A Few Changes

Things have been quiet on here for a long while now.
I just want to give anyone that might be following this blog an idea of what is going on.

I am now starting out to travel the world, and as such I do not feel that I can continue to pay for a self owned site which is not generating any income. So I am going to start moving at least some of the content over to a new free blog.

As to why this blog has been quiet for so long. I feel I have lost interest by making the focus of the blog too narrow- and felt that I had to always write from an agnostic stance, but in reality my views ping all over the place.
As such I will likely be slightly changing the focus of the new blog in order to reengage my interests.

Spells For Travelers- A half finished system

Tags

charms, cities, deity, enchantments, oils, protection, ritual, sacred places, spells, spirits, spiritual, wandering, witchcraft

I get the sense that with my writing on here, I am tending to come across as having much more of an idea what I am talking about than I really do.
My actual practice is really quite a wild mush of trying things out. Picking up new activities, dropping old ones.

Early next year I am setting off to explore Europe and possibly the rest of the world. As such I am in the process of putting together a system of protective travel sorcery that I can carry with me/perform on the road.
So to give you good folks a more rounded view of my practice I am going to post now what I have come up with so far in my research.

And will post again a more polished version of the system in a few months when I have put everything into practice.
I personally find the exploring new ideas, and trying new techniques to be at least half the fun of the whole magical operation!

Carrying the Gods with me
So my first line of defense is simply that of holy protection. I have the benefit of practically all the gods I work with having travel connotations!
I will be making offerings and saying prayers before I leave and at various times during my travels, as well as carrying tiny statues, or representations of Them.

Archangles
As far as I have found so far Raphael seems to be the Archangel to go to with matters of travel.
BUT I quite like the idea of invoking a bunch of them and asking each to protect from their given direction.
Will have to mull over which way to go, or if I do both perhaps?

Psalm  121
A prayer from the good book.
This psalm apparently has a long history of use in the tradition of using psalms as spells.

Commit to memory and use as a spoken spell when feeling threatened? Or perhaps write down and carry as a written spell.

Swallow’s Blood
Swallow’s blood (a magical recipe, no bird killing) is said to comfort and protect travelers.

Dragon’s Blood
Red sandalwood
Rose petals
Jasmine
Orrisroot

Dry and powder the above botanicals and use to fumigate travel clothes, bag, self, and any travel charms.
My main issue with this one is that red sandalwood is endangered- I am thinking of using paprika as a substitute as it has similar colour and properties.

Garlic and Mirror
There is a spell where you simply rub a garlic clove onto a small mirror and place it under your bed.
This one I am a bit on the fence about. Maybe if I take a small travel mirror, I could use this technique to charge it up every now and then.

Compass Rune

Compass Rune

I don’t know why this wasn’t the first thing I thought of when I started coming up with ideas for charms.
I’m aware enough of its historical ambiguity to not get it as a tat. But as a small “doodle”, somewhere on my bag, for instance. Gold!

Condition Oils
I will probably have to make simple versions of these when I get over there, as I can’t see customs being too please with bottles of oil and botanicals!

But I think a money oil, a protection oil, and a luck oil (van van?) would be the way to go. Could even mix them them all together into one little bottle after making the to save space and for ease of application.

Then simply anoint self daily or as needed. Could also be used on belongings and surroundings.

Working with the Spirits of Place
Here I am talking about invoking… the places you are traveling through? to be your guides and protectors.

So start big. I will begin with invoking europe as a whole. Then making offerings and asking  the blessings and aid of europe.
Then get smaller, invoke the country, then the region, then the city or town, then the specific building/park/whatever.

If the very land beneath your feet is on your side, then you are at a big advantage!

I would suggest visiting power sites as a way to deepen the connection with the land. Also make offerings to the nature/land spirits, spirits of the roads and crossroads, and any wandering spirits in the land.
Basically get everyone on side!

Eyes
Eyes are great, paint them on your bag, hang them off it as charms, doodle them on your skin.

Eyes everywhere. Eyes to watch, Eyes to guard, Eyes to alert, Eyes to find.

Blessed Padlocks
I will be blessing my padlocks by the God of Thieves himself. A little engraving and a short prayer that all thieves be kept away, and all my belongings stay with me.

 

So that is my layered system of travel charms/spells/deals as far my research as gone so far. I will likely change a lot of things. Add in, take out, rethink.
I will also be creating a mundane protection system to compliment this sorcerous protection system. Cover as many bases as possible for ultimate safety!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kick Starting Your Daily Practice!

Tags

daily, daily practice, dionysos, energy work, humanistic paganism, meditation, prayer, ritual, spirits, spiritual, spiritual goals, spiritual practice

I think this is a topic that most occult blogs cover at some point, but very few of my pagan friends in the real world seem to actually have anything like a regular practice.
So hopefully by writing this I can give people a few ideas for what to actually *DO*. I know that in the past I have really struggled to find ideas of what exercises to actually do. Meditation is the obvious one. Then maybe some prayer, but quickly the ideas start to run out.

There are also a few tricks for helping stick to the daily practice, and incorporate it into your life- rather than it being just one more chore you have to do.

 

How to Stick to your Daily Practice

I have found that the biggest thing for me is to start small. Pick one small, tiny thing, that you can easily do every day.

Make it something small that can easily fit into your day, and it could even be something you do while doing other things. For me this was a few prayers that
I could say at various set times during the day.

Then add something a little extra. Nothing to big yet, but something a little more involved. Maybe a blessing, or some simple energy work. Have you grounded today?

 And then start adding and building a practice at your actual altar. Again starting small with just a few minutes at your altar each day to start with. Doing a quick divination reading perhaps? Or just a quick chat to the spirits before starting the day. And eventually you can move onto the longer things like meditation.

Another thing I have found useful myself, and which seems to be common, is that you need to do your “formal practice” in the morning. If I leave mine till later in the day, or plan to do it after work- it tends to not happen.

So if you can fit in even fifteen minutes before you start your day- that time is pure gold!

And of course having a practice that excites, calms, and uplifts you is going to be much easier to keep up with than something dusty and boring. Experiment and have a bit of fun with the process!

 

Ideas for Daily Practice

One of the easiest things to start with is finding a pair of prayers. One to say upon starting the day, and one for ending the day before bed. You don’t even have to change anything in your schedule to do this!
The prayers I use are, for the morning:

I farewell the night and welcome the day,
It will be a good day if I let it.*
May I remain awake and aware, fully present in the world,
May I remain grateful,
May I remember my connection to all things,
May the spirits and gods walk with me,
May I experience beauty, joy, and wonder.
It will be a good day if I let it!

 *The first two lines are a modified version of a prayer I picked up from B. T. Newberg over at Humanistic Paganism, Here.

 

For the evening I simply start with “I am truly thankful for my many blessings. I am thankful for…”, I then go on to list at least five things I am grateful for. The more things you can list the better.
It doesn’t matter if they are trivial. As long as you are grateful for them, then it counts!

If you catch a bus or train to work or school, then you have an extra chance to sneak in some “on the fly” practice. This can be a great place for a little energy work. Practice grounding by connecting to the earth and cosmos, or work on your chakras/energy centers, and just generally play around with energy work however you like.

Another place to slip in a littler extra energy work is in the shower/bath, where you can do a simple cleansing of your energy, while cleaning your physical body.

Meditation is a no brainer, though also often the most difficult to find the time for. If all you can fit in is five minutes before racing out the door in the morning then it beats doing nothing! (Or get up five minutes earlier and make it ten minutes!)

However, you really want to be aiming for getting up to twenty minutes a day at least, if possible.

I like to add in a few invocations, or just talk casually to the gods and spirits a bit before meditating, as a way to touch in with my “peeps on the other side” every day or so.

Making small offerings of energy, incense, candles, cups of tea, poetry, or anything you like really. The idea is to make small offerings regularly. This can have two uses. The first is most obvious- it keeps your gods and spirits happy, and you in their good books.
The second use is a little more obscure- but by giving away a little of what you have, you acknowledge your gratitude for the things you have.

A prayer at meal times wouldn’t go amiss either. Now don’t get put off by the Christian idea of Grace.
As pagans we can thank the sun or the earth for their gifts of life giving food.
Or thank the Green Man, for it is his flesh and body that we are consuming.

The one I have been using lately has been going:
I give thanks for this meal,
I give thanks for the lives that were sacrificed to create it,
I give thanks to Dionysos*, the Green Man for it is his flesh we eat,
And I give thanks to Sun, Soil, Seed, and Beast.**

*I am a follower of Dionysos, Feel free to leave him out of your prayer, and just mention the Green Man.

**This line is an adaptation of a phrase I picked up Here, at Witchvox

 

Going Deeper

As just a little something extra, I find it quite a good idea to have a longer session once a week, if possible. In this time you can do slightly longer things that you don’t have time for during the week.

Longer meditation, More elaborate offerings, Full invocation rituals to your gods, More in-depth energy work, making/blessing/enchanting of materia, Any other things that are important to your spiritual life, but that you can’t do every day.

Also going away to a beach, or camping, or some wild place can be a great idea.

Another great way to really sink into the skin of your life and live spiritually is to start learning and practicing mindfulness! Go google it! It is like mediation for busy people that you can do ALL THE TIME!
What ever you decided is personally important to include in your own daily practice, the most important thing I want to reemphasise is to Start Small!

 

The most cuter-ful time of the year!

I was hit over the head with springness today when, while jogging at the park, I saw these balls of amazing cuteness!

 

 

Note: Shhhhhh! My pun-skills are amazing!

Necromantic Treasures

The lovely Emeliene Brought this treasure around for me yesterday!
Squee much?

After laying the whole mess of feathers and bones out, I picked through, pulling out all the bones I could.
I then placed the bones into a jar of holy water for a few hours, both to cleans and sooth the bones, and to make some of the bones and dirt a bit easier to remove.

The cleaner bones where then laid out, and the nicer feathers saved, the rest of the feathers were returned to the earth with an offering of juice from the grapefruit tree in the yard.

I have been gently cutting the last of the ties between the spirit and the bones it used to live in. The connection already seemed weak as the body was not found till after the feathers and bones were all that was left.
The skull and some of the other bones and feathers will probably become a fetish for one of my spirits.
The rest of the bones and feathers will be used to decorate my stang and in making various charms.

Recalibrating

My spiritual focus, as well as the focus of this blog seems to have gotten away from where I  wanted to be heading.

My intent for this blog, was to be part journal, part instructional, part explorational. So far I have been writing mostly within the realms… spiritual humanism? It has all stayed quite strongly in the “spiritual atheism” mode.
But in reality I tend to flick between atheist and theist on an at least daily basis. And I’m cool with that. Maybe I will stay in this balance forever, or maybe I will eventually come down on either side of the fence. Till then I sit somewhere in between.

I am not  a “spiritualist” I am a witch and a mystic, and as such I will be trying from now to have this blog more fully reflect my actual practices, rather  than the almost archetypal posts I have made so far.

 

On an other exciting note I have finally signed up for the latest cycle of Strategic Sorcery. I am looking forward to getting stuck into the work, and will probably be blogging here about anything interesting that comes to light from the work.

Why I cannot be Buddhist

Tags

buddhism, dionysian, dionysos, spiritual goals, suffering

I have been looking into Buddhism and its philosophy for quite a while now, and while I find many ideas and practices there that I really love, and have even stolen a few for my own spiritual practice, there has always been a bit of a wall. There has always been something stopping me from fully embracing Buddhism.

At first I assumed that it was simply that the idea of “accepting what is” is the exact opposite of the witches call to “change what is”. However this seems a fairly superficial difference, and with a little thought could likely be easily solved.

And I had even come across schools of thought with in Buddhism and the philosophies of Dionysos’ followers that came together beautifully.
This was mostly within the idea of mindfulness- a key concept in Buddhism.
In Dionysian thought, He can be seen as the life, and vitality, and beat of the world. To stay in the moment, is to listen to the music of the world, is to dwell within Dionysos.
But the deal breaker, the thing that separates me from Buddhism most strongly, is the goals. My goals and the goals of Buddhism are almost antithetical, and yet might appear similar. And somehow it took me a long, long time to figure that one out!

THE goal of Buddhism is to eliminate suffering. A noble and ambitious goal, to be sure. But my goal in life is to fully experience, to full embody myself, and my life.
While this still sounds simply like mindfulness, I want to go beyond simply experiencing my life fully the way it is.
I want to experience my life fully, while also making it the most amazing, bright, dazzling, dizzying adventure it can be.
And I anticipate that suffering will come with that. Experienceing the full range of emotions seems rather fundamental to the full experience of everything that life can be.

 

I once heard a Buddhist acquaintance say that most people try to stand in the river and catch everything that floats by, taking, taking, taking. And that the way of Buddhism is to sit peacefully by the river and watch everything flow by.

Well I wish to take a different option. That of dive-bombing into the river, swimming and splashing around, having the most fun possible.

 

A Practical Way To Work Your Chakras

Tags

agnostic, agnosticism, chakras, daily practice, humanistic paganism, psychology, skepticism, spiritual, spiritual practice

So all to often I find that nearly everything written about working with chakras seems to focus around the thing of ‘Imagine a spinning ball of (coloured) light opening like a flower‘.

To those of us with an agnostic outlook, we want something a bit more practical!
Is imagining a ball of light going to help us to energise and balance the areas of our lives that the chakra is suppose to govern?
Well, maybe, but more likely we will just be wasting time thinking about coloured balls.

I proppose a new way of thinking about and working with the chakra system.
We can use it as a spiritual map insuring that we are engaging in activities in all areas of life, leading to a rounded and full existence.
We can use this system to see when we are too focused on one area, or are ignoring another.

Maybe this will simply be a way of insuring a full and balanced life, BUT if these energy centers are actual, objective, things within us- then I believe these activities would go a long way to opening and energising them- more so than imaginging glowing balls.

And so I have put together a very brief outline of activities that could be used for connecting to the sphere of life of each chakra.

Base:
-Exercise mindfully.
-Practice mindfulness.
-Live below your means to insure financial stability.
-Garden while really getting your hands dirty and connecting to the earth.
-Dance.
-Eat healthy, eat local.

Sacral:
-Sex! Lots of it!
-Hot, scented baths.
-Prepare food mindfully.
-Dance.
-Create or enjoy art, flowers, colours, music, beautiful things.
-Cultivate spontinaity.

Solar Plexus:
-Learn knew things, or deepen your knowledge.
-Sunbathe.
-Core exercises, such as sit-ups.
-Learn to, or practice standing your ground. Don’t be a push over (Though don’t be the one to do the pushing either).
-Laugh, deep belly laughter.

Heart:
-Spend time in nature.
-Spend time with friends and family.
-Garden and really care for and look after the plants.
-Let the people you care about know.
-Attempt to cultivate compassion for all.
-Cultivate gratitude.

Throat:
-Sing.
-Have meaningful conversations.
-Improve and practice communication skills.
-write in a journal or diary.
-Scream (in an appropriate setting).
-Hum.
-Learn to listen.
-LISTEN.

Third Eye:
– Star gazing.
-Meditation.
-Dreams and journaling them.
-Drawing, art, and close observation.

Crown:
-Star gazing.
-Meditation.
-Spiritual exploration.
-Prayer.
-Contemplate the ways all things are connected.

Post below with any ideas you have for other activities that could help to activate one or more of the chakras!!!

Greening up your Practice

Tags

daily practice, eco, eco-friendly, eco-pagan, neo-paganism, ritual, sacred places, seasonal altar, spiritual, spiritual practice

Very cool post over at Adventures in Animism on greening up your rituals/practice.

Some things Heather says in the post I don’t fully agree with, or think she takes maybe too far. Other things are exactly spot on. Either way her blog always makes me think! Being that ‘paganish-ness’ is basically the only thing I have in common with her, her blog really helps me look at things from a strongly different world view!

Is ‘being green’ a big part of your practice? After reading the post from the above link are there any parts of your practice that you feel you should rethink or change?

Or do you have any ideas for other ways of greening up ones practice?

Uncertainty

Tags

agnostic, agnosticism, deity, humanistic paganism, literalistic paganism, psychology, skepticism, spiritual, theist, witchcraft

 

You cannot know
Personally I feel that most people are just a little too sure of their own beliefs.

I may be a little biased on this point but I feel people, and society as a whole, would be much more happy, secure, and mentally healthy if they were to embrace and become comfortable with a sense of uncertainty.

Nearly everyone I talk to has it “all figured out”.
The theists seem far too certain that there is a god; atheists tend too come across as far too comfortable in their knowledge that there isn’t. But sometimes I wonder if most agnostics aren’t a little too certain about their uncertainty.
Here I mean mostly they get to the point of “I’m not sure if god/gods/witchcraft is real or not”, and then they leave it at that.
My thought is that a sense of uncertainty should push one to question and pursue further understanding, not lull one into apathy of thought or deed. (Yet nor do I think one should worry that the search may be long or fruitless; in many ways I see the questioning to be the most important part).

None of us really know how the spiritual parts of the universe really work, what they look like, or if they exist. Yet most people seem happy to make their minds up one way or another, based mostly on hearsay.

The beauty of Unknowing
But I don’t think that this awareness of uncertainty should just be something we know in our minds, but something that can be fully experienced as well in the heart and body.

I do not think that this unknowing is bad or inhibiting- though for many it may at first be highly uncomfortable, or even painful to break the bindings of “certainty”.
And maybe this uncertainty will always be a slightly uncomfortable and unstable place to stand, but hopefully this will keep us on our toes and keep us curious.
It can be frustrating not quite knowing, yet it can also be a little exciting.

The unknown now becomes a thing of great importance, and in some ways, I feel that this can place the sense of wonder back into many areas of our lives, both secular and religious.

We can indeed learn to love the abstract beauty of that which is unknown.

Orthodoxy Or Orthopraxy?
What might this mean for people in a practical sense, in their spiritual life and practice?
That will probably differ from person to person. But for me it has meant a huge shift in the way I approach and think about my practice- though my actual practice has changed very little.

Orthopraxy is something that I have come to lean on quite heavily.
Orthopraxy (correct behaviour) vs. Orthodoxy (correct belief)
Thus we can see that from the stance of orthopraxy it is the practice that is important, not the belief.
And so I maintain a strong practice because I feel it helps me and adds to my life, while having little in the way of strong beliefs.

I’ve traveled from literalist pagan, to nearly atheist, to something of an atheist humanistic pagan, to a rather more agnostic humanistic pagan.
As such I sort of have a dual view of my practice: from the stance of a literalist, and from the stance of a spiritual atheist, and I am finding these two worldviews sit side by side much more harmoniously than I would have ever imagined before reaching the point I am at today.

A very beautiful and beautifully written post, somewhat related, can be found here.

Do any elements of uncertainty or unknowing inform your spiritual practice? And how important is uncertainty/unknowing in your worldview?
How do these things express themselves in your practice or philosophy?