Meeting the Queen

Recently I've been seeing more emails from folks who have begun feeling the Morrigan's call for the first time, asking me for guidance on how to integrate Her into their lives and spiritual practice. So I felt it was time for a few posts about that.

This is what I frequently hear: "I'm being haunted, and I find it both terrifying and compelling. What do I do?"

The Morrigan chooses people. When this happens to us, the experience is like being haunted by something. People often speak of Her coming to them in nightmares, or at least disturbing dreams. Her presence might be felt in waking life as a shadowy, spectral presence that seems to loom over us, and to follow our steps. She is, after all, the Phantom Queen. Her presence can also be channeled into our lives in unsettlingly personal ways: relationship dynamics may take on a charged quality; we may suddenly find ourselves fiercely intolerant of limitations we once accepted; we may find ourselves driven to take a stand on something. Her presence is characterized by compelling attention to certain things: the dead, and death itself; warfare and violence; heroism and honor, kinship and loyalty; and viscerally ecstatic experiences - blood, rage, sex, grief.

So the question that I get from people is, "What do I do?" The answer depends on what you want, and what you dare. Being Hers means a lifetime of being haunted, to at least some degree. It means those close to you being haunted to some degree as well. Those She claims may find their lives being reshaped, sometimes painfully, to make space for Her demands. It means you yourself will be reshaped, and this can also be quite terrifying. But here is what She offers in return: She makes a weapon of you. She delves into your soul and finds the strength, the fierce unconquerable will, the heroic heart you didn't know you had. She offers you greatness. And She protects Her own, so Her claim also confers protection on both you and your kin. I could really go on for pages; perhaps that's a post of its own some day.

People sometimes ask, "Why me?" I can't presume to speak for Her reasons. But from my own observations, I can tell you this. If you think you aren't cut out for Her service because you're not tough or bad-ass enough, because you're wounded, because you're emotionally vulnerable, that may be precisely why She chose you. Experience has shown me that more often than not, it is those with raw hearts and poet's souls that She chooses, rather than the stoic and macho among us. I think perhaps She finds a deep well of emotion provides a lot of raw material for shaping into Her creation, and a passionate heart is more readily sharpened to the fierce joy She cultivates in us. But there are many reasons. Some are chosen because of ancestry and blood. Some for reasons known only to Her and themselves. Some choose themselves and come to Her of their own volition.

You might have the option to decline the relationship if it does not feel right for you. If this is your choice, my very earnest advice is to be exceedingly respectful in your way of declining Her claim on you. The story of the great hero Cu Chulainn is a cautionary tale about what can happen: he not only refuses Her protection and guidance, he insults Her; and She brings about his downfall, giving him a hero's death. So if you must refuse Her, do so with reverence and with gratitude for what's been offered to you. And if you've ever asked Her for anything, if you've called Her name with feeling, I don't recommend attempting to refuse Her claim on you. In Her world, you've already offered yourself to Her.

For those who choose to accept the claim and move into the relationship, a few thoughts on that question, "What do I do?"

The nightmares and the haunting are often Her way of gaining your attention. While being in Her service does mean always being a little haunted, the frightful quality that often comes with the initial contact will usually transform into a more intimate experience once you establish devotional practice. That devotional practice is a whole topic unto itself, so I will delve into that in a future post. For now I just want to close with a bit of advice for those experiencing the initial disturbances.

Your situation will be unique and personal, of course. Generally speaking, the first act you need to do to ease the disturbances and enter the relationship, is to acknowledge Her claim on you, and communicate your willingness to engage. Second, establish a regular devotional practice, with offerings and time in meditation listening to Her. This gives Her opportunities to communicate Her message to you, and begins to create intimacy. Over time this will tend to refocus Her presence into your devotional practice, thereby easing the nightmares and other uncontrolled manifestations. Third, it helps enormously to have a physical space or vessel for Her presence: a shrine, altar, or other space that you intentionally dedicate and invite Her to occupy. This helps to externalize Her presence so that She does not have to constantly occupy your dreams and waking mind in order to have a foothold in your life. It allows you some measure of control over when you engage with Her and when you choose to focus on other things.

Finally, a few resources, since people also ask me what they should read to acquaint themselves with Her. Here are my recommendations:

Source texts: The main source material for Her lore is a handful of Irish texts, most of which were written down in the medieval period by monks, recording a much older stream of oral literature. The texts in which She appears most significantly are the Lebor Gabala Eirenn, or Book of Invasions of Ireland; the First and Second Battles of Mag Tuiredh; and several texts of the Ulster cycle, most especially the Táin Bó Cúailnge, or Cattle Raid of Cooley. She also makes appearances in many other texts throughout the Irish literature.

Analytical/folkloric studies: The most comprehensive work on the Morrigan is War Goddess by Angelique Gulermovich Epstein, a folklore dissertation that surveys all Her appearances in medieval source texts, and uses them to analyze Her lore and role in the Irish mythological and cosmological system. Second, I recommend this 19th century essay The Ancient Irish Goddess of War by W. M. Hennessy.

Next time I'll post some more detailed thoughts about devotional practice.

Shieldmaiden's Song

Inspired by the incoming storm and my devotions, here is a new poem I wrote this morning.

Shieldmaiden's Song

Storm front walks the landscape,
Hooded dark in thunderhead, towering,
Massed weight of storm cascading from shoulders,
Sweeping down to cloak the shadowed land in sheets of rain,
Whispering mist trails behind.
In your wake the dead rise
In the mist the dead rise

Tree tips bare rake the sky
Sharp spear-points glinting wet in the dawn,
A forest of spears, shuddering in the spirit wind,
Ravening for battle,
Massing before you.
Over the spear-points the black wings thunder
Over the spear-points you are winging
Reveling in storm and terror,
Raven-folk gathering,
Tribes of your nation,
We come to you
We rise to you

Phantom Queen, your hollow eyes pour nightmare
And the deep and endless hunger of the grave.
Kind folk turn from you in awe,
Good folk, hoping never to hear you speak their names.
But I have heard you.
I have heard the haunting cry of your voice
And I cannot unhear it.
I have heard the cry of destiny,
I have heard the war drum thundering.
In the night beating
In my chest beating
And I will open for you
I will open for you the Gate
I will give you this life.

No other dawn is coming but this one that has come,
The day of calling,
The day in which we live.
And I in my small frame, breathing courage,
No great chieftain I, but all I am is given.
I will heed the war drum
I will heed your calling
O Queen of mine, terrible in your beauty,
Make of me an ardent spear
Lifted by the strong heart of a hero.
I am yours utterly
I am your weapon,
I am yours utterly
I am your shieldmaiden

In the blood light of dawn
Sky wet with cast droplets, singing blood,
Silence before thunder, harrowing,
Comes the storm Queen,
Comes the great Queen,
Morrigan cloaked in the red dawn
Destiny cloaked in the red dawn.

(c) Morpheus Ravenna 2012

Gathering the tribes

Here I am, emerging from a long silence in this blog, to bring you some news. During the late fall and winter, I have been consumed with my devotional work with the Morrigan, and with bringing the vision I received from Her over the past year into being. I needed for a time to focus on articulating the vision and beginning to share it with my kin and community. Now I am feeling the need to share it a little more broadly.

What we are engaged in is beginning the formation of a resilience network based on strengthening ties of kinship and community, on developing self-reliance and survival skills, and skills for self defense: the Raven Kin. You can read the vision statement here: http://www.ravenkin.net/. Since this network is intended to be kinship and affinity-based, the details on meetings of the network are not posted publicly. If you're drawn to this work based on what you read in the vision statement, you can contact me for more information. We will also be holding an open meetup at PantheaCon, coming up February 17-20 in San Jose, in the Stone City suite.

I'm also driven to continue sharing my devotional work with the Morrigan, to help others connect with and serve Her, and to bring Her priesthood and devotees together. Toward that end, I'm establishing regular dates for devotional practice and work on the shrine, open to any interested folks, here at Stone City. These devotional days will be a time for us to engage in shared worship, connect with others who are drawn to Her service, learn from one another, and help build Her shrine. Second Sunday every other month, beginning February 12. The full calendar of devotional days is up on my website, as well as the Stone City page.

I hope to be writing more regularly in this blog, and I look forward to seeing some of you soon.

The Cattle Raid

Yesterday, I marched on Market Street in San Francisco. Today, I worked on the Morrigan statue, and thought about wealth.

The protests, which are beginning to take on the character of an uprising, are about wealth, and the distribution of wealth; they are about the apotheosis of wealth, and its demonization. They are about something much bigger and more subtle than wealth. They are about the way in which wealth has become a vehicle for the undoing of a civilization and the debasement of a people.

I think of wealth, and the symbolism of wealth. From the earliest times, since before domestication, cattle have meant wealth - cattle in fact were wealth before they were a symbol of wealth. They arise again and again in iconography. Wild cattle painted on cave walls. The Golden Calf. The cattle of Catal Huyuk. The Fehu rune. The Irish Cattle Raid. The bull of Wall Street.

It is the last two that catch my attention today. Working on the statue, contemplating the controlled rage against Wall Street that I had observed, I found myself thinking about the Táin Bó Cúalnge, the Cattle Raid of Cooley, one of the central texts of the Irish heroic cycle.

It begins when the royalty of the province of Connacht, Medb and Ailill, send messengers to Ulster to ask for the loan of their great Brown Bull, Donn Cúailnge, the most excellent and most valuable breeding bull in the provinces of Ireland. Medb and Ailill had a petty argument, you see, over which of them controlled the greatest wealth. Medb was losing the contest, so to prove herself the wealthiest, she had to gain control of the Brown Bull. So: nine messengers are sent to Ulster, and they courteously arrange with the Ulstermen to borrow the bull, and to compensate Ulster with a fair fee of fifty heifers, lands and a fine chariot for the year's use of their bull. This being arranged, the messengers that evening are feasted by their hosts. During this feast, as the tongues of the guests are loosened by drink and enjoyment, they begin to boast that it was inevitable that the great bull should go to Connacht, "for if the bull were not given willingly, he would be given perforce," by way of a threat. This arrogance of course outrages the Ulstermen, whose chieftain proclaims, "I swear by the gods whom I worship unless they take him thus by force, they shall not take him by fair means." Thus the bargain was broken between the provinces, and the hosts began massing for war.

Is there a message in this story that is relevant to our times? It struck me so. Not for nothing is the very icon of Wall Street finance a great, brown bull.

Most people I know do not resent the rich for being rich. Most people I know don't truly envy the rich - we just want enough wealth to live well. We want a social contract within which there is a reciprocity between labor and capital, between workers and employers, between the financial class and the producing class. A fair deal is what we want, and when we feel we have this, we are able to sit down at table together. It is not the wealth of the wealthy that enrages people - it is not class envy or a rejection of their own part in the bargain. It is the arrogance of their position that enrages us.

If the bull is the wealth of our land and the productive capacity of our people, it was willingly that we would have lent it to them, in exchange for a fair and reciprocal sharing of the benefits it would generate. In an honest agreement we would not have begrudged them the use of the bull, because the sharing of it would enrich everyone. But when they show us that they are willing with a careless disregard to take our wealth and give nothing back - to nationalize losses while privatizing profits - when they laugh at us in our own feasting hall, while dining richly on the best of our land, demonstrating that there was never any intention to negotiate honestly - this is where the bargain breaks.

And so we march.

I think that there is a colossal arrogance which has been at play in the halls of finance and government (which are nearly indistinguishable at this point). The actions of these people in disregarding their place in the social contract display an assumption that there is no limit to what they can take from civilization, and no consequence.

I think they are wrong. We have the position of strength, because there are vastly more of us than there are of them, and what they have forgotten in their arrogance is their dependency on us, our productivity, our courtesy as hosts, and our willingness to allow the taking.

They are a few, and we are a legion. They are in our house. This is a cattle raid: they have come for our nation's wealth, and have defied us to stop them taking it.

I think they will be surprised.

On November 5, a coordinated day of action is planned, where people everywhere will pull their money out of the big Wall Street banks and move it to local banks or credit unions. What better way to show that we will not let our wealth be arrogantly taken from us while they laugh at us in our own hall? This is not a protest action. It is your right of self-defense. In the meantime, the occupations and marches continue everywhere. I encourage everyone to engage.

In Honor of Ancestors

It's the season of the Dead, and I've been thinking a lot about Ancestors. This is partly inspired by the preparations we've been making for the Ancestor Shrine at Stone City, which we have been hoping to build at this year's Samhain gathering.

It's also inspired by conversations I've been having with my partner about the notion of Ancestor cults. Most of our historic Pagan cultures on which Neopaganism is based practiced some form of Ancestor worship, many of them quite prominently. Yet for most modern traditions (with some exceptions, of course), there is no such practice, or only a vestigial one. It feels like a piece of the reconstruction or revival of Pagan traditions that is not yet complete. Many of us commonly invoke the Gods, work with land spirits, and the like, but many traditions lack a coherent pattern of practice for connecting with our own Ancestors. Here I mean Ancestors in our own family bloodlines - not just spiritual Ancestors such as the Mighty Dead of the Craft, or long-distant generic Ancestors such as "the Celts". And I think perhaps that distinction is part of the reason this practice has not yet been more fully developed: The vast majority of modern Pagans are first-generation. In other words, most were not raised Pagan, and therefore I suspect that for many, their recent family Ancestors may not seem like meaningful spiritual contacts. Why would I want to invoke the presence and guidance of my great-great-great-grandfather, who was a Protestant? Well, here's why: he has a direct, vested interest in seeing his bloodline succeed. And who should we expect to take a greater interest in our personal problems and successes: the Gods, or our own Ancestors? Our Ancestors may have more limited powers and spheres of influence than the Gods, but their wisdom is of a kind that is more directly linked to our human needs and conditions, than the (relatively) vast and timeless powers of the Gods.

So I've been asking myself this question: What would a modern Ancestor cult look like? I began my practice by adding people from my direct family line to my Ancestor altar, and speaking to them when I make my offerings. Perhaps we can devise practices in which we make honoring our own Ancestors a more regular part of our workings: since most Pagans open ritual space with an invocation or invitation to helping spirits of some kind (Guardians, elementals, etc.), perhaps we ought to invite our own Ancestors at the same time, rather than just honoring them at Samhain. Perhaps we ought to revive folk practices like Decoration Day, or adopt elements from Latin Dia de los Muertes celebrations: visiting cemeteries, caring for and beautifying the graves of our Ancestors, bringing them gifts.

Lately I am also thinking about Ancestral legacies, and in this I'm also inspired by two other things: the movement toward re-learning and restoring old-fashioned skills and crafts, and the current democratic uprisings taking place all over the world. These movements are both responses to the instability of people's lives in present times, and the degradation of basic security and standard of living of the common people in much of the Western world as the plutocratic elite class strips the wealth of our nations. These movements both strike me as very powerful, perhaps the most powerful, ways of honoring our direct Ancestors. It is all well and good to offer libations and prayers, but I suspect that my great-great-great-grandfather, whose family were farmers and who fought in the Revolutionary War, would be more glad to know that the skills he learned and passed down through generations, and the Constitutional Republic he risked death to establish, were being restored and not dissipated.

No matter where your bloodlines come from, some of your Ancestors likely fought for something equally historic and equally meaningful. How might you honor them and what they worked to establish and to pass on?

October is the season of the Dead. This year, it is also the month that marks ten years of American wars, starting with the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan. Here in the US and most of the Western world, we are coming to grips with the fact that we have been sorely betrayed by our democratic leaders, and that our self-governing process has been fundamentally corrupted by greed and wealth. This month is being observed by worldwide occupation movements in protest of the degradation of democracy and human life. This month, I am honoring my Ancestors with prayers, and with actions. I will be joining the Occupy San Francisco rally on October 15, in honor of my Ancestors who contributed to the first American Revolution and so that their legacy might be preserved. And in honor of the life-preserving skills of my Ancestors, I'll also be bringing eggs and produce that we grew here, to help feed the occupiers.

And maybe, if we remember them and if we honor them in ways that matter, our Ancestors can help. Perhaps we should invoke their spirits to march with us. Perhaps they might bless and help this movement toward re-invigorating the tree of liberty, hopefully without blood this time.

You can find related October 15 events here. For other info on Occupation movements in your area, here.

Answering the Call

This is a quick post to announce the upcoming intensive I will be offering this fall along with my beloved co-priestesses T. Thorn Coyle and Sharon Knight.

We are calling this intensive Answering the Call: Battle Goddesses in Times of Change. It represents the next stage of the work the three of us have been called to by our Gods. Those who have been reading this blog or were present with us at the Morrigan devotional last PantheaCon will be aware that my work with the Morrigan, as with many of you, has been taken "up a notch" in the past year or two. We three, as with many of you, have been hearing an urgent call to rise up, prepare ourselves for times of change, help our communities become strong and resilient.

Two years ago, during our collaboration on the Stone City Samhain rituals and intensive work with the Morrigan, we talked about the strong call we had each felt from both the Morrigan and Freyja in our devotional work. At that Samhain, the Battle Goddess workshops were conceived, which Thorn began offering last Samhain along with her partner Robert, and has continued throughout the year, providing short workshops for self-defense and empowerment training.

We came together again for the great Morrigan devotional at PantheaCon, and as I have written here, that ritual was like the unleashing of a dike - it was a call to battle, opening the door for a great force of inspiration and empowerment that many of us in Her service continue to feel.

This fall's weekend intensive is the next stage in this work. We each feel a strong calling to help mobilize and prepare our people for the challenges of our times, through the guidance and urging of our devotional relationships with these Battle Goddesses. So this is the purpose for this gathering.

It will necessarily be smaller than the massing of the PantheaCon ritual - our focus here will be on in-depth work and practice with those who feel strongly called to join with us in this work. Attendance at this gathering will be limited to 30. It will be held at Stone City, where my work on the Morrigan statue and shrine are underway, and will provide an opportunity for participants to help with that project.

Initial details are up on a FaceBook event page, as well as on my website. Registration will be through Thorn's Solar Cross organization.

I look forward to meeting you in Her service.

At the end of empire

London burning. This weekend, along with the rest of the world, I watched the reports coming in with awe, distress, dread. It is not entirely unexpected, but terrible nonetheless.

I am reading that the riots are to be understood as an uprising motivated by class and racial inequity, by the frustration of an underclass betrayed by ruling elites of the failing empire in which they live, watching the wealth and privilege that surrounds them slip through their fingers as their standard of living degrades. Have we seen this before? Watching London burn, I am irresistibly reminded of Boudicca's rebellion and burning of London during the Roman occupation. The parallel between the two is surely not complete, but I can't help contemplating it. Much of the youth engaged in the riots, I read, are the younger generation of Britain's colonized peoples. Britain may not be their ancestral homeland as it was that of Boudicca's people, but nonetheless both are responses to the inequities generated by empire. It is important to note that the Iceni, Boudicca's tribe, were collaborators with the Roman empire before rebellion; their uprising was motivated by betrayal that pushed beyond the limits of tolerance; it was motivated by a sudden realization that the promised benefits of empire would never be theirs, that the empire was in fact built on their backs. This is not to glamorize either movement, nor to justify the acts committed in them. The youth mobs have hurt innocents and destroyed homes and businesses of their own neighbors who suffered as much as they have; Boudicca's armies killed men, women, and children alike and visited unspeakable atrocities on those in their path. Uprisings may be sparked by real injustice, and in the releasing of that rage and frustration go far beyond the boundaries of justice.

We are witnessing now the decay of our civilization, which is unmistakeably an empire in collapse. Many of you reading this, are, like me, viewing current events from a position of relative privilege and comfort, but it seems clear to me that this privilege and comfort are both built on the backs of others, and cannot last much longer at that. Our own cities may burn with strife some time soon. The unrest in Europe, of which the current riots are only the most recent and severe oubreak, has largely been triggered by forces which are already in motion here in the US as well: Debt/bank default crises, currency collapse, government austerities forced by uncontrollable deficits, abandonment of the poor and needy as services are eliminated, and civil unrest as the disenfranchised by class and race realize they have nothing left to gain by playing within the rules. Every one of these forces is already in motion here in various stages. The President himself announced baldly that austerities will be taken from support services before any cuts to the military budget are considered. This could be a scene straight out of the late Roman Empire.

Meanwhile, representative government in our Congress is being strangled by the new "Supercommittee", which has been set up with little outcry, while we were distracted by the WWF wrestling match in Washington and historic downgrading of the government's credit standing. This new body, in case it has not yet been made clear, gives its 12 members, to be appointed from within Congress without public input, sweeping powers over taxation and use of public funds - the power to select which elements of government will be supported and which will be defunded or discontinued. This while having only the merest nod of responsibility toward Congress itself; our representatives can only respond to the committee's decision via a ratifying vote, yes or no; and even this is a coercive vote where failure to approve the committee's plan will result in disabling cuts to all branches of government. This, my friends, is taxation without representation. From any point on the political spectrum, left to right, this is surely plain.

The federal government has quietly been laying the groundwork for military troops to be deployed into the streets to quell future unrest, increasing secret surveillance of private citizens, positioning the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA to deal with "threats to national security". I don't think it requires a paranoid person to put all these things together into a rather dystopic picture of our near future.

Watching London burn it was borne home to me that this is what the Morrigan has been urging me, urging us to prepare for. This is a call to action, to arms. Not just for those who hold an allegiance to Her, but all people who love their liberty. We are at a juncture in history where corporatist/industrial capitalism is hitting a wall in terms of resource depletion, fiscal and economic decay, and it is dragging democracy down with it. Almost no one now denies that our government serves corporations more than it serves people. Our civil institutions are decaying as the ruling elites consolidate ownership of government in order to protect themselves as they finish looting our society of material, financial and social wealth. When the elites have taken everything they can, what will remain is the shell of a democratic society in which the people will be slaves in all but name. Or, perhaps we will be left to reinvent ourselves in a post-industrial civilization like peasants after the withdrawal of Rome, choosing between autonomy without help versus feudal serfdom under the protection of the remaining elites.

I think we have some choice about this: we can fight the looting of our civilization, and we can protect ourselves and our kin from the worst effects of it. But I also want to say that much of this change is inevitable. If, as so many of us have been saying for so long, our civilization is unsustainable in its current form, then it follows that the current form will end, and the question really is how to best position ourselves toward what is to come after, and how to minimize the suffering caused by the transition. Thus for me, though the near future looks rather terrifying, I also feel enormous hope and exhilaration about the opportunity for change in the long term. I also feel that I have an obligation both to my ancestors and to those who will come after us, to heed the Morrigan's call to arms and do what I can to help prepare our communities to better weather the storm.

So what can we do to protect ourselves, to protect the resources we still have? I don't claim to have any new answers to this question. Many thinkers and leaders have put more time into this question than I have. But here is my instinct: power is to be found not just in numbers, but in strength of bonds. That we need both unity and autonomy. I find myself thinking again and again of the cellular pattern of Celtic tribal society. Individual households within clans and tribes, operating locally and relatively autonomously except at times of threat and need, when war leaders were chosen and delegated temporary authority for specific campaigns. I'm drawn to the parallels between this system and the leaderless cellular structure of revolutionary undergrounds and resistance movements.

I feel strongly and with a near-prophetic force that this is going to require more militancy than most of us are comfortable with. I'm contemplating this article I recently read on the role of militancy in resistance movements. The authors interviewed hold radical views, and I don't endorse everything they say. But I encourage you to take the time to read the full article. The authors bring up some points I think we need to consider. Primarily, the insight that persuasion and reasoned debate have no influence on the drives and incentives motivating the elites - force and money are the things they understand. If this is true then the two forms of action which have the greatest real potential to bring change and to benefit people rather than corporations, are removing our wealth from the economy of empire and investing it in localized tribal economies; and intelligent application of resistance force. In both cases, we have to first be prepared. We have to create the localized tribal economies which will allow us to support ourselves autonomously, and we have to be willing, daring, and skilled enough to make forceful resistance viable.

Most of my community and probably the great majority of readers are not militant folks. We are soft, urban, sophisticated; accustomed to comfortable homes, costume parties, and the assumption that we can change the direction of civilization by voting, recycling and not buying clothing from the Gap. I know for many of you my views will seem extreme. But I can only speak the truth as I see it, and what I see is that we are nearing the end of Weimar USA, and what life requires of us will be different from what we have known before. Even if you are not personally called to active resistance against the elites, you will need the same self-defense and survival skills in order to survive and thrive in the era of instability we are entering.  We need discipline, intelligence, preparation. We need to be a skilled people, who can survive together when the trucks aren't delivering enough food to the city's markets or when soldiers or mobs threaten our neighborhoods. We will all need to know who our kin are, whose support we can count on and what each of us has to offer. We need to train ourselves in self-defense, weapons skills, first aid, survival, self-sufficiency. Above all, we need to commit ourselves to honorable resistance.

I am continuing to think on ways of supporting and mobilizing our communities. For today, please think about making a commitment to yourself in Her name, or in the name of your ancestors and descendents: to begin preparing. As a place to start, think about commiting to beginning training in one self-defense skill and one survival skill: Judo and vegetable gardening, or Krav maga and first-aid, or handgun practice and food storage, or Irish stick-fighting and home energy production. If you are already on your way with skills like these, please consider what you can do to bring others in your community along.

I hope to have more to share soon; I leave you with this quote from the British chieftain Calgacus:

You have not tasted servitude. There is no land beyond us and even the sea is no safe refuge when we are threatened by the Roman fleet... It is no use trying to escape their arrogance by submission or good behaviour. They have pillaged the world: when the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything, they scour the sea. If an enemy is rich, they are greedy, if he is poor, they crave glory. Neither East nor West can sate their appetite. They are the only people on earth to covet wealth and poverty with equal craving. They plunder, they butcher, they ravish, and call it by the lying name of 'empire'. They make a desert and call it 'peace'.