I participated in an online May pagan celebration in a mainstream, non-pagan-specific space dedicated to fragrance, and it was amazing. The May Day week coincided with a celebration for C.'s birthday, so there was lots of celebrating going on in my house offline as well. The houseguest celebrations ended up lasting much longer than originally planned and that led to some changes in my Days of the Week fragrance selections. 

The week of May Eve and May Day 2025 the Gourmand board on the Fragrantica forum held online pagan celebrations. The host dedicated each day to a different set of deities and cultural groups, including Ostara, Flora (celebrating Floralia), Lada (and Slavic culture), Brigit, and others. She started the week off with a role playing adventure, inviting the participants to choose names as various nonhuman beings such as nymphs. I chose to be a hobbit for the week.

I continue to make posts relating to our virtual yacht, the Celestial Admiral, usually just on the first and last days of the weekly themes to provide a way of sailing on to the next theme, but sometimes I make other yacht posts too. This time, the first day of Spring Folklore was all about Ostara, so I offered a side trip to time travel to the Ostara celebration in coastal California in the early 90s. The host signed up for the side trip so I described the festival and the sacrifice to Ran, and provided some old photos of the site and of non-ritual activities. Ran is a sea goddess. After our virtual time travel to the ritual where we honored her, I thanked the participants and assured them we will have safe virtual yachting thanks to our honoring of Ran. 

The host dedicated each day of that week to a different goddess and celebration. One of the celebrations was Floralia, dedicated to Flora, goddess of flowers. For Floralia, I wore Aqua Allegoria Flora Nymphea by Guerlain. For May Eve, I wore Chamade by Guerlain, a fragrance that is made to simulate a fast heartbeat from romantic activities. For May Day, I wore May Flower Moon Alchemy by Alkemia. All of those fragrances, I acquired through sample swaps and traveling boxes from the Fragrantica forum. At the end of the day on May Day, I wore Midnight Bonfire, one of my Magicalrealistartist fragrances and part of the Erin's Garden Collection. I also wore A Midnight Stroll by Gucci, part of their Alchemist's Garden collection, which I had originally sampled from a sample swap but then acquired a bottle.

For the Slavic culture day, I shared a link to this blog, Slavic Pagan Holidays 2018 part 2 Spring. It was welcomed and appreciated.

Link: https://www.witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/gnosis-diary/slavic-pagan-holidays-2018-part-2-spring.html

Since the discussion host thanked me for my link, and the whole thread was very pagan and had lots of great pagan info, pictures, videos, songs, etc. on it, I tried to link back to the discusssion. After that, I then included information about what fragrances I was using the rest of the week when the houseguests who came for C.'s birthday party unexpectedly had to stay several days and I was unable to access the place where I keep my usual Days of the Week fragrances. But every time I tried to save anything on here with the link included I lost everything past the link, including when I made an elaborate chart of the days of the week, my usual fragrances, and my substitute fragrances. I lost the work I had gotten up at dawn to write while the guests were asleep. Since it was the third time I had lost everything past the link I decided that was a sign I should not try to include it in this post. Instead, I will simply tell you that the link I was trying to post went to the Spring Folklore thread on the Gourmand board on the Fragrantica forum.

And I will include the information about my substitute Days of the Week fragrances on another post. Days of the Week is really a separate topic anyway, I was only going to include it here because the party and guests coincided with May Day week. I realize now my chart was not going to work because it only include the past and the present: my previous selections and my selections for this week. It didn't include the future: the selections I will make for spring and summer, and the way my Days of the Week tray will be transformed by my new insights. That won't all fit in a chart, it needs a whole separate post. I'll run it after the posts I've already scheduled for the rest of May, which are the rest of the Novel Gnosis posts and then 2 posts about the Magicalrealistartist fragrances. I have not yet made a new Tuesday selection for summer, but I will make one by the time the Days of the Week Fragrances Revisited post runs, which will probably be in June. 

After the Spring Folklore weekly theme was over, I continued being role playing as the hobbit Carnation Harfoot for the next weekly theme: Sword & Sorcery, in which participants were encouraged to choose a character class and other role playing game choices and to play their character for the week. This was the first full-fledged RPG participation I had done since my experiences in the 90s with my store, The Science Fiction Store, and the group that had met there to play. I had thought for a long time that I would never do any role playing games again after that, although I continued to have great memories of my early RPG participation, especially as a teenage DM in high school, which was where I learned to world-build, a skill I later used in original fiction. 

I had started some game-like storytelling with my yachting posts and we had been doing some role playing type posts during the Spring Folklore theme but the Sword & Sorcery theme was the first time I was in a group where we not only chose game species to be but also character classes and assembled an adventuring party. Carnation Harfoot was the party's healer. It's been fun and I find I have let go of all the things that I needed to let go of in order to enjoy role-playing games again.