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and all I could do was pick elderberries.

Like most of the Pagan community, I knew Margot was ill, had been ill for a while. And now she is dead, gone to Tir Nan Og, passed into the West. She was best known, I suppose, for her terribly important book "Drawing Down the Moon," and for her love of vampires and for her smart reporting from NY on NPR.

I made a memorial candle and took it to our Beloved Crone Antiga's house tonight and we talked about Margot and watched the candle burn and celebrated her brightness.

Ellen Dugan's Witches Tarot has become my go to deck and that is a special privilege in my deck collection. I wasn't sure anything could top the connection I made with my Steampunk deck but then the Witches Tarot called to me in a dream (I kid you not) and now it is the deck at the top of my pile. This is a deck I flirted with for awhile before it showed up in my dream. I made googly eyes at it on Amazon and even drooled over the images on facebook but I had not committed to buying it.

Then it happened, it came to me in my dream time. Yes this deck is that powerful, it will communicate to you while you sleep. I dreamed of the cards and each one spoke to me, literally, it was a dream what can I say! The images imprinted themselves on my mind so when I work up I had no choice but to ring my local Pagan Store, Well of the Moon and ask them if they had the Witches Tarot in stock. Of course they did, right!

So now I had the physical deck in my hands, not a dream deck, not a virtual deck a real printed deck and boy oh boy was it vibrating. The energy that was radiating off this deck was so intense and I had not even taken it out of the box yet. The reveal of a deck for me is a scared thing, the way I take it out of the box, the way I pick up the cards, flip through the book and slowly and carefully look through each of the cards. And the reveal of this deck was extra special.

#PaganNewsBeagle #BreakingPaganNews

Very sad news, confirmed by NPR: Margot Adler has died of cancer.

Adler was both a mainstream journalist and a Wiccan priestess, as is acknowledged in her NPR obituary. Her groundbreaking book "Drawing Down the Moon" was the first major non-fiction book to bring the Neo-Pagan culture to widespread attention in a non-sensational way.

http://wvpublic.org/post/margot-adler-npr-journalist-three-decades-dies

Welcome to Airy Monday at the PaganNewsBeagle: Aleister Crowley, summer skywatching, Scottish petroglyphs, ancient cultures and a little-known museum beloved by Pagans in the American South. Enjoy your week!

The web is abuzz with images from the Scottish Highlands (blame "Outlander.") If you decide to go, check out these mysterious petroglyphs while you're there.

Summer is a great time to view the Milky Way. If you can't see the stars due to bright city lights, here's a wonderful slideshow of Milky Way photos at Space.com

This problem came to me from a pagan couple who are members of CoS: “The past year has been an horrendous one for my family with serious illness, financial worry, personal upsets and coping with an aging parent.  Apart from the ongoing health problems, my partner and I seem to have the problems sorted but thought we’d like to carrying out a thorough cleansing of ourselves on a psychic level.  Any suggestions?”  SBW (Wembley)

“Pride cometh before the fall” is a message I recall hearing many times as a child. The warning that, though there was the expectation that I would always do my best, it was not appropriate to express the positive glow of success and accomplishment. If one did not self-monitor humility, one faced the very real possibility of being “brought back down to size”. Messages that urge us to be humble, to keep quiet, to deflect compliments away are fairly strong. Having internalized these messages, there can definitely be a waft of distaste when we encounter boasting. We feel the wave of Ego come towards us and instinctively step back.

Over the last month, I have been listening to a wonderful telesummit about priestesses. I am also a huge fan of the radio show, Voices of the Sacred Feminine. However, as I listen to both, I sometimes find myself wondering if walking a Goddess path is also viewed as synonymous with, "believe everything, question nothing." Crystal essences, gemstone healing, soul contracts, past lives, spirit guides, astrology, the many realms and dimensions of the occult, mystical, New Age and metaphysical. Is wholesale suspension of logic required to join hands with the Goddess? Is deft management of the tarot essential to the priestess path? Must I ascribe to "enlightened" tenets like, "you are not your body," "I am a spiritual being having a spiritual experience" and "we made an agreement to do this work before we showed up in this body at this time and place" in order to move forward?

I sat at my home altar this afternoon holding an amethyst in one hand and a priestess sculpture in the other feeling entirely too practical and realistic. I looked out my window at the precious trees, the scratching chickens, the drooping flowers, and the dry, dry relentless dust of summer and some answers drifted to my mind: