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A Reminder: Atheopaganism Has a Patreon!
Providing thoughtful material and useful resources for Atheopagans and managing our growing community on Facebook (1,139 members as of today!) takes time, reflection, and work. I do it because I truly feel called to the task, and gratified that so many are gravitating to our Pagan, atheist path. It is a privilege to support and serve this community of fascinating and diverse folk. That said, I can use some help as I do so. Ensuring that I have the time carved out for Atheopagan work (even after I find a job again, which will be soon, I trust) is assisted by having some income directly from the community to subsidize…
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A Deep and Meaningful Hallows to You!
Just a short note for the folks here who aren’t on the Facebook group: I wish you the most potent and meaningful of Hallows celebrations, and may your reflections on your ancestors and Death bring you wisdom. I am about to head off to my circle’s annual Samhain/Hallows gathering, which I’ve described here. It will be a particularly powerful year for it, because my father died last year. I look forward to putting to rest that horrible relationship, and to seeing my circle brothers and sisters. See you on the flip side!
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Visions of the Crash
We are warned now that we may have only a dozen years before global climate change reaches the 2 degree C. tipping point that will render Earth’s climate so unstable as to create ongoing crises in health, agriculture and, fundamentally, human survival. Our population continues to climb, ocean fisheries are crashing, extinction mounts worldwide. Something is going to shift. It is shifting, and fast. The question is how quickly, and how it will happen. To start with, let’s be clear: however big a tragic gouge we cause to be scraped from the biodiversity of Planet Earth, life will survive and go on to evolve for billions of additional years. The…
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Contrasts
Saturday night, I was dancing around a cauldron ablaze with candles, with drums thundering and voices lifted high in song, at the monthly Spark Collective gathering. Sunday morning, I attended a Unitarian Universalist service. Tellya, there are differences. Paganism is fundamentally an ecstatic practice: it’s about living in the body, embracing physicality both of ourselves and of our existence as creatures of the Earth, cultivating joy and intensity of emotional and meaningful experience. UU is more about a calm and gentle cultivation of wisdom on the personal level, and activism on the societal. The service I attended incorporated some quasi-Protestant elements such as singing (rather tepid) hymns with a five-minute silent…
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Ritual Tools I Find Useful
Ritual tools are physical objects with which one performs symbolic ritual acts. In more formal “occult” systems there are prescribed sets of these tools, but in Atheopaganism, we’re strictly practical about them; we use what is useful to us. The items below are things I use in rituals, in combination with objects symbolizing the qualities and attributes I wish to include in a given ritual: Focus cloths: I like to have cloths I can put down on a table or other surface, upon which I build my Focus. They vary in color by the season (bright pastels for High Spring, e.g., or spider web-patterned black fabric for Hallows). Asperger: Asperging is…
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Paganism, Gothic Aesthetic, and the Sensibility of Darkness: An Observation
‘Tis the season, so let’s talk about it: it’s a thing, among us Pagans. Cemeteries, bones, skulls, ravens. Vampires and absinthe and Ye Olde Occulte Symboles. Dark. Spooky. Sexy. It scares some people. Particularly non-Pagan, white-light-obsessed Christians and New Age folks. At this time of year, the Pagan community leaps with particular gusto into the seasonal enthusiasm for skulls and graves and blood. Much of this is because our paths, rather than phobically avoiding the subject of death, actually embrace it as a necessary and inevitable part of the human story. We understand that life is not just light, but is also darkness. That the human experience is not only of…
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A Gift from the Dying
I’ll cut to the chase: we’re all dying. It’s the only guaranteed fact of our lives: we die. Atheopaganism doesn’t promise an afterlife. There really isn’t compelling evidence to support the idea of one, and so we conclude (tentatively, at least) that it is unlikely that there is one. This is the life that we have. And it ends. Personally, I no longer fear death much. I don’t want for it to come any time soon, but I was dead for 13.7 billion years before I was conceived, and I don’t expect it to be any less pleasant when I am dead again. I simply will not be; there will…
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And So We Fight On
We believe in a better world We believe in justice We believe in a better world We believe in peace We believe in a better world We can heal our planet We won’t bow down. We won’t bow down. –An Atheopagan ritual chant It matters now to hold a vision. It matters not to think this moment is forever. It matters now that we are good people, and we uphold kindness and simple human decency as a value. It matters that we love the world with all our hearts. The deathgrip of white male capitalist supremacy will not persist. It will not. Women’s…
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Talking to Kids about the Cycle of Seasons
A guest post by Editor B. This past equinox marks the seventh year running that I’ve come in to my daughter’s school to talk to her class about the cycle of seasons. I started in 2012, when my daughter was in Pre-K. She and most of her classmates were four years old then. I’ve come in for every equinox and solstice since. Now my daughter is ten years old and in fifth grade. I’ve given some version of this presentation 25 times now, and these kids have grown up before my eyes. There have been some changes over the years, and also some persistent themes. I started off by reading…
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Starting Fresh: Imagining a New Paganism
What if we were starting today? If, here, 18 years into the 21st century CE, we were to invent a new, Earth-loving, progressive, reality-based religion? Imagine a practice, a cosmology, a set of values rooted in what we now know about the Cosmos, about Nature, about ourselves. If we were starting just today. What would it look like? What would draw people in, make them want to be a part of it? Well, I have some ideas. To begin with, I’d think we would start with a cosmology that doesn’t fly in the face of what we’ve learned through science over the past few hundred years. Our sources would not…
