ART AND SOUL by Iona Jenkins

One day, during a holiday at the home of Italian friends in the province of Lazio, some forty-five minutes by train from the centre of Rome, I experienced a powerful impression of the Sacred Feminine. She came to me in the Vatican of all places, centuries old male stronghold, and power centre of the Roman Catholic Church.

         Even more surprisingly, her presence was more prominent in the Sistine Chapel, the Pope’s own place of prayer, where Cardinals sit in all male conclave. But there she was, shining through the restored colour on that famous ceiling through the brushstrokes of Michelangelo. I was picking up loud echoes immortalised for centuries through his art, tuning into the soul of the artist, seeing his inspiration in terms of angels speaking in colour and light. But then he was called after an Archangel whose name means Who is like God. God is creative, He created heaven and earth according to the scriptures, but now it was looking like She might have created it with him. Somehow over the years in Christianity, the real Sacred Feminine has been hidden away, negated, turned into a virginal statue with little visible life energy from earth.

Continue reading “ART AND SOUL by Iona Jenkins”

A Ritual for Thanksgiving, by Molly Remer

Find some pine trees
and a wide rock in the sun.
Settle down and feel gratitude
curl around your shoulders.
Listen to the wind
sense that there is sorrow too
in this place,
deep and old,
threaded through the
lines of sun
slices of shadows.
It tells of what has been lost,
what has been stolen,
of silenced stories,
and of fracturing.
Make a vow,
silent and sacred,
to do what you can,
to rebuild the web
to reweave the fabric.
Lie on your back in the pine needles,
feel your body soften into the ground
and become still.
Allow yourself to feel held,
heavy bones and soft skin
becoming part of the land.
Wonder how many of your
ancestors kept other people
from becoming ancestors themselves.
Watch the sunlight making tiny rainbows
through your eyelashes and pines.
Find a pretty rock.
Don’t take it.
Leave it where it belongs,
on the land that gave it birth.
Go home.
Keep your promise.

Continue reading “A Ritual for Thanksgiving, by Molly Remer”

The Norns, Spiritual Mystery and Me, Part 1 by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

In 2020, I began writing my biography because some weird things were happening in my life including some which were time-bending. To help make sense of it, I wrote up “conversations” with the mythical characters of Persephone, Inanna and the Norns of the Norse. Throughout my bio, I speak to the Norns as an out loud meditation on the nature of time, fate and energy.

The three Norn sisters are Urd, Verdandi and Skuld. Their names come from Old Norse which is not a spoken language. The actual translation of their names is open to speculation. In general, here are their common meanings.

  • Urd – past
  • Verdandi – happening or present
  • Skuld – future or debt.

By mythological tradition, they show up at a child’s birth and then weave their “fateful” decisions about that child’s life into a tapestry. They are considered more powerful and fearsome than the gods because even the gods are ruled by the hands of fate (or Norns in this case). They were also treated as oracles where kings and warriors went to consult them much as was done in Delphi Greece.[1]

Continue reading “The Norns, Spiritual Mystery and Me, Part 1 by Janet Maika’i Rudolph”

Rites of May, by Molly Remer

It is important that we share these rituals of celebration and affirmation with our sons as well as our daughters. Men, too, should know the power of joined hands in a circle, voices lifted in song, and sweet words of connection surrounding one another on a bright spring day…

I rose early seeking Beltane dewdrops
with which to anoint my brow.
the cupped violet stems and clover
were dry
and I found no dewdrops
in the chickweed stars.
Instead, I put out oranges
for the orioles,
ran my fingers through the dandelions,
and pressed my nose into the lilacs.
I spotted green flowers
on the mulberry trees,
found the first wild pink geraniums
and tender bells of columbine
and came face to face
with the quiet black eyes
of solemn deer in the raspberry bushes.
These things
their own kind of anointing,
their own small and significant
rites of May Magic.

As a family, we traditionally celebrate the May by making a Green Man face in our field, using natural items that we find that day. As a goddess-focused person who walks an almost exclusively goddess-centered/nature-based path, this is one of our few family rituals that centers around more masculine sacred imagery. It is a favorite for my kids—rituals involving multi-age groups should always be as highly participatory as possible. I have written several times for FAR about how my hearth-priestessing has evolved over the years, letting go of more and more control, doing less and less planning, and being more freeform, spontaneous, flexible, and playful. My four children now range in age from 7-18. We have celebrating the turning of the Wheel of the Year for their entire lives. I love how our memories of past rituals inform the present—for example this year’s Green Man had the same rock for a nose that we used for last year’s Green Man.

This year, May Day was bright and sunny with a wild wind. We circled near the driveway, building our Man on the gravel, where his features would stand out against the brown rocks. We gave him antlers formed from cedar branch and white-tailed deer and a crown of a split stump of gray oak. My oldest son trimmed off cedar branches for his beard, my husband pruned the hydrangeas of last year’s dead growth to frame his face, my sixteen year old gathered golden stalks of dry bluestem grass for a mustache, and my 11 and 7 year olds gathered pieces of grass and cinquefoil to trim his hair and beard.

We stood around him in admiration for a few minutes and then I spoke of the bounty, growth, and renewal of this time of year. We stood hand in hand and read the following blessing together (me calling a line and then all repeating it):

A sweet blessing
of the singing sky
to us.

A slow blessing
of the shining flame
to us.

 A strong blessing
 of the crashing wave
to us.

 A soft blessing
of the pulsing earth
to us.

We then offered a wish to one another in turn with a spritz of “Valiant Heart” spray (from Honey and Sage Co). For example, I spritzed my daughter (11) and wished her curiosity and creativity and then she turned to her father and spritzed him wishing him health and prosperity.

I gave everyone four rose petals (whole flowers would have worked well, but I was working on the fly!) and invited everyone to kiss each petal in turn and then offer it to the Green Man (the wind whirled most of our petals away as we released them, which was pleasant as well—our wishes, accepted), based on this past poem:

Find four flowers
and bring them to your lips
one at a time.
One for wonder.
One for joy.
One for love.
One for magic.
Make your promise
invite them in,
one by one
the spell is done.

We sang a few lines together, laughing, from one of Tom Bombadil’s ditties in The Fellowship of the Ring and shouted out, “Happy May!”  after finishing our raucous rendition:

Now let the song begin! Let us sing together!
Of sun, stars, moon and mist, rain and cloudy weather,
Light on the budding leaf, dew on the feather,
Wind on the open hill, bells on the heather,
Reeds by the shady pool, lilies on the water…

We then each took a handful of wildflower seeds and sang “Call Down a Blessing” over them, each of us plugging in a blessing word in our turn.

Call down a blessing
Call down a blessing
Call down a blessing
Call down
__________before you
__________behind you
__________within you
and around you.

This song is based on Cathy Parton and Dave Para’s song, but is sung collaboratively with each person choosing a blessing to sing together in the blank space. (A recording of our women’s circle singing this together during a ritual is available here.) We then scattered to plant our handfuls of seeds in whichever place we wished to do so.

This whole ceremony took less than thirty minutes and we closed our largely spontaneous ritual by joining hands and offering our family’s usual closing prayer (learned from our own dear Carol Christ): May Goddess bless and keep us, may wisdom dwell within us, may we create peace.

It is important that we share these rituals of celebration and affirmation with our sons as well as our daughters. Men, too, should know the power of joined hands in a circle, voices lifted in song, and sweet words of connection surrounding one another on a bright spring day.

My oldest son is graduating from high school this month and this week I took him to register for his first college classes. At this threshold moment in parenting, I feel the odd psychological sensation of overlapping generational “timelines,” sometimes feeling like I, myself, have become my parents, while at the same time, feeling like I am a college student myself. But, for now, at this moment, we stand here together under a Beltane sun, laughing together around a Green Man in the stones.

Molly Remer, MSW, D.Min, is a priestess, teacher, and poet facilitating sacred circles, seasonal rituals, and family ceremonies in central Missouri. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses at Brigid’s Grove (brigidsgrove.etsy.com). Molly is the author of nine books, including Walking with Persephone, Whole and Holy, Womanrunes, and the Goddess Devotional. She is the creator of the devotional experience #30DaysofGoddess and she loves savoring small magic and everyday enchantment.

The Magic of the Ordinary, by Molly Remer

“Nothing is so simple, or so out of the ordinary for most of us, then attending to the present.”

— Ernest Kurtz & Katherine Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection

I often speak of being in the temple of the ordinary, of seeing the enchantment in the ordinary. In the book The Spirituality of Imperfection, the authors write that “beyond the ordinary, beyond material beyond possession, beyond the confines of the self, spirituality transcends the ordinary, and yet, paradoxically, it can be found only in the ordinary. Spirituality is beyond us, and yet it is in everything we do. It is extraordinary. And yet, it is extraordinarily simple.”

This spring, I presented at an event and the concept of “being versus doing” arose. I reminded participants that “being” is not a competitive sport. We cannot not be, we are being all the time. I think sometimes the pressure we put on ourselves to be better, to “do” being better, can be really hobbling. Likewise, the sensation that spirituality is somewhere “out there” or that it has to be bigger than or better than or transcendent instead of present in the ordinary. On a goddess based path, with a feminist orientation, I find that the Goddess herself pervades all of existence, pervades your whole entire life, even the rough and weary places, even the ragged and strange places. Returning to Kurtz and Ketcham, they write: “Now…beyond the ordinary is not meant to suggest something complicated, different, different or self-consciously special. Nothing is so simple, or so out of the ordinary for most of us, then attending to the present. The focus on this day, suggested by all spiritual approaches, attending to the present, to the sacredness present in the ordinary, if we can get beyond the ordinary is, of course, a theme that pervades Eastern expressions of spirituality and other expressions too.”

I know that I often find myself seeking or longing for the special moments, the magic, the flashes of transcendence, and sometimes this can cause me to miss the ordinary, to miss the present, to miss where I am because I’m longing for something else. Adages to the effect of “do what you are doing” and “be where you are” may begin to sound cliché almost and the reason they do is because it’s so simple and so out of the ordinary to simply come back to attending to the present. The present moment is, in my eyes, truly where we find the goddess, in the pulse of presence in the every day. In the book She of the Sea, author Lucy Pearce addresses the question of the transcendent ordinary as well: “I want to write of the oceanic mystery, the soul of goddess magic, the sacred that which lies beyond words, because the repeated deliberate seeking of connection to this is at the heart of what I do and who I am. It is my creative and spiritual practice. I want to speak of this so that you can close your eyes turn inwards and smile knowing, just knowing until our conversation can continue without words…I want to share what I have known and for not to sound strange, yet strangeness is its nature. The soul is not of this world. It’s not rational, the sacred is not logical, but nor is this chaotic, magnificent, contradictory, and complex world of ours. And yet, we insist on pretending that it is and being disappointed, afraid, or bemused when it shows us its reality, again and again.”

The sacred is not logical, and neither is the world itself, but we pretend that it is, and then we get disappointed when we see reality. I originally learned the phrase “don’t argue with reality” from self-help author Wayne Dyer. There can be a whole range of potential experiences that are beyond objective reality or the reality that people sometimes insist is all there is. Jeanette Winterson, in her book Lighthousekeeping writes: “I do not accept that life has an ordinary shape, or that there is anything ordinary about life at all. We make it ordinary, but it is not.”

Maybe we are trying to make things ordinary that are not. My kids are growing up and getting ready to graduate from high school. One of my sons is very into science and loves biology and genetics and he is fond of boiling things down to an “everybody’s just a mass of cells having a collective hallucination” type of rhetoric that leaves little room for the esoteric and little room for inherent meaning. However, for me, I come back to the reality of being human as its own kind of miracle, its own profound magic. The reality of having this body with all these cells, which are doing all these things day in and day out that I don’t consciously know how to do, and yet my body does them every single day. That’s magic, even if we can explain the objective “why” of it. I don’t consciously know how to beat my own heart, but wait a second, yes, I do, because here it is beating every day from birth till death. Some people may be quite attached to maintaining the assertion that life is random and pointless, but this is not the story I see. I see wonder. I see magic. I see a miracle in motion. I am awestruck at the impossible reality of being a bundle of cells typing this essay right now. Yes, I am “only” a bundle of cells and that is absolutely pure magic to me. In fact, your very presence right here, right now is proof of the sacred on this earth in my eyes. May we all love the ordinary and let it whisper of the magic right beneath the skin.

Breathe deep
and allow your gaze
to settle on something you love.
Draw up strength from the earth.
Draw down light from the sky.
Allow yourself to be refilled and restored.
There is good to be done on this day.
Let your own two hands
against your heart be the reminder
you need
that the pulse of the sacred
still beats
and the chord of the holy yet chimes.

Molly Remer, MSW, D.Min, is a priestess facilitating women’s circles, seasonal rituals, and family ceremonies in central Missouri. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of nine books, including Walking with Persephone, Whole and HolyWomanrunes, and the Goddess Devotional. She is the creator of the devotional experience #30DaysofGoddess and she loves savoring small magic and everyday enchantment.

Shofetim: The Divine Feminine, Magic, and the Role of Gender by Ivy Helman.

This post is dedicated to Carol P. Christ. I knew her first as my professor and then my friend for over 15 years. May her memory be a blessing.

This week’s Torah portion is Shofetim (also spelt Shoftim), or Deutoronomy 16:18-21:9.  I have written about this parshah before.   In that post from August of 2018, I reflect on how the patriarchal elements of the portion should not detract from its larger concern for justice, compassion, and peace. Yet, there is more to the parshah.  In fact, I have recently begun exploring Judaism’s connection to all things magical, and interestingly enough, this parshah fits right into my recent inquiries.   Let me share with you some of what I have learned as it relates to this parshah.  

Where Shofetim and magic meet is idolatry.  There are three instances in Shofetim where idolatry is condemned, punished by stoning to death.  All three of these prohibitions involve polytheism, either directly worshiping other deities or participating in practices associated with the worship of those deities.  What are they?

Continue reading “Shofetim: The Divine Feminine, Magic, and the Role of Gender by Ivy Helman.”

Occult Adventures with Walter Troll – A Truly True Story Part 2 by Barbara Ardinger


Read Part 1 of this story here

We want you as our earth slave.

I put the pendulum away. I went into Charles’s bedroom and watched TV with him.

But I was addicted. First thing Saturday morning—back to the pendulum. We want you as our earth slave. I prayed over my paper Ouija Board. I cupped the crystal pendulum in my hands and prayed again. I visualized white light on the paper, around the pendulum, around my hands, around my pen and notebook, around my whole body, filling my living room. White light everywhere. I called upon angels and spirit guides to protect me.

We want you as our earth slave.

Continue reading “Occult Adventures with Walter Troll – A Truly True Story Part 2 by Barbara Ardinger”

Occult Adventures with Walter Troll -A Truly True Story Part 1 by Barbara Ardinger


I was born into a Republican, Calvinist, working-class family in Ferguson, Missouri, and was a teenager during the 1950s. Nothing remotely “spooky” or occult about my life. I was fortunate to discover the Unitarian Universalist Association during my freshman year in college and was a happy Unitarian until the late 1970s, when I completed my formal schooling and moved to Southern California. Nothing spooky or occult about the UUA, either.

After I moved to California, I met people interested in occult and metaphysical topics. I wanted to know more, so I started reading. I read the mainstream metaphysical literature, the books on the European Occult Revival and the various psychic sciences, books on ceremonial magic, New Thought, alchemy, the Qabala, theosophy, metapsychiatry, and the Universal White Brotherhood. I read Madame Blavatsky, Charles W. Leadbeater, Annie Besant, Dion Fortune, Horace Quimby, Stewart Edward White, Charles Francis Stocking, Manly P. Hall…well, the list goes on and on. (Those books are still on my shelves.) Although I learned enough to be a walking footnote to this day, I didn’t learn anything helpful about the spirit guides that a popular teacher in Anaheim told me were running my life. My boy friend was regularly doing automatic writing, so under his tutelage, I tried automatic writing, too. All I got was a stiff hand. I visited The Psychics To The Stars. I went to a spoon-bending seminar. (I bent one spoon). I attended a remote viewing workshop. All I got was a lot of debits in my check register. I didn’t meet any of my spirit guides.

Continue reading “Occult Adventures with Walter Troll -A Truly True Story Part 1 by Barbara Ardinger”

Loving Venus, a poem by Marie Cartier

Dedicated to Carol Christ, 1945-2021, who taught so many of us how to love the Goddess


She is called “Nude Woman” and currently lives
in her natural museum house in Vienna.
Nude woman. She is art, but she is not in an art museum.
And there are questions:
why was she originally painted red? Why are her breasts so large?
Why is her stomach so large?
Why does she fit in a human hand?
What was her purpose?
Was it to entice men, or to comfort women?
Historians disagree.
Is her hair woven? Or is it a hat?
Why does she have no eyes? No feet? Why is she there?

Continue reading “Loving Venus, a poem by Marie Cartier”

Finding the Antler, by Molly Remer

May you witness
a growing trust
in the guidance around you.
May you allow magic to find you
where you are.

Seven years ago, I did a drum-guided meditation in which I journeyed deep into the forest. On my head as I walked, antlers grew, curving above me. As I followed the sound of drums and the glimmer of firelight, I kept raising my hand to check to see if they were still there, firm beneath my hand. I reached the fire and met the Goddess there, she reached up and took the antlers off my head and cast them into the flames, where they twisted and glowed until they became a golden ring, which she removed and placed on my finger, antlers now wrapped around my index finger. In waking life, I scoured etsy and two years later located a bronze antler ring extremely similar to my vision, which I bought and placed on my own finger in the woods as a symbol of my earth based path, my priestess vows, and some kind of unspoken dedication, felt within but not able to be fully verbalized at the time.

Continue reading “Finding the Antler, by Molly Remer”

Dancing for Forgiveness and Reconciliation – Part Two By Laura Shannon

In Part One of this article, I described dancing Jewish, Romani, and Armenian dances for forgiveness and reconciliation with groups in Germany and all over the world. I also offered danced rituals of remembrance at former concentration camps and other places scarred by the atrocities of war.
I went to camps including Dachau and Auschwitz, to genocide memorials and sites of massacre throughout Eastern Europe, in Australia, and the Americas. At first, my prayers were private: I brought flowers, lit candles, danced my grief, and spent time in meditation. I tried to visualise the prisoners in those places, sending them my deep sorrow and regret back through time. I wanted to let them know that they are remembered and mourned by people from their future. My prayers contained a fervent apology as well as a soul commitment to do my part in this lifetime to overcome prejudice and stand for peace.
In time I invited others to dance with me for healing and peace. We danced at former camps in Germany, including Bad Gandersheim, a subcamp of Buchenwald, and on many occasions in Steyerberg, a former prison camp and forced-labour munitions factory which is now the site of an intentional community called Lebensgarten (‘Garden of Life’), a centre for permaculture, non-violent communication, and other ecologically and spiritually oriented ways of living.

Continue reading “Dancing for Forgiveness and Reconciliation – Part Two By Laura Shannon”

An Outrageously Strange, Bizarrely Weird, Completely True Tale by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

The word apocalypse keeps coming up when I talk to friends about how our present times feel. We’ve all noted how cracks in our society are tearing open and fault-lines are rising to the surface. It is disorienting yet also potentially transforming. I realized I’ve felt this way before:

In January 1997, I became an apprentice to a husband and wife shaman team. They ran an old-style mystery school with regular weekend workshops in Maine and a 4-day in the summer. In August 1997, we met on forested private property that was far from any “civilization.”

Regular weekend meetings began after dinner which gave our small NYC area contingent plenty of time for a leisurely drive up the coast. In August, our teachers wanted us to arrive earlier. We arranged to take the Long Island Sound ferry to Connecticut to avoid the time-consuming drive around the city. About ½ way through our 1 ½ hour ferry ride, a shocking event happened. An elderly woman sitting near us dropped like a rock to the ground. Her daughter began screaming. No one could rouse her. The ferry returned to NY where an emergency crew tried and failed to revive her. She had literally died at our feet. By this time, I was not only thoroughly rattled, I was also deep into contemplating issues of life and death. Because of our delayed arrival in Conn, we began hitting evening rush hour along the major cities of our route. We did not arrive in Maine until well after dark. Continue reading “An Outrageously Strange, Bizarrely Weird, Completely True Tale by Janet Maika’i Rudolph”

Mess and Magic, by Molly Remer

Maybe beautiful things 77381912_2495811250631082_8017831208572420096_o
don’t only grow from peace,
maybe they grow from the
soil of living,
which holds both
blood and tears
muck and magic.

Last week I tried to work on my book while the household debris whirled around me. We are supposed to be leaving for homeschool co-op in just a few minutes, I still need to take a shower, there are orders to fulfill and I really, really want to format this title page, add two attributions, and re-upload the digital file.

The toilet has a ring of water around it, or is it pee, the children come to report.

There’s a weird smell in the kitchen.

I can’t create like this, I yell.

I want to be inspiring, not so messy, not like this.

I gesture frantically, almost crying, my hair wild, my eyes frenzied.

I only have nine minutes before it is time to leave and I still need to take a shower and I haven’t finished my formatting. I stare at the screen and shout:

I only want to make things
from a place of beauty and peace.

But, then I say:

maybe beautiful things don’t only grow from peace,
maybe they need this too, this mess, in order to flourish.

I abandon my book file, left open on my screen, photo half placed and words askew and I take my shower with my heart beating too fast, my mind spinning with to-dos, and agitation thrumming through my veins.

I hastily dry my hair and we pack the car. We will be late, I know. As fly down the road there is a big buck in the road.  It is hunting season and I stop the car on the hill to watch him. Our eyes meet for a moment, he is still, his antlers are wide and beautiful, some of the nicest I’ve ever seen. His shoulders are broad and brown in the early morning sun.

Run free, big guy, I say, run free. If you go up the hill, you will be at our house and it is always a safe place.

This feels both true and beautiful.

A week passes and it is still hunting season, rifle now instead of bow, so my husband and I put on our orange vests before we go out for our morning walks, so that no one will shoot us. I have lived in a state where hunting is an established part of the culture for my entire life, so deer season is “normal” to me and I understand the purposes of it, though I cringe every November to hear the gunshots in the early morning, the wild eyes and swiveling ears of the deer whose home has been invaded with fear and risk after a summer of grazing on wild grasses and berries.

Today, as we walk, we reach the crossroads and something tugs at my attention. I turn back and look into the woods where my eyes catch on the body of the beautiful buck, lying motionless at the base of an oak tree. He has been murdered and then left behind, his large body still and silent, his beautiful antlers against the leaves, the sun glinting on a stripe of white along his belly. His legs are folded against his body, relaxed, this is not a very old kill.

My thoughts of my work and my doing and all the everything that needs my attention fall away and I am struck with grief at this senseless death. I think about his antlers and how I’ve always wanted to find some and I know that someone will come back and cut off his head to remove them. I think for a moment that it could be me who does this, but I don’t have the heart or stomach for it. I imagine taking rosemary and lavender petals to scatter over his body, I imagine laying my hands across his fur and thanking him for being here. I think perhaps that after the vultures and coyotes have done their work I will creep back through the woods and look for him, for his bones, and perhaps I will collect the antlers then, if they have not been chewed by rats or carried off by dogs. I hate that this has happened. It tortures me to walk back by and leave him there, disrespected and alone.

I leave a message for our closest neighbor asking if perhaps he shot a deer that got away and later died in our woods. I message another neighbor and ask if he thinks there is anyway the meat could still be used. The first neighbor calls me back a half hour later, I am surprised to hear his voice on the phone, as we don’t talk often. He is agitated and yelling, not at me, but about the men he found in the road yesterday who killed this animal. He heard the gunshot while cleaning his own deer from the morning and flew down the road to confront them, where he found them standing in the road, truck parked at the crossroads, the deer dead beneath the tree. This is illegal and it disgusts him, his voice shakes as he recounts the story. He tells them that he will always know what they did and they are the ones who have to live with themselves and their actions. They deny it, claim someone else must have done it and drive away, leaving the body behind. He expects they will sneak back in the night to take it, but they have not, and there he lies in the dappled morning sun.

Our employees have arrived to work and the house is full of voices and questions and people waiting for me to do things. I take a shower anyway. Showers are one of those things I occasionally withhold from myself as I desperately try to keep up with everything people need and want from me in a given day, but I take the shower and try to let the adrenaline, the anger, the sense of waste and loss wash away from me. I keep thinking about the deer, his life, my mind turning it over and over, my body filled with sorrow.

As I am putting on my lotion and simultaneously also answering calls from our bank 73292554_2486141391598068_5135782722731507712_oabout a new account, feeling rushed and out of breath, there is a knock on the front door. I quickly dress and go out to the living room, my hair still wet and ragged, and find our other neighbor standing there. He is holding two white skulls in his hands, long antlers curving between his fingers. We talk about the buck, about the waste of his life, about the disrespect and senselessness of this action. He is a hunter too and he says he has been watching this deer for more than a year and that you get to know them when you live here, that you see the same ones, sometimes every day, that there are only so many in a given range, and you get to be a part of their lives. We ask him if he knows Limpy, the doe with the broken leg that healed crookedly, but that we see almost every day, sometimes twice a day, in the field across the road.

She raised twin fawns this year, he says.

We look at each other quietly for a moment. I feel a wave of gratitude that I live somewhere where the neighbors, too, know Limpy and her babies.

I hurt my ankle in June of this year and when I could finally walk on the road again, taking my first real walk in six weeks, I saw Limpy and her twins at the end of our driveway. She looked at me for a long time and I felt a sense of kinship with her, two mothers with injured legs, trying our best to keep going.

My neighbor holds the antlered skulls out to me and says he will call the buck in to the conservation department as you are supposed to do. He says this deer has sentimental value to him and he will make a mount with his head and he is offering me these skulls in trade. I take them with gratitude, though it isn’t the same as finding my own. The antlers are whitened and smooth. One has small chew marks along two of its spikes, the others has knobby ridges along the base. They are beautiful. I hold one skull in each hand, antlers curving along my arms. They feel like precious treasures to me, something given, something received, a moment of genuine respect for a needlessly slain creature of these woods we all love.

When Mark and I walk the next morning, the buck’s body has been moved deeper into the woods, out of sight, and there is only a heavy flattened place stained dark red in the carpet of oak leaves across the forest floor and the thick smell of blood in the air to indicate that he was ever there. We know though, we shared this home ground, and I leave rosemary, lavender, and thyme scattered across the blood-soaked leaves.

Molly Remer has been gathering the women to circle, sing, celebrate, 65317956_10219451397545616_5062860057855655936_nand share since 2008. She plans and facilitates women’s circles, seasonal retreats and rituals, mother-daughter circles, family ceremonies, and red tent circles in rural Missouri. She is a priestess who holds MSW, M.Div, and D.Min degrees and wrote her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses, original goddess sculptures, ceremony kits, mini goddesses, and jewelry at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the author of WomanrunesEarthprayer, the Goddess Devotional, She Lives Her Poems, and The Red Tent Resource Kit and she writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at Patreon, Brigid’s Grove, and Sage Woman Magazine.

 

Devotion by Molly Remer

There are things that ask
50237778_2257311164481093_3090053013251817472_oto be remembered
or, is it that I ask to remember?
The everyday enchantments
of our living
words forming slices of
memory.
A white squirrel watching
from a sycamore tree
the sounds of black
crows calling
from within the secret
passages
between oak tree
and neighborhood
footprints of a shy orange
coastal fox in the sand.
Rays of sunlight
forming individual white rainbows
stretching from cloud
to water.
I no longer feel like I have anything
to teach
I just want to tell you about the
shell I found today
the sandy pink color
of its wave-shaped spiral
the way the pine needles
form a canopy under
which orange monarchs dance
the surprising softness and bright
green hue of thin fingers of grass
the pretty purple pollen cones
of a longleaf pine.
The colors of a morning woven
into a tapestry of devotion.
That is the word for this feeling
in my chest.
Devotion
to noticing.

Devotion is not a word that I have previously felt particularly inspired by or connected to. Perhaps it is too heavy, too responsible, or even “too religious”—carrying connotations of dogma or roteness. However, in the last month or so, something has opened up for me to consider the word, and the process, in a different way. Continue reading “Devotion by Molly Remer”

Dragonfly, Guide to Transformation and True Sight by Judith Shaw

judith shaw photoDragonfly, dragonfly darting quickly hither and yonder, up and down, left and right –  a transparent shimmering spark with effervescent wings, representing the dreamtime and the illusionary nature of reality.  Dragonfly, dragon – both immortalized in mythology worldwide.

Continue reading “Dragonfly, Guide to Transformation and True Sight by Judith Shaw”

Shapeshifting Goddesses by Judith Shaw

judith shaw photo

Magic, divine intervention, shapeshifting – what do these things offer the modern mind, concerned with time clocks, definitive proofs and skeptical disbelief? Yet to the ancients, shapeshifting was a well known tale, found in stories and mythologies across the world.

Continue reading “Shapeshifting Goddesses by Judith Shaw”

Puff the Magic Dragon & the Loss of Magic by Susan Morgaine

img_1549Did you believe in magic?

Did you once believe in fairies, leprechauns and and flying dragons? Did you believe that if you climbed a tree to the uppermost branches, you could touch the sky?

Do we need magic?

As the country finds itself reeling from the proclamations of anew administration, I have found myself, like so many others, in need of comfort. One of the places I find comfort is music. There is the music of ritual and meditation, the music of dance, the music of heartbreak. It can energize and uplift; it can soothe the hurt away, it can take you to distant lands.

After the experience of the Women’s March on Washington, I chose the protest music of Peter, Paul and Mary. I found myself listening to “Puff, the Magic Dragon”, an old favorite. I have listened to this song many times through the years, but this time, I understood it in a completely different way. Continue reading “Puff the Magic Dragon & the Loss of Magic by Susan Morgaine”

Springing Forward with the Wicked Witch by Barbara Ardinger

Barbara ArdingerEl Presidente was enlarging his war against his citizens. This meant the roads were more crowded than before with refugees fleeing the capital city for safety among the farmers on the plains and up in the hills. Some of these refugees arrived, of course, at the farm of the wicked witch.

Refugees

Whenever a family arrived, the witch would put on her wickedest face and voice (she’d been practicing) and tell the children she was going to roast them and eat them with mashed potatoes and baby gravy. The children believed her for about a minute and a half, whereas their parents just smiled as each family was taken in hand by the senior refugees and led to rooms where there were new beds. The tenured refugees had (with the witch’s permission) taken charge and somehow found enough lumber to build two new rooms (lean-tos) at the side of the house. They were also working the farm and doing whatever they could with other providers of shelter to make newcomers as comfortable as possible. All the farms across the plains and in the hills had nearly run out of food to feed their guests, but with the coming of spring and tiny green shoots already showing, many of the people were hopeful. Continue reading “Springing Forward with the Wicked Witch by Barbara Ardinger”

A Light Story by Barbara Ardinger

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

raven—first there was a dark eye at the window. Then a tap-tap-tapping. Then a long black beak came around the edge of the slightly open window. Then the raven hopped inside. “Oh, goody,” said a gravelly voice. “Eyeballs! I dearly love a tender, juicy eyeball.”

The wicked witch looked up from the quaint and curious volume she was perusing. “Oh, Kahlil,” she said, “those are grapes. And,” she added, “do come in.”

Already in, the raven speared a grape. “Pfui! I hate grapes! Back in the city,” he added, “there’s so many dead bodies lying in the streets all the scavengers think it’s a feast day everyday.” He paused and dropped the grape on the floor of the tiny room. “It’s awful in the city. It’s awful everywhere. No sign of yer husband, either. Witchie-pooh, how ya doin’ out here in the country?”

She sighed and pushed the book aside. “Not well. Not well at all. There’s no more room in my house for refugees, and yet they keep coming. The storehouse is nearly empty, and we need to find new seed to plant. I’ve put some of the men in charge of the farming. They’re waiting for the season to change.” She waved one hand over the table. “And I’ve still trying to learn how to be properly wicked. I’ve got all the books I can find. I’m looking for a spell that works. One that will bind el presidente. And his army. Kahlil, has it ever been this dark?”

oil-lampThe raven looked around. The tiny room at the top of the tiny wooden house was filled with books and papers written in a dozen ancient languages, which the wicked witch was reading by the light of a sputtering oil lamp with a nearly empty reservoir. “Well,” he told her, “we’re only six weeks past the solstice. Yeah. It’s dark all over. Girlfriend, you could do with a little more light—” Continue reading “A Light Story by Barbara Ardinger”

The Blood of Isis by Deanne Quarrie

Deanne Quarrietyet1Over the years I have seen the image of the amulet called the Knot of Isis but in all honesty, never paid it much attention. I am on the organizing committee for our annual Goddess Festival here in Austin this year and we have chosen Isis as our Goddess to honor. The intent is to reclaim the Sacred Name of Isis and celebrate Her power, especially for women.

I was supposed to go to Brazil this summer to speak. One thing that was to have happened on my trip was to be my ordination as a Priestess in the Fellowship of Isis. However, because I became very ill and was hospitalized, I had to cancel my trip. In preparation for this ordination, I created an altar for Her and began to get to know Her. I have always had special affinity for Hathor and Sekhmet or as I call them together, HetHeru. And so, began my relationship with Isis. Continue reading “The Blood of Isis by Deanne Quarrie”

Loosening the Weave: Leaving Space for Mystery by Kate Brunner

coloradosunriseYesterday morning, I sat in a sunrise fire circle on a ridge above my new Rocky Mountain home. Two years ago on the same day, I stood before a loom in a reconstructed Iron Age roundhouse in Wales. And in both of those places I realize what made those experiences powerful was the space I left for Mystery to stand with and within me.

The late summer sun sleepily climbed over the horizon yesterday, making its appearance only slightly later than the day before. I could feel the barest hint of autumn around the edges of the dawning day. Staring into the heart of the fire at my feet, I awakened to the sheer volume of tension I am carrying around in my body lately– illustrating just how tightly I am holding on to the fabric of my life and of the world around me. These are tense times. In so very many ways.

I inhabited what felt like a perpetually liminal space for the past decade or so, moving from one place to the next. For a long while, I thrived on the go. But callings and desires shifted and now I feel myself slowing down. I crave roots, the kind it takes time to grow. And I am guilty of trying to rush the process, trying to control so many details all at once. But control? Control is a tricky thing.

Meanwhile, the world around me careens towards chaos. The American political situation is untenable. Unemployment seems to be down, but the Labor Force Participation rate and stagnant wages are alarming. Both the terrorism abroad and the gun violence epidemic at home continue to claim lives endlessly. Countless social justice issues are coming to a head. The “culture wars” rage on.

Sitting at the fire, I felt into my body for just a moment and I witnessed the incredible tension, the desperate desire for control.

How much of the tensions of this time was I carrying within my own flesh and bones? How tightly was I holding on? How many calories was that death grip on my life consuming without my conscious permission?

Too much. Very. And too many. Continue reading “Loosening the Weave: Leaving Space for Mystery by Kate Brunner”

She Changes Everything She Touches by Deanne Quarrie

Deanne QuarrieShe Changes Everything She Touches and …
Everything She Touches Changes….

As a way of entry to this post, I wish to let readers know that this is not a typical kind of post for this blog. It is however, the work of an accomplished priestess and about how she has been reminded of what she knows about manifesting wants and needs in her life. It is personal and it is real. In my professional life I was big on accountability and know that it applies to my magical life as well. This post therefore witnesses my intentions!

I have been feeling horribly scattered lately, almost as though I have acquired ADHD in my old age. Each day is incredibly busy and yet at the end of the day, when I reflect on how busy, I realize I have not gotten anything productive done! I have a lot of irons in the fire and recently have added even more. I added them because they seem important, as they might prove helpful to me for accomplishing some of my goals.

So, I was talking to my friend and fellow Priestess, Letecia Layson, on the phone the other day, lamenting about this as well as other things that I wish to develop in my life that have to do with family and friend connections and spending more time with in-person relationships.

At the end of our conversation, in which my friend used her skills at listening, she remarked, “Bendis, you are a remarkable woman and have accomplished so much in your life. You have shared marvelous things with your students, but in listening to you, I can clearly see that, right now, you are not using what you teach in your own life.” Continue reading “She Changes Everything She Touches by Deanne Quarrie”

Becoming by Deanne Quarrie

Deanne Quarrie, D.Min.The Year 2015 is coming to a close. It is a time of endings and a time of beginnings. That is the wonderful thing about our cycles. We all have the opportunity to end and begin – over and over. Each day, each month and each year. We all scurry about making resolutions for the new year only to see them fail almost immediately.

This is where a good basic magical practice can lend a hand with our resolutions. In every magical act we must first know what it is we wish to manifest. I am not talking some empty wish here but a real look at what we want – really want – for the new year to bring.

If there were one thing I would say needs to be given the most attention in one’s magical practice is the Art of Becoming. Continue reading “Becoming by Deanne Quarrie”

All We Need to Make Magic by Molly

November 2015 059
Photo taken by my 12 year old son this month.

“The tools are unimportant; we have all we need to make magic: our bodies, our breath, our voices, each other.”

–Starhawk

As November drew to a rainy close, we had a small family full moon ritual on our back deck and incorporated a simple gratitude ritual into it. The sky was overcast so we couldn’t actually see the moon, but my four-year-old daughter wanted to get out glow sticks left over from Halloween. We had so much fun dancing around with them and making patterns together in the dark night. We sang a chant I recently made up:

Hallowed evening
Hallowed night
We dance in the shadows
We offer our light.

We did a simple gratitude practice by placing corn kernels in a jar, one for each thing we are grateful for from the past month. We started out slowly and taking turns and then we sped up and the gratitude offerings came tumbling out, over one another. Even the one-year-old added corn, rapidly yet with great concentration to make it actually go in the jar. We drummed and called out, “We are ALIVE! We are GRATEFUL! We are POWERFUL! We are CREATIVE!” When we finally decided to close our ritual and go back inside, the moon peeked out from behind the clouds to briefly say hello and it felt like a blessing on the magic we’d just created together.

As we went back inside, I felt relaxed, happy, and connected. For being something very simple, not particularly pre-planned, and semi-chaotic, it felt like one of our deepest and most connected personal family rituals. The quote above from Starhawk floated back into my mind and I reflected that when I try “too hard” to get things ready for a perfect ritual, I often end up feeling a disappointed. Sometimes I feel like giving up on holding ceremonies with my children entirely. Last year, as we prepared to walk our Winter Solstice Spiral, the baby had a poopy diaper that extended up his back. I often end up snapping critically at whomever isn’t doing it “right.” My boys make fart jokes. My husband gives long-suffering sighs. Our circle looks more like a lopsided peanut. Our humming together discordant and off-key. As we lie on the ground together on the Spring Equinox to do our “Earth Listening” practice together, the kids wiggle and fight, pushing one another off the blanket and exclaiming in loud voices so no one can hear what we’re listening for. We listen to a shamanic drumming CD, but the only one to reach a trance state is the baby as I pace back and forth with him in a baby carrier. The four year old ends up crying because she doesn’t see anything and she wanted to see something cool. Martyrpriestess emerges to complain that she doesn’t know why she even bothers trying to do nice things for anyone if this is how you’re all going to act.

I recently finished reading Under Her Wings: The Making of a Magdalene, by Nicole Christine. A theme running November 2015 007through the book was the concept of “As Above, So Below and As Within, So Without.” I read this book as part of my research for my dissertation about contemporary priestessing and as I read, I kept thinking, I want to hear from the Mamapriestesses, from the Hearth Priestesses! Where are the other practicing priestesses with children at home? I noticed in Christine’s book that the bulk of her work took place after her children were grown and, to my mind, she also had to distance or separate from her children and her relationships in order to fully embrace her priestess self. I notice in my reading and my research group that many women seem to come to priestess work when the intensive stage of motherhood has passed, or they do not have children. Is there a very good reason why temple priestesses were “virgins” and village wise women were crones? Where does the Mamapriestess fit?

As I read Christine’s book and witnessed her intensive self-exploration, discovery, and personal ceremonies and journeys, I realized that in many ways personal exploration feels like a luxury I don’t have at this point in my parenting life. How do we balance our inner journeys with our outer processes? Christine references having to step aside and be somewhat aloof or unavailable to let inner processes and understandings develop, since our inner journeys may become significantly bogged down in groups by interpersonal relationships, dramas, venting, chatting, and so forth. For me, this distance for inner process exploration isn’t possible in the immersive stage of life as a mother. And, yet, I also know in my bones that I’m not meant to give it up. How does the As Within and the So Without actually work?

I return to our Full Moon gratitude ritual. My oldest son, 12, whose height is rapidly extending into manhood, totes his tiny brother on one hip with practiced ease, offering his own glow stick and helping my little one hold his into the air. He expresses gratitude for the fun he’s been having this month with his new video game and, “I’m grateful for you for doing things like this with us, Mom.”

My second son, 9, my bravest child, crawls willingly into the darkness under the deck to retrieve lost glow sticks, poked purposefully down porch cracks by the one year old. He returns, triumphant, holding the bundle of sticks aloft.

My daughter, nearly five, tips her face back, looking up at me with eyes alight, “I’m glad to be a Goddess Girl!” she calls out…

November 2015 001

Molly has been “gathering the women” to circle, sing, celebrate, and share since 2008. She plans and facilitates women’s circles, seasonal retreats and rituals, mother-daughter circles, family ceremonies, and red tent circles in rural Missouri. She is an ordained priestess who holds MSW and M.Div degrees and she is currently writing her dissertation about contemporary priestessing in the U.S. Molly’s roots are in birth work and in domestic violence activism. She has worked with groups of women since 1996 and teaches college courses in group dynamics and human services. Molly is the author of Womanrunes: a guide to their use and interpretation, Earthprayer, Birthprayer, Lifeprayer, Womanprayer, and The Red Tent Resource Kit. She has maintained her Talk Birth blog since 2007 and writes about thealogy, nature, practical priestessing, and the goddess at her Woodspriestess blog. Molly and her husband Mark co-create original birth art jewelry, figurines, and goddess pendants at Brigid’s Grove.

Note: If you have children at home, I’d love to hear from you about the Mamapriestess topic! If you do not have children by choice, how does this play into your spiritual work? If you do not have children and that is not by choice, how does this play into your spiritual work?

Additional resources:

The Pendle Witches and Their Magic by Mary Sharratt

wonderfull discoverieIn 1612, in one of the most meticulously documented witch trials in English history, seven women and two men from Pendle Forest in Lancashire, Northern England were executed at Lancaster Castle.

In court clerk Thomas Potts’s account of the proceedings, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, published in 1613, he pays particular attention to the one alleged witch who escaped justice by dying in prison before she could come to trial. She was Elizabeth Southerns, more commonly known by her nickname, Old Demdike. According to Potts, she was the ringleader, the one who initiated all the others into witchcraft. This is how Potts describes her:

She was a very old woman, about the age of Foure-score yeares, and had been a Witch for fiftie yeares. Shee dwelt in the Forrest of Pendle, a vast place, fitte for her profession: What shee committed in her time, no man knows. . . . Shee was a generall agent for the Devill in all these partes: no man escaped her, or her Furies.

Quite impressive for an eighty-year-old lady!

In England, unlike Scotland and Continental Europe, the law forbade the use of torture to extract witchcraft confessions. Thus the trial transcripts supposedly reveal Elizabeth Southerns’s voluntary confession, although her words might have been manipulated or altered by the magistrate and scribe. What’s interesting, if the trial transcripts can be believed, is that she freely confessed to being a healer and magical practitioner. Local farmers called on her to cure their children and their cattle. She described in rich detail how she first met her familiar spirit, Tibb, at the stone quarry near Newchurch in Pendle. He appeared to her at daylight gate—twilight in the local dialect—in the form of beautiful young man, his coat half black and half brown, and he promised to teach her all she needed to know about magic.

Tibb was not the “devil in disguise.” The devil, as such, appeared to be a minor figure in British witchcraft. It was the familiar spirit who took centre stage: this was the cunning person’s otherworldly spirit helper who could shapeshift between human and animal form, as Emma Wilby explains in her excellent scholarly study, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. Mother Demdike describes Tibb appearing to her at different times in human form or in animal form. He could take the shape of a hare, a black cat, or a brown dog. It appeared that in traditional English folk magic, no cunning man or cunning woman could work magic without the aid of their spirit familiar—they needed this otherworldly ally to make things happen.

Belief in magic and the spirit world was absolutely mainstream in the 16th and 17th centuries. Not only the poor and ignorant believed in spells and witchcraft—rich and educated people believed in magic just as strongly. Dr. John Dee, conjuror to Elizabeth I, was a brilliant mathematician and cartographer as well as an alchemist and ceremonial magician. In Dee’s England, more people relied on cunning folk for healing than on physicians.

As Owen Davies explains in his book, Popular Magic: Cunning-folk in English History, cunning men and women used charms to heal, foretell the future, and find the location of stolen property. What they did was technically illegal—sorcery was a hanging crime—but few were arrested for it as the demand for their services was so great. Doctors were so expensive that only the very rich could afford them and the “physick” of this era involved bleeding patients with lancets and using dangerous medicines such as mercury—your local village healer with her herbs and charms was far less likely to kill you.

In this period there were magical practitioners in every community. Those who used their magic for good were called cunning folk or charmers or blessers or wisemen and wisewomen. Those who were perceived by others as using their magic to curse and harm were called witches.

But here it gets complicated. A cunning woman who performs a spell to discover the location of stolen goods would say that she is working for good. However, the person who claims to have been falsely accused of harbouring those stolen goods can turn around and accuse her of sorcery and slander. This is what happened to 16th century Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop of Edinburgh, cited by Emma Wilby in Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. Dunlop was burned as a witch in 1576 after her “white magic” offended the wrong person.

Ultimately the difference between cunning folk and witches lay in the eye of the beholder. If your neighbours turned against you and decided you were a witch, you were doomed.

Although King James I, author of the witch-hunting handbook Daemonologie, believed that witches had made a pact with the devil, there’s no actual evidence to suggest that witches or cunning folk took part in any diabolical cult. Anthropologist Margaret Murray, in her book, The Witch Cult in Western Europe, published in 1921, tried to prove that alleged witches were part of a Pagan religion that somehow survived for centuries after the Christian conversion. Most modern academics have rejected Murray’s hypothesis as unlikely. Indeed, lingering belief in an organised Pagan religion is very difficult to substantiate. So what did cunning folk like Old Demdike believe in?

Some of her family’s charms and spells were recorded in the trial transcripts and they reveal absolutely no evidence of devil worship, but instead use the ecclesiastical language of the Catholic Church, the old religion driven underground by the English Reformation. Her charm to cure a bewitched person, cited by the prosecution as evidence of diabolical sorcery, is, in fact, a moving and poetic depiction of the passion of Christ, as witnessed by the Virgin Mary. The text, in places, is very similar to the White Pater Noster, an Elizabethan prayer charm which Eamon Duffy discusses in his landmark book, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580.

It appears that Mother Demdike was a practitioner of the kind of quasi-Catholic folk magic that would have been commonplace before the Reformation. The pre-Reformation Church embraced many practises that seemed magical and mystical. People used holy water and communion bread for healing. They went on pilgrimages, left offerings at holy wells, and prayed to the saints for intercession. Some practises, such as the blessing of the wells and fields, may indeed have Pagan origins. Indeed, looking at pre-Reformation folk magic, it is very hard to untangle the strands of Catholicism from the remnants of Pagan belief, which had become so tightly interwoven.

Unfortunately Mother Demdike had the misfortune to live in a place and time when Catholicism was conflated with witchcraft. Even Reginald Scot, one of the most enlightened men of his age, believed the act of transubstantiation, the point in the Catholic Mass where it is believed that the host becomes the body and blood of Christ, was an act of sorcery. In a 1645 pamphlet by Edward Fleetwood entitled A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderfull Monster, describing how a royalist woman in Lancashire supposedly gave birth to a headless baby, Lancashire is described thusly: “No part of England hath so many witches, none fuller of Papists.” Keith Thomas’s social history Religion and the Decline of Magic is an excellent study on how the Reformation literally took the magic out of Christianity.

However, it would be an oversimplification to state that Mother Demdike was merely a misunderstood practitioner of Catholic folk magic. Her description of her decades-long partnership with her spirit Tibb seems to draw on something outside the boundaries of Christianity.

Although it is difficult to prove that witches and cunning folk in early modern Britain worshipped Pagan deities, the so-called fairy faith, the enduring belief in fairies and elves, is well documented. In his 1677 book The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, Lancashire author John Webster mentions a local cunning man who claimed that his familiar spirit was none other than the Queen of Elfhame herself. The Scottish cunning woman Bessie Dunlop mentioned earlier, while being tried for witchcraft and sorcery at the Edinburgh Assizes, stated that her familiar spirit was a fairy man sent to her by the Queen of Elfhame.

faery queen

A 17th century woodcut depicting a petitioner approaching the fairies in their hollow hill.

 

 

Mary Sharratt is an American author living in Pendle Witch country in northern England, the dramatic setting for her novel, Daughters of the Witching Hillbased on the true story of the folk healer and wisewoman, Elizabeth Southerns and her family. Mary is also the author of Illuminations: A Novel of Hildegard von BingenVisit her website.

Do You Believe in Magic? by Deanne Quarrie

I went online to dictionary.com and pulled three definitions for the word “magic.”

The art of producing illusions as entertainment by the use of sleight of hand, deceptive devices, etc., conjuring.

To pull a rabbit out of a hat by magic.

The art of producing a desired effect or result through the use of incantation or various other techniques that presumably assure human control of supernatural agencies or the forces of nature.

Any extraordinary or mystical influence, charm, power, etc.

The magic in a great name; the magic of music; the magic of spring.

The first definition is the one that most people think of when the word is used. The second is what people think storybook witches and wizards do and the third, a great way of using the word when talking about marvelous things in life.

I am going to toss out definition number one because, while valid, it just isn’t the kind of magic I want to discuss. Continue reading “Do You Believe in Magic? by Deanne Quarrie”

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