Beltaine and Pop Culture in Ritual (also: updates various and sundry)

Happy Beltaine! (Or Samhain, if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere.)

A while ago I did a Lughnasadh ritual for a bunch of pagans (it’ll be 3 years ago this Lughnasadh, actually) at a campout. I was asked to high priestess it all by my lonesome, which made me look askance at the organizer because he knew me, right? Surely he had some inkling of how it would go. I mean, inviting me to circle in the first place is basically on par with inviting Loki or Coyote. I’m an agent of chaos crammed into 300 fabulous mortal pounds of flesh.

So I wrote a ritual and did it. Sort of standard Wiccish-based, and I managed to tone down my urges to go full silly. However, two things I allowed myself to keep were a) invoking Leeloo Dallas as the Fifth Element and b) having everyone scream So Say We All instead of So Mote It Be. (I’ve always hated So Mote It Be, personally, so I avoid saying it as much as possible.) It was very well received.

I was chatting with some friends yesterday and that ritual came up, and it sort of occurred to me that it had been a lot of fun and why not incorporate more pop culture stuff into my rituals? Just because some pagans think I’m not being THUPER THERIOUS enough about religion? Fuck ’em.

This has led to the decision to bring in more pop culture references to my rituals, because they work, dammit, and they’re fun.

The next one I’ve decided on? Captain Jack Harkness for Beltaine.

Updates various and sundry: 

I’ve been gone for a while. I apologize for that. There are many reasons that all culminate in: I had to take a break from everything for a while, especially blogging.

But I’m back now. Tomorrow and the next day some posts that I started ages ago will be finished and published, and I’ll be working on catching up with the Pagan Blog Project.

Next week I start school again. I only have one course to finish to finally get my degree, and I managed to luck into a summer course that’s upper level First Nations Studies and only meets once a week: Mondays from 9 am to 4 pm.

This means I can take the ferry over to the Island on Sunday, head to class on Monday, and then take the ferry back home after class. It’s going to cost a lot of money and exhaust the shit out of me, but I’ll actually be able to graduate after this. So it’s worth it. I think.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still a little bitter about having to do this in the first place. I’m having some seriously negative emotions directed towards my school right now, and I’m hard-pressed to be charitable towards them at all. It’s not just this fiasco of not letting me graduate on time and not telling me until a few weeks before convocation; that’s merely the straw that broke that poor camel’s back. There’s a history of my school being full of fail on an administrative level.

Which is unfortunate, because the instructors in the First Nations Studies department are excellent, and the department itself is really good. You just need to have an extra high tolerance for bullshit if you want to go to this school, and unfortunately for me that tolerance had already been worn down because I started out in the school’s theatre department. (And don’t get me started on that.)

Anyway, I’m steeling myself for 7 weeks of very hard work. At the end I’m just going to ask for them to mail me my degree. Whether or not I do convocation remains to be seen — I won’t be able to participate in the one this June, so I’ll have to wait until January 2014 to walk the stage.

I’ll be updating the blog as often as possible during the next 7 weeks. Chances are I won’t be able to fix my laptop anytime soon (for reasons I’m not getting into), but hopefully I’ll be able to work on my iPad when I’m on the Island.

Tomorrow, back to your less-bitter, more-spiritual, mundane mystic.

-Morag