Suns In Her Branches

[ blows dust off the blog ] Okay then. Three weeks ago, I was exhausted. To the point of uselessness. I think that’s important for me to remember, right now. Because while I was in that state, where I could barely do anything at all, I declared that I wanted to mark the equinox. I don’t really have a strong equinox practice, historically speaking. I haven’t turned up evidence of the Egyptians…

Everyone Wants To Be On A Postage Stamp, But Nobody Wants To Die

I got ruminating on material culture because of some discussion of how people blow it off as unimportant compared to written histories. (The trigger was the Marilyn Monroe dress, for the record.) It’s just stuff, right? Not important. (Which is hilarious in the profoundly materialistic culture that I’m surrounded by but let’s just set that over there to side-eye for the moment, while keeping in…

A long time ago, I wrote about kintsugi and the Eye of Heru, and about how a central ethos intrinsic to Heru’s victory is this idea that the restored Eye, not the uninjured one, holds the most strength.

A different version of this can be found in the rituals around death.

Why is the heart the seat of intellect and moral discernment in Egyptian religion?

The heart is the unifying force of the…

I was talking to people recently, about time in lockdown. Every day is Blursday, it is Day O’Clock or Night O’Clock, and it is always the fortyteenth of Maprilay.

And I just now realized a thing: we are all in neheh, more in neheh than usual.

In ancient Egyptian cosmology, there are two forms of time, which combine and spiral and produce our experience: djet, in which one thing happens after…

I Actually Got to Go to the Service Today

The thing about teaching Sunday school is of course that it happens on Sunday, and more relevantly, at the same time as the service, so my church life this year has been, largely, ‘go to the announcements and first hymn, then head to class’, which means I haven’t had things to say about sermons.

But today I wasn’t teaching, so I got to actually stay for the sermon, very exciting.

“What can I, as…

I lit a candle at the service today for Eri – who commented here as Crowess.

https://twitter.com/eriolcaw/status/1210431519086522368

I said I lost a friend suddenly, and I find myself contemplating euphemisms; on her blog, when I posted there to say she was gone, I used an Egyptian one, that she had turned her face to the beautiful West. I said she was brilliant – which she was – and often…

(Welp, I’ve been pretty pants at updates for a while, haven’t I? Let’s fix that.)

Today’s service involved a sextet of dancers.

As I watched them perform, I was particularly drawn to watching one of them, whose brow was slightly furrowed with intense concentration as she paced out the steps on bandage-wrapped feet. Hers were not the poised toe-points of the younger women who seemed to have…

Doesn’t really count as either “Sunday Reflection” or “Wolf-Work” but I’m gonna tag ’em in anyway: two Sundays ago the student minister gave her first sermon, which included a comment about evangelical universalism as a concept. Which gave me the opportunity to introduce someone else to Thiess of Kaltenbrun and the werewolves as those who have the sacred duty to go into hell to steal back what…

A Hope In Hell

[ This is another in a sequence of wolf-work posts and I have no idea how much sense it will make if you aren’t familiar with the rest of the tag. Be warned. Or read the tag. ]

I’ve been learning an awful lot about the techniques of the devil’s sorcerors.

It’s a lot to take in, and a lot to handle.

I mean, the actual sorcerors have an easy thing to understand: their desire to mound up riches in…

This weekend, I attended a talk by Judika Illes, author of, among other things, The Element Book of 5,000 Spells. The thing that sticks in my mind about it was not the core topic – the history of African Diasporic spiritual and magical practice – but something that was almost a side point.

When practitioners of different magical systems hang out together, we talk shop.

When I was working on the…

Figured I’d write something for “autism awareness month”. Content warning: Third Reich; murder of disabled children. Putting in a cut out of kindness. I wish my brain had cut tags sometimes. (more…)

(I guess I’m still pondering Le Guin, as one does, given I’m quoting The Left Hand of Darkness in that title there.) Someone had written us a new hymn, I discovered when I was scrambling into the balcony with the older kids, running later than usual for the service. I don’t recall what the hymn-name of the tune was, it’s one of those old traditional song tunes that comes around on the guitar…

I wrote about the passing of Ursula K. Le Guin over on the authorblog already, but of course there is always so much more to write, to say, to mull over, at times like these. I wasn’t going to write here, but then I was reading so many of the explosions of comments, of articles, of references to old speeches, and I read this: People crave objectivity because to be subjective is to be embodied, to…

As a pagan, I have spent a great deal of time resenting the concept of “salvation”. I did not see a place for it in my cosmology; I did not perceive a fallen creation, or a need to expiate sins, and I had no fear of a supernatural damnation to meet me at the end of my life. (I have a number of canned rants on the subject that I can pop the lids off when appropriate, in fact. And have been known…

I have been thinking a lot, on and off, as part of my processing around placing myself on the spectrum after all this time, about Set as an autistic god. Not a “god of autism”, an autistic god. I think about it because of the ambivalence with which he is often treated in the mythologies: yes, he’s useful, he’s powerful, he’s potent, but he’s also Not Like Us, he’s the fringe one, the god of the…