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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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.

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1. I almost bought a tarp for my television after watching Ringu II
2. something I’ve experienced myself very recently, though to a different end
3. Hate ghosts? Clean.
4. The only thing that sucks more than short-term schizophrenia is permanent schizophrenia.
5. It was a jar candle that’s generally safe to allow to burn down.
6. think quickie aura cleansing that is much stronger than what smudging does
7. I’ve said many time we ain’t talkin’ Tinkerbell. In Minneapolis, there is a section that distinctly belongs to Faery, and it used to have a hold on most of south Minneapolis.
8. It’s not like they need to breathe as far as I can tell.

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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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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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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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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1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Religion is the up/down escalator to transport humans to the divine, and I’ve yet to hear Eros say, “But are you Gardnerian?”

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.

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1. under the false assumption it all leads to Skypeing with demons

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.

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1. 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!

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1. 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.

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 .

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1. there’s a temple a block from where I lived, and a mosque across the street. Yes, I did ask.
2. whether or not either time was a good decision given I was still in my 20s is a moot point as I’m with neither tradition now
3. RIP