Building Local Communities

It is always wonderful when one is able to meet people that one has only interacted with previously online, and to have the experience renew one’s faith in the human project generally (!?!), as I was able to do today.

Ryan of Pagan Reveries came down with his husband today, and we spent several hours going around the local sites and sights, including Mt. Erie. Himself and his partner are some of the few people who have ever gotten the way that Hermes Propylaios seems to be a part of the local landscape here near Mt. Erie. We talked about everything under the sun, and were quite literally under the sun for most of it, including polytheism generally, the Tetrad, poetry, druids, syncretism, pagan politics, the Serpent Path, Antinous, Palaimon, Leukothea (and thus Robert Graves!), and a variety of other things, including some plans that will be launching soon, on which more in the future…

Something else that was part of our experience today was noticing how many memorials to dead male youths there were up on Mt. Erie. There has been one there since the 1990s, which I’ve seen countless times, but had not really properly digested until today; and it was all the more noticeable because, like so many of the benches and such in this area, a new bench had been installed at one of the overlooks that was in honor of a seven-year-old boy who died last year. The memorial marker from the 1990s was to a 13-year old who died in 1992 while climbing the mountain; and, though ostensibly Christian, the pagan imagery in it was striking. It said such things as “in an instant he went from mortal to immortal” and that he was borne to heaven “on eagle’s wings.” Ganymede, anyone? All the more interesting was that we saw quite a few bald eagles in the rest of our travels…as well as deer, and a very small chipmunk crossed the natural torii in the heart of Mt. Erie where I usually make offerings–I’ve never seen an animal therein before!

These two gentlemen of Lummi Island live no more than an hour away from here, and yet we’ve never met in person before, and have only been interacting online for less than a year. Very interestingly, Ryan (and his mother, father, and uncle) went to the same high school as my mother in Spokane, and several of his relatives went to the same college as her as well! It’s a small, small world…!

Also, we mentioned many beloved people who had visited before, including Sannion, who posted a poem today which, as always, is wonderful, but it had a rather unexpected verse in it:

Once all Heliopolis venerated the Ennead,
but this age requires a different rune:
The four emerge from the seventy-eight.
Il Dottore already knows this.

If you don’t know what he means there, this might help! Thank you so much for your ever-amazing work, Sannion, and for this shout-out (or “myth-out“?!? )!

This short entry is just to say: it’s wonderful–and I’ve had the good fortune to experience it twice this week–to be in the company of friends and co-religionists in the flesh, in local communities, and to work toward building them in various ways. It’s what I wish I had far much more of in my pagan and polytheist activities, and now it looks like it might be able to happen more often–so hurrah for that!

I have much more to say on other topics in the near future, but must cut this short for the moment. I hope everyone is doing well, and