Toward a Pagan Science

The featured image for this post shows Beauty and the Beast at supper, an image taken here as the meeting of scientific reasoning and pagan thought. Read on to see how that works out …

The Scales of Time

Happy New Year! Well, at least happy Roman new year. For those of us following the Celtic system of time, the year began back at the beginning of November, but the occasion — and the coincidence of the New Moon — bring up the notion of how we measure time and, by extension, how grossly…

The Echo of Ælfwín’s Ghost

The full moon on the 17th initiated this year’s festival of Yule. We celebrate it as a nine-day festival in the spirit of my post on an alternate celebration of Samhain, and its effect was a culmination of fullness a mere three days before the moment when light shone in the darkest part of the…

Forcing a Look at the Dark Side: What’s Pagan about Star Wars?

Spoiler Alert and a Disclaimer Actually more of a suggestion of spoilers, there are references to all the major plot points of the Star Wars movies and some of the novels in this post, so if you care about experiencing the narratives first hand before reading about them, you better get your binge on now….

The Cauldron of Plenty: Traditionally Pagan Wealth

Our modern culture has a vexed relationship with money. Most “developed” countries make their decisions based on economic value. This does not mean that everyone is going around putting a dollar sign on everything, but it does mean that everyone is evaluating cost against benefit. The classic economic triangle of time-money-quality — do something cheaply…

New Moon at the Close of Samhain

As we turn toward the dark half of the year, it is worth reflecting on how we can navigate the darkness without losing our way.

Another View of Samhain

Today is the first day of Samhain! This declaration may come as a bit of a surprise to some who think of the festival as a single-day event, but in my own practice I have come to think of it as a nine-day festival. Celebrating to the Nines Thinking of Samhain as a nine-day festival…

The Exalting Emotions

I first encountered contemporary paganism in the mid 90’s when I mistook Patricia Telesco‘s Victorian Grimoire for a book of nineteenth century poems. Having never met anyone who promoted a magical perspective, I began a correspondence with her attempting to get a better understanding of how spells could possibly work. I remember at one point…

“Truth Will Out”

My grandmother had a love of quoting Numbers 32:23 “… be sure your sins will find you out.” There is a kind of tragic irony to its use in the Bible belt (where I was born and raised). This particular quote comes from Moses exhorting the tribes of Israel to genocide in the name of…

Charles Dickens’ Paganism

I have to admit that I am post-dating this to the Winter Solstice, but hopefully it will not be utterly without some degree of illumination. The holiday of the Winter Solstice is celebrated almost globally whether in its guise of Yule, Saturnalia, Dongzhi, or even Haudeshaune. It’s true that it is not celebrated universally, but that…

The Weight of Diversity

Few of the words that have become politically charged are more sacred than ‘diversity.’ As pagans, the concept of diversity is central to our perception of reality. There are many gods, each a divine, supernal reality unto themselves and from which ontological moments emerge into our awareness, but diversity as a political is rarely questioned. If…

What’s the Story?

There is a terrible, wonderful power to narrative. We live and die by it. It shapes our thoughts, our perceptions, our very reality in ways that we cannot even — or at least don’t often — imagine. The Magic of the Tale Our pagan forebears knew this far better than we. It is well remembered by those…