A Darker Shade Of...Pagan

It's not circles we make so much, Kay, as spirals.

As you feel you have circled back spiritually to your home in Christianity, so I felt that feeling come upon me tonight. But not a circle – a spiral.

For each turn encompasses the experience, the growth, we have had since we last felt we were 'here'. So we're not really 'here again', but more passing over the ground where we once stood – older, presumably wiser, but more enriched for sure.

I was taken by a fancy to download Jason's latest podcast. A Darker Shade of Pagan informed much of my spiritual life a few years ago, and I hadn't though to listen each week for quite some time now. But the haunting opening strains from ADSOP filled the air just as darkness fell, and I lit the silver candles on my West altar.

I was instantly transported, as one is, to a time a few years ago, when many an episode of ADSOP would cause frissons up and down my spine. My taste in Pagan music has deepened and become more focused since then-but Pandemonaeon's Fierce Black Soul of Night sensitized me to the oncoming Rushing Dark Water in such an intense way that I found I was opening my arms before the altar instead of bringing them into the sign of Namaste. Opening my arms and creating the Sign of Falling Backwards into Night. My own piece of mystic nonsense, performed over several weeks at this time of year, every year.

Deeply open to the forms and feelings beyond this plane now, I sat, completely without any trace of fear, with a curious sense of utter detachment from all the stresses and strains I'd been connected to, and a conduit for, these past couple of weeks.

And I found a sense of label resonating in me as it hasn't done for a long time. For I have been Anarchist, Primitivist, Shaman. Transcender of the Dream and deeply rooted in it at the same time, no descriptions fit and stuck like this one: I am Pagan. Pagan. And upward and downward bound at one instant.

To borrow a phrase from beloved sister Hecate: May it be so for you, too.

Pic: Ataraxia