Celebrate your Pagan heart.
Everything and everyone has magic.
Fun is magic. We can change our lives and the world for the better through fun during ritual.
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“Drinking the water, I thought how earth and sky are generous with their gifts and how good it is to receive them. Most of us are taught, somehow, about giving and accepting human gifts, but not about opening ourselves and our bodies to welcome the sun, the land, the visions of sky and dreaming, not about standing in the rain ecstatic with what is offered.”
–Linda Hogan in Sisters of the Earth
...When someone says "Minoan" many people immediately think of the snake goddess figurines from Knossos. But there are other goddess figurines from ancient Crete that are just as interesting, maybe more so. Case in point: the Poppy Goddess at the top of this post.
She wears a crown with three poppy seed pods that have been scored so the latex will ooze out, part of the process for making opium, which the Minoans appear to have used ritually. Like many of the other bell jar figurines (so called because of the shape of their skirts), she has her arms raised in a gesture that looks a lot like the Minoan sacred horns. In Ariadne's Tribe, we call this post Upraised Arms. It's one of several ecstatic postures that we use in our spiritual practice.
...It's still the single best rationale for pagan ritual that I've ever heard.
Back in the early days of the Wiccan revival, a reporter asked Gardner's first post-Valiente priestess, Dayonis, "Why do you do your rituals?"
"Because," she told him, "if we didn't, the Sun wouldn't come up in the morning."
Now that's a proper pagan answer.
Aunt Doreen—rather peevishly, one thinks—later dismissed this reply as simple-minded. Well, she knew Dayonis better than I do.
But I still think she missed the point.
Three things I'm excited about exploring in 2018:
Elen of the Ways - I discovered this goddess a little over a year ago, and felt instant belonging and surprise that I hadn't heard of her before, and that I hadn't thought to go looking for such a goddess. It felt like remembering I have a mother, or something. :) A horned/antlered goddess and lady of the green... how perfect for me! I've been reading everything I can about her, and I signed up for a now-filled course offered by a priestess of Elen (Walking the Antlered Road) that includes a year of lessons, journaling, movement-meditations, soundings, chants with wrist malas, and an oracle deck. It has been amazingly exciting to get to know Elen, and to start to see how many of the goddesses I've already been drawn to are probably-to-definitely versions of her paleolithic, pan-Indo-European (and perhaps beyond) presence and enduring veneration. The Welsh name, Elen, is but one. You might be as surprised and delighted as I to discover where the others have been all this time! So I recommend Caroline Wise's book, "Finding Elen: The Quest for Elen of the Ways," as well as Elen Sentier's books, and I will be writing more about her in this blog in 2018, and suggesting the connections I have seen.
...
Listen.
The veil is thin.
I spin the web.
I call the circle.
I honor the ancestors.
I am she who
weaves the whole
She who
holds the all
She who
knows the pattern of the ages.
A companion recording that goes with this post is available here. I also created a free October Magic kit that is available here.
...The following is a story I wrote almost five years ago and posted to my first blog, The Magickal Pen. I love to read the works of Dion Fortune, and especially am intrigued by her use of fiction as a tome of teaching the mysteries. She is not the only author who makes use of this vehicle for studies and so, as one who seeks inspiration from many sources, I thought I would give it a try.
I have waited until what I believed to be the right moment to share it again and to a broader audience and now seems to "it". There are so many things at this point in time that are pulling us in many directions and the footing and foundations that we may have worked so carefully at being the staples of our spiritual diets may be shifting and uneasy. So, we need to find new ways of engaging our learning and be open and receptive to all that can serve as lessons along our chosen paths. Maybe all that is needed to renew and shore up those foundations is a foray into a world of creation and fiction that might turn a key to a new awakening within. You be the judge....
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