Personal Reflection
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In the Cold Midwinter
Today, the Wheel turns again: a new year is born and the sun begins its long swing back to warm the northern hemisphere. It has been a challenging year for me. I have been unemployed the entire time, and survival has been a severe struggle. But one bright spot in my life has been Atheopaganism and the growth of our community. I wrote over a hundred posts to the website this year, on topics ranging from sigils and candle rituals to rites of passage to sexual ethics in the Pagan community. We had guest posts on various Atheopagans’ practices, and we selected a beautiful symbol for our tradition: the suntree.…
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Forging Paths of Integrity (with Minor Update)
There has been a lot of talk online lately about the Pagan (or neopagan, if you prefer) community* and integrity, or lack thereof. Stuff about “fakelore” traditions and lineages: pretense of ancient roots that aren’t, and people using this pretense to dangle “ancient secrets” before naive seekers to leverage sexual favors . Stuff about lousy sexual boundaries, harassment and assault**; particularly, the usage of status and power (such as the power to approve or disapprove elevation to higher “degrees of initiation”) to extort sex, money or power. I’ve written about some of these issues before. They are real. They go to the origins of modern witchcraft’s practices and culture with some decidedly kinky…
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Atheopaganism is Not Just a Religious/Spiritual Path. It’s a Movement.
Imagine… A world where critical thinking and reason and Occam’s Razor are the predominant means people use for determining what to believe. Where education is celebrated and made a major public priority, and expertise is once again respected. A world where the Earth and Sun, and beauty and truth and love are considered Sacred. Where people conduct themselves according to principles of kindness and compassion. Where we ritualize our life transitions, and calmly and factually embrace both sex and death as natural parts of a human life. Where consent culture is a norm rather than an aspiration. Where each of us is empowered to take on whatever religious roles we…
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If You’re a US Citizen, PLEASE VOTE!
Jon over at Humanistic Paganism has a great post up, reminding us of the critical importance of voting—and voting Democratic—in Tuesday’s U.S. elections. The domination of the nation’s current politics by the party of Trump simply must end, and the first step must happen now. I have just returned from the Freedom From Religion Foundation‘s annual conference in San Francisco. Among the presenters were atheists from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Bangladesh who told harrowing stories about what happens when religion is allowed to drive politics. Trump and his evangelical supporters want similar draconian “morality” inflicted on our nation, but we have a tool that those presenters do not: elections with an…
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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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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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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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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…
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A Reflection at Dusk
Days are noticeably shorter now. The coastal fog cycle native to my region is sputtering with the weakened power of the Sun, so we have days of heat followed by days half of which are soft and gray, burning off only in the afternoons to sun. Autumn is here. Usually, this is a joyous realization for me. I love the fall, with its colorful leaves, spectacular sunsets, skulls and bones and pumpkins. Autumn feels like the reaping of rewards long striven for, the achievement of the year’s culmination. This year is a little different. It feels as though I have suffered many blows and time is running out to secure…
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Reemergence
As regular readers know, I broke my arm at a Pagan event three weeks ago. Since, I have been contending with lining up a specialist to do surgery to reset it, having the surgery, and recovery. I am in the boring phase of this process. I can’t do much, and I’m chained to my bed where I await the alarm for taking pills every two hours. Even though I can type with two hands now, I have been bone-dry for ideas about what to write on. And with a broken arm, I can’t very well do much on my job search…especially on a Saturday. Meanwhile, Moon Meet is a week off…
