Dancing Down the Moon

Ritual Tools, part 2

Then come the two oddball Elements, Darkness and Light. I was first inspired to include them when I started working with the Brian Froud Faery Oracle; in the accompanying book, five Faery Elements are described, those being the traditional four plus Moonlight. The idea struck me, and percolated in my mind for quite a while before I considered working with it in Circle.

Darkness and Light aren’t really Elements so much as they are energies, or aspects; each Element could be seen as having a Dark manifestation and a Light one, and each of my deities also have both. Everything in the universe is made up of the energies of the four primary Elements, but everything also contains within it a balance—or imbalance, in most cases—of Dark and Light. The two don’t really have a list of correspondences the way the other four do, and I don’t use their energy in magic the way I do the four Elements, but I felt that my Circles were missing something until I started working with the two.

Ritual Tools, part 1

I don’t imagine that the idea of a long-winded essay about ritual tools is terribly interesting to seasoned veterans of the Wiccan path. It’s gotten to the point where, if you’ve read one 101 book, you’ve pretty much read them all, and they all have at least one chapter devoted to the increasingly dull task of describing traditional ritual tools and their various associations and purposes. Really, how much is there to say about a wand?

Plenty, if you’re me, and you don’t use one. There are in fact a number of small but significant differences between my altar and those of many of other Wiccans.

First, however, a bit of background:

I am lucky enough to live alone and have neither inquisitive dogs nor small children, so I have altars all over the house. My main working altar is in my bedroom, where I can see it every morning when I wake up. I have used everything from the top of a foot locker to a board on a stack of books as my altar, and during my first few years on the path I stuck to the layouts and tools that books told me to. I thought, “Hey, I don’t use half of this crap, but someday I might, and besides, it looks so cool.”

Yeah, I thought that. Don’t forget I became Wiccan at age sixteen.

Concepts of Deity, part 2

Any creative act is born of the union of masculine energy and feminine; whether that energy is expressed by a man or a woman makes no difference to me. Relating "masculine" just to having a penis is limiting the Divine to human flesh, and as a panentheist I know there is far more to Deity than anthropomorphized images. I also know that becoming pregnant and bearing human children is hardly the only form of creativity. 

In yet more pseudoscientific terms, the Goddess is matter, and the God is energy. You can’t really separate the two, because without either, the universe simply would not exist. 

From these Two, humans create Multitudes. Different cultures and people need different faces of Deity to relate to; you could hardly expect a tropical people, for example, to connect to a desert god. So thousands of gods have sprung up throughout history, each reflecting the creativity and needs of the people who envisioned them.

Concepts of Deity, part 1

This will be the first in a series discussing aspects of my personal tradition; my goal here is mostly to share how I do things, but also to help me organize things in my head so that I can decide which ideas and practices become part of my teaching tradition, EarthDance, and which remain personal.

I had every intention of starting this series with a post about tools and altars, but it occurred to me that there was one subject that absolutely had to come first: Deity.

Warning: I’ve divided this into two posts, but it’s still hellishly long. If you plan to be a regular reader you’ll need to get used to that. Hope you’re in a comfy chair.

The Problem of "Advanced" Wicca

A complaint I hear often—and have made myself—is that there are not enough books out there on "advanced" Wicca. There are dozens of beginner books, many of which are unnecessary repetitions of what authors like Cunningham and RavenWolf have already written.

 Whatever you may think of their work, they were forerunners of the current 101 book craze, which unfortunately is still going on. They and a few others were here first, and everyone after has been writing variations on the themes they set down. I have seen precious few voices that are genuinely unique since the 90s—and even fewer attempting to teach anything besides the standard "Chapter 1 – Why Wiccans aren’t Satanists; Chapter 2 – How to Cast a Circle; Chapter 3 – Here’s some correspondences; Chapter 4 – Why you shouldn’t cast love spells."

Building a Daily Practice

As busy as we are, how do we find time for all the worthwhile pursuits of the spirit? Most of us like the idea of meditating, of doing devotional rituals, of spending time outdoors--but most days I'm doing well if I make it home from work and collapse on the couch without having killed anyone, and there are a thousand things to do in those few hours we are permitted between work and sleep.