paganism

Contact

I have a little something different for you today. Rather than reflecting on the world-as-is, which is in both stasis and rapid flux right now, I woke this morning with a desire to look back. Specifically, I wanted to share a short section from the chapter I wrote back in 2014 for the volume of …

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The magical economy

There is such a thing as a gift economy (Mauss 1954)*, in which things are given to another in no expectation of exchange. Instead the gifts given are part of a larger social contract, in which the web which holds us together is formed from the noticing of another’s need or desire, and fulfilling it, …

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Tira and the bees

This post is long, but I make no apologies for that. Some things are too important, and too epic, to contain in a pithy article. Indeed, this is a very different blog post to my normal offering. But there is story here, and beauty, and so I suggest that you settle in, with a long …

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A Tiny Adventure

Last week, the husband and I went on a tiny adventure: five days in Ireland. It ended up containing almost all of our favourite things: yoga and geeking out, permaculture and earth politics, faeries and standing stones, prehistoric sites, epic landscapes, road trips, old friends and new, and a lot of laughter. Oh, and a …

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Wild Ones

Back in May I wrote a post asking about radical and deliberate connections with deity – the wild and wondrous gods of protest and resistance. What would they look like? Who would they be? What would their sacraments be? Then followed a really lovely series of conversations on social media and in person, and a …

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Radical Deity – a call

Phil and I were at the Beltane Bhakti Festival last weekend, drinking deep of that rebel heart of devotion within alternative British yoga culture. This is the latest in an occasional series of events at which the UK bhakti community gather. There were devotees of multiple gurus, and more besides like ourselves who have no …

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Here be dragons…

Here be dragons. There are edges and centres, known and unknown spaces to this map. There are braided desire paths, and wild, deep forests, and high walls and highways. There are clustered homes and circled wagons and there are gateways and gatekeepers. There are feuding tribes and border disputes and common land. There are strange …

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Butterflies

Big themes collide like icebergs in my thinking this week: ideological clashes; inspirational conversations; memories recalled; histories remade. I give thanks for a new space of solidarity; and to Matthew Remski for supplying the defining thematic for my week – neoliberalism as religion. I’m realising how deep run the threads of hyper-individualism, consumerism, flattened difference …

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Fragments of Family

I’ve spent most of this week writing a 3,000 word submission to Patheos’ upcoming ‘Pagan Consent Culture’ anthology, and now it’s time for another blog post. I also have a space now on the OU site for my own little blog presence as a ‘junior researcher’, so in future some of these posts might appear …

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