The Slippery Spirit

I am a critical person; it's built into my personality as an "internal processor" and it is part of my "witches work" to juggle it until the day I die. I won't deny it, but I'm also not going to sugar-coat it. However, I will attempt (as I regularly do) to channel this trait into a positive characteristic rather than a destructive one. A rant that regularly passes through my head comes from the criticism I exact against many contemporary pagans. In my opinion, most self-identified pagans don't live a very pagan lifestyle. They call themselves pagans, but they don't act as if their pagan-ness is driving the decisions of their world. It is accepted that Wicca is a pagan religion. It is said that all Wiccans are pagan, but not all pagans are Wiccan. Wiccans are typically called "witches." It is very possible for someone to be a non-pagan witch. An example would be a Curandera, a Hispanic spiritual healer who uses ritualized actions to ...

A recipe for powerful Hoodoo work, this medicinal remedy has four thousand variations. It was allegedly developed during the second wave of the Plague in Europe. I got curious about its origins and so I started looking backwards into the records of the Plague. Here's what I discovered and the opinions that I generated. Since there was no pharmaceutical industry as it exists now, nature was the people’s pharmacy throughout the middle ages. Plants were adopted into in use by the medical community, having borrowed such knowledge from wise pagan men and women healers. During the second wave of the Plague in Europe , four individuals allegedly made it their business to rob the homes and very bodies of those who had died of the Plague, but did not contract the infection themselves. When questioned by the courts upon their capture, they revealed that they crafted a medicinal vinegar, which they regularly drank and wore on their clothes to protect them. To allay a sentence of exec...