PaganSquare.com - WitchesAndPagans.com

Since this is Gnosis Diary I've gotta tell you about gnosis once in a while.

My autumn gnosis experience was about cats. Remember my cat Happy had told me he wanted to return to Earth and I would know which one. Well I was scrolling through the Sin City Witches social media group and a member posted she had kittens to give away. There was a blurry photo of a tiny black fuzzball reaching claws toward the camera. I heard Happy tell me that was him. I contacted the kitten lady, and my housemate.

Monsoon season in the Vegas valley closed out August with a wonderful thunderstorm during my pool party. The week leading up to it had been lovely and still enough for me to manage to get the pool looking nice and clean, always a challenge when a giant pine tree hangs over it. The pool party started with hot, still weather and a few puffy clouds in the sky, as neighbors and friends trickled in through the open side gate. I was super excited by the surprise appearance of friends from out of town I hadn't seen in years. The clouds kept gathering and turned gray and we were all looking at the sky thinking it might rain. We heard thunder roll, and we all responded with enthusiastic noises. I called out to Thor, "I made a fresh pot of coffee!" and plink! drop! Shining diamond blessings from the sky! It started raining! 

So of course I had to go in and get a cup of coffee and come back outside to make a toast to Thor. I got back in the pool with my cup and finished it as the rain increased. Being desert dwellers, we all love the rain.

Asatru and Heathen religion in the modern age was the topic of my recent appearance on The Bard's Archive. This is a video interview, and includes some cute video of my cat Happy. Viewers also get to see my main house altar. I got so wrapped up in the topic, when Garret asked at the end if I had anything to add, I forgot to say "Buy my book!" lol. The link to the video appears at the end of this post, below my other news. 

***

My morning coffee ritual is basically a sumbel, since I make toasts. But after each toast, I listen to see if the gods have any messages for me.I toast Odin, Honir, Lodhur Who Is Loki, and Thor. In the afternoon, I toast the goddesses with tea. I might make a toast with a more traditional beverage from time to time as well. At any time, whether I'm specially listening or not, I might receive a message from my gods. This has been happening since I wrote the unpublishable novel Some Say Fire, and in the process of writing learned to hear the gods, as I detailed in some previous posts. Here on Gnosis Diary, I talk about my gnosis a lot, unsurprisingly. Here are some of my recent gnosis experiences.

My gods very rarely tell me not to do something. As I mentioned years ago, when I was writing the post that eventually became Good Knowledge, Bad Teacher, my computer repeatedly glitched until I took it for a sign and changed my focus. After that I asked the gods to please just tell me when they want me to do or not do something. A few years ago I blogged about when Loki told me not to go spread anarchy in the desert, and I found out later that night someone had stolen the idol of Sekhmet from her temple and the angry goddess was walking the desert right then. (Eventually the temple got a new statue. But the temple was never the same after that and there was a schism in the local pagan community that I blogged about in my post Rebuttal of TERF Values.)

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

A Story About Cucumbers

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. 

During one of the many monsoon storms this summer, after my usual coffee toast to Thor, I lit some candles. Mostly I lit them because during the previous evening's storm the lights had gone out momentarily, but of course the candles are also beautiful, and I lit some of the ones on the main house altar too, so it became a bit of a ritual also. Usually during a storm my housemate and I watch the lightshow and the rain, but this time I felt restless. I was also physically in need of some relaxation due to having fallen trying to take a walk the previous day, so I decided to take a lovely bath to try to relieve some hip pain and so on. I was not intending to take a ritual bath or do anything with spiritual significance, but sometimes these things just happen. The last tiny bit of my umbilical cord fell off. It came right out of my belly button. And no, it was definitely not lint. 

There is an old saying, "cutting the cord," meaning becoming an adult, stopping being dependent on one's parents. I felt that having this tiny bit of paper like skin come off meant that I'm completely free now. It's been about two and a half years now since my mother's death. She was not interested in an afterlife with gods, and stated many times she did not believe in gods, and did not want to participate in religion after her death, so she reincarnated rapidly after her death. I only communicated with her afterwards enough times to know she was happy with where she went and that she knew I was doing ok without her, and we have not maintained contact. She has literally passed on. And I have gone on with my life, as much as I could during the pandemic. I've become the house holder, and the decision maker of the household, and I like it. This was a symbolic sloughing off of the last vestiges of childhood and dependence. How odd to have this feeling at 53.