This week I have been mostly reading The Guardian with great sadness over the horrific murder of 50 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, and growing incredulity at the self-inflicted wound of Brexit. So I have not been keeping up with what’s going on in the blogosphere.

However, I just spotted this excellent post about queer magic by Julian Vayne.

Queer Magic in Theory and Practice

Queer connects us to mythical and historic figures; bisexual deities such as Pan, the Divine Androgyne of Hermetic mysticism, and our queer ancestors from Aleister Crowley to Tove Jansson. Identifying these allies makes a real difference when it comes to claiming our own identity as queer people and especially as queer occultists.

Standing ovation for Mr Vayne. Do read the whole thing, it’s excellent.

Pagan philosophy

I was also pleased to see someone else getting stuck into writing about Pagan theology. When I started writing about it around a decade ago, people said that Pagans don’t need theology (I think they were confusing theology with dogma). This is odd when the word was coined by Cicero in De Natura Deorum (49 CE), which is a work of Pagan theology.

Anna Walther is starting a series of posts about Pagan theology/ philosophy, starting with “Why Religion?”

Why engage with Paganism, or any other form of religion for that matter?

One compelling answer is that religion helps us make meaning out of our experiences and helps us make the decisions that lead to lives worth living, something that science, although powerful, doesn’t do. For evaluating testable claims and learning about causal relationships, science is the best tool we’ve got, but it doesn’t make meaning; it can’t make ethical or aesthetic choices for us. 

I look forward to reading more in this series.