By Jamie Laughlin
It's time to make a bold decision. The time has come to unlearn everything you've ever believed about pagans, and perhaps more importantly, about pagan celebrations.Oh please. The time to unlearn all that rubbish about sacrificing virgins was at least twenty years ago. Why does every journalist feel obliged to start articles with that sort of thing? Wake up and smell the coffee, people. Pagans of all varieties have been highly publicly visible for the last 50 years, carefully explaining that Paganism is about honouring nature and celebrating life. Anyone who hasn't got the message by now must have been living in a bubble.
Admit it — until now, you've bought all the silly urban legends surrounding these polytheistic partiers. Virgin sacrifice? Sure. A diet of raw meat seasoned in tears of the damned? Yup. Heck, you even figured that pagan parties ended wildly late — like "9 p.m. to ???" kinda late.
You couldn’t have been more wrong.
5 comments:
Although the "9PM - ???" was kinda funny... :)
"Seasoned in tears of the damned"?!
Oh, please. Tears of the damned are a marinade, not a seasoning.
Such ignorance. Such ignorance.
Probably comes from having been exposed to The Wicker Man at an impressionable age.
In fairness to the journalist, I know a good number of Pagans that start their discussions about Paganism with that sort of thing too. So while I agree that it's annoying, I'm not sure how much we can ding journalists for doing the same thing many of us do. Maybe we all need to get over the tendency to bring up/fight the stereotypes.
I have never done it, on the grounds that the subconscious does not hear negations, so if you say "We are not X, Y or Z..." your interlocuter's subconscious will hear "We are X, Y, Z", no matter how much you emphasise the "not".
Post a Comment