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A Happy Solstice to You!
The Shortest Day has arrived (in the Northern Hemisphere–Longest in the Southern)! It’s a day viewed with awe and relief by ancestors throughout the world, marking the beginning of the Sacred Sun’s long arc of return to strength. I just want to wish you warm, meaningful and joyous celebrations of this time of year, however you may observe them, and thanks for being a part of the Atheopagan community. Wolcum Yule!
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This Holiday Season, Support Your Community!
Hey, everyone, it’s the holiday giving season. So I’m asking: please consider making a tax-deductible gift to The Atheopagan Society (TAPS) this year. The nonprofit Society is our community’s religious organization. TAPS produces events, creates learning opportunities and manages many of the details of coordinating a community so large and far-flung. The Society is entirely volunteer operated. Funds raised go to expenses–we have no paid staff. Your gift of $25, $50 or even more is fully tax-deductible (in the United States). Thanks for considering a donation to TAPS!
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Ad Astra
I was six. We lived on the West Coast, so we had to get up early to see it. Grainy, on a small-screen, huge-bodied black and white television full of vacuum tubes, the mighty rocket standing, and the countdown… “…4…3…2…1…LIFTOFF We have LIFTOFF of Apollo Seven!” It was 1968. I didn’t understand very much about what was happening except that we were going to the Moon, and this was a step. We were going. To the Moon. I already knew, somehow, that I lived in the future. And you can laugh about that, that a kid in 1968 would think things so advanced, but we had cars and submarines and…
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Sabbath Drop
So, the first week in November was Hallows. The whole week. I wrote about this before: the fun/gross/sexy/creepy launch of Halloween, the days between with their various observances, and then actual Hallows/Samhain, the midpoint between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice, on Nov. 7 or so. It’s a whole week of fun, introspection, contemplation of mortality, and goth goodness. We Pagans love our Festival of Darkness and Death. It’s a/the high point of the wheel of the year. I got to see and circle with two groups of friends, which, frankly…well, are any of us getting face-to-face time with friends much any more? But it’s over now, and I’m…
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Deep in Hallows
We’re deep in the season of Hallows now. Halloween is a memory; the true midpoint between the equinox and solstice still some days ahead, on the 7th. By then, the clocks will have turned back, and darkness will descend quite suddenly on the evenings. This week always feels liminal to me, a between-time very like the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day: the world holds its breath, and everything is laden with meaning. I’ve been doing my rituals. Took my annual walk in the cemetery on Halloween; gathered a spring of yew that will dry on my Underworld Focus for the next year and then be used to light…
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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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PSSSST!… Wanna Be a Columnist?
With this site now migrated to a more flexible and attractive format, I’m also looking at making some content upgrades. I’ve been inviting guest posts since near the beginning of publishing the blog, but now I have one person (to be introduced soon!) who wants to do a twice-monthly column for us, and I wanted to put out the word for others who have an idea of what they would like to talk about once or twice every month. This could be anything: seasonal reflections, craft projects, recipes, phenology journaling from your local clime, rituals and spellcraft…or a mixture of any of the above. The main requirements are that you…
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Welcome to the New Atheopaganism.org!
We’ve got a new look and feel and some much better tools for searching the content of the site now, having pried ourselves loose from the commercial side of WordPress to go with independent hosting and the open-source CMS. Thanks to GLEN GORDON and Rana A. for their help with this complex migration! Have a look around! The new Table of Contents in the sidebar will give you quick access to posts in general categories of topics, while the search bar will look for a specific word string (like “Yule”). All the material from the old site is here, searchable and in the same format as previously. If you have…
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What Do We Mean by “Revering Nature”? A Reality Check
Life is one of the Sacred four pillars of Atheopaganism. And it is often said of Pagans generally that we revere or even “worship” Nature. So…what do we mean by that? To explore that, we have to go back about 250 years to a major wellspring of modern Paganism, which is Romanticism. Starting in the late 18th century, as more and more Europeans began to live in cities rather than in small villages or on farms, the Romantic movement arose, which, well, romanticized the idea of “noble Nature”. Romantic ideas of “untamed wilderness” and “the magnificent wild” persist in cultures derived from Europe to this day, including the idea that…
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Community Update, Oct. 2022
Hi, everyone! We had our regular quarterly meeting of the Atheopagan Society Council last week, and we are going to be going through a strategic planning process to set priorities and objectives for our community for the next 2-3 years at our next meeting, in January. The results of the recent poll of community members will be used to help us set these priorities, which will tell us where to put our energy and efforts. Don’t worry! Beloved activities like the Zoom mixers and salons, the Atheopagan Voice, the affinity groups and the bi-annual Suntree Retreat aren’t going anywhere. But we’ll figure out how best to make these as useful…
