If You Know That Hertha & Cernunnos Love You, Click 'Share'

I was not raised in a religious household -- Okay, in truth, my mother was an avowed atheist whom I never saw set one step inside in a church in my life. I, on the other hand, can't remember a time when I didn't possess a definite "spiritual" (if not "religious") side to my nature.

I can remember attending various churches with my little girlfriends when we were of grade school age. I went more as an alternative way to spend my otherwise uneventful and (for an only child) somewhat lonely Sundays than as a novitiate, however. In my youth (depending upon my "best friend du jour"), I attended Methodist Sunday School classes and Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Baptist, Lutheran and even Catholic and Pentecostal worship services.

When I turned 14 or so, my mother "got religion" and became a Buddhist and it was about that same time that I -- having studied most of the major religions on the planet on my own -- decided that Wiccanism/Paganism was about as close as any religion could come to being the one that made the most sense to me. The fact that Wiccans had a male god that ruled over autumn and winter (Cernunnos) and a female deity that held sway over spring and summer (Hertha or Habondia) seemed to answer quite nicely the "if God made human beings in 'His' image, what about women?" question for me. To my young, logical mind, either there HAD to be at least TWO deities or there was one and s/he was a hermaphrodite.

I opted for the former...

In traditional Wiccanism, Hertha is the "Earth-Mother", the "All-Mother" -- nurturer, healer and the embodiment of the feminine principle. She is depicted as voluptuous and surrounded by the colorful flowers of spring and the ripened fruits of summer. She has dominion over women, children, the moon, the home and hearth, domesticated animals and those places on the earth relating to flowers, gardens, orchards and the like -- places cultivated by the hands of humans.

Cernunnos, on the other hand, is the solar, male deity also called "The Horned One" (NOT to be confused with "Satan" which is a strictly Christian invention) and he embodies the masculine principle. He has dominion over autumn and winter and is often depicted as a neolithic huntsman in deerskin -- right down to the antlers and cloven hooves. His domains are untamed, barren-type places --  places with brambles, weeds, rocks and such -- and he has dominion over the wild, untamed, savage animals of the earth..

This world-view fit so perfectly into my thinking --  male and female, yin and yang, dark and light, summer and winter. Just traveling down the road, one can point out the green, flower-strewn strongholds of Hertha as one passes by, as well as the briar patches and rocky canyons and cliffs of the places sacred to Cernunnos. I embraced the Wiccan philosophy completely... It also had the lure of all things magick: Herb-crafting, spells, divination, mind over matter, healing, psychic powers, so, what was not to like about it?

But this all took place in the mid-to-late 1960s in a small, Northern California town. There were hardly any Jewish people in our town -- much less Buddhists and Wiccans. I can still remember the reaction I got one day when a small group of my girlfriends was discussing which denominations their parents belonged to. When it got around to me and I was asked "what" my mother "was". I said "She's a Buddhist" -- and (in the immortal words of Arlo Gunthrie) "...they all moved away from me on the bench, there. Gave me the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean, nasty stuff like that..." For the most part, I kept my preference towards Wiccanism to myself through high school.

In those days, however, nobody knew "what" ANYBODY "was", really -- religion-wise, that is. The only teacher's religious denomination that I can recall knowing throughout all my years of schooling was a 7th grade science teacher who was a Catholic. The only reason we kids knew he WAS a Catholic was because he showed up one Ash Wednesday with ashes still smudged across his forehead from mass that morning. Otherwise, people just didn't discuss their particular religious preferences. It was considered too personal a thing to bring up in anything less than very close, intimately-acquainted company -- a matter to be strictly kept between the individual and his or her chosen "god". The only religious group that went around actively trying to recruit members was the Jehovah's Witnesses and nobody I knew liked them very much -- mostly because of their austerity with their kids in not letting them have Christmas presents or go trick-or-treating on Halloween. That and their strange assertion that, no matter the state of decomposition at the time, during the future "rapture", people's physcial bodies were going to rise up out of their graves and walk around. (Which has always conjured up a horrifying image in my mind...)

But, even the Jehovah's Witnesses didn't press you to join after you let them know that you had no interest like many Christians do today and I, for one, grow very weary of seeing "God" and "Jesus" plastered all over Facebook and such. I'd like to go back to keeping our religious preferences to ourselves here in the United States -- just like we used to but, I have a feeling that it will take more than simply requesting it to bring that about.

The only way I can see that might eventually work with some of these "militant Christians" would be if all of us belonging to the other religions would start saturating social websites like Facebook with OUR little quotes and sayings all day, every day. I'm of the opinion that this is the only way to get the seemingly ENDLESS preaching to stop: Give 'em a taste of their own medicine and keep it up for as long as it takes them to get the point.

I can see it now! Statuses like:

• "I'm not afraid to post this showing my devotion to Cernunnos and Hertha. Click "Share" if you feel surrounded by Pagan love. Blessed be..."

• "Put the 'Rah' back in Rahmadan! "Like" this post..."

• "Ganesha loves me this I know because the Bhagavad Gita tells me so..."

See, I think if we gave the Christians a taste of their own medicine, seeing OUR gods' names everywhere they looked, they might get as annoyed as WE are and they just might keep their religious views to themselves in the future.

Hey, it's worth a try...

We've Seen it Before and We'll Probably See It Again (Unfortunately)

Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Let me tell ya sumpthin' 'bout this here "Gay Marriage Issue"... Now, we had this same darn thing back in the Sixties. It was the same crap. There were pissed-off folks lined up on one side of the street sayin' black people oughtta be able to eat at the lunch counter same as anybody and there were fat, white women in mu-mus with curlers in their hair on the other side of the street screamin' "We ain't gonna let no n*****s into our school!"

See? Like I said: The same crap then as now...

They eventually did, you know... Integrate the schools, that is... Something that, today, we take for granted. We take for granted that all the kids who live on the same side of town are going to attend the same high school -- wasn't always so. And, when they  finally DID integrate all the schools, it wasn't a matter of simply opening up the front doors and letting everybody in -- oh, no -- it took reams of court orders and a fairly large presence of National Guard for quite some time to make it come about.

This hue and cry over who can legally marry whom isn't new, either. Blacks and whites weren't allowed to intermarry in many states when I was a kid and, even in the states where they were allowed to get married, they took their lives in their hands to do so and appear in public. Opponents of racial intermarriage were fond of saying things like "Dogs don't mate with cats, ya know" and "you'll never find a zebra mated to a rhino" as deluded "validations" of their opinions -- never allowing such facts as, "unlike 'dogs and cats' and 'zebras and rhinos', black and white humans are members of the very same species" to become problematic for them. (A more accurate correlation would have involved the mating processes between different colors of dogs or different breeds of cats -- which occurs most of the time.)

Today, you'll hear those with objections to "gay marriage" say things like "homosexual behavior isn't 'natural' because you won't find any animals doing it". Statements like this are just as problematic for opponents of gay marriage as the above was for opponents of inter-racial marriage.

First, it ignores the fact that humans ARE animals and the even more problematic fact that most other species of animals DO engage in such behavior. In fact, over 1,500 different species of animals have been observed engaging in homosexual behavior with a few species -- such as dwarf chimpanzees -- openly engaging in it throughout their lifetimes. Homosexual relationships between male killer whales are known to last much longer than their heterosexual counterparts and, in many species of ducks and geese, females will even lay eggs in the nests of homosexual male couples -- leaving the hatchlings to the two males to raise (which, we are learning, they appear to do better than heterosexual couples of the same species).

In fact, one biologist has said that only those creatures that are "asexual" -- in other words, ones that don't engage in sexual behavior at all -- do NOT (at least occasionally) engage in homosexual behavior. There IS a type of related behavior that other animals don't seem to engage in, however and that's "homophobia".

Now, in the end -- in the final analysis -- some people are always going be what they call "resistant to change" and a lifetime of  observation of human behavior tells me that the reason isn't because their lives are so perfect and wonderful -- so much so that they don't want to upset the apple-cart -- like you'd expect. Nah... My theory is that they believe their lives (from their perspective, anyway) really do suck but, as long as there's another faction -- some other group of people -- they can point to and say  "Hey, look! Their lives suck even more than our lives suck!", they've got something (no matter how irrelevant or how petty) that empowers them on some deluded level.

My theory flies in the face of most of the social psychologists and behavior analysts of the world who would maintain that it is the members of the ruling classes -- those living in the lap of luxury in their social stratum -- who are the most resistant to changes in the status quo. That may be but, at least they have the intelligence not to show it. That's why you don't see scattered bands of old geezers out there, wearing tiaras and Armani suits, carrying correctly-spelled protest signs.

Getting back to the point that I'm attempting to make here, allow me to state the following:

One faction of human beings trying to dictate to another faction what their lifestyle choices should be is inherently "wrong". It's wrong because it forces the assumption that one group's choices in lifestyle follow some type of "universal rule" of correctness which then facilitates the branding of anyone in disagreement with that "rule" as guilty of aberrant behavior. 

Lifestyle choices are just that: "Choices". If there were cut-and-dried rules to choices, they would cease to be choices and even the most conservative and orthodox of religious adherents among us agree that human beings have been divinely endowed with something called "free will" that confers upon each one of us the ability to decide for ourselves how we are going to live our lives. This is never more true than for those living in a country that claims concepts like "freedom" and "liberty" as the basis for its existence.