Practice
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On the Edge of Darkness: Hallows Reflections 2016
It’s a gray, dim day here in Sonoma County, under a foreboding blanket of low and heavy clouds. Forecasts are for showers throughout the day; it’s one of those Halloweens where parents crane their necks and scowl at the sky throughout the day, wondering whether they’ll get away with a dry window during trick or treating. Which seems like a pretty good metaphor for this entire year. I’ve been scowling at the sky and wondering just what kind of fresh hell may be coming along a lot, this year. Now with a week left until possibly the most important U.S. election since 1860, there are still no clear answers, but one…
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Harvest 2016
We’re coming up to Harvest this week. I’ll be having friends over to enjoy a feast of locally produced food and drink, which is how I like to celebrate this sabbath: as a kind of Atheopagan Thanksgiving. Last year, I wrote about the shadow sabbath: what happens when the events of life aren’t congruent with the metaphorical themes of a given holiday. It was a hard time of financial distress, having been forced to move from my beloved home of 18 years, and the destruction of a nearby retreat, Harbin Hot Springs, to fire. This year is better. We found another—albeit much less beautiful—place to live, and I am employed gainfully. We have enough to…
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The Ecstasy of the Mosh Pit
I love punk rock. I was in high school at exactly the period that disco became a popular genre (which means that it was already dying in the gay bars and minority clubs where it had been born; by the time straight white people took it—because there was money to be made—it was pretty well wrung out). Those years–1975-79–saw some of the most godawful popular music that had been seen to date: lush, overproduced orchestral rock anthems with pretentious lyrics, whiny love ballads, the Eagles (enough said) and ubiquitous disco enjoinders to dance and screw, the soundtrack of the Seventies Bacchanal that set the table for the AIDS epidemic. There were exceptions, of…
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Audio: My Favorite Ritual Tool
This is a test of podcasting function for AP.
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My Favorite Ritual Tool
Ritual tools are personal things. They are objects that we find evocative, meaningful, symbolic. They whisper stories to us, and those stories are folded into the meaning of the rituals which we perform with them. Atheopagans vary widely in the kinds of ritual tools they use, including those who don’t use tools at all. The use of tools in rituals—typically, ritual knives (“athames”), wands, patens or pentacles, chalices and incense burners and so forth—is one of the threads of Western occultism that was woven into the fabric of Neopaganism as it arose in the mid-20th century, and it persists today in most of the Wicca-style Pagan traditions. I use tools…
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Accountability: a Pagan Missing Piece?
There’s been some discussion of the concept of “sin” in the Pagan blogosphere lately: here, and here, and my own contribution some time ago, here. Now, I should say: that’s a freighted word for many people, but not so much for me. I was never a Christian, nor a Jew nor Muslim. So I don’t feel the oppressive weight of the concept of sin that those religions transmit. Please bear this in mind as you read the following. I’ve been involved with the Northern California Pagan community for a long time–30 years next year. And in that time, I have seen a deep imbalance between the community’s orientation to pleasure-seeking…
