“NOW this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.”

(full poem here: http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_lawofjungle.htm)

I go by the name Mowg Lellan.  I’m on facebook, if you like.  My primary identifier is Pagan, more eclectic than anything else.  I don’t consider myself Wiccan, though like most people, that’s what I found first.  I have more of a shamanistic bent, meaning that I do work with spirits, mostly my own, rarely from external sources.  (Everyone starts as a stranger before they become a friend, but spiritually, I make new friends very slowly)  I am not psychic.  I’m pretty science based.  I believe magick is an energy we don’t have the instruments to measure yet, but someday we will, and we’ll be able to do this stuff at will without any superstition…but right now, we only know that what we do works, and we’re not sure why, so all the ritual and hubbub is kind of required, because somewhere in that mix is the thing that works, the thing that switches our brain to the correct brain wave state to make magick happen.

I took the name Mowgli because I grew up in an abusive household.  If you’ve ever read Kipling, it only bears a small resemblance to the Disney version.  The story that most people aren’t aware of (which is a period piece, so it’s a bit racist, but that was what was going on then, so you have to keep that in mind) is that Mowgli is an orphan because Shere Khan killed his parents.  (Once a year, Shere Khan has the right to kill humans…there’s another story on that called How Fear Came to the Jungle, I think) and he wants to kill Mowgli because he knows that little boys grow up to be men with guns who have vendettas.  He wants to get Mowgli while he’s small and harmless.  Mowgli doesn’t know this at all.  He’s just a hungry baby, adopted by Raksha (her name translates to “The Demon” in the wolf language) who tells Shere Khan from the safety of her cave that she will raise Mowgli to kill him.

So here’s this little guy, who doesn’t know much beyond eating and pooping, and his destiny, whether he likes it or not, is to hunt down and kill the biggest thing in the jungle.  There is no escaping that.  It will find him.

When you grow up in an abusive environment, you have no idea how broken it is until you get out into the world.  Once you realize how broken your family is, (and by extension, you are) you can fall into despair, or you can try to fight it.  I didn’t want to waste any time, I wanted to live my life as much and as long as possible as a loving, complete human being, and to deal with all the anger, all the hatred, all the despair, as quickly as possible.

Taking the name Mowgli meant a few things.  It meant facing my fears head-on, with no delays.  It meant staying humble (“Mowgli” means “naked frog” in the wolf tongue, because he is furless and can only crawl, so he is harmless) and not getting sucked into “high priestess-itis.”  It also meant having a foot in both worlds, the mundane and the magickal, and it quite likely meant not really fitting completely into either world completely.

I was okay with that if it meant being a healthy human being.

Nowadays I understand the truth of something someone told me…”You have to beware the names you take when you’re in crisis.”  The symbols you adopt, the ideas you adorn yourself with…if they are who you are, then you are defined by your crisis…you can never move past it, because if you do, you lose your identity.  In order to move past it, it has to be either forgotten, or transformed.

A friend of mine called me “Mowglellan” once.  (There’s all kinds of variants my friends use.  Mowgster, Mowgalicious, Mowgtastic, etc., but my favourite one is “Mowgliferous.”)  She said it was a variant based on Magellan, because I never get lost.  I’ve lived so many places I just have a really good sense of direction.

Mowg Lellan it is.  I do a bit of work with Ariadne, so I feel it is fitting.  And I think Ariadne has led me through this winding path to this particular bit of work, my burning.

And here I am.