When the Magick Dies

I skipped Beltane advent. I didn’t want to. I just did. I forgot about it until the first week of it had passed, and then I forgot again, and again, until it was April 29th and I had no plans for Heksennacht or Beltane. Now it’s May 1st and I still don’t know. See, this …

The Sacred Triad and the Wheel of the Year

Note: this post is written from the perspective of someone living in the Northern Hemisphere on the West Coast of North America. Also it is full of my headcanon about the gods. You shouldn’t take anything here as necessarily backed up by the lore or even other polytheists.  Since deciding on the four fire festivals …

30 Days of Paganism: Pantheon — Otherfaith

My relationship with the Otherfaith and the gods of that faith is still new, budding. I’ve been doing a lot of reading, as much as I can, and trying to understand things. It’s slow going, mostly because I am very tired these days and the day job has sucked away most of my time and …

30 Days of Paganism: Beliefs – Birth, death and rebirth

From the perspective of the faith I’ve been building I haven’t actually given this part a lot of thought — I think I’ve just sort of grafted my personal ideas onto it. Which makes sense, as the faith I’m building is being built out of my nebulous thoughts and ideas about the world and the …

Kore: Accepting the Past, Preparing for the Future

This is an article I wrote for Immanence Magazine earlier this year, though I don’t know if it made it in or if the magazine even came out in the past few months. I’ve decided to use it as my Kore post for the Pagan Blog Project. It’s written for a non-pagan, lay-audience, as an …

X, or the Gift of Poison

Someone on TC suggested that one could do Gebo, the X-shaped rune for the Pagan Blog Project (like most of you, I’m sure, many of us were scratching our skulls a bit over what on earth we could write about). Gebo means gift or partnership, according to my copy of The Book of Runes, by …

Becoming My Own Person — a ritual with Persephone and Hades

A week ago Friday I posted about Persephone, and becoming my own person. I said I was going to do a ritual to cut myself away from my abusive father, because I was tired of being hurt by him. I did the ritual on Monday the 13th, the eve of my 26th birthday, the last …

Expelling the Venom

A lesson I have yet to learn: other people’s advice is never as good as my own intuition.  On Saturday night I went with some friends to their belated Full Moon ritual. They’re just starting their ATC practice, so it was the first time they were doing an ATC Full Moon ritual. It was pretty …

Dedication to Brighid: ritual debrief

I do a few things quite well. One is writing. I’m a good writer. I also make really excellent hashbrowns. And I do a good ritual (with some — ok, half, but with edits — of the parts borrowed from this one here). I was distracted and scattered before the ritual. I wasn’t paying attention, …