Pagan Culture - Pagan Family
Teen Witch
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Teen Witch:
Wicca for a New Generation
by Silver Ravenwolf,
Llewellyn, 1998.
Editor’s note: as this is currently a top-seller for the publisher and the only book like it on the market, we’ve included two different reviews of this title.
The cover is inexcusably sleazy, but if you can get past that, Teen Witch is a well-intentioned and informative book packed with helpful material, written in a breezy style that should appeal to a wide range of teen readers.
Silver Ravenwolf bravely addresses popular misconceptions about the Craft and brings clarity and a real sense of ethics and integrity to the subject: her heart is very clearly in the right place.
Pagan Kids’ Activity Book
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Pagan Kids’ Activity Book
By Amber K, Horned Owl
Publishing 1986, 1998.
You’ve been waiting for this one for a long time. Pagan Kids’ is more than a coloring book. It’s a unique collection of games, keep-sakes, gifts and activities that has something for kids of all ages.
Pagan Kids’ is a great teaching tool offering a variety of activities that are easily adapted for family fun or solitary enjoyment. Brilliantly, the entire book is narrated by two children, Liam and Lesley, who add a personal touch that ensures your children feel they are part of a bigger Pagan family.
Circle Round
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Circle Round:
Raising Children in Goddess Traditions
By Starhawk, Diane Baker and Anne Hill
Bantam Books, 1999.
Circle Round is a bright, profusely illustrated book of stories, rituals, and crafts written for parents raising children in the Goddess traditions. Starhawk, Diane Baker and Anne Hill took three years of writing, meetings, listening to others and trying out their ideas on others as well as on their own children to complete this book. The amount of effort they went to resulted in an attractive book that is well thought out and
Each chapter covers the meaning of Pagan festivals and celebrations, along with rituals and songs, while offering stories from a wide range of Pagan cultures.
Crafts, games, dances and recipes appropriate for the time of year help to create exciting ways to top off your celebrations. I found the easy to bake recipe for “Crescent Moon Sweet Cream Biscuits” exceptionally quick and yummy.
Tarot Cards With Our Children
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The Wise Child
Tarot Cards With Our Children
by Cait Johnson
Most of us on the Pagan way honor and use Tarot cards; they are the keys that unlock our inner wisdom. Rather than giving our power over to some outer “expert” that has all the answers, we run our questions and issues through the filter of our own deep seeing with the cards as our allies. What better gift can we give our children than a way into that deep seeing from an early age?
I am always impressed by how quickly children “get into” the cards and how inherently fascinating they find them. I realized while watching my own son that children respond to the cards in age-appropriate ways throughout their early years. Keeping in mind that the age divisions here are meant to be flexible — every child is so gloriously unique — these rough guidelines may be helpful in facilitating your child’s experiences with the Tarot.
Becoming Demeter
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Becoming Demeter
The Sacred Healing Circles Of Home And Family
By Cassie Premo Steele
Family life and the home, as many of us know, can be places of great pain from which “the sacred” can seem like a refuge. This is particularly true for families who have not learned how to deal with life’s sadnesses and who instead numb themselves through denial, drinking or violence. This past spring I was given the opportunity to learn a great lesson about the sacred healing circles of home and family. As lessons often are, it was a tortuously painful one: our kitten disappeared.
My husband and I, married less than a year, had decided to give Laura, his 9-year-old daughter and my stepdaughter, a kitten at the solstice. The kitten—named Melissa after Melissa Etheridge, one of Laura’s favorite singers—was a perky, wild, crazy little thing. We instantly fell in love with the way she would run at the speed of light through the house and the next minute collapse, purring loudly, in our laps. Even my husband, who is allergic to cats and has politely kept his distance from “my” cat, Cecie, bonded with Melissa during two weeks in January when I was away in Mexico at a writers’ workshop. To my amazement, I arrived home, finding my husband with Melissa on his lap more often than not, speaking softly to her, calling her “Little Cat” and Cecie “Fat Cat,” labelling them as parents will often do.
Teach What You Know
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Live a Pagan life, and your children will, too.
My five-year-old has lost her shoes, again. We’ve searched up, down, and in-between looking for them, but they’re nowhere to be found. Finally, she comes up with an idea: “Put a strawberry under a glass, Mommy! That will bring my shoes back!”
In our house, if you want to find a lost object, you offer a treat to the resident fey for help finding it. My husband does this by dangling a ripe, fresh strawberry around the kitchen for a few minutes while calling to the fey, and then trapping the berry under a glass. When we get our stuff back, he promises, you can have the berry.
We get a strawberry from the garden, and my girl does the same trick she’s seen her dad do; and a few minutes later, her shoes turn up in the middle of the dining room floor.
Often, when we’re at community gatherings, people comment on how knowledgeable my little Witches are about magic and the Craft. Even my mom has noted — with a mix of awe and discomfort — that my kids can manifest parking spaces in the most crowded places.
“How do you teach them?” is a question I field all the time; often followed by guesses about what kind of curriculum we use, or how often I sit them down to study spellwork.
