PaganSquare


PaganSquare is a community blog space where Pagans can discuss topics relevant to the life and spiritual practice of all Pagans.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
Rockin' Religion: The Minoan Baetyl Ritual

Considering that we can't read the Linear A records the Minoans left behind, we know a surprising amount about their religious practices. Much of it is what we would expect from a Bronze Age culture in the Mediterranean and adjacent regions: processions, libations, temples, shrines. The art and archaeology tell us as much.

But some of the Minoans' religious practices were distinct from their neighbors'.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Prepare Your Own Sandalwood Oil

While vanilla and amber is perhaps my favorite oil combination, I have recently moved into a sandalwood oil phase and am delighting in its powers. Sandalwood oil, ruled by both the sun and the moon, is very suited for use in protection and healing. It can be used as a massage oil and is ideal for friendship magic in particular.

To prepare this oil, stir together six teaspoons of powdered sandalwood and two cups of a neutral oil, such as sesame or almond, in a glass bowl. Heat the mixture gently over a flame, taking care not to bring it to a boiling point. After cooling, place it in a colored glass jar and seal it securely.

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Posted by on in Paths Blogs
The Animate World is the Normal World

I happened on a scientific paper saying that believing in or sensing the spirit in an "object" was abnormal. How sad it must be to live in a world full of dead things, where everything is inanimate. Worse to evangelize it and say animist religion and fairy tales are pathological.

Animist religion is not something from the dusty past. Many modern religions have animist components, not only modern revivals of pagan and heathen religions, but continuous religions too.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Carrier Oils and Their Uses

A carrier oil is a vegetable oil that is used to dilute essential oils without diminishing the effect of the essence. It ensures that essential oils used topically are comfortable on the skin. Each essential oil carries specific vibrations that hold much curative power. These base oils support other ingredients, including essential oils, and can be a vessel for healing in and of themselves.

Apricot kernel oil, with its warmth and resilience, is especially good for women. Apricot protects love and nurtures women at every age and stage of life.

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 The Egypt Game - Wikipedia

How many of us can honestly say that we got our start in pagan ritual from a kid's book?

I can. The book was Zilpha Keatley Snyder's 1973 The Egypt Game.

In an unnamed California college town, a disused storage yard becomes, for a small group of kids, the magical Land of Egypt, “a land of mystery and mud.”

There, in imaginative half-play/half-seriousness, they enact rites for the ancient gods of the Nile.

Then unexpected things begin to happen.

 

Illuminated by Anton Raible's charming drawings, The Egypt Game tells a large-hearted tale of the lived imagination. It has everything: likeable, flawed characters, mystery, even murder. Oh, and Halloween, too: that patronal holiday of children, which no kid's book would be complete without.

In 1973, assembling a diverse cast of White, Black, Asian, and Latino characters, as Snyder does here, was pretty radical for a children's book. Even at the time, I knew it was the Way of the Future.

And then there are the rituals.

Snyder captures, better than any other author that I know, the excitement, the mystery, the sheer joyful exuberance, of creating and enacting ritual.

You read about what the Egypt Gang does, and you know that ritual matters. You think: “I could do this too.”

So you do.

 

Modesty is not a pagan virtue; truth, though, is. Fifty years on, I can say truthfully that I'm one of Pagandom's ace ritualists.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
An Oil Blend For Friendship

This blend of oils can be used for anointing candles and dabbing pulse points. It contains oils for the four directions, representing alliance, and will strengthen the bond between you and your friends. To create the blend, have a get-together with some of your best friends.

You will need the following essential oils:

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

A Tale of Sexual Awakening

 

“I'm soooo horny! I wish you were a girl!”

Two adolescent boys, sleeping in the back of the family station wagon. In retrospect, I realize that that night could potentially have been my first shared sexual experience.

Thank Goddess, it wasn't.

 

Looking back, I can see that that night in the car wasn't the first time that my cousin had orchestrated the two of us into a potentially sexual situation. Though a year younger than I, he was by far the more sexually precocious of the two.

He was also—even at the time, I knew it—self-centered and immature. He would have been a terrible partner to discover sex with.

Sheltered, trained by my parents to obedient compliance, I would almost certainly have been the loser for the experience.

 

Instead, my ignorance, and naivete, saved me—at the time, I had no idea that sex between males was even possible—and I didn't respond to my cousin's clumsy overture, if that, indeed, is what it was.

When, years later, my first dorm-room fumblings with another guy finally flowered into sex, transmuted by the alchemy of first love, they came as magical, a revelation.

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