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Love letters are an ancient art that always deepens intimacy. This spell combines candle magic with letter writing to hone the desire between you and your partner.

You will need:

"It's just a sprinkling for the May Queen."

Well, I never did manage to find that Horned God Sex Cult that I've been looking for all these years. Presumably, it doesn't exist. If it ever did, I can read you this oracle: it didn't last long before it managed to blow itself up.

(There was supposed to have been a local sex coven back in the early days of Paganistan. No, it didn't last: they just gave each other various STDs, and then broke up.)

Probably that's just as well. As any historian of religion can tell you, your average sex cult doesn't have a very long shelf life: not terribly surprising, when you think about it. “Volatile” would be the operative word here.

Doesn't mean they're not fun to fantasize about, though.

Beltane's coming—now there's a phrase for you—and the sap is flowing.

Me, I'm a writer: it's Spring, and the green fires burn. Naturally, I've been writing pornography.

Pagan porn, of course: the convergence of obsessions. Talk about a niche market.

Well, why shouldn't there be holy pornography? Sacred pornography? Now there's a pagan literary genre, if ever there was one. Think of the Kama Sutra. Whoever decided that religion and sex don't mix? Whoever he was, he was no pagan, I can tell you that much.

I don't know about yours, but the Witch religion is an eros-driven religion. Gardner got that one absolutely bang-on right. Our gods have genitals, and they know how to use them.

That's where everything comes from, they say: “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

Interestingly, much of what I've been writing is not terribly, as they say, explicit.

In my experience (such as it is) the indirect and figurative is way hotter than getting slapped in the face with it. I learned this from, of all people, Mary Renault. Her novels have some incredibly hot male-male sex in them, but if you weren't reading carefully, you'd probably miss it.

Sex, after all, isn't something one person does to another: it's what we do together.

Gods: gay pagan pornography for smart people. Talk about the niche of a niche of a niche of a niche.

No, you won't be seeing any of my holy porn any time soon; not around here, anyway. Once I get my Substack up and running, just possibly (and selectively). For now, it circulates privately among friends: those who understand both what it means, and what it doesn't.

Not that you, of all people, need it, of course. After all, you've got a wild pagan imagination of your own.

Like every other organ, imaginations need exercise.

They get off the school bus together every day.

They're maybe nine, ten. The tall one has long hair, with a knit cap pulled down tight. His friend is shorter, with short hair. They've both got that indeterminate beauty that might turn into anything, the beauty of the as-yet-unformed.

Two boys. They don't even realize that they're in love.

A while back on Pagansquare I wrote several articles about my work with elemental magic (you can find them here and here). I'm currently in a process of transition from the element of movement to the element of stillness. I've been working with movement for almost two years and will fully switch over on the 2nd year anniversary of my work to stillness. However, even before that date, the transition is beginning. Elements of Stillness have been showing up in my work for a good part of this year and are becoming much prevalent in the time leading up to the change.

When I first started the elemental balancing ritual, I chose the element. The very first year, I chose Water because I knew I needed to get in touch with my emotions and water represented that to me. The next year I chose Sound because I needed to work on connecting with people. The third year I chose Earth because I wanted to ground myself where I was living. After that though, the elements started choosing me. Or rather incidents occurred in my life that spoke for the need to work with a specific element to help me find balance. In the Earth year, the element that came up was Love. I'd made some bad choices in handling relationships and it became clear to me that I needed to work on love and what that meant to me. In the middle of the love year, I had an experience that demonstrated to me that I needed to work with Emptiness as an element. And so on and so forth.

This is the Fourth posting of the (en)LIV(en)ING with the Muses Series

Last weekend I was in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with my daughter. We came to one of the hallways and I looked up and saw a beautiful dome painting of the Nine Muses and Apollo by John Singer Sargeant. As I scanned the image I imagined what type of energy would be in abundance as the Muses danced in free abandon around Apollo, God of the Sun. I thought about the sensuality of this energy and the grace and ease with which it appeared each was connected to the other. The feeling was one of being totally lost in the moment, carried by the urge to create, to move and to inspire. I thought about the tales I had read of the lives of the Muses and the Gods and Goddesses and the common thread of pure passion that flowed through even the most desperate of tales. After all, is it not passion, whether it be positive or negative that fuels the will to live. All of the emotions- jealousy, love, anger, mercy, joy and more, have all come into being because of what we see, what we experience and how we translate these emotions into how we live and ultimately how and who we love. 

I don't always have much to say about my actual artwork as the Muse presents Herself, but this time I feel compelled to explain. This is a very quick pencil sketch on cheap copy paper, the result of this muse's urgent desire to come forth and be recognized, whether or not I was prepared to receive Her.

The result came off looking more like Lady Liberty than any Goddess I recognized. Except for the wings, and She was pretty insistent about those wings.

In my previous post I discussed the elemental balancing ritual and explained how I'd moved from a traditional elemental model to a non-traditional approach to elements. With this post I'd like to share my work with the element of Movement as mediated by Eros.

I always get an idea of which element I'll be working with next about halfway through the year of the prior elemental working. In the case of movement, what told me it would be the next element was how I came across several references to movement in relationship to identity. Since I am continuing my work with identity as a principle of magic, I knew it was essential to explore movement in relationship to magic.