PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

To begin using your magical powers, you must first set the stage, the perfect environments in which to incubate your ideas. You’ll do this by building a stone shrine, your touchstone for daily conjuring and contemplation. By preparing your home and sparking your inner flame, you can clear away personal blocks and invite in the friendly spirits who will aid and abet your supernatural pursuits. It is of the utmost importance to have in your home a shrine or altar, a power center, where you can keep your stones and perform rituals and spells. This is your energy source where you can renew yourself and your spirits every day. The more you use your altar, the more it will build up energy, and the more effective your spells will be.

On a low table, place a white scarf and candles from each of the colors of the spectrum: white, violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, pink, red, and black. Place them in the miraculous arching shape of a rainbow. Take amber incense and place it in a quartz crystal bowl at the center of the rainbow. Amber is good for creativity and healing and also contains crystalline grains of rock resin from Mother Nature. Keep a wand of sage or a smudging stick in a fireproof bowl or seashell on your altar and use it to clear the energy and sanctify the space every day.

Individuation is problematic. That's the unofficial Modern Minoan Paganism motto.

It's sort of a joke, a witty response to difficult questions about divinity. But it's also very serious.

Long ago, you were treacherously bound by your enemies, the gods.

For centuries, you've lain brooding, awaiting the End of Days, when all bonds will be released, and you will take your final revenge on those who wronged you.

What song do you sing in your heart as you wait? Really, what else could it be but....

The Song of Fenris

(To the tune of: Ragmop)

Scrying is the art of divining by looking into an appropriate surface. It could be water, a mirror on the wall, a crystal ball, or a slap of rock. For that matter, some people are quite talented at seeing visions in the flames of fire or in the bottom of a teacup. Smooth, natural surfaces are much better and less distracting, however. 

I like to think that a chunk of shiny black obsidian was the first scrying mirror. We know the ancients had special prophets and priestesses who engaged in foretelling the future, and they were making and using tools of their trade from various crystals at hand. No doubt they would be delighted to know we are still using crystal balls made from translucent quartz and mysterious volcanic obsidian! I cleanse mine before and after each use with rainwater that has set through at least one day of sun and one night of moonlight, but rituals can get as elaborate as you want! 

I suppose it was bound to happen.

A few days after Lúnasa, I take a community elder out to do some shopping. Dismay and delight take hands and dance in me as I notice that they're already stocking the Samhain candy.

(Delight because my nostrils quiver at even the slightest scent of Samhain; dismay because, well, it's freaking Lúnasa, for gods' sakes.)

When does the Samhain shopping season officially begin? Well, I guess we know.

Call it Samhain creep. I suppose we should be grateful it hasn't got as far as Midsummer's yet.

(Buy now: avoid the Samhain Rush.)

Every pagan fantasizes from time to time about what that bright, shiny New Pagan world of the future might look like.

I once heard Sitting Bull's great-grandson, Ernie LaPointe (b. 1948), give what is probably the single most incisive description that I've ever heard, of how non-scriptural traditions operate.

“The Lakota Way,” he told the interviewer, “is transmitted through story and song, and actualized in ceremony.”

Transmitted through story and song, and actualized in (I'll translate into Pagan here) ritual.

You, witch: in your bones, you know that what he says is true.

When I first came into the Craft, nigh on (gods help us) 50 years ago now, I knew it in my bones too. “Teach me the stories and songs,” I said to them. But they couldn't. We didn't have any.

In those days, the Old Ways were young.

Now, half a century later (thank Goddess) that's no longer the case. Now, after a lifetime of gathering, if you come to me with a question, there's a story or song for, if not quite every occasion, at least (given a little wiggle room/lateral thinking) for most: just as ever we've done since the dawning of days.

Once, we were impoverished. Now, my friends, we are wealthy: rich in story and song.

An archivist from the Minnesota Historical Society who's currently working with the Local Pagan History Project—we have a lot of pagan history here in Paganistan—asked me why, five years ago, I started this blog.

As the ancestors would have done, I answered her question with a story: the story that I've just told you here.

Important tools used in magic rituals, cauldrons are typically iron kettles. You can make a symbolic cauldron, however, out of any concave or bowl-like object, such as a large stone or crystal geode.