Ritual
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Meeting the Meat: An Animal Initiation
We are reasoning Pagans. We revere the Earth and Cosmos without gilding the lily with the supernatural. We are poets and singers, dancers and artists. We paint the sky with our pigments, our tones, our voices, the products of our loving hands. And under all that, all that lovely amazing late-evolution neocortical creativity and executive function, there is The Animal. The Animal that, frankly, kind of scares us. It’s sweating and eating and breathing and excreting and lusting, and none of that is under our control. It’s as if our consciousness is surfing a powerful, turbulent wave of capricious, hungry, insistent flesh…except that the consciousness is the wave, too, not…
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Why Hexes Don’t Scare Me
As Pagans, we live in a vivid world full of wonders. For we naturalistic Pagans, those wonders have names like photosynthesis and aurora borealis and cumulonimbus and flamingo. We pay attention to the world around us, and learn about its extraordinary creatures, phenomena and history. Science and reason are our toolbox for discovery of the endless glories of the Earth and the Universe. For many in the broader Pagan community, however, living in an “enchanted world” means believing in a lot of stuff that doesn’t really pencil out when scientifically tested: omens, pseudosciences, instrumental magic, communication with deities and spirits, fairies and so forth. These things are believed out of…
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GUEST POST: Atheopagan Testify! A Banishing Ritual
A guest post by Kaigi-Ron I needed to purge some major ugliness from my life, and command it to GET LOST, so I could move forward with my life. Banishing Ritual: For my banishment items, one was a stick figure of a particularly negative person. I embellished it with stink lines and 3 buzzing flies. Then X-d out her heart and face. And lastly, burnt her. So there, nyah. Did it work? YES!! I felt immediate relief afterword. And I was left with a feeling of greater command over my life, and a feeling of stronger security. I kicked those creeps outta here! So I hereby TESTIFY, AP clerics and…
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GUEST POST: An easy, one-minute daily Atheopagan micro-practice
If you’re unsure where to start with ritual or looking for something new to add to your daily practice, consider trying the 13 o’clock mindful moment. By Michael H. In Ireland, the first thing you notice about the 6 o’clock news on public television is that it is not the 6 o’clock news. It’s the “Six One News.” This is because it starts at one minute past six. Those first sixty seconds are dedicated to the Angelus, a Catholic devotional prayer and the longest-running TV show in Irish history… even if it jumped the shark many years ago. Since the beginning of Irish TV, a static religious image would appear…
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A Brightening Ritual
It’s the February Sabbath! Midpoint between the winter solstice (Yule or Midwinter) and the spring equinox (which I call High Spring), it is the time when the light is noticeably returning after the deep darkness of winter, and the hope of spring is growing. It can thus be called Brightening, anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Where I live, it’s the time when it rains constantly, and so I have named this Sabbath, for my own purposes, Riverain, the Festival of Water. This is a concept for a Brightening/Riverain ritual I came up with this year. We did an adapted version of it in the Atheopagan Saturday Zoom Mixer today. The…
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Shush Now
In the beginning was the word, and the word was BOOM. BOOM exploding out from nothing, from the tiniest point And even in those early moments the wild particles colliding, Combining to form elements, molecules, scattering wide in the blank empty script Of possibility. On they went, making compounds, slowly pulling towards one another in disks of Spinning gravity, tightening, tightening until BOOM again: a star turning rotating part of a thousand a million a billion a galaxy BOOM The molecules pouring out, heavy and pregnant until Grinding to lava glow the rough spheres, the gravid disks collapse to make worlds BOOM The comets pounding down with water, with carbon…
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GUEST POST: A Memorable Mabon
A guest post by Sue Irwin In 2016, after a lifetime of religious affiliation, I walked away from it all. I became an atheist. Although it took me several months to realize it, I was a new atheist with a hole. I was a new atheist with desires. Freed from the mental and financial shackles of the organized religion I’d been born into, I realized I could do anything that I wanted to do. For someone raised in an oppressive religion, this thought is life changing. And what did I want to do? Two things topped my agenda. First, I wanted to read anything and everything I’d missed in all…
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An Exciting Announcement!
I am pleased to report that Llewellyn Worldwide has contracted to publish my next book, ROUND WE DANCE: Joyous Living Around the Year and Throughout Life. This is an Atheopagan book about incorporating rituals into your life, and will go into specific seasonal themes, rites of passage and personal rituals, with ritual outlines and techniques and associated craft projects and recipes. I’m excited! I am busily working on this volume while looking for my next full-time job. I “go to work” at my desk every morning, take a break for lunch and return to writing until 5:00 in the afternoon. I haven’t ever been this disciplined about writing before, but…
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Reintegration
Coming down from the mountainI have seen the lofty gloryI will go again some dayBut for now, I’m coming down. –Meat Puppets There is an ache in my heart right now, a longing for the people and experiences of Suntree Retreat. It isn’t that I’m not glad to be home. I like my life, by and large. But I have had a peak experience and there is a feeling of sorrow, of yearning now that it is over. At the Retreat, I came to feel a deep caring for every attendee and for what we were doing together: the rituals, the vulnerability, the courage, the socializing, the celebration. Such an…
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Towards a Daily Spiritual Practice
One of the things which characterizes our Atheopagan path–and which we share with many other Pagan denominations–is observation of the eight holidays of the Wheel of the Year: the solar solstices, equinoxes and the midpoints between them. So every 7 weeks or so, we have a seasonal festival to celebrate, if we so choose. How we define those holidays can vary widely, as we are aware of our local climates and ecological processes and seek to match our celebrations to them. And we don’t have to celebrate all of them if we choose not to. In addition, we may hold occasional rites of passage for our friends and loved ones,…
