New Worlds of Body, Mind & Spirit Since 1901
When I first began my Pagan journey, I was presented with the Wheel of the Year with which it seemed most Pagans worked. I learned all the dates and correspondences, which took me ages, and I often forgot what was supposed to be where! But I duly decorated my altar for each Sabbat and did the ritual, although I am not sure how much I actually connected with each one. As my journey has deepened and the years have passed, I realised that the Wheel of the Year isn't about dates on calendars; it's more about connections. Mother Nature does not keep to a schedule, and perhaps more so in recent years; the seasons seem to be all over the place. The energies will also change depending on where ...
I recently went to Sweden and spent some time thinking about (read: had a few random thoughts about) older Swedish folk magic and the types of such magic that are similar to the magic that I practice. (There is an abundance of folk magic that differs greatly from my practice, but that is material for a different article.) Plenty of Swedish folk magic was learned from Southern European Catholic monks who came to Sweden. Some formulations of magic that the monks brought are believed to have originated in the 10th or 11th century. The monks also "Christianized" existing Swedish incantations that were based on belief in the Norse gods, the Aesir and the Vanir. After the Reformation in Sweden ...
She was sitting at the edge of her seat looking at me expectantly. "Well?" she asked, unable to contain her excitement, "What do you see?" There was a long line of people behind her wanting a reading at this event, and they were all asking me to hurry up with their eyes. My querent had asked me, "What do you see about my love life?" And while that is often a question that single people ask, the cards were screaming "marriage" at me. Instead of asking her if she was married, I plowed through the reading as if it was talking about her single love life. It felt like I was fighting the cards. Besides marriage, it just did not make sense. I forced the reading even though my intuition told me ...
Most of us would naturally like the spaces that we inhabit and create to be inclusive of a broader range of humanity, especially marginalized people. I've met plenty of ritualists and event organizers that want to make their spaces more friendly and open to trans and nonbinary people (trans being a general term for people who aren't the gender that they were assigned at birth, and nonbinary specifically for those who are neither men nor women) but they don't know where to start. Far too often they assume that simply saying, "All are welcome" means that people of all sorts will feel welcome to attend. If you simply say that everyone is welcome without understanding what would make people ...
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