Another World is our monthly supporters’ journal where we published early-access and exclusive-access essays and other in-depth works. Supporters also receive free digital downloads, free course enrollment, and discounts on purchases in our online bookstore.
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In this month’s Another World
North Wind People
Our third essay from newly-added writer, R.G. Miga:
It’s hard to discriminate against outsiders when you identify with a power that’s thoroughly indifferent to human affairs. Individuals can be skilled or unskilled at dealing with the North Wind; groups can strive to stay in right relation with it, or take their chances. But if we live in its domain, we’re all subject to its rules. North Wind people can get together and boast about how tough we are: the coldest winter we’ve been through; how hardy our gear is; how narrowly we’ve escaped whiteouts, black ice, frostbite, hypothermia. We can quietly (and sometimes enviously) look down our noses at those southern softies with their endless warm weather, panicking at the first sight of a snowflake. Regardless, we will all be equally humbled if we get too prideful. The North Wind has no patience for arrogance or idealism. No one controls it, and no one speaks for it.
The Pagan Music LIST 24
The twenty-fourth edition of the Pagan Music List, featuring Waldkauz, Helisir, and EMIAN.
Soap Has Always Been With Us, and Longer Still
also published at From The Forests of Arduinna (paywalled)
Rhyd Wildermuth explores the “history” of soap, a substance which has been around much longer than humans themselves:
Soap isn’t a new thing, or even a thing humans invented.
Soap is the offspring of fire, flesh, and water, born in the ashes of forest fires, cooking fires, and funeral pyres.
The “oldest” record of soap is from Babylon, some 4800 years ago as we moderns regard time. A clay tablet bears the magic formula for its creation, but only for a specific kind of soap. It’s a recipe for cleaning wool so it can be dyed better. That’s the oldest record we know of, but all that actually tells us is that it’s probably one of the first times anyone decided that a specific recipe for soap needed to be chiseled into a specific stone.
Combine wood ash with fat and water, it directs the reader. That’s how soap is born, not “created” or “invented” but rather arising out of something else.
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