a long time to get anywhere.

Mark: To get to Europa. It's a long way away.

Yucca: It is. Yeah.

Mark: Do you know the movie Europa Report?

Yucca: I do, Yes,

Mark: I love it so much.

Yucca: I

Mark: I, what, what I love about Europa Report more than anything else other than Brooklyn for some ridiculously low budget,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: is that shows scientists really being passionate about science. You know, everybody on that crew wants the data.

Yucca: Yes.

Mark: They, they care about getting the data more than they do their own survival, which is just a beautiful thing to me. It's so cool.

Yucca: Yeah. Not a film to watch with your young kids, by the way. Take a look at, you know, do a little bit of reading before you'd show that to some of your younger, younger audience.

Mark: Yeah, that makes

Yucca: Yeah. . So, but it, you know, there's wonderful parts to it and so let's I think this is a good place for us to kind of wrap back to our conclusion here

Mark: Decomposition is cool. It's not just the law, it's a good idea. 

Yucca: Yep. And death is, is a part of the cycle. Without death, there isn't life.

Mark: No life.

Yucca: Yep.

Mark: Nope. And minimizing death is not a way to foster life. It's life. Life depends on death. In order for us to continue functioning and for the system of life on earth to continue functioning. So, We, I, I've talked before about the so-called death positivity movement that's happening here in the United States where we're Working to transform the, the, the cultural understanding of death and our relationship to it and our practices around it.

And I just feel that this is so important because if you don't really get your mind around the, the positive nature of death, you're not really understanding nature,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: nature. Nature's where it's at. You know, nature is what's happening here, and it's, it's so amazing. It's, it's tragic that there are people who miss it because they don't understand it.

Yucca: Right. And it's all gonna happen whether you want to admit it or not.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Right. So getting to, to enjoy and be part of the wonder of it is. I think that's great personally, right? I think that's an improvement in the quality of the life that we get to have in the short period that we do.

Mark: I agree.

Yucca: Oh,

Mark: So there you have it, decomposition 2022. We are, we're happy to bring you this love note to death and, and rot and wish you all the very best of this. Hello season. This, this time, you know, for many pagans persists for a week or more into early November. And we hope that your celebrations are meaningful and spooky and fun and all the things that we hope for out of this season.

Yucca: Yep. Thank you.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at [email protected]

S3E37 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark,

Yucca: And I'm the other one Yucca.

Mark: and welcome to the Halloween season. This is the season when we celebrate Hallows, or whatever you choose to call it. It's a wonderful witchy holiday that we, pagans really enjoy. It's both fun and and kind of wacky and creative and as well as deep and meaningful and solemn.

And it's just a really good time all the way around. So, this is our episode to talk about how we celebrate that holiday and what it means to us.

Yucca: Right. So welcome. So there's a lot to this.

Mark: There is.

Yucca: Yeah. So I guess we should start with what and when is this holiday?

Mark: Ah, right. Okay. Well, you first, what do you think it is and when?

Yucca: Well, I, for me, it's, it's a little fuzzy on both levels. So there are two holidays that overlap with each other. For me. There is Halloween and then there's Hollows or second Autumn or sowing. I'm not really sure. What name? It's a little bit fluid there. But there's the, the kind of secular Halloween, which is just a celebration of the autumn spooky candy, you know, family fun stuff.

And then there's also the, the season that we're in, which is this time. Remembering the ancestors honoring of death of the sunset of the year. Really this going into truly going into the cold, dark time of the year. And I know that when we were at Solstice, yes, we kind of flipped over or the Equinox is, is getting closer, but now it really is the cold of.

In my climate, we almost always get our first snow as the kids are trick or treating

That's what it happens, right? Is the kids are out trick or treating and it snows on them. So it, it's, it's a, Halloween is the 31st, but the other holiday is kind of around that time when it feels. When it feels right for me, right When we, we kind of do the holidays at the closest day, that works for us.

We're not too worried about getting the exact moment because it's not like the solstice where the solstice I set an alarm for, right? The moment of the solstice and you know, sometimes that's gonna be two 15 in the morning. I'll just wake up, see some solstice and go back, sleep or, you know, that kind of thing.

But with this it's a little bit more wiggle room. So what about for you?

Mark: Well, I, I think we have some similarities, but some differences. I have a little bit more formal definition of when the holiday is. I consider this holiday to be a week long.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And it extends from the 31st through the seventh of Octo of November, which is when the actual midpoint is between the Equinox and the solstice.

Yucca: It's my littlest birthday actually. Yes, he's our little saw and

Mark: so, so official sown is, is is when your little one's birthday is. That's great. So, and I agree with you. On Halloween, we celebrate the secular holiday, which is the candy and the costumes and the, but it's still got all those thematic pieces wrapped up in it, right? It's all the death imagery all of the sort of scary monsters, most of whom have to do with coming back to life after being dead, which is something that we have a, a real aversion to apparently.

Yucca: Discomfort. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, there, that's, that's just not supposed to happen.

Yucca: Yeah. There and there's that transformation both in like coming back from the dead, but the Halloween, the costumes and stuff have this, You get to be somebody else as well

Mark: Right,

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. You get to be somebody else. And often the way that that expresses itself is as. Kind of the darker side of your personality or the sexier side of your personality. Things that you don't feel necessarily comfortable to express all the time, but there's this day when you're given permission to be able to do that kind of stuff.

And that's really important. I mean, I feel like we need more days like that. And people can dress up weird and not be judged for it. So. The, that's the secular part with the, with the candy and the decorations and all that kind of stuff. But then the rest of the week is the more solemn, kind of contemplative part where there's time to think about those that have died and are gone.

And there's time to reflect on my own mortality and update my death packet, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago. Do all that. Mortality oriented work that that I just feel is necessary and this is the right time of year to do it. And then on the first weekend of November, which is typically, I mean, it's typically like the sixth, seventh, fifth, somewhere in there is when my circle holds its sound ritual. we've, this will be our 33rd so, and Ritual in a row one of which was online because of Covid. But other than that, we've done them in person. And and I'll talk about that when we talk about rituals, but that's the more solemn observance really kind of encounter with death.

Yucca: Yeah. And this doesn't seem to be for either of our practices, but for many pagans, this is also the new year.

Mark: Right,

Yucca: So there's different points at which you can start the year, and for some this is, is that that point?

Mark: Right. And, and I think that from. I mean, certainly from the standpoint of my orientation to the Wheel of the Year, there's a real logic to starting there because, you know, the, the process of decomposition and then reassembly of new life is metaphorically represented by the the Hallows holiday, right? So this time between now and Yule is the time when the decomposition and recomposition is happening, and then Yule is.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: So there's a logic there, but for me it's just too hard to try to address new New Years in November.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: so much easier just to say that my new year is at the winter solstice, which is only about 10 days before the the secular.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Calendar New year. It just is a lot easier to deal with. If I have a New Year's Eve party on November 6th, everybody's gonna look at me funny.

But if I have a New Year's Eve party somewhere, you know, in the neighborhood of the solstice, then that makes a little more sense.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, and, and I can also certainly see the logic that people have for us, it, it doesn't feel like that as much because this is the time of the year where we've been getting ready for this time of the year. We have the. It doesn't feel like we're starting new yet. It's like this is what we've been preparing for, right?

This is, we've got all the harvests, this is stored up, and as we keep going through the months, well then, you know, we get to, to using up our stores of wood and our stores of food and, and that's quite on the literal side, but we could use that metaphorically as well. And so for me, starting anew when things are kind of bare.

You know, either the calendar year or even more towards spring really starts to feel like a new year to me.

Mark: Mm.

Yucca: So,

Mark: Yeah, I, I can see that. And of course the thing is time is time is linear, right? Time just goes on. So, you know, we, and the earth, because of our seasonal cycles, it moves in cycles. So there's any point that you put down on the, the 365 and a quarter days that we have in a given revolution around the sun and say that's the beginning has, is inherently arbitrary.

Yucca: sure.

Mark: I mean, it can't be any more arbitrary than January 1st, which makes, Absolutely has no astronomical relation or anything. I'm sure there's something about the conversion from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar that moved New Year's Eve from

Yucca: Well, that's why Christmas and solstice aren't on the same point. Right? And then, and then the way that the months shifted, right? Because the astronomical months, like in terms of lining up the zodiac with our months, they don't quite fit. And then we have to remember. You know, Earth's orbit isn't actually circular in terms of how much we spend in each of the constellations and so I don't know why, but

Mark: Yeah. I mean, it's my point being that it's all kind of arbitrary and so, you know, whatever works for you. That's great. For me, doing New Years now just doesn't make as much sense. Especially because this holiday is so much about endings, you know, And I, I think it's a little, it's a little abrupt and peremptory to say, Okay, we're done with endings.

Happy New year. I think this, this season is important enough and the processes that it commemorates are important enough that having a whole, what is it? Seven weeks, between seven, eight weeks between the holiday and you'll

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: to really kind of let this, the meanings of this season settle in, you know, to reflect on them, to write about them, to think about them.

You know that that miraculous process that's happening in the soil right now, which is all of the decomposers are going nuts with all the leaves, the leaves they're being fed, and the water they're getting that they weren't getting before and all that kind of thing I think speaks to a level of being appropriate to recognize decomposition as really what?

What's the main gain happening at this time of year in the temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere?

Yucca: Right. And I'm glad that you that you bring that up, right? Because we are speaking from, even though we are from different climates, we're still from this closer to each other. So we're both in temperate, northern hemisphere. Whereas, you know, life is gonna be very different and tropics or southern hemisphere, or if you get farther towards the poles, like it, it really changes over earth.

So every place that you are is going to be d. So, Yeah.

Mark: Yep. That's, that is so, so that, that's when, and and what we call it I mean, I've heard some other names for this season, but, and I prefer halls because it's not, it's just an English word. It's not Halloween because Halloween is kind of the secular holiday with trick or treating and all that kind of stuff.

And Hallows sounds much more sort of solemn and goy, I guess.

Yucca: Yeah, but it still is similar enough that there's the, those same sort of themes going on.

Mark: Right. And I don't use the, the Celtic word because I'm not of that derivation, and I'm trying not to, in my particular practice, I'm trying not to draw on any particular cultural frame. So I'm not I'm not appropriating I'm just. Just doing something that started in around the, around the turn of the 21st century with some old folkloric practices kind of drawn in and one item of appropriation, which is the Wheel of the Year, which was invented in the 1950s.

So I don't feel too badly about it.

Yucca: well invented, but but heavily drawing on multiple. Different cultures, traditions, right? They, they took you know, some of the Celtic festivals and Germanic and you know, and they, and the names themselves. You look at their, their mixes from lots of different languages. So, and then that was just sort of stuck together.

Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. And, and that's all, you know. Fair enough. I mean, I, I think, I think the success of the Wheel of the Year as a kind of near universal, I mean, I can't speak to North Heat folks or etic folks or whatever, but in my experience of the Pagan community of North America, the Wheel of the year is a near universal cycle of holidays that are celebrated

Yucca: Well, I think because it's so grounded in. What's happening with the Earth?

Mark: in reality. Yeah.

Yucca: it's not just arbitrary, right? We don't just pick a day, you know, this day it's, well, why we've got the, the solstice, we've got the equinoxes, we've got the transition between them which is, John has talked about often about it being, you know, the, the temperature shifts rather than what's going on with.

Tilt

Mark: Right, Right. Yeah. And so that's why I think it's so successful because it is grounded in reality. And I wouldn't have adopted it for AOP Paganism if it wasn't grounded in reality because my whole thing was, let's do a paganism that's grounded in reality,

Yucca: Hm. Yeah. Now there's wiggle rooms though, right? When you talk about the particular dates, right? When we are saying May 1st or October 31st, you know, those aren't necessarily the actual midpoints and which midpoint are we using, right? Are we using the, the midpoint in the orbit or are we using the midpoint in the days?

Like how are we doing that? So there's, you know, there's wiggle room.

Mark: Right, For sure. So having established that the whole thing is kind of fuzzy. Let's talk a little bit about kind of themes and practices and all that good kind of stuff.

Yucca: Yeah. So looking at Halls in particular, are we gonna talk about Halloween first?

Mark: Well, I suspect that our listeners probably have a pretty good grasp on what Halloween is about.

Yucca: I think so, yeah.

Mark: And I'm, and I, I mean, I love Halloween. I just, I think it's wonderful. I love all the decorations and the, the, the imagery and all that good kind of stuff. So, and I love dressing up in costumes and I love, you know, playing characters and all that kind of stuff.

So it's, it's definitely been a holiday that resonates a lot for. But I think it makes more sense to talk about the, the more solemn and kind of reverential side of this holiday season. You know, we, we just had an episode about ancestors and recognizing ancestors and and about death, about confronting mortality and You know, remembering those that are gone.

In our, and we've, we've talked about this before in our naturalistic approach to cosmology, we don't see compelling evidence to believe in an afterlife,

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: so we don't believe in one. And what that means is that that death is it's the.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: a very serious thing to contemplate. You know, we have these lives that are so precious to us, and knowing that they're going to end sets the stage for everything else, it creates the context for all the decisions we make.

Yucca: Hmm. Yeah. So as we've been talking about for the last few weeks, these. Themes that we're thinking about both our own death, the deaths of others, the those beloved dead that, that are gone already, right?

Mark: Right. Yeah. And so, You know, this, this is the time. Like, and not, not necessarily just in the last cycle. I mean, certainly if you've had losses within the last cycle that the, the herd of that is most vivid because it's most recent.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: And so, you know, lighting a candle or lighting candles, you know, for those that you've lost is, it can be a very meaningful thing, you know, reviewing the pictures.

Of of the, the people that you've lost and remembering the times that you had with them together. And in this case, I'll say people in a, in a very general and vague sense, people, you know, including cats and dogs and, you

Yucca: Yeah. People, not just humans, but people. Yeah.

Mark: I mean, I have a practice that includes some recognition of that on an, on an ongoing basis because of my evening ritual where I light a candle on my underworld focus and say the honored dead every night.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And that is as much to remind myself that I'm going to die as it is about anyone else who. It's, it's really just about keeping me grounded in the fact of my mortality and that I need to, if there's stuff I want to do, I need to get going on it because time is short.

Yucca: Right, And as we said so many times, we don't know how much time we have.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: We know that it's limited, but we don't know if it's tomorrow or if it's in 20 years, 50 years, whatever it is,

Mark: Yeah. I have an acquaintance who three months ago, Suddenly got a diagnosis of stage three pancreatic cancer,

Yucca: Wow.

Mark: and so he's gonna be gone really soon.

Yucca: Yeah 

Mark: barring, barring an extremely unlikely

Yucca: it's, It's very rare. Yeah.

Mark: Really rare.

Yucca: That's how my father-in-law went.

Mark: Oh

Yucca: It was just, it was a matter of months.

Mark: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. So, And, you know, I mean, he had some, he'd had some dietary complaints and some you know, kind of abdominal discomfort, but nothing particularly serious and went to the doctor and next thing he knows he's dying.

So these are things that can happen to us. They, they happen to people and we are people. You know, one of the things that is really important to try to get your head around in contemplating your mortality is that you're not special indifferent when it comes to mortality. I know you've been the protagonist of your, your movie since the time you were born, but the truth is that life will kill off the main character.

That's just you.

Yucca: all, all stories end.

Mark: Yes, con consider life to be, you know, the, the process of life to be the George r r Martin of of your personal movie . Just, just cuz you're an important character doesn't mean you get out alive.

Yucca: So that's one of the really big themes here, right? And that and remembering our own and the one and the people close to us that sometimes feel almost like us. At times, right?

Mark: Yes. That it's unimaginable that they could ever be gone.

Yucca: Yeah. 

Mark: And my encouragement at this time of year is well imagine it, you know, 

Yucca: that won't make it happen sooner.

Mark: won't make it happen sooner, and it won't, and it probably won't make it any less painful when it does happen. But it will make you more able to grapple with it when it does happen. I mean, I've known people who have been impacted by the death of a parent, and they've just been so crushed, just so devastated that like inconsolable When the truth is, if you live to be a decent age, this is something kind of to be expected. You know, we, we, we all run outta time and they do too. So, you can help yourself by by these contemplations.

I know the, the Tibetan Buddhists have elaborate meditations. your own death about the death of those around you, about I mean the impermanence of your society. They, they're nothing if not thorough. 

Yucca: I think that, that all of this just for me highlights just how precious life is, the moments that we have and, and helps to, to act as. It's almost like a filter to help us filter out what matters and what doesn't. What am I wasting my time on? And so, and also having some comfort in the memories, right?

Thinking about the, whoever it was and the, in the wonderful things of that, right? So there's, there's the solemness to it, but there's. There's also a little, this, this quiet joy underneath it.

Mark: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think about the Irish tradition of the wake and there's a lot of laughter at awake,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: you know, because people are telling stories of the the one who's dead. And a lot of those are funny stories, happy stories,

Yucca: What happened at the pub, right?

Mark: exactly. So you remember that time when and and that's.

That's all very very much to be embraced and encouraged because grief, I, I heard a great synopsis of grief once, which is grief is love with nowhere to go,

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: and I think. When we revisit those stories about the people when they were alive, we're able to feel some of the love that we have for them, you know, there for, for an instant there because we're living in a memory rather than in the current moment.

There is a place for the love to go and I think that that is very helpful when we think about funerary rights. Which we talked about when we did a right, A Rite of Passage

Yucca: Oh, it's been a couple years at this point.

Mark: been a long time ago. We might wanna revisit

Yucca: I think so. Yeah.

Mark: of passage again.

Yucca: I think that probably is still in 2020,

Mark: Oh

Yucca: right? This has been quite a while.

Mark: that is quite a while cuz we're numbing up on 2023.

Yucca: Yep. Wow.

Mark: yeah. So, Yeah, when you think about that and we think about funeral rights, those are for the living.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Hopefully they're conducted in accordance with the wishes of the one who has died. But in some cases, you kind of have to overrule the dead person. In my opinion, particularly when the dead person says, I don't want any ceremony, I don't want any memorial, I don't want, you know, any, anything.

You know, the reality is the people who survive you, they need that. And whether or not you wanted something or not, it's probably a good idea that somebody organized something like that.

Yucca: Yeah,

Mark: So, 

Yucca: funny thing is at that point, it's not actually about you anymore.

Mark: that's, You're the subject or you're the object, but you're not the subject. Right? You're, you're no longer capable of being a subject. So it's it's important, you know, that we, that we revisit those memories. And one of the things that we can do at this time of year is to revisit memories of those that we've lost and what we've lost in the way of relationships. Career steps things that we loved in our life that are no longer there, or that we feel like it's time to put down and move away from. Th this is the time to do it. And so there are lots and lots of pagans all over the place. Casting casting what they are finished with into fires, either metaphorically or.

Yucca: Or quite literally

Mark: Written on paper or

Yucca: in a cauldron.

Mark: in, in, in a flaming Cauldron. Yes. And, and there will be during that week between Halloween and the first weekend in November, all over North America. Certainly.

Yucca: mm-hmm.

Mark: It's good to have a time of year that is for that. Because so much of the rest of the year is really focused on growth and goals and

Yucca: Doing, doing.

Mark: and then harvesting, which is a bunch more doing, and, and all of that is so important because right, we need, we need to do things in our lives.

But there also comes a time when, you know, you recognize that the crop didn't. Or it basically failed and you cut down what is there and you composted.

Yucca: Yeah. And that it's okay to rest it's time. To rest, and that's the other half for us, is in my family's tradition, is that we look at this as the, the beginning of night, the end of the year, the sunset. Right. It's the end of the year, but it's not the beginning of the new year

Mark: Hmm.

Yucca: Right. It's okay. The, the annual season is, is gone now it's time.

The, the plants are dying back many. Our annuals and they die back, and the perennial ones are going dormant, and it's just time to go, Okay, the day is done, the year is done. I accept what was and what

Mark: Mm, mm-hmm.

Yucca: here I am now.

Mark: Right? Right. And that, that. Corresponds exactly to my way of viewing the year as mapped along the arc of a human life. Right. You know, middle age is at the autumnal equinox, and then, or I'm sorry, Elderhood is at the autumnal equinox and then deaf at Halls. And then there's this period leading up to Yule, which is the part that we never see of the life cycle, cuz we're not alive during it.

Or if we're alive, we're in a, you know, a zygote form. And not conscious enough to be aware of anything going on. But but there's all kinds of amazing stuff happening there. I mean, we're going to, we're, we're gonna talk about decomposition here, coming up I guess in our next episode.

Yucca: Yep. Next week. Yep.

Mark: And the disassembly of what used to be alive and the reassembly of it by life into more of itself is it's this astounding trick that life does here on earth.

It's, it's, I mean, you know, we think of, you know, the, the incredible scientific leap of Dr. Frankenstein, right? Who's able to, Take what's dead and turn it into something living again. Well, that's what life does all the time,

Yucca: Yeah, that's what it is.

Mark: all the time. That's, that's, that is life. That's what the process is. So it's, it's a great time to recognize that, you know, death comes and, you know, then it's, it's time.

It's the end. Time, the, the day is over and it's time to either go dormant and wait for another cycle, or it's time to be disassembled and created into something else. And so going dormant and taking that rest time is really important. I think about all the Scandinavian countries that have these traditions of, you know, huddling up and putting on a fire and reading books.

I, I know Christmas Day is a day of reading books in Iceland.

Yucca: Hmm

Mark: it's traditional to give one another socks. So you have nice, warm feet and there you are, and you sort of huddle up and read books and it's, and that just sounds like a great time.

Yucca: That's, that's what we do with the whole Yule season. I love it so much.

Every day is about warm, fuzzy socks and hot, you know, nice hot bone broth and the fire crackling and

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: cuddling kitties. So yeah, looking forward to that. There's always that, that bit of looking forward to the next season to.

Mark: Yes. Yes.

Yucca: enjoying this one, but going, Oh, put just around the corner. We have that, That wonderful. The snuggle season.

Mark: Right. Right. Yeah. And so that's another thing that sort of sweetens the bitter pill of, of the Death Sabbath

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: is knowing that, well, yes. Okay. We're facing some very, very hard realities right now. Which we need to because we are mortal beings and you know, if we're gonna have a reality based practice, I go back to that again, then we're gonna acknowledge that we're temporary and that this is gonna happen to us.

But just on the other side of that season is this wonderful celebration of family and connection and friends and loved ones. You know, eating sweets and eating too much and drinking too much, and just having a, a lovely, a lovely time kind of stowing in the last calories that we possibly can before the super cold arrives,

Yucca: Right. Hmm. And if your, if your climate gets it, the snow,

Mark: right?

Yucca: so yeah.

Mark: We get a little bit of snow on top of this. The, the peaks around. Every four or five years. But that's it.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Who knows what's gonna happen with global warming now?

Yucca: Yeah. We get, Yeah. Go on.

Mark: so why don't we talk about rituals cuz we haven't actually talked about what we do specifically at this time of year. And I, I was gonna tell the story about my circle sow and, but I was wondering what do you do for your, for your hallows ritual or sown ritual?

Yucca: Yeah, well, I have a, a personal one that I do, and we haven't really developed a full family one yet. And that, that I think is developing, you know, as, as the kids get older, they get to a point where they can. Different parts of life and reality kind of start to, to set in. And so we'll, we'll see what happens this year.

But it's also an extremely busy time of year for us. Lots of birthdays and, and following itself and, and all of that. But so in, maybe in next year or the year after, I might have something different to say about what we do with the kids. But for me, I choose an evening around this time, and this is really the, the, the big one for me where I go out and I sit outside in the garden.

And at this point it's crispy. Right. The guard. There's, there's not, maybe there's a few of the leafy greens kind of trying to peek out. But I leave, I leave it all. I haven't cleared it out. And I leave a lot of the, the plants till the spring anyways because of, that's where a lot of the insects will over winter.

Right. And I wanna, you know, leave that habitat for them. But I'll sit out and I do not like to be cold . I'm one of those people, you know, if you're seeing the, the recording here I am sitting in my sleeping bag with a little hot water bottle at the c at it with my sweater on. But I'll go out without my big coat on.

And so that I am cold. And I will feel that cold on my skin and sit down and, and have a, you know, a personal kind of meditation or journey and just allow myself to feel that cold as the sun setss and just be out in the that cold. Brown crinkled garden, watching the very first stars come out as the sun sets away and just let myself, let all those things go, all those things that, that it's time to let them go from the year.

Those fights that I had, that, you know, I've been holding on to and the things that, that didn't work out, the dreams, that didn't work out, the, you know, all of that stuff and just. Let it go. It's, it's gone. It's going. It's dead. It's going to bed. Whatever's happening to it, I've released it and accept it. Yeah.

Mark: That's wonderful. That reminds me a little bit of a thing that we do at UL every year, which is to sit out with a cup of something warm, but. To, to sit out in the cold for about a half an hour or so and just feel the air temperature feel,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: feel the cold and dark before we bring the light back into the house. So my circle, as I said, has been getting together for since 1991, this will be our 33rd. Sow and ritual, which is just shocking to me. I don't know how that ever happened, but everybody who was in the circle to begin with is still there. And plus a couple more. Three, three more. And this, we've done some variety of this every year for many, many, many years.

The circle started on, on Halloween night. In 1991. So it's, it's also,

Yucca: work for that?

Mark: Yeah, because I mean count, count 1, 2, 3, Right? It's like this will be the first,

Yucca: I was born in 89 and I'm 33 now, but I guess it's because this is the final anyways

Mark: is the, this is the next

Yucca: year. Yeah. So this is the next, Okay.

Mark: Right. This is, this starts the next cycle.

Yucca: Okay.

Mark: Yeah. So it's 33. The, and what we do is we build a focus, a big altar next to a, a fire circle where there's a fire laid but not lit. And the, the focus has jackal lanterns on it that are.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: So it's glowing and there's all these symbols and bones and skulls and things all over that. And previously we, it was just a raked circle that we made. This is, this is at the home of friends of ours who have forested land, Redwood land. And this is an open clearing where we do this behind their house. And, and previously we just, you know, raked the circle and set it up that way. In recent years, it's a circle of chairs,

Yucca: Sure

Mark: Because we've gotten to the point where many of us really need a chair and are not gonna stand up for

Yucca: Well, we had an episode about that recently, right? About thinking about who is part of your ritual and what are the different needs of the people in that

Mark: Exactly. Yeah. And it I mean, I have to say it did feel like somewhat of a concession at some level. To me it was like, Oh boy, we're getting old, but we're getting old . So there's not a lot to be said about it.

Yucca: Didn't you say you were the youngest or

Mark: I am, I'm the, I'm the youngest. I'm the youngest in the group. And the oldest is 86, 85,

Yucca: Okay.

Mark: something like that.

So, yeah, I mean, and most of the folks are in their sixties or seventies, but you know, we, when we first got together, I was in my twenties, so it's just been a long time. So we get together and then we we do a ritual that's about kind of letting go. Letting go of the things that we no longer need.

Letting go of life, letting go of letting go of our physical, you know, letting, letting go of, of, be, of existing in essence. And then, Yes. And we sing a couple of songs and we love to sing together and we harmonize together really beautifully. So it's really an enjoyable thing that we love to do. And then we, when we're ready, march down to down through the forest and it's very dark down to a dark place that we've designated as the land of the. And there we call out to those that we've lost and want to communicate with, and we talk to them. We, we tell them that we're sorry to lose them, and we tell them that we miss them and we tell them that we love them and all those kinds of things.

In most cases, when my father died, it was a little different. We do that for quite some time until the, the cold starts kind of seeping into our bones and it starts to feel a little too comfortable being there in the land of the dead. And that's the cue that we need to get up and get out of there.

Because otherwise we might stay and that wouldn't be good. So, we make our way back to the, to the fire circle and we light the fire. I use a sprigg of U Tree that I've gathered from a cemetery nearby on Halloween the previous year. So because you know, if I use this year's it would be too green and it wouldn't actually light.

So the last year's U Spri is sitting on my focus right now drying and that's what I'll use to light the. And then we share chocolate and wine and pomegranate and sing some more and sing about how happy we are to be alive. And we come back into the joyfulness of this existence, temporary as it is, and how glad we are to be with one another.

And then, you know, after, after a while that all kind of peters out and we go inside and have a great big, huge. And enjoy each other's company. And we do that as a, as a stay over event. So we all

Yucca: drive home or

Mark: right. Exactly. We can, we can hang out and get in the hot tub or whatever and just have a really nice time with one another for that whole, that whole weekend.

Yucca: Oh, that's amazing.

Mark: It's so lovely and so transformative and you wouldn't think that after doing it so many times that it would be. But every year there are different losses, there are different things to speak to, different circumstances, and we change right from year to year as people we change.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, thinking three decades of change.

Mark: yes. Yes. So it's, it's a really profound thing and it's not a complicated ritual.

And you can, you can, you could do this ritual without having a dark place in the forest to walk to. You could do that as a visualization. Do it as a guided meditation instead. So just, you know, if you, if the space you have is a living room, you could do it right there. You could do it, you know, start in total darkness.

You know, do your early, you know, except for maybe, you know, a jackal lantern lit with an l e d candle or whatever. If you don't wanna set off your smoke alarm and you could then do the voyage to the land of the dead. And you could, you could embellish that much more than we can in real life.

You could row across the river, sticks to the island of apples and, you know, meet your ancestors and stuff. There's all kinds of cool things you can do in a mental journey.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: So, there's nothing proprietary about what we're doing. If this ritual sounds like it's appealing to you, go ahead and.

Yucca: Yeah. And really anything that we share on the podcast, that's, that's, if it's works for you and it sounds like it's something that you wanna try out, please do.

Mark: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, the reason we produce this podcast is for you, the listeners, to provide ideas, resources, thinking opinion. Take it or leave it, you know, whatever, whatever value you can get out of what we're providing, you know, we're, we're happy to, to provide it. So that's, that's hellos, that's, that's the, the Halloween sew hellos sab it season.

Yucca: Yep.

Mark: And we hope that you have a, Happy, cheery, spooky, goofy, sexy, solemn, reflective

Yucca: chilly.

Mark: silly, meaningful passage of the season because it is and can be all of those things at one time or another.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, thank you everybody.

Mark: Thank you. We'll see you next week.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at [email protected]

S3E36 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science Based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca 

Mark: I’m the other one, Mark.

Yucca: and today we are talking about ancestors. So it's an appropriate time of year for that, I think any time of year, but as we approach what some people call Halloween Hollow sa. This is something that's on a lot of people's minds.

Mark: Right, Right. This is the time of year when we think about those who are departed, who are no longer with us. And as well as contemplating our own mortalities we talked about last week.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And it's a good time to sort of sit with who are our ancestors? Who do we, you know, who do we feel connected to in the way of ancestry?

And then of course to have observances at this time of year. Vary from culture to culture, but it's very frequent that at this time of year people are doing some sort of the des MUTOs or some other kind of acknowledgement of relatives who have passed on or, or other ancestral recognitions. So the next thing for us to think about really is what do we mean when we talk about an ancestor, right? I mean, it's kind of a fuzzy word. Maybe we should start by exploring how ancestor. Observance veneration recognition fits into paganism as a whole. And maybe where some of that comes from. I mean, one of the theories that I find pretty credible, honestly as a non theist Pagan one of the questions we have to ask ourselves is, where did these ideas of Gods come from,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Because they're all over the place. and one of the prevailing theories for where the Gods came from is that they were originally stories about ancestors. They were stories about heroic activities or other other personality traits of particular figures from history that were actually real people, right. And then their stories got more and more embellished over time until, you know, the guy who did a great job on the Mastodon hunt ends up throwing lightning bolts from the sky. You know, that's kind of the way, it's the way human storytelling works.

Yucca: Yeah. And I think that it's, it's easy for us to forget how long we've been around for.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: On the one hand it's very short in, in kind of the grand scheme of things, but how many generations of humans there's been, And then of course we'll get into this later, but the, you know, before we were even humans, so how many, you know, 20, 30, just for that transformation, The Mastodon hunt to, you know, lightning bolts, but there's, we're talking hundreds, thousands of generations of people telling stories.

Mark: Right, and it's not like they only tell them once a generation, This is one of the reasons why culture and technology. Evolves so much more quickly than biology does, right? Because those are informational and information can, can morph really quickly.

Yucca: Did you ever play the the game telephone?

Mark: Oh yeah.

Yucca: Right. That's a really fun one to do, and you, that's, you watch that happen every day, with in real time, real life. But it's just such a great, even with a small group of people for anyone who's not familiar, you have one person tells somebody, whisper. This is great with a group of kids, whisper something to the next person and then they whisper it to the person next to them, next to them, and then at the end, the last person says it out loud.

And you see how much it changed from the first person to the last person.

Mark: Right, and this is when they're trying to get it. Right. Everybody is trying to transfer the information correctly, and even with a small group, a small little circle of people, what comes out at the end can be really hilariously different than what was originally said to the first person.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: You know,

Yucca: what you're, with, what you're talking about, when we do it on lifetimes with stories that have emotional meanings to people, you know, It's going to change based on the teller, but what's happening in the lives of these people at the time, the stage of their life. I mean, so much changes over just a lifetime.

But then over cultures, as those cultures evolve and change,

Mark: Sure, Sure. Yeah. I mean, when you think about it, it's like maybe the guy with the Mastodon who turned into the hurler of lightning bolts from the sky. Maybe that particular figures story doesn't have anything. It doesn't have anything particular to do with getting through times that are hard and adversity and that kind of thing.

But when there are times of adversity, you can bet somebody will make up a story about that figure that has to do with how they survived hard times because people need that story then, and we create the stories we need in order to get through the times we.

Yucca: Right. Or not even, you know, just completely make it up, but slightly shift a little bit of the interpretation of the previous version of the story and not even know that they're doing it

Mark: Sure. Yeah, exactly. And, and there's nothing there's nothing devious about it. It's, it's not like anybody, you know, ever probably intended to deceive anybody. But these stories evolve. They evolve to become the stories we need. Right? And that, that's the nature of human storytelling. You know, we can see that in the kinds of movies that get produced.

We can see it in the kinds of books that are popular. They are, they are the stories that are needed at that particular time.

Yucca: Yeah. So I like that idea a lot. I think it's probably not the only part to it, but I think it's a, an interesting component, right.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: I think that there's also a that this, the honoring of, of ancestors and even as far as ancestor worship is something very common throughout the world. There's lots of different groups that do it, and I think some of that comes from simply a place of originally of, of gratitude and recognition of how much we have received from.

Whoever ancestors are, which we should talk about in a moment, but that, you know that we come from them and they worked hard, and without their hard work, we wouldn't be here.

Mark: Right,

Yucca: Literally, very, very literally would not be here,

Mark: Sure. So that gratitude in that veneration is deserved.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: There are also darker aspects to it, For example, Plugging people into a system of ancestor veneration is a pretty good way to keep them obedient to their family.

Yucca: It is.

Mark: It's a way, it's a way for their, their particular clan group or familial structure, whatever it is, to have a lot of influence over their lives.

And what ends up happening in cultures that have very strong traditions of ancestor veneration is of course, that the elderly hold tremendous amounts of.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: they're on their wage boards becoming ancestors.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. or are depending on how you are looking at an ancestor. Right. They're not, they're not gone yet, but they are those who came before. Right. You know, I don't know if you, I'm guessing you probably were told many times as a kid, respect your elders. Right. That's something pretty common in our, our culture.

Mark: I don't know that I was encouraged to respect anybody rather than my father when I was a kid. But I'm, I'm an

Yucca: you didn't, didn't have any, you know, folks who lived on the same street as you, who got mad when you. You know, doing something loud or talking back to a teacher or something like that. And we're told to respect, We're told to respect your elders.

Mark: Oh, I imagine. I probably was, I just can't think of an example right now.

Yucca: We just didn't take it serious. They just forgot it.

Mark: Well, yeah, it's, for whatever reason, I'm just not, I'm not remembering an instance of that right now.

Yucca: Maybe it's a regional thing as well.

Mark: Could be. Yeah, it could be. But when I was a kid you still called adults, Mr. And Miss and Mrs. And that's how you were introduced to them.

Yucca: Well, that's still a regional thing though.

Mark: is it?

Yucca: Yeah, that's, I think that has to do with what part of the, at least, at least within the United States, what part of the country you're in. 

Mark: So ancestors very important part of the practice of many Pagan traditions particularly at this time of year. But we should talk more about what we think of when we individually, what you and I think of when we think of ancestors and what our orientation to those is. You wanna start?

Yucca: Yeah, I mean this is, this is a. Interesting area cuz we can go in a couple of different directions with it. One is you know, my line of the people who made me right. So we can start with, Okay. My parents, their parents, their parents on and on back. And I tend to think of my ancestors as being anyone who was in that line.

There's only. Who's alive out of that? So my father's alive my mother and all four grandparents, et cetera. You know, they're not but I kind of still think of my father as being, you know, one of my ancestors. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say necessarily he's one of my ancestors, right? One of the ancestors but I also think about that going beyond. The humans

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: if we go far enough back then my grandmothers weren't human,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: We go back and we were, some were still apes, some other kind of ape. Before that we weren't apes and keep going, you know, we were little furry creatures curring around when the asteroid hit and keep going back and back and fish.

Mark: fish.

Yucca: And all the way back to what gets called Luca, right? The last universal common ancestor. But actually that's the last universal. That doesn't mean that that was the start, right? And I, I just really love thinking about how there is an unbroken chain of life. You know, there's all of these arguments going on about when life starts and all of that and, but life hasn't stopped.

I mean, it will eventually. Right. We talked about that. Right? Like it's gonna stop in me, but the, but, but the cells that are me were made out of the cell. Out of a cell that was in my mother. That and her cells were made and her mother made in another and just keep, It's just so amazing to think about.

It's just kept going and going and it's not had my consciousness in it,

Mark: Right.

Yucca: but it's been there.

Mark: It's like a relay race lighting torches, right? You know, you run a certain distance with this torch and then you light the torch of the next runner, and that runner keeps going until they get to the next runner. So asking the question, when is, when did the fire start? Becomes a really thorny issue, right?

It's like, well, my fire started in 1962, but the fire started a long, long, long, long way before that.

Yucca: But did it start in 62? Like that's, you know, because what is the, you that started, I mean, you were born in 62, right? But what is the you part of that? Like, are you, you know, was you the, the egg that was in your grandmother? Right. The egg that you, that ended up becoming you. Your mother was born with that.

Mark: That's right.

Yucca: Right. You know, so going back with that, but, but that was her right? Or was it you? You know, all of that. But that's where I love that, how blurry it becomes where the identities just a blur. And I know some people are gonna have very strong feelings about the answer to that. About, no, you are this moment or that moment, or you know, and in

Mark: mostly out of a desire to control people and take away women's autonomy. Let us

Yucca: yeah, let's be that, That's definitely one of the, the major factors right now. But, but for me, setting all of that whole very important side of it aside for a moment, there's this blurry line of this, this continuation of. Life and beings who, who have come to this moment. That's me. But it's also, I, I get very inspired and kind of delighted thinking about, oh, well I'm part of that though.

I'm a, I'm gonna be an, I'm gonna be one of the ancestors, right? Life continues and. We know long after I'm gone, there's presumably, right, We never know what, what the future actually holds, but presumably there's gonna be thousands of people, millions that I'm an ancestor to, and that's kind of inspiring.

Mark: Yeah. Of course that isn't true of me because I'm not having children. 

Yucca: Well, that. On a genetic level. But on a cultural level, that's another thing to explore with the idea of ancestor, right?

Mark: Right.

Yucca: ancestors, not necessarily dna.

Mark: right. And that's, that's something that is very true of my practice when I, when I think about, you know, venerating. People or features of the past. I, for one thing, I go directly to what you talk about in the way of thinking about, you know, very early evolution and you know, the tetrapods that flopped up onto land and, you know, all those kind of wonderful steps that life has made on its way and venerating all of that, but also about, Figures from history that I find admirable and worthy of emulation.

And I may not be in any way related to them on a genetic level, but I still feel like culturally they've influenced me. And so they qualify as ancestors and I certainly hope to be. Seen that way. You know, with the development of atheopagan and that kind of thing, I mean, it, it it doesn't need to circulate around my name at all, but if, if the ideas are worthy and people find them useful and they perpetuate, then to me that's something that's really valuable and I would feel like I was an ancestor of.

Yucca: Yeah. Mmm. and the idea of ancestors. Some of us know the actual names of people going back for many generations, and some of us don't. But, but the, the concept of ancestor doesn't necessarily have to have a name attached, Right? Yeah.

Mark: Right. Yeah. I mean, on my father's side, I actually know. the way back to almost the 16th century because I descend from people who are on the Mayflower and those people have been heavily researched. There's a lot of information about them. But as it happens, the particular people that I'm descended from, Were the daughter of two people who died almost instantly upon reaching the the Americas and an indentured servant

So they were sort of not particularly impressive people. And as I've studied the history of the people who descend from them, there's just been this tremendous. Uninteresting nature of my family for 12 generations in the Americas.

Yucca: But you. We, we often focus on, in history on like these, what we call great people, right? The great men of history, but most people simply are people and the amazing, beautiful moments in our lives. Those, those don't get written down and have stories told about them, but they're still, that's what we get.

Those are the things that really, that I think really matter, right? Not necessarily that they were some great businessmen or you know, they led a war or you know, anything like that.

Mark: no, I, I, I don't disagree at all, although I do find it a little appalling that nobody in my family bothered to go west.

Yucca: Hmm. But do you know that? Well, nobody in your direct line,

Mark: Nobody in. Well,

Yucca: it branches off

Mark: of course it does. Yeah. And there's a, there's a giant volume called the Greens of Plymouth Colony that, that actually goes as far as my grandfather as a baby.

Yucca: Oh,

Mark: in, it was published in 1913, and my grandfather is in the book as a.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: And so it has these, all these lines, all these lineages of, of the, the various greens and boswick and all the people who, you know, got involved with them. And it's just really remarkable to me. These people showed up in New England and just kinda stayed my, my grandparents made it as far as New Jersey.

And then in retirement moved to Colorado and that's where my father was raised. And then he came to California. But all of that happened just in the last generation.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And it surprises me, not that I think that, you know, manifest destiny and colonialism and settling and all that kind of stuff was good cuz I don't, But were a lot of people that were taking advantage of those opportunities at that time, and none of them seemed to find it. They, they either didn't have the courage or they just didn't, They were happy where they were.

Yucca: It. It seems to me like it might be tricky. I've impressed at how much you've been able to do because you do have a more common last name. So there, I would imagine that there are multiple different groups of that. All the greens in the states aren't one big family. Right. They're actually lots and lots of different families because that's a, you know last names that are colors seem like a pretty common kind of name to go to.

Mark: right. I'm very fortunate that this book was published in 1913. This, this gene who was a part of the family. He researched all the birth records and the marriage records and the death records and the, I mean, he just did this exhaustive work that must have taken him decades and then published this book, and it was available as a, as a free PDF download.

The whole thing was scanned as a part of what is it? Google. Google Library? Is that what it's. There's a, there's a huge free archive of books that Google has that are like,

Yucca: That are in the public

Mark: that are in the public domain. This book probably didn't have more than a hundred copies printed cuz it was a privately published thing.

But

Yucca: somebody scanned it and put it up.

Mark: and there it is. And I have the pdf so I've been able to piece together a lot of things from that there.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: But it stops abruptly because there's not very much known about the first William Green. Who first who first came, He was not on the Mayflower, but he came like four years later or something like that, and then married into the Mayflower families.

Yucca: Oh, cuz it the because of the changing of the names,

Mark: Right,

Yucca: Right? Okay. Yeah. The paternal line. Hmm.

Mark: so, well, anyway, there's your tension for the day, the, the bland vanilla history of Mark Green's ancestry. The but so why don't we talk a little bit about how we fold this stuff into our observances.

Yucca: Hmm. Now I, before we do, I do wanna add one other angle that we can come at Ancestry from. So we've been talking about the, the, you know, who came before. Whether that's a, like a cultural or genetic ancestor. But I think that this is a place where we can also add in the idea of what other life came before that made ours possible that isn't, you know, genetic line.

That isn't something that we inherited from, but all of the life. Makes life now possible, right? When

Mark: All the, the food that

Yucca: the food Yeah. Every, you know, the, how many millions upon millions of living things that we have consumed, regardless of whatever your dietary choices are, we all. Other living things, right?

Nobody lives on salt alone. So , that's how many lives those were. And for those lives to be the lives that had to come, that supported them. That supported them. And when, when we look around at Earth, and, and we'll talk more about this when we talk about the decomposition, but when we look out, we're used to seeing soil, right?

Mark: Right.

Yucca: Soil is kind of a new thing. This planet is a big rock. So soil is a mixture of, yeah, it's got rock in there, but it was made by living things and it's the bodies of living things. And from that other living things came up. And just knowing that, that the moment in life that we are in this moment of being part of Earth is.

Because of, and now we're talking about the trillions upon trillions of life that each had their little moment before us to create the system that we are now part of and continuing on.

Mark: Right? Yeah. And all of that to think about. It's really kind of all inspiring. As you say, we'll talk about this when we talk about decomposition in a couple of weeks, but the, the miraculous thing that life does is it takes dead stuff and turns it alive. It assembles it into things that are alive.

It's alive itself and it takes dead stuff and it assembles it into stuff that's alive. And that sounds pretty simple, but when you think about it, we are still not able to do that. We,

Yucca: well we do

Mark: we're working on it.

Yucca: we can't do it outside of the context that already is happening. Right? Because we certainly as living creatures, That's what we do. That's what we're doing when we're eating and breathing and

Mark: I meant like in a laboratory, we, you know, we, we can't artificially create organisms. We can tinker with organisms, we can do all kinds of genetic modifications now.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: But it still has to have that initial operating. Quality of life.

Yucca: Yeah, which is just pretty amazing.

Mark: It is.

Yucca: And even the tinkering that we're doing is just kind of borrowing other life that does it anyways to do it

Mark: Right, right. Yeah. It's, it's not like we're starting with jars of, of raw, pure chemicals and assembling. Maybe someday we'll be able to do that. Maybe someday we will be able to,

Yucca: Figure that out and

Mark: to assemble DNA chains from nothing. You know, just, just from plain peptides. You assemble the peptides and then you, you know, put the nucleotides with the peptides and, you know, put them all together into the proper ladder and create something. But considering how much can go wrong in genetic design, probably the thing we'll be doing more than anything else is just copying copying life that already exists rather than actually making something new.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: So, let's talk about rituals, cuz we like to talk about ritual. This is, this time of year is a great time for it. I see you have a little pumpkin back there in the back of your room, so

Yucca: I do, I love penins. They, I love 'em so much. Yeah. On a tangent note, we have a trampoline and we're going to try to grow. Pumpkins underneath the trampoline in this coming year, and the kids are really excited about that.

Mark: that's cool. So keeps the sun from beating on the.

Yucca: yeah. And we can, we can fence it in

Mark: Oh yeah. Keep all the

Yucca: the Yes, because we, we'd like to you know, we want to grow to share with them as well, but they, you have to cover it up to give it long enough so that the, the Sprout can actually.

Do anything. If you don't cover it up here, you know the moment those first little baby leaves poke out, then you, you come back and they're gone. So,

Mark: We actually have something like that here, just on my back patio. We had a whole patch of basil and the rats love the basil, so they come and they eat all of it. We see rats out there. And Amaya gets really annoyed even though she had pet rats for years and loves the rats. But But that's outside.

It's not inside. There's nothing we can do about trying to control the rat population of the greater Sonoma County area.

Yucca: Hmm. Well, we, I thought, Okay, I will plant some stuff in the yard and we have to water everything. Like planting is a big commitment. And I went, Well, what am I gonna plant that the squirrels and chipmunks and all of that aren't going to eat? So, okay, I'll plant something that has a real strong smell like min.

Mint is often used to keep rodents away. So we plant it, we grew 'em inside and we transplant them outside. And then like an hour later we look outside the window and they have ripped the mint up and are eating the roots and throwing away the leaves. So, Well, Okay.

Mark: Barbara

Yucca: we'll, we'll have to cover it.

Mark: Barbara King solver writes a wonderful story about how. She and her family moved to somewhere in the southwest. I think it may have been, it may have been in New Mexico, actually. And she was putting in a garden and she had this idea that, well, okay, I'm I'll, I'll over plant everything so that there's some for the wild critters that are gonna get it, but I'll get some too.

And of course all of it went.

Yucca: Right

Mark: Because they don't make that deal.

Yucca: They don't, No. I mean, I still plant like that. What is the old, There's a whole lovely little rhyme about, it's like one for the rabbit, one for the house, one for the something, one for the mouse, or, you know, So you're supposed to plant four or five times. But yeah, you, they'll, there's just so little That is that lovely herbacious, fresh green.

They just want it.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: So if you're gonna plant outside, you cover it. You have to put your little pins on it. So we still love them though. They're wonderful. We love their little drama, but that is not a ritual. So let's return to

Mark: let's, Yes. Okay. This has been your tension

Yucca: Yes. It's been your tangent for our episode. Yep.

Mark: So. I actually have an, it may be sort of a surprise because I am not particularly invested in my personal recent lineage ancestors, but I have an underworld focus. That's a part of my, my, my focus. My alter is a bookcase, and the bottom two shelves are full of supplies, you know, lots of fancy jars and incense.

Toro cards and stuff like that. The and above that is a shelf that is the underworld, and there are pictures of people that I've known who have died and cave paintings from France, you know, the old Paleolithic Cave paintings and bones, and a very high quality cast of a human skull. And my human femur.

And other sort of deaf imagery, you know, stuff, skulls and bones and all that kind of stuff. And then above that I, there's a, a double high shelf. I took out one of the shelves to make kind of an open area where, which is the upper world, which is the world and the cosmos and all the beautiful, amazing, cool stuff.

Yucca: That's where like the seasonal things will go and the, Yeah.

Mark: the seasonal things go. The little section for evolution and the section for science and the section for music and creativity and all that kind of stuff. So I have this underworldy space that I celebrate all year round. And I have, I have, there's a thing on there that belonged to my grandfather and. Something, some fossils that sort of speak to deep time ancestry. And I find particularly at this time of year that lighting the candle on there and acknowledging the Sacred Dead is really an important, meaningful thing to me. I, I find it more impactful this year than. Around the rest of the time of year.

Yucca: Mm, It's beautiful.

Mark: So how about you? How about the kinds of things that you do with ancestry in your observances?

Yucca: Hmm. Well, like a lot of things, we really try and integrate it into our whole lives, right? The, the holidays are, are special and extra to, for an extra focus to help us kind of remember about it. But you know, with the naming of the children, they, they have names that. That are, you know, tied back to old, you know, I have an old family name and we gave an old family, you know, old family name to the kids.

Their last names are actually a, a mixture, like a port man toe of our last names because we didn't wanna do. We didn't want to continue what felt like a weird kind of tradition of like the wife and children belonging to the husband kind of thing. Right.

Mark: And Hyphenation just doesn't work for more than one generation.

Yucca: it doesn't, and it, it just ends up with the same problem that you're still having to choose from one family or the other, Which do you pass on? Right. So we just, and we just mixed it together and it's a lovely name and it completely sounds like. You know, and like a name from the, the kind of heritage that we come from, or the ones that we look cuz we're extremely mixed mixed background.

But, but there are certain sides that we kind of identify more with. But like a lot of families, we have you know, photos up of the, the recent family members that we have photos. So there's in the kitchen we. My let's see. So my mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. So a line of, of all of them together.

So we've got that, that kind of thing. But this time of year is also the time where we're thinking about ancestry and, and we make a point of kind of changing what sorts of documentaries we're watching. We like to put documentaries on in the evenings. Not every night, but that's the sort of thing that, you know, maybe three nights out of the week there'll be a documentary that we all watch together.

And so we'll watch things about, you know, early humans or neanderthals or evolution and that kind of stuff. This time of year. addition to all of the wonderful halloweeny looking things,

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: But we'll talk, we'll get more into that. So, but really it's a, just a normal remembrance of them.

Mark: Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Yeah. That's great. So I, I know that for for. A lot of people, they don't have a sort of standing recognition of their ancestors. And so this time of year becomes a time when they'll set up a focus with pictures of ancestors and, you know, offerings.

Yucca: of theirs.

Mark: Things that belong to them. Offerings of things like flowers.

Depending on their tradition, sometimes alcohol sugar, you know, candies and cookies, things like that. 

Yucca: Buy them a pack of cigarettes, you know that if they were smokers kind of thing. Yeah.

Mark: Well, yeah, and that kind of gets into a whole other tradition around offerings of tobacco, which is a whole other,

Yucca: That too. Yeah, that's a

Mark: that, that that's a huge thing. So, be interesting to hear from our listeners about how they are acknowledging ancestry and what kinds of things they're putting into their seasonal celebrations this year.

I mean, obviously we're still, you know, on the long tail end of a very serious global pandemic and a lot of people have gone Over the course of the last two years or so. And so there's been a lot of loss. There's been a lot of grief, and this is the time of year when we, we tend to kind of face up to that and, and recognize recognize our mortality as we talked about last week.

So, drop us a line. We're at the Wonder Podcast Qs. The Wonder Podcast cues at gmail.com and send us your questions, send us updates on, you know, send us a picture of your, your ancestor altar. We'd love to see it.

Yucca: That's always fun. Yeah. So, and we really do love preparing from you, so thank.

Mark: Yeah. We're, we're so grateful for our listeners. There's still this part of me that's very, very skeptical that every time I look at these, the download figures, I'm like, Geez, are people actually listening to this thing But it appears that a lot of you are, and I could not be more pleased. I'm, I'm so glad that this is something that you choose to have in your life because your time, as we talked about last week, is the most precious thing you have and that you choose to spend some of it with us is really a great gift.

Yucca: Yeah. We're just so grateful for all of you. Oh, thank you,

Mark: So we'll be talking about Halls or Halloween or Saan whatever you want to all Saint Steve whatever you want to call it next week, and talking about rituals for that and all that sort of wonderful spooky celebration stuff.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: And we look forward to talking with you again then.

Yucca: All right.

Mark: Have a great week.

Yucca: Bye everyone.

 .

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at [email protected]

Death and dying workbook: https://atheopaganism.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/death-and-dying-workbook-blank1.docx

Freewill.com

S3E35 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Mark,

Yucca: And I'm the other one. Yucca

Mark: and today we are going to talk about death.

Yucca: death. Yep. It's, well, it's October. Although it's a topic which is relevant every day, every moment. Right.

Mark: That's right. But particularly we're going to talk about the naturalistic, pagan perspective on death and approaches to death. And talk about some things that we can do to prepare for our own mortality and just about the perspective that it gives us generally. Because death is. Arguably the fact of our lives more than anything else. It's, it's the thing that's hanging out there, setting the context for everything else that we do or, or that we contemplate doing.

Yucca: Right? And it happens to us.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Right. There's no, Doesn't matter what religion you are, what gender, where you live, what kind of living thing. If you are living, then eventually you stop. Right?

Mark: right. And that's why it's been called The Great Equalizer because it doesn't matter how wealthy you are, eventually you are going to kick it. And there's, you know, you can do all kinds of medical things to try to extend yourself probably with a great deal of suffering associated in most cases.

But eventually it's going to end. And so at this time of year this is the time of year when pagans often contemplate their mortality and their their relationship with the fact of their death. And so we are dedicating this show this episode to to that, to talking about exactly that.

We'll have other episodes later on in the month about sort of other facets.

Yucca: Like ancestors and decomposition and you know, that kind of stuff.

Mark: right. All those kinds of great, halloweeny wonderful topics. But this, this one is just about the blunt fact that we're gonna die and so are you. And we all have to come to terms with that in whatever manner we can.

Yucca: Right now, I wanna emphasize though, that this isn't all a doom and gloom, you know, sad, negative kind of thing. Certainly many of us are quite uncomfortable with the idea that one day we will not exist, right? But as we're gonna talk about, there's actually. Some real upsides to that. Right. And there's some really, I think that there's a tremendous amount of, of beauty in that. But a good place to start actually is how naturalistic paganism differs from some of the other branches of Paganism when it comes to our views on death, or at least on what's after.

Mark: Right, right. As naturalists, we use the scientific method and critical thinking to assess what is most likely to be true. And given, given that the evidence is that there is no afterlife, that when we stop, we stop our brains stop maintaining the, the neural net of information that constitutes our personality and memory and all those things.

And that heat radiates away from our body that that energy radiates away from our body as heat

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and the body cools and we're gone.

Yucca: And the, the pieces that were us, they break apart and become part of other things. Right.

Mark: Right? And that's the decomposition story, which is. You know, stay tuned for that cuz it's actually so exciting.

Yucca: a

Mark: It's so exciting.

Yucca: yeah, and it's, and that's the, that's the death that's happening always. Right. There's, there's the death at the end, right? Where like you just stop completely. But the, but the, the little, the little hundred deaths every day are more than hundreds. That just is part of being life is is this a really cool one to talk about?

But yeah, we don't, we don't see the body as not us.

Mark: Right. This is an important distinction. I'm, I'm glad you brought that up, because the idea of dualism what's sometimes called Cartesian dualism after Renee Decar, who first postulated it in a. In a philosophical kind of way, the idea that there is this spirit or ghost or soul within us that is separate from the body and that persists after the body dies.

There really isn't any evidence to support that, that I'm aware of. And.

Yucca: But the idea is, is embedded very, very deeply into our culture, into our language and it's, it's, it's all around us.

Mark: It is. It is. It's, it's, When we talked about dualism in an earlier episode, we discovered that we don't even really have good language for talking about the understanding of the self as a unified hole. It is the body, You know, we say my body as if it was something different than, My mind. It's, it's all the same thing, but we, the, the way that our language is set up makes it very difficult even to articulate that concept.

Yucca: Right

Mark: So the body stops working for whatever reason. Maybe a disease, maybe an injury maybe just the accumulation of a a thousand tiny Yes. Or, or a thousand, just tiny errors in cellular copy copying over time. So you know, you're 105 years old and things just finally give up. They just stop and then we cease existing in our, in our opinion, in our estimation, we cease to exist.

And that can be a very terrifying prospect for some people. But I don't find it that scary myself because I realized that for 13.7 billion years, I didn't exist either. And it didn't bother me in the least. I wasn't there to be bothered. It was okay. And we were talking about this before we recorded.

We've also had some experiences where we've been put under general anesthesia. And that part disappears too. I mean, that's just time chopped out of your life where your body was still there, but your consciousness was suppressed because your body was, you know, under the influence of these chemicals that were introduced to it.

And there wasn't any suffering during any of that either. I just was absent.

Yucca: Not that I recall.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Yucca: And, and that's what, not what was described to me by those who were conscious at the time. Right. But yeah, that, at least for me, those are times that are just like, it's just gone.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: Right. Look at the clock. And it's different than when it was when I last remembered looking at it. And that's not quite the same as as sleeping, because with the sleeping, there's a, sometimes there's a missing chunk there, but it's a very different, there still is some sort of awareness there, a very different awareness.

But it, it's, it has felt like a very different experience.

Mark: Yeah, I've often thought of, of during sleep the, the sort of dreaming process as being kind of like the brain running a screensaver. You know, you get all these images. You, you know, you have these sort of very, you know, strange and magical kinds of na narratives and stories and snips of scenes and things like that.

And there's definitely something going on while you're sleeping most of the time. It's not the same as just winking out the way you do under general anesthetic.

Yucca: Well, this is maybe a topic we should come back to at another point, because I don't think we've ever talked about lucid dreaming.

Mark: Oh, we haven't. You're right. We

Yucca: that's something that, that I do. And I don't know if that's something you do, but that would be a really, really interesting topic. So let's write that down.

Mark: good.

Yucca: maybe that's a good mid-winter topic that kind of, I associate, you know, mid-winter with the dreaming and the dark and, and all of that.

So,

Mark: a good one.

Yucca: yeah. But with death it's, at least it seems like it's, that's it, right?

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Yucca: So what's that mean for us now? Right. We're not dead yet. We will.

Mark: right,

Yucca: this moment we're not.

Mark: right. I would like to say one more thing

Yucca: Oh, yeah.

Mark: the, the way that other. Other religious traditions and particularly other pagan traditions, do approach the fact of death. Many of those are dualistic. In the Buddhist idea, for example, the idea is that we are on this wheel of karma that we're trying to get off of.

And so when we achieve enlightenment, then we leave the wheel of karma and there's no more suffering and so forth. Which. So my mind has always been a very dark way of framing reality. It's the, you know, that the world is endless suffering. Well, the world is endless joy too. How, how come, How come we're paying all the attention to the suffering

So that's, that's just been

Yucca: does it, does it have the same connotation, the the word suffering when said in a Buddhist sense as it does. In a kind of conventional sense.

Mark: That's a good question. I believe it does, but I can only speak from my experience having been married to a Zen Buddhist for 10 years.

Yucca: Hmm.

Mark: I, I can't, I, I have not done a ton of reading in the Buddhist arena and I don't know that much about. But I do know that it is once again, built on that dualistic idea that the body dies.

But there is something else that persists that goes forward. And it may not be exactly you as a personality, but it's some intrinsic

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: quality of you that's in the process of being polished up in order to, you know, attain this, this enlightenment. Of course the, the mainstream monotheisms, they've all got.

Sort of punishment or reward afterlife idea. And that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me either for lots of reasons that we don't need to go into. But it's a pretty cruel framework in my opinion.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: You know, it's, it's extortionary and it, it threatens people and it terrifies little children.

It's a, you know, telling children about people going to hell is a horrible.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: But in the pagan sphere, what we see very often is a more generalized idea of reincarnation. It's very codified in Buddhism where like, okay, you know, if you've done these particular things, maybe you'll come back as a cockroach.

Yucca: There's particular, yeah, there's particular levels and yeah.

Mark: right. In, in the Pagan sphere, it does not appear to be as well defined in that sense, but there is a broad a broad credulity in the idea that you do come back in some manner. I've been told by people that people that are in their family where once related to them in other ways, in a past life, those sorts of things I don't know where they get that information, but they believe it. So, you know, those are, those are other approaches to the fact of mortality that I feel really sort of skip the important bits of what mortality can give us.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Knowing that we're going to die is actually a tremendous gift

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: approach it that. It, it contextualizes our lives. You know, it's this thing that's hanging out there.

We know we've got a limited amount of time, and that means that our time is very precious. We need to be careful with it. We need to make judicious decisions about what we're going to do with our time and what source of goals we're going to pursue.

Yucca: Yeah. And really think about what matters. Really What, Because if I've, I have a limited number of days. You have a limited, We each have a limited number of days,

Mark: Yes.

Yucca: and on top of that, We don't know the number of days either.

Mark: Right,

Yucca: Right? We hope that there will be many, but this could be the last one,

Mark: right,

Yucca: or it could be in thousands, right?

Mark: right.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. And knowing that, knowing that they're wheeled on a day when you're not in it really does give it, It gives you pause, it gives you it, it gives you an opportunity anyway, to think very carefully about what matters to you. About what your values are, about what you would like to be left behind in the wake of your life, in the way of legacy.

And of course, that's one of the Ethiopia Pagan principles, right? Legacy. The idea that we are responsible to subsequent generations, not only of humans, but of the fabric of life on earth in general. And so. I mean, I very deliberately have made my career around environmentally and publicly beneficial work.

That's, that is the, the work that I've chosen. And there have been costs associated with that. A lot of them financial because working in the nonprofit sector, especially for smaller organizations, just doesn't pay as well as a lot of other things. I have never been able to get my mind around doing some of the things that some people do for money, knowing that all that, that's all that's going on. There's just money making happening there. And I, I can't apply my time to something that seems so meaningless to me. I, I. I need to do something that's more substantial and fulfilling than that with my time. And I'm not criticizing anybody else's decisions. You know, they're, they're, well, you know, they're sovereign beings. They get to make their own decisions about what they consider important to do in their life.

But for my life the, the environmental work that I've done, the, the social services work that I've done and the spiritual community work that I've done are all really important pieces to me that I hope have persisting impact after I'm gone.

Yucca: Right. Yeah. And of course there's sometimes things that we need to do that we would really rather not be spending our time doing, but that That that are things that have to, that have to happen, whether that's dealing with, you know, illnesses or taxes or just, you know, having enough to, to be able to, to feed your family or things like that.

But I think that, that the recognition and the, the memory that the, of our death that's coming can help us to. Put all of that in context, right? And think about how we're going to choose to live as we do those things that we don't want to be doing. Right. So we can on, on the big scale, really work towards the things that, that are meaningful to us.

But know that every moment, even the moment when you are, you know, scrubbing the toilet, that that's, that's one of your moments, right?

Mark: Right.

Yucca: And how are you gonna live that, So,

Mark: So finding ways to be joyful and finding ways. To take deep satisfaction in living becomes in the context of a, of a life without an afterlife, it becomes essential,

Yucca: mm-hmm.

Mark: right? This is all that we've got. So we must then find ways to, to derive happiness out of it, to derive as much joy as we possibly. In a, in a conscientious way.

Obviously not at the expense of others.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Which honestly, I have a hard time imagining how you can have much joy if it's at the expense of others, but

Yucca: Right.

Mark: maybe, maybe someone can.

Yucca: Well, if you are aware of it,

Mark: Right,

Yucca: right, as long as there's that awareness piece,

Mark: right.

That's like the the Ursula Ursula Gwen story. The people who leave Oma.

Yucca: I'm not

Mark: you know that

Yucca: that one.

Mark: It's a, it's a utopia.

Oma is a city and everyone is happy, and everything is beautiful, and it's all magnificent except once a year, every citizen, they're all paraded through this dungeon under the city where there is a poor, neglected, starving child.

Yucca: Mm.

Mark: Whose suffering is necessary in order for all the happiness above the surface to happen. And there are a certain number of people every year who leave the city. They go because they won't make that deal.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: So I like to think that I would be one of those.

Yucca: Dr. Hub borrowed that concept for one of their episodes. There was a space whale.

Mark: Hmm.

Yucca: City of London, I think was based on that, was suffering. So that, so the, the plot there sounds pretty much the, the same,

Mark: hmm.

Yucca: one of the new ones, not one of the old ones,

Mark: Okay. Yeah. Okay. That was your tangent for this week, folks.

Yucca: Well, at least number one, we'll see.

I don't know, that's all. Maybe we've sort of done a few already. We went into dreams, so,

Mark: that's true.

Yucca: Yeah. Okay.

Mark: okay, we're, we're gonna die and we're going to live well as a result of this knowledge. That's, that's where we've gotten to so far. But there are some things that we can do to prepare for our deaths that are great. Kindness is to those who survive us.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. and for us in the process, depending on what kind of death you have, , Right. Some deaths. You don't know that they're happening and some you do.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: So, yeah.

Mark: So those include things like advanced health directives, instructing decision makers about how they. What your wishes are in terms of do you want to be kept alive on machines in a vegetative state? Do you not want that? If it's unlikely that you will ever recover to a point where you're able to care for yourself?

Do you want the machines to be turned off? All those kinds of questions. Knowing that medicine is a for profit enterprise and that end of life is the most profitable part of that enterprise in the United States. They will keep you alive on machines if you don't tell them not to.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And it's important to do that if that's not the way you want to go.

Yucca: Right?

Mark: There are other financial things a will or a trust or you know, some sort of arrangement for what's supposed to happen to your money and your stuff.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

And your dependence, if you have.

Mark: Yes. Including, you know, what goes to which dependence and, and all that kind of, and, and your dependence. If, if you, if both you and your partner or partners

Yucca: If you have, if you

Mark: are suddenly killed if you, if you have them.

Are suddenly killed, then the question of where your dependence go becomes really important. And that needs to be written down and enshrined somewhere, not just something in your head.

Yucca: And this may not just be your human dependence, but if you don't have children and you have pets, that's something to think about as well, so that they, they don't just end up at the shelter. Right?

Mark: right.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: There are other Sorts of things that are very helpful for people when there is a death that can just ease the process a lot. I mean, all of us that have been in grief know the kind of brain fog that descends when there is a painful death. It's hard to concentrate and feelings keep welling up all the time and to be asked at the same time to go digging through someone's desk to find a life insurance policy is, It's an almost insurmountable demand

Yucca: Right, And to be on the phone and being told that, No, we can't give it to you because you're not the person and you're going, Yeah, but they're dead. But you know, all.

Mark: And then you have to go and get a death certificate and provide that to them. And I mean, there's just so much adminis trivia that goes into the processing of a death. having all of that information together in one place in what I call a death packet

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: is a tremendous gift to those who survive you.

Passwords, passwords to social media accounts, to your online banking to your, your 401k or whatever, you know, retirement accounts you might have. All of that stuff is essential in modern times to be able to do the things that you want to do. A list of people who should be notified with their contact information.

Yucca: right.

Mark: There's, there's a lot of different things that go into this. But the good news is we have a workbook

Yucca: Yes. Link in the in the show notes. Yeah.

Mark: Yes, you can download a blank of the workbook and fill it out. And it, it has everything in it. It's got a, a section for filling out all the information that would be necessary to write an obituary, for example. You can make your preferences known about what you'd like done with your body. What kind of services, if any, you would like to have happen.

To recognize your death. And it, it may sound scary and creepy to do this, but as I always like to say, just like talking with people about sex doesn't make them pregnant, working on the fact of your mortality doesn't make it any more likely to happen soon.

Yucca: Yeah. It just means that when it does, it's gonna be an easier process for the, For your loved ones. Yeah. And this is, this is a great time of year to be going through and doing this because we're thinking about death. And it's seasonally and we're seeing it around us, and and it's nice to, to have it on the calendar to be able to go back and review that, right?

Mark: Yeah. One of the elements of my death packet is a farewell letter,

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and I revisit that every year at this time of year just to make sure that, you know, everybody that I want acknowledged, want to be acknowledged is acknowledged. And that

Yucca: If things have changed in terms of what you wanna say or not.

Mark: all, all those kinds of things. Yes. So it's. And it, it's a great opportunity just to pull the thing out and review all the information.

It's like I noticed the last time I went through it, I had moved and I hadn't changed my address.

Yucca: Mmm.

Mark: So that was necessary. I had to make those changes. Once again I can already think of some things that I'm gonna need to change for this year as well.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: so, but once you've done the big task once. Then it's just a matter of updating little bits of information here and there as you go along, and it's not very hard to do.

The important thing is that loved ones know where to find your death packet. If you have like, a filing cabinet with legal papers and

Yucca: fire safe chest that you have and you

Mark: That's, that's a good place for it to live, maybe in especially colored folder so that people know, you know, they can go directly to that folder and pull it out.

What I do is I keep a paper copy, a printed copy in my desk, and then I keep the soft copy, The Microsoft Word file on the desktop of my computer.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: So it, and it's labeled My Death, that's the name of it. So, with a cute little skull icon that I put on

Yucca: Yeah, is your paper one you could put in a little folder, you know, this time of year you can find like the Halloween themed folders and stuff in the school section.

Mark: Uhhuh. Yeah. It's a good idea.

Yucca: little dancing skeletons or something like

Mark: Mm-hmm. , I like it. Yeah, so. I strongly encourage our listeners to, to take on this work. It's it can be a little intimidating you know, to sort of take a deep breath and go, Okay, I'm gonna die. What do I want done with my body? What do I, you know, what?

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: What, what, what are the answers to all these questions?

There is a tool that's available for download online. It's something called the Five Questions that you can look for and that, that walks you through some similar kinds of planning questions about how to organize your, your death planning. But the workbook that you can download from the link in the show notes is really very thorough and it, it contains spaces for all of the different kinds of information that you're likely to need.

Yucca: Right, and, and you could make a little thing of it when you do it. You could make it a little. Self party for the afternoon, right? Pick out, get your favorite drink, get your favorite treat, and carve yourself a pumpkin and sit down at the table with it. And there might be things that you won't be able to do right away, like gathering certain pieces of information, but you could start working through it and starting that process.

Or you could do some of it in ritual, you know, make it. Make it an enjoyable thing that is maybe a little bit less intimidating to approach just so that you, that you do it. Because any piece that you do will be better than having not done it at all.

Mark: right.

Yucca: Right. And so maybe, I mean, I encourage everyone to, to go through the whole packet and do everything, but maybe you just wanna start with, Okay, I'm just gonna.

I'm just gonna get a will in place. Right. And I'm not, you know, I, I don't have the, the mental space right now to write a letter to everybody, but I can get the, the will in place, or I can make sure that I have beneficiaries on my bank accounts or whatever it is that you need to do. Right. Just starting with so,

Mark: I want to tell people about another resource that's available online for free, and it's a, it's a resource called free will.com, and literally that's what it is. It's a wizard that walks you through the steps to create a will for free, and then you can download the. Documents and print them and have them signed and it's legally valid Will

Yucca: Do you put in what your state or country is in

Mark: you do?

Yucca: laws are different about how many witnesses you need or that sort of thing? Okay.

Mark: It's only for the US and Canada, unfortunately.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: But.

Yucca: I would suspect there's probably similar resources though for different countries.

Mark: many other countries. I would agree. I would agree. But it's a, it's a pretty nifty little thing. I, I went through it and I thought, you know what, what came out the other end was, it had a lot of legalese in it, but it definitely included everything that I wanted to, to be included in my will.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. , right? So that's a great, a great place to start. 

Mark: They also do advanced health directives. There's, there's a wizard for that as well.

Yucca: Okay. Right, Because again, many of us probably aren't at the traditional places in our lives where that's something that we would be starting to think about. But as we've said, we don't know. We don't know how many days we have,

Mark: Nope. Nope. The odds, the odds may be low that you are going to die soon. But they aren't zero. They're never zero.

Yucca: Right.

Mark: As long as we're alive, we are subject to death. So we have to be prepared to as great a degree as possible, both for our loved ones but also for ourselves. I don't want to be in a semi-conscious state on a ventilator

Yucca: Mm.

Mark: for. Days, weeks, years. I, I, I really, really am opposed to that. There's pretty good evidence that there is some brain activity in a lot of the people that are in that condition, and that just sounds like hell to me. I don't want it. And I'm very, very clear in my directives that I do not want that. I, I want you to pull the plug, if that's the state that I.

Yucca: Right. or for me, I wouldn't want to be in my last moments worrying who's gonna take care of my kids.

Mark: Right,

Yucca: Right?

Mark: right.

Yucca: Oh, how, you know, being, having to be stressed about these things that I don't wanna leave undone

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: for, for others.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. So I, I'd kind of like to leave this on a, on an upward note. I feel like one of the things that is very hard about death in, certainly in American culture, but I think this is true in the West generally, is that we're so phobic about the subject that we don't talk about it and get ourselves comfortable with it at all. We don't even try to do. And there is a movement the, the so-called death positivity movement that is happening now that's working to overcome that, that's working. You know, we conduct death salons in various places for people to talk about their feelings, about their mortality, their fears, their their concerns, what they'd like done with their bodies, all those kinds of things.

And. I just feel that that's a very important movement. To some degree the denial of death is the denial of life

Yucca: Yeah, and that's one we'll definitely come back on when we talk about death on a kind of larger concept.

Mark: Right, right. And to me, embracing what this is that we are. Here on Earth is necessary in order for us to honor it, as sacred as it is.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And so I really encourage you to look at this as a great opportunity. You know, when you, when you really sit down, you know, across the table from your death maybe, maybe you have some life priorities that you want to change.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Maybe, maybe there are certain things that you absolutely have have been dedicated to the idea that you're going to do someday, and maybe you need to move up the schedule on those to make sure that they happen,

Yucca: Right.

Mark: right? Um

Yucca: Well, and to think about how you are living today, because how you live today is how you, that is your life,

Mark: mm-hmm.

Yucca: right? That is your life that you live. And I find it very helpful In my morning ritual, I remind myself, I say out loud that I remember I will die, and that actually is so uplifting and motivating because it goes today matters. This, my experience, this tiny, I get to be this tiny sliver of the universe for this short period, which I hope will be in the triple digits. That's my goal, but that's still tiny compared to the billions of billions of years of the universe. And here we are and we get this moment. And because we die, it is so precious and so special every.

Mark: Absolutely. I like that I may steal it. I, my morning ritual does not include something like that at the moment, although it does include a death acknowledgement in the evening. The

Yucca: I stole it from the stoic . They have a whole thing about it.

Mark: So yeah, look at, honestly, look at this as an opportunity. Folks. Being in denial about our death isn't gonna stave it off. It isn't gonna change when it happens. One second. So, taking a clear look at, taking a clear look at everything generally is a good idea, but particularly

Yucca: of this podcast,

Mark: it kind of is.

Yeah. It kind of is. Let's, you know, let's, let's not gussy things up with, with fantasy. Let's, let's do what we can to know what's true. To look at that very clearly and then make our decisions based on that. That's kind of what we're about. So, especially in this month of October, which is, you know, the, the, the spooky witchy month really encourage you to take that step if you haven't already, or also like to congratulate those of you who have done a lot of that planning.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Good for you because it's, it's generally good for all of us. When people do that, among other things, what tends not to happen is that people tend not to get gouged for thousands of dollars by funeral homes because, you know, people will put much more modest wishes in their, in their declarations, in their death packet. and that's good for all of us because that industry really needs to be reigned in. It's very destructive and it, it, it needs to change.

Yucca: Well, and, and whatever your particular wishes are you. You can assure those, or at least you can make it more likely that that's what's going to happen, right? By, by voicing it. So whatever, whatever your particular desires and approaches and, and all of that and if it's something that, that you honestly don't care, let let your loved ones know that, right?

Let them know, I seriously, I'm dead. I don't want the casket.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: I don't care. Save the money. Right? If that's your approach or if, hey, it is actually really important to me that there be this coming together of the, of the people in my life and this moment. And you know, you know, you can say that and you can think about that and, and I think that you can learn a lot about yourself too in having that honest conversation with yourself, that exploration.

Mark: right. As you explore what the options are, you may find that some things that people assume are true are not. For example, you are not required to have your body involved. And it's a terrible, toxic thing that we do to the Earth that I really don't want any part of. But I mean, you can, if you want to, that's fine, but you are not required.

Some states require that an un embalmed body be buried within three days after the death,

Yucca: Yeah, there's so different states are gonna have different regulations you're gonna wanna know. Yeah. But that's one of the things that you can do in your October. Death visiting. I don't know what we could call it. 

Mark: I like that.

Yucca: yeah, and if you mo, if you move states or, you know, you just check up on, okay, so what's, you know, what is it like here in Montana versus Connecticut, or, you know, whatever it is.

Yeah.

Mark: right? Yeah. So there's a, there's a body of knowledge and there's kind of a world to explore there of how to, how to get exactly what you want out of this, or at least to tell your loved ones what you want. And of course after you're dead, it won't matter to you. So

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: they, if they don't do what you want

Yucca: You won't know.

Mark: you won't know, and the worst thing that will happen is that somebody will probably say, This is not what they would've wanted.

Yucca: Yeah, so well, this has been good.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: it's inspiring to, to come back to this each year and think about it and, and just again, remembering this is our little sliver. This is our little moment.

Mark: Right. So do what you can to have a good death and as smoother transition as possible for those around you who survive and and live well. Live well and happily.

Yucca: Yep. All right. Well thank you everyone, and we'll, we'll see you next week.

Mark: See you then.

Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at [email protected]

S3E34 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts, Yucca,

Mark: And I'm the other one. Mark.

Yucca: and today we are talking about Cauldrons.

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: yes, and welcome to October. We're here all in. The wonderful aut month, the our kind of spooky hollows is coming and here we are. So we're gonna have some great episodes this, this month.

Mark: Yeah, I'm really excited about it. We've got a lot of cool stuff to talk about for the witchy month and can't wait to get started.

Yucca: Yeah. So speaking of witchy, there's probably three symbols which are most associated with witch broomstick, pointy hat and cauldron.

Mark: Right.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: No one will make any mistake about what you are trying to represent. If you've got those three things with you

Yucca: Yep. And oh please.

Mark: Well, I was gonna say, we don't have enough to say about a pointy hat to turn it into an episode, but there's plenty to talk about with a caldron.

Yucca: there is, Yes. So I think a good place to start would probably be, you know, the history. What is a coldron, what's the history and why? Why it really matters, why we're interested in this symbol.

Mark: Mm-hmm. well. From my standpoint, I, I think you, you really identified the main reason why we're interested in it. I mean, for those of us that gravitate towards Paganism and it's aesthetic and it's iconography in our ritual practice, those. Those standard symbols, like the cauldron become very potent.

They become very influential when, when you're, when you're brewing something over a cauldron, there is very much this sense that you're doing magic, right.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, and I, and I think that the association with the witch, a witch is a powerful figure. Right. And they're, they can be represented in different ways in terms of the morality of them in stories, right? Depending on who's telling the story, whether they're, you know, the good guy or the bad guy. But they're always powerful, right?

They're always, they have agency. But that agency also usually is coming from them and the home. And the cauldron has this association with the home because it's a tool of the. , whether that's an outdoor kitchen around the fire or whether that was your kitchen in the home at the Hearth.

Mark: Right. Yeah. I mean, Among the very earliest implementations of of any kind of cooking equipment that we're familiar with are ceramic pots that were used for cooking. Things in hot stones would be put inside a ceramic pot. And then Cereals or meat or and water or whatever. It could be stirred in that and it would boil which would sterilize it of course, but would also break down proteins in the food to make it easier to digest.

And we have evidence of that going back thousands and thousands of years.

Yucca: Right. Well, because there's a lot of foods that, There's a lot of plants that you might be digging up that you can't eat.

Mark: right.

Yucca: Right. It's not gonna, you have to cook them. And so if we were gonna be doing that, then we needed to cook them.

Mark: Right, and we've had. Thousands of generations to do the experimentation to figure those things out. I mean, people talk about, you know, indigenous knowledge and indigenous healing. Well, think about all the trial and error that went into figuring that stuff out. It's like, all right, who's gonna eat the mushroom?

All right, Bob's gonna eat. Oh, Bob's gone. 

Yucca: Okay. Let's remember that measure.

Mark: Right, But how did they ever get to the point of feeding the mushroom to reindeer and then gathering their urine?

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: I mean, it's just

Yucca: Well, I, We

Mark: scale of

Yucca: time, Yeah. The time we've been around. On the one hand, if you compare us to, Crocodiles, we've barely been around. Right. But compared to an individual human or an individual culture's memory, the, it's so, so long.

Mark: Right. Yeah. 200,000 years since we really started developing culture

Yucca: Or well human, at least our gen, our genius is older and you could quite, there's a lot of argument to be made that that other humans, not just homo sapiens had. Quite a bit of culture as well,

Mark: Well, sure. They had the domestication of fire, which in many cases there are a lot of strong arguments to be made that the domestication of fire was. Kind of the, the launching pad for human culture. In many ways it also coincided with a rapid evolution of our brains because we were getting a lot more food value out of our food once we started cooking it.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: This is a tangent, but

Yucca: Well, but we can relate it back though, because Fire and Cauldrons is that right? So we, This was planned, This was planned tangent. We can say

Mark: So, yeah, the, the hearth, the, the home fire and the cooking pot sitting over it are very, very ancient symbols of of power of transformation. You know, you put those ingredients in and they, they, they come out different. They come out edible food, they come. Tasting different

Yucca: smelling good.

Mark: smelling good.

There's, there's just all kinds of wonderful things that happen in the, the alchemy of that, that caldron. So historically, and, you know, we know that this has been a symbol for a very long time because it was already a trope when Shakespeare was writing about it. Right. You know, with, with the three witches and the double, double toil and trouble and all that.

So now we inherit it today and it's become sort of a stereotype, but at the same time, a caldron is a really useful ritual implement, and we're gonna talk about ways that it, that it is useful for us.

Yucca: Right, and we should say, The image that usually comes to mind when you think of a cauldron that rounded three-legged black, you know, big Iron Pot. That's one version of a Coran, right? This is, that's, we're looking at, that's coming from recent European history, but Qurans are much older and there's, you know, they're always kind of a pot shape, but we don't always see them as that round.

Belly kind of shape. Sometimes we see other shapes involved. We're talking about that because that's what we associate with the witches and a lot of the kind of witch aesthetic is coming from a European aesthetic, but remembering that cultures all over the world had versions of this.

Mark: Yes. Yes. And we should talk about some some variations that exist for the kinds of formats that people might. Experience as a part of you know, selecting a cauldron for themselves. We're in no way saying you need to go out and spend a couple hundred dollars on, on, you know, a pot beed, three-legged iron cauldron.

They're out there, they're really cool, but

Yucca: if you're into that, we're not gonna judge you on that, but yeah, you certainly don't need to.

Mark: Yeah. And if we, and if we do a ritual with you and there it is, we'll go, Hey, wow. Cool. Caldron,

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: But my caldron actually is not one of those, It is a Dutch oven that probably dates from the turn of the 20th century. It's got a lot of rust on it that I've never cleaned off because it's.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And it has a wire bale that I can pick up and a lid.

And I've used it in lots of caldron rituals and it's, it still, it still communicates that sense of antiquity. There's something that's lovely about having a lid for it because it's sort of mysterious. You know, you put the lid on and then some, something magical happens inside it. You take the lid off and things have changed.

Yucca: I think that's really interesting because I, mine are also Dutch ovens. So mine are very used dutch ovens because I have a wood stove in the home and, and yeah, I have a little propane burner as well for cooking on, but as long as we've got, cuz we do heat with wood in the winter, as long as we've got that going.

I love having things up on top of it and you can also stick it into the ashes of the fire. So we've got several different sizes and kind of different shapes there for them. And there's just something about that cast iron, right? Ours are probably are new Dutch ovens. They're probably made within the last few years, but they feel like something that could be around for a very long.

Mark: Right,

Yucca: They, you know, they could be passed on. My grandkids or great-grandkids could literally be using these. Yeah.

Mark: that is the great thing about cast iron is that. It simply doesn't wear out. We use cast iron frying pans in my house and some of them come from thrift chops where they looked hideous. I mean, they're covered with rust and conclusions and just in the worst possible shape. But you get going on, taking all that stuff off, and then

Yucca: take that top layer. Yeah.

Mark: And it is a perfectly good frying pan once again, and it will be for decades, if not centuries, as long as you keep it from being eaten up by oxidation.

Yucca: Yeah. That's what we use all of our, our pans in the kitchen, our, our cast iron, we've got. A couple of stainless steel for boiling, like a pot or kettle stainless steel. But that's, you know, they're just beautiful. And, and some people get very snobby about the exact correct way to treat them and wash them.

And, but I think that they're just super forgiving and if you mess up, then you just it, right? You just re season it again. It's great. And enjoy the things you're eating that you're seasoning it with, you know.

Mark: Right. And there are some things that you make that will take the seasoning off. Like if you cook a tomato pasta sauce, for example, the, the acids in that may very well take some of the seasoning off the pan. So you put a little oil on, stick it in the oven, heat it up for a while, and you've gotta see some pan.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: So, and, and ode to to cast iron. We're big fans.

Yucca: Right. Well, and so going back though to the cauldron, so we were saying that we use our, our cast iron Dutch ovens but there's a lot of Dutch ovens that are not iron. Right. And there's other things that, that would, that serve the same function that we use today. As a coulter would traditionally, So your big crock pots, right?

Or your stockpot, right. We've got like this several gallon stockpot that, you know, is what I used to heat up the bath water with. And it's just, it's, it, it has that same vibe, right? And it, it's modern. It was made within the last 20 years probably, but it still does that same function and looks beautiful at the same.

Mark: Mm-hmm. One of the things that is great about using a Dutch oven actually be is because they do have a lid. And what that means is that you have a little bit more control over temperature. Gradients. For example, if you've got a Dutch oven that is sitting on the fire or in the coals, the bottom of that is gonna get really hot.

But the lid, you could put herbs on that to create a fragrance in your home. Or a little drop of essential oil to do the same thing. There are, if you just want to warm things, I mean, I know you can, you can warm bread and stuff like that on the, on the top of, of a dutch oven as well. So it's a very versatile tool for for a variety of uses.

Yucca: and you can also put a fire right into it. Right? You could have your candle or something in that, and then. When you put your lid on afterwards, you can feel pretty secure that you're not, that you're not creating a fire hazard with that.

Mark: Right,

Yucca: So now it will, your lid will heat up too. So you need to be, be aware of that if you're, you are using it on the stove and, you know, not, not touch that with your bare hands, but it just, it, you could just use it in so many different ways.

Mark: right. Right. And there is something about just the sight of that Dutch oven or caldron heating in a fireplace or over a stove that kind of says home and comfort and warmth and and magic, you know, the magic of the kitchen. We were talking before we were recording and I was mentioning that, you know, one of the things about about older times is that, you know, you, your, your medicines didn't come from a factory.

They came from your kitchen, you know, and the caldron was a, a key. Tool for creating them. You know, you'd, you'd gather the proper herbs, you'd mash them up in a mortar and pestle, which is another classic alchemical sort of witchy, magical set of tools, and then you would brew them.

Yucca: today too,

Mark: Oh yeah, yeah. We, we use ours all the time.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And then, you know, brew them or toast them or, you know, whatever it is in that hot pot. So it's, It's not an accident that a, that domestic tools like the broom and the cauldron are associated with the power of the witch because that kind of ritual magic, if you will, was really the purview of the home.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: That's where it happened.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Very different than, Oh, go ahead.

Yucca: I was gonna say, I still think that, I think that's still where a lot of it does, but in our very busy lives, we kind of forget about that sometimes. We're off running around, but when we come back, back home, back to center, then we go, Oh, I actually do have a lot of power from this place.

Mark: Mm-hmm. . Yes. So, We've established that this is something that has been a symbol for a very long time, and it's been a, a useful tool for humans even going back into very, very ancient times. I'm sure we were heating things on hot stones long before we, you know, invented pottery or any of that kind of stuff.

Yucca: Right. But as long as we've been in the neolithic. We've had something of the sort, right? Every, everybody who's doing that, who's doing the, the whole staying in one place thing, and even nomadic peoples as well could have things that they were, you know, packing up and bringing with them. Yeah.

Mark: right. And we've established that cast iron is good.

Yucca: yes. Yay for cast iron.

Mark: Big fans of cast iron. Why don't we talk a little bit about the kinds of ritual things that you can do with a caldron

Yucca: Hmm. Okay. Well I think we could start with the incorporating what you would be doing with it to begin with, just on a mundane level and adding some ritual and meaning into that. So in this case it, it might be your Dutch oven, but it also might be your stockpot on the stove. Right. What are you doing and why are you doing that?

Right? So can you add something, Can you have a, a moment when you add in that salt or whatever it is that you're adding in, that you, that you take a moment and have just set an intention with that, right?

Mark: Yeah, the adding of seasoning and spices I think is a great opportunity for metaphorically adding magic into whatever it is that you're cooking. Spices are. Spices are kind of magical substances when you think about it. I mean, they are the unique pesticides that various plants have evolved in order to defend themselves from insects mostly. And in some cases from fungal infections and stuff like that.

Yucca: and small mammals and

Mark: Sure, yeah. If they,

Yucca: And us too. It's just, we're so big , right? They're, they're technically poisons, right? They're toxins that they produce because they don't wanna be eaten every, everybody wants to survive and reproduce and they can't get up and run, run away the way an animal can or bite you, but they can make themselves poisonous.

Mark: Yes. And they can make themselves taste bad, but

Yucca: But we ended up liking

Mark: amounts, yes. In small amounts. You're, you're a regno and your terragon and your sage and your onions, and.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: All those wonderful things. Garlic, I mean, they, they give us wonderful, good feelings and very complex flavors that give us a lot of pleasure.

So when casting those things into a cooking pot, we can be setting intentions, we can be stirring them in as meaning, you know, 

Yucca: It would be lovely if you made your own labels and added them to the spice jars. Maybe not covering up what they are. If you need to know which is, which is your cayenne and which is your cinnamon, you wanna know the difference, right? But if you put your label on that, you know, Oh, well this one is love, right?

And this one is creativity. You know, when you're putting in your love and creativity and all of those things that you see that every time. Reach for that spice jar.

Mark: I love that idea. That's a great idea. And it would be a really fun project actually, to do with kids to create the labels.

Yucca: Yeah. And you could do, You could put them on in ritual too.

Mark: Right? Right.

Yucca: And even, No even grown up kids. Right.

Mark: Oh yeah. I.

Yucca: kids of whatever ages.

Mark: I would want to be a part of it for sure.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: So we can do caldron magic in the course of just using the caldron for the purpose, for an ordinary cooking purpose.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: We can also dispense with anything in the cauldron except fire. We can, we can burn. We can burn fire, burn wood, or you know, whatever it is that don't burn anything toxic because then you're not gonna want to use it for cooking ever again.

Yucca: and you wanna be able to be around. You don't wanna breathe and smoke in general, but you wanna be really careful about what it is that you're burning. So you don't wanna be burning like synthetic fabrics or something like that, that really could be very toxic to you. If you get a little wolf of whiff of wood smoke, it's not great, but you know, it's, it's not gonna be quite as much of an issue as burning plastics.

Mark: Right, right. Yeah. So, a flaming caldron is something that we, I've used many times in rituals and you can, you can feed stuff that you want to destroy or dispense with in the form of. Little pieces of wood that you've invested your intention on or written the message on what you mean. You can do that with slips of paper.

You can do that with Little symbols that are flammable of, of some kind. So that's sort of the destructive approach to a flaming cauldron. But you can also do it with wishes. You can inscribe something hope hoped for, that you want to, The smoke will go up into the sky and inform whatever powers are up there and, and they'll put in an order for you.

Yucca: Or thinking of it as this is fuel, right? This is, this is the fuel for the fire. That, that whatever it is burning inside of you, right? What is it that you want to feed into your fire to, for you to continue to grow and do all of these, you know, passionate, wonderful things, whatever it is that you are focused on.

Mark: Right, And in the case of a ritual like that, I really encourage people to use low tech methods of actually lighting the fire. So that it, it takes a little effort, right? You know, whether that's a flint and steel or I, I don't recommend lighting a fire with a bow because it's an incredible amount of work.

And it, you can have disappointing results while you're trying to light your inspiration. Fire.

Yucca: Yeah. Well if, if you do, you might wanna practice that ahead of time and be, and get really good at it. Right. Just knowing that it is a skill that takes a lot of work.

Mark: Yes.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: But there is, there is something to be said to something more than just flicking a lighter and . Suddenly there is flame.

Yucca: Yeah. Well, and it, and you know, if you don't have access to one of those matches, right? There's something more, I, I find there's something very satisfying about striking the match as opposed to just the lighter. Although there are some really cool lighters. We were given one of those arc lighters.

Mark: I have one I use it for, for my alter, my focus all the time.

Yucca: Yeah, I feel so sci-fi, whenever I use

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: like, yeah. It's just really nice and it's USB chargeable, so we just like plug it in and don't have to, I've got lots of lighters and matches all over the place because I don't wanna ever. Want to be lighting a fire and be shivering and being like, Where are my matches?

Where are my lighters? But those are fun, but you know, there's matches. And there's also, I don't know what they're actually called, but you know, the ones we'd use in lab class for bunsen burners? The,

Mark: Oh, those little pizza, electric things that,

Yucca: Yeah, there's silver and you

Mark: spark.

Yucca: Yeah. Those are, you know, when you have a more. Just an out of the ordinary or kind of fun way of starting the fire.

There's a little something extra to it.

Mark: Right, right. There are these striker, they're, they're sort of like flint and steel. They're these sort of striker sticks that you scrape sparks off of onto like cotton or something, which will light on fire. And those are pretty neat for starting a fire too. I don't know what they're called exactly either, but they're you can get them in camping stores.

Yucca: Okay.

Mark: add to a survival

Yucca: Oh, I think I've seen them and they, You can like put them on a key chain or something like that. Yeah, Yeah. Now you gotta be patient with anything like that that doesn't have a sustained flame because you're trying to catch that. Spark,

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: like if you have like a little cotton swab from the bathroom, like those are really good and you maybe half of it, you dip into olive oil and the other half you leave open so that then it starts to burn the oil.

And there's a lot of, that's another thing that you could do fire related is little fat lamps, little fat, an oil lamps. Those are really fun.

Mark: Right.

Yucca: This year the kids and I So they're, they're softa. So my stepmother lives up on our, where we do as well and is really into finding the, the clay here and fire making things and firing it.

So they made little oil lamps. Yeah, so they made little oil lamps and we've been using lard in them and they worked remarkably well and doesn't smell like a fast food restaurant. I was very happy for that.

Mark: That's amazing. Yeah, we've used NAEA uses Tao quite a bit in cooking and

Yucca: how,

Mark: Yeah, so we've, we've, I've used that sometimes as sort of an accelerant for a fire to get started, but, okay, so that's the fire inside the cauldron. That's one whole set of things you can do.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: Then there's the adding ingredients into the cauldron kind of. The, the classic example of that is stone soup, where everybody brings an ingredient and you start with water or stock. Could be vegetable stock, could be chicken,

Yucca: Mm-hmm. , b flam, whatever you have

Mark: Whatever you

Yucca: and whatever matches your, your dietary approaches. Yeah.

Mark: Right. And then people add ingredients and the whole thing becomes soup. Which. Is a lot more satisfying than it sounds. There is, there is really something wonderful about the kind of ceremonial, adding by a whole lot of different people of what they in particular have brought to add to a given dish.

And then it's all put together, it's cooked, and then it's distributed out to everyone to enjoy. There's something very poetic about that, that process.

Yucca: Yeah. Hmm.

Mark: And then you can also do sort of magical potions, which aren't meant to be ingested,

Yucca: Right.

Mark: With whatever ingredients you feel are necessary. Now, bear in mind, cast iron is a little bit porous,

Yucca: Yeah. So if you're gonna eat from it again, you don't wanna be putting non edible things in there,

Mark: right? Right. You know, no Mercury

Yucca: Yeah. Or I, I don't know why this one's coming to mind, but shampoo. Right, because shampoo, like there's really good smelling shampoos that'll bubble up really nicely. Like you could do some really kind of fun smelling and looking things with, with soap shampoos and soaps and stuff like that.

But you don't want, you don't want that in your mouth.

Mark: No.

Yucca: And that's gonna spoil whatever you try and cook in there next. Right? If you get it out cuz you, you're not feeling well and you need that good soup, you know, And then, Oh, shampoo soup.

Mark: it's, this is Lemon Sented shampoo. Oh, dear.

Yucca: Yeah. But if it's one that you are using only for ritual and decorative purposes, that's very different.

Mark: Right?

Yucca: Right.

Mark: Yeah. 

Yucca: I suppose you could put line it with foil or something like that, but it's kind of taken a risk.

Mark: You know, if you really want a sort of bubbly, frosty effect I would just go for the dry ice, you know, put a little little layer of water in the bottom of the cauldron set in a block of dry ice. You'll get abundant fog pouring out of it. It'll look really cool. If you want to change the color, you can break a light stick and drop it in there.

So that you've got like a green fog coming out or,

Yucca: but that you cannot use for food again.

Mark: Oh, I.

Yucca: a light stick.

Mark: I didn't mean to

Yucca: Oh, good. Okay. You mean snap it so it activates?

Mark: it so it activates Yeah. And drop it in there.

Yucca: Well, and with the dry ice, there's nothing to clean up afterwards, which is really nice. Right. If when it come, it billows out, you know, might get things, you know, little damp, but not, you know, you're not gonna have to be mopping anything or cleaning anything up.

Mark: right. Be sure you've got good ventilation.

Yucca: Yes.

Mark: Dry ice is co2. CO2 is poisonous. That's why we breathe it out because we don't use it.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: you just wanna make sure that you've got good ventilation in the room so that you don't get overcome by CO2 and pass out.

Yucca: Right, Because if we, I mean, we breathe CO2 in and breathe it back out, but the problem is it's not oxygen. It isn't the same as carbon monoxide, which is really problematic for us because our bodies confuses that with oxygen and then it basically makes us suffocate. But co2, Yeah. That sort of thing you might wanna be doing either outside or with making sure you have the windows open, but yeah. And also when you're doing, going back to the fire, one being mindful about what size is your flame going to be, Right. If you're lighting a little candle inside of your little cauldron, The kitchen, you're probably fine, but if you're pouring something in Mark, you have a, Don't you have a story about a

Mark: Oh yes,

Yucca: flame that came out

Mark: the flame vortex.

Yucca: Yeah.

That you wanna be outside for, with, you know, appropriate fire or safety equipment. Yeah. Go. So what happens with your

Mark: Well, what What happened was we did a ritual where we burned some intentions for the coming year, and the caldron was sitting on top of. Coals and there was still some flame there. So the bottom of the, the cauldron was very warm. And what we did was afterwards we poured in two bottles simultaneously, two bottles of cheap red wine.

And it was hot enough that the wine boiled on contact with the bottom of the pan, which we assumed was going to happen for the first little bit that we poured in. And then,

Yucca: you gonna make mold wine or something? Is the Okay?

Mark: Yes. And, and mold wide, which included the ashes of the

Yucca: beautiful. Mm-hmm.

Mark: had, you know, been. Been burning there, and then we could all have a sip.

Well, what ended up happening was that the entire pot boiled, it boiled off the alcohol and the alcohol lit on fire, and created this sort of fire tornado that extended up maybe three feet above the, the lid of the, or the edge of the cauldron. And it did that for about 20 seconds. So what we ended up drinking had no alcohol in it for one thing, and it wasn't particularly tasty because it had been boiled also.

But it's a pretty cool effect if you, if you wanna do that again, it just don't do it indoors.

Yucca: Do it outdoors to have all of your, you know, your fire extinguisher or whatever you need Yeah. To put it out. Right. And maybe not, you know. Not near a bunch of, you know, brush and all of that.

Mark: Yeah. Or overhanging branches, which is the thing that people often forget because the picture in their mind is of a fire that is, you know, a nice contained fire that only leaps up about a foot above whatever the container is. But sometimes fires get a mind of their own and they, they get bigger than that and then they can start to.

The, the tree branches that are over the top. So you need to be, you need to be careful with fire,

Yucca: Yeah. And you know, whatever the safety is in your area, check, check with your county regulations. Is there a fire ban on at the moment and all of that because you don't wanna burn your, your neighborhood down. So yeah,

Mark: Yeah.

Yucca: of those, those interesting. We have this lovely, beautiful relationship with it spanning back literally millions of years, but it's also extremely destructive.

Mark: It's very dangerous. The fact that we were able to domesticate this incredibly dangerous chemical process is really a testament to courage in our, in our ancestry, honestly, because when we first got it, it was probably burning trees that have been struck by lightning

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: and you know, I would think you probably wouldn't wanna go near a tree that had been struck by lightning in case it got struck again.

Right.

Yucca: Yeah, and it's still, you know, can still be hot. The, the kids and I are reading some Greek mythology right now and we actually just were reading about Prometheus and my oldest asked, Well, mom, why was Sue so mad about fire? What's the big deal about giving humans fire? When we had to go through all the things that fire can do, how powerful

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: it made people, they went, Oh, okay.

Still doesn't seem like a fair consequence.

Mark: Well, yeah, e Eternal torment never seems like a fair consequence. . So, yeah.

Yucca: they were very sympathetic to poor Prometheus, so yeah.

Mark: So, the last kind of ritual that I can think of is the kind of potion making where. Where you're, you're mixing something up, which you're then going to pour off into jars or into, you know, like if you're making spell jars for example, and there's particular ingredients that you want in all of them.

So you mix up sort of a, a formula of what all those different elements are, and then you can pour them off into jars and maybe add material items before closing them and sealing them.

Yucca: What would be an example of a type of, of ritual that you would do with one of these s.

Mark: I haven't done a whole lot of spell jar rituals myself, but I know of people that have done like spell jar protection symbols for their, for their land,

Yucca: So they would bury it in the four corners or.

Mark: Right. Yeah. Bury those, you know, at the boundaries in order to, well, realistically speaking in order to help them feel more protected. 

Yucca: Well, that's the point of the ritual, right?

Mark: that's the point of the ritual. Exactly. I mean, many of the magical rituals that have been implemented over human history have been to try to get control over stuff that we don't have control.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: It just helps us feel better and that's fine. There's, there's nothing wrong with that.

There's, it's absolutely a great thing to do. So, for example, if you had You know, water from a particular well and maybe some river water and some ocean water and some wine and some, I don't know. I'm trying to think of, you know, a few drops of blood. Whatever you wanted to put in there. You could stir all that up together.

Add in whatever other. Miscellaneous ingredients felt like the right thing to do and then could decant out of the caldron. But you, you get to do that big stirring motion on the caldron, right? That, that wonderful double, double toil and trouble kind of thing. And so you can chant over it, you can sing over it, you can you can do that solo or you can do that with a group.

Everybody can get a turn to do the stirring. I've seen that before. And then you pour off into the jars and put in items. I, I know that historically spell jars have been found that are full of nails,

Yucca: Okay.

Mark: that are sort of meant to protect against stuff, right? Put these sharp objects in to protect people from from what they don't want to contend with.

Yucca: Well, brainstorming as, as you were talking about that everybody putting something in. Maybe one thing you could do is if you're with a group or you could do it on your own, having a, a jar that you're preparing for later when you're having a hard time,

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: the, oh, you know, here's the, all the, the friendship and joy and, and sense of connection and, you know, there's gonna be a day when I'm feeling alone and I need to, to open that up.

To remember that, you know, I have this connection and this appreciation for the community or, or a day where, where you put patients into the jar. So when you're all out of patience, you can, you have a jar, patience stored on that back shelf that you can open up, right?

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Things like that.

Mark: Yeah. You could pour what's in there as a libation for a, a plant or just onto the earth as a way of releasing its power. And then you have a jar that you can refill again and do another spell with, I have patients in knots.

Yucca: Ah

Mark: so when I really need it, I can untie one of the knots on my patient's string and let some patients out.

Yucca: hm.

Mark: It at least gives me something to do other than reacting angrily in the, in the immediate term, cuz the knots are pretty tight, so it takes a while to get 'em undone.

Yucca: Mm-hmm. . And do you have a time when you go back through and retie everything

Mark: I haven't had to do that yet. I think I've got four or five knots left on my, on my patient's string. But yeah, we did that in the, in a ritual of the Saturday morning mixer, Atheopagan mixer that we do on Zoom. So. I found it useful. I've actually used it twice but I'm sure there will come a time when it's empty and I've gotta refill it.

Yucca: Yeah. Hmm. Well, these have been, these have been fun to think about different ideas to do with Colton, and of course there's, you know, there's so many more that we didn't mention. 

Mark: Right. Yeah. The, the wonderful thing about having a, a ritual practice is that it's re it's everything that your imagination can come up with.

Yucca: Mm-hmm.

Mark: And of course, we like to swap our ideas so that we can take advantage of others imagination as well. And I hope that some of the ideas that we've talked about here today are helpful to you.

But if you don't have some kind of a. Big cooking receptacle really encourage you to, to consider adding that to your magical tools. It's it, it really is a, a very useful thing both for individual work and for group rituals.

Yucca: Right. And beautiful.

Mark: Mm-hmm.

Yucca: Right? Depending on your style, I know some people like to. Put their, their ritual tools away and wrap them in the beautiful cloths and things like that. And, and some people like to have them out on display because they like looking at them and they make them feel good when they see it.

So it's both completely valid approaches. It just depends on what, what works for you.

Mark: Right, Right. Yeah. So there you have. Caldron in non FIAs pagan practice. Pretty cool.

Yucca: Yeah,

Mark: I'm so glad it's October.

Yucca: me too. Well, thank you for another great discussion and we will be back to see or talk with all of you next week

Mark: Yeah, thanks everybody.

Yucca: I believe.

Mark: Oh yes. Talking about death.

Yucca: Yes, it's October,

Mark: Gotta do it.

Yucca: All right. Thanks everyone.

Mark: Bye bye.