Et tu, GOP?

 

the sign reads “et tu, GOP? Teachers have been betrayed!” as part of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays.

Photo courtesy of NC Policy Watch.

Now I'm Here

Pagan Blog Project - Week Seventeen - H #2 – Hestia

My house is falling down.

We're renting, thank goodness. But since we moved into this place over five years ago there have been serious foundation problems: backed up plumbing, cracks in the wall and ceiling, damp spots on the floor, dirt in the bathroom...

I've had a strange relationship with this house. At first I was indifferent and uncomfortable. Haven moved from a really great place in Texas, North Carolina was weird and foreign. A friend visited with us a few months later and he said "oh, you have such a cute little witchy house!"

Hmm… maybe.

The indifference continued until a few years ago when I decided I hated this place. I was tired of it and all of its quirks. I wanted to leave, to rent or possibly by a new place. So, we shopped around for houses, looking at prices and financing. It was just not possible. Moving to another rental was also not really a good idea, either.

I'm not sure what happened first. Was it cocktails with my girlfriend, or my at-the-time Coven's ritual devoted to Hestia? But something changed in both my perception and relationship with my house. Slowly, but surely, it became my home.

As a group we devoted a ritual to Hestia/Vesta. I did a lot of studying on her before the ritual, and included a little lesson for the ritual itself. Though the ritual was focused around creating foci (in this case, a tool of devotional focus), looking back now I realize something else happened, at least for me. I finally bonded with my home. Most of all, I realized my physical space was not the source of my dissatisfaction, but I was depressed about more meaningful areas of my life. Changing my house wouldn't make me happy. I would have the same old problems but in a different box.

I needed to change the focus of my life.

In the center of my crappy little home is a huge fireplace, and while the Coven did rituals together in my living room, the fireplace was a natural center staging area, with the mantle and hearth serving as the perfect altar tables. I had always decorated the mantle with flowers and kitschy holiday decorations. But I found that over the years the mantle was less of a mundane seasonal piece of home decorating, but had become a seasonal shrine. And at some point I had begun using it as an altar, charging items or creating little charms. Over the years, my Pagan tools and paraphernalia weren't just hidden and tucked away, but were slowly migrating into the house and into my mundane life.

It wasn't just this refocus on my hearth that shifted my perception of my home, but the ritual itself and learning about Hestia. One of the ladies in the group was going through transitions in her own life and had suggested we do a ritual and lesson regarding reconnecting to our habitats, and Hestia was a natural choice for this.

Hestia’s domain is within the home. But she’s not just about cooking and cleaning, but about protection and nurturing energy. She’s about keeping our focus, and she’s about making sure our domestic energy translates easily into our public lives, and vice versa. The Vestal Virgins in Rome were priestesses who guarded the hearth and flame (may it burn forever!). Their energy in both a literal and a magical sense were devoted to the protection of Rome as both a micro and macrocosm, and this devotion and attention is a useful reminder to anyone who might be feeling a little scattered, a little discontented, a little out of sorts. In my experience, Hestia’s energy is useful for anyone who is looking for something with which to devote themselves.

After spending some time to Hestia, a shift happened in my life. I began to reconnect with and love my home. There was magic there now, in ways I hadn't realized. (Though to be fair, it's not like magic came out of nowhere. The magic had always been there. I just hadn’t really noticed it yet.) And an added and serendipitous bonus of working with Hestia was starting communication with Hermes, who is Hestia's total bff forever.

Most of all, this moment was a catalyst for meaningful change in my life. I got a promotion at work. I was given a car. I applied for graduate schools and was eventually accepted. I have a room now devoted to my Pagan tools and altar. Now I might even love my little house, even though the molding is coming down and my bathroom wall is rotting out.

Working with Hestia totally and literally change my focus, and that's powerful magic

Good Company

Pagan Blog Project - Week Fiveteen - G #2 – Gnostics

What we know about the ancient Gnostics is that we don’t know much. We know that the people who modern people might call Gnostic never called themselves Gnostic. The word Gnostic might have even been used as a slang. (Kind of like how the people who modern people call Pagan never ever called themselves Pagan.)

Plotinus, who is considered by many modern people to be a premier writer of Gnostic source materials, often wrote about the Gnostics as those goofy radicals down the street. "It is NOT as the Gnostics say..." (Kind of like how modern Pagans often write about “those fluff bunnies”, even though two thousand years ago we might all be seen as fluff bunnies.)

In regards to the Gnostics, we don’t know more than we know. But what I’ve learned about the Gnostics is that they’ve always been misunderstood. We don’t know who they are now and no one knew who they were then. Which translates to me that anything can be Gnostic, nothing is Gnostic, nothing is not-Gnostic. (Which works out really great for me.)

We know that the Sethians in Egypt were considered to be the first Gnostics, about 200 years or so before Christianity. These people were a sect of radical Jews who were probably inspired by Mediterranean (Greek) mystery traditions. And these Mediterranean mystery traditions were probably inspired by the Ancient Egyptian mystery traditions, which were inspired by God Only Knows. But whoever the Gnostics were, they went on to inspire Christianity, the Kabbalah, Masons, The Golden Dawn, Wiccans, modern Pagans, comic book artists, rock songs, books, movies, and a continuing cycle of inspired texts and prophets (Dick, Hesse, Moore, Smashing Pumpkins, ELO, etc.)

What I love about the early Gnostics was that they just wrote stuff all the time, and some of it is crazy. I get the impression that if there is was aspect about their current Gnostic myth that they didn’t like, they just wrote their own. So this means as a modern person reading this stuff it seems confusing and contradictory, but contradiction only need to exist in religion if one is looking at religion from a literal point of view. But when looking at religion as something that is organic, changeable, and evolving, the Gnostic myths make perfect sense, especially from a Universalist point of view.  We’re all on a path towards God, we know that each path is different. We’re all just wandering around on a crooked path and at the center is God. 

So who were the Gnostics and what did they do? We don’t really know. But what I like to think is that two thousand years ago, Gnostics, Jews, Pagans, Christians, atheists, agnostics and whoever else got together in comfy backrooms every once in a while. I’d like to think that they were all friends. That they sat and breathed together, wrote stupid stories about talking snakes and laughing gods, chanted, raised energy, talked about God, shared wine and bread, laughed, told jokes, had ecstatic moments, and afterword, in the words of my Bishop, they sat around in joy and said “how cool was that?!”

Dreamer's Ball

Pagan Blog Project - Week Twelve- F #2 – Fairies

This is a continuation of my post Sweet Lady for week eleven of the Pagan Blog Project.

Even though the lineage of my family isn’t the most formal (like, no one is passing down heirlooms or great heroic stories or anything like that) my mom was great about fostering new traditions with me and my sisters. She kind of hates holidays, but she always went all out for us kids. That always meant a lot, especially now that I’m an adult and I feel similar now to how she has always felt about holidays. I can look back and see how hard it must have been for her. But, I’d like to think that St. Patrick’s Day is one holiday that she actually enjoyed.

From very early on she encouraged a sense of magic for this holiday. I remember being in kindergarten and she made a point to make me wear green to bed or the leprechauns would get me. I tried to argue with her, of course, insisting that I was going to wake up that night and get them and their gold. She laughed, tucked me in, and let’s just say that night I had a dream that, to this day, I still remember quite vividly. In all honesty, it shaped my world view concerning magic, St. Patrick’s Day, leprechauns, and fairies.

So, a tradition was born and I went to bed every March 17 wearing as much green as I could. And when my sisters came along, sharing this blooming family mythos with them was quite easy. When they were old enough I started telling them leprechaun and fairy stories, too.

One of my favorite things to do with my kid sisters was to take them on leprechaun hunts. They’d be different every time, continuously evolving and changing, each year more exciting and detailed than the last. I’d take them through creek beds, following scavenger hunts, cryptic letters, chalk drawings, maps made from notebook paper stained with coffee and teabags, making traps out of glitter and shoe boxes, following clues and trails left by my friends. It didn’t matter, because it was something magical we could share together.

And after taking them on a chase around town or in the desert, the trail would always lead to home, because maybe even then I was trying to teach them that true magic was in the most mundane of places, even if that place was in low income housing or a trailer park or in the poor part of town.

Darling Niece and Spoiled Sister, 2013

 

One of the best moments of my life was when I was away at college and my mom called me up to tell me that my sisters were taking my step-siblings on a leprechaun hunt. My heart could never be any bigger than it was at that moment, knowing that our fairy tradition was being passed down to a new generation. And now that my sisters have started reproducing, I hope that my nieces and nephews get to go on leprechaun hunts, too, that the fairy magic of my family is passed down to them.

And of course, my sisters and I now have a healthy respect and fear of fairies. Like the year that they heard the banshee wailing at the high school bleachers, or the time that the banshee caught my friend Patty behind the house, or the time that my little sister swore to me that she saw a leprechaun in her bedroom and to this day I can’t tell if she’s trying to pull my leg or she’s telling the truth. (both are equally likely)

So this is my experience with fairy magic. It’s family traditions and fun. It’s a healthy experience of blurring fantasy with reality. It’s about finding something to laugh and shriek about, of reclaiming a time and tradition for you and your loved ones. It’s making magic in the mundane, which is as real and genuine as this stuff can get, anyway.

Éirinn go Brách!

Sweet Lady

Pagan Blog Project - Week Eleven - F #1 – Food

My mom has always been big into her Irish heritage. (Though she’s moved into a Scottish thing in the past few years after she found out our Irish family really comes from Scotland…) Every St. Patrick’s Day she’d go all out with making soda bread (both sweet and savory), corned beef, potato soup (green!), and as an extra special treat – Irish potato candy! My friends would always love coming over to my house for St. Patrick’s Day because the food was always so good. I’ve tried to carry on this tradition in my adulthood. I have friends who celebrated with me and my family back in the day, and now they make potato soup and Irish potato candy every March, too. And that’s the magic of food and making traditions!

 

Irish Potato Candy – no potatoes!

Ingredients:

One package cream cheese, softened

One stick of butter, softened

One tablespoon of vanilla extract

One large package of powdered sugar (about 32 ounces)

One small package of dried coconut flakes (about 5 ounces)

Lots of cinnamon (or chocolate powder or melted chocolate)

Suggested - gloves

• Mix crease cheese, vanilla, and butter in a bowl. Softened is easier. Some suggest whipped cream cheese, but I’ve never used this.  
• Mix in the dry ingredients. A little at a time works best. This will be messy. Just keep on mixing and mixing and mixing. It will all blend together. It will be very sticky. If you use gloves, it will be easier (but still kind of messy.)
• You can easily change how much of each ingredient you use. Some like less sugar and more coconut. For me, it depends on the day.
• Whatever mixture you use, make sure everything is blended together very well. Put this mixture in the fridge or freezer for some time. Longer is better, but this step is not super necessary, it just helps a bit because it hardens stuff up and makes it a bit less sticky.
• Once you think you are ready, take the sticky mixture and roll it into little balls. Take these balls and roll them into your cinnamon or chocolate powder, or, dip them into melted chocolate. You want the little candies to look like little miniature potatoes – white on the inside, brown on the outside.
• Enjoy! People love these little guys, and they tend to go very fast. Easy to make (although messy) and very tasty, they’re a family favorite and they make good gifts, too.