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Initiations
Categories: Creative NonfictionTags: personal experience0. I walked through the stacks of Barnes & Noble, not particularly looking for anything. I was content to simply stroll around and let my eyes pick out interesting titles to peruse. I wandered past Philosophy and took a left at the end of the stacks into New Age. The shelves were filled with books
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Dechristianizing Yourself: Building Practice as a New Pagan
Categories: ArchiveTags: dechristianizationMoving from a belief-based religion to a practice-based religion can be daunting, especially for those with little experience with personal spiritual practice to begin with. Shifting away from a system where your thoughts and feelings rather than your actions define your spirituality can be very empowering, but some people may worry — as I did
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Revealing the Mysteries: Open-Sourcing the Craft
Wicca is an experiential religion. For a long time, this meant that people didn’t talk about the mysteries central to its practice. There are a variety of arguments for this. First, some people believe that talking about the Mysteries, or the experiential truths that practitioners become aware of through practice and initiatory rites, cheapens them
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Dechristianizing Yourself: Addressing Church-Related Trauma
Categories: ArchiveTags: dechristianizationSome people leave the Christian faith because they have been traumatized by the beliefs of the church or by leaders or other trusted people within it. These traumas can affect people for years afterward if left unresolved, even if they seek a new faith path in the Pagan movement. While healing from these traumatic experiences
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Coffee With the Goddess: A Devotional Practice for Busy Pagans
Categories: ArchiveTags: devotional practiceHaving a devotional practice can be challenging, especially if you’re just starting out on the Pagan path or you’ve got a lot of mundane commitments. If you’re new, there may be so many options of things to do that you don’t know which to incorporate first. And everyone has work or family or community commitments
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The Wiccan Virtues: Ideals from the Charge of the Goddess
It’s been said that Wicca doesn’t have sacred texts. I disagree. While it’s true that Wicca is an experiential religion, relying on one’s personal experience of Deity to define one’s beliefs, it does have sacred texts: Gardner’s original Book of Shadows, Valiente’s Charge of the Goddess, and the bits of sacred writing of early Gardnerians
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The Vocation of Priestesshood: Teaching Yourself to Serve
Categories: ArchivePriestesshood is more than having a mature spirituality and a calling. It’s also having the courage and grace to serve others humbly and compassionately knowing that you will never be compensated for your physical, mental, and emotional labor. It’s giving up your plans. It’s giving up your anonymity. It’s being the bad guy sometimes when
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Understanding the Planetary Hours: What They Are, How to Calculate Them, and Why to Use Them
The planetary hours are an ancient magickal tool that arises from Hellenistic and Babylonian astrology. It operates on the premise that each magickal hour of the day (that is, one-twelfth the time between sunrise and sunset, or sunset and sunrise) is ruled by one of the seven classical planets, and that the energies of this
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Sumatran Dark Roast, Heavy Whipping Cream, No Sugar
Categories: Creative NonfictionTags: personal experienceSusan had a rule. In the mornings, no one said anything to anybody — not even “good morning” — until after the first cup of coffee was consumed. It was a rule she brought with her from Short Mountain Sanctuary, a Radical Faerie intentional community in Tennessee that she’d been involved with for a couple
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Pagan Monasticism: Dreaming of Community
Categories: ArchiveTags: pagan monasticismAs a child I was fascinated with Gregorian chants. I thought it was so cool that there were people who dressed in robes and sang all day. Now, of course, I realize that there’s far more to the monastic life than that, but I can’t help but want to capture that experience of ordered and