Paganism

Occult Clerihews Challenge

/ Yvonne Aburrow / Leave a comment

The Occult Clerihews Challenge! Write a Clerihew about a famous occultist (and post it in the comments or link back to this post so I get a ping-back).

The only rule of clerihews is that they have four lines with an AABB rhyme scheme, and the first line ends with the subject’s last name. I’ve bent the rule slightly because it’s hard to find words to rhyme with Gardner and Valiente. Clerihews don’t have to scan, nor be a complete biography of the person they’re about, and they’re comic rather than serious.

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Autumn Equinox

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There are three harvest festivals in the Pagan Wheel of the Year. The first is Lammas (also known as Lughnasadh) which is the grain harvest (wheat and barley). The second is Autumn Equinox, which is the fruit harvest (particularly relevant in southern Ontario with the huge fruit-growing region of Niagara). It is also the time when day and night are of equal length, but the nights are going to get longer until the Winter Solstice. The third harvest is Halloween (known in Scots Gaelic as Samhain, in Irish as Samhuinn, and in Manx as Sauin), which is when farmers would traditionally slaughter any animals they could not feed during the winter, and salt down their meat for food supplies over the lean cold months. 

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Changing Paths

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 6 Comments

Are you entering Paganism, leaving Paganism, or changing traditions within it? How do you explain your new path to friends, family, former co-religionists, and yourself? How do you extricate yourself from your previous tradition and its associated ideas? How do you unpack your complex feelings about your path, and why you are changing direction?

If you have ever changed paths or considered changing paths, this book is for you. It is a guide for people who have entered Paganism from another tradition, people leaving Paganism for another tradition or none, and people changing from one tradition to another within Paganism.

Find out more at the Changing Paths resources website, where I have created a list of further reading, where to get help, and a Spotify playlist to accompany the book.

Including trans people

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 1 Comment

One of the ways that the right and the centre tries to shut down discussion and debate is by dismissing it as “identity politics” and “the bickering of the left”. But what they fail to say is that there wouldn’t be “identity politics” if they were not constantly trying to remove the rights of marginalized people such as trans people and sex workers.

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The Duty of the Witch

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 1 Comment

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

The Gods know their own (and are not transphobic)

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 1 Comment

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.

The Sun came up

/ Yvonne Aburrow / 1 Comment

It was May Morning this morning and all the Morris dancing made the Sun come up.

But wouldn’t it have come up anyway, I hear you ask.

For the answer to that question, Terry Pratchett had an answer, in The Hogfather, where the sun will not rise unless the Hogfather rides safely home.

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