Yvonne Aburrow's Blog, page 4

Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays = Happy Short Time That We’ve All Got Off From Work Because The Hegemonic Religion Wanted It But Capitalism Would Prefer That We Never Sleep, So We Will Take Whatever We Can Wrest From Its Grasping Metal Hands.

Obviously saying “Happy Holidays” is a good thing because it means that you are acknowledging that many different religions have a festival at this time of year — but the fact remains that any time off you might get is scheduled between Christmas and New Year, and do...

Review: Dreaming the Dark

This is an excellent book, and it was the first nonfiction book about Paganism that I ever read, back in the late 1980s. I have just reread it in 2024.

There are many noteworthy things about this book: its engagement of witchcraft and politics, the fact that it is not gender essentialist—Starhawk notes that the qualities ascribed to men and women are based in culture and not biology—and its emphasis on equality, the importance of immanence, and its acknowledgment that sometimes progressiv...

Review of ‘Witches Among Us’ by Thorn Mooney

This book is a short introduction to a very broad topic (the many varieties of witchcraft that exist today) and as such, was necessarily an overview. It is aimed at people who don’t know anything about witchcraft and want to understand it as a cultural phenomenon.

Each of the chapters could have been an entire book because of the scope of the work, but the succinctness in dealing with multiple versions of witchcraft and multiple histories was good. The book does not brush the controversi...

Hallowstide thoughts

Some of the videos I have made about Samhain and Hallowstide …

Reflections on Samhain / Hallowstide Covid safe candy bobbing A history of Halloween & Samhain Halloween and Samhain customs

Queer Ancestors

Commemorating Queer Ancestors is very important to the queer community.

It’s vital to know our history and the people who fought for LGBTQ+ rights.

Light a candle for these and other queer ancestors.

Brenda Howard, a bisexual activist known as the Mother of Pride. Close to my heart because she was bisexual and because Pride is important.
Marsha P Johnson, instigator of the Stonewall riot and protector of trans youthMark Ashton, co-founder of Lesbians and Gays Support the Mine...

Parnesius and Pertinax

Parnesius and Pertinax: A loving homage to the story of Parnesius and Pertinax in Puck of Pook’s Hill, by Rudyard Kipling. This was the book that made me realize that I am a Pagan.

Paio Pavonius sighed wistfully. The commander and his best friend were standing on the ramparts of the Wall again, looking out towards the debatable ground where the Picts hunted, and the wreckage of Roman wars lay scattered across the heather.

“Ain’t no good you getting your hopes up about Pertinax,” wh...

Gerald Gardner and history

There’s currently a trend of criticizing Gerald Gardner for making stuff up, such as the festivals etc. Gardner never claimed that the Wheel of the Year was ancient, and he did not label the festivals with Celtic names (that happened much later, after his death). Each of the festivals in the Wheel of the Year was celebrated somewhere in ancient times — they just weren’t all celebrated by the same culture; and he knew that he was joining the four “Celtic” festivals (Candlemas, May Eve, Lammas, Ha...

Halloween candy bobbing

There are two forms of apple bobbing at Halloween; both involve trying to get hold of an apple using only your teeth.
In one, the apples are floating in a tub of water; in the other, the apples are hanging from a branch suspended from the ceiling.
I invented a Covid safe version (people wearing masks just boop the candy with their mask) using individually wrapped candy.

Here is a video of me demonstrating the device:

And here’s a video I made a couple of years ago about the history of ...

Reclaiming “warlock”?

I’ve just read an interesting article from Storm Faerywolf about reclaiming the word warlock.

I agree that before I encountered the contemporary Pagan movement, I assumed that a male witch was a warlock, and when I started hanging out with other Pagans, I was told that we don’t use it. And I don’t see why people can’t reclaim it, just like people have reclaimed the word “witch”.

However, as a nonbinary witch, I wouldn’t want the word witch to mean only “female witch”. Storm suggests th...

The function of tradition

I’ve said before that tradition arises when someone does a thing, find it useful and helpful, and either writes it down or passes it on to the next generation. Rather like writing down a recipe. And tradition changes and evolves as people find new ingredients, or when tastes change. But what is the purpose and function of tradition?

When we are following a spiritual path, it is very easy to ignore “difficult” practices in favour of the easy ones. No-one wants to spend three days hanging u...