Laura Perry's Blog, page 24
August 27, 2014
Meet the Minoans: Zagreus
I've just uploaded a new Minoan Path blog post about Zagreus, one of the lesser-known deities of the Minoan pantheon. Don't get him confused with the Greek god Zeus; Zagreus has his own unique, fascinating character.
Meet the Minoans: ZagreusI'm fascinated by Zagreus' connection with the sacred animals goat, bull, and serpent, and also by his connection with ancient shamanic and ecstatic ritual practice.
To join the discussion about modern paganism with a Minoan flavor, please visit our Facebook group Ariadne's Tribe.
August 20, 2014
Finding odd texts on the Interwebz
Many of us are interested in topics that aren't exactly mainstream, from classical and medieval texts to works of magick and esoterica. Books about these subjects can be hard to find and expensive. Here I've shared a few online resources that can help you find what you're looking for without traveling to a specialty library or spending a whole month's salary on books. Enjoy!
The Avalon Project Digitized documents about law, history and diplomacy from the ancient world to modern times. Extensive classical and medieval collection. The site is run by Yale Law School's Lillian Goldman Law Library
The Camelot Project A large database of Arthurian texts, images and bibliographies run by the University of Rochester. Searchable by author, title, image, character, symbol, location and creature.
CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts Searchable online database of texts relating to Irish history, literature and politics. Over 1400 digitized texts from the Middle Ages to modern times. The site is run by University College Cork.
Early Americas Digital Archive Digitized versions of texts written in or about the Americas from 1492 to 1820. Includes early travelogues and descriptions of interactions with the indigenous people.
Fordham University Internet Medieval Sourcebook Extensive collection of medieval texts including literature and legal/governmental documents
HathiTrust Digital Library Not just copyright-free works, but also many publicly-available older documents from libraries around the world, including 15th-century Spanish incunabula, records and court documents from the 13 American colonies (pre-Revolution), and other interesting stuff.
The Internet Classics Archive MIT's online searchable collection of 441 works of classical literature. Greco-Roman, Chinese and Persian works, all in English translation.
Internet Medieval Sourcebook Fordham University's online collection of medieval documents categorized by subject and fully searchable. Includes some MIDI files of medieval music you can play while browsing the site to provide the appropriate atmosphere. :-)
Internet Sacred Text Archive Really extensive collection of classic works about religion, folklore, mythology and esoteric subjects from around the world. Organized by region and subject. Fully searchable.
The Latin Library Just what it sounds like. Extensive collection of texts in Latin from classical to medieval times. Not translated, so get out your Latin dictionary.
Online Esoteric Library These are all older books, no longer in copyright, but many of them are classics in astrology, Renaissance magic, astrology and other subjects.
Perseus Digital Library Tufts University's online collection of Greek and Roman literature in the original languages and in English translation. Easily searchable.
Project Gutenberg Thousands of copyright-free (published before about 1922) works including lots of classics of literature and folklore.
The Robin Hood Project Run by the University of Rochester, this searchable online database includes texts and art related to the folk hero Robin Hood.
Suda On Line: Byzantine Lexicography Keyword-searchable database translation of the massive 10th-century Byzantine Greek historical encyclopedia known as the Suda, or Stronghold. Covers all of Greek and Roman antiquity as well as Christian Europe up to the 10th century.
TEAMS: The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages Digitized Middle English texts, especially those that are less common in print. This site is run by the University of Rochester. Click "METS Texts" to get to the list of available digitized works.
Thesaurus Lingua Graecae Online collection of most literary texts written in Greek from Homer to the fall of Byzantium in 1453 CE. The goal of this ongoing project is to create a comprehensive digital library of Greek literature from antiquity to the present era. It is a Special Research Project of the University of California, Irvine.
Twilit Grotto: Archives of Western Esoterica Extensive collection of digitized grimoires and works about Renaissance magic. Searchable. U.S. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room Digitized materials from the LOC's special collections including selections about magic, old court documents and a scrapbook created by Lewis Carroll.
The Avalon Project Digitized documents about law, history and diplomacy from the ancient world to modern times. Extensive classical and medieval collection. The site is run by Yale Law School's Lillian Goldman Law Library
The Camelot Project A large database of Arthurian texts, images and bibliographies run by the University of Rochester. Searchable by author, title, image, character, symbol, location and creature.
CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts Searchable online database of texts relating to Irish history, literature and politics. Over 1400 digitized texts from the Middle Ages to modern times. The site is run by University College Cork.
Early Americas Digital Archive Digitized versions of texts written in or about the Americas from 1492 to 1820. Includes early travelogues and descriptions of interactions with the indigenous people.
Fordham University Internet Medieval Sourcebook Extensive collection of medieval texts including literature and legal/governmental documents
HathiTrust Digital Library Not just copyright-free works, but also many publicly-available older documents from libraries around the world, including 15th-century Spanish incunabula, records and court documents from the 13 American colonies (pre-Revolution), and other interesting stuff.
The Internet Classics Archive MIT's online searchable collection of 441 works of classical literature. Greco-Roman, Chinese and Persian works, all in English translation.
Internet Medieval Sourcebook Fordham University's online collection of medieval documents categorized by subject and fully searchable. Includes some MIDI files of medieval music you can play while browsing the site to provide the appropriate atmosphere. :-)
Internet Sacred Text Archive Really extensive collection of classic works about religion, folklore, mythology and esoteric subjects from around the world. Organized by region and subject. Fully searchable.
The Latin Library Just what it sounds like. Extensive collection of texts in Latin from classical to medieval times. Not translated, so get out your Latin dictionary.
Online Esoteric Library These are all older books, no longer in copyright, but many of them are classics in astrology, Renaissance magic, astrology and other subjects.
Perseus Digital Library Tufts University's online collection of Greek and Roman literature in the original languages and in English translation. Easily searchable.
Project Gutenberg Thousands of copyright-free (published before about 1922) works including lots of classics of literature and folklore.
The Robin Hood Project Run by the University of Rochester, this searchable online database includes texts and art related to the folk hero Robin Hood.
Suda On Line: Byzantine Lexicography Keyword-searchable database translation of the massive 10th-century Byzantine Greek historical encyclopedia known as the Suda, or Stronghold. Covers all of Greek and Roman antiquity as well as Christian Europe up to the 10th century.
TEAMS: The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages Digitized Middle English texts, especially those that are less common in print. This site is run by the University of Rochester. Click "METS Texts" to get to the list of available digitized works.
Thesaurus Lingua Graecae Online collection of most literary texts written in Greek from Homer to the fall of Byzantium in 1453 CE. The goal of this ongoing project is to create a comprehensive digital library of Greek literature from antiquity to the present era. It is a Special Research Project of the University of California, Irvine.
Twilit Grotto: Archives of Western Esoterica Extensive collection of digitized grimoires and works about Renaissance magic. Searchable. U.S. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room Digitized materials from the LOC's special collections including selections about magic, old court documents and a scrapbook created by Lewis Carroll.
August 13, 2014
Meet the Minoans: Eileithyia
This week I'm sharing some background about the ancient Minoan midwife-goddess Eileithyia on the Minoan Path blog:
Meet the Minoans: Eileithyia
The people of ancient Crete worshiped her continuously from Neolithic times until well into the Christian era, and her worship spread across the whole Greek world.
To join the discussion about modern paganism with a Minoan flavor, please visit our Facebook group Ariadne's Tribe.
August 6, 2014
Why I'm Not a Vegetarian
I feel compelled to begin this blog post with a disclaimer. It's unfortunate that the anonymity of the Internet encourages hostility, rudeness and the tendency to be judgmental, so I’m left feeling the need to explain myself before I even begin. Here’s the thing: How and what we eat is a very personal decision, often fraught with a great deal of concern and angst. All I’m doing in this blog post is describing my own journey. I’m not judging the way anyone else chooses to eat. Whatever you decide for yourself is fine with me; I expect you to extend me the same courtesy.
I’ll begin the actual post by explaining that I once was a vegetarian. I grew up in an abusive family, and in an effort to distance myself from the violence and cruelty of the people I was forced to live with, I attempted to remove as much violence and cruelty from my personal habits as possible. I could identify with animals – they were like me, with faces and personalities and interesting, sometimes odd habits. So I decided not to eat animals.
That practice worked for me for quite a while; it even made me feel more virtuous than people who ate meat. I submitted to my first husband’s constant desire for meat and became an unwilling omnivore with all the expected attendant guilt while I was married to him, then went back to vegetarianism after I divorced him. I felt sure I was enlightened and awake and all those good New Age terms; I thought I understood the meaning of life. Yikes. Then a friend suggested I study Buddhism; after all, that’s the next step after vegetarianism, right?
I began learning about Buddhism right around the same time I began my training in herbalism. Partly for Buddhist practice and partly because I like a challenge, I began the habit of choosing a phrase or concept each New Year’s as a meditation focus for the upcoming year. That’s right, meditating on a single subject for a whole year. Yeah, I know there’s professional help for that. One year I chose “All life is one life.” That’s the same year I began working with plant spirits, inspired by a couple of my herbalism teachers.
I had some profound experiences with the plant spirits; it’s not an exaggeration to say they changed my life. My whole worldview upended thanks to a few interesting herbalism workshops and classes, all during the time I was meditating on “All life is one life.” I began to realize I was missing a really basic concept in that I identified only with animals, and not the rest of the living world, the rest of the cosmos. That’s when it began to dawn on me that saying, “I won’t take a life for my food; that’s why I’m a vegetarian” was a value judgment of the most profound order. My ability to identify with a cow had led me to stop eating them; my inability to identify with a carrot was actually a shortcoming, and it led me to believe that one kind of life (animals) was more valuable than another kind of life (plants). Ultimately, that’s a kind of chauvinism. It says that life that is like us is more valuable, more worth preserving than life that isn’t like us.
People like to joke about being at the top of the food chain, but we really aren’t. The microbes are. But we don’t think of bacteria as living things except when we’re working to exterminate the ones that make us sick (‘antibiotic’ means ‘against life’). Sure, Ye Olde High School Biology Course taught us the basic definition of life – it’s alive if it reproduces, takes in nourishment, excretes waste, and so on – but when we think of living creatures, we confine our thoughts to the animal kingdom, because we’re animals and that’s what we identify with. Makes sense, in a myopic sort of way.
The thing is, when I began working with the plant spirits, I began identifying them as fellow living beings. I did a little reading and discovered that plants have DNA just like animals do. Most of them have circulatory systems. The only difference between a molecule of hemoglobin and a molecule of chlorophyll is that the hemoglobin has iron in the center while the chlorophyll has nitrogen. Living plants communicate with each other and demonstrate electromagnetic responses that look like pain. All life is one life.
Then I began doing shamanic work and realized there’s a whole universe out there that’s full of life, but very little of it looks like us. Quantum physics suggests that there are many layers we’re not even aware of, all of which have presence and energy. So when I said I wouldn’t take a life for my food, I was saying that the only lives worth valuing were those of animals. Every plant I eat is also a living thing. In fact, many of them are still fully alive as I tear them apart with my teeth (sprouts, anyone?). In fact, I think it may actually be more violent to eat plants than animals because of that still-being-alive thing, but because it’s harder for me, as a human being, to identify with a plant, it doesn’t bother me as much.
All this revelation left me floundering, wondering how the hell I was supposed to figure out what it was OK to eat and what I ought to leave alone. Obviously, I was going to have to choose some set of criteria other than ‘if it’s alive, don’t eat it.’ While I was trying to work out this issue, the phrase ‘everything lives by the death of something else’ kept popping up in conversation and the books I was reading. I didn’t like that; I didn’t want to listen to the message the universe was sending me. I didn’t want to be a part of that killing, that death. Along the way, I was also influenced by several teachers who all pointed out to me that indigenous people are invariably omnivorous, and also tend to view everything (and I do mean everything) as alive. Interestingly, one of those teachers was vegan.
Eventually, I gave in to my own experience and accepted the shamanic perspective that everything is alive in one way or another. I’m still hovering in that headspace, somewhere between the depths of quantum physics and the depths of the Otherworld. But that worldview did offer a solution to the question of what to eat, and it involves my three R’s. And no, they’re not reading, writing and arithmetic. (Did you ever notice that only one of those actually begins with R?)
Somewhere along the way, I decided that my three R’s are responsibility, respect and return. In other words, I have to take personal responsibility for everything I do, I need to make my decisions based on a profound respect for the universe I’m a part of, and I have to expect that my actions will have consequences. That makes the decision-making about food easy, though the subsequent information-gathering turns out to be a bit of a pain.
Simply put, my food decisions are based on respect for the living things involved: the plants, animals and fungi I choose to eat and the ecosystem of which they are a part. The industrial agriculture system is not respectful of any of those things. It harms the animals and plants it raises for food as well as the environment it raises them in. So I do my best to avoid that kind of food. I grow about 300 pounds of produce a year in our garden, not including the various nuts and fruit our trees produce (permaculture for the win!). I buy local or humanely-raised meat and don’t eat it terribly often. I’ve had laying hens before and will again, and for the record, I’m agreeable to occasionally eating the hens as well as the eggs. For the most part I avoid food that has been transported long distances, since the pollution that transportation causes is not respectful to the environment, and I’m not sure it’s good for us to eat out-of-season produce all the time. Part of my Pagan practice involves being in tune with the seasons of my local environment, and fresh strawberries in January run counter to that mindset.
Sure, I still shop at the local grocery store, which has thankfully increased its stock of food I’m willing to buy in recent years. And I’m not rabid about any of it – evangelism turns me off, as it does most people. But I do my best to raise, purchase and prepare my food mindfully. I have no idea where I am on that fabled Path To Enlightenment™, if there is such a thing, but I feel like I’m paying attention and being a respectful part of my environment.
So there you have it. That’s why I’m not a vegetarian any more. What kind of food choices have you made in your life, and where have they led you?
I’ll begin the actual post by explaining that I once was a vegetarian. I grew up in an abusive family, and in an effort to distance myself from the violence and cruelty of the people I was forced to live with, I attempted to remove as much violence and cruelty from my personal habits as possible. I could identify with animals – they were like me, with faces and personalities and interesting, sometimes odd habits. So I decided not to eat animals.
That practice worked for me for quite a while; it even made me feel more virtuous than people who ate meat. I submitted to my first husband’s constant desire for meat and became an unwilling omnivore with all the expected attendant guilt while I was married to him, then went back to vegetarianism after I divorced him. I felt sure I was enlightened and awake and all those good New Age terms; I thought I understood the meaning of life. Yikes. Then a friend suggested I study Buddhism; after all, that’s the next step after vegetarianism, right?
I began learning about Buddhism right around the same time I began my training in herbalism. Partly for Buddhist practice and partly because I like a challenge, I began the habit of choosing a phrase or concept each New Year’s as a meditation focus for the upcoming year. That’s right, meditating on a single subject for a whole year. Yeah, I know there’s professional help for that. One year I chose “All life is one life.” That’s the same year I began working with plant spirits, inspired by a couple of my herbalism teachers.
I had some profound experiences with the plant spirits; it’s not an exaggeration to say they changed my life. My whole worldview upended thanks to a few interesting herbalism workshops and classes, all during the time I was meditating on “All life is one life.” I began to realize I was missing a really basic concept in that I identified only with animals, and not the rest of the living world, the rest of the cosmos. That’s when it began to dawn on me that saying, “I won’t take a life for my food; that’s why I’m a vegetarian” was a value judgment of the most profound order. My ability to identify with a cow had led me to stop eating them; my inability to identify with a carrot was actually a shortcoming, and it led me to believe that one kind of life (animals) was more valuable than another kind of life (plants). Ultimately, that’s a kind of chauvinism. It says that life that is like us is more valuable, more worth preserving than life that isn’t like us.
People like to joke about being at the top of the food chain, but we really aren’t. The microbes are. But we don’t think of bacteria as living things except when we’re working to exterminate the ones that make us sick (‘antibiotic’ means ‘against life’). Sure, Ye Olde High School Biology Course taught us the basic definition of life – it’s alive if it reproduces, takes in nourishment, excretes waste, and so on – but when we think of living creatures, we confine our thoughts to the animal kingdom, because we’re animals and that’s what we identify with. Makes sense, in a myopic sort of way.
The thing is, when I began working with the plant spirits, I began identifying them as fellow living beings. I did a little reading and discovered that plants have DNA just like animals do. Most of them have circulatory systems. The only difference between a molecule of hemoglobin and a molecule of chlorophyll is that the hemoglobin has iron in the center while the chlorophyll has nitrogen. Living plants communicate with each other and demonstrate electromagnetic responses that look like pain. All life is one life.
Then I began doing shamanic work and realized there’s a whole universe out there that’s full of life, but very little of it looks like us. Quantum physics suggests that there are many layers we’re not even aware of, all of which have presence and energy. So when I said I wouldn’t take a life for my food, I was saying that the only lives worth valuing were those of animals. Every plant I eat is also a living thing. In fact, many of them are still fully alive as I tear them apart with my teeth (sprouts, anyone?). In fact, I think it may actually be more violent to eat plants than animals because of that still-being-alive thing, but because it’s harder for me, as a human being, to identify with a plant, it doesn’t bother me as much.
All this revelation left me floundering, wondering how the hell I was supposed to figure out what it was OK to eat and what I ought to leave alone. Obviously, I was going to have to choose some set of criteria other than ‘if it’s alive, don’t eat it.’ While I was trying to work out this issue, the phrase ‘everything lives by the death of something else’ kept popping up in conversation and the books I was reading. I didn’t like that; I didn’t want to listen to the message the universe was sending me. I didn’t want to be a part of that killing, that death. Along the way, I was also influenced by several teachers who all pointed out to me that indigenous people are invariably omnivorous, and also tend to view everything (and I do mean everything) as alive. Interestingly, one of those teachers was vegan.
Eventually, I gave in to my own experience and accepted the shamanic perspective that everything is alive in one way or another. I’m still hovering in that headspace, somewhere between the depths of quantum physics and the depths of the Otherworld. But that worldview did offer a solution to the question of what to eat, and it involves my three R’s. And no, they’re not reading, writing and arithmetic. (Did you ever notice that only one of those actually begins with R?)
Somewhere along the way, I decided that my three R’s are responsibility, respect and return. In other words, I have to take personal responsibility for everything I do, I need to make my decisions based on a profound respect for the universe I’m a part of, and I have to expect that my actions will have consequences. That makes the decision-making about food easy, though the subsequent information-gathering turns out to be a bit of a pain.
Simply put, my food decisions are based on respect for the living things involved: the plants, animals and fungi I choose to eat and the ecosystem of which they are a part. The industrial agriculture system is not respectful of any of those things. It harms the animals and plants it raises for food as well as the environment it raises them in. So I do my best to avoid that kind of food. I grow about 300 pounds of produce a year in our garden, not including the various nuts and fruit our trees produce (permaculture for the win!). I buy local or humanely-raised meat and don’t eat it terribly often. I’ve had laying hens before and will again, and for the record, I’m agreeable to occasionally eating the hens as well as the eggs. For the most part I avoid food that has been transported long distances, since the pollution that transportation causes is not respectful to the environment, and I’m not sure it’s good for us to eat out-of-season produce all the time. Part of my Pagan practice involves being in tune with the seasons of my local environment, and fresh strawberries in January run counter to that mindset.
Sure, I still shop at the local grocery store, which has thankfully increased its stock of food I’m willing to buy in recent years. And I’m not rabid about any of it – evangelism turns me off, as it does most people. But I do my best to raise, purchase and prepare my food mindfully. I have no idea where I am on that fabled Path To Enlightenment™, if there is such a thing, but I feel like I’m paying attention and being a respectful part of my environment.
So there you have it. That’s why I’m not a vegetarian any more. What kind of food choices have you made in your life, and where have they led you?
July 30, 2014
Meet the Minoans: Dionysos
This week I'm sharing some tidbits about the multi-faceted god Dionysos on the Minoan Path blog:
Meet the Minoans: Dionysos
I'll be fleshing out the Minoan pantheon with a new post every other week. The first post was about the great goddess Rhea. Who would you like to hear about?
To join the discussion about modern paganism with a Minoan flavor, please visit our Facebook group Ariadne's Tribe.
July 23, 2014
Writing Who You Know - or Not
Mug via CafepressYou’ve probably seen this saying, or something like it, posted on Facebook or Twitter. It’s a common threat we writers make, in jest, to our friends. But it’s not actually that easy to insert a real person into a work of fiction, even if something stupid they’ve done makes the writer want to portray them as an idiotic character and kill them off in some gruesome fashion. That kind of thing is best left to private fantasies; it just doesn’t work in novel form, and I’ll tell you why.
Have you ever read a book and thought, “This character is just like my [parent, friend, ex-lover, self]”? Most writers have encountered a reader along the way who is sure they’re in our latest book because one or two of a character’s attributes feel familiar to them. But if you look closely, that real person isn’t actually in the book. Honest.
When you’re writing fiction, you have a plot that’s going somewhere and characters whose job it is to move that plot along to its predetermined destination. As Mark Twain so famously reminded us, truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense. All the strands of the story have to move forward in believable ways, and in order for this to happen, the characters have to take certain actions. What those actions are depends on the particular scene the writer has dropped the characters into.
Say I have a character in my story who is really the girl down the street from the neighborhood I grew up in. Yes, I have plenty of reasons for wanting to put her in a novel and kill her off in a gruesome way and yes, I know there’s professional help for that. Since I spent a good bit of time with her all those years ago, I can portray her personality accurately. I can also predict how she’ll respond to any fictional situation I put her in. The problem is, sooner or later, she’s going to end up in a scene I’ve created and insist on doing something that totally messes up my plot.
Real people have real personalities that are pre-fabricated, fully-rounded and other fun compound adjectives. They’re not malleable. A writer can’t put a real person in a story, realize the character actually needs to be an orphan in order to make the plot operate properly, and then kill off her parents in a flashback – at least, not if the real person happens to have two parents still living. A real person who has a spider phobia won’t work in my story if I need to have him remain rational and calm in order to escape from a spider-infested cave.
Writers don’t just create stories; they create characters, and with good reason. Like a chef who chooses the best ingredients for a particular dish so it blends well in a five-course menu, a writer puts characters together so they do their bit to move the story forward, working smoothly within the confines of the plot.
Yes, we writers occasionally take a little inspiration from the people around us. I’ve occasionally caught myself thinking things like, “Wow, the way he reacted in that situation is exactly the way my character needs to deal with her boss in that scene I haven’t finished yet.” And I don’t know a writer who hasn’t spotted an interesting stranger in a coffee shop and spun up a character based just on the person’s looks and hot beverage choices. But these are all fragments, tiny facets, and not whole people.
Writing biographies is different; the plot is laid out for the writer before they even start, and they know the characters will work properly in every scene because they did so in real life. But for pure fiction, no matter how much we might want to shove someone off a cliff or drop them into a vat of boiling oil, we have to restrain ourselves if we want to end up with a workable story, and save those oh-so-very-satisfying fantasies for the moments we daydream, in between bouts of pecking out the latest scene.
July 20, 2014
Meet the Minoans: The Great Goddess Rhea
Statue of the goddess Rhea by Rolf Krahlvia Wikimedia Commons
I've just added a new blog post to The Minoan Path blog series on PaganSquare:
Meet the Minoans: The Great Goddess Rhea
This is the first in a series focusing on the gods and goddesses of ancient Crete. Future posts will include Dionysus, Ariadne, Zagreus, the Bee Goddess and more. To join the discussion about modern paganism with a Minoan flavor, please visit our Facebook group Ariadne's Tribe.
July 9, 2014
Book Review: Dancing with Nemetona
I've just been introduced to a new goddess. Actually, she's a very old goddess, but one I had only heard of in passing, in discussions of Druid groves. Joanna van der Hoeven's marvelous little book, Pagan Portals Dancing with Nemetona, explores the human relationship not only with this goddess but also with the concepts of sacred space and boundaries.
Known as the Lady of the Sacred Grove, Nemetona teaches us that we are each a kind of living, moving sacred space, and the way we interact with other people, animals and the places we visit affects us (and them) at a very deep level. That's a truly profound concept that we often give lip service to in Pagan practice, but it underlies so much of the Pagan worldview, I think we would do well to focus more closely on it and learn to understand the implications of this interconnection more clearly. This book is a big step toward that end.
Like the other titles in the Pagan Portals series, this is a fairly short book but it's full of valuable information and exercises - a touching house blessing, a visualization of your own inner sacred grove, and more. I love the way Ms. van der Hoeven dovetails the layers of sacredness in our lives, from our 'insides' (mental and physical), to the people we interact with, the world at large and the deities that inhabit it. I also love the idea of the micro-retreat - what a great way to maintain your sanity in an increasingly insane world! - and the collection of essays that depict other people's experiences with Nemetona demonstrates that she is not only ancient and worldwide, but also fully relevant today.
Known as the Lady of the Sacred Grove, Nemetona teaches us that we are each a kind of living, moving sacred space, and the way we interact with other people, animals and the places we visit affects us (and them) at a very deep level. That's a truly profound concept that we often give lip service to in Pagan practice, but it underlies so much of the Pagan worldview, I think we would do well to focus more closely on it and learn to understand the implications of this interconnection more clearly. This book is a big step toward that end.
Like the other titles in the Pagan Portals series, this is a fairly short book but it's full of valuable information and exercises - a touching house blessing, a visualization of your own inner sacred grove, and more. I love the way Ms. van der Hoeven dovetails the layers of sacredness in our lives, from our 'insides' (mental and physical), to the people we interact with, the world at large and the deities that inhabit it. I also love the idea of the micro-retreat - what a great way to maintain your sanity in an increasingly insane world! - and the collection of essays that depict other people's experiences with Nemetona demonstrates that she is not only ancient and worldwide, but also fully relevant today.
June 27, 2014
New Blog Series: Walking the Minoan Path
I'm delighted to announce that I have just begun a new, monthly blog series on the PaganSquare/Witches & Pagans website. I'll be blogging about Minoan spirituality in the modern world. My first post, about how I stumbled onto this particular path, is here:
Walking the Minoan Path: Easier Said than Done
I will offer a new post at the end of each month. If you have particular topics you'd like to see me address (related to Minoan paganism, of course) please let me know.
Walking the Minoan Path: Easier Said than Done
I will offer a new post at the end of each month. If you have particular topics you'd like to see me address (related to Minoan paganism, of course) please let me know.
June 25, 2014
Book Review: Pagan Portals Fairy Witchcraft
I have to admit, I haven’t been particularly intrigued by any of the books I’ve come across about Fairy Witchcraft. That is, until now. This is not a fluffy, New Age, everything-is-goodness-and-light book, and for that I am grateful. Pagan Portals Fairy Witchcraft is a concise introduction to making a connection with the Fairy world and working with those energies in your personal magical practice.
Like the other books in the Pagan Portals series, Fairy Witchcraft is a slim volume, but it is packed full of information. Ms. Daimler provides a great deal of background about folk belief in Fairies, particularly in the Celtic world, so the reader will understand that they are not the delicate, sweet, gossamer-winged creatures of Victorian fantasy. They are, in fact, ancient beings with a great deal of power who are not always friendly to humans. Working with them has its dangers, and Ms. Daimler makes that very clear.
Ms. Daimler shares her own experiences with the Fairies as well as providing information about traditional ways of approaching them, including how to properly prepare yourself, how to create altars and rituals and, most important, how to listen to them and learn to hear what they have to say to us. This is a very practical book, an excellent introduction to Fairy Witchcraft that provides a strong foundation for a lifetime of connection with the Good Folk.
Like the other books in the Pagan Portals series, Fairy Witchcraft is a slim volume, but it is packed full of information. Ms. Daimler provides a great deal of background about folk belief in Fairies, particularly in the Celtic world, so the reader will understand that they are not the delicate, sweet, gossamer-winged creatures of Victorian fantasy. They are, in fact, ancient beings with a great deal of power who are not always friendly to humans. Working with them has its dangers, and Ms. Daimler makes that very clear.
Ms. Daimler shares her own experiences with the Fairies as well as providing information about traditional ways of approaching them, including how to properly prepare yourself, how to create altars and rituals and, most important, how to listen to them and learn to hear what they have to say to us. This is a very practical book, an excellent introduction to Fairy Witchcraft that provides a strong foundation for a lifetime of connection with the Good Folk.
