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. My latest book, Changing Paths, is a companion guide for people changing from one religion to another.
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.
Continue readingSeptember Pagan Challenge #1: Introduction.
Continue readingRecently there has been a pattern on social media of BIPOC people expressing their completely valid pain and anger and sadness over the continuing murder of Black people by police, and getting pushback from “spiritual” people claiming that their anger is too much, or somehow misplaced. I have also experienced this phenomenon. I used to call it “spiritualler-than-thou” syndrome, until I discovered that it already had a name, spiritual bypassing.
Continue readingAn interview with me about the reissue of Dark Mirror and The Night Journey is up at the Centre for Pagan Studies blog.
You can pre-order the book from the Doreen Valiente Foundation online shop.
I am delighted to announce that The Centre For Pagan Studies and the Doreen Valiente Foundation are publishing the revised and expanded edition of Dark Mirror: the Inner Work of Witchcraft by me, Yvonne Aburrow.
Buy the paperback from the Doreen Valiente Foundation Shop
Buy the hardback from the Doreen Valiente Foundation Shop
They are also publishing a new edition of my follow-up book, The Night Journey: Witchcraft as Transformation.
My first guest column at The Wild Hunt.
I have been anxious for months, years even. I have watched with growing horror the rise of right-wing populism, the melting of the icecaps, the burning of Australia, the beginnings of wars over water and resources, the seemingly inexorable destruction wrought by climate change. The protests of Fridays for Future and Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion gave me some cause for optimism, but it is also obvious that governments have not been doing enough to turn the economy around to stop the production of carbon emissions. So when everyone suddenly swung into action to deal with the coronavirus crisis, it gave me some hope that perhaps now the needful actions to deal with climate change (many of which, it turns out, are quite similar to the actions needed to flatten the curve of coronavirus transmission) would seem doable. It also feels like now everyone else is as anxious as me.
Continue reading at The Wild Hunt.
If you enjoyed this post, you might like my books.
I thought regular readers of Dowsing for Divinity might like to know that I now have a public Instagram account, @yvonne_aburrow, where I will be posting videos, talks, photos, book reviews, and news of upcoming events and workshops.
![Water Reflections, by Ana Montreal on Flickr. [CC-BY-SA 2.0]](https://i0.wp.com/wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/sermonsfromthemound/files/2015/09/anamontreal_flickr_water_reflections_CC-BY-SA2-300x200.jpg)
Water Reflections, by Ana Montreal on Flickr. [CC-BY-SA 2.0]
So we had a very enjoyable brainstorming session via email, with a total of fifty-five different suggestions for names for the blog. But we kept coming back to dowsing imagery, with its connotations of looking for hidden currents, connections with the unseen, hidden waters, and hidden patterns.
We also liked the fact that divining is another name for dowsing, so there is a pleasing symmetry in the name Dowsing for Divinity. The divine, if we choose to listen for it, to feel for its presence, is hidden just below the surface of things, in the woods and the waters and the rocks and trees, hidden in plain sight in the land itself.
As W B Yeats wrote:
Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine, and could take a human or grotesque shape and dance among the shadows; and that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not less divine and changeable. They saw in the rainbow the still-bent bow of a god thrown down in his negligence; they heard in the thunder the sound of his beaten water jar, or the tumult of his chariot wheels; and when a sudden flight of wild ducks, or of crows, passed over their heads, they thought they were gazing at the dead hastening to their rest….
I love this quote, and it was for me the starting-point in the creative process of finding a new name for the blog.
— Yvonne Aburrow
When the three of us started brainstorming a new name together, once someone tossed out the word “dowsing,” we kept circling back to it. Dowsing is a form of divination sometimes known as “water witching” because it’s often been used to find ground water (though it can also be employed to find metal, lost objects, gravesites, and more). To dowse, the diviner holds a forked stick with one end in each of their hands, and then follows the motion of the third end to find what they’re seeking.
I love dowsing as an image for the kind of theological exploration we do on this blog. Dowsing is an intuitive, physical activity that requires a receptive state of mind. Of course, we bring our education and analytical skills to our writing—these intellectual resources provide essential structure for our theology and practice. But the heart of what we’re creating here is experiential, not intellectual: it reaches for a place that is beyond words, but as close as our own flesh. Through writing and thinking and living and being, we are seeking: Divinity? Mystery? Our Selves? Perhaps all of those and more.
Dowsing also appeals to me as a metaphor because of the close relationship between spirit and water in many cultures. Water is used for blessings and baptisms; it can be found in healing baths and holy wells; it makes up 60% or more of our bodies, and it is essential for life. To me, dowsing for hidden water is a perfect image for spiritual seeking.
— Christine Hoff Kraemer
Pick up the forked stick and move by feel and feeling, towards the secret source, the spring and springing. Suss out sympathetic resonances, wait for the dip, the tug and pull. Close the eyes and trust that there is water, that you will find it. Dare to step forward.
To dowse is to listen. To dowse is to walk, aware.
In this space, we do theology by gut, by feel, listening under the surfaces of events and words, making our way through the terrains of intuition, experience and reflection.
Reflection…another water word. Pointing us back to the original mirror, the calm pool, surface in which to see and seek.
Welcome.
–Sarah Sadie
This is the video of my talk at Witchfest in Croydon, November 2014. The talk discusses expanding and deepening our understanding of the concepts of polarity and fertility, what tradition is and how it works, what we bring into circle (our whole self, or do we bring only our essence, and what does our essence include?) and how to make Wicca more LGBTQI-inclusive, with examples from rituals and from history.
All acts of love and pleasure: inclusive Wicca, by Yvonne Aburrow, published by Avalonia Books, 2014
In my talk, and in my book, I advocate a more nuanced understanding of gender, sexuality, and biological sex, and using these understandings to inform our understanding of magical concepts like polarity and fertility.
In the middle of my talk, we did a practical demonstration of another form of polarity, asking all the people who were born under Air and Fire signs to create energy together, and all the people who were born under Earth and Water signs to make energy together. We then merged the two energies together. Polarity happened. And the room became warmer and everybody became more animated. The energy changed. (We didn’t video that part of the event because of issues of consent.)
There are many different forms of polarity, and whilst it is great that a man and a woman can make polarity, many other pairings can also make polarity – and even if you are focussing on male/female polarity in your rituals, you may be sure that other types of polarity are also occurring at the same time. The bottom line is: if one person can generate polarity with another person, regardless of gender, sexuality, or biological sex, let them do so. If a same-sex couple, or a man and a woman who are not a couple, or a person born under an Air sign and a person born under an Earth sign, or any other combination where oppositeness can be generated, want to make magic together, then let them do so. And no-one is saying you can’t have male-female polarity and heterosexual symbolism. We are just saying, why does it have to be that 100% of the time?
At a previous discussion of this, back in the summer, a couple of people said they felt that you don’t bring your personal stuff into circle (of course you don’t bring petty concerns about the shopping and the car etc into circle, but you do bring your core identity, which includes sexual orientation). But I bring my whole self, including my politics, gender identity, and sexual orientation, before the deities. I don’t leave behind my concerns about the struggle for justice for Black communities, or First Nations, or women, or LGBTQI people, when I am in circle – I do magic to support those struggles.
Others have commented that we should not adapt religious traditions to suit ourselves, but should allow the tradition to transform us. Yes, up to a point, but when the tradition excludes a whole group of people because of who they are, then it is time to dig deeper. If we look at the concepts of polarity, fertility, and gender as they are expressed in traditional magical texts (which are the source material for Wiccan ritual, as demonstrated in the excellent book Wicca: Magickal Beginnings, by Sorita d’Este and David Rankine), we can see that they are separate and distinct concepts, which are not reducible to a simple and restrictive gender binary. If we look at ancient pagan traditions (which Wicca also claims to draw upon) then we can see that they were also inclusive of people with diverse gender and sexual identities.
For me, Wicca is neither solely a path of self-development, not is it only a path of service to the deities. I was taught that we work in partnership with the deities. The deities are more powerful in their realm, but they need our physical embodied presence and co-operation to get stuff done in the physical world. I discuss this in some depth in chapter 14 of my book, All Acts of Love and Pleasure: Inclusive Wicca, and I also touched on it in chapter 16. I wrote a whole chapter on it in Priestesses, Pythonesses, and Sibyls, edited by Sorita d’Este.
Traditions evolve, and Wicca is evolving. They evolve because they are living and moving discourses, not fossils set in stone. Wicca is received differently by the different cultures in which it is practised, because of history and culture and context. Tradition is not a fixed and unchanging thing. Of course we should be mindful of accuracy in transmitting what has been handed down to us, because history and oral transmission of lore are important – but that does not mean we cannot change and adapt things, provided we transmit the original versions of the rituals that we received.
I discuss all of this in more depth in the video and in the book, so I would be grateful if you would watch the video before commenting.
If you enjoyed this post, you might like my books.
Dowsing for Divinity 