Pagan life as it is actually lived: sometimes sacred, sometimes ridiculous, occasionally profound, and very often not nearly as dignified as the books make it sound.
New posts appear weekly, with observations on Pagan culture, witchcraft, magical practice, community, changing times, and the wonderfully strange business of being a Pagan human in the real world.
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October has arrived and the Pagans are not okay.
To be clear, nothing is wrong. Quite the opposite. We are so ridiculously excited that we’re just barely containing our bodily functions. We’re practically vibrating. We’re breathing heavily in the Halloween aisles, buying things we absolutely do not need, and experiencing a level of seasonal enthusiasm usually reserved for children on the last day of school before winter vacation. If you encounter a Pagan looking slightly unhinged during the first week of October, don’t be alarmed. We’re happy. Possibly too happy. Someone should probably check our blood pressure. Continue reading It’s October. The Pagans Are Not Okay.
I don’t know, sweetheart. It looks like a piece of a sprinkler.
Continue reading The Trouble With Being the Witch in the Family
I have some concerns about the veil. Not just “the veil,” but “The Veil.”
Apparently, it has been thinning for several months now. Possibly years. Every Samhain, certainly. During eclipses. Around full moons. During various astrological events. On numerologically interesting dates. Occasionally on Tuesdays.
At this point, the veil has been thinning so frequently that I am concerned about its structural integrity.
Somebody should probably call maintenance. Continue reading Does Everything Have to Be So Dramatic?
By JB, Just JB
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this personal account appeared in Green Egg, Vol. LVIII, No. 194 (Summer 2026). The author has since expanded and revised the piece, adding further detail to his account of the experience and its lasting spiritual significance.
Continue reading An Encounter With the Great God Pan Among the Stars
The publishing world moves quickly, and even good books can disappear from view once the excitement surrounding their release has passed. For this edition of The Pagan Bookshelf, we are stepping away from the newest arrivals and reaching back a little farther for two Moon Books titles that deserve another look. Robin Herne’s Pantheon: The Egyptians was published in 2021, followed by Halo Quin’s Crimson Craft in 2023, but neither book has lost its relevance simply because newer titles have since crowded onto the shelves. Sometimes the best addition to our reading list is not the book everyone is talking about right now, but the one we somehow missed the first time around. Continue reading Books You May Have Missed
Some books teach a technique. Others invite us to reconsider the way we understand an entire practice. This week’s Pagan Bookshelf offers a little of both, with three works spanning spellcraft, Tarot, and the Toltec spiritual tradition.
Eileen Holland’s A Cauldron of Spells returns in a new edition, bringing a collection of practical spellwork to a new generation of readers. Rachel Pollack’s Tarot: The Open Labyrinth celebrates its fortieth anniversary with a new edition, while Michelle Rodriguez and Sergio Magaña present teachings rooted in the Toltec tradition for contemporary readers. Together, these books remind us that not everything arriving on the “new releases” shelf is entirely new. Sometimes a familiar work finds fresh life in a new edition, and sometimes traditional teachings find a new audience. Continue reading More From Red Wheel/Weiser
There is something almost suspiciously tidy about the Autumn Equinox. Light and dark are balanced, the harvest is gathered, baskets of apples appear everywhere, pumpkins glow obligingly in the background, and a few artfully arranged acorns complete the picture. Perhaps there is a cinnamon broom involved if we are feeling particularly festive. Pagans are very good at autumn. Give us a crisp morning, a candle, and something orange and we will absolutely make a religion out of it.
And yet, the older I get, the less I think the Autumn Equinox is really about any of those things. Increasingly, I think it is about reckoning—not the ominous, thunder-on-the-horizon sort of reckoning but reckoning in its older and simpler sense of counting up, taking stock, and looking honestly at what came from what we planted. The harvest does not care what we intended to grow. It shows us what actually grew, and there is something profoundly Pagan about that. Continue reading The Honest Harvest: What the Autumn Equinox Asks of Us
This visit to The Pagan Bookshelf brings together three books concerned, in very different ways, with what we make of ourselves. Loren Morris puts cord magic quite literally into our hands, Shavonne Readus approaches Tarot as a means of developing confidence and self-understanding, and Madison Murphy Barney invites us into the decidedly stranger territory suggested by a title like Our Ancestors Want Us to Be Mushrooms.
Practical magic, Tarot, ancestry, identity, and transformation make unusual shelfmates, perhaps, but Pagan bookshelves have never been particularly interested in behaving themselves. Let’s see what these three have to offer.
Few publishers have embraced the sheer breadth of contemporary Paganism quite like Moon Books, and this week’s Pagan Bookshelf demonstrates just how many directions that breadth can take us. We have dragons and ancient lore, Irish mythology in fresh translation, the enduring presence of Herne the Hunter, and Witchcraft steeped in the color, fragrance, history, and magic of lavender.
These four books range from scholarship and folklore to devotional and practical magical work, but all share an interest in looking more closely at the stories, beings, traditions, and natural allies that continue to shape Pagan practice. Whether your interests run toward Celtic myth, legendary creatures, the wild forest, or the Witch’s garden, there is quite a bit here to explore. Continue reading New From Moon Books!
My first husband once explained that part of the reason he divorced me was that he couldn’t respect me because I “talk about things that aren’t there” and went to my “meetings” wearing a bathrobe.
The bathrobe was my ritual robe. It’s not like I stopped by the Piggly Wiggly on my way home–in my “bathrobe”–to buy milk and oreos.
The things I talked to that weren’t there were considerably more complicated.
The Pagan Bookshelf is getting a little crowded lately, which is hardly the worst problem an editor can have!
I am blessed to review an impressive assortment (and number) of new books the publishers send our way, and rather than make good books wait patiently on the shelf for the next quarterly issue, we’re opening the doors a little wider here on the Green Egg Blog.
This week, three recent releases from Weiser Books approach personal transformation from very different directions. Amy Blackthorn takes plant magic into the shadowlands, Elwynn Green explores the liminal spaces of Witchcraft, and Leslie Tagorda asks what happens when astrology moves beyond telling us who we are and begins asking what we intend to do about it. Here is what I found between the covers. Continue reading New from Red Wheel/Weiser
I have built a lot of altars in my life. I know how to do it deliberately. I know how to choose a location, cleanse the space, select the objects, arrange them according to purpose, and create something that clearly announces, This is an altar.
Those aren’t the altars I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the ones that appear when nobody is paying attention.
Continue reading That’s Not an Altar. It Just Sort of Happened.
By Katrina Rasbold
I read candles for a living, among other things. When I finish spellwork for a client, the prayer candle itself is part of the reading, and I pay close attention to what happened while it burned. Black soot on the glass traditionally indicates resistance or obstacles. White soot can indicate divine or spiritual assistance. Wax that manages to break through the glass and bleed down across the label is a breakthrough, although often not a particularly gentle one. The way the wax pools, the direction it moves, the condition of the wick, the residue on the glass, and the behavior of the flame can all contribute information about how the working progressed.
I also know perfectly well that candles are physical objects and, I can embrace those magical words, “Science is a thing.”
There is a particular sound a Pagan makes when encountering a good rock. It isn’t quite a word. It’s more of an oooh. The rock may be lying beside a creek, embedded in the dirt along a trail, sitting at the edge of a parking lot, or minding its own business somewhere completely unremarkable. This does not matter. Something about it has caught our attention, and now we must pick it up.
I have a strong working knowledge of stones. I can usually identify what I’m looking at, and I’m familiar with the magical and metaphysical properties traditionally associated with many of them. This does absolutely nothing to prevent the ancient instinct known as Good rock. Must have. Continue reading I Have a Rock for That
By Katrina Rasbold
I miss the days when being irritated with someone meant I was irritated with someone. These days, apparently, I need to examine why this person triggers me, determine what they’re mirroring back to me, identify the unhealed wound they’ve activated, journal about my response, pull three Tarot cards, take a cleansing bath, and investigate whether the whole mess originated with my maternal ancestors.
I was hoping to just call them an asshole and get on with my afternoon.
Welcome to shadow work. Continue reading Apparently, I Have More Shadow Work to Do
By Katrina Rasbold
Somewhere, at some point, someone decided you should never buy your own Tarot cards.
I would very much like to meet this person.
Mostly because I have questions.
Who does buy them, then? Is there a designated Tarot distribution committee? Do I submit an application? What happens if nobody in my family takes the hint? Am I simply destined to wander through life Tarotless until a mysterious benefactor recognizes my readiness and presents me with a Rider-Waite deck? Continue reading Who Put the Rules in Witchcraft?
Every generation of Pagans seems to have an unofficial fashion icon.
If social media is to be believed, we’re all gliding through forests in flowing black velvet, trailing lace sleeves, silver jewelry, and enough dramatic scarves to supply an off-Broadway production of Macbeth. Somewhere in the background, Stevie Nicks is singing while ravens circle obligingly overhead.
It’s a lovely image.
It just doesn’t happen to resemble most of the Pagans I know. Continue reading We Think We Dress Like Stevie Nicks (But We Really Dress Like Marla Singer)
By Katrina Rasbold
I was looking for one particular candle the other day.
Not a fancy one. Not the expensive beeswax pillar I’d been saving for some future occasion worthy of its existence. I was looking for a little red candle that had already done its job. It had burned down to a crooked little nub, with barely enough wax left to stand on its own.
Naturally, I couldn’t find it.
What I could find was an entire box of other candle stubs. Continue reading Why Do We Save Candle Stubs?
By Katrina Rasbold
We are sitting squarely in the middle of July. The excitement of the Summer Solstice has passed, the intense alchemical heat of the summer crucible is blazing all around us, and yet, the first harvest of Lammas is still just on the horizon. In this dense, shimmering stretch of the year, a strange kind of spiritual exhaustion can creep into our circles.
Our agrarian ancestors knew that this was a period of tense waiting. The crops were in the fields, baking under the solar furnace, but they weren’t ready for the sickle. If you pushed too hard, you ruined the yield. If you did nothing, the weeds took over. Survival depended on mastering a delicate, high-summer equilibrium.
For the modern practitioner, this mid-July station offers a profound lesson in the Middle Way—the art of balancing fierce external action with deep internal restoration. Continue reading The Middle Way of High Summer: Finding Balance Between Action and Rest
By Katrina Rasbold
Look outside your window during the mid-afternoon hours of July, and you will see a landscape standing in a state of absolute, baking intensity. The gentle, shifting rains of spring are a distant memory. The soil is hard, the air is thick with heat, and the sun hangs in the sky like an unblinking, golden eye.
In modern society, we spend this month retreating indoors, turning up the air conditioning, and waiting for the temperature to drop. We treat the high heat as an inconvenience to endure.
But ancient earth-spiritual traditions view this specific stretch of summer completely differently. They recognize it as the crucible of the year.
A crucible is a severe test—a vessel designed to withstand extreme temperatures so that whatever is placed inside can melt, transform, and purify. July is not a time for passive, comfortable comfort. It is the month of white-hot alchemy, and it demands that we step directly into the furnace. Continue reading The Crucible of July: White-Hot Magic and the Power of the Furnace