I am delighted to announce that The Centre For Pagan Studies and the Doreen Valiente Foundation are publishing the revised and expanded edition of Dark Mirror: the Inner Work of Witchcraft by me, Yvonne Aburrow.
Pre-order the paperback from the Doreen Valiente Foundation Shop
Pre-order the hardback from the Doreen Valiente Foundation Shop
Later this year they will also be publishing a new edition of my follow-up book, The Night Journey: Witchcraft as Transformation.
I can’t be the only person who starts reading a Pagan book, gets to an exercise in the middle of the chapter, thinks that I don’t have time to do the exercise right now, and either puts the book down, planning to come back later (and never do), or skips the exercise and reads on.
An interview with me about the reissue of Dark Mirror and The Night Journey is up at the Centre for Pagan Studies blog.
You can pre-order the book from the Doreen Valiente Foundation online shop.
The absolutely outstanding Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender, about a trans teenager in New York.
We just started watching the series Warrior Nun on Netflix. It’s rather enjoyable so far. However I couldn’t help noticing that it is wrong about haloes.
The news that Hagia Sophia possibly contains eight green marble columns from the temple of Artemis at Ephesus reminded me of this poem I wrote in 2008.
Recently there was an excellent column on The Wild Hunt by Luke Babb, Reckoning with Racism through a Pagan Lens. It was a good analysis of the relationship of Protestant Christianity with racism, and of attempts to use that tradition to justify racism.
In the column’s comments section, some readers said they felt that the evidence offered for the intimate connection of racism and Christianity was insufficient. The disconnect seemed to stem from a conception of racism as only being its more extreme manifestations – that is, as actual expressions of violence toward Black, Indigenous, and other people of color – rather than the everyday reinforcement of white supremacy and privilege by those who choose to ignore the fact that they are living in a colonial state that grew rich from the exploitation, dispossession, and destruction of Black and Indigenous communities.
Three major pieces of evidence – the concept of terra nullius, the activities of Christian missionaries, and Indian residential schools – reinforce the relationship between Christianity, colonialism, and racism, and reaffirm the points Babb made in their original article.
Featured image: native-land.ca
My poem for July’s “Name that Vase” competition at The Alchemist’s Studio.
The lines on the vase
Are hedges and paths around
The fields of the sky
Sky people travel
Along the lines, pause to breathe,
Dazed by the blue glaze
The dots are deep wells
Where fresh memories gather
Dew from rising dreams.
It’s time to share our winner and feature another vase in need of a name! Welcome to my monthly feature – ‘Name that Vase’.
In initiatory Wicca, there have been some fairly heated arguments over the years about what tradition means, and what aspects of Wicca can be creatively altered to be inclusive. When I started talking about making Wicca more inclusive for LGBTQIA+ people, the response from some people was “but what about the tradition?”
In this post, I propose a new approach to questions of tradition: more of a creative dialogue, and a focus on the real purpose of a tradition (which is the approach I have tried to take all along, but some people assumed that I was throwing away all adherence to tradition).
Register for the talk on the CFPS website
Update
