By Psyche | January 17, 2010
Standing Stone and Garden Gate is a new podcast started at the end of December 2009 by author and philosopher Brendan Cathbad Myers and Juniper, who blogs at Walking the Hedge. Their tagline is “the podshow for thinking Pagans and working Witches” and they’ve already put out three episodes.
In Episode One Brendan and Juniper introduce themselves and the podcast. Also introduces the segments, such as Standing Stone, a segment dealing with philosophic themes – very appropriate for Brendan. Rants and Raves, which will be commentaries on current media, book reviews and other social commentary on the Pagan scene. Garden Gate, how to find the magickal in the mundane, every day practice. Ask Dr Expert, a segment where Juniper will try to stump Brendan on some bit of arcane lore. Continue reading »
Popularity: 7%
By Psyche | July 4, 2008
I first came across Siva Vaidhyanathan‘s excellent and wonderfully lucid book, The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System
, via Wes Unruh‘s recommendation on Alterati.com.
It looks at the way we interact with information with a focus on ownership and distribution, arguing that the way we structure this can be boiled down into two essential forms: anarchistic and oligarchic systems.
Vaidhyanathan avoids cartoonish portrayals of anarchy, sticking largely to anarchy’s core definition: the absence of recognized authority, rules imposed or enforced. Oligarchic forms use the rule of the few, the elite who decide how and where information is distributed, if at all. They set the the rules, and they hold all the cards. Continue reading »
Popularity: 8%
By Psyche | June 27, 2008
The Globe and Mail recently ran an article in their Life section titled “How to set an unfair rule (yes, it’s acceptable)” about perceived double standards, a sentiment I encounter quite a bit among friends, co-workers and human beings in general.
The article, written by clinical psychologist Anthony Wolf, looks at the rules set for Continue reading »
Popularity: 3%
Dr Brendan Cathbad Myers is the author of several books on radical Paganism and Druidry, his latest, The Other Side of Virtue: Where Our Virtues Come From, What They Really Mean, and Where They Might Be Taking Us, will be published by O Books in July 2008.
A spiritual path is, among other things, a way of seeing the world. That is to say, a spiritual path is a way of understanding or interpreting our relationships with the many things, events, people, and places in the world. In most cases, the path will be expressed or configured by a logic of correspondences. In accord with this logic, the appearance of a certain animal, or plant, or weather event, or whatever, signifies realities beyond itself. Similarly, every spiritual path will have meditations, rituals, techniques, practices, and so on, designed to help the practitioner recognise those signs and read the messages they convey. The co-ordinates of the correspondences will vary in accord with language, culture, climate, geography, and other factors. They can grow ever more complicated and intricate, in order to accommodate an ever growing range of things and events in an ever-changing world. Continue reading »
Popularity: 10%
By Psyche | January 1, 2008
Earlier we looked at the role of “accuracy” in tarot, particularly in comparison to fortune-telling (see [cref 21]). A key point to take away from this is that, in reading for a client or even for oneself, the main goal of any divinatory reading is to provide information that is useful to the querent.
Whether or not the future is set can become irrelevant when the cards clearly foretell disaster for the querent. When the cards spell doom, deciding how to relate that can be tricky. Changeable or not, it’s rarely something a querent wants to hear, and depending on who the querent is it can be more detrimental to share this information than not. Continue reading »
Popularity: 3%
