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Shame, Guilt, Pride and Humility
Recently, I’ve had a number of opportunities to feel shame. They come to all of us. We do things or say things we wish we hadn’t, especially in anger but sometimes out of simple ignorance or carelessness. Like all of us, I have done and said my share of shameful things. Shame is not always harmful. It’s an emotion we feel that reminds us to learn from an experience, to make different choices going forward. But it is not useful if it becomes chronic, if it becomes a weight around your neck that you carry, day by day, throughout your life. Then, it has mutated into its toxic cousin, guilt.…
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Meeting the Meat: An Animal Initiation
We are reasoning Pagans. We revere the Earth and Cosmos without gilding the lily with the supernatural. We are poets and singers, dancers and artists. We paint the sky with our pigments, our tones, our voices, the products of our loving hands. And under all that, all that lovely amazing late-evolution neocortical creativity and executive function, there is The Animal. The Animal that, frankly, kind of scares us. It’s sweating and eating and breathing and excreting and lusting, and none of that is under our control. It’s as if our consciousness is surfing a powerful, turbulent wave of capricious, hungry, insistent flesh…except that the consciousness is the wave, too, not…
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Why Hexes Don’t Scare Me
As Pagans, we live in a vivid world full of wonders. For we naturalistic Pagans, those wonders have names like photosynthesis and aurora borealis and cumulonimbus and flamingo. We pay attention to the world around us, and learn about its extraordinary creatures, phenomena and history. Science and reason are our toolbox for discovery of the endless glories of the Earth and the Universe. For many in the broader Pagan community, however, living in an “enchanted world” means believing in a lot of stuff that doesn’t really pencil out when scientifically tested: omens, pseudosciences, instrumental magic, communication with deities and spirits, fairies and so forth. These things are believed out of…
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Aging, Intimacy and Atheopaganism
Intimacy is the gold standard of human relating. It is the authentic, vulnerable sharing of the inner worlds of those connecting with one another, and is a deeply nourishing, though sometimes scary experience. It is a human need; we thrive when we have it, and often suffer when we don’t. Under the Overculture, intimacy is usually conflated with sex, the idea being that the only times we are intimate and the only people with whom we are intimate are those we connect with in our sexual lives. This is a sad state of affairs, and one we should work to transcend. It is one of the places where our Atheopagan…
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GUEST POST: Atheopagan Testify! A Banishing Ritual
A guest post by Kaigi-Ron I needed to purge some major ugliness from my life, and command it to GET LOST, so I could move forward with my life. Banishing Ritual: For my banishment items, one was a stick figure of a particularly negative person. I embellished it with stink lines and 3 buzzing flies. Then X-d out her heart and face. And lastly, burnt her. So there, nyah. Did it work? YES!! I felt immediate relief afterword. And I was left with a feeling of greater command over my life, and a feeling of stronger security. I kicked those creeps outta here! So I hereby TESTIFY, AP clerics and…
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GUEST POST: An easy, one-minute daily Atheopagan micro-practice
If you’re unsure where to start with ritual or looking for something new to add to your daily practice, consider trying the 13 o’clock mindful moment. By Michael H. In Ireland, the first thing you notice about the 6 o’clock news on public television is that it is not the 6 o’clock news. It’s the “Six One News.” This is because it starts at one minute past six. Those first sixty seconds are dedicated to the Angelus, a Catholic devotional prayer and the longest-running TV show in Irish history… even if it jumped the shark many years ago. Since the beginning of Irish TV, a static religious image would appear…
