The Wild Hunt
Pagan voices is a new spotlight on recent quotations from figures within the Pagan community. These voices may appear in the burgeoning Pagan media, or from a mainstream outlet, but all showcase our wisdom, thought processes, and evolution in the public eye. Is there a Pagan voice you’d like to see highlighted? Drop me a line with a link to the story, post, or audio.
“Live that truth. Speak up about rape. Take risks and say things out loud. Make sure you vote for those who respect the rights of women. Don’t worry about the economy so much: as the majority labor force in this country, and the majority in colleges and universities at this time, women will be able to figure things out with the economy once we are able to stop wasting our time on, you know, worrying about being raped or forced to have children who are products of rape. It is amazing how resourceful and smart we are about things like money, medicine, and astrophysics when we don’t have to trouble our pretty little heads about this other crap.” – Yeshe Rabbit, speaking about the “I Stand Against Rape” campaign, which invites men to make a public declaration against rape and share it with the world. You can see a selection of the participants, including my entry, at Rabbit’s Pintrest page.
“Patrick has offered service to the larger Pagan community at great expense to himself for many years, working in the US and on the international stage. It is a powerful thing to have a Pagan in such a high profile position at events like Awakened World. I feel grateful for his willingness to do this work, and will lend my support. Patrick, you’ve worked long and hard for us, and it is time for us to do some work to support you.” – T.Thorn Coyle of Solar Cross Temple and Morningstar Mystery School writing in support of Patrick McCollum’s fundraising effort to send him to the Awakened World 2012 gathering in Italy.
“As Socrates said (in the Apology), “the unexamined life is not worth living.” These kinds of questions are how humans have examined their lives by challenging themselves in their insight, or in their despair, to answer them. Or fail to. Here are the deep dark waters of the human experience. The record of humanity, especially the religious record, is the record of all the many ways we have attempted to answer them, as far back as writing goes, and arguably even farther. Long have we plumbed those depth and weighed those answers.” – Sam Webster, founder of the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn (OSOGD), and author of “Tantric Thelema,” on the topic of religion and spirituality.
“When you look at other religious cultures who have survived over the millennia, including polytheistic cultures, you find that the process of creating, expanding and strengthening family was extremely important. Like anything else, these traditional processes could be, and sometimes still are, used to abuse and harm. Just as with a knife that can both slice bread and cut flesh, we don’t simply abandon traditional things because they have the potential to be used to harm. We already work positively with elements that could be used to harm in the wrong hands: divination, initiation, magic, etc…” – Patheos Pagan Portal editor Star Foster, asking if arranged marriages would work for the Pagan community.
“I guess you could say that I prefer my current employment environment where my technical expertise is easily determined by tangible results that I produce every day. A professional magician would function more like a clinical psychologist, often with only some subjective testimonials indicating that the magick worked for this person or that it greatly helped them. As for me, my professional skill-set is constantly being challenged and measured, even certified by an official testing regimen. Since there is nothing like that in the occult world, then claims of self-mastery and teaching accolades would have to be verified by the subjective opinions of various individuals. For myself, I would find this too intangible and tenuous. There is also the problem that if I initiate and teach someone, any fees that I might apply to that teaching would have to be done on a purely “quid pro quo” basis. I could never charge another initiate anything more than what would cover my out of pocket expenses, if even that.” – Frater Barrabbas, on why he won’t become a Professional Pagan Magus.
“I don’t believe just because you choose not to do something that you are a bad person. I think you made a different choice. You have to live in our society so you get to decide what you will do and won’t do. Society is differnet for different people. We know people in the Pagan community who are very closeted, whose family doesn’t know what their actual spiritual practice is. And we know people who just can’t understand why you can’t be spiritual every minute of the day and out there and open and loud and proud. The culture you are living in is not necessarily as uniform as we’d like to believe.” – Lisa Spiral Besnett, author of “Manifest Divinity,” responding to a question from PNC Minnesota about personal boundaries and choosing not to do what a deity has told you to do.
That’s all I have for now, have a great day!
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