It’s not dressing as if you’re at a Renaissance Faire. Nor goth/BDSM aesthetic, all black and “witchy”. Both are fine, if you want to indulge in them. But they’re not relevant to the path. It’s not a commercial platform for selling crystals, oils, tinctures, potions, tools, incenses, candles, Tarot cards, workshops or books. It’s not having elaborate “occult” tools. Though some who practice it may avail themselves of such things. Atheopaganism is actually something serious, though lighthearted. It’s not a dress-up game and it’s not about collecting stuff. It isn’t even necessarily about doing rituals…though it is about creating and having experiences. It’s about loving and delighting in and wondering…

Contemporary Paganism in the English-speaking world suffers from multiple contaminating ideas carried over from the overculture that suffuses that world. A part of our effort at liberating ourselves from these assumptions and paradigms through Atheopaganism must, therefore, lie in choosing and adopting different models for understanding ourselves in relation to our Universe and the very nature of religion itself. Among the ideas we must transcend are: •  The assumption that it is normal and natural that a religion should be imported from far away, as opposed to rooted in local land and biome. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism all come from lands far distant from the Anglophone world. That’s…