Green Egg Omelette: An Anthology of Art and Articles from the Legendary Pagan Journal
286
Green Egg Omelette: An Anthology of Art and Articles from the Legendary Pagan Journal
286Paperback
-
SHIP THIS ITEMTemporarily Out of Stock Online
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781601630469 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 11/26/2008 |
| Pages: | 286 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Christopher Penczak (New Hampshire) is an award-winning author, teacher, healing practitioner, and eclectic Witch. His practice draws upon the foundation of modern Witchcraft blended with the wisdom of mystical traditions from across the globe. He has studied extensively with renowned Witch Laurie Cabot and other Witches, shamans, yogis, and healers in the New England area which have influenced his eclectic path of personal Witchcraft. Penczak is an ordained minister of the Universal Brotherhood Movement, is a certified flower essence consultant, and is a certified Reiki Master (Teacher) in the UsuiTibetan and Shamballa traditions. A popular public speaker, he tours extensively throughout the year at bookstores and major gatherings. Penczak is the author of City Magick (Red Wheel;Weiser), Spirit Allies (Red Wheel;Weiser), and Gay Witchcraft (Red Wheel;Weiser'nominated for a Lambda Award). A columnist for newWitch magazine, his work has also been featured in publications such as Genre, InnerSelf Magazine and Kaleidoscope, and his writing appears in the recent book I Do, I Don't: Queers on Marriage. Penczak is a faculty member at the North Eastern Institute of Whole Health and a founding member of the Gifts of Grace Foundation, a nonprofit organization in New Hampshire made up of individuals from diverse spiritual backgrounds dedicated to service to the local communities.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
New Pagans
Introduction
byChas S. Clifton
Before the 1970s, everyone knew what a "Pagan" was. That was someone who ate, drank, and made merry, never giving a thought to what happened after death when they would face the awful judgment of God — and, boy, would they be surprised to learn about Hell. But in 2003, New York University Press would publish Michael York's Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion as a serious theological book. Quite a bit had changed in thirty years! Paganism — or various Paganisms — was increasingly seen as designating a collection of new religions, new forms of old religion, and (among the most liberal-minded) could be applied to older "animistic" or "tribal" religions that had persisted through the centuries. Green Egg was a big reason for this shift in thinking, because it brought Pagans of all sorts together, rather than serving only one Wiccan tradition, Druid order, or whatever.
"Neo-Paganism" sought new ways of thinking about religion. It was no longer a case of monotheistic believers versus atheists. As Isaac Bonewits writes in his "Aquarian Manifesto" (he briefly used "Aquarian" almost synonymously with "Neo-Pagan"), "Aquarians — NeoPagan, NeoChristian, Agnostic or of any Faith — are by definition tolerant of ALL Pro-Life Beliefs and Organizations. They do not proclaim the existence of any One-True-Right-And-Only-Way; but rather that every Sentient Being must find her or his own Path." The contrast with the Abrahamic religions could not be stronger.
Tony Kelly, a British Pagan writer, produced an essay called "Pagan Musings," which was widely reprinted in the Pagan press. It makes the point that our religious innovation and creation started with sheer wonder at the cosmos: "We have walked in the magic forest, bewitched in the old Green Thinks; we have seen the cauldron and the one become many and the many in the one; we know the Silver Maid of the moon-light and the sounds of the cloven feet. We have heard the pipes on the twilight ferns, and we've seen the spells of the Enchantress, and Time be stilled." Not just wonder, but also sadness permeates this piece, a sadness of shrines neglected, old gods and ways forgotten, joy trampled under repression. And so he promises that days of Pagan wonder can be reclaimed.
As the new American Pagans found each other through Forum letters and advertisements in Green Egg, members of different groups began to see what they had in common as Pagans. The statement "Common Themes of Neo-Pagan Religious Orientation" was a beginning in the process that would produce Professor York's book thirty years later. It includes declarations of ecological wholeness, of an integration of Eros and religion, and an affirmation of the multiplicity of divine forms. This declaration, in effect, makes the point that divinity can appear within the material world, the "tangible [and] sentient," as York would later write. And it calls for religious freedom to be extended to Pagans too, foreshadowing a struggle for recognition that continues to this day.
The Neo-Pagan Alternative
byErinna Northwind,Church of All Worlds
Mayday, 1971. MANKIND SEEMS to be locked into a course of Terracide; the murder of the planet upon which he lives. The process involves, among other things:
1. A combination of willful apathy and real helplessness; lack of control over his institutions. Man cannot focus his attention on the problem or get excited about it. Apathy prevents him from acting individually and from organizing to do what he cannot do individually.
2. Inability to distinguish real values from symbols. Not only real enjoyment and happiness, but health and safety are sacrificed in favor of acquiring symbolic wealth and social status.
3. Profit-motivated proliferation of the use of materials and processes not fully understood, with no assurance of the harmlessness of the given use.
It is well-known that both overcrowding (lack of private space) and sex-repression produce fatigue and depression in the individual, among other ills. Both require the victim to develop a rigid, insensitive outer "shell" as a defense.
He can "shut out the world" by (going into his shell.) A person whose "shell" is sufficiently thick may actually experience reduced sensitivity in his skin, and may interpret pleasurable and painful stimuli conversely.
This shell enables him to shut out painful (or pleasurable — therefore painful) contacts, but it also shuts him in. His perception of reality outside himself is distorted. He cannot experience events normally. He may feel like a spectator in his own experiences.
Denied authentic experiences, he lives in an inner world of abstractions and symbols. His thinking becomes inhuman, machinelike. His aims and actions, while preserving a lunatic logic of their own, become irrational in relation to any normal interpretation of reality; inhumane, and rigidly patterned. He cannot himself test abstractions against reality to determine their relative validity. Hence there are hardly any limits to how far his fantasies can go. He is left suggestible to any appeal that does not attack his basic fears or excite his defense mechanisms.
Thus he can be brainwashed to accept premises any sensible person would dismiss as nonsense, such as: that it is immoral to steal a loaf of bread from a supermarket, virtuous to let one's family starve for want of it, commendably "good business" to misrepresent the weight and the contents of the bread one offers for sale, and one's civic duty to punish the bread-thief. Or, that we are condemned to eternal torment for the sin of coming into existence; that the God who condemns us is all-powerful, yet at the same time is unable to save mankind from hell except by submitting his only son to unspeakable tortures; that we please this God by suffering and self-mutilation, yet must regard him as a loving father. As Tom Paine put it while still a child, any human father that behaved that way would be hanged.
That society in the mass is afflicted with these malaises can be seen in the artificial lifestyle that is accepted as standard. People today live so far removed from direct contact with natural realities that they have only the dimmest ideas of how or where their food is produced, far less any idea of what the surface of their planet is like in the wild state. Many see the sky only through a veil of dirty air.
These causes of human impotence, seemingly a tangle of many strands, are merely different aspects of a single phenomenon: defiance of the elastic and gentle laws (but laws nonetheless, with definite penalties for violation) of Nature.
Man defies Nature by exceeding wise limits on his own numbers, and reproduces the behavior of overcrowded laboratory rats: he turns to sexual perversions (of which chastity is the most bizarre), he fouls his own nest, he kills his Children. He defies Nature by rejecting reality in favor of symbols; by exploiting Nature's mysterious powers without first understanding them, in the arrogant belief that there is nothing he does not know. The most primitive creatures that could be called human knew better than that.
The Church of All Worlds attempts to get at and correct the root causes of Terracide before the crime can be fully accomplished. The tools used include:
1. RELIGION. This is merely saying that there are processes we don't understand yet, and therefore we must not exploit them carelessly. But neither can we afford to ignore their existence, because by doing so we may run afoul of them. Since we do not understand them fully, and perceive them only intuitively, we can best talk about them metaphorically, in the language of myth. There are certain things we must do that bring no immediate concrete gain, yet we must do them for an object "bigger than our individual selves:" the saving of the planet. It is a religious act to use biodegradable, phosphate-free detergent, which may be more expensive than the polluting kind. By acknowledging the religious nature of these concerns, Neo-Pagans are fighting apathy with a very powerful, very old force: the instinct to worship, which can be, and is in the case of the Church of All Worlds, superstition-free. Certainly a CAW Neo-Pagan is freer from superstition than the "hard-headed businessman," who values figures on paper above a life richly lived.
2. RETURN TO NATURE. By getting his fingers in the Earth the typical alienated man of today may experience healing of his riven self. Living close to Nature and working in cooperation with Her to produce his necessities and pleasures, daily experiencing the flavors of raw life, must work to reacquaint man with his own nature.
The natural environment is capable of pouring into us masses of subtle information about our own nature and identity and about the universe and our place in it, if we will only approach and be receptive. CAW works to preserve and restore natural wilderness, and to provide opportunities for people to experience contact with Nature and participate in producing their own food, by health-giving organic methods.
Members of the Church of All Worlds are asked to search for the difference between healthy natural desire and neurotic compulsion, and be guided by the former. Thus we serve Nature manifested in ourselves. We are encouraged to turn to Nature as a source of spiritual refreshment and bodily health, so that we can be of more use to ourselves and to our human family.
3. SMALL-VILLAGE LIFE. The Church of All Worlds is working towards establishing new communities to bring institutions down to manageable size. We wish to rely increasingly on the use of village-scale institutions of our own making, which are controllable, and work out solutions to them using our own cognitive apparatus and intelligence. This is in sharp contrast to the method in use today.
People are accustomed to having their personal problems, values, goals and methods selected and defined for them and imprinted on their passive brains by means of the hypnotic tube.
CAW's motto, "Thou art God/dess," is particularly relevant when we realize that most of humanity's problems come from thinking that someone or something else is God: money, the great father in Washington, the Church, our parents, General Motors; whatever we allow to make our decisions for us. When a man shares Godhood with all Nature he has the freedom and responsibility to act in his own behalf. He and no other is the architect of his own life. He and no other is responsible for his own decisions.
The Church of All Worlds is Paganism grown up. Where the ancient Pagans bowed before awesome Nature in their own helplessness, Neo-Pagans make peace with Her in the strength of our terrible technological arsenal. In maturity we know our power to preserve or destroy, and we also know on what we depend for life, and what it is we must be careful not to destroy but to preserve.
GE Vol. IV, No. 39 (5/30/71) 3–4 Reprinted, GE Vol. VIII, No. 70 (Beltane 1975)
The Rising Tide of Pagan Tradition
byW. Holman Keith
(author of Divinity as the Eternal Feminine)
A number of trends are emerging at this dawn of the Aquarian Age: the ascendancy of woman, the emancipation of sex, the shaking of the foundations of our secular and spiritual institutions. We are at the crossroads, and a choice of path must be made. Science, technology and collectivism are the prospects of the future — all of which tend to robotize man. Or, regression because of human failure and folly on a wide scale to the ancient rule of violence and force. If a great religion is to counter both of these possibilities it will be a religion in which man's deepest sensibilities are re-awakened as to the divinity of Nature, sex, the human person, as to the sacredness of life as of both time and eternity, aid as ideally and rightly itself the worship of the Divine. Of all the new religious developments of our time this presents the livest and profoundest issue.
In the days of the Apostle Paul, Diana of Ephesus and Her craftsmen who lived from the trade of Her cultus caused the Apostle some uneasy moments and no small opposition. The days of the great Temple at Ephesus were numbered, and Demetrius and his silversmiths were identified not with a lost cause — not in the larger perspective of history — but with their own utterly inadequate and unworthy version of the Goddess truth, in which commercialism predominated. This timeless truth was not timely at this stage. Christianity was to prevail, as both the destroyer and yet incorporator of Paganism. The Temple at Ephesus (one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world) and the Temple at Jerusalem were both to pass off the scene.
But the truth of Nature, sex and femininity as divine manifestations of Supreme Being — to which the Temple of the Seven Wonders bore witness, however unworthily, as did an earlier temple at Jerusalem in its sexual rites — this truth is more durable and beautiful than those great worship centers of antiquity which were destroyed. This truth cannot be destroyed. Its recovery and full realization ethically will not mean a return of the decadence of Greece and Rome, reflected in their depraved debauchery, from which the asceticism of primitive Christianity was a rebound. This latter may have been the only possible and right response at the time, for all the right-thinking and well-intentioned, Christian or otherwise. But not to mention the ascetic excesses that developed in the early Christian Church, that were often unwittingly a kind of sensuality in reverse and a perversion, such austerity could not rehabilitate the flesh and its pleasure into any kind of nobility. Such precisely is the ethics and esthetics of the Goddess faith. Spirit must elevate and ennoble all the fullness of sense, in the name, spirit, and worship of the Divine. This is the only alternative, by the highest idealism and in the long run, to the debased sensuality that drags the spirit down into a loss of its integrity.
The ancient fertility faith and Goddess worship persisted well into historic times, even after the patriarchal social revolution, in such cult mysteries as those of Ishtar and Tammuz, Aphrodite and Adonis, Cybele and Attis, and in such great worship centers as those at Cyprus, Cyrene and Ephesus. The worship of Goddesses as subordinate to the All-Father (Zeus or Jupiter) persisted of course until the fall of Greco-Roman polytheism, brought about by the triumph of Christianity. This triumph must be re-assessed, in the name of an older and a newer truth.
The Goddess Venus, for all the Romans, including Emperor Augustus, the most proper Roman of them all, was the exemplar, guarantor, guardian of the effulgence of life, in Nature, in history, in human affairs and high adventure. For the Pagans the grandeur of Rome was inseparable from the glory of Venus, Venus Genetrix. The neo-Dianic religion — Aphrodisian, Feraferian, Wiccan — in claiming an indispensible truth and message for our time and crisis, is seeking to awaken the modern mind to a glory of the Divine that is lost to our orthodox religious thought. The complete routing of the Goddess truth in the three great monotheism except for certain disguised and minor survivals, principally in Christianity, made its eventual and triumphant return all the more inevitable. And the living Goddess will mean more in this day of desperate coming to grips with life and reality than in pre-Christian Paganism.
GOD IS DEAD! LONG LIVE THE GODDESS!
Biotheology: The Neo-Pagan Mission
byTim Zell,Primate, Church of All Worlds
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This article was originally written in mid-1971, about nine months following a profound Vision I had on September 6, 1970, of our entire Earth as a single great living organism — a revelation I articulated the next weekend as a sermon to the congregation of the Church of All Worlds, titled "TheaGenesis: The Birth of the Goddess." I finally published it as an article in Green Egg #40 — Litha, 1971. I followed it with an ongoing series in each issue over the next few years, expanding upon the implications of this paradigm; this piece was the first of those sequel articles. For this and my other writings of the time, I coined the term Terrebios — later Terrabia (f.) — Latin for "Earthlife." This was in accord with the convention of scientific nomenclature in which Greek names are used for extinct creatures, and Latin for living ones. However, when, a year later, British atmospheric biochemist James Lovelock published his first essay — a letter to the editor — on the Earth as a living organism ("Gaia as Seen Through the Atmosphere," Atmospheric Environment, 1972), in which he used a variant of the ancient Greek name Ge, as proposed by novelist William Golding, I replaced Terrebia with Gaea or Gaia in my own subsequent writings and reprints. These writings were widely reprinted in other Pagan periodicals of the time, having, according to Margot Adler, a profound and transformative impact of imparting a passionate sense of mission and purpose to the emerging Neo-Pagan movement. –OZ, 4/17/08
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Green Egg Omelette"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Oberon Zell-Ravenheart.
Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Christopher Penczak,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction by Chas S. Clifton,
1. New Pagans,
2. New Witches, Greeks, & Druids,
3. Old Pagans,
4. The Gods of Nature; The Nature of Gods,
5. Nature, Evolution, & Ecospirituality,
6. Ritual, Celebration, & Worship,
7. Magick, Arts, & Crafts,
8. Pagan Culture: Family & Tribe,
9. Power & Politics: Changing the World,
10. Gender & Sexuality,
11. Future Visions,
12. Pagan Fiction,
Resources Pagan Publications,