Paganicon 2024: Day Three

I feel a swirling host of deep emotional currents within me as I sit to begin this post at a quarter to eight in the evening, reflecting on the outstanding day I had and the transformative, evolutionary weekend at Paganicon 2024 this has proven to be for me. Powerful feelings of jubilation and gratitude wrestle with an increasing melancholy as my mind and heart come to terms with the fact that save for the long drive back home tomorrow, this weekend of fellowship, discovery, learning, sharing, and connecting has come to an end. Winter winds whistle through the night air, as if nature itself is keening, partaking of my waxing sadness. Swirling currents. As within, so without. But what wondrous things I have to regale you with, my friends. Do read on…

Profound Thanks for Today’s Spontaneous Healing Courtesy of an Oglala Lakota-Sioux Medicine Man

When something extremely good happens to me as the direct result of the intervention/intercession of a spirit, my policy is to publicly praise that spirit. Hence this blog post expressing my absolute gratitude and humility for the profound healing gift given to me by the spirit of the late Leonard Charging Crow and, through him, his totem of the mighty Black Buffalo Spirit.

Film Review: In Praise of Robert Eggers’ Bold Old Norse Religion-Saturated Spectacle, “The Northman” (2022)

You know that a newly released film has made quite an impact on you when, hours after you’ve left the theater, you obsessively muse upon its indelible imagery and the effect of the moviegoing experience is all you seem capable of discussing with family and friends. In fact, you’re filled with missionary-level zeal in urging people you care about to go see the film as a matter of vital importance.

I had the immense pleasure of seeing Robert Eggers’ The Northman (Focus Features, 2022) yesterday and I’m still very much enthralled by it. I greatly encourage anyone with even the slightest interest in Old Norse Religion–whether that interest is based in academia or in a lived personal spiritual tradition or both–to see this film at once. Let it transport you to 9th century Northern Europe, from the desolate coasts of the Orkney Islands to the lushness of the Dnieper River in Kievan Rus to the majestic valleys of Iceland. Indeed, the overall effect of the film on me was equivalent to an intense 2-hour-plus shamanic journey to a sensational Otherworld brimming with wonder and terror. There are thoughtful and deliberate evocations of Old Norse Deities, chiefly Odin and Freyr, that are sustained in the film and add to the feeling that, if you honor these Gods, you’re partaking of something akin to religious communion just from the very act of watching this movie. But make no mistake, as a member in the audience, viewing this film is not a passive experience. If you’re a Heathen or a Witch or a Pagan, this film will call you to participate at a Soul Level. You will, frankly, be shook.

Encounters with the Dark Goddess: Artistic and Ritual Reimagining of Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

April is National Poetry Month. As a former college English instructor, a published poet, and an ordained Priestess, I honor the legacies of artists whose works have transcended the boundaries of their artistic mediums, and the vagaries of the times in which they lived, rippling out with profound spiritual force to affect so many people today. American poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is such an artist who has had an incalculable effect upon my developing spiritual consciousness from my adolescence onwards; I go so far as to hail her in the ranks of my Mighty Dead, my spiritual forebears in Witchcraft.

Three years ago, I began to meditate on the idea of Plath’s poetry as a vehicle for encountering Dark Goddess energies and the need to harness those energies in a public Pagan ritual format. I knew I wanted to weave together the strands of my academic analysis of her work (I taught American poetry at the undergraduate level for 3 years as an adjunct English professor on Oahu), my Priestessing skills in generating energy and directing it towards a specific purpose to benefit a group of participants, and my own personal religious devotion to specific Dark Goddesses (e.g., Hekate, Nephthys, Hel). Art served as the medium of inspiration, as it often does: not just Plath’s poetry, but my artistic interpretations through acrylic paintings of some of Plath’s most famous works.

The following chronicles my process and its eventual public ritual outcome: an evening of tribute to Plath’s genius through the ritual encountering of Dark Goddess energy, recitals and discussions of Plath’s poetry, and a shamanic journey facilitated by the use of my 2017 painting An Homage to Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ as a portal into the Otherworld. My goal was to have ritual participants surrender to the “blackness and silence” of the Dark Goddess, as described in Plath’s inimitable voice, and experience the transformative gifts of the Shadow.

A Lament for My Familiar

Death. I’ve been acutely reminded of its omnipresence in many ways lately. Seeing the low angle of the sun at this time of year has begun to trigger my seasonal affective disorder. My nightly cemetery walks have been tinged with greater pensiveness and even despair. It’s a gloomy, cool day here in Chicago as the Sun gets ready to enter the eighth sign of the zodiac, Scorpio, herald of the mysteries of death and rebirth. I’m still processing the devastating news I received on Tuesday when I took my 11-year-old cat, Thor (a feral kitten rescue from Hawaii), to an emergency veterinary clinic for an abdominal ultrasound and other tests. My regular veterinarian had performed an X-ray on Thor to determine the cause of his misshapen stomach and elevated liver levels revealed from recent blood testing. The X-ray indicated a mass protruding from Thor’s liver–one so large it had actually pushed Thor’s stomach at a 90-degree angle. No wonder Thor’s lost 9 pounds in a little over two months. Was it a tumor? If so, could surgery be an option? I was referred to the emergency clinic, which is equipped with an advanced radiology department, to find the answers. Instead, the main veterinarian there stunned me with the diagnosis: advanced pancreatic cancer that has metastasized to his liver and lungs. And then those horrible six words, laden with the iron weight of finality:

“There is nothing we can do.”

On Grief and Grieving

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness–
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way.

–Sylvia Plath, “The Moon and the Yew Tree” (1961, lines 17-22)

The more that I think about it, the less I believe what I experienced at 4:52 this morning was the ending of a dream. It was more of a spontaneous shamanic journey, the kind I’d had with disturbing regularity in the first two years of my brother Mark’s death. What I know for certainty was that I was in the Duat, and Sekhmet was next to me. She panted/grunted while scenting the air, Her lioness nuzzle awash in blood. Her pupils were massive, dilated, and gleaming like actual carnelian stones. Torch light either gleamed from behind or radiated from within Her. There was a wall behind us. We stood within a long, dark corridor. I knew unequivocally that Sekhmet protected me fiercely against evil entities that wanted to harm me. She fed on them. I was afraid–not of Her, but of where we were. I wanted out. And no sooner did I think that than did I feel myself being rapidly “plucked” upwards–in sheer nanoseconds. It was a jolting sensation, but I felt myself being pulled up out of the ground–even through my bed’s mattress!–before “crash landing” back into my body. I gasped and thrashed a bit–hitting my fiancé in the process–before sitting up and grabbing my iPhone from my nightstand. 4:52.

Serving as a Mouthpiece for Sedna: Last Night’s Shamanic Journey to Adlivun

Mutilation and Creation. Hrana Janto’s stunning painting depicting the creation of sea mammals from the Inuit goddess Sedna’s severed fingers hangs in my office. Check out more of Hrana Janto’s goddess art on http://www.hranajanto.com.

It is 30 degrees Fahrenheit outside my downtown Chicago office as I type these words. Like other sensible Chicagoans, for my morning commute today, I bundled up for the kind of bitter cold and biting winds that usually arrive in mid-winter, not pre-Thanksgiving. I was spiritually as well as physically ready for it, however, and I greeted the cold with glee this morning. You see, as soon as last week’s weather forecasts warned that the Midwest (and the Great Plains and Rockies) would be engulfed in “relentless November Arctic cold,” to borrow the words of one headline, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that Sedna, the great Inuit Goddess of the Sea and the Dead–sometimes just referred to as “the Sea Woman” by the Inuit for fear of invoking Her–was stirring and wanting to make Her presence known.

Go to Hel, Part 3: Bound by Bone—Deepening My Devotion to Loki’s Daughter

The wallpaper on my work PC is a stunning 1905 painting by the German artist Emil Doepler. Entitled “Loki’s Brood,” I find throughout the course of any given workday that I completely lose myself in reverie as I look at Hel. It’s almost as if Her distant gaze, surely focused as it is on Other/Inner Worlds, mirrors my own as I gaze at Her and think on Her glorious Being. Is it possible to truly love—with all the inner reserves of affection and devotion that your heart is capable of squeezing out—a Goddess of Death?

Go to Hel, Part 2: “Please, Don’t Squeeze the Shaman”: Journeying Deep into Helheim

It all began in August of 2013, when I moved into my first-ever purchased home: a cozy condo in Chicago’s far northwest corner—a neighborhood, unbeknownst to me at the time, notoriously known for its ghastly history and stupendously huge mass paupers’ graves lurking beneath my very subdivision and a large swath of the surrounding area!

Song for Sedna, Composed Upon Concluding a Shamanic Journey Before Her Newly Erected Shrine

Here’s my editorial note for this poem: I wrote it immediately upon coming back from a shamanic journey to meet with the goddess Sedna in the Arctic Ocean; I returned to an ordinary state of consciousness and grounded and centered myself with prayers of thanks to my helping spirits and with food. My relationship with the Inuit goddess Sedna began the day before I received word of my-then Archpriestess/mentor’s diagnosis of Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD), a horrible, lethal neurological disease that shut down her senses one by one and killed her within 8 weeks of her receiving the diagnosis. Sedna came to me roaring with rage that day, and in the coming weeks I would come to understand why. Again, I’ll be crafting a series of blog posts narrating how the Chicago Fellowship of Isis community banded around our beloved Deena Butta to help mitigate the devastating effects of this disease. Many prayed for Deena to have a complete and total “miracle-cure,” an absolute reversal of CJD. I, however, prayed for Her Highest Good, especially after Deena told me that she wanted to die so she could be reunited with her 22-year-old son Maris, who killed himself not quite two years prior. So much of Sedna’s grief and rage, as I would come to find out, were mirrored in Deena’s state of being in the final weeks of her life.