In today's Watery Wednesday community news, we've got news that focuses on our many intertwining communities: an upcoming divination conference; The Wild Hunt's editor Heather Greene; Paganicon announces its headliner for 2015; a Witches' memorial; and a magickal woodland handfasting. Enjoy your day!
An upcoming conference in New York promises to explore the mysteries of divination. Check out all the details.
Samhain is a time to see, not just with your eyes, but with your mind and heart. It's traditional to make predictions at this turn of the wheel (it is the New Year, after-all), and there are lots of tools that can help us do this. One of my favorites is a scrying mirror. You can make a scrying mirror out of things that are probably in your home right now--save for the peacock feathers. You will need:
Coffee can
Pencil
Scissors
Glue
Cardboard
Black Paper (If you have no black paper, you can paint the cardboard black once it has been cut--see directions below. Use as many coats as you need to get a solid color. Allow each coat of paint to dry before applying the next.)
Cling film plastic wrap
Peacock Feathers (Besides looking pretty, the tips of peacock feathers look--and function--like eyes, and since this tool is going to help you “see" in a different way, they will make a great frame for the mirror.)
Symbols, both ancient and contemporary, can be a treasure trove for creating fresh divination positions for layouts. Even symbolic shapes have informed tried-and-true spreads; the Celtic Cross and Horseshoe Spreads spring to mind.
A few months ago, my fellow blogger Deborah Blake wrote about establishing a daily divination practice, something which I have have been doing, first with my personal coin divination system and more recently by using the Lymerian oracle. Recently, in response to the question of, "What will today bring me?" I drew kappa, which means, according to the translation of Apollonius Sophistes, "To fight with the waves is difficult; endure, friend."
Usually that one doesn't give me a super-good feeling.
Sometimes I run into a situation with a client where the answer simply isn't making itself known. When that happens, I turn to the clarification card technique.
This isn't something I developed. I learned it a long time ago from a beautiful witch in Toledo. Lady Lhianna taught me that sometimes
Our topic this time is creativity and what springs forth. Well, that’s my loose interpretation of our Blog Wrangler’s theme. Joanne Sprott charged all of the Tarot Blog hoppers to discuss creativity.
Some months ago I decided to set aside years to skepticism and conscious non-attunement in the interest of developing my divination skills. As I mentioned to one of the other bloggers on this site, part of that practice is by using the Lymerian oracle daily, to get a sense of how an established system works, particularly one that was used by my Hellenic ancestors. However, I'm a money guy, so I've also been trying out coin divination, with interesting results.
That journey began with the purchase of a copy of Raymond Buckland's Coin Divination. It's available for as little as one cent on Amazon, and my initial impression was one of being had, since there's only about six pages of original information in the book, and even that was pulled from previously-published works by the author. Nevertheless, the few pages which aren't a rehash of the I Ching or an awkward attempt to use coins as if they were a tarot deck have some intriguing possibilities, so I have been exploring them. It's been a very slow process of discovering a system for myself, and it's long from over, but it is has had unexpected benefits.
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...