February nefasti 2011
And the dream goes on. Cousin Jezznette thinks that the Provençal pagan saga could be made into a Hollywood film, “But we need the drama, baby, and your life seems to be so perfect.” And it is – at least at present. There’s been enough drama in the past from the fire in the house in the Amsterdam commune days, from my sister over my inheritance, to the knife-point robbery in Oaxaca and my on-going ‘eternal’ standoff confrontation with Yahweh. And in the world all about us, there is more than enough drama for everyone. But this is my year of hiatus, and I have stepped off the world stage and am all the more content for it.
Bron, wearied and flummoxed by the persistent political squabbles and petty jealousies that envelop his professional life, says that that is probably why he loves nature and its solitude. I can relate to this sentiment, and here in the Department du Var, while tamed since Neolithic times, there is yet the ubiquitous presence of raw nature that contrasts with how she is masked elsewhere by the urban façade. But at the same time, I adore the human interchange – something I doubtlessly inherited from my mother, and I still require both the natural and the human in balanced measures.
So as uninteresting as it may be, my ‘year of rest and renewal’ is one which is already full of seemingly countless projects. My foremost tasks are writing my paper on “Interfaith and an Evangelical Christian Assessment of Pagan Druidry” for the July International Society for the Study of Religion conference in Aix-en-Provence, more than doubling my slightly more than two thousand word paper, “Poetic Metaphor and Boundary Navigation: Complexity, Shamanism, Postmodernism and Idolatry” for a Peter Lang book (Franca Bellarsi has me listed for 5,000 words!), writing a review of Lee Gilmore’s Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man, endorsing two new books published by Goddess Ink, Ltd. (one on Sekhmet and the other on her Nevadan temple), progressing with the website, joining Facebook, and recasting and reducing my ‘Pagan Ethics’ manuscript. And, of course, the play.
Several correspondents have asked about the dies nefasti and the fast we do in connection with them. My ‘golden key’ has become the calendar and in particular its roots in the festival sequence that Rome’s second king, Numa Pompilius, has been claimed to have perceived. For me, many, many years ago, when in fact I first moved to Amsterdam in 1970, a book in a shop virtually in Shirley MacLaine fashion fell off a shelf into my hands. It was Harold Mattingly’s translation of Franz Altheim’s A History of Roman Religion. The book cost me fourteen guilders as well as the rest of my life. Inside, there was a list of public holidays such as the Vestalia on the ninth of June and the Saturnalia on the seventeenth of December. It was something for which I intuitively longed since my Haight-Ashbury experiences with the traditional Christian celebrations had, as a rule, proved to be unsavoury. Here was a whole list of forty-five religious festivals at the heart of our own secular Julian-Gregorian time-reckoning system. And with these, I was launched into an on-going spiral of celebration and discovery – one in which Vivianne Crowley’s statement in her Wicca: The Old Religion in the New Millennium, that beside a sensitivity to and appreciation of nature, “all that is required is that we accept the framework of ritual and symbolism … as containing age-old truths which are not literal but which are hidden and whose truth will unfold over the years as we integrate them into our own lives,” has certainly been true. For myself, the ritual framework has become the Roman festival calendar of Numa Pompilius.
Within the calendar, there are four stretches of ‘not-right’ days (dies nefasti) – at some point being or becoming legalistic designations but which I have interpreted and practiced over the years as originally times of ritual preparation. These comprise seventeen days in April, nine days each in June and July, and the initial sixteen days of February (the one we have done now). Exceptions I have made in the past for the feriae or holidays that fall within these periods as well as birthdays or other special commemorations, but we have since tended to persist with our abstinences in general despite the calendrical encouragement possibly to do otherwise. Consequently, my practice has been to abstain for the duration from anything artificial or ‘ceremonially indulgent’. This generally translates into a vegan regime (with the exception of the April nefasti since the dairy-goddess festival falls with them): no meat, usually no dairy, no alcohol, no caffeine, no drugs, no white flour and no white sugar. All in all, these are things that we know healthwise we would be better without. This most recent abstention, we actually were looking forward to and did not find it at all painful or restrictive but, to the contrary, invigourating. We have actually in the past been to such occasions as wedding receptions and, to our surprise, even though we did not drink, found that we had just as good a time – and were not burdened with a hangover the following day. By the conclusion of the fasts, not only do we feel cleansed and more healthy, but we also have the extra bonus of a renewed freedom in that the world is once again our oyster.
The world-at-large, however, seems hardly to be anyone’s oyster, though the popular revolutions that now appear to be domino-ing across the Arab world appear to be an unexpected assertion of the will of the people as opposed to entrenched ruling elites and the power mechanisms that they employ. Would that something similar could occur in the United States. As Diva Stef put it, “I am deeply disappointed in Barak Obama.” We had such hopes, however foolish they may have been. But after recently reading a 29 July 2002 New Yorker article by Hendrik Hertzberg on Robert A. Dahl (“Framed Up: What the Constitution gets wrong”) as well as two articles that Norman sent to me online (a 25.1.11 JapanFocusexposé on The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy by Peter Dale Scott, and Robert Jensen’s 2004 City Light’s publication, “Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity”), I am now realising that it was even more than foolish to think and hope for any change in a constitutional system that was flawed from the start, regardless of who’s running it and especially when any nominal leader would have had to sell his soul to the corporate-military axis. Aristotle was sceptical over democracy as something that would or could work, and I share that scepticism. We do not have a democracy in America – never really have, and with that as a given, the most we can hope for is a working Bill of Rights as the individual’s only bona fide guarantee to protection and dignity. It is our constitutional rights that constitute our democracy; not our government or our governmental system. From the imbalance represented by our Senate (Aristotle would have applauded that one) to the shenanigans of the Electoral College and now to the Supreme Court’s recent ‘Citizens United’ ruling that corporations have inalienable human rights, we can at best only manoeuvre and navigate under perpetually stormy, risky and imperfect political conditions. And while this is nothing new for the US, this mini-rant is not directed against just any democracy. I have respect in that sense for Finland, Australia, Canada, Switzerland, The Netherlands and France among others, despite their inevitable flaws, but to think that there could be a popular yet progressive uprising in the United States is risible. We do not have a motivated youth as we saw spearheading the revolt in Tunisia and Egypt, and nor would I want any of our youth to lose lives in any such uprising. Instead, we can perhaps at best eke out our niches and proceed on more local levels. My experience in Narragansett in connection with the Friends of Canonchet Farm has allowed me to witness and appreciate democracy at work on the more immediate level even when there still persists corruption and abuse of power as part of the conditions within which it must operate. Beyond that, I remain in putting my hope into information and its random dissemination. The two political issues on the wider American stage that I now choose to support are promoting the Constitutional Reform Act of 2011 concerning the non-differentiation of Congress members from the rest of the population as a Constitutional Amendment, and the organised efforts to deny personhood to corporations. To be uninformed is to breed fear, and to be fearful is to insure ignorance and the lack of charity. To wake the American people is no forthcoming task. It may only come through a major economic collapse, and that would be devastating to everyone – not just to Americans alone. But if we could develop a representational Congress that represented human persons over corporate persons, that might help to inch ourselves toward a more enlightened and magnanimous state of being.
On a more personal level, I have at least five dear friends and loved ones currently facing critical health difficulties, and this fact alone puts a sobering damper on the blissful milieu that is otherwise my remote life at present. I know that none of us ultimately gets out of this alive, but my wishes, energies and prayers are with each and everyone of you who are more immediately facing impairment. You know who you are, and may you be valiant and triumphant.
Our own regime of cleansing nears to its end. The rains have finally arrived as I write this. And carnival follows next.