Damh the Bard wrote this excellent post on the harvest festivals last month that I’m only getting around to sharing now, but I recommend everyone read it and consider how you connect (or don’t) with the harvest festivals. Living in Europe has definitely changed how I relate to those common Pagan holy days.

Over on Patheos Pagan, Cyndi Brannen wrote about spiritual death and the season of autumn. An interesting read that touches on spiritual dismemberment and witchiness.

There don’t seem to have been any religious temples, in the classical sense, in Ireland. There were many large monuments and sacred sites, but these were mostly open air locations. Any that were enclosed, such as the great Passage Tomb at Brú na Bóinne (Newgrange, County Meath), were quite cramped – physical space wise, you wouldn’t be fitting a lot of live bodies into that passage and the chambers. It makes sense that any large scale community rituals, feast days, etc would have been conducted in the open air, with maybe an ‘inner circle’ element happening in an interior space within the broader context.

Lora O’Brien, ‘Pagan Priesthood in Iris History‘ (also check out ‘A Practical Guide to Pagan Priesthood‘, O’Brien’s new book)

Morgan Daimler has a post up on their PaganSquare blog about the relationship between folklore, pop culture, and fairies. (Always a favorite topic of mine to read!)

Here’s a post from earlier in the year, by Anna Applegate, about prayer and its importance within Paganism and polytheism.

Lastly, an important post by Thenea about ‘thoughts and prayers‘. Many Pagans and polytheists seem perfectly fine using our own version of ‘thoughts and prayers’ in place of actually trying to fix problems that we can address. Any call for us to think more critically about what we are doing (or not doing) is beyond valuable.