Pagan Author-ity

An excerpt from The Goddess Book of Psalms by Patricia Della-Piana, a.k.a. Delia the Crone

Psalm 79.
Beloved Mother, Divine Enchanter, whose hand has stilled the turbulent sea;
who filled the oceans with food and pleasures to feed and nourish Her children’s needs,
You listen to our every call and we are never without Your love.
O Lady whose voice above the clouds does trill and spread across the universe at will,
who speaks to winds and calms the breeze and grows the grasses green and tall,
Your magic lives in each of us and we sing praises to Your love.
Creator of the rock and flame, whose will recycles both the sun and moon,
who raises mountains and dredges valleys, guide us through the chaos round us.
You alone can give us glory; we have no fear with You within our hearts.
Eternal Goddess, Mother Earth, whose truth is planted firmly here with light and darkness intertwined for we are whole within Your shelter,
Yours is all the shield we need; we hold Your love within our souls.
Goddess who divines our every wish, who sees our errors, yet stays with us,
whose grace and love has set us free within the sacred space we make,
join our songs and dance our joy; we celebrate Your love all ways.

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Excerpt from The Goddess Loves Your Shoes, a novel by Christin Keck. This excerpt is from Chapter 1. It's just after Cassie Rivers, the heroine, agrees to attend the Imbolc ritual at the Church of River And Pasture (CRAP) that her two best friends, Gwen-Vera and Mirra attend. They've talked Cassie into attending despite her better judgment--she's had a very bad year, and this doesn't look promising for making things better. Cassie has been a solitary for years, and Gwen-Vera finds out that she owns no ritual tools or garb. So they go out for cappucinos and Gwen-Vera tells her about garbing for ritual.
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“What do you guys wear to these shindigs?” I asked Gwen-Vera later. The skulls with the clown noses had been baked and were now strung on a leather thong around her neck, knocking against all the metal there with tiny clacking sounds. She had even turned the vocal volume down a bit, after I had held my hands over my ears while we were in the car. We’d left Mirra’s to go get a couple of cappuccinos at McDonald’s drive thru.

”Don’t you have any robes or dresses? Don’t you ‘garb’ when you do ritual?” she asked.

“No. I just do them in whatever I’m wearing. Why?”

“Well, it’s better to garb. It shows more respect, it shows others how you feel—sort of like dressing up to go to a Christian church does.”

I didn’t dress for that either. The concept of dressing for an occasion was pretty foreign to me. I wore jeans and ordinary tops everywhere, and I didn’t even own a skirt. I was into comfort, not fashion—the plainer the comfort, the better I liked it. It was simple and you could dress in the dark without worrying about matching colors or styles. One from column A, one from column B—and maybe a tasteful ring on one hand, or a pretty scrunchie to tie back my hair. That was the extent of it for me. At my high school prom I was the only girl wearing sneakers. But that was because I needed the traction running away from Joey.

“I don’t have anything like that. Can’t I just go in jeans and a shirt?”

“Well of course you can! How you dress isn’t important. But I always glam it up a bit when I go. Makes me feel more—I dunno—closer to the Goddess somehow. Like She would be all decked out if She were really here, know what I mean?”

I didn’t. Not really.

“You mean you think the Goddess cares how you dress? That She, um, likes your jewelry? Or even your shoes?”

Gwen-Vera grinned at me. “Well, maybe not like that exactly—but I dress up because I like it, and I’m comfortable that way, and if She’s watching, She’ll see that and bless me even more.”

I pondered this. So the Goddess was a fashionista? Hadn’t thought of Her like that before—and in fact hadn’t really thought of her as Her before either. I practiced a solitary form of Paganism that required I do almost nothing to sustain it except believe in whatever worked for me. In fact, the only reason I even called it Pagan was because “Cassie-ism” sounded stupid. I wasn’t sure what it really was, or how it had come about. I assume it was the result of all those Christian churches my mom had dragged me to over my formative years as she sought for her perfect religious experience—which she never found. She'd kept on looking, though, until the day she died. In fact, at her funeral, a Priest, a Rabbi and a Minister all showed up, all swearing that she had pre-arranged the service with each of them. To us in attendance it just looked like the opening of a very old joke. Truth is, I am comfortable believing in whatever I like—at whatever time I like it. I’ve learned some of everything: Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Taoism, Ba’hai, Buddhism, even Secular Humanism. I can see the connections between them all, and just take what I need out of a big Bucket O' Holy, praying to whatever deity seems appropriate for the occasion. I had never put a label on it until I met Mirra.

Mirra and Gwen-Vera were into the other kind of Paganism, the kind where they held regular rituals on all the High Sabbats, joined a coven or sept for “circle work” and actually try to accomplish “levels” of belief. Gwen-Vera was fairly well-versed; Mirra had just begun to study formally about a year ago, and had managed to attain the Second Degree or Level, or whatever it was they were called. She planned eventually to become a clergywoman in the church, whatever that entailed.

“Well, I have nothing to wear. I’ll just go in my street clothes for now and maybe try to get something later.” I could see that Gwen-Vera was highly disappointed.

“I could loan you some wings, if you want,” she said.

“You could loan me what?”
“Wings. Oh—THEY’RE BEAUTIFUL! WAIT TILL YOU SEE! THE WOULD LOOK COOL, EVEN WITH JEANS. WHAT SIZE SHOE DO YOU WEAR? MAYBE I HAVE SOME YOU COULD TRY ON. OR A CLOAK—I KNOW I HAVE A CLOAK SITTING AROUND SOMEWHERE—ONE I NEVER USE. WE CAN TRICK YOU OUT PRETTY NICE.”

She had begun shouting again, and I covered my ears. I might have to wear earmuffs to this thing if I stood next to her. But—wings? I think I knew what she meant about those—they were made of old pantyhose stretched over shaped coat hangers, and spangled with sequins, glitter paint, shiny ribbons—and they tied onto your shoulders with cords—just the thing for Gwen-Vera. I knew she had several pairs.

“Yeah, okay,” I said, not very enthusiastic about the wings, but curious about the rest of the process, anyway. I could at least check it out. “We can look at your stuff—but no wings.” I'd probably find something—Gwen-Vera had some killer shoes.
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This is the Introduction from Devotions for the Witch, presently available at http://stores.lulu.com/deliathecrone and soon at Amazon.com.

The purpose of this little prayer book is to provide the Italian goddess worshiper with a calendar of festival days, remembrance days, prayers, hymns and rites for the entire year. It is devoted to the female Streghe; therefore, all the prayers included are written to a goddess, with the exception of a prayer offered on February 14, to Diana and Her consort, Dianus. You will find historical prayers, invocations and hymns as well as some written in very recent times, by the author and by others. The format of the book is loosely based on the traditional "books of hours" known in Medieval times, and includes prayers for daily use and for the dead or dying.

As the Grecian Empire preceded the Roman Empire by several centuries, and covered nearly all of Europe and the Middle East at its prime, there are some deities which the Greeks brought with them into those lands, who were adapted by the native peoples there. For brevity’s sake, I include only those Greek deities who survived such adaptation to become major goddesses in their own right in the area we now know to be Italy. Some of these you may never have heard of, and some are infinitely familiar to you already. My intention is to connect them to the Italian heritage with as much factual history as I can fit into this non-historical document.

The native peoples of whom I speak include the Etrusci (of Etruria, mostly the area we now call Tuscany), Sabini (of the area east of Rome, a tribe that eventually scattered over the entire peninsula), Samnites, Ligures, Veneti, Picenti, Marsi, Frentani, Apuli, Messarii, Lucani, Bruttii, Sicilian (of the island of Sicily, where a great deal of Greek settlers remained), and Sicel (forerunners of the Sicilians - one of the three tribes who inhabited the island), in addition to the expected Roman and Greek. I have also included Carthaginian, Phoenician and Thracian deities in the mix, since many of those cults found their way into the Italian world through merchants, warring, or other means. Sometimes the worship of a deity was so widespread, it has become nearly impossible to determine exactly where that worship began, so is identified herein simply as Italian.

Pat Della-Piana, South Carolina, 2009
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