Diana Rajchel » Wicca

8 ways in which I’m “not Pagan”

di — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 14:30:03 +0000

I have over years been referred to anything on the gamut from "flaming Pagan" to "in the broom closet behind the vacuum cleaner." Really, I fall somewhere in between. I’ve outgrown the belief that immediately announcing "I’m pagan!" contributes anything to the world. I think my current attitude was inspired by some dear friends who are gay, who chose to come out to me after I knew them as people – so my context for these individuals is "This is this person, who is like this, and has these values, and who is also gay." It’s worked well for me as a Pagan who lives in the mainstream, too – and in one work situation years ago, it saved my ass. Another woman training for the same job decided to be "out" as a witch in the most obnoxious way possible, even following one coworker to the library and announcing to him she was reading up on witchcraft (This was the guy who wore the "Lutheran for Life" T-shirt. So oh yeah, it was her harassing him for his beliefs with her beliefs, no question.) I was called in as one of the sane and stable in our work group, and when they brought up the witchcraft thing I was there to say, "I believe that too, and you know me and know my values." Because it was me – and my coworkers knew me – they decided to leave the religion out of their complaints, and it worked just as well because then the badly behaved coworker was removed and I didn’t necessarily need to be in or out of the broom closet. I was Diana, who was really smart and fast on the phones. Oh, yeah, I don’t think she’ll do the church group thing, but she’s good to work on Sunday.

It worked out well for me in that respect.

I also don’t go in for a lot of American Pagan stereotypes, or I’ve outgrown them. So here’s a loose list of things common to neopagans that I happen to not share:
1. I hate, hate HATE J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s bad, laborious writing and it bores the living hell out of me.
2. I think corporate life and thinking has some good things in it worth saving, although corporate culture does need a serious realignment – and corporate personhood needs to die, NOW.
3. I try to avoid wearing black t-shirts or broomstick/peasant skirts. It’s too much of a stereotype, and is actually a subvert reference to body image issues.
4. I hate camping. I mean HATE it. I even tried it again, like I do beets every few years, and I will take a hotel any day, thank you.
5. I believe – and prefer the idea – that Wicca is a modern religion, not a stone age cult. I think that the stone age cult stuff smacks of chicanery, stupidity and low self-confidence.
6. I enjoy science fiction, but I hate Star Trek with a burning passion. Making Star Trek references results in me finding excuses to leave, usually leaving a dust cloud behind me.
7. I believe in being personally organized, and I believe the "herding Pagans is like herding cats" is the statement of those who have not bothered to learn basic organizational skills.
8. I have no fantasies whatsoever about the past being better than the present. It’s all a work in progress, emphasis on progress.

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Eclectic: Use what works, not whatever the hell you want

di — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 14:30:13 +0000

I don’t see a lot of people use the term “eclectic” to describe their Wiccan spiritual practices anymore. I think this is because of the bad rap eclecticism got in the 90s, when hordes of new practitioners – me included – wandered into the neopagan movement and picked up the term to describe ourselves. I think most of us did this because “eclectic” seemed like the best way to handle our fears of commitment. As those around me became “serious” or dropped out in favor of another spirituality or absence thereof, the use of the term “eclectic” faded. Most of those individuals I knew who identified as eclectic back-when now uphold specific traditions or styles of magic. Teaching covens I encountered did seem to push this approach: pick a tradition. Stick with it. Be serious if you’re going to be taken seriously.

I think that this insistence on “getting serious” did serve a greater purpose. I encountered fellows in eclecticism whose approach I liked, and others with a perspective that upset me. It seemed there were two schools of thoughts on eclecticism:

School 1: Use what works.

School 2: Do whatever the hell you want, and call it spirituality.

Use what works

The first approach (mine, for full disclosure) assumes a certain set of rules to magic and spirituality. Those rules have a certain flexibility, and can be broken on rare occasions for one very right reason not within our power to determine, but for the most part if we want our ritual or energy work to have any results, we must for the most part adhere to those rules. The divine is infinite, but within magic and life we’re given the laws of physics so most of the time we don’t just go flying off the earth. Different spiritual systems all manage these rules in different ways, and over the years I’ve come to distinguish what aspects of a spiritual system are spiritual, and what aspects of a spiritual system are humans trying to impose human and frequently petty agendas. A good spiritual system opens and frees, protects those unable to protect themselves and releases from judgment the things where some people might be offended but absolutely no one gets hurt.¹

I acknowledge that this means at some point I must discuss what I consider those rules of magic to be.

This means that if I use prayer beads, or adopt elements of Buddhism into my ritual work, that’s fine – as long as it works. It can’t just be that I like it. Whatever I work in must actually have some impact on my practice, some result in my spellwork or assist me in a visualization. If I try it and it fails, as a committed eclectic I must set it aside – because it does not work.

Yes, I have tried things and they have failed. I’ll flip through my old BOS notes – I’ve been spelunking old files rather a lot lately – and I’ve turned up some incidents of major fail, especially during my Saturn return. This is not to be blamed upon Saturn, but upon the blindness that comes from being desperate and in the middle of a Saturn return. I think the core lesson of that time for me is that all my love lessons in this life are karmic, and while I can use magic for short-term gratification, I personally don’t get to monkey with love in any other way because I’ve got some karmic pre-sets.

Do whatever the hell you want and call it spirituality

I do think there are lines to draw here – for example, if your “spirituality” requires something from someone besides yourself and your divinity, it’s generally a good sign that a)it’s not spiritual and b)you’re playing God. Yes, there is a whole woven ball of consent and ethics that provide fine distinctions but when you strip it away if you need a second or third person to cotton or conform to it, FAIL. I also believe that “Thou art God” is not intended to be interpreted as “Thou gets to PLAY God with the others who haven’t figured out that they’re divine too!”²

Rather than analyze and define, I’m just going to give a list of things I’ve encountered that bug me:

“Oh, I just make up my own gods.”

Gods and archetypes reveal themselves. A deity-level thoughtform requires energy from thousands, if not millions of minds. This is very different from creating a servitor.

“I know that the pantheons don’t really fit together, but I like them.”

If you’re Wiccan and you’re invoking deities, you’re doing so on the supposition you’re dealing with real beings – and that “mythology” is like meeting someone you’ve heard about who is legen….dary. To mix it all up takes the attitude that you are handling fictions, and supposing all sorts of things that are convenient for you to believe. The gods may not be telepathic, they don’t all like each other and sometimes you’re just being rude. I do mix, on occasion – and when I do, I research the parties and try to set up some pre-ritual where they can share a coffee and get to know each other. Mostly, I don’t mix – I just work with the Hellenic divinities, or with the cultures that bumped into each other that formed the basis of Classical mythology.

“I chose Wicca because it supports my alternative lifestyle.”

Yes and no. Pagans are turning out to hold some universal values, but don’t assume that just because you’re polyamorous that the Wiccan next to you in circle is, too. Don’t assume that your furry thing is great conversation over cakes and ale. Don’t assume because you’re straight that your entire coven shares your heteronormative views. Be who you are, but realize that while the gods may or may not be accepting about your modern choices, the individuals standing in circle with you have evolution to do, and have agreed to share that spiritual perspective – to explore sexuality or other aspects of your being, you are obligated to obtain consent first, and there’s a good chance if that troubles you that you yourself still have some evolving to do.

“I just want it to be like the old times.”

This is popular among Renn Fest fans, science fiction conventioneers and other people who get off on harking back to some non-existent good old days. This is bullshit. No matter how torn up the world is, no matter what’s wrong, no matter how much the earth suffers – Right now is the best the world has ever been. No matter when right now is. With progress comes problems, with problems comes progress. I for one like the right to vote, flushing toilets and contraception. I do not think giving up these modern devices brings me closer to Eros.

My phone was tapped because I am a witch

di — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 14:30:11 +0000

No, really.

And it’s not that big a deal.

Seriously.

Here’s the story:

Years ago, before I started grad school and around the time I finished my bachelor’s degree, I knew a guy. He was a non-trad at MSU, VietNam war vet, one of those shady drifters who liked college girls, especially those of us who were misfits before the punk genre revived and gave our watered-down follow-ups a name.¹ He was also one of those vegetarian Buddhists so obnoxious that my ex once wanted to throw chicken bones at him when we were eating together at a bar. But I digress.

Shady guy naturally had a shady living situation. I knew nothing about this. Shady guy also knew I practiced Wicca, and stated he found my take on it more respectable than what he found among other college girls. This was during the rise of the fluff bunny Wicca population, before metaphorical cats descended upon us in the form of Real Life and the Bush administration. Shady guy was quite fond of seeing me, and announcing loudly “It’s my favorite witch!”

Sometime while I knew him he ended up in a federal case for mail fraud. It took some asking around (he was not so forthcoming) but apparently shady person he was living with was a Universal Life Church minister who was one of those selling “spells” in the back of the National Enquirer. Charging for magic is a hoodoo practice, and I didn’t know much of anything about it at the time. I know more now, and from what little I could gather, whatever this person’s situation was, it was not that. I was frequently approached for spells, myself, but no one paid me, I usually said no, and the stuff I did take on was of the de-haunting variety for people who were already having mental health issues without the added pressure of a ghost.² Apparently some people were unable to pay for spells, or something happened, and this woman he lived with was accused of threatening to curse people if they didn’t pay more money. How this guy was involved I am still not clear on. Was he the heavy? A curse caster? I honestly don’t know. To this day, I never had a clear idea of what happened well enough to have an opinion of who was innocent or guilty.

In the course of the investigation, it was apparently logical for the FBI to track anyone involved with magic. Since I lived beyond the outskirts of town in a dirt road above a washed out dirt road, it was impossible for them to be subtle. It became so obvious from my crackling phone conversations that I was being tapped that it became a point of amusement. Of course I was upset at first, called the police (I was young and not thinking it through) and no, it never occurred to me to look it up online. As it was, it would get really obvious when I was talking to one friend or another about witchcraft, how it worked, etc.

The white van that obviously didn’t belong to any property in the area that parked in front of our mailboxes also made it obvious.

It got to the point where the van would park in front of the mail box, close enough I couldn’t access it. One day, I picked up the phone when the van was parked that way and said, “Hey guys, could you move the van? You’re blocking my mailbox.”

The van almost immediately moved.

I’m pretty sure that’s when they ended the phone tap. You’re supposed to get a letter when they tap you. Maybe that’s why they kept parking in front of my mailbox.

If nothing else, someone at the FBI got an education about Wicca and neopaganism. Poor, bored, pre-9/11 feds.

As for the shady guy? He went to prison, and died a few years later while on work release.

Happy Solstice!

di — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 13:23:26 +0000

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.

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On Friday I dehaunted two homes!

di — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:30:43 +0000

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.)

What I encountered in this particular situation was a combination of haunting, squatting and dimensions bumping into each other. Each one by itself wasn’t bad, but the combination thereof amplified the entire situation.

To outline the situation as best I understand it:
The primary haunting location was in South Minneapolis. The secondary haunting location was near where I live in Northeast Minneapolis. The person who lived in the primary location frequently spends the night with his lover up here in Nordeast. His lover rents a room in my working partner Joel’s house. While Joel knows the basics of house cleansing and wards, since he moved in there there’s been a few incidents where Joel has had to do some magical cleansing work – and it’s always related to a renter or someone who’s spent excess time in the house. This in particular lends credence to my “living energy is required for a real haunting.”

The person with the primary haunting was classifiable as a non-believer, as was his roommate. Obviously Joel’s house had all the believers, including this man’s lover, who then talked to me about some of his experiences with the spirit world. He had noticed a slow progression of more activity, but his partner did not, and until you experience something unavoidable, you pretty much want to be a non-believer as it keeps you well within the range of social acceptability. I’m probably going to have to do some follow up training with both the men living in South Minneapolis, because once you see the spirit world you can only unsee it if you learn how.

Here are some interesting factors I want to note:
In the primary haunting location, both men living there are first generation immigrant. I’m interested in this because I’m second generation immigrant and I suspect that those of us who are slightly less indigenous to the United States tend to have slightly more incidents like this, even if rooted firmly in non-belief as these two men were. The primary house owner is Norwegian (?) or German, and the renter’s parents are Haitian.

Second, the owner of this home is waiting for the house to go into foreclosure. Up to my visit, he had mentally relinquished ownership of that home. I fully believe that this relinquishment is what precipitated the phenomena.

Third, the homeowner spends a lot of time in bars. Most bars in Minneapolis are notorious for both their living resident alcoholics and the hitchhiker spirits that live in them, and it’s actually the newer bars that have this more. The exception to this is Merlin’s Rest and I think that it’s no coincidence that the bar has a Druid on staff.

In the primary location, the following phenomena was described to me. I decided to class it as “emergency” because physical phenomena was happening:
1)A glass broke in the owner’s hand – it was a clean break, and while it could be explained by poor glass blowing technique, when I examined the glass I couldn’t pinpoint a weak spot. There’s still a high likelihood that this phenomena is attributable to physics, but given the owner’s psychological state, I chose to put it in the “maybe” category.
2)The owner found the stove lit when he had not been home. His tenant does not cook and generally avoids the stove. That I definitely chalked up on the supernatural end. Stoves do not turn on by themselves. This also made me consider it an emergency, since no one has “spirit negligence” coverage on their home insurance.
3)General feelings of creepiness, pressure, both men getting shaken awake at night², and the owner seeing a face with black eyes and white face staring at him. My first thought at this description was “Faery tribe!” even though my encounters with Faeries are limited.
4)The tenant is in his mid-forties and recently survived a crippling accident. He currently suffers from untreated (?) depression.

In the second house, the phenomena described to me:
1)Strange animal activity. Joel’s Labrador Retriever, who loves everybody, did not want to let the man with the activity described above in the house. The cats, which were very familiar with this man, were also showing signs of discomfort. Also, this man saw a bat bouncing off of nothing, as though something was there and screwing up its sonar. Bats are common in Minnesota but I’ve found they only make themselves known when a)you have a great toilet to sleep in or b)they want to warn you about something. I hope to continue to avoid any issues with bats and rabies.
2)A general “creepy” vibe. In this case “creepy” means “like thousands of little bugs with cold feet crawling on your nerve endings.”
3)Things being turned off that were on, things being turned on that were off.

I did the second house first, in part because I knew Joel could fix the basic stuff on his own. As far as I can tell he shares my view that wandering ghosts and spirits know damn well they aren’t supposed to be in our homes unless invited, and most bank on the humans that see them feeling all guilty and soft-hearted because the ghost hunter shows that are so popular these days always make us feel sorry for the poor stuck/lost ghost. In my experience, a truly stuck ghost is rare. The ones I meet know damn well they’re dead, that they don’t need any sustenance that they can’t get off a light bulb and that they follow people home for a free meal or for some more obscure motivation specific to the individual ghost. This excludes visitations from relatives and those who shared family ties, with or without blood. Ancestral rules differ.

Joel did a really good job putting up a ward that extended across his property. I could feel it on the sidewalk out front of his house, long before I crossed his threshold. While there were pockets of stagnant energy generated by Joel and his clutter³ the top two floors of the house felt pretty good. But when I got to the bottom floor where his tenant lived and where the man from the first household was sleeping, it felt much colder than it should have, and I felt a distinctive tingling around my neck and shoulders, especially in a spot on my shoulder where I had a recent attachment incident of my own.⁴ When I do a cleansing I work with my second sight off. It keeps stuff from messing with me by flying at my face or the usual parlor crap, and it helps me focus on my main job: reinforcing with the homeowner that s/he has the real power. Even with it “off” I can still see some things in non-altered states: movements out of my peripheral vision, odd and multiplied shadows, pictures in my minds eye, and often I can see the outline of a form filling up space, just not the full details because I keep my “vision key” off most of the time.

Each room in the basement felt a little bit weird. It was also colder than it should have been – I have been in that basement in below zero weather and felt perfectly comfortable; this visit was during late spring/early summer warm weather. It felt way too cold. Also, the air vibrated. Most of what I felt was a residual energy, rather than an actual presence.

I did find a presence in the laundry room. It reminded me vaguely of a toad. I told Joel what I saw, and agreed with their assessment a cleansing was needed. Joel followed my usual instructions: smudge, spray (salt water, blessed), and offer. For the offering we went with invoking and requesting the aid of Persephone and Hades, as the bat represents Persephone, and this time of year we get the above with Persephone and the below with Hades.

I left a Flip camera to record the room, and Joel and I went out to breakfast. I didn’t have the patience to watch the full footage, but I didn’t notice anything overly remarkable. The animals of the house were surprisingly quiet, but other than shadow movement easily explained by passing clouds filtered through the egress windows, I did not catch anything in particular.

Joel reported that after we parted for the afternoon, he went into the laundry room and felt something touch him on the spine. I also noticed that a blue candle I lit as an offering to Archangel Raphael in his tenant’s space was snuffed out neatly when I came back that evening for dinner. His tenant denied snuffing the candle.⁵

During the afternoon I went home and prepared a few things for the other house. I went by instinct, mostly, and thankfully I live within walking distance of an Arabic and an Indian grocery store; between the two, and the Mercados on my street, I can obtain magical supplies for much less than I’d spend at any local occult shop. I bottled up some of my banishing and uncrossing oils, made up an extra bottle of my own Florida Water⁶ recipe, and I made a powder of arrowroot, aesfoetida and Solomon’s seal. I also grabbed the mix of copal and orange peel I keep on hand for fumigation, and along the way I bought two onions, several key limes, and a coconut. The Indian grocery store also had ceremonial brooms for sale for $3.99. I picked out the most lopsided one of the bunch so that the homeowner would not inadvertently use the broom for housekeeping.

When I arrived at the primary haunting, the front door felt fine. The homeowner had a coworker come over at lunch that day, and she performed a Russian prayer that invites the spirits to move east. He says she felt something hug her, etc. This made the main threshold of the house feel fine, but the basement still had an unnatural creepy-crawly coldness vibe, and a few spots where I felt sentience coming at me. I also noticed that this man kept this space dark even as we were walking through it, and that the basement had a non-functioning door leading from the outside to the inside. As I walked through, I realized that yes, there were spirits wandering around, but that there were also non-physical beings that were just as alive as myself. I also sensed a hovering question, “So we go east. Then what?”

I took the owner outside and had him tell me as much as he felt able to. His sense was that the universe was punishing him for losing his house. I reassured him that the universe doesn’t generally get involved in real estate, but that his feelings about the property were attracting at least some of the phenomena.

As far as I can figure out, there were multiple things going on:
1)Yes, there were spirits. Squatters, mostly, that sensed this man relinquishing his claim on his home. This encouraged them to wander right over that threshold and take up residence themselves. The amount of time he spent in bars could explain how some of them were also getting into his lover’s home; squatter-spirits love bars, as I learned from a shaman friend.
2)The non-functional door became a sort of spirit passageway.
3)The door may also have been a passage to Faery, and the face he saw was likely some sort of bain-sidhe. They’re not bad so much as they don’t like humans. I’m not a Celt, and neither is the homeowner, which left him really unprepared for dealing with the idea of Faery.⁷ He had some firmly entrenched ideas about the spirit world and the living world; I don’t think he was ready for my take that what was going on involved a lot more worlds than just the two he assumed.

I played it by ear because there was so much stuff going on, but just for documentation’s sake, here’s a loose list of what I did:
1)I identified the most sentient spirit or faery (I think it was faery.) I explained that it needed to leave, that I wasn’t as nice as the first lady that talked to it and that if it didn’t go, I would make it go. I requested it shut the doors between dimensions that caused so much traffic. In my mind’s eye I saw a blue creature hurriedly shutting a series of doors while asking me for more specifics on “go east.” I suggested that it go east to the Mississippi River and ride it down into the ocean, where the spirit of all waters lives (I was thinking along the lines of Yemaya, although this is outside my familiarity zone.) There it could recycle into a new life form or be given a new home under water if it liked.⁸ I do have a vague concern that if I suggest this too often I could trigger a Flying Dutchman situation. But maybe that can only happen to pirates.
2)I had the owner find a silver coin and bury it exactly halfway underneath a gate on the easternmost point of his property, reasserting himself as the master of his home. While there was still “stuff” after he did that, it was like someone turned off an electric fence and there were just a few animals milling around.
3)I had the owner take a broom and run around the basement shooing things out. While I have a pat phrase I say, I had the homeowner do a “party’s over, everybody out!” approach as it was a concept he already understood. It was like clearing out Bourbon Street after Mardis Gras, without the giant street cleaning machines afterwards.
4)I then instructed the remaining spirits to go to the river.
5)I cut the onions in half and placed them in strategic places where the weird energy was the strongest. I did the same with some of the limes.
6)I then gave the tenants of the house the Florida water, and showed them how to use it.
7)I presented them with the coconut and the aesfoetida powder. I explained that the powder is the napalm and the coconut is the A-bomb; they are to use them only the event of further shenanigans. I also talked to the owner about using light as a banishing energy (and suggested a few smartphone apps that could help with it, like a simple strobe light since he’s a techie). I presented him with several printouts I made of the 3rd Seal of Jupiter that protects from harm and demons while traveling or at home and I placed the coconut on the stove as a general warning – and because the stove is still often the spiritual center of a home.
8)I had the owner burn the copal and orange incense in the area most affected by phenomena.

I then did a simple cleaning on his tenant’s room, especially as he was describing frequent wake-ups during the night. As far as I could tell from the energy, his situation was different, in part a byproduct of depression but also more of an “ancestors want your attention” thing. I did a quick brush-and-cleanse, and deposited a few cut limes in his room, too. I also explained to him what I thought might be happening: much of what I felt was energy coming out of his body and then coming up with something to amuse itself. This was part of why his ancestors wanted his attention.

The homeowner was supposed to join us for dinner at his lover’s place, but never did arrive. He texted me that he was enjoying the feeling of his home so much that he wanted to hang out with it.

As for his lover’s place, I did add onions and limes there, especially in the laundry room. On follow up, the lover reports both homes feel much better. I think it’s well within Joel’s range to maintain that energy, and Joel’s capacity as a witch is growing daily. The Faery bleed was weird, but at least I knew what it was, and I do think that the bulk of what happened stems from the psychological condition of the men living in that home.

In my own case, I spent most of Saturday recovering. The mold in the basement caused my feet to hive for the first time in a long time, and despite a full and brilliant meal provided for me at Joel’s, I made the rookie mistake of not grounding properly at the first opportunity and two days later I still feel ravenous shortly after eating. I did spend some time using a white noise program on my Droid to cleanse, as well as a sandalwood-soap cleansing shower. Even so, I’m always deceived by how much energy even cooperative house cleansings and spirit negotiations take.

Oh, and I need to look up some recipes for key lime pie. Even after making offerings I have a few left.

Bat bones are not crucial to Wiccan ritual

di — Mon, 10 May 2010 15:30:39 +0000

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.

I do think that name changes, like polyamory, should come from an organic place. I don’t think most Wiccan names do, and that in fact the name we are given when we enter this world often does have power in its own right if we choose to own it. This is in no way related to the concept of true names, which you should just keep to yourself, period.

When you’re in circle if it floats your boat to go by some hippyesque pseudo-Celtic or 1960s Pixie MoonDrip name, fine. But once the government gets involved, it’s grownup time, and in order to be taken seriously it’s wise to use your real name. Besides, at least in the US, when you engage with the government you are assuming a role as a citizen, and your given name is key to using your power as a citizen within a Democratic Republic.

Also, bat bones are in no way “essential” to Wiccan practice. Ultimately only your brain is absolutely essential to Wiccan practice, just as only your brain is essential to any religious practice – prayer is a universal religious practice, right? – there are relatively few items that any person absolutely has to have. Candles, incense, rocks, all nice, give good visual cues, but you do not need them. More specifically, God/ess doesn’t need them – those were just put here for you and the rest of the creatures running around the Earth.

In terms of ritual essentials, let’s assume that a Wiccan is incarcerated. That means that person, who let’s also assume is guilty of the crime he is imprisoned for, does have a few things that he can ask for within his rights. If I were asked to give a list of stuff they must have to perform their practices, I would include:
1)A basic book of magical correspondences. 777, Spiral Dance, Power of the Witch, Magician’s Companion, whatever has one of those lists in the back.

2)A wand. While an athame is usually preferred the point is to direct energy, and if you are in prison, for instance, it’s going to take senatorial strings to let you keep a double-edged knife on hand. If you’re like most Wiccans, the fringe religion thing will probably make even related politicians distance themselves from you.

The wand doesn’t need a crystal strapped on, and truth be told, you could do just as well with a Crayola. Hell, you could adjust the nature of energy directed through what color you choose thatsy way.

Frankly, I’d stop there. I would suggest also that person needs some outdoor time. Wicca is a nature religion to varying degrees depending on the tradition, but nature is indoors just as much as it’s out (really.) If that person practices one of the older traditions of Wicca, like Gardnerian trad, I might also suggest supervised use of a rope/cord to mark the circle or if that’s absolutely not possible because of violent behavior in the prisoner, chalk to mark the circle instead.

So that’s it, what I consider essential to Wiccan practice:
1)A brain
2)A book of correspondences for those who do not have an intuitive sense for symbolic alignments
3)A straight-lined object with which to direct energy
4)Chalk

Everything else is a luxury and gift.

I’m no ascetic – oh hell no – but I do dislike clutter. So taking it down to the above essentials once in awhile is good for my brain, and strangely freeing.

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More updates on the Wicca and Divorce Book

di — Tue, 04 May 2010 15:30:43 +0000

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.

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More progress on Divorcing a Real Witch

di — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 16:18:59 +0000

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.

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What is and is not Wiccan

di — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 13:30:19 +0000

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.

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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?”

Oy! Where’d the time go? Oh, and elemental mastery

di — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:30:18 +0000

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.

Holy crap. It took me five years to get to the next step in the elemental mastery exercises I designed. I haven’t scheduled when I’m going to perform this ritual – I’m on the fence about waiting for Mercury Retrograde to end, and since it is Mercury Retrograde I can assume that any divination I do at this time will also come out muddled. I was warned that at certain phases of life, mastery programs repeat and take longer…and longer…and longer.

I’m hoping that this is not the case, since this is the only explicit training I’ve ever gotten on elemental work (or that I’ve really ever seen.) I’m training myself through it, and hopefully Joel a bit, too. I have attended workshops on elements when I was still doing pagan mini-conventions, but I always left a bit dissatisfied. I did find one or two things in the Wiccan book offerings that at least touched on the topic. Margie MacArthur’s book is excellent help, and DJ Conway’s book is interesting if you enjoy the fairytale approach to witchcraft. But in terms of Wiccan elemental mastery, I believe that there are some very common perceptual gaps and people rely on imagination but don’t really know how to go about building a field in which to inquire with detail into the elements and how they work. Since I’ve encountered a few Wiccan priestesses who absolutely do not want their students even touching Ceremonial Magic¹ we end up with this void where we’re using all this language about elements as a standard quarter call but even when asked to consider it more deeply we simply don’t. When I finally broke away from the “avoid CM” conditioning and cracked open the Bardon and Agrippa, I finally found the connective tissue I needed.

Typical elemental understanding exercises usually consist of word lists and nature scenes. These are definitely a start, but most people never get to the point where they bridge the gap between simple knowledge of categories and a deeper understanding of how they fit together. So while I may write about air’s qualities: communication, travel, movement, hot and moist, this is just rote. It doesn’t demonstrate I can apply them to anything. I may recognize certain things commonly recognized by air: a bird! a plane! Superman! I may want to cast a spell to ease my ability to interact with others, and I realize on an intellectual level (air, also) that I need things associated with air, so I gather things off a little chart and talk to the sylphs from my point of view and if I’m really concentrating I send forth visions and images from my frame of reference.

But if you take it deeper, you understand air from air’s point of view. A bird pooped on my windshield while I was driving once. Since I was driving 70 mph down a state highway in crowded traffic, I assumed it was a message from air. Not much of a message, I admit, but given that it landed exactly in my line of vision and I was a rapidly moving target, I allow the possibility that something wanted my attention and was quite probably signaling disapproval regarding things I was involved with at the time.

It came from a bird, which lives in the element of air. I was in a moving car – motion belongs to the element of air, as does travel. A song I’d thought about earlier that day came on the radio. Sound is a manifestation of the element of air. These were reminders that I was utterly connected through air, and while each element harbors that utter connection, each does it in a different way that you need to understand.

I’m trying to remember where I read that some of the old-school philosopher/alchemist/occultists sometimes posited that air was in fact not an element, but a medium through which all the elements passed. While Agrippa still went on quite a bit about the virtues of air as a separate element, he had to know about that theory. While I don’t think it’s a medium alone – I think all the elements serve as mediums through which to pass energy and intention – it definitely is the most recognizable and used medium.

So if I work with air, I need to understand the language of air and appreciate how a whirlwind might think. Paradigm shifting is a key part of magic, and it starts with truly mastering and appreciating the elements as individual powers and kingdoms/dimensions.

I just hope that once this work commences, it takes me less than five years to get onto the next aspects. Because truth be told, I’d really like to write this book – something that revolves entirely around direct magical experiments I’ve done myself.