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Seriously? You sold your car because a piece of cardboard told you to?

All other things being equal, I always say, consult divination.

But, for gods' sakes, be smart about it.

Yea or nay? you ask, and throw the bones.

Yea say the bones, but you think: No, nay!

So now you know your real mind on the matter.

There's your real answer, subtly delivered.

A Word to the Wise: Use your divination.

The Devil Made Me Do It: Creativity as Daemon

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Today, I’m going to highly recommend that everyone take a great, big time-out. It feels high time to get more in tune spiritually, physically, and emotionally. Protecting our overall health and well-being from burnout seems to be the order of the day. Because frankly, we’re being inundated from intense negative, toxic energy on all sides. It has been an onslaught since January of this year, and I think most of you know what I’m talking about. It has been relentless, and in order to keep fighting the good fight, it is imperative to keep our wits about us and our strength up. Sloshing around in the cesspool with people that prefer it will not help us in the long run. We need to band together and recharge in healthy ways so that we can be sharp. Notice how a certain group of individuals keep making really sloppy, careless, big mistakes because of this? They’re never taking a breather. I’m going to keep it short and sweet and to the point.

Take Time for Healing

Take care of yourselves and those close to you (that are good for you to keep close). Set up strong boundaries with those who aren’t. Partake in as many pampering activities as you can on the weekend, and those that you can feel great about. Many neighborhoods are holding Earth Day cleanup activities this weekend–get involved and take pride in doing something loving for our Mother Earth. She needs it right now, believe me. Relax with a healing podcast, like this latest episode of, “Women Who Howl at the Moon.” Local Tarot Reader and Counselor Susan Sigl joins us to talk about the concept of the wounded healer, for her new book. Take refuge in anything kind you can–giving and receiving. By all means, if you need to take a couple of days off from the news, do so. Channel the energy of the New Moon on Sunday. Then you can take a deep breath and deal with it on Monday. Blessed be to you all.

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:

Easter 2025: Three Voices

A Satire in Bad Taste

Here, Your Holiness, I baked you some Easter cookies. They're from my mother's favorite recipe. I hope you enjoy them.

Why, thank you my son, I'm sure I will. Mmm, delicious. Bless you, and a happy Easter.

Twelve Hours Later

Although, thank Goddess, I didn't grow up Catholic, I've known many who did, and I've heard the stories.

So, for all those feel-good “Come Home to the Catholic Church” commercials, here's the truth-in-advertising version.

Hi, we're the Catholic Church.

We're the ones who, all over the world, have sexually abused hundreds of thousands of children.

We're the ones who did everything that we could to hush up that fact.

We're the ones who have routinely done everything that we could to protect the perpetrators.

We're the ones who repeatedly, when caught with our cassocks up and our pants down, have protested with words of repentance, but still done nothing to stop the abuse.

A long time ago, you walked away from the Catholic Church.

Bet you didn't know it, but Cecil B. de Mille's 1956 epic schlockfest The Ten Commandments has a pagan connection.

Dianic high priestess and musician Ruth Barrett grew up Jewish in Southern California. Apparently, religious leadership runs in the family. Her father was a rabbi in the Reconstructionist movement, a modern Jewish “denomination” that views Judaism as an ongoing religious civilization. Reconstructionist Judaism tends to be ritually conservative and socially liberal.

(The standard joke is: “At an Orthodox wedding, the bride's mother is pregnant. At a Conservative wedding, the rabbi is pregnant. At a Reform wedding, the bride is pregnant. At a Reconstructionist wedding, both brides are pregnant.”)

Anyway, when C. B. was putting the film together, he looked around for someone skilled at blowing the various calls on the shofar, the ram's horn trumpet used since antiquity in Jewish ritual—at the first sighting of the First Crescent, for instance.