One hundred years ago today, the fledgling Irish Free State established the Tailteann Games for the first time in at least eight hundred years. You may not know it from the frequent intermingling of the holiday with the Anglo-Saxon holiday of Lammas and the Elizabethan legend of John Barleycorn, but the Tailteann Games were, for…
How real is the experience of spiritual phenomena?
So, the question of “belief” in Pagan practice has been on my mind a lot in recent months. Many people have claimed to have seen, heard, or felt spiritual phenomena and experienced things not explainable by modern science. Among Pagans, the degree of belief in the existence of deities or otherworldy phenomena vary widely. Many…
Happy belated Imbolc
Happy belated Imbolc! I’m normally a bit more timely in marking my holidays, but this has been a busy week for me. This week I moved to a new apartment and that is is a big step for me. I won’t say specifically where I moved, but I can say that I’m somewhere on the…
The great Christmas letdown–consequences of a perverse marriage between spirituality and commerce
It’s fitting that both the day after Christmas and the day after New Year’s fall on a Tuesday this year. Tuesday is an appropriate day to wake up to after a long period of fantasy and gluttony disguised as the highest holy holiday of the year. Like other periods of gluttony and celebration, we wake…
The promise of the Winter Solstice
Modern humans in the Christian-dominated Western world have backloaded all of their spiritual celebration energy into the months of November and December. This can make December in particular both a time of great joy and great stress and even sadness. Most Pagans through the Wheel of the Year, spread out our seasonal celebration energy evenly…
Recreating a tattoo from the “Siberian Ice Maiden?” I’m not so sure about that.
There has been a lot of buzz about the frozen body of a 2,500 year old Pazyryk woman, known popularly as the “Siberian Ice Maiden.” She was mummified and then further well-preserved by the Siberian permafrost. The permafrost also preserved her tattoos well. One of the tattoos depicted a deer that appears to be flying….
The Samhain celebrated by the ancient Celts
Let us welcome the Celtic fire holiday of Samhain! Forms of this ancient Celtic festival have spread around the world, particularly with Halloween. Such popularity might be seen as both a blessing and a curse. The festival has changed in ways that probably would be almost unrecognizable to the ancient Celts. So in this post,…
A Samhain New Year? It actually makes sense
What if I told you that an argument could be made that the time around Samhain is one of the most natural times of year to mark the new year? This is not a point of view I’ve always held. As a solitary Pagan, for many years I celebrated the New Year at Yule because…
Wheel of the Year criticisms peak at Autumn Equinox
Due to a rather strange set of circumstances, Wheel of the Year criticisms are now part and parcel of the Autumn Equinox tradition. And I’m all for it.
Lammas is not Lughnasadh
Preparing for a semi-public Lughnasadh ritual that I’m leading motivated me to dive deeper into the holiday and its origins. I wanted to ensure that I accurately portrayed the tradition. In doing so, I found something much deeper, richer, and more robust than the generic versions of Lughnasadh/Lammas that Internet content farms often promote on…