Symbel: A Great Ritual for a Mixed Religious Crowd
Symbel (or sumbel… one of the great things about studying an ancient faith is the non-standardized spelling!) is a Norse tradition that has been written about in various old works from Beowulf to Snorri’s sagas, with regional variations in the exact performance and significance thereof. The word itself most likely comes from an Old Norse...
Share Your Holiday Traditions with the Princesses
Yule tidings, y’all! [Have we mentioned we live in Texas?] Today is the shortest day of the year and the first day of winter. While the sun will be spending more time in our sky in the days to come, his warmth will be mightily tempered by winter’s chill. As Jax said last week, the...
GG Gives You Science, I Give You Unfounded Meditations on the Nature of Chaos, AKA WTF is Yule?
Serious UPG* alert. There are 5,000,000,000,001 holidays this month. (I counted.) And as every pagan knows, the greeting “Happy Christmakwanzakah†doesn’t account for the one thing most December holidays center around – the solstice. As GG pointed out earlier this week, the solstice is the longest night of the year. Long ago when I realized...
A Brief Introduction to Lunar Cycles and Pagan Seasons
A few weeks ago, our friend Bekki commented there will be a lunar eclipse on December 21st (thanks, Bekki!). You might be wondering about the significance of one or both of these events. This had me thinking about our blog. It occurs to me that we are writing about pagan “holidays,†without really explaining them....
The Other Christmas Music
I love Christmas music. I mean, yeah, a lot of it’s based on, well, Jesus, and I don’t worship Jesus as a god (though I do have a lot of respect for his work as a person – talk about a progressive!). But I have fond memories of singing “Silent Night” and “O Come, O...
