Tomorrow is Election Day in the United States and I strongly encourage everyone who can to vote. Many of us – myself included – are frustrated with the political process, and I am convinced the most important changes for ourselves and our wider world will be created by non-political means. But the democratic process is too important to abandon to the monied interests who dominate it, and voting does make a difference even if it doesn’t have the impact it... Read more

There’s a lot going on tonight. There’s handing out candy to trick or treaters and walking your own trick or treaters around the neighborhood. There’s remembering our beloved dead and honoring our ancestors. There’s celebrating the end of Summer and letting go of the things that no longer serve our True Will. It’s a time for divination, through Tarot, Ogham, runes or scrying. But after you do all that, I hope you’ll take a few moments to gaze through the... Read more

Most of my dreams fall into the category of routine sorting and filing – my subconscious grabs onto something from the waking day and reprocesses it. On rare occasions my dreams are prophetic. I can’t tell you how I know they’re prophetic, but when I have them there’s no doubt what they mean and what I have to do with them. And then there are dreams like last night where I have no trouble figuring out where they come from... Read more

“If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention.” I can’t find the original source for that quote – it could have come from the left or from the right. With the election less than two weeks away there’s a lot of outrage in the air. And while I am not a conspiracy theorist (the world is too complicated for grand conspiracies to work), there are people out there whose goal is to keep you outraged. If you’re outraged you’re more... Read more

Why do Pagans gather in circles? Why do we cast circles? What does the circle mean? In the wake of yesterday’s post on a circle that didn’t work out very well, I’d like to explore an area of Pagan practice that many do but few understand. Gathering in circles. Circles are a very efficient shape – if you have a length of string and you wish to enclose the maximum possible area, arrange it in a perfect circle. Look at... Read more

Teo Bishop has a new blog post titled “I Felt Ashamed At Pagan Pride.” He went to the Denver Pagan Pride celebration in a large downtown park. The main ritual was Wiccanish and as such it included a circle casting – which had the effect of excluding the public. Go read the essay and at least skim through the comments: it’s attracted responses from some pretty knowledgeable Pagans, including Phaedra Bonewits, Thorn Coyle, Alison Lilly and Themon the Bard. At... Read more

The Patheos Pagan Channel is getting thin. There have been several Pagan defections from Patheos lately. First Managing Editor Star Foster, then Jason Pitzl-Waters, then Teo Bishop. No one has made any complaints of bias or discrimination. But some bloggers are uncomfortable being associated with the ads Patheos runs and prefer to build their own brands rather than contributing to building Patheos. I get that, but at the same time the Pagan movement benefits greatly from having a place on... Read more

There’s a new Pew Research study out on the rise of the religiously unaffiliated or nones – as in “none of the above.” The numbers are ominous for organized religions in general (though perhaps optimistic for liberal religions) and they’ve initiated analysis from all over the religious spectrum. They’ve also spawned another round of essays bashing the folks who call themselves spiritual but not religious – bashing that basically says “it doesn’t look like MY religion so it must be... Read more

One of the ways we learn about our gods, goddesses and ancestors is through their stories. For those of us following a Celtic path this presents a difficulty. The Celts kept an oral tradition and none of their stories were written down until well into the Christian era. Few of the original texts and none of the complete documents are more than a thousand years old and much of the transcription was done by Christian monks – they are full... Read more