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Sifting for Gold
It’s a soft, rainy spring day. I’m grateful for the rain—we need it—and for the lush green it has brought to the hills and meadows, the vineyards carpeted with bright mustard flowers. These are such challenging times. The circumstances of my personal life are stressful and frightening; the broader culture is caught in the nightmare of Donald Trump’s willful smashing of all that is decent and righteous. Friends are struggling to make ends meet; my area is still grappling with the incomprehensible shock of last October’s wildfires. As I said: challenging. I find times like these—although, to be fair. there have never been times as extreme as these in my…
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Walking Our Talk: Modeling a Vision for the Future
As I have written before, Atheopaganism is a forward-looking religious path. We envision a time when humanity lives in balance with the natural systems of the biosphere and when all people are treated fairly and equally in human society. Those are tall orders, but that’s what a vision is for, right? Especially in these times, it is clear that we have far to go to approach these visionary goals. And so as we create our “microcosms” of human society in our Pagan circles, it is that much more important that we model for ourselves and others the world we hope to create. In my experience, Pagans don’t do nearly so…
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High Spring: Themes, Resources and Ideas
As the vernal equinox (which in my version of the Wheel of the Year I term High Spring) approaches, Pagans everywhere prepare to celebrate this important Sabbath. As the “Spring festival” (whether you consider it the beginning of Spring or, as I do, the height of it), themes of High Spring include new life, youth, childhood, innocence, inspiration, new beginnings and the initiation of new projects and efforts, and balance (just as the equinox is the balance point between the primarily-dark and the primarily-light halves of the year). Here where I am, at least, the world is green and blooming with flowers, and hope is in the air. Some common…
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Five Great Reasons to Be an Atheopagan
This is a bit of a bandwagon post. John Beckett and Jason Mankey have just posted about “Five Bad Reasons to be a Pagan” and “Five Good Reasons” to be one, respectively. They’re at Patheos, which I no longer link to, but you can find them easily if you like. Their posts got me thinking about how happy I am with my Atheopagan practice. It’s been ten years this year since I stripped the god-imagery that I really didn’t believe out of my practice and completed my essay on why I wasn’t going to pretend any longer. At that moment, a profound sense of relief and “rightness” swept through me.…
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Journeying in the Inner Landscape
Here at Atheopaganism, we have discussed ritual skills quite a bit. Developing the skill sets that help people to attain the Ritual State (or “trance”) is key to our ability to be effective ritualists who can transform consciousness in empowering ways. Click here to see previous posts tagged as “Ritual Technologies and Core Skills”. Thus far, these posts have been about using skills and technologies to induce the Ritual State. But today we turn to another question: what to do once you get there? Trance is powerful, and can be experienced simply as a glowing, liminal state within which to conduct ceremonial activities or contemplation…or it can be the context…
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Producing Your Own Atheopagan Event
Having online community is great, but real, in-person gatherings where we can build relationships, celebrate our rites and learn from one another are much, much better. I encourage you to organize your own events and start building your own non-theist Pagan community. To that end, I’m happy to announce the release of the Atheopagan Event Planning Guide . I hope you’ll download the Guide and its associated spreadsheets (the Timeline Template and the Budget Template), and use them to create your own gatherings. When planning your Atheopagan event, be sure to contact The Atheopagan Society (our registered nonprofit) to see if there are ways we can help (with affordable event…
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Woodland Dreaming: Missing Ancient Ways
I’m back from Pantheacon, and had a wonderful festival again. I was involved in three conference offerings—a ritual for activists (“Arming the Earth Warriors”), a mixer for non-theists, and the annual ritual by the Spark Collective, of which I sit on the Core group—and all were well-attended and received. Our non-theist ritual had nearly twice as many attendees as did last year, so things are growing. As for the conference itself, it was a flurry of reconnecting with friends I rarely get to see, late-night parties (followed by early-morning work shifts), resultant sleep deprivation and diligent efforts to make sure I remained fed, hydrated and grounded. It’s an otherworldly environment where…
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Unpopular Ideas
On this day in 1809, Charles Darwin was born. 50 years later, he would publish “On the Origin of Species”, which pretty well blew the doors off the scientific world, outraged the contemporary religious culture, and established the key scientific foundation of the field of biology for all time. Darwin knew what he was doing. He sat on “Origin” for years, aware that the core implication of his work—that no God was necessary to explain the diversity of life on Earth—would bring him a deluge of hatred and ridicule. He was right. 159 years on, Christian fundamentalists still rail against Darwin’s discovery. Their entire worldview is threatened by his simple…
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On the Other Hand…(A Love Letter)
So, I’ve been a little hard on the Pagan community lately. I’ve decried abuses and hierarchies, lack of political engagement, and the leftovers of the sexual culture of the 1960s that still thrive in many corners of it. Those things are true, in my opinion, and I stand by them. So why, one might ask, do I continue to be a part of a community of people who I find so problematic? Well, let me tell you: because it’s wonderful. In all my experience, no cohort of people has ever been so smart, interesting, creative, unique and, by and large, genuinely good-hearted. Weird, yes—but isn’t that just a synonym for creative? Despite blind…
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Children of the Earth Tribe, WAKE UP
Back in September of 2015, I asked, is Atheopaganism political? Go ahead, read it. It lays out why I believe that any religious path that is truly about this Earth—any path of integrity—must, in days such as these, be one of activism. Since, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to consider the Pagan community generally through this lens. And I am sorry to say that I have been sorely disappointed. Most of the visible voices, most of the “Big Name Pagans”, are anything but political. At best, they may voice the occasional political opinion in passing, but mostly they’re about rituals and magical tools and cultural traditions and “mysteries”. Oh, and selling…
