‘This is my picture and I dunno what it means’ – A Journey of Revelations
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...PaganSquare is a community blog space where Pagans can discuss topics relevant to the life and spiritual practice of all Pagans.
‘This is my picture and I dunno what it means’ – A Journey of Revelations
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...The Devil Made Me Do It: Creativity as Daemon
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...Novel Gnosis is both a concept and a title of what was going to be a book of essays by multiple authors. The concept may be familiar to long time readers of my blog: religious inspiration received while writing fiction. The book of essays eventually became this upcoming series of blog posts. In this intro, I'll briefly tell the story of why it's not a book. Most of the authors who contributed essays to the anthology are still onboard with the project and have agreed to have their essays run as a series of guest posts on this blog.
The idea:
...Since this is Gnosis Diary I've gotta tell you about gnosis once in a while.
My autumn gnosis experience was about cats. Remember my cat Happy had told me he wanted to return to Earth and I would know which one. Well I was scrolling through the Sin City Witches social media group and a member posted she had kittens to give away. There was a blurry photo of a tiny black fuzzball reaching claws toward the camera. I heard Happy tell me that was him. I contacted the kitten lady, and my housemate.
...Monsoon season in the Vegas valley closed out August with a wonderful thunderstorm during my pool party. The week leading up to it had been lovely and still enough for me to manage to get the pool looking nice and clean, always a challenge when a giant pine tree hangs over it. The pool party started with hot, still weather and a few puffy clouds in the sky, as neighbors and friends trickled in through the open side gate. I was super excited by the surprise appearance of friends from out of town I hadn't seen in years. The clouds kept gathering and turned gray and we were all looking at the sky thinking it might rain. We heard thunder roll, and we all responded with enthusiastic noises. I called out to Thor, "I made a fresh pot of coffee!" and plink! drop! Shining diamond blessings from the sky! It started raining!
So of course I had to go in and get a cup of coffee and come back outside to make a toast to Thor. I got back in the pool with my cup and finished it as the rain increased. Being desert dwellers, we all love the rain.
...Asatru and Heathen religion in the modern age was the topic of my recent appearance on The Bard's Archive. This is a video interview, and includes some cute video of my cat Happy. Viewers also get to see my main house altar. I got so wrapped up in the topic, when Garret asked at the end if I had anything to add, I forgot to say "Buy my book!" lol. The link to the video appears at the end of this post, below my other news.
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...My morning coffee ritual is basically a sumbel, since I make toasts. But after each toast, I listen to see if the gods have any messages for me.I toast Odin, Honir, Lodhur Who Is Loki, and Thor. In the afternoon, I toast the goddesses with tea. I might make a toast with a more traditional beverage from time to time as well. At any time, whether I'm specially listening or not, I might receive a message from my gods. This has been happening since I wrote the unpublishable novel Some Say Fire, and in the process of writing learned to hear the gods, as I detailed in some previous posts. Here on Gnosis Diary, I talk about my gnosis a lot, unsurprisingly. Here are some of my recent gnosis experiences.
My gods very rarely tell me not to do something. As I mentioned years ago, when I was writing the post that eventually became Good Knowledge, Bad Teacher, my computer repeatedly glitched until I took it for a sign and changed my focus. After that I asked the gods to please just tell me when they want me to do or not do something. A few years ago I blogged about when Loki told me not to go spread anarchy in the desert, and I found out later that night someone had stolen the idol of Sekhmet from her temple and the angry goddess was walking the desert right then. (Eventually the temple got a new statue. But the temple was never the same after that and there was a schism in the local pagan community that I blogged about in my post Rebuttal of TERF Values.)
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