#but it's like. one of them was basically wiccan. became born again christian

[unluckyxse7en]

Something I still haven't adjusted to is that my whole entire family just. Abruptly turned Christian on me overnight. Like it's been a couple years since it happened but it's like. My brain doesn't even know what to DO with this info. It's so surreal.

[redpanther23]

second autobiographical essay below

The first sixteen years of my life I spent with my mom, and they were honestly the motherfucking worst.

My mom met my step dad larping when I was about 2, he was 16, and she was 26. She got pregnant, they got married, and he started sexually abusing me right away. When my brother was born, I couldn't stand him and was a complete cunt to him (sorry dude, I was a kid and I didn't know better.)

When I started school, I struggled to focus and did very poorly, and my mom and step dad would beat me and take all my things out of my room except for furniture, and lock me in there except to use the bathroom, for months on end, until they thought my grades were good enough. My step dad would come into my room at night and touch me. He would also jump out at me around corners and "wrestle" with me (pretending to wrestle for fun so he could squeeze my tits.) I would struggle and yell, and bite him as hard as I could, and my mom would punish me for hurting him. Sometimes he would do it in front of her, and when I complained to her, she would call me a liar. (His name again: Rigel Cameron Freeman.)

We moved pretty much every year because my parents struggled to maintain jobs. Mainly we lived in different parts of Gainesville, Florida, but we also briefly lived in Raleigh, North Carolina. At school I was usually the only non Christian kid, and I was a complete asshole because my family life was so horrible, so no one liked me and I was bullied constantly. I spent a lot of time in class, and all my time at recess, drawing and making up imaginary friends, or reading books about talking cats (I was very misanthropic, something I still struggle with.) When I was in late elementary to middle school, I made a few friends I still talk to. That was also the same time as my first suicide attempt (5th grade), and when I started self harming.

When I was 12 I dyed my hair red, and my friend's dad named me Red (their family were Irish and Cherokee.) I had been called lots of other names before that, basically something different by each relative, and the only thing everyone could agree on was that none of them suited me (and no one ever called me my government name.) After I was named Red, I dyed my hair every other color you can think of, but my name has stayed the same.

The same year, I moved to Miami, and that began a new isolated phase in my life that led to me becoming interested in magick. My mom had never lived in a major city before, and we ended up moving to a pretty sketchy neighborhood (gunshots almost every night, drive bys, etc.) In our home country (Mississippi) kids are simply expected to fend for themselves outdoors until supper. Now that I was trapped inside with my incredibly abusive family, I had nothing to turn to but the internet (something I'm sure many of us here can relate to.)

I became interested in magic through mythology. I had always found other pre-Christian cultures fascinating, since I wasn't allowed to learn anything about my own, and I discovered through Wikipedia and Google searches that people still practiced the pagan European religions of my ancestors. Through neopaganism, I began to learn about ceremonial magic extremely quickly, feeling as though it was the one piece of my life I'd been missing, finding that I had an innate understanding of something other than visual art for the first time. It wasn't long before I was ready to try my first invocation. I had always wondered if I had a "spirit animal," or a guide, which I knew must be part of my subconscious, and recognizing immediately that I could use ritual meditation to access this, I crafted my first ritual based on some uninitiated wiccan articles I had been reading, and what implements I had laying around. I set out a circle of stones, invoked the four quadrants with a candle at each cardinal direction, laid out offerings of oil, salt, and water, lit an incense cone, and two additional candles for the Mother and Father. My practice is very different now, but my results at the time were extraordinarily intense. When I closed my eyes, this is what I saw:

Dense forest, high on the mountain. It's foggy and overcast, but it's summertime. The rocks are covered with moss, thick and green. I look down at my sandy brown forepaws and know that I am a panther. I begin to stroll, and I can feel the power in my muscles. I'm strong and free.

I opened my eyes, and was back in my bedroom, surrounded by rocks and candles. Shortly afterward, my mom mentioned Scott Panther to me for the first time (I didn't remember meeting him as a baby.) I'm sure it will confuse some that my first experience with a native archetype, my family animal, was through a European style ritual. Hey, think how I feel! I should have been able to take peyote and meet a mountain lion face to face to earn my name, like any decent person. Unfortunately, since I was so isolated, I didn't have the privilage. My connection to the panther is extremely deep - some of my first dreams were of being a cat, and the first time I prayed (age 8) it was to "StarClan," which, for the uninitiated, is the clan of dead cats who live in the sky in the children's book series Warrior Cats (I still like to think my cat ancestors are up there watching.) I've always studied cat behavior and embodied cat energy, even before I had any vision, but in my life that was treated as something annoying and strange by the people around me, rather than the sacred mystical practice it was. When I had cats in my life, I prioritized them, often over my own health and safety. Even though I only have a dog now, I still consider cats to be my teachers. I can't say whether my conceptualization of reality and my experiences is native, or European, but I would guess it's a mix of both, like me.

I started high school at MAST Academy in Miami, a school for "future scientists." My family always discouraged me from drawing or playing music, often my instruments would be taken away or sold, or I would have nothing but lined notebook paper to draw on (I would only get things I needed for school.) Since all I had to decide a "career" on was my passion for non-human animals, I thought I might be a zoologist. It was a lot less horrible than most other high schools in a lot of ways, and a few of the teachers even treated me like a person (cheers.) I started visiting my dad a little during this period, he began teaching me about Jewish mysticism and Kaballah, what little I could understand, and I began to read from his collection of books on magick and the occult.

During my second year of high school, my mom and step dad moved to the Netherlands, and brought me with them. I was too young and shy (scared) to have any fun, and I just thought about suicide constantly. My mom would never stop yelling at me about everything, telling me how l worthless I am. I caught my step dad taking pictures of me as I got out of the shower, and my little brother told me he caught him watching me sleep through the window over my bedroom door (you could stand at the top of the stairs and look right through it.) I became paranoid he was going to start raping me again, like he did when I was younger, and slept with a knife beside me, when I could sleep. (Again, his name is Rigel Cameron Freeman, and he is a computer programmer who works in the video game industry.)

The only positive part of my life during this period was an online death cult I joined, called Les Fleurs de la Mort. I can't talk about our practices in detail, but it lead me to get really into gardening, which was probably the healthiest possible pastime for me. I don't think I've spoken to any of my fellow Fleurists in years, but if any y'all are reading this, meow.

After I turned 16, I got the chance to visit my dad back in Miami (court ordered), and I refused to return to my mom. I haven't heard from my mom or step dad since then, except for a handful of extremely rude emails from my mom before covid, and I hope that's the end of it.

Rigel Cameron Freeman, the pedophile who made my life hell and molested me constantly throughout my childhood, currently has sole custody of my youngest sibling, who's 9. (He was born after I left, and we've never met.)

[seluma-wulfsige-blog]

Spiritual Baggage...

I still, and probably always will, see myself as a student of paganism. That isn’t to say I don’t know the basics, I think I’ve nailed them down by now, rather... There are times when I feel as if I’m dragging past religious thought into my current practice. CRASH COURSE AUTOBIOGRAPHY TIME!

So I can safely say that I was born and raised in the American South, aka, the Bible Belt, and into a family which proudly partook in the culture. I was homeschooled until third grade (with supplements from Sunday School, homeschool programs at churches, and Vacation Bible School of course), and then attended a private Southern-Baptist-Radically-Conservative school for the next ten years of my life, graduating with a class of thirty-five (most of them I’d known for the entire ten years). During this time, I was bullied and teased because I wasn’t the “model student (female version)” this bunch wanted. 

The modest woman, the obedient wife, the godly future mother, a female that understood her role in life and kept her mouth shut unless she was singing a hymn or teaching children.

Now, hardly anyone I knew was actually like this, but there were plenty who could “turn on spiritual mode” when they needed to, and you know... I don’t think it was necessarily fake. I think these people really felt as if spirituality was something separate from your daily life, something you only connected with when a leader prompted you to. 

I always saw myself as a spiritual person, but not to the god of the Christians, and it wasn’t something I took pride in. It... scared the hell out of me. I didn’t understand why I found peace in the ritual of church, but just could not connect with the doctrine of Christianity. I thought I was doing something wrong, that I wasn’t forcing myself to be a “good woman” and that’d it’d all click once I submitted.

But... that never happened. I couldn’t bring myself to become the blessed sheep that would be cared for by the Great Shepard if only I’d let myself go. I couldn’t get over this idea that my strong sense of individuality and my undeniable need to scream the question “Alright, but WHY?” at everything was a part of me for a reason. It didn’t help that these traits ostracized me a bit, causing even more of a rift between “the good girls” and myself, making it even harder to connect to the god they claimed was so good to them and was saving them from hell.

Please understand, I don’t blame them for my bad connection. Yes, I was miserable for the longest time because I felt like I was just going to have to fake it till I made it to Heaven, because that’s about as close as I could get with Christianity. I hated the way they justified hate by calling it “tough love for the sinner”. I remember so, so vividly how angry I became when I found out how people of the LGBTQ+ community were shunned by these people that had raised me, how people of different religions were shunned because they worshiped a different god (btw, yes, in my experience, they painted it to be straight up a black and white, good versus evil situation. They had the false bad god and we had the REAL god), how SO MANY PEOPLE WERE JUST THROWN INTO A CATEGORY AND SHUNNED BECAUSE THEY WERE DIFFERENT.

Now I understand today that this isn’t all Christianity, it was the Christianity I was exposed to, the awful mix of classist southern culture and “Southern” Christianity. I know there are Christians out there that ARE beings of light and love, and that do wonderful services for others, but... the rift between me and what the Bible said was just too great, and eventually... and I’m talking age nineteen... I slowly began to accept that I was not ever going to be able to be a Christian and be true to myself, and that my only tie to it was what they fondly call “fire insurance”, or those that claim Christianity in the name of staying out of hell.

One last bit of history, the takeaway: I didn’t want to be that way. Yes, I’ve always been a bit of a contrarian and a rebel, but I WANTED to believe in Christianity, because I NEEDED an outlet for my spiritual side, and everything else was going to send me to hell (yes, I genuinely believed that I was going to physically burn and be tortured for all eternity when I died because I couldn’t get it to “click”). It was after years and years of defeat in trying Christianity that I finally said, “You know what, Google exists, and I want to know more about what other religions have to say, and I don’t care if my parents check my search history anymore.” Yes, my parents and family were a MAJOR, if not THE obstacle standing between me and pursuing what was right for me. It wasn’t until college that I really got the chance to begin exploring other spiritualities in a safe space to do so (Anthropology majors WHADDUP).

Look kids, I could go on for quite a while about my tumultuous relationship with Christianity and my family. Hell, I’m still in strong denial with my family that I’m Wiccan, the only person that explicitly knows is my significant other and a few people I’ve met through the craft. But here’s where my current problem comes in:

When I try out spells, and they don’t... well, immediately come to fruition, I become frustrated. Again, I know that this is common and patience is a pretty big virtue in the practice, but I can’t help feeling like I’m dragging some of that old Christian thought into my practice. They say when you pray to God and nothing happens, it’s because he’s either saying “no” or “wait, I have something better”. Now, I understand also that prayer is somewhat akin to spells, but more so asking the Source Energy to do something for you rather than manually channeling it yourself. So I guess my question is... Do those of you that come from other spiritualities often find yourself bringing negative “baggage” from your old beliefs into something that you know to be fundamentally different? Just wondering, let me know if I can clear any of this up, just something that was on my mind.

[lilbitlestrange-blog]

Entry #3 — Wheel of the Year

Witches, Wiccans, Pagans etc celebrate Sabbaths. These are festivals dedicated to the death and rebirth of the Sun (aka the seasons, to make it somewhat easier to follow)

The Wheel of The Year many Wiccan Witches like myself follow has eight festivals on it. These are the equinoxes, solstices and their cross-quarter days. Don’t worry, I will explain this in a moment.

Please keep in mind that the dates of some festivals can change slightly due to the changing of the seasons and leap years and whatnot. (Side note – I’m in the Northern Hemisphere; my apologies to everyone in the Southern part of the world; your Wheel will look different)

 February 1; Imbolc

Imbolc is a cross-quarter day also known as Candlemas. This festival marks the beginnings of Spring. This is the season for new life, for rebirth. When I was little, my nan and granddad held sheep and I was always so excited for them to have lambs during this time of the year. It’s also time for new beginnings; may it be re-arranging your room or blitzing it from top to bottom.

Imbolc is also the holiday of Brigid; the Goddess of the Sun, Fire, healing and poetry.

Celebrating this festival is often done by baking, lighting candles, planting seeds and making Brigid dolls. Symbols associated with Imbolc are swans, the flame, serpents as they were associated with inspiration and creativity, sheep, snowflakes…

 March 21; Ostara

Also known as the Spring Equinox and the ‘official’ beginning of the season of Spring. Everything is perfectly balanced. The days and nights are equally as long but yet the light is more prominent than the dark. Slowly, the days become warmer and brighter.

This festival celebrates the Goddess Ostara, also called Eostre. In time, Eostre evolved into Easter within the Christian church and was also the source for the name of Eostrogen (the more you know!)

The hare is by far the most notable symbol of the Spring Equinox. It is sacred to the Goddess Eostre and also a totem of Goddesses of the Moon. Nature’s rebirth in Spring is associated with the dying and awakening of the moon. The hare is also a representative of this and with that also a symbol of immortality.

The hare eventually became the Easter Bunny in Christendom and gave eggs to children. Why the eggs, you may wonder? Let me share with you this secret. Eggs represent rebirth, fertility and is a symbol for the whole universe. The egg consists of a balance between light and dark; Sun God embraced by the White Goddess. And that’s what Ostara is all about; balance in nature.

But why the hare, why the egg, why?!

Well, there’s a story that goes as such;

Once upon a time; there was a grand, spectacular party in the animal kingdom. A very important guest arrived and all the animals, rich and poor, wanted to present this guest with gifts. The guest was the Goddess Ostara. With their utmost excitement, every animal gave the Goddess whatever riches they possessed. But the hare was but a poor animal with little to no possessions. He didn’t want to show up to the party empty-handed, but the only thing in his possession was an egg… Hare decided to decorate the egg by painting beautiful patterns in bright colours on it. Once at the party; the hare was anxious to give Ostara the egg. But upon receiving the gift; Ostara saw hare’s true self. Giving away all he got made hare the Goddess’ special animal.

 May 1; Beltane

Beltane is a fire festival and a cross-quarter day that celebrates life and symbolises the oncoming of Summer. Everything in nature is at its peak on this day. Flora, the Goddess of Spring and the Queen of May falls in love and marries the Young Oak King and hereby become the symbols of Sacred Marriage. This is why Beltane is such a popular time for Pagans and Wiccans to have their Handfastings.

If that sort of commitment is not for you; don’t fret. For a lot of Pagans, it wasn’t, either. They decided to go into fields or woods to make love instead and nine months later, Beltane babies were born.

Traditionally on Beltane, bonfires are lit to honour the Sun. The origin of the word lies in ‘Bel’, whom is a Celtic God and ‘teine’, which means fire in Gaelic. During Beltane and through the bonfires; people support the sun and encourage its light to nurture the oncoming harvests.

The fire was also jumped over to bring fertility, cleanse and purify and also a means of couples to pledge themselves to one another.

 June 21; Litha

Aka the Summer Solstice or the ‘official’ start of Summer. This is also the longest day and the shortest night of the year. The power of the light is at it’s peak; but the descent into the dark is nearing yet again in this turning point of the Wheel of the Year.

There’s not a whole lot for me to say about Litha, to be completely honest with you. In my opinion; this is all you need to know.

 August 1; Lammas

This cross-quarter day is also called Lughnassadh (don’t make me spell this without Google, please) and is the celebration of the first harvest of three in total; which I’ll talk about later on.

Lammas, from ‘loaf mass’ centralises the harvesting of the grain and making the first loaf of bread from said grain.

The ground meaning of Lammas is that the completion of the present harvest already carries the seed from which all future harvests will grow from. (Fun fact; a woman pregnant with a daughter is not only carrying said daughter; but also all the eggs her offspring will release. Making this woman both mother and grandmother.)

The grain harvest provides food for the winter and the seed of another rebirth as the Grain Mother is pregnant with the new seed of Lugh, the Sun King.

Lugh is cut down along with the grain he represents and with this he gives his life to feed his community and simultaneously plants new seeds in the Grain Mother. (Does this make sense? I’m not quite awake writing this)

 September 21; Mabon

This day marks the ‘official’ beginning of Autumn (Fall, for you Americans) with the Autumn Equinox. This is yet another perfectly balanced milestone in the Wheel as day and night are equally as long once again. But in contrast to Ostara; this time, during Mabon, the darkness slowly takes over the light with the coming of Autumn and nature turning beautiful shades of brown and orange.

Mabon is the second harvest called the Fruit Harvest in our Wheel of the Year. Apart from that; it is also a time to reflect on the influences of Ostara and Imbolc as well as finishing up projects you might have been working on and cut ties with things you do not longer require in your life.

 October 31; Samhain

It’s finally Halloween; my favourite time of the year and every witch’s favourite holiday. Samhain is also the final harvest; the one of berries and nuts and it also happens to be a fire festival. But most importantly of all; it’s a memento mori. The Sun King wanders the Underworld until his reawakening during Yule.

The veil between the world of the dead and that of the living is at its thinnest; encouraging better communication with our ancestors whom have since long parted from us. It’s a time to honour the dead and celebrate the fact that we shall soon be reunited with them once more.

 December 21; Yule

Yule is also known as the Winter Solstice and has the longest night of the year. This is also the time of the year the sun appears to be standing still in the sky; pondering whether or not the light will eventually return or if all will descent into darkness forever. (Wow, that was deep)

But it’s needless to say that the light returns with the reawakening of the Sun King and slowly the cycle of nature continues and the light starts to overpower the dark.

In conclusion

This concludes my revision about the Wheel of the Year. I didn’t cover every single aspect because this post has already gotten way longer than I anticipated. But the basics are there.

Let me know whether or not you like longer posts or prefer my slightly shorter ones. I’m not sure which type I prefer myself…

 Until next time.

[medicalmarijuana-news]

Onward Christian Stoners

In the words of the late, great comic Bill Hicks: “To make marijuana against the law is like saying God made a mistake.” These days, legalization and the Internet are bringing Christians and cannabis together.

On a Wednesday evening in a quiet Denver suburb, a small group of Christians are beginning their weekly Bible study. Prayers are spoken with heads bowed, songs of praise are sung to the heavens, followed by a heavy discussion about the Book of Job.

At first glance, it looks just like any of the other countless Bible studies happening in suburban homes all over the country. The one anomaly is that every God-fearing soul who showed up tonight is getting thoroughly stoned.

Relaxing on the back patio of this upscale home, the participants pass joints and bongs around the circle, along with Bibles for people who forgot to bring theirs. A summer breeze blows through the dozen half-grown cannabis plants that surround us, bolstering the overwhelming funk of ganja emanating from the circle. The red-eyed pastor guides everyone through the Book of Job, which sparks a conversation about how marijuana can serve as a conduit for spiritual experiences.

“In Job’s time, he could speak directly with God, but we can’t do that today,” says Deb Button, whose home is serving as the gathering place for tonight’s Stoner Jesus Bible Study. “I believe that consuming cannabis brings me closer to Jesus. It gives me that sense of awe, the spiritual experience I was always looking for in church.”

A middle-aged mother of two who curses more than any evangelical Christian alive, Button has transformed her home into a social space for Christian potheads (as well as a Bud & Breakfast), despite having tried marijuana for the first time only 18 months ago.

Since she began advertising the group on Craigslist and MeetUp, Button has been inundated with daily messages from Christians all over the world and from many different backgrounds, excited to find other followers of both Kush and Christ.

“There’s a lot of people out there who feel isolated as Christian pot smokers,” says Button, who sees no conflict in identifying as both an evangelical conservative and a pot smoker. “There are a lot of conservatives out there who smoke pot.”

Button believes that the traditional 420 stoner stereotype doesn’t begin to capture the variety of people who consume cannabis, a notion that’s reflected in the diverse makeup of the people attending her Bible study. There are so many ages, races, classes, cultures and genders in this group, it looks like an ACLU ad for diversity. Many of these people have been consuming cannabis and reading the Bible their entire adult lives, but had never met others who did likewise.

An elderly white woman passes her vape pen to a college-age black girl as they discuss how much they appreciate God’s creation of the trees, mountains and sky. Before legalization—and the Internet— it would have been difficult to imagine these two even crossing paths, let alone engaging in passionate conversation about a shared interest.

“Last year, it was hard for me, as a Christian, to come out as a pot smoker,” Button says. “But I think it’s becoming less taboo.”

Marijuana: Sin or Spiritual Tool?

From a certain perspective, it might appear that Christians are beginning to warm up to marijuana. In 2012, iconic televangelist (and two-time presidential candidate) Pat Robertson said: “I believe we should treat marijuana the way we treat beverage alcohol.” Around the same time, so-called “cannabis churches” began popping up all over the country. And in the last year, the Sisters of the Valley have become media darlings for their nuns-who-smoke-pot activism.

But look a little more closely, and this picture is not what it seems. Robertson would go on to retract his endorsement of pot; most cannabis churches have nothing to do with Christianity; and the Sisters of the Valley are not Catholics but Wiccan priestesses.

In fact, studies show that while a majority of Americans (58 percent) are increasingly in favor of marijuana legalization, the demographic pulling that number down is evangelical Christians, only 29 percent of whom, according to a Public Religion Research Institute study, support legalization. Other Christian groups hover in the 40s—far below the national average.

This wasn’t always the case, says Dr. Carl Raschke, professor of religious studies at the University of Denver. He doesn’t believe there’s a scriptural precedent for banning marijuana. Unlike booze or certain sexual practices, the Bible doesn’t mention pot, in part because it wasn’t very common in that time and place, but also because, as Raschke explains: “In ancient Judea and Christianity, the focus wasn’t on the substance itself, but how it was used. This legalistic approach of forbidding some substances was a late development. It’s not an ethical issue but a legal one. In America, we’ve decided marijuana should be a Schedule I drug for whatever reason, but we didn’t have those reasons before the 1930s.”

In the past, inquisitive young Christians who asked their parents why God forbids marijuana use were typically pointed toward its illegality, along with several Bible verses instructing them to obey the laws of man. But once marijuana laws began changing in 2012, additional arguments were needed to condemn pot.

Since then, several tech-savvy young pastors have written blog posts with some variation of the headline “Is Marijuana Use a Sin?” (Presumably because this was a popular Google search among their followers.) The vast majority of these Christian bloggers are anti-pot, and they typically cite Bible verses condemning intoxication and the defilement of our bodies, basically revamping the antiquated arguments that Christians made during the anti-alcohol temperance movement of the early 20th century.

But what if you believe that marijuana isn’t an intoxicant, but a spiritual tool?

For nearly a century, Rastafarians have used marijuana as a ritualistic sacrament. And they have their own Bible verses to cite when defending cannabis as holy, such as Revelation 22:2, which refers to the Tree of Life bearing leaves “for the healing of all nations.”

Similarly, David Simpson, a Texas state representative and evangelical Republican, made headlines last year when he offered a Christian argument for legalization by citing 1 Timothy 4:4 (“Everything God created is good”) in an interview with the Daily Beast.

There are also Christians who believe that the holy anointing oil mentioned in the Bible was made from cannabis, and even that Jesus used the herb to perform his healing miracles, though these are far from mainstream beliefs.

For the most part, marijuana has been so taboo among modern Christians that those who use it have, until recently, done so in secret, alone and often with no small amount of shame. And as with gays and lesbians, we’re now finding out that tokers have existed in churches around the country this whole time.

Bible Beatniks and Cannabigotry

It’s an often-overlooked piece of pop-culture history, but throughout the 1970s, many burned-out hippies in California were converting to Christianity in what became known as the Jesus Movement. Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan and Barry McGuire were all devoted converts. Even John Lennon toyed with the idea.

This culture kept the hippie clothes and music, but rejected hard drugs in favor of clean living. Grass fell into an unspoken gray area.

Did people in the Jesus Movement smoke dope?

“Definitely,” says Professor Raschke, who was a student at UC Berkeley at the time. “It was illegal, so people didn’t talk about it, but most people had a benign attitude about it.”

This movement of Bible beatniks soon spread across the nation, ironically laying the groundwork for what would become the Christian right of the 1980s, a political force that wholeheartedly embraced Ronald Reagan’s escalation of the War on Drugs. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, any Charlie Churchgoer who required cannabis for medicinal reasons (or simply liked to get high and watch The Cosby Show) was forced into the closet with a towel under the door. For anyone who’s experienced a moment of paranoia while high under awkward circumstances, life was like that all the time for Christian stoners in the late 20th century (not to mention the difficulties of finding a reliable dealer when your entire social circle comes from the church).

“I was constantly worried about smelling like pot or having red eyes,” remembers Greg Giesbrecht, the red-eyed pastor from Stoner Jesus.

A decidedly normal-looking, silver-haired white dude clad in a polo shirt and jeans, Giesbrecht seems like he’d fit in better at an insurance convention than a 420 rally. But he’s an old-school, born-again bong-ripper who knows what it takes to keep his medication a secret.

Growing up in Fountain Valley, California, Giesbrecht was exposed to marijuana from a young age, smoking a joint with his older brother for the first time in 1975. It didn’t become a regular part of his life until he moved to Denver in the 1980s, when he fell down the steps of the Capitol building while delivering a copier. The injury got him hooked on opiates, before friends recommended that he try switching to cannabis.

It has since become an essential component of his life, though before he met Deb Button and the Stoner Jesus group, Giesbrecht rarely let anyone in on his little secret—especially not anyone who knew him from church. “I was honest with my family—my children always knew it as my medicine,” he says. “But I had to be careful who I let into that circle. Almost none of my friends knew.”

Until earlier this year, Giesbrecht was volunteering and playing guitar for a large church in Colorado (which he doesn’t wish to name). By this time, marijuana was legal in the state, and he was beginning to be somewhat more open about his medication. This led him to join the Stoner Jesus Bible Study, where, for the first time, he discovered that he wasn’t the only one who saw no conflict between God and ganja.

Still, a local news outlet filmed a story about Stoner Jesus featuring Giesbrecht and others sharing a large joint while praising God, and he was quickly reminded that mainstream Christians still weren’t ready to accept a cannabis congregation. “After the story aired, I got a call from one of the pastors, and he said, ‘You’re not the type of people we want in leadership here,’” Giesbrecht recalls. “And then everyone turned their backs on us.”

Button also knows something about cannabigotry on the part of Christians. The avalanche of support she received from Christian tokers online after forming Stoner Jesus was equaled by the amount of hate she received from mainstream believers, who harassed her via blogs, social media, e-mails and phone calls.

“There were some disturbing comments on my Facebook page—people calling me a heretic, saying that I’m going to hell, very vitriolic,” she recalls. “One was a very graphic death threat putting a $10,000 bounty on my head. After that, I shut down the website and tried to scrub my phone number and address from the Internet.”

Button has since relaunched the website, but she’s careful about whom she provides with her home address. While her online haters are now confined to a computer screen, she still has to contend with the disapproving eyes of her fellow suburbanites.

“My neighbors told me how fearful they are now that they can’t keep their doors unlocked anymore,” she says. “And I’m like, ‘It’s a freakin’ Bible study!’ I think they don’t like the look of the people who come here—it’s a very diverse crowd. They take pictures of everyone who comes and goes.”

Button is very protective of the community she’s created with Stoner Jesus. Like Giesbrecht, she was forced to abandon the social network she’d formed at church when she decided to go public about her marijuana use—though, unlike him, she’d never even tried marijuana before 2015.

Before that, Button fit the profile of the red-blooded, all-American, strongly conservative soccer mom. Despite being a lifelong Christian who raised her two sons in an evangelical church, Button says she’d lived her whole life without ever experiencing the emotional stir of God’s presence that her peers seemed to have every Sunday. “I was very lonely in my faith,” she confides.

Feeling increasingly disconnected from the people at her church, Button longed for a spiritual community she could relate to. Around the same time that she began drifting away from the church, Button and her husband divorced, sending her into a spiral of depression and migraines. To help with her headaches, Button’s friend recommended that she try a cannabis edible. In the past, Button might have declined, but with her life turned upside down, she was willing to try anything.

“It was like a reawakening,” Button recalls of her first cannabis experience. “It focused me in the moment, and my worry started to disappear. All that mattered was the love I was feeling right then. It gave me a sense of awe and wonder for God’s creation—the feeling that everyone said I should feel in church. Suddenly, I felt betrayed by the church.”

Button was amazed at the spiritual power of cannabis, and she soon began centering her life around the experience. If she hadn’t been living in the banner state of legalization in the age of the Internet, Deb Button might have been damned to the life of isolation that befalls most Christian stoners. But all it really took was a couple of posts on MeetUp and Craigslist, and suddenly she had the community of spiritual seekers she’d always wanted—right in her own living room!

It’s important to Button that Stoner Jesus never takes on the trappings of a church service. Instead, it remains an informal social hour where Christians can discuss the Bible while enjoying the lift of a good toke.

“There’s nothing about church in the Bible,” Button says. “I think, for a lot of people, it’s outlived its purpose. I never felt anything praying in church. But praying with a friend in the backyard—that’s personal.”

Button adds that if politics enters the conversation, she has an easier time talking things through with a group of stoners than she would have with anyone in church. When she told the group of her plans to vote for Donald Trump, a few of them rolled their eyes (the racial and gender makeup of the group certainly doesn’t match that of a Trump rally), but that’s about as vitriolic as things get.

The two intersecting circles that make up the Stoner Jesus Venn diagram—religion and weed—can splinter off into many opposing views. Catholics, Mormons, Baptists and folks from several other denominations are often in attendance, and not all of them consume marijuana with the same intent. Many are recreational users, but Geisbrecht only uses pot medicinally. He says that he doesn’t experience the same supernatural high that Button does. But Button explains that her recreational and spiritual highs are very different experiences, like the difference between sacramental wine and a shot of tequila.

Whether or not their cannabis use is integral to their spirituality, the fact that the members of Stoner Jesus can discuss these different approaches and experiences in public, with people who might be strangers, in a place of scripture and prayer, represents an opportunity to unearth what many Christian stoners have been doing in private for decades. And this can only lead others like them, living in more repressive, non-legalized Christian communities, to reject the shame and isolation handed to them by church leaders, and begin to proudly identify as tokers for Christ.

For all of HIGH TIMES’ culture coverage, click here!

from Medical Marijuana News http://ift.tt/2iY3pA5 via https://www.potbox.com/

[tipsycad147]

The Wheel of the Year

This wheel is sometimes called the Gardnerian Wheel because it is a combination of two ancient wheels (acknowledgements to Kenny Klein). The hunting wheel, the oldest, has two God births: The Oak King is born at midsummer and rules through to Yule when he dies and the Holly King is born. The agricultural wheel has the young God born at Ostara, symbolic of the sun/son rising in the East. He dies in the second harvest, Mabon, which means 'the young Lord'.

In the different traditions these holidays (holy days) may have different names, for example Imbolc is called the festival of light in the northern tradition.

Western Pagans have no fixed temples in which to worship but instead (usually) make a circle around all the celebrants (or the celebrants themselves form a circle) in a room or in a clearing or on a beach or find a naturally occurring circle such as a grove or use one of the ancient stone circles. Pagans have no hierarchy like the established religions so Pagans are free to follow whatever spiritual path they choose.

Pagans like to celebrate more rites of passage than the prevailing culture. Most people see two rites of passage: coming of age (18 or 21) and marriage. Christians also get a first one, the Christening, though the subject is unable to experience it.

The Pagan equivalent of a Christening is a Naming ceremony. Other rites of passage may include Child - celebrating change from baby to child, Puberty and so on. Marriage is called hand-fasting and this may be arranged for eternity or just for a year-and-a-day, renewable. The latter is a great stabilizer against casual relationships and divorces, providing some level of commitment yet recognizing that some relationships will not last.

PAGAN SYMBOLS

THE MOON

Changes it's face roughly every 28-29 days, at about the same rate that female humans menstruate, it has long been associated with the feminine and hence the Goddess - Artemis and Hecate.

THE SUN

The God symbol - Apollo and Jesus

THE CHALICE

Cup used in rituals

It is a container and is associated with the womb and vagina, and hence a symbol of the Goddess. Two examples of Chalices in myth are the Cup that Jesus had drunk from at the last supper, and the Holy Grail, which the knights of the round table had to search for in order for Arthur (and the land) to become whole again.

THE ATHEME

It is a dagger used in rituals, primarily to focus and concentrate power. It is a phallic symbol and as a cutting tool a divider, and thus represents The God. Magic swords are another version of the Atheme and are popular in fantasy novels and myth. One example is Excaliber, which King Arthur uses via "divine right". Another is Stormbringer, as used by Elric in the stories written by Micheal Moorcock. Note the dual imagery. Excalibre was used as a force for order, Stormbringer drank souls and was a force for Chaos. Tools are only as good as their user.

THE FIVE POINTED STAR Pentangle or a Pentagram - Goddess

For neo-pagans this is symbolic of the four elements: air, water, earth, fire + spirit. Pythagoras held the number 5 to be the sum of the feminine element (2) and the masculine element (3), so it is also symbolic of a union of masculine and feminine. The symbol also has meaning in Taoism, Hinduism and Islam.

The overlapping arms (which does not appear in all versions) shows how each part is interconnected with the others. The circle around the star represents unity, the self, and wholeness.

One mode of understanding is that the pentagram shown as above (with one point at the top) represents the Goddess, and inverted (with two points at top) the God. Of course the inverted pentagram in Christian belief represents the Devil -- not suprising since the versions of Pan and The God were used to represent such.

THE ANKH

This is an ancient Egyptian symbol representing eternal life. It is said to be taken from a simple sandal strap. Regardless of that, it is also a symbol representing the Goddess and the God and this a Neo-Pagan symbol.

This is an ancient Egyptian symbol. It has three elements. The circle represents the Goddess; the vertical line represents the God, and the horizontal bar is the "scroll of knowledge". Join them together and you get an ankh.

"Neo-Pagan" means "new pagan" (derived from the Latin paganus , "country-dweller") and hearkens back to times before the spread of today's major monotheistic (one god) religions. A good general rule is that most Wiccans are Neo-Pagans but not all Pagans are Wiccans.

Neopagans hold a reverence for the Earth and all its creatures, generally see all life as interconnected, and tend to strive to attune one's self to the manifestation of this belief as seen in the cycles of nature.

Pagans are usually polytheistic (believing in more than one god), and they usually believe in immanance, or the concept of divinity residing in all things. Many pagans, though polytheistic, see all things as being part of one Great Mystery. The apparent contradiction of being both polytheistic and monotheistic can be resolved by seeing the God/desses as masks worn by the Great Mystery. Other pagans are simply monotheistic or polytheistic, and still others are atheistic.

Some people believe paganism to be a religion within itself; others see it as a belief system (such as monotheism) that can be incorporated into religions like Wicca or Druidism; others see it as a broad category including many religions. The fact that we are re-creating religion for ourselves after centuries of suppression makes us very eclectic and very concerned with the "rightness" of a particular thing for the individual. So when you see some people calling it a religion and others not, when you see it capitalized in some instances and not in others, don't be confused - we're all still basically talking about the same thing.

Neo-Paganism is any of several spiritual movements that attempt to revive the ancient polytheistic religions of Europe and the Middle East. These movements have a close relationship to ritual magic and modern witchcraft. Neo-Paganism differs from them, however, in striving to revive authentic pantheons and rituals of ancient cultures, though often in deliberately eclectic and reconstructionist ways, and by a particularly contemplative and celebrative attitude.

Typically people with romantic feelings toward nature and deep ecological concerns, Neo-Pagans centre their dramatic and colourful rituals around the changes of the seasons and the personification of nature as full of divine life, as well as the holy days and motifs of the religions by which their own groups are inspired.

Modern Neo-Paganism has roots in 19th-century Romanticism and activities inspired by it, such as the British Order of Druids (which, however, claims an older lineage). Sometimes associated with extreme nationalism, Neo-Pagan groups and sentiments were known in Europe before World War II, but contemporary Neo-Paganism is for the most part a product of the 1960s. Influenced by the works of the psychiatrist Carl Jung and the writer Robert Graves, Neo-Paganists are more interested in nature and archetypal psychology than in nationalism.

Neo-Paganism in the postwar decades has flourished particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom and in Scandinavia. Some of the major Neo-Pagan groups are the Church of All Worlds, the largest of all the pagan movements, which centres on worship of the earth-mother goddess; Feraferia, based on ancient Greek religion and also centred on goddess worship; Pagan Way, a nature religion centred on goddess worship and the seasons; the Reformed Druids of North America; the Church of the Eternal Source, which has revived ancient Egyptian religion; and the Viking Brotherhood, which celebrates Norse rites. Beginning in the late 1970s, some feminists, open to feminine personifications of the deity, became interested in witchcraft and Neo-Paganism.

[tipsycad147]

White magick, black magick: What’s the difference?

Posted by Michelle Gruben on Mar 28, 2017

“I’m a white Witch. He practices black magick.” If you spend enough time in witchy company, you’re sure to come across some discussion of shades and tints of magick. But what do these terms really mean? What beliefs and ideas do they encompass? And, more to the point, is there really a distinction between white magick (good) and black magick (evil)?

Before I launch into the whole white/black magick taxonomy, I should acknowledge that these terms have fallen out of favour in recent decades. Few contemporary Witches really use them to describe their practice. You can blame creeping moral relativism for the shift, but there’s really more to it than that.

Try it. Bring up black/white magick at a gathering of Witches, and count the mere seconds until someone blandly recites, “Magick is neither good nor bad, it’s your intention that counts.” Then someone else will pipe up and make an analogy between magick and a knife (or box of matches). A third person will add that the words “black” and “white” have an implicit racial bias, and shouldn’t be used to describe morality all. A chorus of Witches will chime in that “white magick” and “black magick” are reductive, insensitive, and outdated terms.

Magick is a tool that can be used for good or evil. It’s your intention that matters. Sure, it’s a loathsome cliche. But it does neatly sum up how many Witches feel about the ethical status of magickal work. That’s another way of saying that any spell or working that’s done with good intentions is white magick.

Is it ever that simple? Of course not! Why? Because human intentions are never that simple. But, when you’re explaining to your grandma why witchcraft isn’t Devil worship, I suppose it’s enough.

I could stop right there, but my psychic powers tell me that some of you won’t be satisfied with such a glib answer. So let’s drill down a little further into the “colours” of magick.

The history of an idea

While the dichotomy of white versus black magick may be out of fashion at the moment, it’s not going away anytime soon. This concept can be traced all the way back to the earliest medieval writers on occultism. Though nobody likes to admit it, the entire Western esoteric tradition is built on a foundation of medieval magick. (And that includes a framework of Judaeo-Christian cosmology.) Even Wicca has never really escaped the long shadow of Jehovah. Trying to extract the medieval worldview from Western occultism is a bit like boning out a whole chicken: The end result may be more palatable, but also rather flat and wobbly.

The 12th and 13th centuries were a very exciting period of magickal discovery. Ancient traditions of geometry, astronomy, proto-chemistry, written language, and image-making were being rediscovered after getting buried during Europe’s Dark Ages. The medieval grimoires rushed to synthesise all this knowledge into a comprehensive map of all Creation. Fuelling it all was a yearning to match the massive achievements of the Classical world.

Nostalgia for ancient times is something that many Witches and polytheists can relate to. And while we might be tempted think of the Pagan empires—Egypt, Greece, and Rome—as being happy magickal paradises, some of that is wishful thinking. State-sanctioned magick was basically limited to oracles and priests of the gods. Most ancient legal codes contain laws against witchcraft—including sorcery, necromancy and poisoning.

It’s not always spelled out in black and white (heh), but as long as magick has existed, there have been legal and social rules governing its use. Early civilizations did distinguish between approved and unapproved types of magick. Acceptable types—like augury and healing—were usually practised under the sponsorship of some deity. As far as personal magick, you might ask Ra to punish your enemies or pray to Diana for fertility. Maybe you’d even sweeten the pot with a generous gift or carefully made tablet or talisman.

But that was as far as it was safe to go. You made your offerings, and you prayed to the gods for omens or favours. If you didn’t get your way, one can presume, you upped the ante and tried again. Anyone caught trying to manipulate the natural order of things through forbidden arts was distrusted as the worst type of criminal.

If you think about witchcraft laws from a sociopolitical point of view, they make a lot more sense. Kings and priests don’t want their authority undermined by every hedge-witch and soothsayer in the land. They can also do without the panic and turmoil that comes along with witchcraft scares. (On the other hand, arresting a handful of Witches every now and then is a tried and true from of propaganda—a way to show you’re still in charge and fear no one.)

Things were even stricter among the People of the Book. The Old Testament forbids witchcraft explicitly. Not just harmful sorcery in this case, but also polytheism, idolatry, fortune-telling, spell-casting, astrology, and medium-ship. The scriptures demand complete trust in God, which was seen to be incompatible with occult practices. (Never mind the rumours that King Solomon himself practised magick.) For centuries, Christians and Jews shunned witchcraft as a rebellious and faithless act against God. Predictive magick, such as astrology, was rejected as an affront to free will.

So anyway, here we are in the Middle Ages and the crowning of the Western occult tradition. Reams of ancient texts are being re-discovered (or in some cases, forged). People started reading Aristotle and Pythagoras again. The Emerald Tablet, the foundational text of Hermeticism, was translated into Latin for the first time. And soon enough, new Kabbalistic writings in Arabic were lending Abrahamic legitimacy to this esoteric flood.

The rules about magick began to get fuzzy. People started to lighten up a bit. But as (mostly) Christians, they still had to tread carefully. Doing the wrong kind of magick could still get you in big, big trouble. Suddenly, it became very important to know what occult pursuits were approved by the Man Upstairs, and which would damn you to hell. (Or at least a very uncomfortable death by execution.)

Among the first to draw a line in the sand was the 13th century French bishop William of Auvergne. William rejected the earlier Christian belief that all magick is demonic. His treatises made a distinction between “natural magick” (which was allowed) and other kinds (which were not). Natural magick draws on the beneficial properties of herbs, gems, and animals. Because these powers were conferred by God, using them in the service of mankind is permissible. Unacceptable forms of magick include consulting with spirits and all types of image magick—the use of idols, signs and symbols.

Medieval thinkers started—but did not finish—the conversation about white and black magick. For the next several hundred years, ceremonial magicians try to find a way to do what they want while staying at the right hand of the Lord. Rules are bent and hairs split. Magick circles acquire even more holy initials. Occultists tease out the boundaries between theurgy and thaumaturgy, high and low magick.

During the Enlightenment, the conversation goes dormant until the occult revival of the 19th century. Magickal ethics get revisited and refined in libraries and drawing rooms—this time with the introduction of Eastern ideas, including karma. Gerald Gardner unveils Wicca to a conservative British public. Facing a major PR battle, he rebrands witchcraft as “the craft of the Wise” and promulgates the Wiccan Rede and the Threefold Law.

The modern neo-Pagan movement is born. Witchcraft’s public makeover has begun. It’s from this point on that the phrase “white magick” comes into regular use as newly minted Witches step up to defend their craft.

What is white magick?

White magick, is beneficent magick. It is performed to help or heal the magick worker or the target. White magick may include spell-casting, energy work, divination, blessings and prayer. As first described in the Middle Ages, white magick often depends on the inherent virtues of colours, herbs, or stones. Through his/her knowledge and its careful application, the white Witch harnesses the hidden power of the natural world. To this day, white magick is sometimes called “natural magick” and even “the right-hand path.”

White Witchcraft generally makes use of Earth energies and celestial energies. But not all Witches agree on the source of their powers. White Witches may draw their power from higher beings, from their own energy/will, or by capturing and directing neutral energy toward positive outcomes. Many white Witches work with deities or angels to steer their work toward its highest purpose.

Cleansing and healing are the most obvious branches of white magick. White magick also encompasses spells for friendship, peace, wisdom, creativity, dreaming, and personal growth. However, white magick is not necessarily selfless. Also, even well-intentioned spells can have negative consequences.

Many Witches consider all magick to be white magick, as long as it does not harm another. Some Witches do not see love and money spells as white magick, since they may constrain the wills of others. Protection spells may qualify as white magick if they are passive (e.g., setting up wards around a property), but not if they seek out or attack an adversary. Binding magick—even if it’s intended to prevent harm—is also usually excluded from the realm of white magick.

Contrary to what medieval magicians would have condoned, today’s white magick practitioners may contact spirits as part of their work. Communing with spirits for guidance, channelled healing, and conveying messages from departed love ones are all spiritualist practices that fit under the banner of white magick.

What is black magick?

Black magick, called “the left-hand path,” is white magick’s opposite. There are really two separate definitions of black magick swirling around: Magick intended to harm, and magick involving rebellious spirits.

The meaning of the term has been further complicated by people who label any occult practice they disapprove of as “black magick”. Workings involving the dead or the Underworld also get tossed into the black basket out of fear or misunderstanding. Voodoo and other (non-white) traditions have been exploited for decades by horror books and film—so they, too, get unfairly classified as black magick.

So, one definition of black magick would be all negative magick: Curses, hexes, psychic attack, spells to bring injury, illness, and misfortune.  Negative magick can be as simple as wishing harm upon someone, or as complex as an elaborate ritual. Occult practices that seize the energy of other life forms—such as vampirism and animal sacrifice—are regarded as black magick no matter their aim.

Another, older definition of “the black arts” is magick assisted by spirits or demons. The black magician makes pacts with the devil, conjures spirits of the dead, or summons infernal beings to do his bidding. In this medieval view of black magick, it doesn’t matter much what the magician’s purpose is. (She could be summoning Azaroth to heal her sick poodle. It’s the contact itself that’s unsavoury.) Yet there are plenty of Solomonic and Goetic magicians who work with demons, and who would be mightily offended by the suggestion that what they do is black magick.

The most comprehensive way to tell the difference might be this: White magick works in harmony with nature, while black magick is against nature. Nature’s habit is to continually improve, albeit in fits and starts. Black magick seeks to undo progress through chaos and destruction. Quintessential black magick workings—raising the dead, pacts to achieve immortality—usually seek to defy the natural cycles of life, replacing them with the magician’s own selfish obsessions.

What is grey magick?

Gray magick is a term that describes ethically ambiguous magick. It first appears in occult writings in the 1960s. Also called neutral magick, grey magick is neither specifically beneficial nor hostile. It can also refer to magick in which the ends justify the means, and vice versa.

You can imagine a square in which white magick—doing good things for good reasons—is in one corner. In the opposite corner is black magick (doing bad things for bad reasons). All of the rest of the square is filled in by grey magick (doing bad things for good reasons, or doing good things for bad reasons). Gray magick exists in a continuum, from a cloudy tint to a deep shade of charcoal.

If you cast a binding spell to stop someone from bothering you, or a love-drawing spell without concern for the trail of broken hearts, you might call that grey magick. Persuasion and glamour magick are grey-ish. So is magickal power for its own sake. Money magick can be grey: If your charm to win at the gambling table causes the other players to lose, then it’s not clear that your magick has contributed to the greater good. In one sense, all magick done for self-gratification can be considered grey magick at best.

Is grey magick a real category, or a cop-out? Gray magick is one way of acknowledging that you can never know all the consequences of your magick, and that your motivations may not be as saintly as you believe them to be. However, it can also be a way of dodging responsibility—or worse yet, delaying action.

Uncle Al (Crowley) —tells us, “The first condition of success in magick is purity of purpose.” If you’re not wholly committed, the results of your magick will be so feeble that you won’t need to worry whether it’s black, white, or gray.

Other colours

Are there other colours of magick? So glad you asked! “Green magick” or “green witchcraft” refers to the herbal branches of the magickal arts. Green Witches sometimes use that phrase to emphasise their reliance on the plant kingdom. A related term is “brown magick,” which includes the magick of animal guides, animal familiars, and shapeshifting.  And although it’s not common, I have heard the term “red magick” to describe the use of (consensual) bloodletting or sexual activity to raise massive amounts of energy in a hurry.

White and black magick today

Wiccans and Witches have been trying for decades to convince the public that their magick is benign—and for the most part, it’s worked. There’s more understanding and acceptance of alternative spirituality than ever before. If you tell someone you’re a Witch in my city, they’re more likely to visualize a pile of herbs and cats and crystals than some disturbing rite. It only took a thousand years, but white magick is finally dominating the cultural conversation about witchcraft.

But some Witches, it seems, do miss the element of fright that comes along with their vocation. Some don’t want to be lumped in with the wishy-washy, lovey-dovey white-light crowd. Some just don’t give a damn about what colour their magick is, as long as it works. For every mild-mannered Wiccan agonizing over whether her reversal spell violates the Rede, there is someone in a botanica buying a bottle of Bend Over Oil.

The whole black magick/white magick divide is arbitrary, culturally specific, and rooted in old Judaeo-Christian dogma that we Pagans profess not to believe in. And yet, magickal actions, like all actions, can have serious consequences. Most of us can agree that there are types of magick that are inhumane and destructive, and some that are vastly beneficial. But there’s a lot of wiggle room in the middle of the spectrum. In speaking and writing, the definitions of black and white magick seem to come down to what is acceptable to an individual Witch. It’s worth keeping these tired phrases around if they can help us to think and talk about magickal ethics.

https://www.groveandgrotto.com/blogs/articles/white-magick-black-magick-what-s-the-difference