The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/neopaganism/page/19)
Here it is. Black Friday: The invented retail holiday after the dysfunctional dinner of glut when you’re supposed to buy something for everyone who participated; and celebrate the capitalistic commercialism of conspicuous excess. We get it. Black Friday drips with existential hypocrisy and all the obscenities of greed. So, here’s our gift guide.
Every time the planet Mercury appears to move in reverse or becomes what is known as retrograde (It really doesn’t move backward, it just looks like it does.), the internet and social media see a flurry of articles and memes proclaiming the dire pitfalls. The reality is that this astrological “weather” is not much different than navigating every day weather occurrences. If meteorologists tell us it is going to rain, we remember to grab an umbrella and maybe wear rain boots that day. If snow is forecast, we prepare accordingly—ice melt, shovels, purchasing the ubiquitous bread and milk. Those who pay attention to what is going on astrologically, and many Pagans do since moon cycles and other astrological influences play a role in their religious or magical practices.
The Pagan Awareness Network inc (PAN) recently celebrated 21 years’ service to Australia’s Pagan community. Our Australian Correspondent Josephine Winter recently sat down with president and founder David Garland as he reflected on the organization’s many achievements over the years, discussed the current climate of the community and looked to what comes next for the Network, which has become a cornerstone of Australian Paganism.
The Wild Hunt: Tell us a bit about your path and practice. To what extent is community service part of your spiritual path? David Garland: My beginnings were as a solitary, skirting around what I later found out was Stregha, from my grandmother.
Pagan Perspectives
Back in 2013 and 2014, when I was getting ready to start gathering sources for my masters’ thesis in Old Norse Religion, I realized something: while the vast majority of medieval Norse-Icelandic sagas were readily accessible in Old Icelandic, quite a few of them were hard to get a hold of in translation. Sure, I could have soldiered on, armed with only my trusty Old Icelandic-English dictionary and go through every single saga in the original language, but it would have taken such a long time that, had I done so, I’d probably still be at it today. What I needed were more general editions and translations, with enough notes and index-entries to quickly find relevant information. When it came to the more popular sagas, such as the so-called “family-sagas” (Íslendingasögur), I had little problem finding good versions. In my excessive exhaustiveness, however, I found a severe lack of material related to the more obscure sagas.
Pagan Perspectives
One of my most vivid school memories comes from a history lesson I had when I was about seven or eight. From very early on, history had been my favorite subject. The books were always filled to the brim with colorful pictures, and the fact that the topic encompasses just about everything that ever took place regarding mankind drew my attention. That day at school, we were supposed to learn about the Renaissance and the 16th century. As I opened my book, my eyes met with a picture of a crowd laying waste to a church, breaking windows and tearing down statues.