The Slippery Spirit

Please try to put aside all of your ideas about dragons. I am not here to explore the idea of the fire-breathing, scaled creature of today's movies. In my mind, the dragon is different than that and much more than that. Dragons in The West The Persians called the primordial chaos a "dragon," but that could have been a translation issue. We really have no English word for the thing that Tiamat was, but it was her body that was used to create the universe. This kind of dismemberment cosmogony was exposed to the cultures of the Ancient Neat East, including the Semitic peoples, before the writings that became the Bible were written. In Isaiah 27, we find mention of "Leviathan" as the dragon of the sea. Remember that the sea was present at the time of creation - "and God parted the waters and made dry land appear" - the sea was the primordial ocean, the representation of the chaotic world before it had any ordered form, and it was out of this that the wo...

During the dawn of the 20th century, a group of spiritualists and occult scholars joined together into what we know today as the Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn. It didn't last very long, but it produced studies and principles that would shake the very idea of what we believed made up the world. Though many witches before them knew of it, the GD introduced into a more mainstream arena the idea of an divine energetic world - one built of an immeasurable stuff called aether - that exists beneath everything we can see, touch, hear, taste or smell. More importantly, this group revealed that human beings had the power to work with this stuff to make changes happen in the world. One particularly charismatic, albeit flaky, member of the GD was named Aliester Crowley. He worked extensively with the idea of manipulating this energy and coined a word for the process. The use of the unseen energy to cause changes in accordance with one's will he called "magick," spelled wit...

Many neo-pagan traditions espouse the belief that candles should never be blown out - they should only be snuffed or pinched out. The idea is that overpowering them with the breath (being either the element of Air or the breath of life force) is disrespectful to the the element of Fire. This never really measured well on my truth-o-meter so I decided to dig up whatever I could find about it. Since we relish blowing out birthday candles, I started there. The tradition of putting candles on birthday cakes started with the Ancient Greeks, who put candles on offering breads in ceremonies to the Goddess Artemis so the breads would glow like the moon. This also allowed prayers to be carried up to the Goddess in the smoke of the candles. There is no indication of how these candles were extinguished and no lasting tradition that demands a ceremonial breath to do the job. Since the 3rd century BC, candles were typically used to keep time. As candle clocks, weights were cast into the sid...

In recent years I've noticed a kind of witch becoming more and more prevalent. I have dubbed them "indoor pagans," though they really are just witches. Their ability to operate as a pagan would (should?) in our modern world leave much to be desired. These are people who have been searching for some spirituality that is other than the dominant triumvirate that currently exists. They want more drama, more mystery, more glamour, and maybe even more deviancy than the others provide. So they find and study witchcraft or one of the traditions of Wicca. Many of them started as people trying to make sense of a world with little apparent morality. Maybe they just wanted a community that allowed them to be a little morally ambiguous themselves from time to time. Let's face it, many of us have our trashy moments, and what's really wrong with that? My point is that they may be witches, but they are not pagans. They don't enjoy being outdoors, unless its a brief nature...

It has become pretty clear that I need some help, and I don't mean help with the shaman thing. I've spent the last few decades labeling myself a solitary pagan and witch. Bully for me. In all of that time, despite starting a few esoteric books, I've found that I'm really not giving my spiritual health very much energy. Of all of the beginners' exercises that are typically recommended, I rarely do any of them. I am prone to starting something and then losing interest and motivation before it's finished, including books, exercises, classes, and projects. This is a real problem. Lately I've allied myself with a couple of online witch "schools." They are providing a structure to people who want to study the esoteric arts. I think that's just what I need -- structure. I'm willing to start at whatever these schools claim to be the beginning. I want no claims of previous study to place me out of any classes. I want to do the entire program fro...

I have to face the fact that I'm a mutt, as I think many Americans are. I don't call myself "European American" or "German American" or any of the numerous countries that are in my family history. Frankly, my recent genealogical research has revealed so many cultural origins that I really can't lay claim to any of them. By percentage, I'm probably more German than anything else. And yet there is some part of me that doesn't feel appropriate when I try to immerse myself in the Asatru religious variants. Something just didn't feel like it clicked, probably because I've never even visited Germany.  I felt the same thing when I studied British traditional witchcraft. The names sounded foreign and there was a cultural flavor that felt slightly foreign. So, do I call myself a witch, a druid, a shaman, a hoodoo, or do I just not bother with labels and worry about doing my own thing? Recently, as I was considering the state of my being on thi...

I often find repetitive physical work to be a kind of meditation. So I wanted to share with you a sacred moment I had recently. The trees near me are finally done dropping their leaves, which means I couldn't continue to put off the raking of the yard. I told myself I would wait until all the leaves were down. Now the work needed to get done if I wanted any kind of lawn in the spring, and I had to do it before all the plants under those leaves died. Since this is a job that I do only once every year, I decided to make it into a simple little sacred moment. My Ritual: I smudged my rake saying, "May this tool become an extension of my hand and follow the directions of my desire." (This is my stock request when purifying a tool that isn't one of my usual ritual tools.) I smudged myself saying, "May this work bring strength to my body, focus to my mind, and peace to my spirit." That's all it took. I then spent half the day raking leaves. I spent tim...