Living
Column: A Wall of Stone
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Sheri Barker builds a stone wall at the Bear Path Cottage, and finds herself communing with the spirits of her land and with the poetry of Robert Frost.
Paganism
Column: Ragnarök and Odin, Death and Memory
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Is Odin’s role in Ragnarök purely fatalistic, as it has often been claimed? Karl E.H. Seigfried argues for a more hopeful interpretation of Norse myth that focuses on building a better world for our descendants.
Culture
Review: three Pagan poets for National Poetry Month
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If, as is proclaimed in the Charge of the Goddess, “all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals,” then the pleasure of poetry is among those rituals, too. April is National Poetry Month in the United States. Here’s a look at the works of three female poets: a Wiccan priestess, a pioneer in the modern women’s/goddess spirituality movement, and a priestess in the Welsh Bardic Tradition. The Charge of the Goddess: the Poetry of Doreen Valiente
Doreen Valiente Foundation in association with the Centre for Pagan Studies, expanded edition 2014, 142 p.
Ironically, the Charge of the Goddess included is this collection by the acclaimed “mother of modern witchcraft” is not her rhyming, poetic rendition but rather her far more famous prose version. The late John Belham-Payne, a friend and “working magical partner” of Valiente’s, shepherded her poetry into publication following her death in 1999, thus fulfilling a deathbed request by the Wiccan priestess who had been initiated into Gerald Gardner’s coven by the man himself in 1953.
Australia
Poet Fleassy Malay’s ‘Witches’ poem inspires women
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In the past they burned us,
because they thought we were witches. Just because we knew what to do with herbs outside of the kitchen. Because we knew how to dance, seduce, pray. Because we moved with the cycles of the moon. That’s the beginning of poet Fleassy Malay’s Witches, which has been shared and appreciated widely within Pagan circles.