On Hallowe’en I carve a pumpkin and give out candy. That same night, the Pagan feast of Samhain, I honour my ancestors beyond the veil. The next day, All Hallows, I honour my favourite saints.
Saints you ask? Oh yes. You can take the girl out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of the girl. So I have saints too, just Pagan ones.
I will never forget the moment I saw Sheena for the first time. We had known each other for years. We had spent time together, but I had never actually seen Sheena. I hadn’t even seen a picture of her. I was nervous about our first meeting and wondered if I’d recognize her. I summoned a picture of the last time we were together and tried to imagine Sheena. But when she finally came walking up to me, I did not recognize her. Who was this beautiful, elegant, radiant woman? Surely not the same person I used to know.
Since it's All Saint's Day, I thought I'd introduce you to one of my favorite saints--and the inspiration behind our Nurturer - Energy (aka Queen of Wands) card from our Snowland Deck. This is an excerpt from the Snowland Intuitive Workbook, which includes information about her legend, associated symbols (especially eyes), keywords, intuitive questions for journaling, wring prompts, affirmations and a "secret":
Description: Also known as Saint Lucy, Lucia stands at the center of several official stories and unofficial histories. Most of these say that Lucia was set to be wed in an arranged marriage, but because she didn’t want to, her eyes were gouged out— either by her own hand, or by others in torture. In all cases, her eyes were miraculously healed. Thus, Lucia is associated with healing and averting all eye disease. In fact, it’s reported that the poet Dante Alighieri credited Saint Lucy with healing his eyes that were damaged after crying when his beloved Beatrice died (Lucy appears in his masterpiece Inferno).
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...
Archer, Great list! I love the quote by Symmachus, and the choices of Feynman and (the admittedly fictional character of) Spock a
I'm so excited to learn about Thomas Morton! Thank you as always for your kind words and knowledge-sharing.
