I've been seeing a therapist for my depression for a few months now.  He seems pleased with my progress.  I'm pleased with his identification of the depression as a symptom of the underlying anxiety; somehow it's been easier to come to grips with the anxiety, and let the depression take care of itself, which it seems to be doing; I'm down to once-a-month meetings with the therapist.

I saw him a week or two before Litha, and mentioned that I'd been preoccupied with something, glossing over the fact that it was the ritual I was trying to write for my Wiccan circle's public Midsummer celebration.  Then I took a deep breath and told him I'd be celebrating the solstice with some Witches I knew in New Orleans, and when he asked if these were Wiccans, I said they were and admitted that I was one.  He was not freaked out by this, which was a great relief to me.  I know it would be unprofessional of him to be freaked out by anything a client says, but I've had some unexpected people react in odd ways to the news of my alternative spirituality.

I told him that Pagans refer to this kind of revelation as coming out of the broom closet, and he laughed out loud. 

I once had a Wiccan friend ask me if I was out of the closet or not, and I said that I was, but I hadn't let go of the doorknob yet.  I'm pretty discreet about it at work; most of my department knows, but the library administrators don't.  I've been wearing a pentacle ring to work every day for about five years now, and I have a pentacle necklace that I'd worn on occasion before that, but the ring I wear now is not very in-your-face--my therapist hadn't noted it, though I'd worn it to every one of our sessions.  The five-pointed star is laced around a crescent moon, with a chip of amethyst in the center, and the moon is what's easiest to see.

So I've gotten used to people not noticing it.

So I was a little shaken this week when somebody spotted the pentagram and asked about it while I was typing his request for blues music DVDs into our catalog.

My first reaction to questions about my ring is just to describe it--it's the moon and a star, isn't it pretty?  A lot of people stop there, unsure if I know what it actually stands for and unwilling to be the one to point it out to me if I don't.  I've had people mistake it for a Star of David, or an Eastern Star ring--the women's Masonic organization; I once had an older black gentlemen warn me quite seriously that if I wasn't in Eastern Star myself I shouldn't wear their ring and they could take it back.  I had very amusing visions of a Masonic SWAT team coming to my house to ransack my jewelry box, and I assured him it wasn't one of theirs without specifying whose it was.

Sometimes people will persist in asking what it really means, and I'll usually tell them in as simple and inargumentative terms as I can.  I told Blues Man that the five-pointed star represents the five elements of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit, and the crescent moon is for the Great Goddess.  He said he'd thought as much, and was pleased to have the confirmation that he'd been right.  He didn't seem freaked out by it, and thanked me for putting in a DVD request for him, since we didn't have the series he was looking for.  He asked my name, and I told him just my first name; my last name is distinctive for this region, and I don't let it get out much at work lest some of our more squirrelly patrons look me up in the phone book.

A while later he came back and asked if it was the name I'd been born with, and for some reason that just freaked me out.  My favorite astrologer says that with Mercury opposing Pluto and the Moon in Scorpio paranoia is in the air; I certainly felt quite paranoid for the rest of the afternoon, imagining that the guy meant to make trouble with my bosses over my non-Christian religion.  This even though other people who have noticed my Pagan jewelry (the pentacle ring I used to wear was a lot more obvious), even the Evangelical schoolgirls who gave me a hard time about it, have not complained about me to my superiors.

Of course, if this kind of thing is going to upset me so much, the obvious solution would be to stop wearing a pentacle openly to work.  I like to have one on me, but I could take to wearing a pendant tucked into my shirt again.

But on the other hand, I am fortunate in having very little vulnerability to the kind of harassment that makes many Pagans decide to stay in the closet.  I have no children I could lose custody of.  As a public librarian I am an employee of the local government and my job is protected by civil service rules; if my bosses wanted to get rid of me, about all they could do would be to make my life so miserable that I'd quit.  It's a real possibility, but not nearly as bad as the chance of being fired without notice and having my kids taken away.

So I wonder if I have a responsibility to the Goddess and my fellow Witches to go on being quietly open about my faith: not pushing it on anybody, of course, but not avoiding occasional questions about it.  Maybe one or two people might be inspired to think well of Pagans if they see one as normal as I am, acting in a friendly and helpful manner.

Here's a movie I'll have to go see: Agora, due out next year some time, starring Rachel Weisz as the Alexandrian philosopher Hypatia!  Historical inaccuracies notwithstanding, since it appears they're throwing in a love story angle, and Hypatia was famous for being quite sharp with prospective suitors.

I read history books for history, and go to movies for entertainment, so it's not a big deal to me when they tweak the facts.  It often doesn't trouble me much when movies take liberties with literature as well, since I understand that what works on the page often won't work on the screen.  On the other hand, I refused to go see Beowulf even though Neil Gaiman, a favorite author, was one of the scriptwriters, because I didn't like what I heard about his revisions of the story.  I guess some things really are beyond messing with.

The Elmira, N.Y. Star-Gazette ran an article on local folk and their tattoos.  Included was a 49-year-old Wiccan woman, Camilla Nhamercedes, with a blue crescent moon high on her forehead.


I found this through the excellent Pagan blog The Wild Hunt.  Blogger Jason Pitzl-Waters mentions that the crescent forehead tattoos are not uncommon among modern Pagans, and were "apparently first inspired by the tattoos given to priestesses of the Goddess in the cult-classic book The Mists of Avalon."

At which point I had a horrible suspicion about the lady's name.  Nhamercedes, Daughter of Mercedes.  It's not uncommon either for Pagans or for feminists to name themselves as the daughters of their mothers--I used to know a woman called Dorisdottir--but the matronymic syllable Nha does not come from any culture on earth.  It comes from the Darkover novels by Marion Zimmer Bradley, who is also the author of The Mists of Avalon.  On the planet Darkover, colonized by spacefaring humans and then lost to the greater galactic civilization for many centuries during which it developed a totally patriarchal, quasi-medieval society, the Free Amazons are women who band together so that they need not be dependent on men. 

It's been a long time since I read any of those books, but the Free Amazons caught my imagination at the time, and I'm pretty sure that's where the Nha comes from.

*facepalm*

Being inspired by a work of fiction is one thing.  Being (or seeming) unable to distinguish between real life and an author's invention is something else again.  The people who go to Glastonbury Tor in England expecting to find Avalon, the kids who get in touch with Wiccans and Pagans asking how to apply for admission to Hogwarts, and the people who protest movies like The Da Vinci Code and The Golden Compass as an affront to their faith all need to learn the difference.