PaganSquare
PaganSquare is a community blog space where Pagans can discuss topics relevant to the life and spiritual practice of all Pagans.
“Water becomes sacred when we recognize its powers: as a sustainer of humans, animals and plants; as a means of transportation, as a vehicle for cleansing, initiation or gaining wisdom; and as a source of inspiration and enchantment. Water is perhaps humanity’s oldest symbol of life, sustenance, abundance, fertility, movement, generosity, permanence and strength. Sacred water is all around us: from the tiny drops of morning dew on a spider’s web to the thundering cascade of a tropical waterfall, in the salty tears that we shed, and in the summer rain that we embrace."
If you love water and work it into your spiritual and/or magical practice as much as I do, I can’t recommend “Sacred Water” enough, and I think you’ll refer back to it frequently and find lots of great inspiration and ideas to enhance your practice and your whole life which, after all, depends entirely on water!
How can YOU invite dreams, vision and intuition to be your guides? By tuning in to all the magickal, mystical, dreaming potential that surrounds you along with a BEAR MEDICINE meditation, spirit animal guidance, zodiac goddesses, wild-herbal oracles, Celtic Tree Magick and some cat spirit medicine to awaken your creative soul.
It’s Pisces Season and it’s the Pisces New Moon! Pisces Birthday 2021 dates range from February 18 - March 19. This is when the Sun is in the zodiac sign of Pisces.
...Pisces Solar Eclipse
Solar eclipses reveal a blank slate for us to explore. Open the nooks and crannies of our inner selves, revealing our deepest wishes and darkest desires. Pisces is queen of going "far out" into the astral realms. Eclipses tend to reveal sudden imbalances and creates a hyper-awareness of the world around us. Trust your gut instinct during this time as it is flooded with insight. Pisces offers guidance and curiosity into these spiritual corners. Take note of your dreams and manifest them into reality! Swim on into the rivers of these changes!
Happy New Moon!
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Today is the New Moon in Pisces, the final sign of the zodiac, where we are dissolved, finally, in deep, starry waters. We are closing out the zodiacal year in the sign of the deep ocean, the sign of imagination, dreams, fantasies, secrets, a lacuna of magick and myth and desire as personal as our blood type. With the Sun, Moon, and Pisces' ruling planet Neptune all swimming in Pisces' mystic ocean, it is easy to get pulled under, into the tide of our emotions, our dreams, our longings. We float into the swells, buoyed up or engulfed by waves. It's easy to feel lost, without a compass or map.
...We had a bit of a warm snap last week, and all the snow on the lawn melted. Then the frozen ground began to thaw. It was certainly a lovely break, going out in just shirtsleeves, in the middle of Winter. It went on long enough that things have started to bloom—some dandelions on sunny hillsides, a tiny little purple weed in a sheltered bed. And despite knowing that winter was most emphatically NOT done, and that snow was around the corner (it is in fact fall right now as I write this), I took several deep breaths and sat in the sunlight, and smelled new scents in the air.
I could smell pollen and rain, mostly blown in by a strong wind from the southwest. I could also smell the bitter-til-its-sweet scent of hard dirt yielding to water. It was as if the ground was heaving a sigh of relief as it stretched and relaxed. The scent of mud was all around me on my hike, as I squelched down the muddy path to a creek swollen fat and high with melted snow.
..."I see skies of blue, and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world."
What a Wonderful World ~ Thiele and Weiss
The whole-hearted optimism and idealism of this wildly popular song that Louis Armstrong pretty much owned would probably cause it to fall flat on its face were it released today. Cynicism, deep pessimism and hypocrisy are rampant. Just reading the news is an exercise in developing emotional resilience — assuming you can manage to avoid getting depressed. But as we try to pull back from the edge of causing our own extinction, as we try to figure out how to deal with the obvious insanity of our culture (did you read the one about how they just restarted a nuclear reactor located two miles away from a highly active volcano that is close to erupting?), as we try to keep our own lives on track, it is important to remember that the simple joys, the sacred moments, the acts of blessing and being blessed are experiences inherent to our human consciousness, experiences that connect us with Spirit and bring healing. Nurturing those experiences is the work of the healers of the world -- and we are all healers, if we choose to be.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl (neurologist, psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor)
It is only by changing our consciousness as individuals that we can change the world we live in. This month’s Full Moon reminds us that we are being called to a level of transformation that requires leaving cynicism, pessimism and hypocrisy behind as we become more and more aware of the effects of consciousness on physical reality. The ramifications of the choices we make every day about how we use our minds, thoughts and emotions reverberate through our lives in the same way a plucked string on a guitar sets the other strings vibrating, even though they are untouched.
Unless you are a complete materialist, and believe that there is no existence or awareness separate from what your brain generates, and that brain is no more than the result of a process that began with the entirely random knocking together of atoms in a primordial soup, then you know that consciousness extends not only within and throughout physical reality, but in a reality that exists beyond the borders of time and space. (I am not questioning the mechanisms of the evolutionary process here, BTW, just the “entirely random” part.)
We have considerable and accumulating evidence that consciousness does continue to exist after death, and between lives, and that consciousness — or perhaps I should refer to it as Consciousness — not only exists outside time and space, but is responsible for the creation of it. If you have experienced this reality — whether you believe in creator gods or a single God or simply the non-theistic existence of the Tao — then you realize that Consciousness is primary, the Source. From there, it is an easy step to conclude that your own consciousness must also be creative and influential, since it is part of the greater Consciousness that is the force behind all creation.
Twelve Healing Stars is a yearlong project in cooperation with the Temple of Witchcraft that explores social justice through the lessons of the 12 Zodiac Signs. This is part six. Basic social psychology suggests that religion can be a very dangerous thing. Open any introductory textbook to the chapter on social psych, and you’ll be hit with a flurry of concepts that build upon each other to show us how tribal, exclusionary, and potentially violent religion – any religion – can become.
- The Out Group Homogeneity Effect tells of our tendency to see all people that are not part of our group as “all the same.”
- In Group Bias is our ability to tolerate differences within our own groups, even as we don’t see them in other groups.
- The Fundamental Attribution Error leads us to blame another person’s character for mistakes they make and any behavior they do while ignoring the situational variables that could have caused the mistake or behavior.
- Group Polarization is our tendency, once within a group, to gravitate toward extreme thinking. Our opinions may be moderate on a topic, but as we hang out with people with more extreme opinions, we move in that direction.
- Groupthink tells us that when we have a charismatic leader and a lack of dissenting opinions in a group, we make very poor choices.
Add these together, and any time a group gets together they risk extreme thinking and tribalism. We see that play out in everything from sports team rivalries to international politics. We tend to naturally separate ourselves from others. And one of the places we see it way too often in is religion. Ethnobiologist E.O. Wilson is working on a trilogy to explore the human condition and its intersections with spiritual practice. He says that a major problem with religion is this tribal mentality. “Religion,” he says “features supernatural elements that other tribes – other faiths - cannot accept.” The problem with that is that, “Every tribe, no matter how generous, benign, loving, and charitable, nonetheless looks down on all other tribes.” Mix that with social psychology and you are creating a pretty toxic brew for humanity’s survival. There is a way out of this. Another concept from social psychology, a deceptively simple one, can be our key. It’s called the Mere Exposure Effect. We’ve all experienced it. When a person begins with a negative attitude toward a person or group, spending time around that group – merely being exposed to it – can improve their attitude. It’s one of the reasons that coming out of our closets, be they broom closets or any other kind of closet, is so important. When we know good people who belong to a misunderstood group, our perceptions of that group improve. Instead of separation, we need to come together. We need the Piscean message of merging together, yet we can’t lose what makes us all unique. This is a large part of the mission for Alix Wright, the Pisces Lead Minister for the Temple of Witchcraft. Paganism of any brand, but especially Witchcraft, runs a great risk of being misunderstood and maligned. Wright says that, “The air of mystery surrounding the various pagan faiths could feed the fear of those who don’t truly know what we do.” She adds that, “Anytime you keep things closed off and secretive, those not in ‘the know’ have the opportunity to put their own spin on things and can demonize what the only have minimal, or no, understanding of.”
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