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Show Your Pride! Atheopagan Pendants and Products
We now have several sources for Atheopagan products. Here’s how you can buy them! First, there is The Atheopagan Store at Zazzle, where mugs, bumper stickers, Winter Solstice cards and t-shirts can be purchased, as well as collar pins and ritual stoles for when you need that clerical look. Prices on these products are nearly at cost, and all proceeds go to the Atheopagan chosen charity for the year. For laser-cut wooden suntree pendants, Yule ornaments and Focus symbols, visit Akashazamora.com. Beautiful work at very affordable prices! Next, there are splendid bronze and pewter suntree pendants at Meuleurgy on Etsy! Also very reasonably priced. Finally, if you have access to…
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Happy Solstice!
A very joyous Longest Night (or Longest Day, in the Southern Hemisphere) to you! Here is a compendium of Yuletide traditions, projects and rituals you can use to inspire your own celebrations. Wolcum Yule!
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The Secrets, Pt. II: Ritual and Observance
I’ve been thinking more about the idea behind this post. Had a good comment exchange with Yvonne Aburrow about the concept of a day when we can share our deepest and most shameful secrets. She agrees that it could be really beneficial for many; an opportunity for the kind of “absolution” that Catholics, for example, seem to get out of confession. Now, I think of guilt as the most useless of emotions except possibly envy. It doesn’t make us better people; it just gnaws at us long after we have learned the lesson of whatever we did to disappoint ourselves. It doesn’t necessarily have to be that way, but we…
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The Secrets
What if we could speak the unspeakable, shameful secrets, just for one day? What if we could say, I have come to hate my child, or I make my money illegally, or I like rough sex, or I am impotent or I am using heroin or I am a compulsive shoplifter or once, I hit my partner? What would it be like if we could bare ourselves to one another, just for that one day? If that One Thing that inspires a cascade of shame could be spoken to another, without being judged? If we, as a society, had a culture of radical honesty on one particular day? I have…
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More on Community Transition
Recently, I wrote an optimistic piece about the evolution of the Pagan movement. Some insightful commenters were not so sanguine as I, and I’d like to address their contentions here. Their arguments fell into several general buckets: The Internet is not a substitute for in-person contact and relationships. Rigid ideologies and fundamentalism are tearing us apart, and newcomers seeing this will be alienated and flee. We cannot have kinship and a culture—and, therefore, a cultural impact—unless this divisiveness ends. Paganism has reached the end of a 40-year cycle common to spiritual movements and, having not gained much social traction, will now fade. People are leaving Paganism and “occult” practice, even…
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The Pagan Community in Transition
Once upon a time, there was a deeply oppressed minority whose very existence was illegal: the gay community. And though we* are far from winning the fight for full equality for LGBTQ folks, it is fair to say that much progress has been made, and the LGBTQ community has made transitions as a result. For one thing, it isn’t as necessarily committed to secrecy, to clandestine gathering in obscure locations like dive bars and bathhouses to avoid police and the general, critical public. I believe the Pagan community is arriving at a similar crossroads, and is changing as a result. Recently, two major announcements have discomforted the North American Pagan…
