The winter festival time can be stressful, even for Pagans. Some honor their family’s holiday traditions with a bit of discomfort. Others are caught up in the responsibilities of cooking, baking, gifting and visiting like everyone else.
Whatever you celebrate this time of year, tarot can help you make it more joyful, more inspiring and more fun.
This blog, 78 Magickal Tools, is about using tarot in ritual and magick. I believe that the only limits on what tarot can help us do are the limits we impose ourselves.
In my posts I like to give ideas of ways to use the cards with the hope that you, the reader, will be inspired to discover and create even more ways to incorporate the cards into your spiritual practice.
Your tarot deck is a fabulous tool for magick. Each card carries specific energy. You can use your cards as altar tools to invoke energies and entities. You can use your cards to offer protection, to quickly usher in change and to assist with healing.
You can use tarot as part of formal magick in ritual. You can also use tarot in casual magick by carrying an image with you or pinning an image to your wall.
I’m back from my summer travels! We drove from Florida to Connecticut, where I was happy to give tarot readings to many friends both old and new.
The long trip in our Ford E250 Cargo Van got me thinking about tarot magick for travel. These days I do it without even really thinking about it. Gas? Check. Oil Change? Check. Magick? Check.
On the weekend of Vancouver Pagan Pride, one of my tradition sisters offered to touch up my new sacred tattoo that I had received about six weeks prior. "It's really great for someone who was new, and her lines are excellent," she said, "but it's fading a little already and I want to dress it up a little, if that's okay with you."
My spirit-sister Jennica had done the tattoo - a triple moon with a blue pentagram in the center of the full one - in a cast circle as part of sacred ceremony. It was my first tattoo ever and that meant a lot to me. I had insisted upon this because I had been told the story of how my initiator Lord Redleaf had received the Green Man tattoo on his chest as part of ritual in a cast circle and it moved me. I told my trad sister Amity Loyce this and let her know that it was very important to me that it remain sacred, and still done in a cast circle and empowered. "Sure, that's fine," she said with a nod. "I don't have any problems doing that! I always wanted to tattoo in a cast circle . . ."
"Even though modern culture has done it's best to corrupt art into a celebrity production machine, simply another form of entertainment, designed specifically as an opiate to the downtrodden, gluttonous, and vapid, it fails because the artist knows better. Art is magic. Art is one of the rawest shamanistic forms of connection with the universal source of everything, but only if the artist is brave enough to give the audience what it needs rather than what it thinks, or has been told, it wants." --Peter Beckley
The past few weeks have found me focused on a personal project of connecting to the lunar energies. As a practicing witch I have worked with the lunar energies regularly for many years. I have worked ritual, written poetry and offered up praise to Her in all of her phases. So, it would seem that my connection is very deep already. The beauty of this Path, however, is that there is always something more that can be learned. Something new that can be experienced and a deeper level of knowing that can be brought into your work.
I have been on a mission to fully experience the energies of the Moon in all of her cycles and through the lunation of travel through the Zodiacal Wheel. Having a good working knowledge of astrology and planetary magick helps this journey, but the intent of connection to the phases of cycle is not dependent on it. I am also an Air sun sign, so analysis comes more readily than the emotional and feeling nature. This is precisely why I felt this work would be very productive.
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...
Janet Boyer
I love the idea of green burials! I first heard of Recompose right before it launched. I wish there were more here on the East Coast; that's how I'd l...