Solsticing WITH SANTA

THIS YEAR I'm celebrating the Solstice with Santa.

Not the fake one with the beard and belly that shakes like jelly, I'm Solsticing with the real Santa: the Great Goddess Holda, of continental Europe.

It's not a hefty elf in a sleigh who's always brought children gifts in December at night while they sleep, it's Holda.  

Kids leave out cookies and milk for Her (or, in the past, whatever they had in the house that came close -- maybe a mug of lager and a slice of strudel if milk and cookies were nowhere near).

And Holda drinks and nibbles a bit, just to let them know she's been there.

Since Holda grows old with the year, in spring she's young and gloriously gorgeous, and in winter old and regal.

Babies and children she loves all year round.

 MERRY & GLORIOUS WINTER SOLSTICE TO ALL!!!!

Love, 

Athana

breaking THE MOTHER GOOSE CODE

A humdinger of a new book for goddess lovers is coming available: Breaking the Mother Goose Code: How a Fairy Tale Character Fooled the World for 300 Years.

In this new book, Mother Goose reveals herself as simply a clever disguise for an ancient European Great Goddess, a costume designed to help escort this deity safely through Europe’s Burning Times. 

What’s more, Mother Goose’s fairy tales form a secret, oral Bible.  Like the Christian Bible, Mother’s secret book covers cosmology, theology, morality, and the history of religion (in this case, Europe's “Old Religion”).

Waltzing beyond the Christian Bible, however, this centuries-old fairy-tale Bible possesses secrets about the sacred use of magic.  The author of the book makes the radical claim that certain fairy tales are records of actual shamanic journeys into the Spirit World (or “Otherworld”), taken far in the past by actual European shamans. 

Recently, historians have admitted that Western Europe possessed shamans too, once upon a time, and like all shamans these habitually entered trance in order to do battle with evil spirits. 

After creaming and crushing their evil foes and then snapping out of trance, these ancient and Medieval European shamans returned home bearing magic solutions for everything from illness and infertility to lost children, lost lovers and the need for protection against sexual predation.  

So what about it?  Could “Hansel and Gretel” be a magic spell for locating lost children?  “Jack and the Beanstalk” a spell for winning good luck and good fortune?  “Donkeyskin” a spell for protecting oneself against a would-be rapist?  Get your hands on a copy of Breaking the Mother Goose Code and see for yourself. 

Go HERE now to pre-order the book. 

And while you’re at it, order one to give to your favorite friend during the magic of the Winter Solstice! 

BILL COSBY & THE Goddess

Thinking he was too awesome to get caught, a black man pigged out on a gigundo basketful of forbidden fruit.

If the world revolved around ancient pre-patriarchal goddesses, would rape ever happen? 

Of course not. 

When we switched from Great Mother Goddesses to war gods*, the bond between men and women was zapped, turning the two sexes into enemies of each other.  Same with blacks & whites.  And whites & reds.  And so on. 

Why? 

Because the war-god world is all about a handful of elites controlling the rest of us, and that handful of halfwits can’t have all of the rest of us playing on the same team, now can they?  

It would make the rest of us too powerful, and their job of controlling us too much of a major pain.   
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*War gods include dudes like Mars, Ares, Odin, Indra and YAJ (YahwehAllahJehovah, the god of Abraham).   

MASSIVE slide into PAGANISM

,K

OH, how lucky we are here at RGT ... a birdie told me the Chalcedon Foundation and its sweet little Christian elves are paying us secret, periodic visits! 

We must have been verrrrry good, all year long. 

These Chalcedon cuties are the people begging for “the death penalty for homosexuality, striking or cursing a parent, adultery, and lying.”

I could go on, but you get the drift – these crazies want to stone you to death for everything from sneezing to dragging your garbage cans out too early to the curb Monday evenings.      

These little guys are also secretly dredging tons of money into American politics -- just to muck it up. 

Go check out their charming review of Not My Child: Contemporary Paganism and the New Spirituality, “a book about ... a massive slide into paganism and the occult...” 

According to this little gem of a book, “pop paganism can lead young people into moral and intellectual confusion, drugs, promiscuous sex, unwholesome and unhealthy body modification, and even violent crime, murder, or suicide.”

Excuse for one moment [BWA HA HA HA HAHA HARDY HAR HAR!  HAHAHAHAHA....] [wiping tears from eyes]

Last ten times I heard about kids doing suicide, it was after Chalcedon types filled their heads with nonsense about how being gay landed you on a fast track to "hell," that made-up Christian fantasyland.  

(Anyone who still believes in “hell” prob’ly still believes in Santa, too, what do you wanna bet?)

GARBAGE GODS sent packing

A dude I know is cooking up a sweet novel about goddesses making a comeback.

But he’s gotten hit with some bum advice.  Yesterday he told me,

"A friend of mine who teaches at Harvard ... made an excellent argument that I'm wrestling with. If the goddess religions were so much better than the patriarchal religions, why didn't they thrive and survive, and why didn't the patriarchal religions die out?"

Whoa!  How do you answer fluffy-puff like this? 

You, my good readers, know that goddess religions *did* “thrive and survive” – for at least 30,000 years -- from the Upper Palaeolithic to the dirty birth of patriarchy around 4000 BC.

And you also know that 4000 BC (or thereabouts) witnessed the dirty birth of primitive, violent desert gods, born out of the minds of people gone looney-tunes from generations-long starvation.  

So these lunatic gods have been hanging around for only 6000 years – at least 24,000 years fewer than the peaceful, egalitarian goddesses they supplanted. 

And since people like you are finally getting smart about them, I suspect the looney gods are on a fast track to that great garbage dump in the sky somewhere. 

Can’t happen fast enough for me. 

Old Dog Girl

My Breaking the Mother Goose Code: How a Fairy Tale Character Fooled the World for 300 Years will break into print this coming February 27, 2015.

To whet your appetite, here are a few snippets from the book -- about "Old Dog Girl":

"If fairy tales were at one time subversive revolutionary communiqués, how exactly would they have been passed on from one person to the next?  Especially after the witch persecutions began to heat up in the early-modern era (16^th-18^th centuries), it would have been exquisitely dangerous to be caught passing along any religious beliefs except the Christian kind. Even when the tales were told in secret code, the transmission would have needed to take place in extreme secrecy.

"One idea: they were passed along by itinerant traders and wandering vagabonds.  Davidson and Chaudhri note that with the invention of the cheap “chapbook” in the 1500s, many fairy tales, and especially perhaps the literary ones, traveled rapidly around Europe, carried by peddlers from town to town and village to village.

"Marie-Louise von Franz describes a fascinating example of one way oral fairy tales were disseminated by itinerant peddlers.  In 1926, one Father Bramberger, an Austrian Catholic priest, published a book of fairy tales called Marchen aus den Donaulande.   Approximately one fourth of the tales in the book were collected from “Old Dog Girl,” an elderly itinerant peddler and storyteller.  Traveling the countryside, Old Dog Girl sold “shoe laces and the like,” and also took children aside to tell them her tales in exchange for which the children’s parents would serve her a good hot meal. Adults were not allowed into Old Dog Girl’s storytelling sessions, and “Father Bramberger himself had to pay her with many sausages before he was allowed into the presence of the children to write down those stories."

"Two facts stand out here:  First, as an itinerant, if Old Dog Girl got into trouble, she would be practiced at quickly and quietly moving on – with no one knowing exactly which direction she might have taken.  Second, she told her tales to children, and children only.  Since no adults were allowed into the story sessions, no adults could be quizzed by authorities about what this woman was telling their children.  And if any authority insisted upon sitting in on a session, Old Dog Girl could easily “tidy up” her tales." 

DAY FOR dead GRANNIES

I feel cheated, I really do.  In other places, people have a day just for their beloved dead grannies, but do you think good ol’ Christian America would be so considerate and kind? 

Not! 

Everyone but us!  In Babylonia and ancient Greece there was the Feast of All Souls.  In Rome the ancestors were celebrated every February.  The Buddhists hold their Feast of the Dead on April 15.  And even China and Japan have their annual Feast of Lanterns -- just for dead people.*

But not us, oh no!  

When I was growing up, my poor family had to sneak around the graveyards on Memorial Day, and shoot furtive glances left and right to make sure no one was watching.  

Then we'd drop flowers on the graves of our non-war-hero ancestors, and scurry away ASAP before we were caught red-handed honoring someone who didn’t die in a war.  

(For those of you outside the US, America’s Memorial Day is technically a day for honoring dead soldiers, not ordinary grammas and grampas.) 

But since I now have Samhuinn to honor my dead, I feel lucky in a big way.  I can openly feel fuzzy and warm about them again, commune with them, love them up from this side of the veil (which is swirling ever and ever thinner even as I write). 

SO, HAPPY SAMHUINN TO ONE AND TO ALL!  (Aren’t we lucky?!)

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* Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dict. of Folklore, Vol. 1, p. 38