Sometimes you will find yourself reading something written long ago, perhaps 125 years ago, and find yourself suddenly struck by how very Pagan it is. Does that ever happen to you?
One of my favorite poets is Peggy Pond Church. She is magnificent, funny, brooding, cautious and ecstatic. Her voice changes from Cassandra to Baubo, and she is always deeply in love with the earth. I’ve loved her poetry for well over a decade, but my volume of her poetry has been packed away in a box for some time. I haven’t read her work in probably 3 years or more.
Sometimes it’s good to give poetry room to breathe so you come back to it fresh and taken with it’s beauty anew. And sometimes you find things you missed before:
The Woman Who Dwells
The woman who dwells at the place of healing by the river
sits singing and sings the shape of the gods from the four directions;
sings onto the horizon the four mountains where the gods dwell;
sings into the bare sky the small cloud moving in brightness;
sings into the bare earth the growing tip of the corn;
sings the river into a singing curve around her;
sings herself into the center of herself, alive and listening.
The woman who dwells in the place of healing by the river
stirs not from her place, goes not to the far mountains,
soars not into the high sky, enters not the deep earth;
sings as she draws into the sand the circle of healing;
sings the gods from the four directions into that circle;
sings the growing cloud into the reach of her own heart;
sings herself into the spear of the green corn growing.Peggy Pond Church, 1939
Peggy was the daughter of a Rough Rider, born and raised in New Mexico. To my knowledge she never met Victor and Cora Anderson. She never encountered Feraferia. She was unaware of the Church of Aphrodite. I don’t have any reason to believe she was acquainted with the Golden Dawn, Thelema or the Rosicrucians. As far as I can tell, she had no knowledge of or interest in the modern Pagan movement.
Yet, in the same year that Gardner was likely coalescing whatever the hell he was actually up to in England, Peggy wrote this poem. Somehow she wrote this poem, which evokes Wicca in every line and image. How astounding is that?
A lot of her poetry evokes Pagan ideas and ideals. The above poem is not one I would count among her best. Perhaps her poem about Andromeda is my favorite, or the sonnet containing the line “I am shaped upon your shape like flesh on bone.”
When I first read her I was immersing myself in a lot of Goddess literature. Her poetry didn’t strike me as unusual because it was in the same vein as everything else I was reading at the time. Now, looking at her words and conjuring her images, her landscapes, I find myself checking and double-checking the dates on her poems. 40 years before Starhawk, 30 years before Z. Budapest, 5 years before Victor Anderson met Cora, this woman was weaving very modern Pagan themes into her poetry.
Peggy didn’t identify as Pagan, and I can only guess from her writing that she was not a practicing Christian. It would be wrong to brand her as ours when she likely had no clue we existed. But it seems to me, that like Shelley and Byron, Peggy Pond Church is a Pagan caught in the twilight, that tantalizing and shadowy place between Julian and Gardner where nothing is what it seems.
The anthology I have is This Dancing Ground of Sky, and it’s available dirt cheap on Amazon Marketplace. I’d love for you to read through it and tell me what you think of it.
WOW- deep stuff for a Friday morning- thank you for this unassuming gift! I will definitely check it out!
WOW- deep stuff for a Friday morning- thank you for this unassuming gift! I will definitely check it out!
That was lovely, thank you for sharing! I’ll have to look up more of her work.
I do find the timing interesting, I must agree. Almost as if the Goddess started singing, and two different people, hearing the song, added different harmonies…
Wonderful! What a treasure! Thanks for sharing this!
It is amazing what sorts of things poets get up to in every period…I was just extolling the virtues of a woman poet/writer of the late 1800s/early 1900s in Boston yesterday, Annie Adams Fields, who was writing about Antinous when it was mostly (emergent) gay male British classicists who were writing about him…and she was bisexual!
Isn’t it funny how surprising the past is? Who’da thunk it?
The West gave birth to many women like P. P. C. in the early 20th century. Some in New Mexico and Arizona were entranced by the spirituality of the Pueblos and the Navajo, as she was. Others, like Leslyn Macdonald (Robert Heinlein’s second wife) and Shirley Jackson — both from California — called themselves witches and openly practiced magic. There is a whole history of American alternate spirituality here that has been long forgotten. Thank you for uncovering some of it here.
I did not know that. I remember reading about some fella in the 40′s on the east coast gaining some press for reviving Witchcraft. Our history gets curiouser and curiouser…
The West gave birth to many women like P. P. C. in the early 20th century. Some in New Mexico and Arizona were entranced by the spirituality of the Pueblos and the Navajo, as she was. Others, like Leslyn Macdonald (Robert Heinlein’s second wife) and Shirley Jackson — both from California — called themselves witches and openly practiced magic. There is a whole history of American alternate spirituality here that has been long forgotten. Thank you for uncovering some of it here.
Beautiful
Beautiful
“The pine tree which I could see from my window at night, which became the landmark, fixed and steady, against which the stars moved in procession, streaming up from the sky from the east, as through a great canyon. My mother taught me the names of the stars and constellations, Greek names, so that the Greek myths were always present in my mind. Cassiopeia’s Chair, the square of Pegasus, the sky so overwhelmingly pagan.” [p. 69]
“How the plateau became part of my inner geography. With the child, ten years old, scornful of dolls, pagan instinct, having cut her teeth on myths of the Greeks, on the poets whose geography is timeless and universal.” [p. 137]
From “Bones incandescent: the Pajarito journals of Peggy Pond Church”, where one also finds a few references to “goddesses”, such as “It is the goddess who weeps and rages, the goddess who wept when the Sacred Groves were cut down in Palestine and has gone on weeping ever since.” [p. 96]
Very nice!
Very nice!
In the words of Utah Phillips, “…the past didn’t go anywhere.” And in the words of William Faulkner “The past is never dead, it’s not even past.” Especially with Poets.
“Although only breath, words which I command are immortal.”
– Sappho
When I read this, I didn’t get Wiccan imagery, I got Navajo imagery: four sacred mountains at the directions, sand painting “sings” (rituals) for healing, corn growing…
But calling Gods into a drawn circle is a rather unusual thing outside of Wicca. Or at least that’s my understanding.
Navajo and Peublo imagery is pervasive in Arizona and New Mexico to the point that, when I left the desert, I was stunned at the terrible lack of Native American imagery in other states. If you posit that there wasn’t really any Wicca in New Mexico at the time Peggy Pond Church was writing–something which seems reasonable to me, given the timeline you stated–then the possibility that she embraced an eclectic kind of Paganism highly influenced by Southwestern Native American spirituality seems quite feasible, especially given the statements Apulieus Platonicus quoted. When a deep spirituality is in the very air one breathes, when it is totally accessible to even a tentative reach, it tends to incorporate itself into one’s worldview no matter one’s practice. It did for me, at least, and given that gorgeous poem, it seems to have done so for Peggy Pond Church as well.
I suspect that by “she draws into the sand the circle of healing,” she was speaking of the generally round shape of sand-paintings, not a circle drawn around the participants. (If I remember correctly, it would be inappropriate to draw a circle around the participants because all but the healer and patient would tend to come and go during the many hours–or even days–of a sing.)
Also, the idea of calling gods into a drawn circle comes to Wicca from Golden Dawn practices and possibly also from Woodcraft Chivalry, which was inspired by Native American practices. And it’s pretty common in various *magical* traditions throughout the world. Wicca is unusual in European-derived cultures in using it for *religious* practice.
According to wiki, some Native American Indian tribes construct “medicine wheels” on the ground which is then quartered according to the cardinal directions. The most well-known medicine wheel come from the Hopi tribe. Each quarter of the Hopi medicine wheel is assigned a color, an animal, and an element. Perhaps not coincidentally, the Hopi elements correspond to the Wiccan elements: North-Earth, East-Air, South-Fire, West-Water. Each quarter is also assigned to a stage of life, beginning with childhood in the North and
proceeding in a clockwise fashion (just as in Wicca) through adolescence and adulthood to elderhood in the West. The influence of the Native American medicine wheel on Wicca could have been transmitted through the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry.
Amazing poetry. Thanks Star. I’m going to track down her collections now!
Since reading “Triumph of the Moon,” my unverified personal gnosis has been that the Lord and the Lady were very hard at work seeding the Otherworld with this energy in the late 18th and throughout the 19th centuries, and that it was picked up on not just by active occultists but by many people with a poetic or artistic bent, especially the ones attuned to Nature. Thank you for sharing.
Exactly. I could not agree more. I think the people who flip out on “Triumph of the Moon” are simply not getting this very clear indication that Hutton’s book points up. The revival of the Craft in the West was a long-time, long-term working by the Divine. The story of that working is far more fascinating than the accepted origin stories could be.
I would go so far as to say pagan divinity was at work from the moment classical paganism crumbled in the Roman Empire, and never ceased in the centuries since then. Even at the lowest ebb, when formal practice had been obliterated, we can see survivals of traditions in folklore etc. Huge chunks of Christian ritual and tradition have obvious pagan DNA. From the late middle ages, the old pagan gods were speaking in obvious ways through art, the incredible intellectual hunger to rediscover everything about the classical world etc. It was, of course much longer before operative systems of ritual and tradition would be re-forged, but the journey we are on did not begin with Gardner, or even the Romantic period. That journey was many centuries old and just happened to reach a critical mass by the time we were lucky enough to come on the scene.
What gorgeous poetry, and I am always looking for more poets to read. Thank you!
Beautiful, tho’ I get Navajo/ Dine’ or Pueblo
imagery, not Wiccan. I grew up in AZ, where this kind of imagery is very widespread. I was not surprised to learn she was from NM.