Notable and quotable 22

This week’s absolute belter of a post was Christopher Penczak’s article Holding the door open.

Don’t miss Julian Vayne’s series of interviews, Our Magical Things.

And a lovely post on egg healing in Slavic magic on the Divine Multiplicity blog.

Really great post on being in mythological time from Kiya Nicoll (how was I not following Kiya’s blog before now?)

And a guest post by Ing Venning on Nimue Brown’s blog.

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Follow Friday

Just been having a conversation with someone I’m following about how to find good blogs to follow on WordPress.

I don’t use the search function very often. I have found the occasional good stuff via search, but it is rare.

Instead, I follow the blogs of people who write good comments on blogs I’m already following. Or people I find on Twitter or Instagram who share an interesting article. Or people I know from other contexts.

I have also followed a lot of people whose posts are featured in The River Crow’s excellent series, Friday Foraging.

In this post, I am going to share a list of the people whose blogs I am following on WordPress. (The title is from #FollowFriday on Twitter)

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What we have in common

I dreamed that I was in an Anglican or Episcopalian Church in North America and had been invited by the vicar to introduce a hymn. She handed me the order of service which already had a hymn picked out, and it had been annotated to change “him” to “her”, so I introduced it and encouraged people to sing “her” where appropriate if they wanted to. One of the congregation said they didn’t really know the tune for that hymn. So then I suggested we sang Morning has broken and changed “him” to “her” in the second verse, and “God’s” to “Her” in the third verse. Then I woke up.

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Water, water everywhere

I am currently sitting beside Lake Erie (Erielhonan), or in Ojibwe, Waabishkiigoo-gichigami (Neutrals’ Sea), or Aanikegamaa-gichigami (Chain of Lakes Sea).

Lake Erie is one of the largest bodies of fresh water in the world. The surface area of the Great Lakes is about the same as the surface area of the British Isles (a statistic I’ve often quoted to impress the sheer size of Canada upon my fellow English people).

Despite Canada (1) possessing the largest body of fresh water in the world, a significant percentage of the original inhabitants of this northern area of Turtle Island (2) do not have running water in their homes.

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Notable and quotable 14

This week, some interesting attempts to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable: science and spirituality, the Bible and feminism.

A post drawing a much-needed distinction between beauty and glamour, which are all-too-often confused with each other. And a post about the often contradictory mythology and folklore of owls. And an amazing post about how magic, prayer, and visualization can be explained with the ideas of morphic resonance.

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Gods or Angels?

A guest post at A Pilgrim in Narnia

The Inklings and Paganism

Before he became a Christian, C S Lewis was deeply inspired by ancient Pagan mythology, and he continued to value it as mythopoeia after his conversion, and seems to have sought to reconcile the Christian worldview with the ancient Pagan one (for example in That Hideous Strength). Lewis was also fascinated by the symbolism of astrology: a practice and worldview which started in Pagan antiquity and continued well into the Christian era. Lewis’ book, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, deals in part with astrological symbolism as part of the medieval worldview.

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