Andrew Watt

Pisces III: A time for the Lesser Mysteries
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Pisces III: A time for the Lesser Mysteries

by Andrew B. Watt

Editor’s note: The zodiac divides the sky into 12 signs of 30º each. An ancient subdivision of these 30º signs is into three “decans” (from the word for “ten”), or 10º segments. Each year, ten days before the Spring Equinox, the Sun reaches the third decan of the sign of Pisces, before beginning the astrological year again as it enters Aries at the Equinox. This post was written specifically for this third decan of Pisces.

This time of year, I find my thoughts drifting back to something my friend Sara Mastros said about visiting Greece in February. She got into a cab one day at her hotel, and told the cab driver to take her to Eleusis, about fourteen miles away. The driver, once he understood her request, nodded and sighed. “There, it will already be spring.” In downtown Athens, she said, this was a hard statement to credit —it was cold and blustery, with an extra needle or two of frost in every breeze. But, once there, she found it impossible to ignore — there was new greenery everywhere, and flowers were starting to open in every sunny sheltered place around the site of the ancient Telasterion, the hall where the Mysteries of Eleusis were celebrated.

It was already spring there.

Of course, the Greater Mysteries of Eleusis were celebrated at the start of the ancient month of Boedromion. Called “The Showing” and open only to initiates, it was a multi-day ritual that we know only a little bit about, and some of that only from Christian apologists attacking it as pagan nonsense. The season of these Mysteries began on the 14th day of Boedromion, and probably at or just before the Autumn Equinox, and with particular pomp and circumstance every four years. We know that these rites involved the story of Hades kidnapping Persephone, of Demeter’s imposition of the first winter on the Earth, and Zeus and Hermes negotiation of a truce.

But by the 7th century BCE, the Mysteries were already so old and full of archaic language that people barely knew what they were witnessing. And sometime in the century or so that saw the elevation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey to cultural prominence in Greece, the priestly families that oversaw the Eleusinian rites established the Lesser Mysteries. These lesser mysteries, called “the Teaching” or “The Telling”, were also only open to would-be initiates, who sent a donation of a piglet as an offering to the Telasterion and its attendant families as the price of initiation.

This Telling was held at this time of year, in our mid-March before the Spring Equinox, in the Athenian “month of flowers” — and they were a catechism of sorts, a multi-day series of rituals, sacred meals, purifications, lectures and discussions about what would be received by the initiates at the Greater Mysteries. Once inducted, attendees then were eligible to participate in the Greater Mysteries eighteen months later, where they would have the background and intellectual framework to understand the experiences that the initiates went through in the autumn.

It sounds a lot like a modern pagan gathering, with rituals interspersed with workshops, doesn’t it? And how many of us had the depth of knowledge to understand our first pagan gathering? How many of us needed to come a second time, or a third, to really understand what was going on?

Of course, our rituals today are not the same. At Eleusis in the fall, we know there was “an ear of grain in silence reaped” — there was a mass washing of people at a beach, and a night in complete darkness, and a sacred drink in the dark, and a chest or box with sacred secret things in it, and a basket whose contents are similarly obscure to us today. And our rites and rituals are not so obscure or ancient to us that we have to hold special training sessions eighteen months ahead of time to have clarity about them.

But. All the same?

It’s not a bad idea to use this time of year to reflect on our own mysteries — not the Mysteries of what this object or that ancient text might mean to us as pagans today; or how to interpret the strange symbolism of rituals that haven’t been performed in almost eighteen hundred years.

No — instead, let’s take the time to talk about the Mysteries of how all life on Earth is dependent on the interrelationships of Sun and seed and soil, of rock and planetary orbit and seasonal shifts in daily sunlight, and the way that the dead provide both the fuel and foundation for new life. We can couch it in myth — like Persephone and Hades and Demeter and Helios — or in the most up-to-date scientific lingo we can.

But at its heart, this is still a mystery we humans understand only a little. And we deserve to be reminded of it, again and again — and perhaps most especially at this time of year, when the equinox is not yet come and the trees are still bare of leaf or blossom. This is the time of year when we most benefit from the reminders and the explanation, of course — because in summer and in autumn, the bounty of this transformation is obvious. Now we need to Tell ourselves the story, because the Show will be so obvious, later in the year.

And perhaps this is the reason to mark the Lesser Mysteries now, at this time of year when it’s still gray. It’s how we make spring come early in our hearts and minds, and bring a little of the mystery of Eleusis into our life.

There, it is already spring.

Photo of a stone church in Eleusis, Greece, on top of a rocky mound, with blue skies above.
Eleusis. Photo by Vassilis St on Pexels.com
February Festivals
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February Festivals

by Andrew B. Watt

From time to time, flashes of the ancient world of the Mediterranean help me illuminate the life I lead today. The three days of festivals at the end of February are among those flashes — not exactly the Eight Greats of solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarter days, but something in-between. Rome’s second king after Romulus, the semi-mythical Numa Pompilius, set up the sacred calendar of ancient Rome and decided which days should be the important festivals of the gods. In a no-nonsense, legalistic approach, he chose dates based on day-counts rather than complex formulae relying on the relative positions of the Sun and Moon, or elaborate astronomical calculations.

By these simplistic day-counts, the twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-third days of February were marked as the time for “end of year” celebrations, for a year that began on March 21. Why not hold those festivals on March 18-20? The weather might change, and an early spring would give farmers a chance to start their planting. Better to hold the formal observations of the end of the year when it was still cold and frosty nights might still delay the seeding of the ground!

Today, the twenty-first of February, was the Feralia. A day for honoring the dead, not with elaborate rites but with a washing of the family’s graves and a small offering, and perhaps a re-arrangement of images of the dead in the family shrine. The Roman poet Ovid, in Book II of his poetic exploration of the Roman sacred calendar Fasti, writes of the Feralia, “a tile wreathed ‘round with garlands is enough, a scattering of meal and a few grains of salt, bread soaked in wine, and loose violets, is enough.”

Tomorrow, the twenty-second of February, was the Charistia. This was a day for renewing ties with neighbors, walking the boundaries of your personal property lines as a home-owner; sharing food and drink with the humans whose territory touched yours. It was also a day for calling on more-distant friends through letters or even personal visits, and renewing bonds of friendship. Here, Ovid says, “It’s surely joyful to turn our faces to those alive, after so many are mourned, to see those of our clan who remain alive, and count the degrees of kinship.” Incense was often burned for the health of one’s living kin and friends, although Ovid warns the impious brother and the cruel mother-in-law to stay away — how ancient is that cliche that one’s mother-in-law is awful, anyway??

At the end of the day, at the meal, there was a toast to one’s own elected officials, beginning with the duoviri, the co-mayors of your city, and ending with the Emperor. We might begin with a similar toast for our own elected officials… including, perhaps, an equal recognition of a safe and successful re-election for our preferred officials — or their replacements!

The twenty-third of February – Friday this year –,was the Terminalia — a day for personally reinforcing the boundaries of your city or town on both the physical and spiritual level. Many Roman citizens belonged to the auxiliary militias, and would walk the town wall and confirm that stores of arrows and spears were still secure, while the city’s priests ceremonially re-cut the pomeranium, the sacred trench that separated the civitas, the human community, from the wilderness beyond the wall.

In rural areas, Ovid says, the men brought the firewood, and the women carried coals in a pot from the hearth fire; the neighbors brought a suckling pig. The boy throws grain five times in the air from a basket, and the girls bring out honeycomb and wine. The boundary stones are found and honored, and Terminus, the two-faced boundary lord, is commanded to move not an inch in the coming year. Then there’s a feast out there on the edge where our fence meets yours, and where both of our boundary markers touch the wild places.

I don’t know how other people might do this, but I’ve identified a route that will take me from my home on a long circuit through the centers of all of the towns that border mine, and then back past my community’s town hall. On foot, it would take me 18 hours (Google claims); I think I’ll probably drive this year since it’s uphill (both ways!), but it will take me past the doors of a number of friends’ homes.

There’s no obligation on anyone to honor these three festivals as February’s days grow longer and there’s a shift in the weather, of course. But there’s something simple, here, too, about counting heads among the living and the dead, re-thinking boundaries, and having a minor celebration or two. And I think these three days have something of that simplicity of expectation that can shape familial traditions and practices.

I’ve not quoted directly from this translation of Ovid, but Book II of Fasti. has been ably translated here by A.S. Klein. https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/OvidFastiBkTwo.php

Bayberry as a Prosperity Charm
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Bayberry as a Prosperity Charm

Andrew Watt

The last several years, and beginning even before we were married, my wife and I have given bayberry candles as presents at Winter Solstice. Usually, we attach a red ribbon and a tag with one of the many surviving rhymes from US colonial-era folklore:

  A bayberry candle burnt to the socket brings food to the larder and gold to the pocket.

Or possibly you’ve heard a slight variation on this.

  A bayberry candle burnt to the socket puts health in your body and gold in your pocket.

Or again, the longest one my wife and know of (but not always the one we use).

  These bayberry candles come from a friend:
  On [Christmas] Eve or New Year’s Eve, burn it down to the end.
  For a bayberry candle burned to the socket
  will bring joy to the heart & gold to the pocket.

It wasn’t until this year that I found myself wondering why it was that bayberry, so specifically, should be the key ingredient in this charm for the New Year. So I began to do some research, and made a couple of intriguing discoveries.

First, I was startled to learn that bayberry (Myrica cerifera) is native to North America rather than a European import. Originally found on the Mid-Atlantic coast from Delaware to southern Connecticut, English settlers successfully transplanted it to the Caribbean, too.

That meant these charms were neither Welsh nor English in origin. Instead, they were the result of Europeans learning important lessons from the new landscapes of New Jersey, Long Island, Rhode Island, and Cape Cod — possibly through interactions with Native peoples who already lived here, definitely through study of the plant itself. Both Natives and colonists used bayberries as a potent but somewhat risky medication taken as a tea or syrup for exciting and supporting the immune system. More often, though, the berries were boiled in order to extract the wax and essential oils to make candles that scented the air and allegedly drove off disease. Somewhere along the line, Europeans learned that the berries were risky to ingest but easy on the lungs and throat.

One of the plant’s other interesting features is that it creates nodules in its root system — tiny organic caves, almost — which serve as sheltered homes for symbiotic fungi that fix nitrogen in the soil at rates even higher than most legumes. Gardens with bayberry bushes thus tend to thrive, because they make this key nutrient available to other species in their environment. Plant bayberries, and your garden would thrive.

So the rhyme, which for many years my wife and I thought to be of English origin, is really of American origin — the result of communication between original inhabitants, European settlers, and the plants themselves.

And so, after many years of following this custom of giving out bayberry candles to burn at Winter Solstice for prosperity and health in the new year, I can regard it as a special tradition that doesn’t come from Scottish crofters or English peasants or even Welsh carolers parading beneath a Mari Llwyd horse-skull. No. It comes from us. It’s native to here. And maybe that’s a path forward for us all — to recognize that we don’t have to spend all our time regarding our European ancestors as the sole source of spiritual truth. To some extent, it’s necessary for us to recognize that we’re here on this ground, and our spirituality and customs have to be rooted in the places where we live and where our children and grandchildren will grow old. And maybe that means that we have to walk with greater grace and acceptance of the First Peoples who lived here, and honor what they taught our predecessors.

With that in mind, I decided to write my own rhyme, and add to the folklore around this little bit of winter magic, the bayberry candle.

  Our foreign forebears learned to know this land,
  and humbled themselves to learn its treasures.
  Bayberry made golden soil from sand,
  wafting aromas of year’s-end pleasures.
  “Friends, please come, burn these bayberry tapers;
  warm up at the hearth, sing songs of good cheer;
  drink of this wine, eat salmon with capers —
  tell tales to last ’til the turn of the year!”
  So it had happened in long-ago days,
  as the bayberry burned to the socket —
  and shall again, when we revive old ways,
  and treat friends better than gold in pocket.
  Then, a New Year rich with health, wealth and peace,
  is ours for giving — and getting — with ease.

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Flavors of Shadow

by Andrew B. Watt

Like many people, I spent my quarantine time learning baking skills. Instead of focusing on sourdough bread, though, I learned a lot about tarts, cakes, and pastries. In the fall of 2020 I made apple and pear tarts, which involve slicing up the fruit and arraying them in fans within a pie crust. In the spring and early summer of 2021 I worked on lemon curd tarts, and then berry tarts — strawberry, blackberry, blueberry. No rhubarb though: I never could stand the stuff, myself.

And who can forget pumpkin spice? The mixture is usually a roughly equal blend of cinnamon, ginger, clove, nutmeg, and sometimes allspice. Today we think of it as a mix reserved for overpriced coffee drinks — but the combination owes a great deal to the ‘sweet mix’ used in royal desserts in the courts of Henry VIII and his daughters Mary and Elizabeth I of England. This may have had something to do with the spices’ putative magical properties, too: cinnamon for protection and purification, ginger as a prosperity charm and as a protective spice, clove for both sexual potency and mental clarity, and nutmeg for both prosperity and imagination. Allspice, too, promoted health and improved focus. We can imagine the royal chef telling King Henry, “this cake, it’s not bad for you — it contains healthy things too!”

Three years in, I’ve learned a lot about the craft of baking. But I’m starting to turn my attention to identifying which of these festive dishes belongs to what times of the year. Here in New England, autumn is a season of shadows and darkness. Pumpkin pies and mincemeat pies are seen as traditional for Thanksgiving and the Solstice-cluster of holidays. Sugar cookies and gingerbread are ancestral holdovers for many.

For Samhain this year, I found my attention turning to the idea of making a Pomegranate curd to fill a tart shell. The pomegranate, that maroon-colored fruit filled with yellow rind and jewel-like arils, each with a seed inside … Well. The fruit of Persephone, of the High Priestess card of the Tarot, that symbolizes secret knowledge and gnostic insight… it does not want to be curd or custard. It does not want to set at all into a soft, sugary tart filling. I’m sure it has to do with the pH balance of the juice, or the way the juice interacts with extra butter and sugar.

Following recipes online, I found that, with careful timing and attention to heat and chill at the right times in the cooking process, you can make pomegranate curd, and fill a pie shell. It’s this lovely maroon color, with swirls of darker purple, and it draws gasps and awe from the people who have a slice of the pie. It’s this sensual and dark flavor.

But the secret to getting pomegranate curd to set properly, and be the right color — is dried hibiscus flower. It turns out that to get the right flavor of darkness… you need to include the memory that spring will return.

Photo by Andrew Watt
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Public Rites, Private Work

Andrew B. Watt

In my first career as a schoolteacher with a speciality in world history, I was often tasked with making the deep past relevant to a modern audience. In my current, second career as an astrologer and artist, I find that this is still in a sense my real job — finding ways to make ancient insights and wisdom available to a modern readership. This is the first of what I hope will be a regular series.

When modern people engage with ritual in an Earth-centered spirituality, it may not be the case that they are explicitly pagan — that is, they may not worship a pantheon of pagan gods with names like Zeus and Aphrodite, Odin and Thor and Frigga. Some of them certainly do; some of them are quite open about it. Others may follow a Christian path, attending a local church in their home community on Sundays. Some may light Shabbat candles, keeping with Jewish family traditions of worship at home.

At Rites of Spring and other events connected with Earth-centered spirituality, though, they will often engage in public rituals in which no god or gods are mentioned by name by the presiding officers. There are things that are said at these rituals, of course — the names of the recently deceased may be read solemnly, or the names of newlywed couples may be announced with joy. There are things that are done at these rituals, too — attendees may dance around a fire to the sound of drumming; or they may erect a Maypole; or take a walk in the woods to connect with nature. Finally, there are things shown: a loud figure in startling garments and grotesque make-up may stand between two smoking torches, terrifying all who hear her; veiled figures may appear at a meal with everyone present, to chaperone a select few off on pre-arranged journeys.

This formula, of Things Said, Things Done, and Things Shown, is very ancient — we know that this was the standard formula of the secret Mysteries of Eleusis in Greece. Candidates for the initiation process underwent a purification rite in mid-March, and then in mid-September of the following year, they all went into the initiation hall at dusk to spend the night in complete darkness. Nothing was said of what occurred in this hall on penalty of death. The Mystai, as the initiates were called, were only able to say, “Well… Things were said, and things were done, and things were shown.”

The ten days prior the Autumnal Equinox are about when these September Mysteries were celebrated — a season that begins this year on September 12. It’s a good time to reflect on one of the essential parts of the EarthSpirit Community’s traditions — that in our public rites, things are said, done and shown — but the meaning of these things is rarely defined for us as members. It remains the private task of the individual and their trusted family and friends, to sort out how what’s said, done, and shown, affects our personal lives — ethically, morally, intellectually, emotionally.

Proserpina with Ceres and Triptolemus
Proserpina with Ceres and Triptolemus, Ancient Greek, circa 330 BCE, Eleusis Archaeological Museum

Many community members call that highly personal and private process, Work—first reflecting on how the public parts of the ritual resonate deeply within us; and second, figuring out how to turn those internal meanings into outward behaviors and actions. Work is an active intellectual, emotional, and creative process. No two members of the community do their Work in quite the same way, either — but you can observe their Work in what they say, what they do, and what they show.

Under Stars,
Andrew B. Watt
Astrologer & Artist
http://andrewbwatt.com/

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It Looks A Lot Like Justice

By Andrew Watt
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Written on November 8, 2018

The Parliament of the World’s Religions closed yesterday. We go home today. It’s curious and apropos that today the planet Jupiter enters into Sagittarius, astrologically:  wisdom and knowledge integrating with power and authority. When coherence and responsibility blend, the results look a lot like justice. The results look a lot like mercy and peace.

I heard from several aficionados of these Parliaments that “this time wasn’t as good as Salt Lake City (Utah, USA)” or “it wasn’t as intense as my experience in Melbourne (Australia).” For my part, as a first-timer, I was astonished by the range of diversity, nuance and complexity on display within the various theological and spiritual traditions — and the ways in which these vast and subtle traditions resolved to a few core principles again and again:

Develop a right relationship with the spirit world.
Develop a right relationship with nature.
Develop a right relationship with other human beings.
Develop a a right relationship with self.
Develop and iterate traditional practices that cultivate these relationships.

Now— it must be admitted, those relationships look VERY DIFFERENT based on whether your tradition began in a desert or a forest or a mountaintop or a city. Those

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Our EarthSpirit delegation (photo by Moira Ashleigh)

relationships look different when they’ve been cultivated for fifty years, five hundred years, five thousand years, fifty thousand years. Those relationships look different if you’ve always been persecuted, never been persecuted, or suffered both extremes. Those relationships look different based on the portability and replicability and practicality of your traditions and the ideas it carries.

But the successful religious systems still look like justice. The successful ones still look like mercy. The successful ones still look like mutual respect and kindness for all the realms of being.

It can’t possibly be an accident.

Every conference attendee I spoke with couldn’t deny how powerfully we were affected by the conversations, the presentations, the constant reminders embedded in both our own traditions and those of others, to practice hospitality and welcome, to share with strangers, to communicate in trust and in good faith, to hope for a better world.

It doesn’t mean we’re not ruled by fear at times. It doesn’t mean that we’re not going to have genuine conflict as individual people or as nations over resources, over access to necessary goods and services, or challenges with bad actors of various kinds. And, of course, we are all experiencing some of the most radical shifts in our relationships with nature, that our species has experienced in quite a long, long, long time.

But after talking with Buddhists, Indigenous elders, Sikhs, Jews, Christians, and other pagans and heathens — I end my own Parliament experience with recognition and insight and renewed sense of purpose that love, justice, and mercy live very close to the center of all of the Earth’s great wisdom traditions. and that love, justice, and mercy look a lot like long-term survival.

It can’t possibly be an accident.
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Weaving a Fabric of Inclusion

by Andrew Watt
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One of the items on display here at A Parliament of the World’s Religions is Esther Bryan’s Quilt of Belonging. Consisting of 263 hexagonal frames for 263 embroidered and textile blocks, the quilt is a kind of self-portrait of Canada at the dawning of the Christian Era’s second millennium: there is one block for each of Canada’s First Nations, and one block for each nation of the wider world whose immigrants have come to Canada. It took six and a half years to create. Members of each immigrant group and First Nation worked on the block representing their community, some only agreeing after long periods of negotiation and gradual or grudging trust-building. One nation, San Marino, is represented by only one person in all of Canada, while other blocks represent thousands of people and their descendants. One two-year-old sewed a couple of stitches, while a 92-year-old had to be helped to hold the embroidery needle between trembling fingers. Just outside the display area, several massive crates with giant foam rollers inside hold the Quilt on its travels around Canada — which have already taken it enough miles to go from Earth to the Moon five times. Listening to Ms. Bryan talk about the creation of the quilt left me with the impression that the Quilt of Belonging is not simply a quilt: it is a treasure-house of stories.

The Quilt is currently on display on the first floor of the North Building. It’s nearly impossible to take in all at once — the ribbon of color that forms the upper edge creates a rainbow of extraordinary intensity. Yet as one approaches, the appearance of continuum dissolves into a formula of precise strips of color all down the length of the hall. Beneath

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Photo by Miriam Klamkin

these ribbons of hue in harmonious order are the Nations. The eye catches on San Marino, and then on the Tlinglit First Nation. One has to go and seek out countries of one’s own national origin: perhaps Great Britain, perhaps France. The Diné come into view, and then perhaps Thailand. Malayasia and Tonga and Cuba appear. The Labradorans and the Dakota and the Haida.

It’s the opposite of erasure.

And then something curious happens. You stop seeing the names of countries, and you start looking at the artistry, at the needlework, at the overarching structure of the quilt. You start to see the heavy tassels of yarn along the bottom. You start seeing how the fabric pulls against the stitch-work here and there. You begin to imagine women and men sitting with Esther Bryan in kitchens and living rooms, all across Canada, as she gently but deliberately earned their trust, came into their communities, and helped them stitch a quilt block. This pull here was a stab through the textile by an untrained hand; that one over there is a daughter guiding her mother’s hands that are starting to lose a battle with arthritis; these interwoven threads were stained by the tears of a refugee remembering their homeland. You start to see those big crates carrying the quilt on the back of a cargo skid pulled by a ski-doo across the ice for a display in the far north, or hauled onto a ferry for a showing on Prince Edward Island. You imagine careful hands unrolling it from its crate for the first time, and staring in wonder at a picture of their homeland for the first time.

And then you, the viewer, start to cry.

You become one with the stories that you see, hear, and imagine in the great quilt before you. You, in a sudden moment, find yourself drawn into the story of Canada, even as a visitor, you find yourself wrapped in all the tales of wonder and heartbreak and hope and tragedy and dignity that are caught up in this quilt, tangled together in its threads and in its fabric.

You are in the presence of a relic. A medicine, in a sense. An object that has been made holy by the hands that have made it, and the stories that have been woven into it, and

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Photo by Miriam Klamkin

the community that has chosen to honor it. An emblem of Canada — not its government, not its national presence on an international stage — but of its people and its common life.

So many rooms and spaces at the Parliament are barren and devoid of symbolism. It’s a conference center, of course — part of the very nature of the spaces within it is that they are non-descript and easily shifted from one purpose to another and another. At the same time, though, the Quilt of Belonging shows a portrait of grace: a nation of nations, a country of countries, at peace with itself and with its neighbors.

And simply by viewing the quilt with your other eyes, you feel the potential for welcome and trust, the gracious hospitality, and the growing strength, of this year’s host nation for the Parliament.
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EarthSpirit is at A Parliament of the World’s Religions this week in Toronto!  You can find more updates here and on our Facebook page.  

The Canadian Way
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The Canadian Way

by Andrew Watt
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At my second day of A Parliament of the World’s Religions, the thing that keeps striking me is the “Canadian Way”. That’s the name I’m giving to a practice, which I have found striking and emotionally powerful, of acknowledging and recognizing the First Nations of the region around Toronto as the keepers of the land.  These tribes include the Mississaugas, the New Credit Tribes, and the Six Nations.  I’ve not caught all the names or subtleties of the relationships between the tribes, I know.  But I know that they are here, their chiefs saw us at the Parliament’s opening session on the first day, that they knew we were coming, and that they have extended a formal welcome to the Parliament and a kind of formal permission to conduct our business here. (In a kindly, funny but also serious fashion, we were told in no uncertain terms to go home when we were done.)

Talking with a few Canadians today, I learned that this is becoming more and more common at all sorts of Canadian official events: graduations and conferences, government meetings, matriculation ceremonies, and higher-level religious events like church synods.  Canada appears to be making a serious commitment to recognize and acknowledge the place and position of what it calls the First Nations within the fabric of Canadian life.  My new Canadian friends admitted that it feels more like “talking the talk” and not enough like “walking the walk” — but that Indigenous Peoples are much more active in the political and social fabric of the nation today than they were twenty and forty years ago in their own childhoods.

And so, the Canadian Way: to be welcomed to traditional lands by traditional First Nations custodians, to be given permission to settle and perform ceremony, and to participate in the life of the nation as the First to speak.  To Be First.

The formal opening session of the Parliament was preceded by several hours of Indigenous Ceremony in the park outside the Convention Center: dancing, smudging done by members of the Toronto tribes, welcomes from the chiefs of several of the tribes, drumming and singing in the traditional styles and in the traditional costumes of the

Indigenous dancer

photo by Moira Ashleigh

Mississaugas, the Cree, the New Credit Tribes, the Six Nations.  A few hours later, at the formal opening of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the chiefs spoke again.  No rousing strains of “O Canada!” filled the hall.  Instead, with the raising of Indigenous eagle feathers and staffs, the singing was one of one of the local tribe’s national anthems, and another song in a First Nations language to thank veterans. During the opening speeches, a minister of the government of Canada thanked the Mississaugas and the New Credit Tribes and the Six Nations. So did the Lieutenant Governor of Ontario.  So did a city councillor of the government of the city of Toronto.  No one stumbled over unfamiliar names.  No one tried a couple of times and gave up.  The tribes were mentioned in the same order each time (which I’ve endeavored without notes to repeat, but apologize if I’ve gotten in wrong).  There is clearly an effort underway within the Canadian government to restore a sense of traditional custodianship of the land to the First Nations, at all levels of government.

That’s extraordinary in itself.

But then… it happened in some of the sessions and workshops I attended during the day.  A presenter thanked the First Nations tribes of the Toronto area, and named them the same way the government officials had.  Then she got around to thanking the Parliament for inviting her to speak.  A ritual event in another space included a formal acknowledgement that the ceremony was taking place on Mississaugas land.

Later in the day, I asked a Canadian if they knew what First Nations land they were on. “Mississaugas,” came the answer, followed immediately by surprise. They didn’t know, quite, how long they had known that information, or how they’d come by it.

And yet, in an extraordinary way, the Canadian Way is beginning to undo the effects of centuries of deliberate erasure of the First Nations:  by inviting them to speak First, by inviting them into the role of the traditional custodians, all across Canada people are waking up to the idea that they are on someone’s land, that they are in someone’s land: that Canada is more than one country, and the country has a deeper and longer history than just the French and English, Confederation and a couple of World Wars.

The Canadian Way may bring about a deeper understanding of their nation’s cultural heritage, a heritage that extends at least twenty thousand years into the past…. and into a present where the First Nations always speak First, in words of welcome and of permission. There’s a power in that; and I hope that it brings the many peoples of Canada a few long and graceful strides toward reconciliation. At the same time, I feel the challenge and the opportunity in the Canadian Way that all of these visitors from around the globe must see and hear, and I hope that many of them — and we ourselves — can take the steps and begin the conversations that begin to put Indigenous voices as First Voices.
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EarthSpirit is at A Parliament of the World’s Religions in Toronto this week!  Keep an eye here and on our Facebook page for more updates on our interfaith experiences.