Spirituality for Living

Norse religion still affects much of our culture today. Our fondness for feast holidays originates with them, as does the name of many of our days of the week. Their imagery has much in common with Indo-European religion, and is a variant of shamanism in many ways it’s practiced. It was primarily a clan based [...]

Halloween is very much ingrained in our collective unconscious, and has a very long history. It was basically the Celtic New Year. Like the Norse legend of the world being born of ice, they see winter as the first season not the last (or rather they did). Halloween is more like the traditional thanksgiving. This [...]

Voodoo is basically African shamanism. There was a first great spirit, the source of all life and creation, but he created the world not as separate from himself but as an act of self expression. Dancing. As he revealed more of his inherent power, or ‘ashe’ as it’s known, he took the form of various [...]

There are basically two ritual paths, and you will find one or the other in any faith. An exoteric path and an esoteric. An ecstatic path or a contemplative, same thing. Though one is seen as holy and is approved, and the other tends to get demonized. There is even a story from the Bible [...]

It’s actually quite interesting how very far from gone witchcraft is. It wasn’t really shamanism, and wasn’t driven by a tribal view of nature. The phrase old wives tales for example.  Often it not always refers to the lore of witchcraft. Women in particular, and to a lesser degree men, have been making intuitive observations [...]

The biggest complaint everyone has is the lack of energy. I hear it constantly. We as a culture are told to control ourselves. To subdue our feelings and motivations, and then wonder why we have no motivation. Energy doesn’t come from what we are supposed to do, that saps energy. We have to re-route energy [...]

The truth of physicality is the common sense of our culture, yet everyone ignores it as they busily manifest their spiritual wounds. Excess leading to the palace of wisdom, but that’s if you can get back. For many, wisdom is the compensation for life as f#*&ed up.
You can say it’s this way for me for [...]

We created science with the notion that observation could reveal laws of reality. That it could be understood, and used to permit us more of what we desire. Freedom, power, health. This has proven true at least for the most part, but we hold the superstition that there are these little closed systems. Little splinter [...]

Cartomancy is a relatively new method of the more general practice of divination. It arose in the late medieval era as a way of preserving initiatory murals in a way that could be kept safe and transported. The major arcana specifically is those big spooky cards you often see in movies and are read about [...]

If you are fascinated with the astral plane, this is where you lose control because you set it apart. You see it as special, and disempowered yourself from dealing with it. When you set it apart you blind yourself, and many people do. They don’t want to engage. They want a fantasy story. They want [...]

What is meaning and why is it important? To a degree the consensus is love. The common ground we can all stand on. It can be diversified and thus enriched, but still there is the connection. The spectrum of meaning is synonymous with the range of beliefs and these do vary.  But one of the [...]

Ever witness people arguing over what is ultimately a matter of syntax? And in fact they were saying the same thing? It even grows very negative. I would say in a sense it’s the rule with few exceptions. The evil of semantics.
Would you rather be right, or happy?  It seems people would rather be right, [...]

The idea of the matriarchal society is strong in a lot of cultures. Matriarchy by spiritual and not military leadership and the two coexisting. In the Yezidi culture (the non Islamic Kurds), women are not made to wear veils by anything but law as supposedly Satanist as they are. As the Ophistes were seen, they [...]

Jainism, for being a minority faith, has had a seemingly inordinate impact on Hindu culture and Indian culture in general. Even leading to the Sikh movement with the addition of Islam to India. Part of which was the impact of what amounted to Indian paganism making it what it is now. There was a tradition [...]

To date, even in modern parapsychology, much of the old understanding of angelic powers is gone. There are still reported encounters or sightings of unknown beings that behave much like the “angels” of old. Though without any seeming divine agenda nor a malicious one. The Mothman might be the most readily apparent and the dialogue [...]

I don’t actually go into technical things as a matter of course, but often these subjects do help a technical practice anyway. The biggest shocker may be this, astrology is not about the stars. Astrology is in essence the same sort of discipline as feng shui or other forms of natural study. It’s based on [...]

How exactly do these planetary bodies ‘plug in’ so to speak and influence me? They are large scope or macrocosmic influences, and as things move them they move literally everything else. Like how we have more storms during sunspot activity. So in astrology they seek to see these large scale forces on a human level.
The [...]

The word ‘cannibalism’ itself was actually a Spanish ethnic reference to the caribe tribesman of what we all know as the Caribbean islands. In the case of the more common examples of traditional endocannibalism, and even in the case of much exocannibalism, it was believed that a spiritual essence was contained in a particular part [...]

Many of the modern medical observations came from old “occult” experimentation, “necromancy” and alchemical exploration. The common practice for chemical analysis in old alchemy was by taste, and human material was used in medicines as in a sweetbread. Heart in animals is a “sweet meat”, as is brain which do tend to go to the [...]

Death rites are perhaps the most universal in there nature and there significance. The lore behind death rites is as big as religion, science and magic itself, and the rites of death are really rites of life. They differ as much as the cultures views on life, from the Haitian “birthday” like celebration to an [...]