Easter Does my Head In

Goddess, how I find this festival intolerable. It is intolerable on several fronts.
From a pagan point of view a lot of twaddle is spoken about it (much of this twaddle and a sensible rebuttal of all of it can be found here. The reason any talk of pre-Christian paganism in Britain is on a hiding to nothing is that our pagan forebears didn't write stuff down, and even if we have artefacts left, we don't know what they were used for because they are literally pre-historic. Any accounts of what paganism was like were written by Christian missionaries, who are not the most objective people in this situation, and may well also not have understood what ritual was about.
Eostre, for example, has only one historical mention by a bloke called Bede who was a monk. We can believe that the missionaries deliberately attached their religious events to pagan days, but it is well nigh impossible to say what the pagan festivals were about. This is also the reason the witch cult in Western Europe is a fantasy.
In case anyone thinks I'm only going to offend pagans, this is where I start on the Christians. The central event of the Christian year is a real problem for the Christians in my opinion. How in hell do you celebrate a resurrection? It's an event outside of our experience, if taken at face value. If not accepted uncritically it ceases to be special at all, because of the great difficulty historically in determining death. It is not unusual in history for people to appear dead but not be. And I'm not even going into the bloody horror of their tortured Messiah. And people say witches are weirdos!
Apart from anything else the Christian calendar is repetitive and everyone knows what's coming next. I like my gods to be a bit surprising myself. There used to be a joke about a woman who saw Jesus in Southwark cathedral on Good Friday. After much agitating she got an audience with Archbishop Amigo, and told him she had seen Jesus in the cathedral, to which he replied, 'Well he's got no business being in there on Good Friday.'
And don't get me started on Ostara! At least it marks an actual astrological event, but the Hound is firmly of the opinion that the current pagan calendar was cobbled together by old Gerald and that other nudist who was a druid, in the 1940s.
EbEv the chocolate is frequently wrecked by putting milk in it. And stop saying Bournville, the Hound likes white chocolate.
And not even estrogen has the decency to be derived from Eostre. I was hoping it would turn out to have been named after the Goddess as being to do with being randy and getting impregnated when the sap's rising. But no, the hormone has a boring etymology. But this hasn't stopped me illustrating this post with an advert for the pill.
Pass me another egg.

Tarot: The Tower Today

I have been avoiding writing this post, simply because it is such a difficult subject, but of course another modern Tower has happened again this week.
The Tower is one of those cards which people dread turning up in a reading, since it represents monumental, irresistible, sudden and traumatic change. The actual tower itself can represent any of the physical, psychological, or social constructions which help to shelter us from the world outside. Much of the point of the card is that these are the sort of defences which can be suddenly brought to an end by a life event or'act of God'.

This is ironic, since the traditional name for this card is La Maison Dieu, with the phrase's historical connotations of being obliged to depend on the hospitality of the church, through poverty. That G*d could cause the downfall of his own sacred institution is one of the fears of the G*d-fearing, and a reminder of the need to please him at all times.
It is of course more difficult when the 'lightning strike' is not caused by inscrutable divinity but by humans, and one of the main characteristics of this card is that the events will bring out the real motivation behind events. A marriage ending in murder, for example.

This theme has been apparent this week, as apparently a few French billionaires have pledged a huuuge amount of money to the cathedral's restoration. They could have used this cash, which is obviously surplus to requirements, to end world poverty, but they didn't. Thus the restored cathedral will be a monument to the wealth of a few, and another tower in the sense of this card.
There is another way of taking the events of this card, for example if you are stuck in an abusive situation you may be at least partly relieved to be out of them. There is a tradition that the tower in the Tarot de Marseille has an unseen exit in the back, implying that the tower we are in is one we could get out of if we tried.
I mentioned above the ambivalence found in an abuse survivor, and the events of this card, because they are traumatic, will normally provoke complex reactions. The best example of this is probably Grenfell Tower. A huge proportion of emergency services workers at the towertower trauma symptoms, as do survivors, complicated by survivor guilt. This complex reaction makes it difficult even to engage in the therapy which the local mental health services have set up, and to get on with life.
While on balance it is better to be out of the tower, it will have ongoing effects.

Spirit of Place: The Wellington Hotel

The end of an era has arrived with a change of landlord at the Wellington. Not the one by the floozy in the jacuzzi, the one on Bromsgrove Street, pictured during the Birmingham Superprix.
It was always an acquired taste, and I once went to a production by Acting Out there with someone who expressed her surprise at one of the Pauls actually referring to a customer as a c*nt to his face.
That building is otherwise a challenge in other ways. For a start it is ridiculously haunted. I have not seen her myself but there is a grey lady who walks across the bar, and in one of the bedrooms female guests get harassed by a Randy ghost. That's the sort of ghost I would love to be.
The place also has another secret but even the loquacious Hound isn't going to rush into print with that one...

Spirit of Place: the Birmingham Wholesale Markets site

The former wholesale market has been demolished, revealing that the site is HUUUGE. And drawing attention to views as far as St Albans in Highgate and the Rowton House (I will post about that one of these days). All sorts of things are mooted for the site, among them opening up the river so that it can be an actual feature for a change.

Spirit of Place: Wolverhampton

Today I have been to Wolverhampton, largely because the Cex shop had in the box set of the Confessions films. Robin Askwith was an early crush of mine, and I just love 1970s sex comedies.
My friend who lives in Wolvo maintains that it's a shithole, but I rather like it. This is not least because it was the scene of several formative memories for me...
Going to a Whimpy bar with my dad (but I don't think either of us had a bender burger.
There was a bookshop in Chapel Ash. At one point it was run by a woman who my mother looked down on because she had concluded she was an alcoholic.
Going to the Grand Theatre, where Dame Hilda Bracket actually spoke to me from the stage on the last time I saw them before she died.
It formed the escape for me as a young gay who had my sights set above a life in Lower Gornal.
Going to Mass at Snow Hill on a Saturday evening so that our parish priest would think I had lapsed from the Catholic faith.
I used to get the bus in from school when I was in the sixth form and go cruising.
So even though Wolverhampton is definitely showing signs of today's economic climate, I am still grateful to it in all sorts of ways.