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Pagan

Magic(k), Ritual, and Mysticism

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March 2020

March 19, 2020

COVID-19: We’re All In This Together

A bit more than twenty years ago, after my 30th birthday, I went away for...

February 2020

February 14, 2020

Frederick Douglass’s Root Magic

Given the significance of Douglass to the abolition movement, this fight with Covey might fairly...

December 2019

December 31, 2019

Finding: A 2020 Sigil

As I considered what I need for this coming year, and what I think we...

December 31, 2019

It’s A New Year Until Imbolc

The year remains New until Imbolc, more or less midway between December's winter solstice and...

December 16, 2019

Yule: Keeping The Pilot Light On

I've done it every year since, and I'm come to think of it as keeping...

December 11, 2019

Magic As A Social Force

Magic gives us the power to believe that we, individually, are important. In that, we...

October 2019

October 30, 2019

Working with Jizo Bodhisattva at Samhain

Death is the great mystery, the undiscovered country, the unavoidable confrontation with the boundaries of...

October 23, 2019

A Zen Pagan Ghost Story For Samhain

But as the creepier side of the season reminds us, sometimes unwelcome presences can push...

October 09, 2019

Magic Doesn’t Care About Metaphysics

Imagine that we could hop in our TARDIS and jump back to the Golden Age...

September 2019

September 26, 2019

Breaking the Glamour of Greta Thunberg

The social-media-viral cult of personality around Greta Thunberg is a glamour being cast as what...

September 21, 2019

Walking Behind The Waterfall At The Equinox

It strikes me that, if ritual is "poetry in the realm of acts", then a...

August 2019

August 22, 2019

Invoke Often

"Invoke often." This simple advice has been offered by Robert Anton Wilson and Aleister Crowley...

August 05, 2019

Of Baltimore And Magic

With just a bit of license, I might say that to be a Baltimorean —...

July 2019

July 17, 2019

Buddha Touched The Earth: A Zen Pagan Ritual Cycle

My inspiration for this year was that the story of the Four Sights could make...

June 2019

June 02, 2019

Pagan Priests Vs. Whitman’s Kosmos

But my Paganism is very much aligned with these words of Walt Whitman, from the...

April 2019

April 13, 2019

Travel, Renewal, and Ancestor Work

Travel gives you an opportunity to raise the magickal energy, but you have to take...

March 2019

March 15, 2019

“Shaman” Is A Fine Word For A Shaman

"Priest" can be a specific term referring to Catholic religious figures but it also has...

February 2019

February 10, 2019

Why The Moment Calls For Magic

In O'Keefe's view, throughout human history magic has served as a form of resistance the...

January 2019

January 05, 2019

A Sigil For Political-Artistic Liberation In 2019

We sometimes think of creativity as a light, playful thing, an airy-fairy luxury for the...

October 2018

October 20, 2018

Thank You For Letting Me Be Myself, Again

As we drum and dance and support each other around the fire, we sort of...

September 2018

September 03, 2018

My Labor Day Mystical Experience

It is the way of these things that they are ineffable. To even say "I...

July 2018

July 18, 2018

Pagans Are Wild

Who's going to find what we need? The wild ones. The experimenters. The spiritual mad...

March 2018

March 27, 2018

Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, And Black Magic

Product advertising has been with us since some Paleolithic guy boasted that his flint arrowheads...

January 2018

January 07, 2018

The Empress Restored: A Dream And Tarot Reading For 2018

Every spread of the cards is a funhouse mirror, reflecting what comes before it, distorting...

December 2017

December 21, 2017

Magic And Change At The End Of Time

Change is going to happen. That's pretty much an inevitable part of existence. But if...

November 2017

November 13, 2017

Healing At Autumn Fires

Then I started dancing. And it became a ritual, the unloading of a million pounds...

August 2017

August 14, 2017

The Fire Circle: All Kinds Magic Worked Here

The fire circle is an audience participation event. In fact, there is no audience. We're...

May 2017

May 20, 2017

Blessing Computers? Why Not?

Some corners of the net are getting a lot of incredulous chuckles about a photo...

May 13, 2017

Kyoto Bonus: Daruma-dera Visit

The figurines symbolize a proverb: if you fall down seven times, get up eight times....

April 2017

April 26, 2017

Kenny Klein And Jerks In Your Lineage

If we see our spiritual selves primarily as products of a lineage, as inheritors of...