Honor

Okay, this is going to be a little tricky, and I don't know how much I want to share, given that that is my real name at the top of this blog; then again, it's only been my real name for not quite a decade yet, so there is still a bit of camouflage there.

But Hecate's post got me thinking. And now here's the part I don't want to get into, much.

I should warn you all first, I suppose, that this blog may now well descend into the occasional navel-gazing; and I guess I have two things to say to that. One, this is a blog, and one can hardly be surprised, as hello, this is a blog; and, two, that one should rightly check one's belly button on a regular basis, as a lotus may be sprouting there. You never know.

This is the time of year when it is traditional to honor the ancestors. The veil is thin, so they say, and the ghosty sorts crowd us round, as the leaves fall and the trees shift through their annual deaths. I can't say I can really feel it this year, though, as I still have that cotton in my ears of necessity. But that's okay, as it really has done wonders for my anxiety level.

So now to that navel-gazing part I'm not sure I want to share, about the ancestors.

Or, rather, about my father. A warning to the stray cousin who may have wandered here: if you do not wish to hear anything bad about your Uncle Walter, you may want to leave now.

You see, my father was a deeply broken person. I say was, even though he is not dead, because he is now in a nursing home after a stroke several years back, and he does not remember anyone. This is a good thing; a great blessing, in fact.

He was seriously mentally ill. I mean, not that we recognized it growing up; I am only able now to see that there was something really wrong with him, or put a name to it. But he had a personality disorder, a severe personality disorder, one called obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. This is not, it should be noted, the same thing as obsessive-compulsive disorder, no. They are not even, as far as I've been able to find out, particularly related, other than the similarity of names. OCD is perceived as not-quite-right by the person with it; they know, on some level, that the compulsions and rituals they perform aren't rational.

But personality disorders are different. They are perfectly in harmony with the ego. Which means that not only does a person with one think they are perfectly rational in their behaviors, they think they are right in doing what they do. Especially someone with OCPD, with its focus on perfectionism. Other personality disorders, by the way, include narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and the ever-fun antisocial personality disorder.

Anyway, this made my father, well, not fun. Actually it made him an impossible completely opaque control-freak who could not be reasoned with, even a tiny little bit. Oh, and he was a hoarder, too, of an extreme sort. If you wish to hear about this more in-depth, really, go read my other blog, Tetanus Burger. There is more than enough about him and the effects his behavior had on us over there, as, well, that's the stated purpose of that blog. I would like to especially direct you to a recent post on his OCPD.

So, back to the ancestors. Though I know that honoring them is a big part of this time of year, and of this religion of Paganism in general, it has never been something I've been all that interested in doing. I suppose some of it is that my family (to either side) is not all that close-knit. As a family we don't really do family. And that's fine.

And some of my family are just, well, dysfunctional, as Hecate put it. And I don't wish to honor that. Acknowledge, sure, that's fine, and healthy, as denial won't get you anywhere, but honor? Not really, no.

My father's father, my grandfather, died when he was young, when my father was I think eleven years old. My father was the eldest of three boys; so his father also left a six year old and a two year old. My grandfather died suddenly, and unexpectedly, in 1934, right in the middle of that Great Depression which also wiped out the family's savings. Fortune, actually, one might even say, or so I hear. There was money on that side, once, as evidenced by the numerous rich houses my ancestors built, including a big stone number that now functions as the Historical Society for the next city over.

So, bad times. And one could reasonably surmise that that childhood of loss, insecurity, and deprivation triggered my father's later hoarding.

His mother, so I have heard, was also a piece of work, perhaps a hoarder herself. I don't know; I was very very young when she died, and I don't remember her.

So. Back to things of a Pagan nature.

A couple years ago, my father came down with some kind of raging infection in the nursing home. He was taken to the hospital where they started pumping him full of intravenous antibiotics. We went to visit him there. He was running a high fever, and was very very out of it. Or, almost, to my Witchy eye, very very in it. Some part of him, it seemed to me, was seeing very clearly. Oh, not in an intellectual sense, of course; but some part of him knew he was very close to the edge, very close to dying. And he was terrified. Because he was completely unwilling.

I'm not surprised; the man was terrified of any kind of change, even the littlest sort. And it doesn't get much bigger than death for changes, does it?

But as much as I have reasons, good reasons, to dislike the man, or, even, to hate the man, I am a compassionate person. I think I am, anyway. Though at that point, really, it wasn't my father there. Just a scared, terrified person.

So when I got home I invoked my ancestors, his ancestors, though I had never felt the need to before.

I did not honor them. I did not ask nicely. I told my grandfather, the one who died young, that I did not know if he left willingly or unwillingly, but that his leaving had caused a profound mess, a real fucked-up pile of shit, one that my father had happily passed on to the rest of us. And so I told him that it was now his responsibility to get his ass over to that hospital bed and be there for my father. And the same for my grandmother, too. Because I sure as fuck was not going to do it. As if I could have anyway.

So I don't know about honor. I figure the ancestors are dead already. They can deal with the unvarnished truth.

Or maybe that is honor. I have always considered the telling of that kind of truth, that level of honesty, where nothing is sugar-coated and I just tell it straight from the soul, to be a form of respect. So maybe it is.

The next day my father was much better. Remarkably so, and the doctors commented on it, even. Though I don't remember now if I thanked them. The ancestors I mean. They still owe me, a lot.

Shadow

These last few years I find myself craving black in this season. Not at Samhain; no, then I crave orange and russet and red, the colors of the leaves or the fat full moon rising at sunset. But now, as we spiral down to Yule and the Solstice, and the light gets smaller and smaller like the aperture of a camera closing down, I want black like you wouldn't believe.

These last few years the practice of lighting lights for the season has seemed so alien, so wrong, so, and I don't normally use this word, so blasphemous. One does not welcome the dark by lighting a candle. This seems obvious to me, these last few years. Perhaps I am becoming old and cynical and fed up with holiday spirit and the usual forced cheeriness; that is entirely plausible. Probable, even. But I want to sit with the dark. That feels proper. I do not want to hurriedly banish it away at the first thought; that feels like denial, like fear, like willful ignorance. This preemptive warding-off, this feverish and wide-eyed jumping ahead to the light feels disrespectful, like it is ignoring, dismissing the reality of the dark.

I want to sit with the dark a while, in quietude. Long enough, at least, for my eyes to grow accustomed to it. Long enough that I can, maybe, look around a bit.

For me, anyway, and only in these last most recent years. I do not know why my attitude has shifted, but it feels calm and measured, and not based in fear, or despair, or seasonal depression. Perhaps I have simply had enough of the blaring commercialism, itself a form of denial. I don't know.

And this year I find I want to paint Styx, the Goddess, She of the blue-black river, the eldest daughter of primaeval Ocean. A dark Goddess, certainly, but an uncomfortable one; and I am not entirely sure why I am so drawn to paint Her. For Her name means Hatred.

She is an ambiguous figure, or is, at least, to a radical feminist such as myself. She is a Titanis, one of the elder race of Gods, against Whom upstart Zeus started a war for supremacy. When He declared war He invited the other Gods to join Him, telling them He would heap status and gifts on those taking His side; and Styx, though a Titanis Herself, was the first to come to Him, against Her own people. For this, She was rewarded with a river named for Her, a river considered so holy the Gods swore oaths by it.

Did you catch that? When Zeus declared war, Hatred immediately flew to His side.

She is properly a traitor, this Styx, though of course described in glowing terms by the winners Who wrote mythic history, meaning, the Olympians, Who ended up dominant and victorious. Nike, Victory, is Her daughter, which is I suppose a large part of why the Olympians won, for when Styx went to Their side She brought Her family with Her. Victory, Daughter of Hatred. Something is being acknowledged there, don't you think?

But Styx is a Titanis, and is mentioned as early as Hesiod (which is about as early as you're going to get in Greek myth). And the thing with the Titanes is that they are generally regarded as belonging to an older stratum of myth, one likely held by an earlier people, who were assimilated into the Greeks proper when they arrived in the land; the mythic war between the two sets of Gods being a sort of fossilized representation of the conflict between the two peoples and their traditions playing out. That is of course simplified, and probably only true in a general sense; still, it makes me wonder about the roots of Styx. What is She really?

I would guess that the myth has it backwards, as myths usually do concerning attributes of the Gods; She was always Goddess of that Underworld river, as that is by definition what She is. The story about being given the river as reward is a later explanation, a rationalization; the river was always Hers. And it is unusual, also, that She is a river Goddess, for the overwhelming majority of river Deities in Greek myth are male, as a quick skim of the Potami page at Theoi shows. So She is a rare exception to the rule. That, right there, hints that She is old, or original, autochthonous if you will, sprung from the land, some older remnant that proved intractable to the new inhabitants, and could not be changed, only adopted. But I don't know.

She is, as I said, ambiguous, for although Her name means Hatred, Styx is also concerned with matters of justice and truth; Her river is so sacred, and so powerful, it knows, She knows, when the Gods are lying, and the waters will poison Them if They do, which is part of why oaths sworn by Styx are so strong. Or, at least, matters of justice and truth so far as the Olympian Gods, so far as Zeus, are concerned. I do not know that I consider His justice my justice.

I spent an evening not too long ago researching Styx, starting out at the Theoi page and following branching paths and faint scents; and I found that there is a real river, in Arkadia, Greece, which is called the Styx. It took a bit of research to get to its modern name, and where exactly it is located, but after a few hours I tracked it down, and, wonder that the internet is, it wasn't too long before I found a photo of it. It is quite dramatic, a high spring falling from a sheer cliff; and the rocks at the base are a rusty red and a deep, wet, black. Here, see for yourself.

If I paint Her I will make Her hair black, and long, and flowing, as is proper to a river Goddess. She will be in red and blue-black, I think, and in shadow. The north side of a mountain, of the underworld, kind of shadow, the kind that never sees the sun, deep and ambiguous and dark.

I mean, if I paint Her. I am not sure I will.

Remembering the Ancestors at Samhain

I actually have an ancestor who was burnt at the stake. This fact is very impressive in certain Witchy circles; though he wasn't burnt as a Witch, just a heretic. Just. Like that made a difference.

So at Samhain, and though my religion is not his religion, I remember John Rogers, Protestant martyr, who was burnt at the stake on February 4th, 1555, in the town square in Smithfield, England. He has more than a few descendants, I hear; and no wonder, considering he had eleven children, one famously 'a babe at the breast' when he was executed.

He had a hand in translating into English what would become the King James version of the Bible; there is a Wikipedia page on him if you are so inclined.

His spirit of non-conformity, in both the usual sense and its original, religious, sense, lives on, and is in fact quite celebrated on that side of my family, the crazy artsy side, my mother's side. We remember him in how we live.

This also means the urge to religious freedom is in my bones.

So at Samhain, Summer's End, I remember John Rogers.