Naturalistic Paganism
The Summer Cross-Quarter (Summer Thermstice) Approaches (+ online Lunasa Rituals)!
Lunasa is the start of the prime campfire and stargazing season – bringing the unique combination of both warmth and longer nights “Sunlit Summer”, see the 8 season names here. Lunasa arrives again, but it’s not like last year, nor the year before. Why not? Because the many nested and interwoven cycles of our solar system make each stargazing season unique, and hence make every Lunasa unique! Last year the moon washed out the Perseids. This year, it looks like we’ll have a wonderful Perseid show, with the moon mostly out of the picture – August 13 – 15! Plus, here are a half dozen online Lunasa ritual opportunities!
Meeting the Meat: An Animal Initiation, by Mark Green
We are reasoning Pagans. We revere the Earth and Cosmos without gilding the lily with the supernatural.
We are poets and singers, dancers and artists. We paint the sky with our pigments, our tones, our voices, the products of our loving hands.
And under all that, all that lovely amazing late-evolution neocortical creativity and executive function, there is The Animal.
Finding My People, by Susan Paterson
Meeting new people is pretty scary. Not knowing how to behave in a new context is also scary. I am certainly not the prime example of social anxiety, but still, the feelings are there and they are uncomfortable. Signing on to the Atheopagan Web Weaving conference was intimidating, softened only by the fact that I have interacted with a handful of the attendees online in the past.
No-Nonsense Paganism: Keep It Simple
In this series, “No-Nonsense Paganism”, I have been striving to strip Paganism down, take away its ancient or faux-ancient terminology, its mythological and legendary pretensions, its foreign (to wherever you are) folk practices, its superstitious and pseudo-scientific justifications, and its esoteric ritual structures, and get down to the phenomenological core of pagan experience: our interaction with the earth and the other-than-human beings who we share it with. You can check out previous posts in this series here.
In this part, I want to talk about why and how to keep ritual simple.
Read MoreHappy Summer Solstice! Check out these Stonehenge Livestreams!
Happy Summer Solstice, tomorrow for many of us! Due to the weirdness of our time zones and spherical Earth, we can watch the Summer Solstice sunrise over Stonehenge late tonight on the evening of the Summer Solstice! What? How? Because when the Sun rises on the day of the Solstice (when the Earth’s axis exactly points the most toward the Sun in the Northern Hemisphere or the most away from the Sun in the Southern Hemisphere) at 4:51 am at Stonehenge, it will be the night of June 20th in the United States (11:51 pm) and will already be the evening of June 21st in Australia! Coverage at that site goes from 11:00 pm EDT to 1:00 am. Or does the Sunset before the Solstice move you spiritually? If so, you can catch the Solstice Sunset livestream from Stonehenge, with coverage from 3:30 – 5:30 pm EDT *today*. (Also, it is Winter Solstice/Yule for those in the Southern Hemisphere).
Buy Godless Paganism (paperback)
Buy Godless Paganism (ebook)
Pagan Coming Out Day – May 2nd
Naturalistic Paganism 