My books are about inclusive Wicca and witchcraft; how to include LGBTQIA people, disabled people, and BIPOC people in ritual and witchcraft; embodied spirituality; and the inner work of ritual.
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Review of Chaos Monk by Steve Dee
Steve Dee (2022), Chaos Monk: Bringing Magical Creativity to the New Monastic Path.
Norwich: The Universe Machine.
An exhilarating journey through chaos monasticism, a mystical practice informed by chaos magic. Accessible, clearly written, and witty, yet informed by a deep knowledge of the history of spiritual movements in both East and West, decades of magical practice, psychotherapy and art, this is a book for anyone with mystical leanings who wants to put them into practice.
Continue readingAbortion is health care
The Duty of the Witch
A great post from The Less Hidden Path about what it means to be a witch and why it means we should help people get access to reproductive health care.
“Witch”. A loaded term that people have died just through having been suggested to have been associated with. A word with immense cultural baggage …
The Duty Of The Witch
And another great post from the same blog about why witches and Pagans should definitely get involved in politics.
The time to dispense with the modern conceit that “politics and magic don’t mix” is many years overdue. It has never been true, but it gets more harmful the longer we leave it.
Politics and witchcraft
And a great post from a polytheist perspective exploring the Ancient Greek view on when the soul enters the body.
What about *my* religious beliefs? — and a passage from Iamblichus
Personally, I do not believe that the soul can enter the body until birth — which, in my belief system, requires the fetus to be viable without the use of the modern contraptions that keep the extreme premature alive until they are physically self-viable. It has life, yes, but not personhood. A woman who wants an abortion should be able to have one.
— Kalliste
Books I read in May 2022
I started a couple of books and didn’t finish them so I only finished two books in May.
Continue readingThe Craft is for everyone
Excellent videos from Jason Mankey. The Craft is for everyone, and the central mystery of Wicca is love.
Continue readingThe Gods know their own (and are not transphobic)
Guest post from a Gardnerian Wiccan
If a person I have known and loved before were trans (or intersex or non-binary or something else) I would honour that.
I would initiate them with a Priest or Priestess or all of us together or whatever the fuck worked to generate the dynamic interplay of energy needed.
I would invoke upon them the Goddess or the God and trust that the Gods know their own and would come.
I would kiss them as a sibling and hold them and call them by Priest, Priestess or Priestex or whatever term meant servant of the Gods to them and us.
I would teach them the beautiful and awe inspiring mysteries of the Gods and not shy away from the heterosexual generative story, but I would also explore the mysteries through other stories too and encourage them to write and share their own.
I would introduce them to the wider Gardnerian community and help them make friends and connections there.
I would work to heal them when they needed healing and receive healing from them also when I needed it.
I would work to confront my own discomfort and reconcile it, not seek to remove its source in fear.
I would work to understand where I may have done wrong and try to do better.
The person who wrote this chose to remain anonymous because of the way that transphobes tend to target inclusive people. I have shared it here with their permission.
Review of Queer Qabala by Enfys J Book
Incredibly clear, beautifully written explanation of the Hermetic Qabala and its inherent queerness, expressed in the idea that there are three pillars (force, balance, and form), and that the Divine includes all genders and sexualities.
Continue readingCensing vs smudging
“how come we were never taught this in our schools?”
The oppressors never teach their children
About the oppressed, or their suffering.
Instead they claim that they brought technology,
Civilization, religion, as gifts
To the colonized, the marginalized,
The brutalized and the enslaved people.
You have to learn to look between the lines
At the imperfect feet of the statues,
And the nakedness of half-truths and lies.
Stolen land, stolen lives, streams of language
Dammed, diverted, stopped. Whole cultures broken
Into scattered fragments, gathering dust
In museums. Hiding between the cracks,
Waiting to emerge into the sunlight.
Yvonne Aburrow
9:22 am, 23 May 2022.
Inspired by the line “how come we were never taught this in our schools?” in WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier
Continue readingLily minds
If we saw the brain
As an elaborately folded flower
Containing thought bees
Nestling among the petals
Searching for nectar
We might think of the soul
As the roots of that flower
Drawing nutrients from the river mud.
Inspired by the phrase “lily-minds” in Elegies by Kathleen Ossip.
Dowsing for Divinity 