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Good Morning, Evening and Afternoon Everyone!
I’m so sorry about the delay, the amount of bad luck I’ve experienced this winter break…I don’t think anyone is going to believe me.
As everyone knows, I got sick thanks to my Little Bro and that made it very difficult and painful to type anything for a good week. After getting over that, I was feeling much better until my mom started feeling sick as well. I thought she had the same thing me and Little Bro had but it turns out she had a VERY bad flu that has been running rampant in forty-one states…and then she gave it to everyone in the house. We were all sick with MAJOR fevers, throwing up, and upper respiratory distress from Christmas into the first week of January.
You think, “Man, that sucks but everything got better after that, right?” Nope, thanks to either someone at Wal-Mart or someone at my brother’s school. I had to stay up Thursday night until 2:30 am Friday while my mom ripped through my hair and my brother’s with a lice comb and fumigated our rooms and bedding.
“Wow, that…really sucks,” you might say, “But it stops there…right?” Nay, it shall not I say! Next weekend, I now have to experience the wonders of oral surgery to remove a very painful granuloma that I’ve developed on the right side of my mouth…
Okay, thank you for letting me rant. Now here is the post I promised: Saint Expedite Part Deux! Finally!
I wanted to do a second post on this because of all of the wonderful feedback from the first post. There are two points that I want to touch on in this post: getting to know saints and ritual remains.
Many of the strict traditions of Wicca and Paganism (such as Alexandrian and Gardenerian) don’t really use saints that often if any that I’ve noticed. I think this is because many Christian saints started out as Old Religion spirits and deities that were Christianized when Paganism was persecuted; so many pagans, with some exceptions, use the original names to distance themselves from the oppression that Christianity caused. Take St. Brigit of Ireland who is worshipped by thousands and has many schools and churches named after her. She started out as the Goddess Brighit of the local pagans. As well as Santa Claus or Saint Nick who is a hodgepodge of deities including Nordic Odin and The Holly King.
But this does not mean that calling a deity one name is more powerful than calling it another. How I see it is that they are one and the same but also they are individuals, like two sides of the same coin.
When I started the St. Expedite spell, I took the advice of Dr. Lazarus Corbeaux, a hoodoo practitioner that when you are going to petition a saint or any deity that it’s a good idea to talk to them and let them get to know you before you do your actual spell/ritual. How I did this was that when I had my altar on the kitchen table, I sat across from Saint Expedite and introduce myself.
I know this may seem silly but there is a reason for it.
I simply introduced myself and…I talked. I talked about me, my family, my troubles my successes and things like that. In the morning I said hello to him and at dinner I ate at the table with him and afterwards I would light his candle and meditate my intentions with him.
This creates a bond between petitioner and petition-y, a friendship if you will. If a complete stranger came up to you and asked to borrow one hundred dollars or borrow your car, you would say no or possibly a ‘Hell No!’ If a friend you knew and spent time with and knew really well asked you these things, there’s more of a chance that you would say yes, and that goes the same with deities and saints.
Secondly, the subject of ritual remains. Ritual remains are all the stuff left over after a spell is completed such as candle wax, herbs, flowers, offerings and the like. With the pound cake, flowers and water in the spell, after my petition was answered, I placed them outside in thanks. With the paper with my petition on it, I buried it in my backyard and said thanks to him. The candle wax from the spent candle I chose to keep because I plan to make another candle for Saint Expedite using the wax. Some people dispose of the wax by burying it or throwing it away but I like to keep the wax I use because it is already concentrated and holds magical energy that it will boost the next candle that is made.
I hope I covered everything I left out wish me luck with the rest of my winter break!
Blessed Be )o(
Happy Yule and Merry Solstice to everyone on this beautiful sunny day! I think the Goddess went into labor early yesterday because it was so rainy and dark that I could barely see my hand in front of my face and now it so beautifully bright.
Great news is my fever broke and the rash is starting to go away and it’s not as itchy or painful as it was before. Even though I still feel a little yucky, I wanted to share pictures of my Yule altar with everyone. It’s not as big as I hoped to do it this year, but I’m still proud of it…
I made the yellow sun out of air dry clay and painted it, then put a ribbon through it to hang it in my room. The images of the Holly King (left) and the Oak King (right) I printed them out on cardstock like my Saint Expedite photo. The goddess statue is actually an old lotion bottle I found at the thrift store for $2 and she had a sister that I gave to my mom.
I placed some stones in the shape of the pentacle to represent things that I hope for the year and for my family: Sunstones to call back the sun, rose quartz for love and Aphrodite my patron goddess, Adventurine to attract luck and prosperity, citrine for cleansing and bloodstone for protection.
I hope everyone has a great Yule and a great Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa and a happy holiday all around.
Blessed Be 🙂 )o(
The first thing I have to say is…thank you God, Goddess and every deity known to human kind and the few known to monkeys for helping me get through Exam Week. I know this will sound whiney, but I feel like I’ve been dropped kicked across Milwaukee, all the way to Madison and back. I kid you not, when I came home from my last exam of the semester, I went to my room and slept for three hours before my mom came home around six-ish.
Essays, essays and guess what…more essays! Luckily one was a take home, but doing that and trying to study for four other classes is NOT an easy task.
I can’t believe I only have one more semester until I have my Bachelor’s…very scarey.
I’ll be posting a second part to my Saint Expedite spell post early this coming week, because I …sort of…forget to do it because of exams (thank you wonderful Emmelia for reminding me! 🙂 ). It’s just going to be a brief go through of what I did with the ritual ‘remains’ of the spell and maybe give you guys some ideas if you want to do this spell.
First…sleep. Blissful, wonderful, much needed sleep.
And caffeine detox…
Blessed Be everyone! )o(
Blessed Be everyone!
Wow, have things been going on! Some really cool things and some very serious things…
I celebrated my 21st birthday with my beloved parents and Little Bro by going to the movies and seeing something I’ve wanted to see for months, “Rock of Ages” (yay)! I’m a huge fan of the Broadway performance and the movie didn’t disappoint, although, the movie and the musical are two completely different things that I love for completely different reasons. The movie has a HEA ending while the musical ending is more realistic but still happy. Both are awesome in their own way.
Some might know that a couple of weeks ago was the Summer Solstice also known as Midsummer or Litha. And it’s not just a Wiccan or Pagan holiday, its celebrated all over the world as the longest day of the year and as the half way point to the end of summer. It’s the end of the Oak King’s reign and the Holly King has taken his place, and the time has come to prepare for the upcoming harvest.
When Litha came, I wasn’t in a very good spot. It was a mixture of things that I could write ten pages on, but let’s just say it was multiple stresses from multiple areas of my life. I had a plan that I wanted to make Litha a big thing with my family and we’d go outside and have a bonfire with marshmallows and a small ritual and…everything fell though as sometimes it does. I was disappointed because I have been putting off all the sabbats and esbats because things would come up with my internship or me trying to muster up the creative energy to work on my creative writing that I hadn’t touched since May which isn’t going very well…
The sun was setting, and I was alone with my family doing their own thing.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I walked outside, barefoot in my cupcake pjs, and knelt at the foot of the several years old willow-esque tree in the back yard where I like going for making offerings and doing rituals. I felt awkward and uncomfortable, not just because I was kneeling on some very hard dirt in my unpadded pajamas. I had only felt that way once before in the seventh grade when I had to talk with the school counselor after a poem I wrote about a grey cloud made my English teacher think I was depressed…don’t ask.
I knelt in the quietness of Nature and I cried everything out of me, every frustration in my life, every angry thought that I had of me and how disappointed I felt with myself. After the crying, I still sat. And…I talked. I talked to the God and Goddess for what seemed like hours, but it was only a couple. I know my neighbors must have thought, “Oh, that neighbor’s kid is just not right” but… I had never felt so connected to Spirit than in those moments. I felt a pressure release inside of me and a velvet comfort in my mind that seemed to say “I hear you. I understand. It’ll get better”.
My point of this is that life has its sucky moments where you feel mentally and emotionally shattered. It could be from the death of a beloved person in your life or from financial hardships or just from plain loneliness. But I think something that M. Flora Peterson said rings true, “Today in our fast paced lives, its challenging to find those 10-15 minutes a day where we can find our center, find our balance, and really feel that divine connection in our lives”. For months I’ve been feeling that something was missing. That something wasn’t right. I don’t know if what I described could be called a ‘spiritual awakening’ or ‘wakeup call’ or something. But whatever I was…It was something that I really needed and maybe it’s something that many people need.
So I want to assign some homework for anyone who wants to do it and it will only take 10 minutes…
Go someplace where you feel comfortable, preferably somewhere quiet. Close your eyes and empty your head of all the junk we accumulate in the average work week, boss is ticking you off, parents are breathing down your neck about something, the kids aren’t listening to you. Just chuck that out the window for 10 minutes and let the silence speak to you. Because I have come to believe that silence can tell you a lot more than the noises we have to listen to on a daily basis.
Blessed be everyone and have a great July 4th!
When I first started on my path, I read a lot of books on Wicca and Paganism. One custom that many write about is the giving of an offering to the G&G as a way of saying ‘thank you for everything’ or as a way of asking for help with something.
But one thing that I noticed is that in one book, the writer would say ‘offering’ while another author would use the word ‘sacrifice’. Now I don’t know about anyone else, but when someone uses the terms ‘pagan’ and ‘sacrifice’ in the same sentence, some might get the wrong idea…like boiling bunnies or chaining a virgin to a stone slab.
There is a difference between an offering and a sacrifice. The lines between them can be confusing at times but there is a difference.
A sacrifice is what the word means: the person is giving something up that is vital to THAT person. I mean the person that is making the sacrifice. You sacrificing your big sister’s mp3 player to the G&G by throwing it into the river and asking for a good grade in math is not a sacrifice because you didn’t give up anything. The most popular example of sacrifice is a sacrifice of blood. YOUR BLOOD! Not the blood of some poor helpless living creature. Blood is considered a sacrifice because you are giving a part of yourself up, a part of your essence. It is the reason why many ancient civilizations used human and animal sacrifices, because a living beings life essence it a very powerful form of magical energy.
An offering is the giving of something that you have in abundance. Many pagans have alters that they store their offerings on like freshly cut flowers, flower petals, salt, bits of bread or fruit, etc.
Food is one of those confusing things that many question is it an offering or a sacrifice? Food is more accessible today than it was a thousand years ago, where the giving of food was a much bigger deal. When I do offerings, I like to use things from around the house that I know no one else will use. Such as the ends of a loaf of bread, cornmeal, fallen rose petals from our garden outside, leftover candy from holidays, etc.
So that is the difference between an offering and a sacrifice. I hope I was clear enough, Blessed Be 🙂
Writing A Silver Broomstick 