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One of the more challenging aspects of developing a new spiritual tradition is having to figure out what you need terms for and what those terms should be.

I was in the middle of writing a child blessing ritual for the upcoming second edition of Ariadne's Thread (release date: May 15) and realized I needed a term for Modern Minoan Paganism folx to use, a word for the kind of person Christians call godparents: the close family friend who will have a special place in the life of a child as they grow up.

You've probably heard about the AIs that people are using to make art these days. These are software programs that take a phrase the user inputs and turns it into a digital painting. But the software doesn't make these digital paintings from scratch. It creates them using a collection of art that's already in existence, that they gather and turn into a database. Where does this collection of art come from?

The AIs scrape it off the Internet.

I like science metaphors when talking about heathen concepts that differ from the ideas common in our current modern American culture. In the Fireverse, my fictional universe based on heathen mythology (see previous entries on that topic), the main human character is an author stand-in who gets a guided tour to the worlds and time, like the main human character in Dante's Bible fan fiction. Like me, she likes science and especially physics as spiritual and religious metaphors, so, the Hel-Boat looks like a Viking longship but behaves like a spaceship, landing and taking off from the Nine Worlds as if they were planet type worlds rather than the dimensions the main character knows them to be. Metaphors for the multipartite soul didn't come up in Some Say Fire because the main character is already in her afterlife after the opening scene, but I'm thinking about them now.

Reading Heathen Soul Lore Foundations to review it (review coming soon), I encountered a metaphor for the various parts of the human soul based on alchemy, especially the idea of refining salts to transform substances into other things. This metaphor just doesn't work for me because I'm not into alchemy. During my daily morning coffee ritual I had a conversation in my mind with Odin about metaphors for the soul.

I must apologize, it's been way too long and when I got the mail today and saw the latest issue of SageWoman, and realized that I can't remember the last time I had received the magazine, well, let's just say that I was sad.

Where do I start?

Listen now, friends, to a tale of best-laid plans going awry.

As many of you know, my first book on Minoan spirituality, Ariadne's Thread, went out of print early this year. I got my rights back to the book and began revising it for a second edition. I wrote it before Modern Minoan Paganism came into being, so it definitely needed some changes. I was planning to release the new second edition on November 1 of this year.

Individuation is problematic. That's the unofficial Modern Minoan Paganism motto.

It's sort of a joke, a witty response to difficult questions about divinity. But it's also very serious.

For some time now, Ariadne's Tribe has been developing our own counterpart to the hieros gamos as it's known from ancient Mesopotamian, Greek, and Buddhist traditions and that's expressed in modern Paganism via acts such as the Wiccan Great Rite.

We wanted a concept and a practice that we could use in our rituals that would encompass the idea of communion with deity as well as connection with each other and with the non-human beings whose spirits also fill our world. And we wanted it to be inclusive, avoiding any kind of gender binary.