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Ancestor Day

This year, my kindred decided to combine Disablot and Alfablot and hold Ancestor Day. Disablot is supposed to be for the female ancestors and Alfablot for the male ancestors. Yes, Alfablot means elf sacrifice, but the line between the elf mound and the grave mound was fuzzy for the heathens of historical times. Even though it's traditional, separating the ancestors by gender just didn't feel right to me, and I asked the rest of my kindred if they would like to combine the two days into one Ancestor Day. Everyone liked the idea so we planned it.

Rounding out the year's posts on the holidays of the reconstructed pagan religion Ridnoveri, here are the winter holidays coming up as 2022 turns to 2023. And if you're using this calendar in a leap year such as 2024, be sure to add in the Leap Year day! I'll be posting about that specifically as it gets closer. 

 December

Since this is Gnosis Diary, here are a few short entries of my recent gnosis experiences.

A Story About Cucumbers

In September 2022, Amanda planned and led Haustblot for our kindred. Amanda is the first gythia I trained. Haustblot is an autumn seasonal and harvest ritual. When my kindred was creating our ritual calendar for 2022, I asked the kindred members if we wanted to do Rainbow Season for fall again this year, and Amanda volunteered to do Haustblot instead. Just before the ritual started, Amanda, I, and some of the ritual participants posed for a Heathen Visibility Project photo.

I'm so proud of Amanda. I'm delighted she worked a pomegranate into the ritual since it came from my tree. I still got in a Rainbow Season toast to Heimdall on behalf of Tom, and also a toast to Tom, during the sumbel portion of the ritual.

I have a few more religious experiences to relate and I've collected them here because they are each a bit too short to post by themselves.  I've posted so many experiences here on Gnosis Diary, and I keep thinking I'm done surely, but then I have another one! lol. 

In the summer of 2022 I got to do 2 things I'd been wanting to do for a while: 1. have a "book tour stop" where I speak and promote my book, and I did that at Occulture Faire Las Vegas, and 2. go to a science fiction convention just to enjoy it rather than as a panelist, so I could have the kind of fun I used to have when I was younger and hadn't started having all my time scheduled to speak when I went to an sf con. I mainly wanted to enjoy the costuming and the music and filking (that means an sf themed bardic circle) and I got to do that too. 

For a couples of hours one day this year, I needed to be beautiful. Of course I did all the usual beauty things like putting on makeup and so forth but that wouldn't get me as far as I needed to go. I needed to be beyond beautiful; I needed to be glamorous. 

Glamor is magic. It's not a coincidence that it's both a word for a certain sophisticated sort of beauty and also a word for the innate shape changing magic of the fae. 

If you're looking to deepen your Ukrainian based practice or your connections to Ukrainian gods and culture, here is a list of upcoming holidays in the reconstructed pagan religion Ridnoveri. Some of these may be similar to holidays in other Slavic cultures. They also may have overlap with Christian holidays. 

September