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 on the screen, and then a bell would ring for the full minute, giving the average viewer time to drop everything and pray along at home. Here’s an example from 1983:
As the country has become more diverse, culturally and religiously, there have been calls to eliminate this daily dirge or make it more representative. In recent years, it has morphed into a “moment of reflection” but still retains the Catholic-specific name, “The Angelus.”
Take this recent example from 2021, where you can see the stark difference from its 1983 ancestor:
In addition to the 6 o’clock airing, the Angelus is played on Irish radio at noon… it is played on the radio in many countries, I believe. And, of course, it rings out from Catholic churches worldwide. So, it didn’t seem strange at all to me when I moved to the Midwest and heard that meridian belling as I sat in the park eating my lunch. Kind of nostalgic!
The Midwest Angelus?
There was something odd and new, however: the noonday tornado siren also kicked in. Yep, it’s tested every day at noon around these parts. This routine was particularly strange when we went to a birthday party last year at a specially built sensory playground. Why they constructed a playscape across the road from a tornado siren, I have no clue.
In any case, noon came around, and the ol’ siren stretched its lungs like an iron rooster. The birthday picnic was abandoned for a few minutes, the shrill and rising “wheeeeeeeeee” driving us to our cars like cockroaches, clutching our four-year-olds with their little hands cupping their ears. It went on for a full five minutes. Talk about a noonday demon. Here’s an example of the kind of scene we scrambled from:
This is all to say, why do tornado siren enthusiasts and Catholics get all the fun when the sun is at its highest? Surely, this is a place where Atheopagans can hustle. But we’re not stuck with 12:00 p.m. either. We’ve got a whole clock.
The 13 O’Clock Ritual
Ritual is hard. Maintaining a daily practice takes work. But I still want to try. While thinking about simple daily habits, I alighted upon that idea of a secular Angelus… a moment of self-reflection, meditation, or just taking a moment to breathe or light a candle. Or a chance to listen to music, sing a song or write a special word I might like to hold on to for the rest of the day.
One idea you could try yourself is taking an item that represents your Atheopagan practice, holding it in your hand for a minute, and thinking about everything this symbol means to you. For me, it’s the Suntree pendant I received at the Suntree Retreat in 2022.
I don’t particularly feel comfortable doing this at noon—I need to put some space between my practice and those other things mentioned above. Instead, I’ve chosen 13 o’clock instead. 1:00 p.m.
Thirteen is just a fun number for pagans— and it’s taken on meaning for us as Atheopagans. So, I invite you to join me every day at 1:00 p.m. to take a moment and think about what your practice means to you.
I look forward to hearing how this micro-ritual works for you all.
We’re coming up on three years since the nonprofit organization The Atheopagan Society (TAPS) was organized. For some in our community, its role is a bit unclear, so I thought I would write this post explaining it.
The Society is a religious organization recognized by the US Internal Revenue Service as a legitimate religious group and exempt from taxation. We received our letter of determinationlast summer, confirming this. The mission of TAPS is “To facilitate, support and enhance the spiritual practices and mutual engagement of Atheopagans throughout the world.“
TAPS was created so that Atheopaganism can carry on into the future, beyond me or any other individual. I have arranged to leave the publication rights to my bookATHEOPAGANISM: An Earth-Honoring Path Rooted in Science to the Society so the fundamentals of Atheopaganism and its beginning history are always available for its use. Being a registered nonprofit organization also allows our community to take advantage of certain benefits that only nonprofits can access, like discounted software and event insurance. Creating TAPS was a bunch of work, but it was a natural next step for our growing religious movement and gives us protections under US law (and probably in some other countries) for our religious activities.
In short, the Society is a facilitator and support system for our growing community. In the future, it will provide educational curricula, online or self-directed classes, and more.
The Atheopagan Society is young, and it doesn’t have much money. It is funded by donors who give once or make a monthly pledge, and operated entirely by volunteers. The Atheopagan Society Council (or board of directors) is made up of a diverse group of Atheopagans who volunteer their time to develop plans, goals and priorities for the Society, and then work to implement them. I’m a member of the Council, though not an officer; we meet quarterly.
The Society’s website is where I usually direct the curious to find out about Atheopaganism. It has a lot of explanatory information about our beliefs, values and practices. It is also where people can ordain themselves online as Atheopagan “clerics”. This online ordination is legally valid and there are downloadable resources for clerics on the site about how to carry out this role of service to the community*.
That’s pretty much it! If you have any questions, please comment and I’ll answer them.
*Note that being a cleric is not an elevation in status within Atheopaganism–it is a commitment to perform services in the world.
Welcome to the second installment of Paint by Season! My name is Raena, and I am an artist, poet, and educator living in Jackson, Wyoming. Paint by Season is a new monthly column where you can follow along with me to create a monthly seasonal painting to celebrate the wonders of that season. I live in a harsh mountain climate that has two solid seasons (winter and spring) and occasionally has two short but sweet transitional seasons. My art reflects where I live and likes to pull from the joy of each season. For this month, we are celebrating the return of the light with a bright and bold winter scene.
Grab your paintbrushes and let’s get started!
To follow along with me you will need:
A canvas (any size will do but mine is an 8×10)
One flat brush
One round brush
A toothbrush
Something to put your paint on (I use a paint palate, but you could use a plate or lid)
A water cup for rinsing brushes
A towel or paper towel to clean brushes
Paint (I used acrylic) in the following colors: red, orange, salmon, yellow, white
Step One: Prep your paint by placing about a quarter size dot of all your colors on your palate. Step Two: Load your flat brush with the yellow and beginning about 2/3 up your canvas, spread the yellow out in a thick band.
Step Three: Load your flat brush with the orange and begin to spread and blend the orange into the yellow. Add more orange to the top band of yellow and continue to fill in the upper space of your canvas.
Step Four: Still using the orange, add a solid band of orange below the yellow. Do not blend the yellow and orange here, you are creating a horizon.
Step Five: Load your flat brush with red and blend into the orange on the top portion of your painting.
Step Six:
Still using the red, blend into your orange band below the yellow. Take your red nearly to the bottom of your canvas.
Step Seven: Using the round brush and the pink paint, add mountains along your yellow horizon (image 7.1). Clean your round brush and lightly dip it in white paint. Very gently add strokes across the bottom portion of your painting (below the horizon, image 7.2).
Step Eight: Use a tiny amount of white paint mixed with pink to add a little dimension to your mountains. Create a snow scene in the front of your painting with the white paint. Use a tiny amount of red paint to add shadows on the water below the mountains.
Step Nine: Using your round brush, add some pink mixed with white to your snowy hills.
Step Ten: Using your toothbrush, mix some white with water and rake your finger across the toothbrush to create snow falling. Congratulations, you’ve finished your painting!
At that point, it had become unwieldy to share information and resources as Facebook files to our growing community, and it was clearly time to have a publicly accessible venue for development of thought, exploration of ideas, announcement of events and access to downloadable resources.
More than 120,000 site visits, two books (with one on the way), 137 podcasts, 28 YouTube videos, 3 in-person community events and the help of dozens of community volunteers later, here we are, with the 600th post to the blog.
Our community has mushroomed in size and complexity, including formation of our own nonprofit Atheopagan Society, and Atheopaganism is well-established in the Pagan community (except in the minds of a narrow few) as a legitimate religious path.
We have more on the horizon: an online conference this year, another in-person Suntree Retreat gathering in Colorado next year, the recently revitalized YouTube channel‘s weekly videos. We’re growing as a community and deepening our practices with new ideas like the recently floated Atheopagan Action Day. Affinity groups have sprung up across the globe and for communities of interest, and some of them have started to hold in-person as well as online gatherings, and new columnists have joined me as writers here. A calendar project and a ‘zine are in progress.
8-1/2 years may seem like a long time, but this is a tremendous amount of development and activity for that short a span.
I cannot thank you enough for your warmth, generosity of spirit, curiosity, intellect and dedication to meaningful and kind values. The Atheopagan community is a great place to be, and it is the thousands of members who make it up that keep it that way*.
600 posts. That’s about six solid book-lengths! Amazing.
Guess I’ll get started on the next 600.
Thank you for being a part of what we are creating here. May Life, Truth, Love and Beauty decorate your days and bring meaning to your heart. So be it!
*That, and the moderators and admins, who are complete rock stars and deserve all the appreciation we can muster!
One of the things about spirituality is that without some effort, it can become a bit…navel-gazing.
It’s not a failing, nor anyone’s fault. What we do through our religious paths helps us to grow, heal, and cultivate joy, all of which are internal things. They help us to build community, too, which adds to happiness and contentment in life.
All great stuff, really important.
I have always said, though, that Atheopaganism isn’t one of those paths that thinks that politics and activism “aren’t spiritual”. Working to make the world a better place isn’t some sideline or secondary concern in Atheopaganism–it is important, just as the rituals and Sabbaths and sense of belonging are important.
But it can be hard, in a busy life that many of us struggle simply to survive, to find something we can do to help. Many of us do not have the luxury of lots of time and energy to devote to activism and advocacy. Although at previous times in my life I have eaten, slept and breathed political effort, I can’t do that any more either. Like many of us, I am scraping by and must focus my attention on survival.
So I have a proposal. I call it “Atheopagan Action Day”.
What if one day a month–say, the 13th, since we love that number–all of us who wanted to participate agreed to do something substantive, like make a call to an elected official or write a letter to the newspaper or, if we can, spend the day volunteering?
It would be like a monthly tithing of effort and energy towards a kinder, better world.
We could pick collective actions on a common topic or theme some months; others, people could act on their personal areas of concern.
So I’m going to put Action Day in my calendar as a repeating event, and start doing my part. I’ll post about it on Facebook and Discord every month, too.
Happy Belated New Years, Atheopagans! I hope your year has been kind to you so far <3
Manifestation Like many Atheopagans, I try to celebrate the turning of the Gregorian Calendar with special occasions. This usually involves beer, friends, and sharing New Year’s Resolutions (perhaps more beer than resolutions, lol, but always in good company). My friends and I did something similar this year, but with a twist – we decided to add a layer of ritual to our resolutions – both to release what should be left in 2022 and to materialize what we want to bring with us into 2023.
My initial idea for this was pretty simple – imagining my goals for the New Year like an egg that needs to be “hatched” in order for it to materialize. I wanted to associate this process with new life, treating my goals like living things born every new year – things that must be nourished, that mature with time, and that require my constant attention to survive. Rather than treat my goals as things that just happen in the background, I felt the need to take ownership of what I’m trying to actualize, treating each goal like a mini act of creation – as fragile and helpless as any other life that’s born into this world.
Last year, I ran a prototype of this ritual, which worked pretty well (considering I didn’t burn my house down), but it only felt like half of the total ritual. The egg brings new life into the New Year, but it doesn’t abandon those things behind that no longer serve me. As much as I love my little egg, it needed some help, which is where a friend came in! Another Atheopagan, Hawthorne, created a sister ritual for this New Year (out of shear synchronicity), and this blog post will be a collaboration of our efforts! I’ll briefly go into the symbolism and making of my New Year’s egg, and Hawthorne will close this article by describing their New Year’s Release ritual, the symbolism baked into it, and the making of the sacrifice.
😊 This was a fun collab, and I highly encourage other Atheopagans seek-out ritual collabs when possible.
As for the egg, the spell had four main components: 1) the eggshell, 2) the ledger of goals/themes, 3) an offering of incense, and 4) the spell’s verbal invocation. I made the eggshell using papier-mȃché and a latex balloon, cutting construction paper into strips that appear like dragon scales (because dragons are cool, and because phoenixes are a tad overplayed). The ledger is also typically made of construction paper, red in color, with the names of participants stretching top-to-bottom, their goals/themes parallel on the sheet. For incense, I normally choose a scent that is either sweet or “smoky”, depending on the mood (or whatever I think will smell best when burnt).
Once I’d gathered all my ingredients, I arrange them in my black offering bowl (pictured below) and take them outside for the invocation. With hands placed to the sides of the egg, I read my spell aloud and set the egg on the fire (invocation included at bottom). Once ablaze, I give myself a few moments to stare into the flames and acknowledge what all had transpired this previous year: “what goals were accomplished?”, “which ones weren’t?”, “where can I still grow?” … once I’m satisfied with my reflections, I let the egg burn to cinder and thank the fire for this act of beautiful destruction.
ID1: {Collected ashy-gray eggshell, red ledger of themes/goals, and brown incense stick placed decoratively within my black, shallow altar bowl, all of which against a marble background.} ID2: {Image of the dragon egg mid-cinder, with whipping flames of orange, blue and yellow stretching into the early morning’s sky.}
Dragon Egg Invocation “By serpent’s tongue and dragon’s flame, I build this nest to stake my claim. With hope and fright, I’ve braved this night, to deliver my wants with ash and light. Twix‘t leaves and hay I’ve mold to clay; an egg shall mark this New Year’s Day.
And with it shall burn, shall smoke, shall cinder, these cherished notes, now burned to tinder.
And upon my pyre that I make bright, I give to thee my humble plight: That you may make, through chance and through choice, the dreams of many, through whom I voice. On their behalf, I do this deed, and on the New Year, I bid farewell this white Winter’s Eve.”
Release
When Dan informed me that he would be carrying out a communal ritual designed to birth goals and aspirations into existence for 2023, my immediate response was one of excitement, to participate in an externalization of my promises to myself for this new year. Paired with the excitement, though, was a gnawing sense that this ritual was somehow fundamentally incomplete, missing an important and necessary aspect for a ritual being carried out for the new year. I realized that while the ritual as planned would work excellently for bringing new things into the new year, it needed a companion ritual to leave behind unwanted things in the old one, and to that end, I decided that I would plan and carry out such a ritual myself.
For the core of the ritual, I decided that the things people wished to leave behind in 2022 would be destroyed by fire, just as the things that were desired for this new year would be birthed by the flames. I gathered the unwanted intangibles from my friends and community through the use of a Google form (never hesitate to use technological tools in your practice to help stay organized!) so that anyone who wished to commit something to the flames could inform me of what that is privately, emphasizing that the ritual was merely symbolic and that each participant would still need to do the work if they genuinely wanted to leave what was mentioned behind. Each person’s unwanted things were carefully written down on small pieces of what I call “fire paper”, paper colored bright orange in a dye bath of the simmered skins of yellow onions that I have been using to burn my wishes and petitions for many years now and, after this ritual, need to create more of. A bit of loose incense sourced from a metaphysical shop local to me was then folded into each slip, a pinch of altar incense meant for all ritual purposes and a pinch of happy times incense intended to, well, bring about happy times. The bundles were then carefully folded such that their contents would not fall out, received an inscription of “X will no longer carry this” on the outside (with X being the person’s name), and tied tightly with cotton twine.
After the bundles had all been created, I decided that I would enclose them all within a papier-mâché effigy, as a practical concern – it is, after all, much easier to place one object into flames than it is to shake out nearly a dozen tiny parcels and hope they all land in the fire the way I want them to. The bundles of incense and unwanted intangibles were wrapped in tissue paper with a bit more incense for good measure, to keep them together. This paper packet was then placed within a mass of excelsior, a material of fine, soft wood shavings loved by taxidermists and people packing fragile objects alike that would form the inside of the effigy, reducing the amount of papier-mâché necessary and providing more material to burn. The effigy itself was a very simple design – a corpse wrapped in a shroud, befitting of the almost funerary tone that the ritual would take on. Of course, a simple design was also an ideal one, given that my skills with papier-mâché are not exactly those of a master craftsperson, and not being more ambitious than is realistic given my capabilities is a good way to avoid frustration with the work done.
Layer after layer of cooked flour paste-soaked strips of paper were wrapped and draped over the excelsior core, mindfully transforming a mass of wood wool into something that resembled a humanoid form. When the effigy was complete, I placed it at the center of my focus for several days to dry, and to stay in my line of sight, acting as a catalyst to reflect upon the things that I personally wish to leave behind, and the work I know I need to do in order to actually shed them.
Image description: A papier-mâché effigy resting on a grey-brown wooden surface. The effigy is humanoid in shape, and behind it are two votive candle holders – the one on the left containing a half burned candle, the one on the right being empty – and a large candle in a wood bowl. Around the effigy and candles are spruce branches.
After the effigy had had sufficient time to dry completely, it was packed up with a number of other supplies and brought to the lake shore to be burned. A dear friend assisted me with building a small bonfire to destroy the effigy in, an endeavor that proved much more challenging than I imagined that it would. Once flames had been coaxed from the logs, birch branches (selected for their association with guidance, adaptability, and new beginnings), paper, egg cartons, and pecan shells we had brought, the effigy was nestled within, and allowed to burn. Handfuls of dried herbs were fed to the flames as well -lavender, for peace and to symbolically wash away the things people wish to leave behind, and bay leaf, for prosperity and luck. Originally, I had planned to include a spoken component to this ritual, but this was scrapped in favor of a silent vigil, watching over and tending the flames as the effigy and unwanted intangibles within were slowly reduced to white ashes and wisps of fragrant smoke drifting over the water.
Image description: A small bonfire with charred logs and leaping flames. The burning effigy is visible in the center, and various loose, unburned materials are visible around the edges of the logs
After the effigy was burnt to my satisfaction, I silently thanked the fire for the role it had played in symbolically destroying the many things people wished to leave behind in 2022, and proceeded to heap more wood on the flames and be merry – after all, why not have a good time with a bonfire by the lake on a bright January day?
