21
Jun
These photos are from the Minneapolis annual Solstice celebration. The theme this year was “Water Rites” and my dear friend Brenda was one of the dancers in it. This modern dance ceremony marks the point of highest sun in the sky. That’s a big deal in Minnesota, where winter lingers and controls so very much of our lives.
This took place along the banks of the Mississippi River, and yes, this really is what Minneapolis looks like. It’s a powerful combination of urban and nature, harmoniously interwoven.
Bear with me on this one. I performed something a bit more than a house cleansing and a bit less than an exorcism on two homes on Friday. It took all day, though most of that time I spent preparing materials for the living inhabitants to use since the actual spirit-dealings were not as time consuming as talking with the homeowners to fully understand what was going on. If you read nothing further on this post, please take this away for your own workings if you deal with hauntings, ghost hunting, etc.: when a house manifests psychic phenomena look first to the lives of the living people there. A lot of people are programmed to look to the history of a building or locale for a romantic story of haunting, but ultimately a living psyche is needed to fuel the majority of phenomena. There’s a Japanese horror trope where it’speople that are haunted and not buildings; while I refuse to watch any more such horror movies1, I agree with the trope.
(There’s also a snake picture below the cut for those who are freaked by snakes.)
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- I almost bought a tarp for my television after watching Ringu II [↩]
Saw the “Wicca” episode of Bones. While the implication that “all witches are evil” is finally going to the wayside, the characterization of the Wiccans in the show made me want to choke someone. That person was not necessarily the show writers. The hippy-dippy pseudo-Renaissance speech crap came from a real person, I know this on a purely intuitive level.
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It may not look like it right now, but progress is being made. I just sent off the intensive survey questions to a friend who will overview them for really obvious bias and inclusiveness. I’m trying to work in questions for those without gender identity, as I believe that is a factor I overlooked when writing the first draft of the book.
Towards the end of demonstrating I’m marketable, I’ve also opened up my own fan page on Facebook. If you’re on Facebook, please join and please recommend to anyone who would find my work relevant. Believe it or not, Facebook actually has a decent amount of marketing clout, so just by joining you are helping me bring this book into being.
I’m only now taking baby steps into writing the proposal, and I started with a rewrite of my chapter outline. This will definitely not be the final draft, but I thought I’d give you all a peek at the chapter titles so you can get the jist of the book:
Foreword: Why I wrote this book
Chapter 1: Why divorce when marriage is optional?
Chapter 2: The impact of divorce on family and friends
Chapter 3: Untangling the entanglement: the magical benefits of handparting
Chapter 4: Spells and magic to assist handparting rituals
Chapter 5: A year and a day, the end
Chapter 6: Oathbreakers and Warlocks
Chapter 7: Divorced witches under 30
Chapter 8: What to expect when you’re divorcing (and a witch)
Chapter 9: Rebounds, retrogrades and Saturn returns
Chapter 10: Life after handparting
Chapter 11: Between divorce and dating
Chapter 12: I’m single and Wiccan. Now what do I do with me?
Appendix – this will list resources helpful to divorcing pagans. Right now it’s just a book list including the works of Julia Cameron and Z. Budapest’s Summoning the Fates.
Looking at it here, it needs some re-ordering in the middle, but I can work with it.
25
Apr
What is and is not Wiccan is not entirely mine to say. But I do want to share this observation:
Wicca as an overall religion does not have a central authority. This means that no one really gets to say what is and isn’t Wiccan, although people do try, and sometimes even I wish we could go “Uh, …. NO.” For instance, Klingon Wicca is just hard on my brain, especially since Klingons are much more in line with Asatru. Although Asatruar would likely not handle such a thing with… good humor.
Gardnerian Wicca has the most evidence supporting it as the first Wiccan tradition. OK, I’m fine with that.1
Then the religion evolved as a belief system that actually has the hallmarks of a strong spiritual path will. A lot of Gardnerians I’ve read seem very unhappy about this. One or two go so far as to try to classify other Wiccans as “neoWiccan” or just “not Wiccan” because it is not their style of Wiccan, and do not use their methods or standards of initiation, whatever those might be.
I just realized why I think this is shit behavior. I don’t care if someone thinks I’m Wiccan or not. That’s between me and God/ess, and since the divine and I are still talking there’s nothing another human being has got to say about my validity or lack thereof that I’d ever for a moment take seriously.
But I realized why it bothered me anyway. It’s a repeat of Christian history. It’s exactly what the Roman Catholic church does with any other style of Christianity. “Oh, that doesn’t exist.”2 It even has the same ring of authority to it. I’m not particularly a rebel, but my call to Wicca was just as legitimate as anyone else’s, and I don’t think God/ess actually gives a flying hobo about any religion.3 The we’re first entitlement is so… oldest sibling syndrome.
I’m not allowing comments on this one because a)like it or not, it’s a comparison that needs to be pointed out and b)I think we all need to think about it for awhile first because it’s bound to jerk a few knees and c)after the chest-pounding superiority that got peed on the True Blood post, I will no longer tolerate any self-aggrandizing shenanigans in my own house. I’m learning by observing rather than discussing at the moment. This is what I’ve observed and what I think about it. And unless I have reason to, I don’t really see myself discussing it further unless it becomes a problem to solve.
- It seems like a solid faith practice, although among the Gardnerians I know in Minneapolis there’s not one I would ever stand circle with. There’s too much of an undercurrent of somebody making decisions for me, and I don’t know what that is, but I know it’s human and not divine and I don’t like it. [↩]
- If the Gardnerians try to adopt Alexandrians the way the Catholic church attempted to adopt the Lutheran church in 1991 I’m going to fall over laughing. [↩]
- Religion is the up/down escalator to transport humans to the divine, and I’ve yet to hear Eros say, “But are you Gardnerian?” [↩]
Awhile back, I performed a ritual I created to better understand earth as an element. I intended to work through each element according to a program I designed for myself, one that I hoped (possibly still hope) to make a useful book from at some point. Today, after a year of nagging and setting aside due to distress, I finally wrote a ritual of air. I was referring to the earth ritual for format consistency and saw the date where I’d scribbled notes about the experience: 2005.
So, after putting together a really extensive custom search engine for plus size clothing over on Fat Chic, I got to thinking about all the nifty ways I might apply the technology elsewhere. Along with building myself a private bath and beauty supply listing and attempting to make one unique to my Etsy shop1 I decided to make this one for my occasional witch-based shopping needs. While I do use local businesses or make my own supplies a good portion of the time, sometimes it’s nice to just find what I need online.
The engine is by no means comprehensive: I pretty much stuck to shops I’m familiar with, that have a broad or reasonably unique selection, that are Google friendly. This isn’t going to be a great advertising panorama although there are text ads that will pop up in search. If you click them, I get paid, at the advertiser’s expense. Thus, full disclosure is done.
One of the nifty things you can do with Google search that a lot of pagan shoppers will appreciate is search by price. So if you want a beeswax candle between $5 and $20 type in beeswax candle $5..$20 and an appropriate list will come up.
So happy shopping! I’ve added this engine to a handy sidebar widget on my page (next I need to get some of my author’s links back in as they disappeared the last time I upgraded the page layout.) But, here it is, for your convenience and my own.
- the engine for the Etsy shop does not seem to work as I’d hoped [↩]
Ze penguins. Zey bicker. pic by Diana Rajchel
My husband is a scientist. He identifies as such. He doesn’t think there’s no such thing as spiritual experience because the numbers tell him that there probably is something along that line, somewhere. Even so, he identifies wholly as a skeptic. Most of the time we operate pretty well – his skepticism does push him to research things and he gets to feel like he’s protecting my safety by understanding what I’m doing without going about it in a paternalistic and patronizing way. Sometimes, though, he’s not really being skeptical – he’s just being inert.
Such as my latest adventure. I got my hands on a DVD labeled “yoga for your eyes.” If it does make outrageous claims about perfecting your vision, I can’t read it because I think it’s printed in Afrikaans. The reason it got my attention at all is because a few years ago I watched an interview with a 108 year old woman who actually got herself off of wearing glasses at all after she discovered some eye exercise book in her public library.1
My husband and I are both terribly nearsighted. We both have astigmatism. While corrective lenses and surgery are definitely options to us, I thought this might be well worth exploring. We have plenty of options without yoga.
Even so, I’ve watched the exercises and it doesn’t seem like I’m likely to hurt myself. In fact, I might even relieve the eyestrain I frequently give myself on days I don’t take enough breaks from my computer. And if I think something has changed, I can go to my optometrist and get an objective measure of whether or not my eyesight has improved. I know I can’t correct the astigmatism without surgery, so I’ll never get 100% – but slowing down the need to hold a book two inches from my face with my glasses off might be kind of nice.
The subtext of the conversation with my husband is a regular one I’ve had over the years with other skeptics, and it’s one of the reasons I get so impatient with them:
A lot of them insist because something might not work, there’s no reason to try it. This can come from fear of failure, or from fear of being wrong. This does not include situations where skeptics, doing their jobs, have actually proven whether something does or doesn’t work. This is stuff where it’s all inconclusive.
My husband isn’t quite on the fauxhemian/douchetastic/hipsteresque bandwagon where people “cynic” themselves into non-motion. But this particular argument suggests he’s been infected by too many people that do think it’s better not to try at all.
Scientists rely on failure. It’s actually part of the query process: you try stuff, and most of it just doesn’t work. So you keep trying stuff, until something does. It’s the same way with serious and intelligent mystics: not everything you try is going to work. But just because it’s in an arena other than science, the damned skeptics get all upset – maybe it’s because if the stuff we do works, they’re going to have to go back and do more science experiments and fail at a bunch of stuff to figure out why.
Not trying something that won’t hurt you just because it might not work is, in my mind, a shameful heap of bullshit. By golly I am going to try it. If it doesn’t work, I can’t see myself being particularly upset – I’m in a position where I do have other options for my vision health anyway.
For heaven’s sake Mike, it’s not like they’re asking me to poke out my eye!
- She also figured she was alive because God forgot about her. Personally, given how pissed she was, I think maybe her God was just afraid of the earful she was going to give when he finally did show up. [↩]
18
Mar
I daresay we all go through a phase where we think we know just everything. What we fail to notice during that phase is how we’re getting absolutely nowhere.
Things I am really tired of:
I am SO academic. I’ve read ALL the source materials.
Ever? Really? I’ve read Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy cover to cover, and since I can’t read ancient Greek, I use a lot of stuff on Internet Sacred Text Archive. It’s so boring it actually prevents useful learning. While I encourage my students to read whatever interests them, I don’t push too much on source materials until they’re ready to start talking to gods.
I’m sure those of us who are serious read a good number of source texts. But unless you’ve got a degree in Classical studies, you are flat out lying if you claim you’ve read them ALL.
Insert any anti-other-religion sentiment, followed by standard justification because “something bad happened”
I know a lot of people are justifiably bitter about their past religious experiences. And you have a right to be about YOUR FORMER CHURCH. But when you paint all of one religion with the same brush, you are willfully being a bigot. I know it’s hard to imagine, but Christianity has a left, Islam has magic workers and Hindus think pagans are Hindu – but don’t see Hindus as pagans1 .
This is personal: QUIT MAKING ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT ME.
I swear about half the attitude I get is just because I write once in awhile for a certain moon-oriented publisher. I do have graduate level education, I did go through initiations up to third degree twice2, I am not Gardnerian, nor have I ever been, nor do I ever want to be. I am an adult in my mid 30s who has practiced my faith seriously every single day since I was 19. I am not a goth. I RABIDLY dislike JRR Tolkien. I heart my technology. I see no virtue whatsoever in martyrdom, poverty or pretending that raging negativity is in any way truth telling. The environment matters to me a lot, but I’m going to just do my thing to take care of the earth, not make pious ranting shows about it.
I hear a lot of excuses as to why not to practice magic and I think they’re all bullshit to cover for being afraid of the entire world. I think having someone take vows without knowing what those vows are before a ceremony is a dirty, dishonorable practice. If you don’t at least try to be a good person, I don’t like you. If it’s an occult book published before 2003, there’s a very good chance I’ve read it or may have it waiting for me on my shelf. I do think I need to keep a public reading list – I’ve had so many books recommended to me that I read several years ago that it makes me want to choke a bitch. I stopped wearing a pentacle in favor of a Vitruvian man pendant, and I’ve had very good success with making sure people of other faiths treat my religion respectfully by letting them get to know me and that I am a moral human being who believes in a greater good and then, when asked, explaining my faith. I feel no need to be different. I already am different. Very different.
If I’m not writing about magic here, it’s because you’re not seeing it, not because it’s not there.
This rant triggered by idiots who miss the point and assume I’m some 20-something sitting on a stack of pizza boxes while thumbing through my Cunningham3 .