Awake, Oh Sleeper!

Are the Christian End Times coming soon, with the Tribulation, the pouring out of the Vials of Wrath?  Is the Norse Ragnarok coming soon, with an endless winter and a war like no one has seen before?  Is there a great catastrophe Apkallu?  Will the US economy collapse soon?  Will the world end on December 21, 2012?

Will the Age of Aquarius start this year?  Will there be world peace?  One stable world government?

Every culture, every religion, every faith, foretells trouble coming at some point, or great peace and prosperity.  Regardless of who you ask, no one thinks the world will stay the same.  All prophecies are of change.  Even politicians foretell change.

But when it comes down to it, all we can do is do our own work and help those we can. Whether we move toward a stable one world government or towards complete anarchy, it's not what happens that matters but how we respond. Our responses bring learning and growth, and we move forward on our journey. If all things stayed the same, we would be stagnant and never grow, never change, never move forward.

Our world is very turmoilous, but we walk the border between this world and other worlds even more turmoilous than ours.  In the liminal space, change is the only constant.  If you don't change, you die.

Don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care of itself.  Experience your world today, in this moment, let change take a hold of you and move you forward.  The journey is nothing more than placing one foot forward, then another.  Live in the now.  Respond to the now.  Make a difference in the now.  Don't waste the now.  Each moment is Da'ath, Knowing.  Each moment, we stand in the Abyss and are changed by it.  Unless we are asleep.  Awaken, oh sleeper, leave your dreams of tomorrow, your memories of yesterday, and see the landscape before you, see the now, step forward, and change!

FFF,
~Muninn's Kiss

The Return of the Dead

Yesterday, I received a new book in the mail.  A few years ago, I read a book called Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages by Claude Lecouteux.  I checked it out of the library and liked it so much that even though I had read the entire book, I bought a copy.  This new book is also by him and I am looking forward to reading it.

 The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind looks like a very interesting book to me.  Here's what the Amazon Product Description says:

"How the ghost stories of pagan times reveal the seamless union existing between the world of the living and the afterlife

• "Demonstrates how Medieval Christianity transformed the more corporeal ghost encountered in pagan cultures with the disembodied form known today

• "Explains how the returning dead were once viewed as either troublemakers or guarantors of the social order

"The impermeable border the modern world sees existing between the world of the living and the afterlife was not visible to our ancestors. The dead could--and did--cross back and forth at will. The pagan mind had no fear of death, but some of the dead were definitely to be dreaded: those who failed to go peacefully into the afterlife but remained on this side in order to right a wrong that had befallen them personally or to ensure that the law promoted by the ancestors was being respected. But these dead individuals were a far cry from the amorphous ectoplasm that is featured in modern ghost stories. These earlier visitors from beyond the grave--known as revenants--slept, ate, and fought like men, even when, like Klaufi of the Svarfdaela Saga, they carried their heads in their arms.

"Revenants were part of the ancestor worship prevalent in the pagan world and still practiced in indigenous cultures such as the Fang and Kota of equatorial Africa, among others. The Church, eager to supplant this familial faith with its own, engineered the transformation of the corporeal revenant into the disembodied ghost of modern times, which could then be easily discounted as a figment of the imagination or the work of the devil. The sanctified grounds of the church cemetery replaced the burial mounds on the family farm, where the ancestors remained as an integral part of the living community. This exile to the formal graveyard, ironically enough, has contributed to the great loss of the sacred that characterizes the modern world."

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