Guest Author: Eric Slade Roberson of Shift Your Spirits

A few months ago, Slade was kind enough to invite me onto his site as a guest author, where I took the opportunity to summarize the How to Choose a Religion series. (That summary has things in it that I still haven’t gotten around to here on my own blog!) I jumped at the chance to have Slade write something for the Druid Journal in return.

Slade is an author of tremendous energy and creativity, and an experienced medium and Reader as well. In Drawing Cards he describes a new way of using the Tarot, one that draws directly from the images in the cards — in my opinion, the greatest strength of the Tarot.

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In (belated) honor of Valentine’s Day, I present to you an hommage to the language of love.

(I really shouldn’t do this, and I feel guilty about it. As a linguist, I value all languages highly and respect them as monuments to human culture and innovation. On top of that, French really is a lovely language, both written and spoken. Its spelling system may be inefficient — the word eaux, for example, is pronounced “o” — but who cares about that? Beauty doesn’t have to be efficient. But… still… perhaps I may engage in the occasional guilty pleasure…)

What is the difference between older religions and newer religions?

Ever since I posted the previous essay in this series, Languages of Spirit, I’ve had a surprising number of page hits from people putting this question into Google. I don’t know — maybe some professor somewhere issued this as a question for a take-home test, or something. In any case, since it seems to be on people’s minds, and I’m itching to write about it anyway, here we go! Read the rest of this entry »