Practice
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Sigils: Barcodes for your Brain
In Atheopaganism, we understand ritual “magic” as the manipulation of consciousness according to desired outcomes: as “programming the mind”. It’s not supernatural, and it doesn’t affect things at a distance, but it does have a powerful ability to change our selves: to increase our courage, our focus, our attention to things we find important. Over the centuries, many cultures have used drawn symbols to communicate magical meaning. Examples ranging from Roman curse scrolls incised on lead sheets to European ceremonial magic in Enochian script to Vodoun vé-vés have signified the invocation of results, magical beings or deities. This is an old practice, and one Atheopagans can use as well. A…
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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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Come Join Us at Pantheacon!
For the fourth year in a row, Atheopagan events will take place at Pantheacon, the largest indoor gathering of Pagans in the United States. Pantheacon 2018 will be held February 16-19, at the Doubletree convention hotel in San Jose, California. Pantheacon is an adventure: there is wide-ranging content on all sorts of Pagan paths, and the attendees include many memorable, wonderful, and colorful folks. Much of the material isn’t really germane to Atheopaganism, but I always find useful and thought-provoking presentations to attend, and the experience of seeing in person friends I rarely get to experience other than online is a real treat. This year, I am involved in three…
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The Ritual Cycle of the Rain Baby: An Example
So, last year I wrote about a new tradition for Riverain, the Water Sabbath, which is how I celebrate the holiday that falls between the Winter Solstice (Yule) and the Spring Equinox (High Spring). Riverain comes at the height of the wet season in California’s Mediterranean climate, when the hills are green and the creeks and rivers are running high. Riverain is an example of my firm belief that the Sabbaths (holidays) we celebrate around the Wheel of the Year should be rooted in the actual climate, culture, growth cycles, and land where we live, rather than reflecting some other culture or place in the world. The traditional Pagan holiday at the…
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Approaching the Animal Self
I’m a white guy. I mean, a seriously white guy. My 23andme.com DNA profile shows me as having 100% Northern European ancestry, pretty much all of which is English/Irish except for 1.2% Scandinavian, which has GOT to be a Viking raider. Not one of my ancestors ever had the courage to mate out of group, to choose someone different than the people s/he was raised by. As a white guy, I’m the first to admit that I’m kind of crippled. I am the product of centuries of European cultural “bleaching out” of human wildness in favor of manners, rectitude, forebearance, privacy, and shame. Of steady alienation from the body in favor…
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Introducing SLOGG: The Winter Demi-Sabbath
January is a hard damned month for me. There, I said it. After the colorful lights and parties and presents and many festivities of Yule comes a dark, cold time when we all go back to work. No fun for us now: just trudging through the snow or freezing rain, in the dark, to and from our obligations. It’s the longest, most miserable month of the year. Here where I live, in the wine country north of San Francisco, January is a time when the hills are green from whatever rain we’ve had thus far (not much yet, this year), and rain is typically common. We’ve had flooding in January…
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The Cauldron of Hope: A New Year’s Eve Ritual
If you are gathered with friends or family for New Year’s Eve, here is a light ritual you can do that isn’t interruptive of festivities but can add some meaningful heft to the launch of the new calendar year. Place a dollar coin, for luck and prosperity, into the bottom of an iron cauldron or Dutch oven. Pour in 2″ of fresh water (rainwater if you have it). Add a handful of kosher salt or sea salt, for strength and patience, and stir until as much salt as possible has dissolved into the water. Each guest is invited to drip a small libation in the cauldron from whatever they are drinking,…
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Yule Offering #3: Love
My final wish for you all this Yule season is that you be surrounded with love. We are social apes, we humans, and loneliness is a terrible burden to us. Here at the dark and cold time of year, we can feel even more isolated, even more as though we must face life’s trials on our own. It is quite likely that this was one of the main drivers of the creation of our Winter Solstice traditions in the first place. I happen to be someone who has no blood family any longer. It’s better that way, overall: the dynamic within my family was toxic and abusive and would not, could…
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Yule Offering #2: Courage
My second hope for you at Yule is that you engage the season with bravery. This is the time when we stand up to darkness and cold and the prospect of much more of it, and we do so with a combination of brazen silliness and real strength: the kind of strength it takes to deal with difficult family members and multiple obligations and inclement weather and looming deadlines and planned projects and lists and unsnarling the bloody lights and figuring out where we put the tree stand last year and deciphering Grandma’s 40-year-old spider-scrawl on that recipe that simply MUST be made. The many demands of life multiply at…
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Yule Offering #1: Stillness
Here’s my first hope for you at (what I consider) the New Year: the Winter Solstice, or Yule. That after the holiday frenzy of Silly Season, after the parties and dinners and rituals, there comes a moment when you can just stop. And be still. And feel within you the glow of all your life’s wealth: the beauty, the love, the gifts that the very Earth itself rains down on you. I hope that—even if only for a moment—you will feel your body swell with the joy that is your birthright, and you will know that you belong here, between soil and stars, a unique expression of the very Universe, looking…
