For some notes on the origin and meaning of Alban Elued, see this previous post. Our family’s Alban Elued ritual is drawn directly from the pages of John Michael Greer’s Druidry Handbook. It is in no way supposed to be a reconstructed ritual, a reenactment of what ancient Druids performed 2000 years ago. Almost nothing…
Month: September 2006
The Eight-Circuit Tarot Deck I: Alchemy, Astrology, and Jung, Oh My!
As I mentioned before, I’ve had some pretty strong indications that Someone wants me to create a Tarot deck. Since I’ve been burning a lot of calories thinking about astrology, Jungian archetypes, and the eight-circuit model, it only makes sense to see what kind of deck would emerge from drawing together these structures with the…
The Instructions of King Cormac
Below I’ve copied in a remarkable ancient Irish text, “The Instructions of King Cormac“, taken from the Book of Ballymote, which dates to about 1390. The “Instructions” themselves are certainly much older — probably they date to pre-Christian times, since they fail to mention God anywhere. Ellen Hopman drew attention to it on the Druid…
On Faerie
If the belief community model is correct, then it is possible to do or see things that are generally considered impossible (like physically flying unaided, or seeing fairies). But it takes time, and usually it involves making new friends.
The Mist-Filled Path II
In this post I’ll wrap up my review of Frank MacEowen’s The Mist-Filled Path, lay out some of my ruminations on the mixing and matching of disparate spiritual paths in the modern world, and give the interpretation of the dream I described in the previous post.
My Anima
In my meditations over the past couple of months, I have continually found myself running into a young woman. She has followed me down forest paths, or waved to me in passing, in almost every meditation I’ve done. If I haven’t seen her, I have seen her house in the distance. She isn’t anyone I…
The Mist-Filled Path I
In this post and the next one, I’d like to share an odd little sequence of synchronicities in my life. They led me to think long and hard about the spiritual path I’ve chosen and how it relates other paths people are following these days.
On Subjective Reality II: the Belief Community Model
As I noted in my previous post, believing in subjective reality as Steve Pavlina defines it requires struggling with some strange and thorny questions, including to what extent you can trust your own memory, how the “rules” of physical reality are learned, and whether you can use the Law of Attraction to generate other conscious…
On Subjective Reality I: Strange Questions
I’d like to take a couple of posts to talk about Steve Pavlina’s recent remarkable podcast on subjective reality. Steve tries to explain the Law of Attraction — that is, the observation that your reality strongly reflects your thoughts — by proposing that everything you observe is caused by your own consciousness. In fact, nothing…
Tour of a Waldorf Kindergarten
This week our children are returning to school. They are ecstatic, and we’re pretty excited too. This is the beginning of our fourth year as Waldorf parents, and our enthusiasm hasn’t waned over time. On the contrary, every year we are more certain that Waldorf is the perfect place to send our children. It is,…
