I found Nyx in a poster.
Who knows what I thought,
a child, as I saw her floating,
all good things edging
along her body as she drove
her nightfall over the Earth.

Kaye, ‘The Cosmos — Void — Night — Radiance’

I really enjoyed this post on ritual and sacrifice in Hellenismos. One quote I especially like from the article is, “We can base our practices off of the ways of the ancients, but household worship is intimate, personal, and routine. That routine you will find yourself, and it will change through the years. What matters most is that it follows the basic steps of ritual, and that it’s conducted with the beauty and greatness of the Gods in mind.”

Our word is the most palpable thing we have in a devotional practice. Nothing binds us more than it.

Sara, ‘On Oaths and Promises to the Gods‘ on Lightning Struck

Another post from Kaye on Kallisti, this time on terminology and identity. Because I link to Kaye rather frequently on this blog I figured it would be remiss of me to not include ‘A Positional Statement on Some Recent Twitter Things‘.

Are we persecuted? In some form or fashion, isn’t just about everybody? I’m not convinced witches and pagans have a corner on that miserable market. That doesn’t make it right or OK by any means. What persecution can do, however, is spark in us a commitment to have compassion for whatever (whoever) the “other” is for us.
Is that possible? In some cases, no. I could list exceptions but I think most of us can figure out what they are on our own (and some of us don’t need to figure it out; we know from excruciating personal experience). Some persecutions are truly unforgivable. And yet, can compassion be an outlook that informs our actions even as we do not forgive? I actually think that’s doable. Not easy, but doable.

Marthy Kirby Capo, ‘The Persecuted Modern Witch‘ on Agora (Patheos Pagan)

Here’s a short post by Steven Posch, which has a lovely evocative line: “For the witch-hunters were right about this much at least: the Sabbat demands everything. The Sabbat demands your soul.“

We need to return to an ancestral way in which nature is not an Other, but an Us. If we truly love nature, if we consider ourselves friends to the animals, then we need to know nature itself, through books and observations, through science and questioning. We need to know the rest of nature as well as we know ourselves.

Lupa, ‘Our Deadly Lack of Nature Literacy‘ on Humanistic Paganism

Kaye on Kallisti has a very interesting post on purification and the terms used surrounding purity and impurity in Hellenic polytheism.

Reconstructionism is a broad term, often abbreviated recon. It refers to the adaptation of ancient polytheism and its structures, and its main concerns are authenticity and historical grounding. The term seems straightforward — until it isn’t. Antiquity lasted for a long time. Religious practices evolved, and information about those practices can simultaneously be scant and way too much. Much of Hellenism is still very DIY, or at least as DIY as a complicated set of secondhand IKEA furniture with the instructions missing.

Kaye, ‘Is My Libation To-Go Cup Authentic?‘ on EIDOLON

Merri-Todd has a breakdown of Hozier’s ‘As It Was’ through the lens of a fairy ballad.

I did not realize until I had it, perhaps, how much I wanted a religion that made the erotic a central concern instead of leaving it to lurk around the borders, beyond the light of the candles on the altar, a religion that wasn’t angry at women for somehow being the cause of everything bad because we’re just so tempting. It goes deeper than wanting to worship goddesses or honor female ancestors, though those desires, those needs, are also deeply important. Hail, Saint Mary Magdalene, consort of the Savior, Apostle to the Apostles: Pray for your sisters who are still stuck under the bus.

Merri-Todd Webster, ‘Throwing the First Apostle under the bus‘

I have even been told that I would have problem in my married life because of my feminist ideologies that I should give up after being married. Are we just supposed to ignore our ideologies, our sense of right or wrong just because we respect our elders? In the name of respect, are we suppose to follow those traditions that we firmly believe are wrong? Why can a girl not ask for equality in life? And if she does, why is she not appreciated? These are some questions that demands pondering.

Srijana Chhetri, ‘My Experiences of Patriarchal Rituals in the Nepali Community‘

Over on Divine Multiplicity, Katalin Patnaik wrote on how to perform puja (a Hindu form of ritual).

This is perhaps the biggest consideration for me. I don’t want to be a Pagan chaplain, I want to be a chaplain who is Pagan.

Conor Warren, ‘9 of Beagles: A Pagan in A Christian Seminary?‘ on Agora

Through this post on Priestess of Aphrodite I found another book to add to my ever-growing and unmanageable book wishlist: The Empath’s Survival Guide by Judith Orloff.

A lot of folks, especially monotheists, but often polytheists as well, have an oddly rigid and systematized view of the many gods. “So-and-so is a goddess of storm,” they’ll say, or “This one is a god of marriage.” It’s like a very compartmentalized divine bureaucracy, as if you have to take the proper form to the correct functionary or you’ll simply be turned away — not their department.
But who is the god of suicidal friends? Who is the godden of persons who are maybe already dead, but hopefully not? Who takes responsibility for missing adults who left the house under their own recognizance, but aren’t safe from their own thoughts?
It’s not a workable system, and thankfully it’s not how the Holy Ones work, either. They certainly have their interests and typical activities, just as we do. But — again, like us — they are complex persons, and they have relationships with those who honor them. They may not be the best respondent for any particular situation, but when you build ghosti bonds with the Holy Ones, they don’t turn aside; they help as best they can. The best god to turn to in crisis is the one you already know.

Mike Berschenk, ‘The god you already know‘ on Cardinal & Locust (one of the coolest blog names I’ve seen)

I am sharing these Lughnassad posts a bit late, considering the holiday was a few weeks ago. Better late than never, right?

Both are by Kris Hughes. First, her article on Agora, ‘Our Lughnassad Harvest‘. I’m not sure I buy her premise or conclusion entirely, but it was a thought-provoking article. I especially loved this line: “The story of birth, death, regeneration is truly mother nature’s story. She is red in tooth and claw. It’s not eat or be eaten, so much as eat and be eaten. It’s the natural order of things.” It resonated with my understanding and experience of the Clarene especially.

Second, her post from last year, on her own blog. ‘Contemplating Lughnassad‘ has similar themes to her more recent post. One line that stood out to me, and that I am still turning over in my mind, “…preserving the unploughed natural world is more important to me than whether me and my tribe have enough to eat over the winter.“

Owning things is becoming increasingly a privilege of economic class.

We’re used to thinking of buying things being, obviously, a privilege of economic class. Economic class means how much money you have with which to buy things, so it’s unsurprising that buying things is something people with higher economic class get to do more of.

But owning things – even things that were given to you as gifts, that you made yourself, that you found, that, crucially, cost you no money to acquire, and which you never bought – is also an economic privilege, and, I am contending, becoming ever more and more so.

Now, half a moment’s thought will point out that owning things has always had costs attendant, and thus has always been a privilege of economic class. You can’t own a private jet without a hangar for it; for a more banal example, it’s hard to own a car if you haven’t anywhere to park it. The small stuff we keep inside our homes, we can keep more of it when we have larger homes; ergo, it’s not surprising that getting to have more stuff is an economic privilege, and to some extent always has been.

What has changed is just how much of a privilege it is. Which is to say, more than it was not that long ago.

Siderea, ‘The Privilege of Property‘ on Sibylla Bostoniensis

Too often the conversation about cultural flows across color lines devolves into a useless debate about appropriation versus appreciation, a reductive rhetoric that misses the point when people of color are not only replaced, but also rendered invisible. There is no dearth of guides and how-tos in cyberspace that define cultural appropriation with a negative connotation—as the “selecting of certain aspects of a culture, ignoring their original significance, for the purpose of belittling it as a trend.” Appreciation, on the other hand, is positioned as the superior choice, since it involves “honoring and respecting another culture and its practices, as a way to gain knowledge and understanding.”
What these definitions miss entirely is that “culture” is not something material that exists separate from actual human beings. Quite the opposite, the social mechanism by which a culture becomes appropriated relies on a simple truth—that Whiteness, and White womanhood in particular, need constant care and feeding to survive. 

Rumya Puchta, ‘Yoga and the Maintenance of White Womanhood‘ on Namaste Nation

For months that moment has left me wondering—what is Grace in the face of indignity and injustice?
Is it abdication?
Is it apathy?
Or it is action?

Rumya Puchta, ‘On Yoga and White Public Spaces‘

While getting lost in the internet I stumbled over this interview with Lasara Firefox Allen, focusing on their book Jailbreaking the Goddess.

From Misha Magdalene, on Outside the Charmed Circle on Patheos Pagan, an article on ‘The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Pagan‘.

Brandy Williams, author of The Woman Magician (a book I dearly want to read!), wrote a few articles about the term and usage of ‘black magic’. Here is her shorter post on Patheos, and the longer (much longer) piece on her own website.

Jumping off from there to an article by Shannon Barber: ‘Black Magic, Black Heart, Black Skin: Decolonizing White Witchcraft‘. A line that stood out to me was, ‘I will not be held in the sunshine when what I need is moonlight.‘

And a final quote:

Soon, nearly everyone could agree that racism was the evil work of people with hate in their hearts — bigots. This was a convenient thing for white Americans to believe. Racism, they could say, was the work of racists. And wherever you looked, there were no racists: only good men like Wallace, minding the welfare of their black fellow citizens, or the segregationist South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, defending states’ rights. Racism definitely existed, at some point — no one was out there denying that slavery had happened — but its residue had settled only in the hearts of the most unsavory individuals. Society as a whole didn’t need reform for the sins of a few.

Greg Howard, ‘The Easiest Way to Get Rid of Racism? Just Redefine It.’ in The New York Times