It’s over thirty years since the Satanic Panic in the UK. So perhaps it is fading from memory. But at the time, things were really scary — and with the current rolling back of various human rights legislation that we have taken for granted for a generation or more, in both the USA and the UK, those times could return.
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Happy International Nonbinary People’s Day
Thursday 14 July is International Nonbinary People’s Day—a day for raising awareness and organizing around issues that nonbinary people face around the world since it was first observed in 2012.
Nonbinary people are nothing new. We aren’t confused about our gender identity or trying to be trendy—nonbinary identities have been recognized for millennia by cultures and societies across the globe.
It’s important for nonbinary people to be able to live, dress, and have our gender respected at work, at school, and in public spaces.
Continue readingThe winters of my childhood
In the 1970s, I remember proper snow in Hampshire, England. We would go out for walks and the snow would be ankle-deep (on me, a child) and collected in drifts against the fences. The snow only lasted a few days, but when it came, it blanketed the countryside in white and transformed it. I remember building a snowman in the back garden for quite a few years.
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
Trans Day of Visibility
Today is International Trans Day of Visibility.
It’s more important than ever that everyone stands with trans and nonbinary people, as there’s a concerted campaign to erase us from existence.
Continue readingConspiracy theories and witchcraft persecutions
Contemporary conspiracy theories and older witchcraft beliefs have a lot in common. Both are networks of ideas, mostly unconnected with each other, but linked by tenuous theories. This comparison has been explored by a team of researchers at UCLA and Berkeley using AI and folklore to map the key people, things, and relationships in thousands of social media posts.
Continue readingPlace names
Indigenous people frequently and correctly point out that Indigenous place names in North America are based on geographical features or things that happened in that place, whereas settler place names in North America are either named after the first person to settle there, or a place in Britain or Europe. This is true.
What’s more, the place names in Britain and Europe are named after geographical features, things that happened there, Pagan deities, and previous inhabitants’ names for the place. So it makes no sense to transplant them to a place with different geographical features (though I assume people did it for nostalgic reasons).
Continue readingOrange Shirt Day
I’m wearing my orange shirt from the Woodland Cultural Centre today, Orange Shirt Day, in honour of residential school survivors and all those who didn’t make it home.
Continue readingIndigenous resources
In the wake of the awful discoveries of unmarked graves in residential schools, more and more Canadians want to learn the truth about the destruction of the cultures and languages of Indigenous Peoples in Canada, and the theft of their lands.
I have created a new resources page with links to websites where you can learn more about Indigenous culture and issues, and identified the key resources to get started on your learning journey.
If you only have time to interact with a few things on this list, check out the ones with a star next to them.🌟
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Dowsing for Divinity 