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Flying is one of the most common dreams, not to mention one of the most fun! If you’re soaring through the air in your dream, gazing out over the earth beneath you, you are probably feeling on top of the world in your waking life. Flight represents freedom and release, so this dream might be a sign that you are experiencing some of those feelings in your life, or it could be encouragement to let loose. Dreams of flying suggest that you have confidence in your ability to rise above challenges that come your way. You can do anything or be anything your heart desires, there are no limits to what you can do.

June 4, 2021

30 Years Since the Tiananmen Square Massacre

May the Goddess of Liberty

once again raise Her torch

in Tiananmen Square,

for Her children in China,

and through all the world.

As a little gay witch kid growing up in a time and place when it wasn't safe to be either, I learned early on: Let them think what they want to. In my own heart, I can be free.

Not having to follow someone else's rules is freedom from one kind of slavery.

(I might add that I've spent the rest of my life working to make it so that no one else ever has to live like that again. We're certainly not there yet—maybe we never will be—but we're well on the way.)

A friend of mine prides herself on never following recipes. To her mind, this makes her free. Maybe so. To my mind, though, this makes her just as much as a slave as someone who slavishly has to follow every last detail of every last recipe. It isn't following the rules or not following the rules that frees; it's the choice to follow, or not to follow, in any given case. The choosing frees, and in this sense we free ourselves every day, with every action that we take.

Not having to follow your own rules is freedom from another kind of slavery.

Ye shall be free from slavery, the Lady of Witches promises her people. It's quite a promise. But hear how she goes on: ...and as a sign that ye be truly free, ye shall be naked in your rites.

There's physical bondage and there's mental bondage, and it's clearly the latter that she's talking about here. That's her promise to her people: that social norms that constrain others will simply not be binding on us.

Here's the kicker: what she does not mean here is that all of our rituals have to be skyclad rituals. That in itself would be a form of enslavement, enslavement to the Goddess herself. What she wants for us—what she expects of us—is that we not be slaves, not even to her. The essence of freedom is in the choosing.

To the pagan eye, the main difference between our religions and the Abraham ones isn't the difference between One or Many.

It's the difference between Slave and Free.

With the spread of the Slave Religions across the world, loss of spiritual freedom has invariably gone hand in hand with loss of political freedom: spiritual imperialism with political imperialism. Pagan peoples everywhere have fought to preserve our political, cultural, and intellectual freedom. Sometimes we've won, most often we've lost, but in our hearts, even when shackled, we have never submitted, and we never will.

Unlike some, the pagan gods don't want slaves, and they don't want eternal children. They expect us to grow up, to stand on our own two feet, and to do for ourselves. If you raise your children to be dependent on you, you've failed as a parent.

We, the Pagans, have been here since the beginning; we've never gone away, and we never will. We dare to dream of a day when the Slavers and their ways will vanish from the Earth, when once again we will all live as our gods want us to live: as Free peoples, everywhere.

We are the Pagans, but “pagan” is a name from without. What do we call ourselves from within?

They call us pagans, but we know who we are.

We are the Free Peoples of the Earth.

We are the free peoples, our gods the gods of the free.

Free is our goddess. Being her people, we bear her name.

Let the shackled call us what they will. In the end, they are slaves.

Pagans, better than anyone else, understand the power of symbols.

And statues in particular.

It's bad enough that, as you read this, the body of “evangelist” Billy Graham lies in state in the US Capitol rotunda.

Now there's a plan to memorialize him there permanently with a statue.

Graham never held public office. He simply does not deserve to be memorialized in a building dedicated to the preservation of a wall of separation between church and state.

That his body was exhibited at the US Capitol was a slap in the face of every non-Christian in America.

For his statue to stand there would be a knife in every non-Christian heart in the country.

Ye shall be free from slavery.

Witchcraft begins with a slave revolt.

C. G. Leland tells the story in his 1899 Aradia: Gospel of the Witches.

In those days there were on earth many poor and many rich.

The rich made slaves of all the poor....many slaves escaped. They fled to the country....[I]nstead of sleeping by night, they plotted escape and robbed their masters, and then slew them. So they dwelt in the mountains and forests as robbers and assassins, all to avoid slavery.

The Moon, as all-seeing Lady of the Night, witnesses her people's troubles and, in her mighty ruth (mercy), she sends her daughter Aradia to teach them magic and herbcraft, so that they can hex and poison their oppressors.