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…

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…

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…

Pagan Time: Ritual of the Gods

After last night’s marathon post, tonight’s will be fairly short and to the point. After all, I fully expect you to be out drinking and celebrating and not at home reading blogs! Incidentally, the image attached to this post is from the Daily Mail. You can read the article it’s from here. Strange Bedfellows The strange…

Pagan History: the Eagle’s Eye View

History is the collection of stories that we tell about our pasts to make sense of who we are now. They can and most often do look to the future and are never simply a recounting of events that have happened. There would be no point to learning history if it were simply the sum…

At the Height of Summer

I’ve gone through a lot of topics for Solstice this year, and since many other pagan blogs will be focusing on the different celebrations or use of it, I thought I would focus on something more thematically in keeping with this high festival of the sun at its peak and the moon at its fullness:…