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I'm sorry I haven't been updating this frequently: I've been both busy and unproductive lately. However, on Friday afternoon, while I was waiting for an oil change, I wrote a poem inspired by the book I've been reading, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. The early portion of the book discusses in some detail a thing I'd known about for a while, but apparently isn't commonly known: that the Agricultural Revolution resulted in a significant decrease in the standard of living for the vast majority of humans.

It turns out that hunter-gatherers on relatively productive land--unlike those living in the borderline environments where they still exist today, because the land isn't worthwhile for agricultural societies to expropriate--tend to be healthier and live longer than peasants did in most agricultural societies. The median level of well-being in agricultural societies may not have reached what it was in hunter-gatherer bands until a century or two ago. On the other hand, the elites: the people who could read and write, who owned the land (and the slaves), and whose names history remembers were much better off: their social roles couldn't even exist without the agricultural surpluses and sedentary lives made possible by agriculture.

Anyway, in response to this all, I wrote a poem that can perhaps be described as a Marxist hymn to Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of love, beauty, sex, desire, fertility, war, justice, and political power who may be seen as the goddess of civilization itself, since she is the keeper of the foundational principles of civilization, and stole them away from the chief god for her city of Uruk.

(As a note, this poem is in two different voices. I'm curious if any of you can identify the two speakers and which stanzas they get: it's kind of subtle.)

"Justice from Inanna"

Lady of Uruk¹, Queen of Heaven,
Founder of Cities, and Keeper of the Mes²:

Fifty centuries thou hast been with us.
Our ancestors ate thy wheat and rice and maize,
and built thy temples and thy cities,
and lived together, aided by thy laws.

Lady of Uruk, Queen of Heaven,
Planter of Fields, and Keeper of the Grain:

You chose your children from our wandering bands
and made them kings and priests, soldiers and scribes.
You set us to plow your fields for a crust of bread
and break our backs that walls of brick and lapis³ rise.

Lady of Uruk, Queen of Heaven,
Mistress of Empires, and Keeper of Peace:

To every plot of land, and across the salty sea,
we followed thy lead, and reaped thy gifts
of glory and power, of leisure and wealth,
and of a piece of earth that was our own.

Lady of Uruk, Queen of Heaven,
Lover of Kings, and Keeper of Slaves:

In Babylon and Rome, Xi'an⁴ and Teotihuacan⁵
you taught your children arts and gave them tools,
but all their glory and all their wealth
was wrung by force from our unremembered brows.

Lady of Uruk, Queen of Heaven,
Founder of Cities, and Giver of Futures:

If fifty centuries of blood and sweat,
unwillingly shed upon your altar,
have won any boon, let it be this:
That the bloody sacrifice may end
and that all people may enjoy thy gifts.

___________
Footnotes:

¹ Uruk was a Sumerian city that flourished around 2900 BCE, when it was the largest city in the world. It was strongly associated with Inanna, and was home to her chief temple, Eanna.

² The me were a Sumerian theological concept that doesn't translate well into any modern language: they were "one of the decrees of the gods that is foundational to those social institutions, religious practices, technologies, behaviors, mores, and human conditions that make civilization, as the Sumerians understood it, possible. They are fundamental to the Sumerian understanding of the relationship between humanity and the gods." Confusingly, the me are also described in mythology as being physical objects, even though some of them are immaterial concepts, such as "victory."

³ Some versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh suggest that the walls of Uruk (implausibly) or of the Eanna Temple (more plausibly) were covered in lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone that was important in Sumerian religion. Inanna wore a necklace and carried a measuring rod of lapis lazuli.

⁴ Xi'an, a city in what is now central China, is the oldest of the traditional "Four Great Ancient Capitals of China," and was the capital of the Qin Dynasty and early Han Dynasty, who created a unified Chinese empire contemporary with the rise and height of the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean.

⁵ Teotihuacan was an ancient Mesoamerican city that was the largest in the Americas at its height in about 250 CE. It is unclear whether the Teotihuacan culture established an imperial state, but they were a major economic power and exported high-quality obsidian tools throughout Mesoamerica. By Aztec times, Teotihuacan's ruins had attained a legendary status and the Aztecs claimed descent from the city's builders.

Trigger warning for discussion of male genital mutilation and discussion of AMAB genitalia.

( Read more... )

As I discussed in my previous post, I attended a lecture on new updates dinosaur paleontology by Tim Holtz, a professor at the University of Maryland, during Chessiecon last weekend. I took detailed notes, partly for the benefit of a friend and a friend's kid who are both obsessed with dinosaurs, and partly because I'm embarrassed by how much about dinosaurs I've forgotten: they were a childhood special interest that I haven't thought about much in a while.

Anyway, here's the summary, with links for as many things as I could find them for.

New Dinosaur Species

Forty-eight new dinosaur species from the Mesozoic were described in 2017, and forty-one have been described so far this year. New genera described in in the past year include:

Macrocollum, possibly the earliest prosauropod yet discovered.

Ledumahadi, possibly the earliest sauropod yet discovered. It wasn't fully quadrupedal and had flexed rather than pillar-like forearms. (Bipedalism is the ancestral condition for dinosaurs.)

Halszkaraptor, a dromaeosaur, but very goose- or penguin- like, and apparently aquatic.

A full-body fossil of a baby bird preserved in amber from about 99 million years ago was found.

Borealopelta, one of the best-preserved dinosaur finds ever. It's a nodosaur with the keratin sheathes and skin on its horns and armor preserved. This means we can get a clear idea of what they would have looked like in life. It appears to have been countershaded (dark on top, light on the bottom), which is usually camouflage against predators that can look down on prey. We only see this in mammals when they're a lot smaller than Borealopelta, but the Cretaceous had much larger predators.

The Early Triassic Keeps Shrinking

Contrary to popular belief, the geologic time scale of eras (like the Mesozoic), periods (like the Jurassic), and epochs (like the Pleistocene), isn't actually defined in terms of specific amounts of time in the past. Instead, it's defined in terms of particular rock strata and features that can be found around the world, allowing one to identify certain rocks as of the same age without necessarily knowing what age they are. This means, for example, that the end of the Cretaceous is defined as the appearance of the iridium layer that signals the impact event that wiped out the dinosaurs, and by the disappearance of dinosaur and other fossils, not as being exactly 65 million years ago.

Today, the exact points at which geologic time periods begin are defined via the Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point markers hammered into the rock at particularly clear rock faces in national parks around the world. For example, the start of the Cambrian is officially marked by a marker in a particular rock face in a nature preserve in Newfoundland. (I mentioned this to the author friend I was at the convention with, and I think I might have talked her into including a visit to one of these in the novel she's working on.)

Anyway, one consequence of this is that, as geological dating techniques are refined, it is possible that the starts, ends, and lengths of geologic periods may shift. In particular, the dates for the start and end of the Early Triassic were revised this year, and it appears to have been only four-and-a-half million years long, while the Middle Triassic was about ten million years long and the Late Triassic was about thirty-six million years long.

Did the Dinosaurs Get Their Start Because of Rain?

A new hypothesis published this year suggested that the dinosaurs took over on land in the Late Triassic due to a period of intense rainfall called the Carnian Pluvial Event near the start of the otherwise arid epoch. This period, about two million years long, led to a major diversification in tree species, which seems to have benefited dinosaurs at the expense of the pseudosuchians--the subgroup of archosaurs that includes modern crocodiles--that had previously been dominant on land.

Dinosaurs seem to have had a delayed take-over in North America, where they don't become dominant until the end of the Late Triassic. This may be due to the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, the second largest episode of vulcanism since the end of the Precambrian. Rock from this period includes the Hudson River Palisades and some of the hills at Gettysburg.

Gaits and Dinosaur Tracks

This year, some very tiny tracks of either a baby raptor or a very small species of raptor (such as Microraptor) were discovered.

More importantly, though, a study of dinosaur tracks in Culpepper, VA that was published this year suggests that dinosaurs didn't have distinct fast and slow gaits (i.e. walking, trotting, and running) as mammals do. Instead, like birds, bipedal dinosaurs seem to have had a single gait that they could use at fast and slow speeds.

Brooding Eggs

A recent survey paper looked at which dinosaur species' nests were open on top, indicating that the parents brooded the eggs, keeping them warm by sitting/laying on them to provide body heat. It appears that this trait originated in the basal pennaraptora, meaning that it was unique to oviraptorosaurs, dromaeosauridae ("raptors"), trooodontidae, and avialae (flying dinosaurs, including Archaeopteryx).
In other words, only raptors, raptor-like dinosaurs, and birds seem to have sat on their nests: others, including Maiasaura, the famous "good mother lizard," didn't.

Why Did Neornithes Survive the KT Extinction?

It's well-known at this point that neornithes--the ancestors of modern birds--survived the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period, while other dinosaurs, including some flying ones, did not. One possible explanation for this that was introduced this year is that it is due to the global forest collapse that resulted from the impact event at the end of the Cretaceous. Trees seem to have been absent worldwide for over a thousand years after the impact event, with ferns the dominant land plants. Why would this matter? The early neornithes appear to have all been ground-nesters, while other late Cretaceous birds all nested in trees, which would have put them in serious difficulty when trees vanished, or marine. (It's less clear why marine birds would have been at serious disadvantage, but they may have also laid eggs in trees?)

Last weekend, I went to Chessiecon, a small science fiction convention held in Timonium, just north of Baltimore, at the suggestion of my author-friend, Ruthanna Emrys, and her wife, who were going for the first time this year because their friend, Jo Walton, was the guest of honor. In theory the convention gives "particular attention to materials of and by women creators," though that wasn't particularly evident to me from the choice of panelists on most of the panels.

I had a very relaxing weekend, which I certainly needed, and I did enjoy most of the things I attended at the convention, even though I slept through rather more of them than I'd planned to.

Also, I was impressed at how trans-friendly the convention was. There were pronoun (she, he, they, and fill-in-the-blank) ribbons to put on member badges, and there was a non-gendered bathroom set up for people who weren't comfortable with the hotel's gendered bathrooms. I wore a skirt basically the whole time, though, and used the women's restrooms regularly without getting any weird looks.

Friday

I hadn't quite realized how close Timonium is to College Park when there's no rush hour traffic: I was able to drive there in about an hour, which was a good deal faster than I expected. After checking in to the Red Roof Inn next door, where I'd decided to stay because it was cheaper, I headed over to the Red Lion Inn to check in to the convention. Conveniently, I ran into Ruthanna and her wife, the only people I knew at the convention, in the check-in line. We sat around talking in the lobby and they introduced me to some of their fannish friends while we waited for the programming to start.

Jo Walton Reading

Despite the fact I've heard a lot about her from Ruthanna and her family, I'd never actually read anything by Jo Walton before. The upcoming (in May) novel she read the beginning of, Lent, sounded wonderful, and I definitely need to read it when it comes out. It's historical fantasy, set in Medieval Italy in a world where Catholic theology--and demonology--are empirically correct.

Unforgivable Villains with Understandable Motives

This panel, which had Jo Walton, Ruthanna Emrys, Heather Rose Jones, Karen Osborne, and Martin Wiley on it and was moderated by Don Sakers, was pretty good. Unfortunately, writing this close to a week later, I don't actually recall that many of the details, but there was some discussion of the difference between "forgiveness" and "redemption," and whether understanding someone's motives actually implied any sort of sympathy for them.

After the Unforgivable Villains panel, I had dinner with Ruthanna and her wife. We'd wanted to go to a filk concert by Benjamin Newman after dinner, but it was rescheduled because of a lack of heat in the room it was to be held in, so we sat in the lobby and talked more. I ended up having a very long phone conversation with a friend in Australia. (Time zones make it really hard to get in touch with him, so in the middle of a convention was the best we could manage for catching up.) Finally, I went to the bardic circle filk room and listened to music for an hour or so before going to my room to get some sleep.

Among other songs, some of which I recognized, I was introduced to Sara Thomsen's "Somewhere to Begin" by a rather cute Irish guy playing a guitar. I really liked "Somewhere to Begin," and recommend listening to it...conveniently, it's on YouTube.

Saturday

On Saturday morning, I managed to make it back to the convention in time for University of Maryland paleontology professor Tom Holtz's talk on "The Latest in the World of Dinosaurs." The talk was really good, and I took extensive notes, which will hopefully be the basis for a separate Dreamwidth post soon.

Walking to Mordor: A Panel about Pacing and Time Compression

This panel, like all the panels I attended, was moderated by Don Sakers, and had Elektra Hammond, Julie Holderman, Steve Kozeniewski, and Jo Walton on it. It was probably more targeted for people who write fiction than for people like me who don't, but there was some interesting discussion about why "random encounters" work well in D&D but not in fiction, and ways to imply a long journey while eliding actual discussion of the day-to-day minutiae of travel.

Jo Walton also mentioned a essay she published on Tor.com a number of years ago called "Faster Than Light At Any Speed" about the fact that faster-than-light drives in science fiction very commonly follow the same basic set of assumptions (will require large ships that can't land on planetary surfaces; will take weeks or months to get between star systems). I think there are some explanations for this, including the fact that you can't have travel or communication between star systems be too fast if you want to maintain the impression of them being completely different worlds with different cultures. But it's certainly something to think about.

Group Discussion: Steven Universe

The group discussion of Steven Universe was quite small, and I was surprised that I was only one of two people (out of seven or so total) who didn't have grey hair. It was certainly quite different from my default expectations of Steven Universe fandom based on the fans in my social circle, who are mostly younger than me and almost all non-cis. The discussion was kind of interesting, although I felt like people didn't take the fact that the diamonds are in fact fascist dictators as seriously as they should have.

Jo Walton Interview

The Steven Universe discussion was followed by an interview with Jo Walton. I probably didn't get as much out of it as I would have if I'd read some of her books, but hearing about them led me to decide that a number of them needed to go on my Goodreads to-read list, so perhaps I'll eventually manage to get caught up.

I'd wanted to go to a number of additional panels on Saturday afternoon, but I found that I was just far too sleepy, so I went back to my room to sleep instead. Getting several hours of sleep seemed to help a lot, and I managed to have dinner with Ruthanna, her wife, another of her housemates, and Jo Walton. It was an enjoyable dinner, and I got the impression that Jo Walton didn't actually find me annoying, which was really exciting.

After dinner, I spent a while in the bardic circle filk room listening to more singing and, at midnight, participated in Chessiecon's annual singing of the Hallelujah Chorus: although I'm tone deaf and a horrible singer, I figured that with at least fifty people involved, no one would notice. I sang the alto part in my usual falsetto: it made me really happy to be in a vocal section that was essentially all women.

Sunday

I clearly was in a lot of need of sleep on this trip: I ended up sleeping in on Sunday and only making it to the last five minutes or so of a panel on "Badass Women in History" that sounds like it was really good.

They're the Protagonist, But are They a Role Model?

This panel was...a disaster. It wasn't really the moderator--Don Sakers' fault, though he could have done a lot more to fix things--but the only thing that salvaged it at all was an attempt by Jo Walton to get things under control. Other than her, the panel consisted of three white men who seemed to be trying to be "edgy" in problematic ways, such as suggesting that it was important to be able to empathize with Nazis' motivations, as opposed to only understanding them to avoid writing two-dimensional cut-outs.

The biggest problem, though, was panelist Stephen Kozeniewski, who said that he thought it was a universal experience that when someone cuts you off in traffic you get the urge to follow them home and kill them in front of their family (or possibly kill their whole family; different people heard different versions), and that the only reason he (and he assumed everyone) doesn't do this is fear of getting caught and going to jail.

After that, everything kind of went to hell. Jo Walton pointed out that no, that's not a normal reaction, it's a really disturbing one, and Don Sakers tried to blame it on the patriarchy and American culture being so violent, and Stephen Kozeniewski spent some time trying to defend the normality of this.

Besides that, there was one additional bit of awkward that wasn't actually the panelists' fault: an older, white woman in the audience commented that she thought that the loss of "traditional religion" is why our culture is so immoral today.

After that last panel, I think everyone was pretty badly burnt out. I had lunch at a seafood restaurant with Ruthanna and her wife, and went back to DC for my afternoon tutoring appointments.

I'm reading Charlie Stross's The Labyrinth Index and I just got some rather good advice: that you can't have imposter syndrome without a certain level of competence, and that I should take the fact I feel incompetent as evidence I have at least some understanding of topics.

The disturbing part...this advice came from Stross's version of Nyar'lathotep, the Crawling Chaos and Opener of Ways.

I...survived an hour-and-a-half meeting with campus administration about having more non-gendered bathrooms. I was there along with a trans guy and three butch cis women from the LGBTQ Faculty-Staff Association. Administration promises to put a single-user non-gendered bathroom in every new building that gets built. The bad news: because multi-stall non-gendered bathrooms are obviously impossible, administration has no plans to put any non-gendered bathrooms in the main academic core of campus in the next five years.

And now I feel sick to my stomach and really drained. Administration was even fairly supportive as such things go: the Facilities people were better than my limited experience with MIT Facilities people about this. (I gather things have gotten better there since I left?) I just...find these things incredibly stressful and hard to survive. I hope my body language of probably appearing progressively more sick to my stomach and spent as the meeting went on didn't hurt us. I think I managed to be civil when talking?

Well, we survived yesterday. It certainly wasn't a miracle, but it was better than I was half-expecting, and we're in a better position to survive the next two years than we had been. I got through the night with a lot of support from friends, ate too much chocolate, and ended up skipping class this morning to sleep ten hours, which I really needed. (I was barely able to sleep at all on Monday night.)

What I can't stop thinking about, though, is how much politics has changed in the last decade. It's been ten years since Election Day 2008. Although I did vote in the 2006 mid-term election, 2008 was the first presidential election I was an adult for, and the first election I really felt involved in.

Like most of my friends, I'd gone through high school and college learning to fear the Republicans as I watched Bush the Younger do horrible thing after horrible thing. I wasn't one of the really early Obama fans, but I voted for him in the primary, and I was quite excited about the idea we might actually have a non-evil president. Excited enough that I actually canvassed for him, even though I found it terrifying.

Back in 2008, it was hard for me not to feel optimistic about the future of the country. Most of my political consciousness had happened under Bush, so I was used to thinking of that as a baseline, and the idea that Obama could get elected, with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and control of the House made it feel like things were getting better.

And then there was same-sex marriage. Those were still the days where I found it hard to believe it would be legal nationally in decades, if ever. Proposition 8 passing was a huge disappointment to me, and made me quite angry with California, where I was at school at the time, and had been for several years. But, at the same time, that seemed like a setback, but an unsurprising one in what would surely be a decades-long fight.

Also, even though it was unclear for a while if the Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate or not--and then they lost them fairly quickly to a random guy with a pickup truck--I didn't really think it was as big a deal as it was. In those days, I thought that the Republicans were still willing to compromise. And, honestly, I think things were actually a bit different then...it wasn't until Obama was elected and the Republican Party decided that its primary goal had to be stopping a black president from doing anything, that Congress really completely broke down.

In any case, if you'd told me in mid-November 2008 that in ten years, we'd have a fascist president but that same-sex marriage would be legal everywhere, I probably wouldn't have believed you. Of course, I also wouldn't have believed just how much the Tea Party and Mitch McConnell would do to destroy the functioning and legitimacy of the legislature and judiciary, either.

For the record, it was when Mitch McConnell announced that he wouldn't allow President Obama to replace Justice Scalia that I finally concluded that the American government was irreparably broken. I still didn't quite expect that Trump would get elected, but when he did, I felt like the floor had fallen out from under me. All my hope for the future of the country, and for the idea that things would get better in the long run, kind of fell apart. If Trump could be president, and get to appoint new Supreme Court justices, how could there be a future for the country?

Honestly, I still can't bring myself to believe we have a future. Trump hasn't been as horrible as he could have---he hasn't staged a coup or anything, yet at least---but he's been quite horrible, and we have two more years of him doing awful things. Plus, we Scalia and Kennedy replaced by his appointees, Federalist Society shills who want to destroy everything I care about will control the Supreme Court for a generation more. (I know that Court-packing is an option, but doing so would be one more step down a path I'm scared to go down.)

These election results will help some, and I'm going to try to keep going. But I'm still terrified that Justice Ginsburg won't survive long enough for a Democrat to replace her. And that the damage Trump does to people's lives will keep expanding and becoming more irreversible. And, well, a part of my would really like to run away to somewhere else...except that it seems that the tide of fascism is rising everywhere, and I have no idea where could be safe. And, of course, there's the reality that my chosen family is important to me, and is nearby, and I'm terrified of the idea of trying to move further away from them.

I wrote this ritual this weekend to perform on Monday with some friends who are also really scared about the outcome of Tuesday's election. I'd appreciate any comments or suggested changes, especially with respect to all the prayers for the libations.

Supplies

altar table

hearth candle

lighter

small bowl of barley groats for purification

incense for making khernips

bowl of salt water for making khernips

large cup of honey water for making libations

bowl for pouring libations into

plate of food for offerings

bowl for placing offerings in

Ritual Cleansing

Light a stick of incense and immerse it in a bowl of water, saying "xerniptosai" to make khernips.

Pass around the khernips for everyone to dip their hands in.

Light candles for illumination, and sprinkle barley on the altar table.

Lighting the Hearth

Light the hearth candle, then all join hands in a circle surrounding the altar table.

As our hands are joined in this circle,

may our hearts be joined as around one hearth.

Hestia, first-and-last-born, who tends the hearth and guards the fire,

please accept the first drink, and bless us as we gather here.

Release hands, and pour a libation of honey water to Hestia.

Libations

Pour a libation of honey water after each prayer.

(1) Queenly Hera and Zeus, who is father of all gods and men,

you rule us justly from high Olympus:

And so to you we pray, that our own government can be righted,

that the rights and needs of each shall be fulfilled.

(2) Bright Phoebus Apollon, who speaks the truth,

and wise Athena who instituted courts:

We praise you and pray your protection

for justice and the rule of law.

(3) Hestia, who guards the hearth and home,

you protect us in the spaces that we make our own:

Grant us your blessing and your aid

to keep ourselves and neighbors safe.

(4) Athena Polias, of the City lord,

who taught us to live together in piece:

We ask your protection for freedom

and for the cities in which we dwell.

(5) Mother Demeter, whose harvests feed us,

your glory is in all that is green and growing:

Give us the wisdom to protect this bounty

and to avoid destroying it with our greed.

(6) Poseidon, Earth-Shaker, Lord of the Sea,

by whose sufferance our cities are built:

We pray for the wisdom not to upset the Earth

nor your wrath upon our children’s heads.

(7) Zeus Xenios, you bid us aid the stranger;

Hermes, you guard all who travel far from home:

We ask your blessing and your help, that we may protect

the newcomers and refugees among us.

(8) Hephestus the Craftsman, you labor at the forge

and create wondrous works, both day and night:

We ask your protection for all who work

from those who would line their pockets with our blood.

(9) Artemis of the Silver Bow, whose arrows fly true;

huntress who guards the births of humans and beasts:

We ask your protection for those with wombs,

that they alone shall have claim on their bodies.

(10) Glorious Apollon Paean, bearer of the golden bow,

and rod-bearing, snake-taught Asclepius:

We pray for all who have need of your arts,

that they shall have access to your healing.

(11) Athena of the Many Roles, all-renowned

as weaver, warrior, maiden, and mentor:

We ask your blessing and your aid

for all who break free of gender’s confines.

(12) Fair Aphrodite, who inspires love among us,

and Artemis, who loves only as she wills:

We ask your blessing and protection,

for those whose love those of the same sex.

(13) Fire-bringing Prometheus, you dared disobey

great Zeus himself, when his wrath was unjust:

We ask your blessing and your protection

for all those who resist oppression and unjust laws.

(14) Torch-bearing Hekate, who comforts the fearful,

brings light in darkness, and teaches strength to the weak:

We ask your blessings for all who need them

and pray that we too may take part in that work.

(15) Athena Sotor, of the flashing eyes,

you hold the aegis to protect the weak:

We pray for your protection for all of us

who wish to live in peace with freedom.

(16) Oh Deathless Gods, who look down from Heaven,

whose whims can shape our very lives:

We pray to you for all your children,

that they will be free to live and not only fight.

Offerings and Prayers

Going around the circle, each person makes any additional prayers they wish to make, and then put something from the plate of food on the offerings plate

Extinguishing the Hearth

Pass the hearth candle around for each person to hold, then place it in back on the altar and join hands in a circle.

As our hands are joined in this circle,

may our hearts be joined as around one hearth.

Hestia, first-and-last-born, who tends the hearth and guards the fire,

please accept the first drink, and bless us as we gather here.

Extinguish the hearth candle, followed by the illumination candles.

Deposit the offerings and libations appropriately outdoors.

"Samhain Prayer (to Hekate and Persephone)"
by DW Rowlands, 31 October 2018, Catonsville, MD

Hekate, you who bear your torches high
and guide your cousin 'tween her realms:
we ask your blessing and your aid
for all who cross the mighty Styx.

Please join swift Hermes in his rounds
to help them leave the many cares
that keep the dead still bound to life
and let them find a place of rest
within the Host of Many's halls.

Kore, you who go to rule the dead
and bring us spring on your return:
we ask your blessing and your aid
for all who cross the mighty Styx.

As autumn's failing plants make mulch
to feed the springtime's burst of growth,
please help your shadowed subjects fade
and free their breath and all their worth
to follow you to sunny realms.

Dear cousins of the spring and night,
of death and torches shining bright:
our lives must end and be forgot,
but grant that Life shall still go on.

This evening, a friend who's a former theology grad student and in the process of converting to Reform Judaism asked me "Do you actually believe in the Hellenic gods or just like the tradition?"

I thought the answer I gave him was worth posting here, since it's a more-complete explanation of this bit of my theology than I've managed to get written down in a long time.

My understanding of gods (small-g intentional; this doesn't apply to the "creator of the universe" sort monotheists tend to like) is that they're...emanations from the collective sapience of humans. They didn't exist before we did, and won't continue after us, and their power is limited to places where humans are or maybe have been.

They're basically...anthropomorphizations of things that are important to us. They don't depend on our believing in them in a Terry Pratchett / Discworld sense. They do depend on us caring about the things they represent.

So...there are gods of cities, of civilization, of the hearth, and so on because people collectively have conceptions of and strong feelings about these things. Of course, people's conceptions of them vary, especially between societies, and especially over time, and so the gods do, too. I certainly don't think that the entity I pray to as "Athena" is the same as the entity that an ancient Greek would have prayed to. It also probably isn't quite the same as the entity that a Hellenic pagan in modern-day Greece, who was raised Greek Orthodox, would be praying to.

But, thanks to several thousand years of Western (mostly Christian, but also Jewish and Deist and so on) writers using the Greek gods symbolically even though they don't believe in them, I think the Greek gods's names and symbols and rituals are a good latching-on point for the gods that map to the conceptions of the world that matter to me.

When I pray to Athena, I'm praying to a warrior maiden and patron of cities and civilization, and so on...but one whose current existence is tied to a modern (and American and liberal) understanding of those things. Which, it seems clear to me, can't be quite the same as the one who presided over the cities of a slave society like Classical Greece.

They Greek gods are certainly not the only latching-on point for these entities. Other religions' gods work, too, and I'm quite fine with sacrificing to the Morrigan and the Bridgid beside my friends who are devoted to them, for example. And there's a reason I use the Catholic saints for this purpose, too: they're a set of latching-on points for the gods that have developed alongside the society I'm part of for a long time.

There may have been a historic Martin of Tours--I don't know if that's something historians agree on--but when I pray to "St. Martin of Tours," I don't think the entity I'm praying to has any connection to the historic person other than a shared name and symbolism. The name and story of St. Martin, whether based on a historical person or not, have become a sort of latching-on point for approaching a portion of the divine that they're associated with.

Anyway, I hope this interests some of you all. And doesn't make me auto-fail Hellenion (the Hellenic pagan group I'm in's) basic adult education class when I get around to taking it.

I'm on Amtrak back from a quick weekend visit to New York, and I want to jot down at least a few quick memories of the trip while they're fresh in my memory. It was a short trip--I arrived at Penn Station on Friday around 1:30pm and left for home from Penn Station on Sunday around 6:00pm--but it was still a wonderful trip, and well worth my decision to cancel my tutoring clients for the weekend.

The trip happened largely as a reunion of Tesseract: the strange little social group focused on an off-campus apartment that formed during my senior year at Caltech. One of my closest college friends, who I hadn't seen in five-and-a-half years because she lives in England, was in the City for a conference, and I and a number of other Tesseract people traveled in to get to see her and each other.

We spent Friday wandering around the West Village and chatting, eating apricot tarts from what seems to be my go-to French bakery in New York, Patisserie Claude, browsing book shops including Unoppressive, Non-Imperialist Bargain Books, and catching up. On Saturday, I got a lot of sleep, which I really needed, and didn't leave Sunset Park, where I was staying, at all. That evening, we had a wonderful party to preview one of my Tesseract friends' "Dance Your PhD Thesis" video. I cooked a bunch of Polish food and everyone seemed to really enjoy it. Plus, I successfully introduced a New York Twitter friend to some of my other New York friends, and they got along wonderfully.

Sunday, though, was in some weird way, likely the best day. On Saturday night, several of us stayed up until nearly four in the morning talking and catching up, so we ended up crashing at the apartment of the friend who was hosting the party in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. We didn't manage to get up until almost eleven in the morning, but we did eventually get up, and were joined by a MIT friend who now does urban planning work in New York for breakfast at a very good Mexican restaurant down the street. My English friend was particularly excited, because she says it's impossible to get good Latin American food anywhere in Europe. (We all went to college in Los Angeles, which I suppose gives us some opinions on Mexican food.)

On our way back from breakfast, we ran across a parade--I'm not sure exactly what, though there were floats with flags from a number of Latin American nations--and I was reminded how much I love Sunset Park. It seems to be exactly what I imagine New York should be: a very dense mix of immigrants from basically everywhere, with all the stores open 24/7, and almost everything one might need within a few blocks. We then saw a bunch more of Brooklyn due to a series of Lyft rides to the places other people were staying, since they hadn't intended to spend the night, and finally my English friend who I hadn't seen in five years and another close, mutual friend went on a walk from the 9/11 Memorial in Downtown Manhattan to Penn Station, where I caught my train back to DC. I'm a bit sad I didn't get to go to Mass with them afterward: one of them is Catholic, so they went to Mass at a church a half-block from Penn Station.

A thought, which needs more elaboration when I have time.

I've been wondering a lot what to do about the fact that the ancient Greek agricultural year was the opposite of ours: winter was the wet season and summer was the dry season where everything died. This means that the Persephone myth and the festivals associated with it are at the opposite time of the year as make sense for those of us in Northern Temperate climates.

However, Hellenic pagans aren't the only people with this problem: Israel also has a Mediterranean climate where the winter is better for farming, which means Jewish holidays run into similar issues: Passover was originally a harvest-time holiday, but is now a spring holiday for Jews living in northern Europe and much of the US.

Can Hellenic traditions be made to switch significance in similar ways? For example, around the Autumnal Equinox was the traditional time to celebrate Persephone's return from Hades, along with Demeter's institution of the Eleusian Mysteries that allowed mortals to retain their reason after death.

Would it would to focus instead on Demeter teaching Persephone how to return from Hades, after leaning that the pomegranate seeds would bind her to return each year? And could we associate this with the promise of compost/manure/seeds/winter wheat? That death and things buried in the ground in the fall will return to us as new life in six months' time?

I really don't post here often enough--or at all, I suppose--but I managed to write another poem some of you might like. This one is pretty Papo-pagan: I'm being ambiguous about whether "Heaven's Queen" is Inanna or Mary, but it's definitely intended to be polytheist. My interest in the archangels, whose feast day is coming up on 29 September, is that angels seem to be intended as God's court eunuchs, and as someone who identifies somewhat as a eunuch, this appeals to me. (It also explains my interest in my name saint, who was also a court eunuch.)

Anyway, not sure who on here would like this? Maybe

kaberett or

gwaihiril or

wolby ?

"To the Archangels"

by DW Rowlands

20 September 2018, Catonsville, MD

All-honored servants of high Heaven's Queen,

Out of your mouths, her words are clearly spoke,

And by your hands, her work is deftly done:

Please bless us that we too may serve the gods.

Saint Michael, with stout courage and swift sword,
You stand between the darkness and the light:
Give us the courage and the steadfast strength
To aid the weak and all who are in need.

Saint Gabriel, whose voice is strong and clear,

You speak the truth from high for all to hear:

Give us the wisdom and the winged words

To counsel and console our fellow folk.

Saint Raphael, with holy, healing hands,
You cure the sick and all who need your aid:
Give us the softness and the gentle touch
To comfort and to lessen suffering.

Chief ministers of Heaven's holy Court,
Custodians of this and all the worlds:
We praise the works your labors have achieved,
And pray you grant that we may also serve.

But in the meantime, this Yoon Ha Lee story is incredibly beautiful and I am crying. And there is a cat, and kit is Good.

http://www.beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/stories/the-starship-and-the-temple-cat/

Yesterday afternoon, I got to attend a Hellenic pagan group ritual for the first time ever. It was a Hellenion ritual organized and led by

alexseanchai, who is also the person who made me aware that Hellenion existed, and even has an organized group in my area (for sufficiently broad definitions of area, anyway).

The experience really made an impression on me, and I hope that I'll be able to attend more Hellenion rituals in the future, especially since they seem to have a decent amount of presence in Maryland. Trying to explain why it moved me so much is trickier, but I think it helped a lot that it was actually focused on the gods I try to worship, rather than the usual vaguely-Wiccan-inspired ecclectic Pagan rituals which focus on a cosmology that doesn't work for me, and require a lot of mental mapping to make them seem relevant.

The other thing that I think was important to me was how much of the ritual was focused on hymns and prayers: most of the time was spent taking turns reciting hymns--ancient, modern, and written by participants--and that's something that I think is really missing from a lot of pagan rituals I've seen. It's also part of why I really want to finish that calendar of readings I want to write to try to restart my daily practice, which I think would be a good thing to do.

In case anyone's interested, a poem I wrote for an Athenian New Year's ritual I'm attending tomorrow:

"Hymn and Prayer for Athenian New Year"

Thou dearest father of all gods and men,

who gave to us the world to dwell within,

And thou, our foster-mother and our guide,

who gave us tools to build a better world:

Athene Pólias, of the city, lord,

and Zeus who guards and keeps the public sphere:

allow that right and justice shall prevail

and grant protection to all those in need.

Lord Zeus Xeníos, who guards host and guest,

and Hestia of the ever-burning hearth:

allow us that great honor, to be hosts,

and bless all who around our tables meet.

Athene Atrytone, ever-strong,

and Zeus Apemius, who keeps ill away:

please let us not be led into despair,

but give us strength to face our world's fate.

Athene Ergáne, thou who taught us crafts,

and skilled Hephaistos, skilled in artifice

please share with us your wisdom and your wiles,

that we may find the tools to heal our world.

Oh, Lord who speaks among the leaves of oak,

and Lady of the flashing eyes and spear:

We pray that you who read our fate from high

will see our world through the coming year!

This article by Ari Ne'eman on the intersection between his Jewish and autistic identities is pretty interesting to me as well. One of the most persistent bits of my identity has always been a feeling of being alone, of being an outsider, of not being human. A lot of this is almost certainly due to having a very socially isolated childhood, and due to the fact that my autism makes it harder for me to easily form connections with a lot of people.

While it's problematic for a white person to say they don't feel like they have a culture, I do feel like I was raised without a "community" or group identity in much of a meaningful way. My family didn't socially interact with neighbors and my parents didn't have friends. It wasn't until college--where I met a number of other autistic, queer, geeky people--that I actually got a chance to find something that felt like solace and community with people like me. But it also quickly taught me about the limits to such community.

Again and again, I found myself feeling really close to a group of people, only to find that they didn't feel that way about me, or that we had some fundamental disagreement that forced us apart, or even just that they had to move to another state or continent. This feeling of joy from being with "my people" is something that I yearn for, but also something I've learned that I can probably never have. Maybe I'm too choosy or too weird. But, even if it's ephemeral, I can't stop myself from running toward what feels like "home."

Religion seems to be the main way people solve this, but that doesn't seem like a viable option to me. Besides the reality that religious communities are going to be prone to the same problems I've found in other ones, I've found that the ones where I might best fit in socially and culturally--Unitarian Universalist, largely--don't have enough ritual to move me. And the religious rituals that do move me pose other problems: Catholicism I have deep theological and social/ethical issues with, and paganism--especially if you're not Wiccan--is not an easy place to find a community, or even anyone else to practice with.

Lately, I've spent a lot of time with people for who Judaism is where they get that feeling of community and group identity, and I'm occasionally a bit envious of it, perhaps because I know that it's something that could never be available to me, even though some components of it--the ritual design, and the presence of a lot of liberal and socialist, autistic people--appeal to me. Yes, I know that conversion is theoretically possible, but as a committed polytheist who has both deep personal trauma from and deep ethical discomfort with infant circumcision, it isn't really something that could ever work for me.

A summary of the current situation, for those worried about me. (I.e. anyone who's communicated with me in the past day or two, honestly.)

Trigger warnings for discussion of circumcision and severe trauma related to it. Also trigger warnings for discussion of suicidality, self-harm, and severe mental distress.

The conversation that triggered this was with a couple of people who may be reading this post. I don't blame them at all for what happened, but they may find reading this painful, and I suspect they may not want to read it at all. They are welcome to if they want to, though.

( Read more... )

I've scheduled an emergency phone session with my therapist for 5:00pm this evening, and an emergency in-person one for 7:00pm on Monday.

I do not believe I'm currently in any danger, and I'm really sorry for the amount of stress I've put a lot of you through today.

I will explain more when I have the spoons; for now, I'm just writing this to have a record. I don't actually have any idea what sort of meltdown this was: was it autism? a severe depressive episode? something else? some combination of things? But the way I perceived it while I was hiding under my weighted blanket, thrashing and screaming about wanting to die--at least in those moments I could perceive anything other than pain--was that my mind was a small animal in a trap, very confused and in immense agony, flinging itself against the walls but not able to form thoughts large enough to do anything really dangerous because it couldn't plan ahead.

I am more stable now, though scared I will end up back there shortly.

The issue of sacrifices and ritual offerings to the gods is something that I've been thinking about a lot recently from a pagan perspective. Partly this is due to wanting to have a better theological understanding of my own practice. However, I may also be somewhat self-interested, in that I've found it really hard to develop a regular and meaningful method of making offerings, and thus I'm motivated to develop an understanding that makes this less of a concern.

The expectation of making offerings to the gods seems to be near-universal among modern pagans. For traditional reconstructionists--people who attempt to follow the ritual practices of an ancient polytheistic religion as closely as possible--this is natural enough, since the traditions they are reconstructing generally heavily involved animal sacrifice. From their point of view, the question is really how to substitute for the fact that animal sacrifices are not really possible today for the vast majority of pagans.

However, non-reconstructionist modern pagan practices still seem to have a heavy focus on offerings. I suspect that this is due to two things: the fact that historically, most non-Abrahamic religions have required sacrifices, and the fact that Christianity and modern Judaism--the cultural contexts in which most modern pagans were raised--do not, and have often attacked them as "idolatry."

I definitely feel a pressure to make food offerings, both from Hellenic reconstructionists (my favorite Hellenic recon blogger regularly points out that worship without burnt offerings is meaningless in the Hellenic tradition) and from the pagan community in general. For the most part, I don't actually do so, though, both due to what I call the "offering disposal problem"--since I can't burn them or easily bury them, how do I dispose of offerings appropriately?--and due to the fact that I just don't have the time, energy, or executive function to maintain a daily practice that involves the complications of food offerings.

The few times I've made food offerings that have felt very meaningful and "effective" (to me at least; I hope the gods approved of them) have been in the context of group meals, where I've eaten with other pagans and we've set aside a portion for the gods. I first did this in grad school with

aliothsan on a couple of occasions: we cooked meals together and afterward ritually deposited the gods' portion on the ground outside. More recently, the ritual sharing of a small amount of food, with a portion for the gods deposited under a tree, has been part of the Imbolc and Spring Equinox rituals I participated in this year with the pagan-Jewish family I'm friends with locally.

There is a practical reality that disposing of food offerings outside is reasonable for an occasional group ritual, but not as part of regular daily practice (it would attract rats), but I think the real significance of the food here was as a shared meal. The idea that the gods need offerings for sustenance, or that receiving food is a primary reason they concern themselves with humans, strikes me as somewhat blasphemous, honestly.

On the other hand, the sharing of food and hospitality is a significant way of creating closeness, especially in traditional cultures where food was more valuable than it is today. It's certainly something that I feel helps me feel closer to my friends, and I think that in this symbolic context, food offerings as a way to make a connection to the gods make a lot of sense.

A related theological issue was--unintentionally and ironically--raised by a fundamentalist Christian acquaintance from high school, who for a while had an AOL Instant Messenger status that read "I will not offer to God that which costs me nothing." As much as I distrusted the source, this made a certain sense to me: if the gods are self-sufficient, the purpose of sacrificial offerings must be the sacrifice--what it costs the sacrificer--and a sacrifice has to be something of value to mean anything. Food satisfied this requirement in the past, when it was regularly scarce, but for most modern Americans, myself included, it really doesn't today.

The conclusion I've come to is probably partly influenced by what I've heard

ashnistrike and my partner Jan say about the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, in its more liberal understanding as completing creation by improving the world. Learning more about Jewish theology in this context probably makes a lot of sense, since ritual sacrifice has a very important role in Jewish scriptures, but modern Jewish practice lacks it and Reform and (I think) Conservative Judaism teach that these sacrifices will not be reestablished even when the Messiah comes.

Since I generally understand the gods as related to, and patrons of, particular aspects of the world and human endeavor, it makes sense that the most useful sacrifice I can offer them--both in terms of benefit to them, and in terms of it costing me something--is devoting my time and energy to causes that I believe to be important to them.

Since I worship Athena as a patron of cities and of learning, my efforts to write and teach people about urban planning and transit issues, and to push for improvements in these issues are an appropriate offering to her. Since I have come to understand Artemis as a patron of mental health issues, effort I put into helping my friends with their mental health issues, and hopefully helping people in general with them, are an appropriate offering to her. Since Hestia is a goddess of the hearth, I serve her by cooking for others, and organizing gatherings that help people build social ties. (Not that I have been putting as much effort into that as I should be, admittedly.)

I have no place to speak on the issue of whether the gods find this interpretation of things acceptable, and these sort of offerings sufficient, but I hope that they do, and that if I can feel less guilty about not making burnt offerings, or regular food offerings in general, I'll be able to form a healthier relationship with them and be able to serve them better.

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Child of the Air

Recent Entries

A Poem about the Agricultural Revolution

sighs at my brain

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Chessiecon 2018 Con Report

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Samhain Prayer (to Hekate and Persephone)

I hope this post doesn't make my pagan friends shun me...

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"To the Archangels"

I should really post more...

Athenian New Year Festival

Hymn and Prayer for Athenian New Year

Thoughts on Community and Identity

Summary of my current mental health crisis...

Observation on Mental Health Meltdowns

Why sacrifice to the gods?