Tag: spirituality

Mmmm, Fall…

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

October and November are my months.  I spend them wanting to start a coven, start a new book, or start a bar fight.  There’s just so much electricity in the air, and it’s glorious! The catch is for about two months I feel alive, magical, and often…well…I tend to vacillate between mystical exuberance and dick-in-the-dirt depression.  

Autumn is the season of harvest, and I find myself introspecting even harder than usual – even ruminating, which is not exactly healthy.   The year is shifting from light to dark, from a time of growth to one of decrease, and it begs the question:  How’s my own harvest going?  What all did I try to grow in the light seasons, and what was the result?   It’s both a literal and figurative harvest – fruits and vegetables, hopes and dreams, plans and schemes.

As you likely know, Texas does not adhere to the traditional Western European Wheel of the Year.  I don’t consider Autumn a time of slowing down – growth slows down, yes, but the heat just broke.  The lightness in the air calls for celebration, socialization, and fun, however you define it.   My birthday being in November just adds to that call.  Also, though, I find myself wanting to start new things because with the Summer finally over it feels like I can move again.  If you’ve never lived in oppressive heat (you probably will eventually, let’s be real) you may not know how hard it is to accomplish anything – even things that don’t require being outdoors!  The energy of Texas Summer is so heavy and still that until the Autumn thunderstorms start up it’s like the sky is your own personal weighted blanket…or shroud.  

So if you find yourself feeling a strange mix of excitement and sadness, don’t worry – it’s totally natural.   Autumn is in many ways the out-breath of the year – just look at the trees.  After the heat of Summer they seem to sigh and just let go in that way that nature makes look so easy but humans always manage to complicate.  Nature urges us gently to release the months that have passed and be open to whatever is next, but you and I both know how hard that can be for us two-legged meaning-making animals.  Hence the introspection and evaluation of Autumn – before we can release the light part of the year we have to go into our memories, our lists and plans, and stand looking out over the fields for a while.

A Little Magic

Mix together some cinnamon and sugar into their own little container; add a crystal of some sort to the bottom of the container if you like and charge the mixture with feelings of comfort, strength, and discernment.  Add a pinch to your tea, coffee, or other hot beverages in the morning, and as you stir and sip, feel yourself taking in that energy.  If you remember and/or want to, think to yourself:  “May I be like the Autumn trees, who know how to let things go with ease.”

(Whoa, I actually rhymed something, has hell frozen over?)

A Few Influences

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

Just to give you an idea of what I mean when I say spiritual inspiration can come from anywhere, here are some examples from my own practice.  

1.  I use prayer beads, which of course are common to many cultures; I designed my own system, however, so it’s not a mala or a rosary.

2.  I light a flaming chalice on my altar to honor my UUism, which was one of the first ways I altered my way of doing things when I joined the church.  The chalice is a traditional Pagan symbol, but to me the church’s flaming chalice is the light of reason in the embrace of spirit–a flame in a chalice.  That’s just how I view it, though, everyone thinks of it a little differently as a symbol.

3.  I smoke cleanse my space, but usually with stick incense for practical reasons.  I have been known to use white sage but I’m not buying any more now that I understand how threatened the plant is becoming.  I’d rather the tribes who use it in their own traditions have it. There are a couple of Native-made stick incenses that I’m willing to buy but no more bundles for this Witch.

4.   The goddess that I interact with looks almost exactly like a celebrity (Sara Bareilles, please don’t tell her, lol).  I have no idea why!  I am a fan of her music but if we were going on fandom levels alone she’d be Taylor Swift. That would be truly weird.

5.   When I envison magical energy I use a modified version of a concept I found in a fantasy novel (Gael Baudino’s Strands of Starlight, which calls it the Dance; I just call it the Web of Life).  When “hooking up” to the Web (you can’t be disconnected from it but your awareness can be) I experience and imagine how, in the movie Pacific Rim, the Jager operators snap into their robots and enter the Drift (see gif below).

6.  Not long ago I was doing a meditative journey and found myself in the Forest of Spirits, which is where I sometimes meet with Persephone, but instead someone else showed up, and we’ve met a few times since.  I don’t think he’s a god, just a teacher-type entity–and at least in these meditations, he’s Dream of the Endless from The Sandman TV series on Netflix.  We talk about working magic through the visualization of the Web of Life, and I’ve learned quite a bit about, as he calls it, dreamweaving.

Full disclosure, this may just be because I want to bang Morpheus like a Tibetan temple gong, but even so, the imagery works surprisingly well for me.  

7.   Over the years I’ve used imagery from witchy and ritual moments of Supernatural, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Vampire Diaries, The Secret Circle, The Craft, Practical Magic, and Frozen 2 when casting circle or doing energy work.  When I see something neat that looks like what I’m planning to do, I try it!  If it moves me, I keep doing it.  If not, I go back to my usual methods.

8. The images of Deity on my altar include a Funko Pop! of Te’Fiti from Moana.

Okay, so I couldn’t find the Pacific Rim gif I was looking for but I think you’ll agree this one is way better than anything I could have shown you related to the post. 

Build Your Own Gods?

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

Here’s a thought that immediately gets sneered at by a great many people in a surprising number of religions:  You are under no obligation to devote yourself to “ancient” gods or archetypes.   You are free to take inspiration from your own world, here and now, and your spiritual practices can come from new sources and even…*gasp* pop culture.  

The fact is a lot of “old” deities can come with a lot of baggage and not really make sense in today’s world.  As with many things it’s a matter of perspective.

Let’s say you’re drawn to the Greek goddess Hera.  Hera comes from a patriarchal culture that frequently portrays her as a bitter, vengeful, and jealous wife, the embodiment of a dozen icky stereotypes about married (and all) women.  But when you meditate on her, or contact her in some other way, you feel her strength and power, her refusal to let her husband’s flagrant infidelity and general rapey-ness go unchallenged.  You find in her a modern feminist goddess, not a shrieking shrew.  

So which Hera is “right?”  If you find something in a deity or archetype that was not part of their ancient cultural makeup, are you still revering that same deity, or something new you’ve made up?  

Many, many women perceive Persephone as a Queen and a woman who undergoes the descent into Hades willingly, not a kidnapped little girl being traded between male gods.  Many argue that the myth existed in a more powerful form before the Greeks took it and turned her into a passive victim, but at what point does a deity stop being Greek and start being modern?  At what point are we projecting our modern values onto something born from a completely different time?  Is a sovereign Persephone valid?  

If you are not a mythological purist or a historian my answer for you is, “Sure, why not?”

It is my opinion and experience that sometimes Deity comes to you in an inconvenient or weird form.   In a lot of ways you can’t control it.  If the Goddess is reaching out to you and looks suspiciously like Scarlet Witch from the MCU, and you vibe with that, well, why not work with her in that guise?  If the way you envision magical energy is as the Force, why deny it?  If the warrior traditions and mythos of the DS-9 Klingons gets your bat’leth buzzing, who am I to say you’re just “making stuff up?”

Psst…we’re all making stuff up to one degree or another.  That’s beside the point.  The point is that the sacred will come to you in ways that make sense to both of you – even if it takes you a while to figure out why exactly, or what that particular vision means to you.  It may be meant to combat a stereotype or help a particular part of yourself evolve. 

Not every deity or teacher is going to stay with you for life.  Some come to us to show us something particular, to help us through trauma or processing an event, and then fade out so Someone Else can come in.  We’re not all dedicated to a single face of Deity or even to a single pantheon.  You may end up with a Goddess for every day of the week, or you may adore one your whole religious career.  

That said, if you find yourself drawn to the spirits or deities of an existing culture (especially a historically oppressed culture, like most Indigenous tribes the world over), PLEASE do your homework, and consider very strongly whether “borrowing” one of those concepts or beings is okay for you.  If you are a white person and you decide you just can’t bond with any deity except White Buffalo Woman you need to be prepared for the fact that you will be challenged on it – and rightly so.  

There are thousands of faces of divinity and rituals to celebrate that divinity.  There is no need to take from oppressed and closed cultures.  Even those that aren’t necessarily closed, like Hinduism, should require you to respect that culture, the history of the deity, and the way They are revered by actual living people.   There is a difference between appreciation and appropriation, but that difference relies on respect and education, which is YOUR responsibility.  Other cultures don’t owe you a pass because you “have a Native friend.”  

The cool thing is we don’t have to do any of that!  Really consider what it is you’re trying to accomplish and how you could get that same result using tools that aren’t the spiritual property of people who have been victims of genocide, those very traditions ground beneath a colonizer’s boot.  I bet you can find a way.  It doesn’t have to have come from another existing tradition to work.  It doesn’t have to be ancient to be valid.  

The benefit of our form of cheerful syncretism is that we have an opportunity to create all new practices, traditions, and even gods rather than clinging to the old.  But even if you are working with ancient deities from well-documented cultures like Greece, research and study are still paramount. 

You may have gotten the idea that I believe gods are just archetypes, but that’s definitely not true.  They are archetypes to a degree, but archetypes with centuries of history, myth, worship, and power behind them.   After all, you were inspired to connect with that deity – that inspiration came from somewhere, right?

 My experience has been that Deity is reaching back to us through those archetypes, and in that sense they are very real and often behave differently than they would if we just made them up out of nothing.  We’re tapping into something very old and often very opinionated.  Even when working with adaptations of modern and popular culture keep in mind that there is energy behind them, and often they hook into ancient archetypes and energies because that’s what humans are spiritually drawn to.  

The gods are not just faces and names and a list of correspondences.  Deity as a universal force is alive; it changes and dances like any other living thing.  

So when you reach out to the universe and she reaches back, whatever she looks or sounds like, take some time and find out everything you can about that aspect of Deity, then proceed with both mirth and reverence.  And be sure and ask her name; it’s only polite. 

Ritual Tools in My Practice

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

Most forms of Neopaganism use ritual tools to one extent or another, and a great many are similar across traditions.  The nice thing about that is once you are familiar with the standard tool set and the general outline of Pagan rituals you can attend a Circle with just about any group and at least have a pretty good idea what’s going on.

Like most baby Witches I used to be really into the tools of the Craft (Except wands.  I always felt silly using a wand.).   Altar-building was and still is one of my favorite forms of sacred art.  Taking down, cleaning, and rebuilding my altar is a very important ritual in my personal tradition (I even managed to make a video about it once!)…but now, in my 30th year as a  Witchy type (holy smokes!), there are only a handful of tools I use, and most of them are only glancingly similar to the traditional Wiccan toolkit. 

Most particularly I have left off the use the ritual blade common to most Neopagan trads, most often referred to as an athame.  I have one that I have loved for decades, with a black blade and an ebony handle, but I just don’t use it anymore, mostly because I don’t do a lot of full-out ritual.  I work in my bedroom, in a corner where my altar is a folding desk (in deference to my bad back and knees); I don’t usually cast a Circle any bigger than where I’m sitting.  I can do that just fine without waving a knife around. 

To me an athame is a fantastic tool for groups – it helps them focus energy, visualize the Circle, and be aware of the dual nature of power and responsibility.  But as I practice 99% solitary my old pointy friend is currently wrapped up in my box full of old ritual cords, pendants, and other objects I’ve gathered on my spiritual travels.

I only have a few tools that I really use.  What I do have a lot of are pretties – Goddess statues, including my collection of small figures that I call my Wee-ities; natural objects; altar cloths I change out seasonally (or whenever I feel like it), symbols of my particular brand of divinity; divinatory toys and accoutrements; and a framed image of Kore/Persephone by Anette Pirso that I turn depending on the season. 

My Current Tool Lineup

Prayer Beads – I have two sets that I use, one for the darker half of the year and one for the lighter, although sometimes I just grab the strand that calls to me at the time.  I made one and purchased the other online.  They’re a powerful meditative tool for me and I have a number of prayer cycles, gathas, and mantra-type recitations that I use.   I loosely based the original design of my handmade set on the Catholic Rosary – it has different sized/styled beads and several divisions to make counting easier rather than being a strand of all the same size like many malas.  They’re also not loops – I don’t wear them or anything like that – just a straight line.

Chalice – but not one for drinking out of.  It has a candle in it which I light every time I sit down at my altar (and sometimes just for comfort).  The flaming chalice is the primary symbol of Unitarian Universalism.   It has different meanings to different people; I think of it as the light of justice and knowledge held in the palm of the Goddess (since the chalice usually is treated as a feminine tool in the Craft), and looped in by diversity.  (The two circles represented the Unitarians merging with the Universalists.)

I have two on my altar right now:  One that my church gave me when I became a member, and a vintage one I bought that is the centerpiece of the altar.  I do sometimes drink things in ritual but I’ll bring in a different vessel for that.

Pentacle – Mine is a flat wooden disk with the symbol painted on along with representations of the Elements and the Triple Moon.  I made it myself from a plain wood piece.  I use it primarily as a focus during spellwork; I place whatever I’m charging onto it and channel energy into the object through the pentacle.  I also consider it the anchor point of my Circle, like its center of gravity.

Incense Burner – I am not a fan of charcoal tablet incense; it’s very evocative but it’s also high maintenance.  I prefer sticks most of the time and have a small plant pot full of sand into which I stick a whole mess of sticks in different scents that I can just spark up whenever I want just to make the room smell and feel good.  I also have a variety of purpose-made sticks for magical work.

Divinatory Tool – Most often I keep my Light Seer’s Tarot near to hand but sometimes I switch it out for the Shadowscapes deck.  

Candles – There is a novena candle on either side of my altar that’s really just there for light.  Those along with the light in the chalice are usually plenty to see by.

Dragon –  The unsung hero of Pagan life:  The long-necked lighter.  I have one that hangs on the wall next to my altar at all times.

Bell – A dear friend gave me a gorgeous metal bell many years ago that has the loveliest tone; whenever I’m doing something a bit more formal or am cleansing my altar I hold the bell over the surface and ring it once.  That baby vibrates energy like nobody’s business!

And that’s pretty much it aside from whatever magical or seasonal accoutrements I have around the altar.   The decorative items are very important in their own right; I can change the whole mood of my room and myself just by shifting the colors or seasonal objects.  I’m always fiddling about with what’s there.

I suppose I should include my chair as a vital ritual tool since it holds the most important part of all:  My big ol’ Witchy booty.   After all, tools are only as good as the person using them.  A stick is just a stick until you choose to dedicate it as a wand.  

And here’s the video I made a couple of years ago showing all my altar stuff. It looks a bit different now but the layout is still the same.

Devotional Witchcraft 101, Part 2 – To Whom Do I Pray?

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

Strap in, this is gonna get a little wordy.  I’m not going to cut too much though because this is important.

I used to be your bog-standard Wiccan duotheist – God and Goddess, Moon and Sun, all that stuff.  Before that, I spent time as what we used to call Dianic (I have no idea if that’s still the term) meaning I only revered the Goddess.  I was influenced by a series of novels that still affect my spirituality today (The Strands of Starlight series by Gael Baudino). 

By the time I was working in a coven I’d returned to duotheism, and for a long time had a relationship with a particular face of the God, whom I called Jeff (just for expediency among humans since He didn’t really have a name).   I also had a yearlong experience with a dark face of the Goddess that started out amazing but ended very badly.  

When I wrote The Circle Within I espoused a form of panentheism, although I didn’t know the word yet (people were very happy to tell me after the book was published, lol).  I described it as the belief that Deity is within the universe as well as outside it – that everything is Deity, that nothing can be disconnected from Them because we They are us and everything beyond us. 

In the years leading up to my return to Paganism and my adoption of Unitarian Universalism, I went through all the usual questions and doubts one does when one is a thoughtful believer in a dark decade of the soul.  Is God good?    How do you account for suffering?  Do we really have free will? And so on.  I wasn’t satisfied with any of the answers, let alone how they would apply to duotheist Paganism (which was quickly distilling back down into something more like monotheism).

Then, quite unexpectedly, thanks to my UU minister, I ran headfirst into Process Theology, and realized that, holy shit, it has a name!

I won’t go too deeply into the subject as it would become very dry very quickly, but I have come up with my own take on it that adds in more personal stuff I’ve experienced.  I’m still exploring the entirety of process theology, but the basic concepts have helped me to crystallize a lot of what I already felt about how the sacred works.

The essence is this:  Deity is a verb more than they’re a noun.  Revelation and creation are continuous, and that Web I mentioned in the post about “what is magic” – the Web that is all possibilities and probabilities – is the Goddess’s being (Or God, or Goddess/God, whatever lights your candle).  Since She is that Web, and the Web is in constant flux, that means deity also evolves.  It does so through us and through creation.  In a universe like this we are subject to a lot of circumstances based on our lives intersecting with others, but all beings have some creative freedom or free will.  We simply don’t act in a vacuum where free will is so cut-and-dried.

Deity in my way of thinking has a different character from the mainstream  – She is by nature benevolent, but not omnipotent or perfect.  Omnipresent, and omniscient more or less, yes, but as Her creation is a process that never ends, that means She is subject to the Web as much as we are.   This helps me settle the question of whether or not God is good – to me, I’ve always sensed Her as loving, even if it’s not always pretty, but with the evil in the world I couldn’t reconcile Her nature with reality.  Looking at it from this angle I can.

She knows everything that is happening in the Web at every moment, including the millions of possible outcomes for our choices, but because we have freedom, She can’t know which of those possibilities we will choose until we choose them. 

She may not be omnipotent, but she’s still pretty damn potent – Deity works primarily through influence, showing us beauty and joy and love and the value of compassion to encourage us to choose those paths, rather than thundering down domination or intimidation.  She doesn’t force us to do anything.  Therefore the answer to “God, why do you allow suffering to exist?” is, “Well…why do you?”  Humanity didn’t wake up one day and decide the world should be like this.  Millions of choices got us here.  That same divine creative freedom is the only thing that can save us.  

There is an element of randomness at work in things as well; in most cases you can trace how something happened back through the choices of the people connected to it, but sometimes rocks fall and everyone dies.  The chain of events that led those rocks to fall is far too long or distant for us to see, but She sees.  There is causality for everything, but not necessarily inherent meaning.  Humans are the meaning-makers, so it’s our job to take what happens in our lives and make it mean something to us.

All of this is very brain-intensive, and that may lead you to think my relationship with the Eternal Unfolding is something purely intellectual, but you’d be mistaken.  She speaks and moves through everything that exists and through all our potential and creativity.  We can work together to shift the waking world in ways that are positive and benefit myself and others.  

Deity itself is formless, genderless, faceless; but They are more than happy to enter into symbols and images humans have created so that we can relate to it.  To my view that means your god could be YWVH or Thor or Quan Yin or David Bowie  or Dream of the Endless or all of those at once; they all stand for the same force, and act kind of like an icon in that the picture you click on connects you to something a lot bigger.

Relationship is key in process philosophy and theology.  We exist in a web, remember, not each dangling at the end of a single string.   In this sense God is also in how we treat each other, how we interact, and how we codepend.  All beings live in relationship; that includes humans and nonhumans.   Everyone contributes to the Web and makes small changes with their lives that can ripple into big changes.  Everyone is inherently worthy and of value.

I’m sure there are plenty of nice theological arguments against the way I see things, but honestly?  I don’t give a damn.  I’m learning as I go, experimenting and experiencing.  This way of looking at Deity and the universe makes sense to me and to my spirit.  I feel like if it’s a positive influence on my life and helps me to grow, who the hell cares if God is one or two or the Seven Dwarfs? In the end, someone’s belief about God is less important to the larger world as someone’s behavior based on what their God persuades them to do.  

She wants to see you be brave.

As for my Goddess?  She is essentially dual – one dark half, one light, each governing different times of year.  The two facets bleed into each other quite a bit. There’s not a hard division.  I separate the two just to give me a more useful seasonal calendar.  Most of the time we meet in a forest during either a Full or New Moon, and in that place the sky swirls around like the Aurora Borealis combined with Van Gogh’s The Starry Night.  What does She look like?  Honestly? Kind of like Sara Bareilles.  

If this sounds a lot like the Persephone in the Shadow World series, well…it should.  The books and my life draw from each other.  The Web, the Forest of Spirits…yeah, that’s all “real.”  Did I make it up?  Hell yeah I did.  But as I was getting into the symbolism in the novels, those images began to bleed over into my practice, and finally I realized that She had been there all along, waiting for me to put it all together.  The “real” one isn’t a vampire goddess, of course, but hey, Nobody’s perfect.

Why the V-Word?

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan
Ahimsa, the Sanskrit word for “non-harming”

People often wonder why, given the social stigma associated with the word “vegan,” I wouldn’t just call myself “plant-based,” which is apparently way more palatable to the mainstream.

There are several answers to this, the first one being, I am not all that interested in being palatable. I am interested in living according to my values. If my being vegan upsets you, well, there’s the “back” button.

The second answer is that to me, “plant-based” is a diet.  It’s a fad, to be perfectly honest, like Keto or Paleo or whatever the hell the newest “eat all the bacon you want” thing is, just in a different direction. A large percentage of people who call themselves “plant based” are doing so merely to lose weight.

This irritates me mightily because we know diets don’t work, and I can tell you firsthand that eating only plant foods does not guarantee any particular health outcome (there’s no meat in a French fry). So when people decide that their plant-based diet is way too hard because it doesn’t offer enough pleasure or satisfaction (which I get in spades from non-diet vegan food, by the way), they quit, often becoming the dreaded “ex-vegan” who evangelizes against the entire lifestyle despite never having really lived it.  Basically, dieters don’t make good lifelong vegans because dieting is bullshit, and a diet of bullshit is only sustainable long-term for flies, mushrooms, and people who watch Fox News.

Important side note: Many people who have issues with eating a vegan diet forget that you still have to eat enough. If your overall caloric intake has dropped of course you’re going to feel like hell! EAT! If you eat a varied diet with sufficient calories, it will be very difficult for you to become medically deficient in anything, especially protein.  When was the last time you heard someone mention the actual medical term for the condition caused by protein deficiency?**

That brings me back to my overall point:  Veganism is not just a diet.  It encompasses far, far more than what you eat.  The definition of veganism, as offered by The Vegan Society (whose leadership actually coined the term “vegan”), is,

Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.  [italics are mine]

When I say I’m a vegan what I mean is that I try to follow this definition, not just that I don’t eat meat, dairy, or eggs. I also practice compassionate consumerism when it comes to household products, clothing, shoes, accessories, body care, and more.

There are of course areas I don’t have much control over. No sane vegan would tell people to stop taking their antidepressants because they might have animal products in them – or because they were almost certainly tested on animals.  (If anyone ever tells you to do this, run away.)  Note that the definition says, “as far as is possible and practicable.”  If I don’t take my meds, I may commit suicide one day, which means I can no longer advocate for animals (or the environment or minorities or anyone else), so I choose to stay mentally healthy and try to make the world a more compassionate place.

There is NO SUCH THING as 100% vegan. It’s just not possible. At some point you’re gonna step on a bug.  We live by consuming living things; that’s just how being alive works.  Vegans are not ignorant of this fact.  We make an informed choice to cause the least harm we can in every way we can…and we do the best we can. Sometimes we fall short. Humans do.

Thus, I personally eschew the term “plant-based eater” because it’s a one-dimensional phrase, typically bandied about by fatphobic dieters, that only covers one part of my vegan practice. 

Yes, I consider it a practice, and a vital spiritual one at that. I chose to call it that because it reminds me that, as with any other kind of practice, perfection is not attainable and that’s okay; I can only keep doing better than the day before.  It also reminds me that these choices are as much a part of my spirituality as any other. My meditation practice, devotional practice, divinatory practice, and vegan practice are all strands in my wee spiritual web. They all inform each other and in many ways depend upon each other.

** kwashiorkor

My Book of Shadows, v. 25 (or so)

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

Part 3 in my series about the spiritual toys and tools that have remained a part of my practice (or are part of it again, or have become important to me since I’ve started getting my groove back).

One of the things that I always loved about Wicca and its relatives was the idea of a Book of Shadows.

For those unaware, a BoS can be a lot of things to a lot of people. In some traditions the material in it is handed down upon initiation, and is either passed down verbatim or added to by the practitioner. In some traditions the whole thing is your own to create or curate. Some people use it as a journal of rituals, magical work, and divination; others use it strictly as a “cookbook” where they write down spells and rituals, both of their own composition and those copied from books or online. Some people keep two books, one a cookbook and one a journal.

A lot of people use some sort of handmade or beautiful bound book; some use a computer file. I’ve seen some that are sort of both nowadays that you can keep on your tablet but make look like a book using Goodnotes or another notes app. You young’uns and your technomancy!

There’s no right or wrong when it comes to a BoS (which some call a grimoire, others using one term for a journal and one for a spellbook) I’ve had several over the course of my magical career and the only kind I never could really warm up to was the digital variety. Keeping a BoS appeals to my love of pretty notebooks and journaling supplies. My last one was a gorgeous thin book of handmade paper I got at a local bookshop; I wrote in it all by hand, did all the borders and doodles, and nearly filled it up before it became obsolete for my practice.

Okay, there’s ONE “wrong” in a BoS, and that is not crediting your sources. Add where you got a ritual or poem somewhere on the page, both because it’s the ethical thing to do, and so that you can find it again if something happens to your book!

Last year I started a new one. I dubbed it my Book of Moonlight and Shadows, as the duality of shadow and light are very important to my practice, and have combined illustrations, poetry, prayers, and records of Tarot readings so far. I’m absolutely in love with the overall style I have going, so I wanted to show off a few pages here. Notice that you can see the new knob I got for my altar drawer to replace the boring wood one it came with.

Supplies used will be linked at the bottom if you wish to check them out.

An A5 dot grid journal from Archer and Olive; note all the fuzzies on the cover. Their notebooks are gorgeous and super high quality (the pages are 160gsm) but the fabric on the covers attracts dust and hair like you wouldn’t believe. I have cleaned it with a wad of tape and gotten most of the hair off, but living with four cats, it’s kind of a doomed enterprise. Oh, and the edges of the pages are silver-gilded! It’s soooo lovely.
The cover page. The color in these pics is weird, even after white balancing, but note that the paper in A&O notebooks is bright white. The drawing is in ink and colored pencil.
I am primarily posting the Index page to show that I screwed it up and had to patch over it. Any time I get a nice notebook I remove one of the pages to use for patching, as it’s way less distracting than correction tape (especially if your pages aren’t bright white). Also I love the berry bramble border.
A sort of dedication page, featuring a Rumi poem I love that I first heard at church last year. We sing it as a round. I get it stuck in my head all the time!
Even though I don’t celebrate most of the NeoPagan Sabbats (see my post on Beltaine), I love having a Wheel of the Year image in my BoS, and I’m extra proud of how this one came out. I intend to add to the page, filling in the blank spaces with notes on the seasons and adding holidays I *do* celebrate.
Another spread I’m really proud of. These are prayers that I use often, either as a whole or one section at a time, often with my beads. The left side are prayers to Theia, my Goddess of Starlight and Moonlight; and the right is to Persephone, Goddess of Shadow .
The left-hand page is a draft, really, of the verses that would end up in the blog post about breathing prayers; the right is the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism, with the logo of my church in the bottom corner. (I just realized I didn’t write the origin of the Principles on the page – look at me violating my own rule! I will fix that immediately.)
Lastly, one of the more utilitarian page spreads – Moon phase lore on one side and number lore (for Tarot cards mostly) on the other.

Not pictured are images of Tarot readings, as those are extra personal. Those pages utilize a lot more washi tape and glued-in images. I’m considering moving my divinatory records to my bullet journal and making my planner much Witchier, in the same vein as Jessica Starr does in this video:

If you’re interested in any of the supplies I used, here are some links. They are not affiliate links and I receive no compensation, I just wanted to share things I enjoy using.

All You Can Do is Breathe

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

Lately I’ve watched so many people experience something I know all too well from life with Bipolar II, though on a more condensed timeline than I’m used to:

You have a few days where you feel pretty okay. You’re productive, calm, can take most things in stride. The pandemic can’t last forever; there are good things to look forward to. You feel you’re adapting as well as can be expected. Life is weird as heck but you’re working with it.

Then you have one day (maybe two) where you can’t get out of bed. You don’t get anything done. You might just sleep. Everything is too much, especially the outside world…and the idea of ever leaving quarantine is almost as terrifying as the idea of it lasting a week longer. I saw someone on Twitter call these days the Hell Zone.

If this is happening to you, I am so sorry. Nobody should have to visit the Hell Zone, ever. It absolutely sucks that the one thing we can all do to make a positive impact out there – stay the heck home – is also a big contributing factor to depression!

If you pay any attention to the outside world at all the onslaught of uncertainty, outrage, and fear is relentless. Our poor neurotransmitters were not prepared for this. Fight-or-flight is one thing; “Scream impotently at the TV or cry on the toilet, repeat for three months” is another.

Some days, all you can do is breathe, and it turns out, that can be a huge help.

Breath work is almost instantly calming. Why? Well, think of how an animal breathes when she’s freaking out or just escaped a predator. Short breaths, shallow, high in the chest. Now think about how you breathe most of the time – for Americans it tends to be short breaths high in the chest. The way we breathe can put us in a constant low-level OMG-WTF-RUN! state.

The remedy is to breathe deep from your belly, getting your diaphragm involved, and let your chest be the last thing that fills up with air. Deep, slow breaths tell your body and brain that the threat has passed and you can let go of that pesky cortisol.

Working with my breath is fundamental to my spiritual practice. I learned the basic technique that I use courtesy of certified Zen badass Thich Nhat Hanh; in his writing he calls it “mindfulness verses.”

All you have to do is, as you inhale down to your belly, mentally recite “Breathing in, I…” followed by what you’d like to have happen or what you’re doing; then as you exhale at the same speed, think, “Breathing out, I…”

The simplest version:

“Breathing in, I know I am breathing in;
Breathing out, I know I am breathing out.”

Then you can up the stakes and invoke the state you want:

“Breathing in, I feel calm;
Breathing out, I feel safe.”

And so on. The important thing is that you’re bringing your attention to the act of breathing as well as the feeling you want to create within yourself. Timing chants or prayers with the breath is an easy way to intensify their effects on your mind and body as well as draw up more energy to put toward your goal.

I recently happened across a prayer that was a more Christianized version of Zen mindfulness verses; it was spoken to God, and it connected the in-breath with a positive attribute of the Almighty and the out-breath with something the practitioner wanted to give up to Him. I liked the idea, so I created one of my own, and I thought I would share it with you.

Take this idea and use it, adapt the wording to your own beliefs; take out “Your” if you’d rather not deal with personified Deity at all. But do give this kind of easy but powerful practice a try next time you feel unmoored, are having a Hell Zone Day, or just want to pause a moment and allow yourself to pause and reflect.

Meditation, Prayer, and Magic (Oh My)

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

Let’s take a moment to talk about three concepts that are thrown around a lot in spiritual discourse but tend to mean different things to different people: Meditation, prayer, and magic.

I’m not here to give you the definitive word, but I would like to explain how I view them so you’ll have a sense of where I’m coming from, and perhaps it will spark off thoughts of how they fit together, or don’t, in your own practice. In mine, they don’t really have definitions so much as characteristics, and those characteristics are…pretty fuzzy around the edges.

Meditation

In my practice there are two basic kinds of meditation:

  1. Plain old sitting, which may be breathwork or what I refer to in my head as The Drift. I plug into the current of the Universe and just let that current move through me, like docking with the Mother Ship.
  2. Visualization or “guided” meditation, which I put in quotes because most of the time I’m guiding myself. In these meditations my mind is more active, following a path. I often use this kind of meditation to relax at the beginning of a session by visualizing energy flowing either up or down through my body one part at a time; I also use visualizations such as a path through the forest in order to commune with Deity.

The defining trait of both of these is that they are receptive in nature. I meditation am the radio, not the microphone.

Prayer

Prayer is the other end of the communication spectrum; in prayer I am reaching out to God/Goddess. I express something, whether gratitude, a plea for help, and so forth. As Anne Lamott says, the three most essential prayers are “Help!” “Thanks!” and “Wow!”

Prayer can happen at any time, and in a lot of forms. I might be sitting on my bed going over the things I’m glad of, or sitting in my car at a stop light panting after someone nearly t-bones me. I might have walked outside for the first time in days, felt the sun on my skin, smelled jasmine in the air, and just had to say “Oh heck yeah!” to the Universe. I might be drawing or painting or dancing. What matters is I am expressing an emotion or need, whether I hope for a reply or not.

(It is my learned opinion (as in learned the hard way) that all prayers are answered, just not necessarily with a “Yes,” and not necessarily right away, or in English. Sometimes the conversation of prayer is two-way. Sometimes it still feels like shouting into a void – but I do it anyway, because if nothing else, it makes me feel better.)

Magic

The definition most people give for magic(k) is that old Crowleyan one that goes something like “the art of causing change in accordance with the will.”

What does that mean? Well, in my own practice, magic is the creative art of tapping into the energy of probability in order to influence events.

Okay, well what the heck does that mean?

If you’re not familiar with the magical arts you might have this idea that we’re out here believing we’re Harry Potter or some shit, but it’s important to know that actual magic is NOT the same as fantasy sorcery. It’s not about waving a wand and POOF! your desire appears; magic in the real world works with probability and within the realm of actual physics (which admittedly is rather magical). Splendid alterations of natural law have been known to happen but in general we expect something a bit more…subtle.

Magic won’t make you instantly rich (usually), which is the judgment people often hurl at magic workers: “Oh yeah, if it’s real, why aren’t you rich?” Well, what I’m doing in a spell is increasing the odds in favor of my desired outcome, not producing an outcome out of nowhere. How well it works depends on how much probability is pushing back against me.

For example, let’s say I want a particular tangerine-tinted buffoon to be eaten by wolves and shat out over a cliff. No matter how much oomph I put into a spell for this, there is way more stacked up against that happening. He’d have to be somewhere wolves are found, left unattended by his sitters; the wolves would have to want to eat him, and then do so without being fatally poisoned. I’d also be working against the will of a lot of very silly people who for some reason don’t want him to be eaten by wolves and shat out over a cliff. There’s a lot in the way.

Also, magic works best when it doesn’t work alone. If you do a spell to get a job but then don’t apply for any jobs, the probability of you actually landing a job is pretty damn low. Sure, an offer could come out of the blue, but you’d be far more likely to get an offer if you polished your resume, researched the market, sent out applications, worked on improving any rusty skills involved, and did a job spell. Magic is a tool to achieve change, and as an added edge can make all the difference – it pushes on the boulder, but if the boulder isn’t already aimed downhill, it probably won’t roll as far as you’d like.

The takeaway is that in my practice meditation, prayer, and magic often work interdependently:

I may meditate on the question of what it is I need in my life, trying to nail down what’s underneath my desire for a million-dollar book contract; I might pray for guidance (which includes reading Tarot on the subject, more on that later as well) or find that the meditation/prayer combo gives me the insight I need to not even feel magic is necessary this time. If I then do a spell for my desire, I might meditate afterward to allow any wisdom on the matter to come into my mind or out of my subconscious.

Like I said, the boundaries are fuzzy. I think they’re pretty fuzzy for a lot of people. In practice, I don’t usually think of them as separate actions, but just part of my spiritual work as a whole.

There are a lot of nuances to unpack in the concept of magic and spellwork, which I’ll do in a post coming up very soon.

The Heretic’s Beltane

Posted on by Dianne Sylvan

A NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN: I am about to put forth some no-doubt unpopular opinions about the religion of my 20s, and I want to make it clear that this is based on MY experience. I should not be considered an authority on Wicca, especially since it’s been a decade since I called myself one and I am not involved in the Pagan Community at all. I am absolutely sure Wicca has evolved since my time; I am basing this on my life mostly in the 00s, starting in the period of 1990s Pop-Wicca when Silver RavenWolf’s “Teen Witch Kit” caused so much pearl-clutching. I am not trying to be an iconoclast. I’m just trying to be true to what I’ve lived, in the hope that if you’re in a similar place you won’t feel alone. That said:

This past weekend brought the Pagan festival of Beltane, and I kept thinking, “I should write something about this.” But then I kept thinking, “I don’t want to write about a holiday I don’t like!”

That’s right, folks, allow me to introduce myself, a Pagan who hates Beltane.

If you don’t already know, Beltane is considered one of the high holidays, or Sabbats, of many NeoPagan traditions, including Wicca, which I practiced for well over a decade. It is a “cross-quarter” day that falls midway between equinox and solstice; Samhain, aka Halloween, is another. In fact Samhain and Beltane are the two biggest festival dates, possibly because they fall during times of the year when big festivals outdoors are be doable without heat stroke or frostbite.

That was problem one, I found – in a lot of places, including Western Europe where Wiccan festivals were codified as such, May is still part of Spring. Most of the natural symbolism and iconography didn’t really apply here in Texas where it is already 90 on May 1 and Spring is basically in the rearview mirror. Before I even got to the mythology involved I had to change out the correspondences.

Really though, Beltane was a fertility festival. Pagan or not you’ve surely seen a Maypole in you time, but you might not have realized it is, essentially, a giant beribboned dick that everyone dances around – symbolic phallus worship.

Oddly enough I did not find this practice appealing.

Nor have I ever been into the hyperfocus on sex – specifically heterosexual coitus – as this grand sacred end-all-be-all in my religion. My experience was that Wicca in general was way too sexualized, and the guiding myth by which the Goddess gave birth to the God and then…I’m not sure how it worked but She basically waited until He was grown, shagged Him, then bore Him again the next year…I found intensely distasteful, particularly through the lens of my own personal history. I was told “it’s just a story,” but aren’t the stories we tell about Deity kind of important? Don’t those concepts and symbols work their way into the bedrock of our belief system? If it’s “just a story,” why not stay “Christian” but say it’s not important whether Jesus was crucified or not, let’s just say he wasn’t, and died at 80 surrounded by fat grandchildren.

The ideal put forth by Wiccans was that the religion is feminist, or at least non-masculinist, but if you looked at the specific traditions established by Gerald Gardner, and many traditional lines formed from his ideas, it’s a little difficult to find that in practice. The emphasis was on heteronormative coupling – lots of it – and since Gardner was a naturist there was a lot of ritual nudity as “a sign that you are truly free.” The figure of the High Priestess was almost always depicted as a traditionally beautiful thin white woman who really, really loved the Great Rite.

Now, I learned very quickly that a lot of what considered itself Wiccan (including myself most of those years) only partly adhered to its original rituals. A lot of what I encountered was really more of a blend of Wiccan concepts with more feminist ideals, sometimes to the extreme of cutting out the God altogether. People still clung to the Wiccan label because that was what was popularized, and it gave groups and solitaires an identity to hang on to when the rest of the world was hostile toward any NonChristian belief structure.

But even with the most Goddess-heavy groups, the emphasis on female biology as her defining characteristic (Maiden, Mother, Crone – these are all based on stereotypically “feminine” stages of biological development) still placed limits, still established a cishet focus that at heart excluded anyone who wasn’t born with female organs or whose life stages did not progress according to the timeline, so, in yet another religion, the idea that humans are made in God’s image (or She in ours) did not apply to all women.

As you can tell I am not a fan of trans-exclusionary radical feminists. I don’t want to hear from them, like ever, thanks.

In my mind, religion is what you do with other people, and spirituality is what you do with God; in a lot of ways hanging onto a Wiccan identity was for me a way to connect with others even though my own practice and connection with Deity and nature bore very little resemblance and used maybe 40% of the rituals “everyone else” did.

I wrote an entire book about, let’s be honest, practicing Wicca without necessarily practicing all of Wicca. I really got into the idea that the religion was evolving and could be what we made of it. (I still believe this and I hope it has continued to evolve in my absence.) I also tried creating my own tradition, you might remember, and the coven I belonged to definitely had its own way of doing things that was…sort of Wiccan? But even before my crisis of faith and the decade of nothing that followed, I was already realizing that there’s only so far you can stretch a label before it tears apart.

One of the few really fun things about jettisoning the label was that I could drop the pretense that I was at all interested in many of the Sabbats. To be honest the only ones I celebrated on my own were the Equinoxes, Mabon and Ostara; I’m not really sure why those two in particular appealed to me more than the others, but they remain my favorites. If I were to hazard a guess I’d say that the liminality of them attracted me – they are each a precipice, a transition moment between the light and dark halves of the year, and my relationship with Deity was always and still remains centered around the concept of a Light and Dark face to Her/Him, corresponding with those halves.

The interplay of light and darkness is kind of my jam. I’m a double Scorpio with lifelong cyclical depression. I guess I was predisposed.

I could, if I wanted, try to reclaim Beltane for myself. That’s certainly something I would recommend exploring to anyone who has fallen out of love with their religious practices – dig down into the meaning of the holiday, all the myths involved, all the usual symbols, and consider ways in which the holiday might apply to your own life and beliefs. Beltane is a day of rising action, of burgeoning energy as the Light part of the year really gets going. It’s about tending those seeds planted earlier in the year and helping them grow and grow. It’s a waxing quarter Moon, a time of getting your ass moving.

It’s also a good time to look at the things you wanted to do with your year and re-evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. If that habit you tried to start back around Ostara didn’t get anywhere (six weeks being a typical fatigue time for humans when it comes to change, and the Sabbats each being six weeks apart), see if there’s a different way to look at it, a different method. It’s a time to course-correct after a few moments of fiery honesty with yourself.

Now, Beltane in the time of COVID-19 is a bit different. If you’re like me all the plans you made for 2020 have kind of fallen to shit in the last couple of months, and you’re at loose ends, or coming unraveled entirely. This whole societal experience has shown a lot of people what’s important and what isn’t; it might be a good time to make that list for yourself, and make some decisions about what you really, truly want to invest yourself in going forward and what really wasn’t that important to begin with.

For me, remaking Beltane to suit myself is one of those unimportant things. There may come a year when I’m ready to take on that challenge, but for now, I’m content to celebrate the Sabbats I really love, and say “Happy Beltane” to those who observe it, “Happy May Day” to those who don’t, and “I hope you and those you love are safe and well” to everyone reading this, may all manner of things be well.