Naturalistic Paganism
Yule (the Winter Solstice) is coming up fast, + a bunch of Online Rituals!
For many of us, this is a big Sabbat, which takes a more preparation (and if you are buying gifts, the Naturalistic Pagan Gift List here might help). Whether it’s due to cultural inertia, or kid’s expectations, the importance of Stars and this Sabbat, or whatever, it’s a big deal in our family. We are already well along with the the Solstice doors Advent practice and with decorating. If you have been doing your Winter Solstice traditions for years, if you are just starting your family and are currently building the traditions which will bring the Universe to your kids, or anything in between, I hope that the traditions and practices on this post are found to be useful, inspiring, or just comforting.
No-Nonsense Paganism: My Winter Ritual
In my first post in this series, I explained how I wanted to strip away everything non-essential from pagan ritual and build it from the ground up–literally, starting with our interaction with the earth and the other-than-human beings who we share it with.
In the second part, I talked about various occasions during the winter season which present opportunities for ritual. As pagans, we need way more ritual in our lives than just eight times a year. The shift from Daylight Savings, feeling the first bite of winter, the solstice, the first snowfall, Christmas, New Years, and the coldest day–these are all good times for ritual.
And in the last post, I talked about the process of creating a ritual, starting with listening–to nature, to our own bodies, and to our unconscious. Ritual is a conscious structure applied to an unconscious response to the more-than-human world. And I focused on using simple gestures and poetic language, inspired by the practice of deep listening.
In this part, I said I would share my own ritual for the solstice. I vacillated about sharing this, because I’m not certain about it’s usefulness to you. If you create a ritual using the process I described in the last post, it’s not going to look anything like mine. But I’m going to share it anyway, just to give you an example of one outcome of the process.
Read MoreNo-Nonsense Paganism: Creating a Ritual (part 2)
In the last part, I wrote about how to get inspiration for creating a ritual from listening to the living world around us, to our own bodies, and to our deep selves. In this part, I’ll talk about how to create a ritual with a simple gesture and some poetic words.
Read MoreNo-Nonsense Paganism: Creating a Ritual (part 1)
In the last post, I wrote about the when of doing a winter ritual, and now I want to talk about the how. Now that you’ve decided to mark some special event–whether it’s the solstice or the first snow or New Year’s Day–with ritual, how do you decide what to do? Note, the process I describe below can really apply to ritual at any time of the year.
Read MoreNo-Nonsense Paganism: Thinking About Winter Ritual
As I explained in the introduction, I want 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.
Pagan ritual should arise out of our experience of events happening in the world around us, both what is happening in the “natural” (other-than-human) world and what is happening in the human social world. The distinction between nature and culture is itself a human construct, and one that falls apart when you start looking at it closely. Over the course of this series, I will highlight some of the ways the line between human and nature gets blurred. But let’s start with nature.
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Pagan Coming Out Day – May 2nd
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