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The question of whether I am pagan or not has been at the back of my mind for quite a while. I've been trying to self-identify but external validation is a huge thing. In many ways I am shaped by New Age philosophy more than anything but I have stopped reading New Age and concentrated on Pagan books and blogs for many years now. It's like I've digested what I needed and now I'm searching for something in the pagan world. ( Read more... )

... but regardless it's amazing.

This is the second time I'm writing this since the first time I was ~~pretty whiny~~ aggressively defensive and no one needs to be subjected to that. :-)

I am defensive because everywhere you look there's always a Standard of Excellence and if you're not at least trying to meet it you're on the downward slope to mediocrity and who wants that? That's a pretty high standard and a lot of pressure and leaves me plenty of people ashamed and apologizing for their lack of expertise. This attitude is everywhere and a source of status and oneupmanship. Paganism and Witchcraft are not immune.

People vary greatly in their capacity and their interest. I've run across lists of what an experienced witch is expected to know in some traditions and I'm amazed. It's the equivalent of getting a Ph.D. Very impressive but I dropped out of college twice and it's not for me. But the impression lingers on that that's the way to do it right and I'm being half-assed about it. ( Read more... )

I've kind of gotten off topic (and clearly I needed to define and legitimize my own practice to myself) but basically I want to say that Paganism is so broad and so rich that everyone's practice and investment is personally-defined. So long as it meets your needs and works for you, then it is good enough. Even if it looks completely different from what other people are doing. *finally takes own advice*

I have a great fondness for animism as a paradigm because it unlinks the concept of 'people' from 'human'. Humans have a tendency to be decent to people and not so much to not-people, however they define whatever not-us is, i.e., animals, poor people, other races, the enemy, etc. So that leads to the awareness that everything is alive and has a consciousness of some type^[1,2] and can be interacted with. The universe is filled with people. ( Cut to spare my dwircle from a topic they may not want to read. )

Flower essences are a form of alternative therapy that introduces the vibrations of specific flowers into the energetic field of a person in order to cause a positive mental/emotional shift. The effects can range from subtle appearing over several weeks or almost immediately depending on your energetic sensitivity and awareness and the correct choice of essence.

Essences are made by picking flowers and floating them on the top of a glass bowl filled with spring water and left out in the sunshine. The sunlight helps transfer the flower's vibration into the water. The flowers are then removed and the water is mixed with brandy as a preservative. This is the mother essence. Like homeopathy, a little goes a long way, so further dilution with seven drops to a small bottle of mixed spring water and alcohol is called the stock bottle, which is the level it's sold at. You can use this directly or dilute it further in combination with other essences to tailor it to your specific needs. ( Read more... )

Well, it looks like I've missed the D for my Pagan Blog Posts. Ah well, I knew it would likely happen. *climbs back on horse*

I've said before that I'm on the outer edge of Paganism and edging my way in. Part of joining PBP is hoping to define and consolidate my path. My family upbringing was far left liberal and I have a fascination with magic so Pagan feels like the community I have the most in common with. But I would necessarily define myself as solitary eclectic.

I ran across this quote a couple months ago and it made me laugh with recognition:

Increasingly, I think more and more people are finding Paganism not as discrete religions, but as a part of an open-sourced kit to build an individualized belief system or practice. They aren’t Wiccans, or Druids, or Asatru, they are practicing “Paganism” as a syncretic and eclectic system in its own right... -- Pink’s Paganism and Being Spiritual (But Not Religious)

I know there are pagans who find eclectics annoying and fluffy and wish they would just settle on a trad and get serious, but that's just not going to happen. Maybe back in the day before the Internet when there were relatively few books and people discovered witchcraft and paganism via meeting a group and got trained into a trad but it doesn't work that way today and didn't always work back then either.

People come to paganism and witchcraft with history. They've picked up this bit and that and it took so either they find a trad that is compatible or they practice multiple trads or they try to syncretize it for themselves. It may seem disconnected and jarring from the outside but there's reasons within the practitioner.

I'm deeply influenced by having adored the TV show, Kung Fu, devoured the Carlos Castaneda books, felt the rightness of Huna (and some of the Chaos tradition), been fascinated with New Age energy healing and flower essences. Nor can I ignore the impact of lifelong anxiety and depression. These things shape me and they influence both my current practice and where I would like to be in the future. I am going to pick and choose among all the offerings because I am driven by my own needs and some things click from a trad and the rest doesn't. That doesn't mean those things don't have connections; I am the connection. The fact that it may be invisible or not good enough to some people is irrelevant. It fills my needs and forms something beautiful and wild and necessary.

Eclectic is slippery and labor-intensive and absolutely awesome when it clicks. \o/

I stumbled across this term while Internet surfing and latched onto it with glee. Finally, a word for something that happens to me frequently. A cledon is an omen that comes to you via synchronicity: the lyrics of a song on the radio, an overhead conversation, the advertisement on a bus passing by. You recognize it as answering a problem you've been worrying about. Laughter is frequently the response to an accurate and helpful cledon.

This is a form of divination from the ancient Romans. Apparently, they would pray for an answer in the temples and then go out into the marketplace looking for an overhead conversation to answer their problem. I can't vouch for the accuracy of this since googling gives a few variations of the same story from New Age sources and the few Latin on-line dictionaries I tried don't have the word cledon in them. However, it's a useful word and the phenomenon is real.

The original form worked with the spoken word and bibliomancy works with the written word but I think the spontaneous and open-ended nature of this type of divination can be stretched to cover any kind of informal omen. ( Read more... )

One of the most influential books I read in my teens was The Medium, The Mystic, and the Physicist by Lawrence LeShan. At a time when I was beginning to realize that every culture, every religion had wildly incompatible versions of the nature of reality and that I was somehow supposed to work my way through and choose one as being my truth, this book gave me an amazing, beautiful alternative.

LeShan takes each of the paradigms in the title and shows what the basic core beliefs are and how they are internally consistent. He then goes on to discuss the applications of each paradigm and then concludes that each one is accurate within its area of expertise. In other words, science is not the best paradigm to answer questions about the supernatural because it focuses on the material world. Nor is a mystic concerned with the afterlife because the mystic yearns to unite with the whole and the mediumistic implies continued individuality shedding the body. So it depends entirely on what your question is before you choose the correct paradigm designed to answer that question. That paradigms are tools to understand and work reality and that you need more than one tool in your tool box.

I cannot begin to tell you the relief I felt on reading that. It gave me a way to take in conflicting beliefs without blowing a gasket. It also gave me a way to deal with aspects of a paradigm that made me twitch (origin myths, anyone?). Was it internally consistent and useful for certain purposes? Then we were good to go. I spent a good part of my twenties and thirties collecting paradigms (books and interesting people are a treasure). At this point in my life, I feel like I have a bit of a cluttery mess in my head and need to prune and reorganize. *g* ( Read more... )

I love this quote. It's neat, succinct, and more flattering than 'so eclectic I can't even see a trad from here'.

Increasingly, I think more and more people are finding Paganism not as discrete religions, but as a part of an open-sourced kit to build an individualized belief system or practice. They aren’t Wiccans, or Druids, or Asatru, they are practicing “Paganism” as a syncretic and eclectic system in its own right... -- Pink’s Paganism and Being Spiritual (But Not Religious)

I've decided to join the Pagan Blog Project. I've been dithering about it for weeks because I'm hesitant to claim Pagan. Mostly because I don't work with deities or follow any specific tradition. I'm about as solitary and eclectic as it's possible to be and I feel like I'm more pagan-adjacent or pagan-influenced. But I do the occasional magic and energy work, my library is full of pagan books, and I get the gleeful A-ha! when I come across a new concept, paradigm or skill. I haunted the Pagan Blog Project last year *refresh refresh refresh* and I think there must be some other readers who are on the outskirts like me that may be interested. So...

A is for Altar. If I don't work with any gods then why would I need an altar? Everyone has concepts of what is highest and best even if they don't think of it in traditional spiritual terms and an altar is a form of focused intent. ( Read more... )

I've been kind of earnest and depressing in my journal lately so I thought I'd write something a little more upbeat. What came to mind was an experience I had when I was in my early twenties in college. I think of it as my 'vision quest' experience.

It was summer and I was hanging out in the Boston Public Gardens on the pond. That was something I was doing fairly frequently that summer, both because I was lonely and because it felt like stepping out of my mundane life into a few hours of being a transient traveller. An experience I was nostalgic for and something I'll write about later.

Someone had let their two dogs off the leash and these beautiful black labs were having a blast, chasing each other in and out of the pond and spraying all the annoyed people sitting on the grass as they shook off the water. They were being a nuisance but they were having so much fun. I was watching them wistfully and had the strongest thought: I wish I was like them. I didn't have the words then but I knew the concepts of extrovert and introvert.

Almost immediately after that thought I noticed a pigeon take off from the grass and fly towards me. I watched it hoping it wouldn't take a dump on me as it flew over me. Instead it flew right at me and the tip of its wing thumped the top of my head. It felt exactly like a Zen master's "Pay attention!" So I started looking around to see what I was supposed to notice.

There was a seagull about thirty feet in front of me. My first thought was, "Oh, I wish I had some bread to feed you." The seagull instantly veered towards me and I hurriedly thought, "But I don't have any." The seagull stopped, confused, and waddled back and forth (like a duck in a shooting gallery) before launching into the sky. I followed it as it rose and swooped elegantly through the bright blue summer sky. Then just as it hit the top of an arc it gave this raucous cry and dive-bombed another seagull ripping what looked like a piece of fish gut out of its mouth and flew off.

I burst out laughing. It seemed crystal clear that I was being offered something to counter-balance the dogs. So what if I wasn't the dog. I was the seagull and I could see the waddling on the ground (social misfit) and the soaring flight (my thoughts, dreams and hopes were beautiful and would take me far), but then the squawking garbage eating was a disconcerting shock. It felt like a sly comment on something I didn't understand or didn't want to understand. *g*

What I did take away from it was that I wasn't a dog type, I was a seagull and that I could be many things -- clumsy, magnificent, greedy -- all in one package. It was about knowing oneself and self-acceptance. How well I managed to incorporate it I don't know but I've had a fondness for pigeons and seagulls ever since.