the spinner's archive – Page 16 – over 10 years of posts from Morag Spinner

Pagan Pride Recap (probably)

I mean, not probably anymore; it really is a Pagan Pride Day recap now. I’m just harkening (harking?) back to the Going Full Ravenclaw post I made a few days ago.

So, ok. Short answer: I’ve had better days. I’ve had a lot of better days.

Long answer: the day was a combination of good and bad, but the bad is sort of outweighing the good in my brain.

Had to take a ferry to get there. Missed the 8:15, which meant I had to take the 10:45. This put me at my friends’ house at just after 1 am (the boat ride is 2 hours long, and the drive from the ferry I took to their place is half an hour). We didn’t fall asleep until about 2am, and had to get up around 7 to get down to the park to set up. I slept well, even if only for five hours.

When we started to set up, we realized the canopy/gazebo/tent thing we were using for our booth was missing its canopy. It had got left in Powell River. So I then had to run to Canadian Tire to pick up a new tent. (We got a really good one, actually, for sixty bucks, and it can be used for future events. So that’s a plus.) I also picked up coffee, because ye gods mom and I were tired and snappish and ripping each other’s faces off.

After coffee we felt a little more human. We left the frame for the old gazebo up because it was holding some of the clothes and such we were selling fairly well, but soon it became apparent it was too windy to have it up without the canopy to tie it down. So, with quite a bit of effort, we took it down and put up the new one (with less effort).

Which is good, because then it started raining.

Tyee, the dog, got his wires crossed. He’s Shepherd-Wolf, so his Wolf instincts started saying “This tent is our den!” and his Shepherd instincts started saying “GUARD THE PERIMETER.” So he snapped at some people. I think, too, he just got played out — he was great for the first half of the day, but as the weather got worse and he spent more time in the “den”, and he got too much attention, I think he just got into a bad mood, which didn’t help.

Hey, you know what helps sell books? Having a giant wolf-looking dog snap at you as you get close to the booth. REALLY GREAT FOR BUSINESS.

We ended up getting rained out, which at this point I’m seeing as a blessing in disguise, because then Tyee only had, like, 2 chances to snap at people.

He’s actually a very friendly dog, and I don’t think he’d EVER bite anyone. He’s snapped at me before, and I get that it’s scary, especially if you’re not used to big dogs, but he’s not vicious. You know, sometimes it’s just him asserting his boundaries.

Unfortunately we live in a world where people don’t want wolves or wolf-dogs to assert their boundaries, and wolves and wolf-dogs doing so can get killed by the city. Because nature! We haz to tame it!

So that’s a frustration I have with people in general, though I think it’s fair to say that if we’d had one of our wolf-huskies they never would have snapped at folks. Not the way Tyee did, which was very Shepherd-ish (and scary). Huskies will generally just walk away if you’re bugging them; if you’re really pissing them off they might bare teeth a bit. The only time I ever had a husky snap at me (and bite me) was Toyon, the family meathead, and it should be noted that he had Shep in him.

(Sheps are great. But you should never, ever, ever blend them with wolf. The only dog you should ever blend with wolf is husky. I am dead serious on this. Because wolf instincts don’t mesh well with Shep instincts. You want wild + mild, not wild + GUARD THE PERIMETER.)

But, in the moment, we had to let Tyee know that what he’d done was wrong. You’ve never seen a more contrite wolf. He curled up into a little ball in the car and just slunk right into bed as soon as he got home. Didn’t say a word; usually he’s pretty talkative and active.

It was his first event, like that, so it did show us that no — he can’t do events like this. Not until we have another, more sociable dog that can front most of the attention, and he’s older and mellower and can just chill in the back of the tent or something. (It is our plan to get a puppy, at some point, to help mellow him.)

On the money side, we ended up making less than I did last year at the event — and likely this is because we got rained out. Almost all of our stuff is damp and it’s now strewn across my living room, including the tent covering, trying to dry.

Good things? Afterwards my friends took me out to dinner, which was very nice of them, and I had the most amazing burger. It was the Grilled Cheese Burger at Montana’s; they use two grilled cheese sandwiches as the buns, and it has onions and bacon and cheese on the burger itself. It was amazeballs.

We told them it’d been my birthday almost two weeks ago, too, and they brought out the ice cream and moose hat for me to wear. So I got to be a moose. I did a pretty solid moose impression, I think.

And I sold a book at dinner, which was cool.

Caught the 9:30 ferry back to Vancouver. As soon as I parked my car on the ferry deck I grabbed my bedding from the back seat, put a blanket on me and a pillow behind my head, and next thing I knew we’d docked on the other side and cars were starting to leave the boat. I then spent Sunday vegetating.

I did also get to see my friends, which was nice. But overall the day was…disappointing, and I’m kind of depressed about it all. Going to need a week to recover my happy, I think.

This coming weekend I’m off to Pirates and Fairies, which is the event where I met the Ogre three years ago. (Have we really been together for 3 years? Wow. Time flies.) It’s a real vacation for me, and I have a metric fuckton of work to complete before going, so I may not be posting here again till after. Can’t make any promises; I don’t know how long work will take.

So if that’s the case, I’ll see you in September.

ETA: I did end up writing another post today, because I was pissed off. It’s scheduled to go up tomorrow. Other than that, probably September.

The Pagan Unity Campaign: why I joined, why I left, and why I’m tired of hearing how horrible all PUCers are

The Pagan Unity Campaign was a group I was part of for a few years during and immediately after high school. I was a state chair for them, and I avidly participated in the campaigns we ran.

The PUC was a political campaign. The goal? To get elected officials to realize that they had pagan constituents.

When I joined I was a new pagan, a not-as-new political activist, and champing at the bit to get something done. I believed then, as I do now, that politics and religion are inseparable. (It shouldn’t need saying, but I’m not talking about church and state. I’m talking about personal politics and personal religion.) I wanted to put my money where my mouth was, so to speak — I wanted to get involved.

The PUC campaigns were largely, to my mind, harmless. Send in postcards to EOs saying “I’m pagan and I vote!”, basically. If you’re not pagan? “I’m a mom of a pagan and I vote!” or “I’m a friend of a pagan and I vote!”

So on, and so forth. The idea behind the “unity” wasn’t about religious unity, but political unity — getting over our differences to join together and show our EOs that we existed.

The problem really came when we got to a definition of paganism. Mind you, at the time I didn’t see it as a problem. I realized we needed to have a definition ready for any EOs who asked, and the one we’d come up with seemed — to me — to be fairly accurate. It defined paganism as positive, live-affirming, and earth-based, and excluded satanists.

Please note, at this time I was still reading Silver RavenWolf as if she were a good resource.

Also, I had no mentors in the pagan world. There were no pagans in my area, or if there were they were hiding very well. The only people I’d had to guide me were the writers of pop pagan books marketed to teens and people I’d met online in chatrooms and Yahoo groups. And they were of the sort of pagan that ignored history, confused pagan with Wiccan, and were basically crazytown bananapants. Which we all are, a little bit (at least). But crazytown bananapants combined with a death-grip on misinformation and bad history is…well, I don’t think I need to tell you what it is.

During my time with the PUC, I ran into a lot of resistance from people I’d thought were friends. I was never extremely pushy with the campaign, especially as most of the people I knew weren’t pagan. I simply explained what it was about, told them I was pagan, and that I’d really appreciate their support.

The responses I got were generally along the lines of “You’re a godless heathen who will burn in hell, please fuck off.”

These responses helped solidify in my mind that I was doing the right thing by being part of the PUC. Obviously there was so much misinformation out there; someone had to do something.

I ended up burning out, being State Chair, and though I was still part of the PUC in name, by 2007 I wasn’t doing much. I was beginning to question the efficacy of their methods. 2007 was also the year I joined The Cauldron, the forum that I spend a lot of my time at.

TC had run into the PUC before, and they hated them. I didn’t understand why at first, but slowly it became clear to me.

The PUC was trying to define paganism for other people, and that wasn’t cool.

Before TC I hadn’t had a wide exposure to different sorts of Paganism. I didn’t even know what a reconstructionist was. I basically thought all pagans were some variation of Wiccan.

I decided to leave PUC. My heart was no longer in it, and I was beginning to suspect that the then-leader was a bit racist. (The time leading up to the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primaries was when you really got to find out who among the people you knew was a secret racist.)

I left in the fall of 2007. I don’t regret my time with the PUC. It taught me some valuable lessons.

However, it tends to get brought up every so often on TC. And every time it does, there’s more bile and vitriol to go around, as if the more time stretches between TC’s last encounter with the PUC the more the anger needs to multiply. Like rabbits left together.

I get it. I do. The PUC wasn’t good at respecting people’s agency in self-definition. I didn’t know that when I was part of the org, but I know that now. So I do understand where people’s anger comes from. (After all, when I left the org I was getting pretty angry with the leader because she was batshit and incredibly thickheaded and probably racist.)

But I am getting tired of hearing about how horrible or stupid all PUCers are/were. Because understand, when you talk about how every single PUCer was out of touch with reality, or stupid, or thickheaded, or anything else, you’re talking about me, too.

I was a misguided teenager. I fully admit that.

I resent the implication that I was stupid because I was lacking for actual mentors in pagandom. I resent the implication that I was out of touch with reality because I wanted to make a difference and the PUC seemed like a good way to do that.

It’s not always easy to see the darker sides of organizations that purport to make a difference. Especially not when you’re a starry-eyed teenage activist who desperately wants to help make that difference.

I used to be a member of PETA, too. Does that mean I’m stupid and psychotic?

The PUC did wrong by trying to define all pagans for them, and so narrowly. Their campaigning methods were questionable.

Do I still think they were trying to accomplish good? Yes, I do. I believe their intentions were pure.

But I can see now that it’ll never work to form an organization like that. There are better ways to effect change from a pagan perspective. (I won’t go into them here, because this post is getting too long already.)

The organization is now largely-defunct, and it’s probably because other PUCers either burned out or realized they were going nowhere fast. I’m not saying all, or even some, of them came to the same realizations I did, but it’s possible. It’s likely.

So please. Could we maybe keep our criticisms and bile and vitriol focused on the organization, and maybe leave the people alone? Can we judge people on their own merits? Could we refrain from saying how every single PUCer ever is stupid and out of touch with reality?

Is that too much to ask?

-M

Entheogens

Yeah, so, I use entheogens.

If you ask some people, this makes me a bad, bad person. Seriously. There are people who believe that anyone who ever does any alcohol or drugs or any sort of mind-altering substance at all is contributing to the downfall of our society; we are the moral decay at the heart of America, we are everything that is wrong with youth today. (And yeah, the people I’m referring to are pagans.) I can only assume these people have never had a really good meal, or cup of coffee, or any sort of treat, because let me tell you — that stuff is just as mind-altering as booze or belladonna. I once orgasmed over a chocolate bar, no lie.

Since then I don’t try new chocolate bars while I’m driving.

Anyway.

But wait, you say, stroking the hairs on your chin, Morag, I’m confused: what’s an ‘entheogen’? And what does it have to do with chocolate?

You must be new here, I say, and go on to explain anyway because otherwise I don’t really have much of a post.

Entheogen literally means “generating the divine within”. It’s a psychoactive substance used in a religious context.

“This weed made me see GOD, man!”

Something like that, Stoner Steve. Something like that.

An entheogen, however, doesn’t need to be psychoactive. And since psychoactive substances are not necessarily always used as entheogens, the term generally refers to those substances that have been used historically to achieve altered states in religious/ritual contexts.

The entheogens I’ve used are wine and three different flying ointments. Witches’ Ointment I’ve found the most effective without killing me. (Belladonna ointment was effective. Also dangerous.) The Mandrake I found didn’t have as strong as an effect as I wanted, but I only used a little bit that first time — I still need to try a higher dose. The wine I’ve taken in conjunction with the Witches’ Ointment.

(Outside of ritual context, I’ve also tried weed, shrooms, and ecstasy. I may try shrooms again in a ritual context.)

My advice for trying flying ointments: do your research, be thorough, and be cautious. If you’re allergic to morphine or otherwise have a bad reaction to it, do not take the belladonna flying ointment. I didn’t realize when I had my experience that people who have adverse reactions to morphine can have the same reaction to belladonna; it never occurred to me because the plants are not closely related. I learned it after I’d survived the ordeal. (Then, the next time I saw her, I let Sarah Lawless know and she put a warning up on her site for future customers — because it wasn’t something that had ever occurred to her, either.)

My advice for using wine in ritual: pick a bottle you like with a low alcohol content. Make sure you’re in a safe place and your car keys are out of reach. During the ritual, I didn’t notice how much wine I was consuming. The hangover didn’t hit until well after I’d finished the ritual, and I didn’t get drunk in the traditional sense, but still — if I used something with a higher alcohol content I could have been in trouble.

The last time I used wine was before I was on my Zoloft. I’m not sure how it would work as an entheogen for me now because Zoloft lowers my alcohol tolerance considerably. I’ll probably avoid it so long as I’m on this medication (the foreseeable future).

My advice for chocolate as an entheogen follows, but I don’t use it myself. Mainly because I consume so much on a daily basis that it doesn’t have that much of a spiritual effect on me if I use it in ritual context. (I still use it in ritual context, but not as an entheogen.)

However, if you don’t eat it all that often, it may work quite well for you, and — assuming you’re not allergic — it’ll be safer for a first time entheogen than using alcohol or flying ointments.

Now. Chocolate as an entheogen: if you want this to happen, you have to find the darkest chocolate you can. The ones with the really high cacao content. My recommendation is to buy Mayan style chocolate from Antigua, Guatemala, but that’s obviously not possible for everyone. (I once made brownies with that chocolate for a pot luck. At least three people asked me if they were weed brownies. The stuff is powerful.)

Don’t even think about using milk chocolate. Not going to work. White chocolate is right out; it’s not even fucking chocolate, for Itzamna’s sake!

(If you’re wondering what makes this random witch blogger so qualified to talk about chocolate, let me show you my qualifications: my mom used to own a chocolate factory. So there.)

So find some dark chocolate. If you want one with flavors in it, like raspberry (my fave), go for it. So long as it’s dark.

It’s not going to be sweet. If all you’ve ever had is milk chocolate and you’re under the assumption that chocolate is naturally sweet, drop that assumption right now. (I’m looking at you, Chef Robert Irvine.*) Tons of sugar is added to chocolate to make it palatable for American and Canadian tongues. It’s not its natural state.

Dark chocolate with a high cacao content should be closer to bitter than sweet, and it’s the one that’s more likely to give you an entheogenic experience. Getting one with hints of raspberry, or some other sweet flavor, works too, though generally those don’t have as high a cacao content.

Start your ritual. Do whatever you do; I ain’t gonna tell you how to religion or magic or whatever. At the appropriate time, consume the chocolate. See what happens.

When I say consume, I don’t mean gobble it down like it’s going out of style. Savour it. Take a small bite, let it rest on your tongue, use all of your senses to experience it. The eating of the chocolate is as much a ritual as the ritual you’re doing. Or more, if you’re not doing much of a ritual.

Log your experiences while they’re happening; this helps you get a clearer picture of what the etheogen is doing to you. Sometimes you might think “Oh, this is doing nothing” and then later, when it wears off, you’re going “WOAH that did a LOT”. Entheogens are kind of mind-fucky that way. So keep a log of your experiences at first.

And tell me what chocolate does for you in the comments below! I’m interested in hearing your experiences.

-M

*There was an episode of Dinner: Impossible where he had to make a several course meal for the executives of Hershey’s, and he had to use chocolate in every single course. He would not shut up about how chocolate is so SWEET and it’s so HARD to make a bunch of dishes out of something SWEET and I was screaming at the TV “HOW DARE YOU CALL YOURSELF A CHEF; YOU KNOW NOTHING!”

Going Full Ravenclaw, part 3

I am obviously way behind on all of this, but I want to see if I can actually finish planning all the posts and perhaps writing some of them?

Or, at the very least, planning them and then writing something completely different. I’ve already written a different D post from what I originally planned (Doors); chances are I’ll probably drop my original ideas for some of the other posts I’m behind on. Some of them don’t really resonate anymore. Well. At least I planned them.

So, here’re my plans for posts N through T.

July

5th, N: Nature Is More Than Pristine Wilderness

12th, N: NRE, or New Religion Energy

19th, O: Orgasm Magic

26th, O: When “Oath-Bound” Is a Problem

August

2nd, P: Witch Skills: Proper Posture

9th, P: Pagan Pride Recap, probably

16th, Q: Queenite

23rd, Q: Quill: sometimes mightier than the wand

30th, R: Witch Skills: Raising Energy

September

6th, R: Religion-Building

13th, S: So Say We All: spirituality and Battlestar Galactica

20th, S: Witch Skills: Shielding

27th, T: Witch Skills: Trust Thyself

October

4th, T: Tarot, because I’m basically running out of ideas here

-M

PS I am at Vancouver Island Pagan Pride right now. I scheduled this post…from the past. TIME TRAVEL THROUGH BLOGGING

Change to the blog-shrines

In the sidebar you might notice my list of dedication blogs, or blog shrines. For the longest time they were at Blogspot. I’ve moved them to WordPress.com, because so long as they’re at Blogspot I’ll never update them. I hardly go to Blogspot these days because the scripts it runs make my computer have a nervous breakdown.

So, change your bookmarks accordingly. The addresses for Reclaiming Sovereignty and Seafoam and Vanilla are the same, except at Blogspot now; I had to make more changes to Brighid’s and Manannan’s shrines. The links in the sidebar have been updated.

That’s all for now.

-Morag, who is running around like a headless chicken trying desperately to get ready for Vancouver Island Pagan Pride tomorrow. (I’ll be in the Kat & Wolff booth, with my mother, Wolff, and our large wolf-dog, Tyee. If you’re there, stop by and say hi.)

Calendars

I love calendars. About as much as I love figuring out relationships.

I guess they’re sort of the same thing.

When I was a kid I was obsessed with how people were related. I read all I could about our family tree, researching our genealogy as much as I could.

I was also obsessed with the relationships between numbers. Each one had a personality and a gender. I can’t explain them very well anymore, but I remember the feelings I had about them (and still do, to a large extent).

It may be a form of synesthesia. I don’t know; I’m not a doctor. All I know is I still have it in a lot of ways.

English: A 50-Year perpetual calendar made of ... — English: A 50-Year perpetual calendar made of brass, showing July, April, and January of 2008 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Like with the year, which I can explain better than numbers. January is male; February is female; March is male; April and May and June are all female; July is male; August is female; September and October are male; November is female; December is male. January is the CEO; at work all the time, hardly ever pays attention to February. February is gentle and soft-spoken, always shrinking herself down for the others. March is hot-headed and arrogant, always demanding more space. April is more concerned with her garden. May is motherly, though she’s not always warm. June is aunt-like — cool Aunt June, who takes the kids to the waterpark when mom needs a day off. July is the jock, always involved in some outdoors stuff. August is a tomboy, always chasing after July (and sometimes claiming victory over him). September is the scholar, nose buried in a book. October is avuncular — the type of uncle who chase kids around the house, dressed up in a monster mask. November is a snarky caustic bitch, mainly because she’s the black sheep of the family; she stalks the booze table at family gatherings. December is fatherly, but not a disciplinarian.

Perhaps my associations with the months are directly related to where I grew up (Lower Mainland, British Columbia) and its climate. I don’t know where they came from; to me they’re involuntary. Regardless, they show a set of relationships — specifically among the months of the year, which sort of seem like a family to me.

I still see calendars as sets of relationships, but I’ve expanded those thoughts — they’re now also sets of relationships between people and the world around them; between people and time itself. We put holidays where they make sense according to the world we live in; we give meaning to the days in order to relate to the world around us.

This is why I spend so much time creating calendars for the worlds I create in my fiction. It makes no logical sense to me for a people to not have some sort of calendrical system, some ordering of the days, and some designation of special days. They need to mark their relationship to time and the world around them somehow.

Calendars may be arbitrary. But if we don’t mark our relationship to time, it becomes one indistinguishable mass of day after day, placing us squarely in survival mode.

And that’s probably part of why I’m obsessed with them. I’m always trying to find ways to beat survival mode.

Dealing with Disapproving Ancestors

When I first moved into this apartment — the apartment that belonged to my Oma for 20 years — I tried to keep a spiritual/religious/witchcraft life going.

It wasn’t easy.

It never felt right, and it seemed that no matter what I did spiritually or religiously, I never got centred. Not to mention, a ton of small things continually went wrong.

Recently I had to pack away all of my altar items (with the exception of Aphrodite’s altar, because it just looks like a collection of pretty things on the bathroom counter), because we are trying to sell the place (which means it has to look like no one lives here — that’s so much fun to accomplish, let me tell you). Since doing that I have done basically ZERO religio-spiritual-witchy things, with the exception of Flamekeeping for the Cill, because let’s face it — I’ve got the sort of mind where things need to be right in front of me for me to remember them. With my stuff packed away into drawers and cupboards and boxes, I’m not going to pulling stuff out to do quick things and then putting them away again.

I still don’t feel centred at all, and honestly not being able to have a religio-spiritual-witchy practice is starting to drive me a little nuts.

But you know what has happened?

Things have slowly improved in the house and my life overall. My car hasn’t broken down since (I mean, I did get it fixed again, but that hadn’t seemed to make a difference before). My closet has stayed up and has not exploded again. The ever-present invasion of zombie-bugs into my kitchen seems to finally be on the downswing (note to self: clean up the bodies before the place gets shown again).

Etcetera.

The thing is, I can feel her here, in the apartment. And I thought about doing a small ritual to ask her to stay out of my bedroom, so I could at least continue to do stuff in there — but I just never felt right doing that. So I figured I’d just try and coexist with my Oma’s Protestant ghost, hoping she’d understand.

In her physical life, she didn’t approve of my religion, though she was never terrible to me about it, and at some point we managed to come to an agreement in philosophy: “Jesus was a nice dude.” I think it helped that her daughter had strayed from Christianity in her youth, eventually settling in Buddhism; this wasn’t the first generation of the family finding a new path, so she’d had time to come to terms with it.

Also, I was her only grandchild, and I think that after she lost her first husband and her youngest child, she probably came to a decision that differences in belief were not enough to cause a rift in family. She only had my mom and me after the death of my Aunt; all the rest of her relatives were either in Alberta or Holland.

Once she remarried, Oma kept her religious leanings more private — her new husband, my step-Opa, hated the Church and religion in general. He was the one in the family my mom picked up Religulous for, and he enjoyed it. (I had to walk out of the room before I punched the TV screen.)

But 3 years ago, she died. And in her last days, at the hospice, she asked my mom several times if mom thought she’d get into heaven. And she prayed, every day.

We thought, through her years of keeping her faith private, that she’d perhaps strayed from it. Sure, she didn’t approve of my religious choices, but that didn’t necessarily mean she was still a staunch Protestant. So it was a surprise, to us, that she still held deeply to her faith — obviously only putting it aside for peace in the family.

I know my Oma loved me and approved of me, the person, though she disapproved of my religion. And I love her, though I have clashes with her faith.

So in the interest of keeping peace in the family, I’m putting aside my practice until I can move into my own place. As long as I live in Oma’s old place, I’ll abide by her wishes.

This means no ancestor altar. No witchcraft. No daily prayers.

St Brigid's Cross. Re-decoration. Phase 6a — St Brigid’s Cross. Re-decoration. Phase 6a (Photo credit: amandabhslater)

The only thing I continue to do is my Flamekeeping shifts, and I get the feeling Oma doesn’t mind that. There’s enough overlap there with Christian practice, after all; perhaps she feels that’s a battle not worth fighting.

Or perhaps that is the one part of my religion she does approve of — the part that is directly connected to my writing.

Re-reading Evolutionary Witchcraft

Which I never really finished the first time I read it, anyway.

I have this problem with practical books that are full of exercises to do. I don’t finish the book before I start doing the exercises, and then I stop doing the exercises, and forget about the book.

I’ve decided I should read through the whole thing and then start up a practice from the exercises within.

So I’m on page 99. This part is going much faster; I’m pretty sure I got up to page 150 last time. I’m not allowing myself to do any exercises until I finish the whole thing.

Hoping I can finish before the end of the month and start doing a rotating practice of exercises come August.

-M.

I AN’T DEAD

This isn’t really a post, more of a quick note to let you all know I’m still alive and planning on blogging again.

I’m in a class right now and I have to travel to the Island each week to attend, so it’s sapping most of my spoons. On top of that, I’m in the process of getting ready to move soonish, so the stress is basically eating my face. I have no face, and with no face, I cannot blog.

Just go with it.

Anyway, expect blog posts later this month when I’ve survived school and have a face again!

-Morag

PS: It’s been confirmed, this is my last class and I’m definitely graduating with my Bachelor’s in First Nations Studies after I’m done. CUE LE CELEBRATION

Hallowing: A (Short) Guide to Making Sacred

The idea of hallowing something, or making it sacred, is an interesting one to me. On the one hand, I believe that everything is already sacred — the sacred is in the profane, the mystic in the mundane. On the other hand, I definitely think it’s possible to make something sacred. And somehow these two ideas don’t contradict each other in my brain.

When you make something sacred, you are setting it aside. That is what sacrifice means; it means to put something aside, to designate it, to distinguish it. If I hallow a chalice to receive water as an offering to the ancestors, I am saying that this chalice will be used for watering the ancestors only. (Insert Plants vs. Zombies joke here.)

Dedicating is a similar idea. Last year on Walpurgisnacht I dedicated my rose-tipped flogger to the Morrigan. I hallowed it to Her service.

Once something has been made sacred, or dedicated to service, it’s not generally a good idea to use it for anything else unless you already have a replacement lined up. This can sometimes be a point of contention with roommates or family members, especially in the case of offering dishes that need to get washed and get left in the drying rack for a little too long. (Refrain from putting roommate’s heads on spikes and decorating the lawn with them. That’s frowned upon in modern society.)

Continue reading “Hallowing: A (Short) Guide to Making Sacred”