Naturalistic Paganism
Happy Summer Thermstice/Lammas!
Celebrations
Heat! Productivity! Success! Growing Darkness! These and many other themes join with the baking of bread and early harvest celebrations of Lunasa. What could better exemplify heat and productivity than the casting of molten metal into Atheopagan medallions? Check it out!
The growing darkness has already given us wonderful views of Comet Neowise. Though the comet is effectively gone, the Perseid meteor shower is right around the corner, August 11-14.
As a special Lunasa treat, check out this Lammas music from Bart Everson. It could be part of a ritual, solitary observation, or just having around now.
Some of the ways many of us are celebrating were recently published. For my family, celebrations with our annual Lunasa blueberry harvest and evening ritual will be today! We are also going on a wilderness quest for the glowing stones of awe – Yooperlites!
For some of us, the celebrations will be later this week – the actual midpoint between the Solstice and the Equinox is August 7th. However you are celebrating (including Imbolc celebrations in the Southern Hemisphere), may your be celebration be blessed.
The Summer Cross-Quarter (Summer Thermstice) Approaches!
Warm weather makes for pleasant stargazing, and the universe this year has already given us Comet Neowise (which is still barely visible but now has dropped to dimmer than 4th magnitude). Also, this year will give us the best Perseid show for the past few years coming right up on August 12th (more on that soon)! In the Northern Hemisphere, the Autumn cross-quarter or Summer Thermstice is celebrated on August 1 as Lughnasadh/Lammas/Lunasa. How will you be celebrating it? Astronomically, the event occurs on August 6th for those in the United States, but at that moment it will already be August 7th UTC. Read More
Comet Neowise! You can go and see it! [Starstuff, Contemplating]
For many of our Ancestors, the ghostly apparition of a comet hanging still in the night sky was a sign of fear and dread, a portent of impending doom. How fitting this unexpected, retrograde comet appears not just during the first pandemic in a century, but also when that pandemic is surging for many of us.
Read More
The Dying God: Learning to Die in the Anthropocene
This essay was first published at Gods & Radicals.
Our civilization is rushing toward its inevitable end. And it’s going to take out a big part of the biosphere with it. Cap and trade is not going to save us. Renewable energy is not going to save us. Nuclear energy is not going to save us. Carbon capture is not going to save use. The politicians are not going to save us. The scientists are not going to save us. The activists are not going to save us.
We are not going to be saved.
For so many reasons, we are going to fail … and fail badly.
Once we come to terms with that fact, the question becomes …
SO WHAT DO WE DO NOW?
Read MoreTripping With the Gods – On Entheogenic Spirituality:, (Part 3 of 5) by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. [The Dionysian Naturalist]
THE PHARMACRATIC INQUISITION
The emergence of patriarchy in the Neolithic era led to several related social structural changes which radically altered the role and function that mind-altering plants played in societies. The two most central of these are (1) the State and (2) Patriarchal monotheism (e.g. Christianity). The lethal combination of patriarchal Church and State proved deadly for shamanistic cultures because out of them emerge “the Pharmacratic Inquisition”—a severely violent prohibitionist campaign of terror.
Buy Godless Paganism (paperback)
Buy Godless Paganism (ebook)
Pagan Coming Out Day – May 2nd
Naturalistic Paganism 