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If You Give Gifts at this Time of Year…
Why not consider some of the great suggestions Jon Cleland Host has over at Naturalistic Paganism? Remember, too, that we are coming to the end of 2021, when our Atheopagan Chosen Charity has been BLACK LIVES MATTER. All proceeds from the Atheopagan Zazzle store will go to BLM through December 31. So head over there and see if there is something you’d like to gift, or for yourself! Like, say, our famous Axial Tilt Winter Solstice Cards…which are currently 50% off!
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You Have Permission to be Witchy
All of us in the nontheist/SASS*/Atheopagan sphere start out having to contend with that pesky internal Critic Voice that says, as we begin to move out of our ordinary mental states and towards creating or participating in ritual, “THIS IS STUPID. YOU’RE MAKING A FOOL OF YOURSELF.” For we are practical, rational folk, yes? We sift the world for evidence to make our determinations. So actions for no concretely definable reason become questionable at best. Ergo, the Voice. Yes, that voice speaks JUST LIKE THE CHARACTER DEATH in the late lamented Sir Terry Pratchett’s novels, with as much authority and gravitas and certainty. The difference between Death and your inner…
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The Sacred Rite of Composting
Before we slide into the joyous, let-us-eat-now-for-tomorrow-we-freeze holidays of December, let us take one final, sincere look at the time of Hallows and the meaning of this season. This post relates to a previous piece, Death, the Creator. Go ahead, read that first. In my Wheel of the Year, the period between Hallows, the Sabbath of Death, and Yule, the annual “birth” of the Sun, is the time of composting and recomposition: metaphorically, it is when I recognize that after death, my body will be disassembled through the process of decomposition, and its component molecules will return to cycling through the vast and wonderful apparatus of Life. It is the…
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Murderous Holidays
Today, in the United States it is Veterans’ Day (titled Armistice Day in Europe), which was founded to mark the end of the obscene, utterly baseless bloodbath that was the first World War. According to the Overculture, today is a day to feel grateful to those who Gave The Greatest Sacrifice For Our Freedom. Never mind, of course, that the US hasn’t been in a war for purposes of actually defending itself since 1945. Nor that the vast majority of those Sacrificed were conscripts who were FORCED into the slaughter machine known as modern warfare in places far, far away from the Americas: places like the Korean Peninsula, Southeast Asia,…
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Hallows 2021
Welcome to the Witchiest Sabbath, everyone! It’s been another hell of a year, and it’s hard to get my mind around the fact that it is already Hallows season again. 2020 seemed to take forever, but 2021 has just flown by. As I write, torrential rain pours blessedly on the parched land of California. We’re in a drought and desperately need this, but it’s a Class 5 atmospheric river storm (only 10 have ever been recorded here) and there is widespread local flooding. Famine or feast, it seems. My partner Nemea and I are in pretty dire financial straits right now, but today, in a cozy little place with food…
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Imagining Ancestors
Much as the Christian Overculture has made it its business to erase, co-opt or appropriate pre-existing religions in the West–as well as to eradicate and supplant other cultures and traditions throughout the world–archeology presents us with treasures now and again that remind me of a different world that existed prior to the imposition of the angry sky gods of the Levant. One prominent such example was discovered buried 13 feet deep in a peat bog in Russia in 1890. It is now known as the Shigir Idol. Made of larch wood, it is 17 feet tall, towering more than three times the height of the people who built it. Now,…
