Question of the Week: Poseidon v. Hera

Ok, since people liked my last QotW which featured a deity battle between Odin and Zeus, here’s a new one!

Poseidon, god of the seas, has a good bit at his command.  He has a bit of a temper as well, and kept Odysseus from reaching his home for years because Odysseus blinded Poseidon’s son.  The god can call up huge storms with whirlpools, floods, etc.  He also has a chariot, since horses came from him, so he isn’t limited to just the sea.

Hera, Queen of the gods, tends to be a bit jealous and narrow-minded (in my opinion).  She doesn’t necessarily have powers the way Poseidon does…but her fury is not to be ignored.  She’s crafty and creative, has some minor transformative  powers, will stoop to kidnapping, blinding, and curses, and has at her disposal the loyalty of some of the other gods.  Hera is persistent–she dogged Herakles’ life and made him endure a great deal of torment for simply being born.  She could also potentially call upon her son Hephaestus to fight with her, but he’s not terribly fond of his mother, so his aid isn’t to be counted on.

If Hera and Poseidon were to be locked in battle, who would win?

Post your answer in the comments below!

Curses, Part 1: What is a Curse?

Guest post by Kyros

Curses can be an unfortunate reality in life.  Sometimes they’re cast on purpose, other times they are purely misapplied intention.  First though, let’s define what a curse is:

A curse is a magickal force working to do harm.

That’s a pretty simple, basic, and open definition.  A curse can be an elaborate spell designed to trap and torture someone in a specific way, or it could just be someone with power who’s angry and directing that anger at you.  A curse can even result from a spell gone badly.  Curses range in power and in effect, from incidental curses that fade in a day to curses that follow a bloodline for generations.

Before we can analyze if we’re being cursed, we need to look at the effects of a curse. To do this, we can divide curses into two distinct categories:

1. Entropy Curses, or the “stuff just goes wrong” kind of curses
2. Targeted Curses

Let’s look at the first type, which is the more common.  Entropy Curses don’t require elaborate rituals or much power to cast, and can be easily cast by accident, or by simply directing bad intentions.  They’re the sort of thing you may suspect if you have a long run of very bad luck, or if a lot of unlikely unfortunate events occur.  Of course, sometimes unfortunate events do occur just in life, and sometimes even in strings, so you’re looking for a very extreme case before you want to consider that it may be a curse.  If your house gets robbed one day, and then two days later all your pet fish die, and the next day your favorite sneakers go missing, only to have your grandmother pass the next week, well, then that’s possibly a curse.  (But do keep in mind, it doesn’t have to be a curse– it could just be plain unmagickal bad luck.)

The second type of curse manifests itself in more interesting ways, and usually requires some pretty specific intentions and some power behind it to work.  Targeted Curses tend to occur in a specific way, and do a specific sort of harm.  Say you’re dating someone magickally talented and you slip up and cheat on them, only to have your next three lovers be unfaithful to you: that would likely be a targeted curse.  Or, say you break up with someone magickally talented in a bad or harsh way, and then start experiencing heart problems: that’s also potentially a targeted curse.  Targeted curses involve ritual, power, and usually are related to the original problem: you broke a lover’s heart so they’re breaking yours, in a physical sense; or you cheated on a lover, so now all your lovers cheat on you.  It’s important to note that they aren’t always related to the original problem–your injured lover could curse knee pain on you, but that’s not the usual case.

It’s important to understand the nature of a curse.  Curses can happen easily, as easily as being cutoff in traffic by a rude driver and directing bad intentions under your breathe, “I hope you get in an accident.”  That’s definitely a form of cursing, and like all cursing, it’s dangerous. Cursing is at heart a tool of hate, and like all tools of hate, magickal or not, they ultimately damage the user more so than the target.  Curses create bad karma for the caster, regardless if the caster feels the curse is “justified”.  More so than just bad karma, curses make you weaker, they wear down your power, and they make you a target for darker things.  When faced with a curse, the worse response is to counter-curse, as that only leads down a road of attrition.

Curses are dangerous, both for the caster and the target.  Curses can be cast easily, and still result in harsh consequences.  There is no “right time” or justified time to cast a curse.  It’s always wrong, plain and simple.  Curses are also complex, and can take many different forms. There isn’t always a rhyme or reason with curses.

Part 2: Detecting Curses
Part 3: Breaking Curses

Weekly Deity: Malsumis

Although there is very little information to be found about this god, I thought he sounded very interesting.  There aren’t many gods that are considered purely evil, but he appears to be one of them.

Malsumis is a god of the Abenaki tribe, who are of the Algonquin people from northeastern North America.  He’s the god of evil.  Seriously–that’s basically his only title: god of evil.

Attributes

None known.  Godchecker.com says that Malsumis is “rather wolfish”, and this could be a reference to what this god looks like, but it’s not very clear.

Mythology

Malsumis is considered the son of Tabaldak, in a fashion.  Tabaldak is the creator god.  Malsumis is also the twin brother of Gluskab (aka Glooskap), the god of good.  According to the legend, Gluskab was born from the dust of the world that fell from Tabaldak’s hands after he created the world.  Since Gluskab and Malsumis are considered twins, it’s possible that he was created from the dust also, but it’s not stated explicitly how he was born.

While his brother Gluskab uses his power to create, Malsumis uses his power to do evil, and he uses a lot of tricks and cruel acts to accomplish this.  It appears that he could do good, if he so chooses, but he prefers to stick to the dark side of things.  Because of Malsumis, plants have thorns, and some insects have stings–these are examples of the trickery and cruelty of Malsumis.

Eventually, Malsumis is going to be the end of man, for he plots the end of man to this very day, and he is in constant opposition to his brother Gluskab, because his brother protects man.

Light and Dark Sides

Malsumis is responsible for all the negativity of the world.  While it looks like he could do good, he makes a conscious choice to turn away from the Light and do evil.  Although there are no myths available to me to verify this, it does appear that Malsumis is an entirely Dark god.

Forest Restoration and Cleansing the Environment

A major point of concern for many people in the past couple of decades has been the degradation and destruction of the world’s forests.  Trees play a vital role in the ecosystems and balance of the planet, yet in places like Brazil, logging is sometimes the only means of gaining subsistence and is a big industry and source of jobs.  When countries are faced with the harsh choice between making people find new employment when there is none or banning logging, the issue takes on a different perspective, but only emphasizes the great importance that some kind of solution be found.

Logging in the Brazilian rainforest (credit: Scientific American)

I stumbled across this article the other week about this nonprofit group called Archangel Ancient Tree Archive who are trying to collect genetic material from species of tree which are rapidly disappearing.  They then want to clone those trees and replant the forests around the world.  Sounds a little unattainable right?  But they’re having some moderate success, at least in the areas of gaining tree genes and successfully cloning the trees.

What they are having greater trouble with is convincing people to replant these specific trees.  You may ask what is so great about these particular trees.  The giant redwoods and sequoias and other mega-trees are actually very essential to keeping carbon dioxide and other pollutants out of the air.  One of these trees does the work of hundreds of other trees in retaining pollutants.  Old growth forests are central to cleansing the environment, yet we stupid blundering humans have destroyed almost all of them.

“Finding genetically superior trees has been challenging, but group leaders acknowledge their biggest hurdle may be selling the public on the urgency of restoring the world’s ancient forests.”

They can be planted in any number of places, from college campuses to office parks to Central Park, but the most ideal places are those that favor a long life and adequate room for the tree to grow.  But most people don’t see the value in planting one of these trees–as the article points out, many of the people who do plant trees are in the business of growing, selling, replanting, and then growing more as fast as possible.

Why should we care?  Well, I think most of us would like to live on a healthy planet while we’re here.  I doubt we’d really appreciate breathing in pollution on a daily basis, and in some countries that is exactly what happens.  But why should that be the case when this problem can be fixed with a little time and effort?  Also, we as pagans should be especially interested in the death of forests across the world–our ties to nature are (perhaps) stronger than the ties of non-pagans to the natural world since we tend to see the magic and the beauty in nature a little more easily because of our beliefs.  [I realize that's something of a generalization, but it is true that the majority of pagans have some kind of reverence for nature.]

Original article here.

Technological difficulties

I apologize for my lack of postings this week.  It sounds like one of those trumped-up excuses you tell to get out of something, but I really have been experiencing the hate of technological devices in the past few days.  First my laptop (granted, it is 9 years old, but still…) decided the backlight of the screen should die–meaning I can see a picture, but it’s really really dark and I was straining my eyes to read anything.  Then I got home and the internet decided to not work.  At all.  Until I plugged it into my mini HP laptop, and it worked fine, though the two computers run the exact same version of Windows.  I still don’t quite understand it, but I got it working on my desktop again–but too late for me to write a post with any quality.  So that’s the story.

Expect a better post later today!