Pagan Bloggers with Naturalistic Worldviews
A number of recent posts in the Pagan blogosphere, including Lisa Wagoner’s first post in her new Patheos blog Witch, Indeed? and John Halstead’s recent post on why people may have good reason to make fun of Wiccans and witches, have me thinking about the labels that I put around my spiritual practice. I plan… Continue reading On Being Witch: How, Why, Where, When, and with Whom? →
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Sacred Mysteries were initiatory rituals or ritual cycles in the ancient world which revealed secret wisdom to participants. Some examples include the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece and the Mysteries of Dionysos in Rome, and the initiatory mystery religion of Mithraism, also from the Roman period. These rituals and ritual cycles were characterized by solemn oaths of silence, so many … Continue reading Toward Atheopagan Mysteries
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SAVE THE DATE! The second annual Moon Meet is a congregation of Atheopagans, non-theist Pagans and others interested in our paths, held from Friday, August 24 through Sunday, August 26, on private land on a redwood-covered mountain near Healdsburg, in the beautiful wine country of Sonoma County, California. Moon Meet—named because we will hold it … Continue reading SAVE THE DATE and CALL FOR WORKSHOP PROPOSALS: MOON MEET 2018!
Read moreOriginally posted on Pray With Your Feet: “A Single Garment of Destiny” In his penultimate sermon, delivered on March 31, 1968, at the National Cathedral in Washington,…
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Existing in both the atheist world and in the Pagan, Atheopagans have the unique “good fortune” of fielding criticism from extreme elements of both. I’ve written before about Pagan fundamentalists who dismiss our religion as “not real Paganism. ” Today, we take a look at the atheist community’s counterpart: the so-called “anti-theists”. A vocal subset … Continue reading Talking with Atheists Who Dismiss Your Atheopagan Practice
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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 … Continue reading Sigils: Barcodes for your Brain
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I have a long history with dewberry plants, since my dad used to grow them along the back fence of our home, when I was a child. He got his canes from my grandparents, who got theirs from my Texas German great-grandparents, who used to turn the berries into wonderful pies, jelly, and wine. Most… Continue reading March Blue Moon Tea: Dewberry →
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This proves that our relation to Neandertals are not bound strictly by DNA, but by the shared humanity of understanding, the importance of storytelling, and ritualizing rites of passage. The more we segregate and conceit ourselves from the history of Earth’s species and where we come from, the more this is mirrored toward our human peers within our day-to-day activities, and to the shared animals of our planet.
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Of all the many factors on planet Earth that enable us to live and thrive, there are two which border, in my opinion, on the miraculous*: the conversion of sunlight into sugar through photosynthesis, and the mysterious alchemy of microbes and nutrients and water that makes dirt into the life-giver to us all. Yet we … Continue reading The Miracle of Dirt
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Happy High Spring! Today I walked with Poe and observed what’s happening outside. The Austin sky is sunny and breezy today, with temperatures only in the 60s F, and thank all the gods, no packages except those that I ordered have been delivered to our front door. Early spring bloomers like henbit and chickweed now… Continue reading Notes on Spring Equinox 2018 →
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