Regular Practice

I’ve always had difficulty establishing a regular practice. This has caused me an undue amount of stress in my magical career, as the most common advice I got from more established magicians was always “have a daily practice,” or at the very least “meditate regularly.”

I still don’t meditate, and perhaps I would benefit from it, but I have managed to build a daily practice for myself. I have noticed a significant change in how I approach magic, how I plan for it, and how I integrate it into my mundane life.

Honoring the Ancestors

As part of my daily ritual work, I give offerings to my “ancestors, protectors, and allies,” which includes my father, my grandparents, and the man who acted as a mentor to me as I delved into the occult world. There are some problematic elements to that practice: My grandmother’s abuse has caused lasting trauma in three generations of my family, my grandfather was heavily critical of my mother for being friends with a woman in an interracial marriage (and allow my sister and I to play with their children), and my mentor continuously pushed me toward racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes.

There’s a lot of cruel and problematic behavior packed in all that, yet I still include them in my regular practice. I also honor ancestors that came before them, who practiced various forms of Christianity that upheld systems of racism, colonialism, and oppression. A lot of other pagans have had difficulty dealing with ancestor veneration because of this issue, and I know many that refuse to engage in the practice at all.

Devotional Offerings

I think it was Stephen Posch that gave a talk about animal sacrifice at Paganicon (Sorry Stephen — I can’t find my notes and for some reason Pagnicon doesn’t have the class listed in the old online schedule). The presenter was discussing Wiccan ritual structure, and how raising the cone of power was adapted to fill the hole where animal sacrifice would occupy a ritual from antiquity. I haven’t followed up that theory with any research of my own, but it makes sense: most religions in antiquity had some manner of sacrifice, and the Victorian sensibilities of Gardner would not have been amenable to including the practice in his creation.

As a young magical practitioner, that bias against flesh offerings extended to other types of offerings. Offerings in general were devotion, you see, and that sounded an awful lot like submission, which good magicians discarded along with their Christian backgrounds. Magic was all about energy and will, you see, and I took pride in not kneeling before any gods.

Pagan Politics, Part Whatever

John Beckett asks an interesting question: Must Paganism be Transgressive?

Do we lose something when a radical spiritual movement starts to be accepted by the mainstream? Or is it more complicated than that?

Beckett looks at a few other discussions going on in the Pagan blogosphere in examining this question. I saw a few themes that I’ve talked and thought about before, so I felt the need to open my big mouth.

Witches in Popular Culture

Steven Posch has a brief article on what he calls witchsploitation.

You know the genre. Wicker Man I (“the one without Nicholas Cage,” as a local movie marquee put it during the midnight Samhain run last year), To the Devil a Daughter…so many to choose from. Somewhere off in the sticks there are (bwa-ha-ha) still real, live witches (or left-over pagans) and they still practice…(shudder)…human sacrifice. Whoa, dude, way scary.

A coven-sib recently confessed to me that her bookshelves are filled with trashy novels with the word “witch” in the title. Magenta, you’re not alone. I resemble that remark myself, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

The most amusing are the ones written by people who have done just a little research. Remember that 1964 cauldron-boiler Book of Shadows? In the opening scene, police are called to a gruesome murder in NYC’s Central Park. A man has had his belly ripped open, his guts nailed to a tree, and he’s been forced to walk around and around the tree wrapping a grim maypole with his own intestines.