Get Ready for Lughnasadh on the Full Blue Moon, but Beware Venus!

Lughnasadh is coming up in a little over a week, and it falls on not just a full moon, but a blue moon. 

That's pretty cool-- makes it an excellent time for working magic-- but do keep one thing in mind. Venus goes into retrograde this week! So you may need to tweak some spells to work with that. 

I explain it all in more detail here: Magic for Lughnasadh: Simple Spells, Potions, And Other Magical Inspirations

My Tip for You Today: Enjoy your Sabbat! Blessed Lughnasadh and I'll see you next week. 

Wiccan Holidays: What Is Lughnasadh

Wheel of the Year: Simple Lughnasadh or Lammas Ritual

Lughnasadh Old-Fashioned Magical Blessing Bread Recipe

Pagan Family Harvest Crafts

Celebrating Lughnasadh: Associations, Traditions and Correspondences

I'm going to be taking a break from blogging and social media until after the sabbat, giving myself a push to try and finish my first book on Wicca, which will be released in October. 

So I will see you in August!

Daily Bomb #6: You Don't Actually Want to Banish Negative Energy, it's Good For You

The Daily Bomb was explained in detail in this first Daily Bomb post here. 

In a nutshell, there is a terrible epidemic of misinformation in Wicca... and it is important that Wiccans start correcting it (even if it means re-examining your previous ideas). 

Here's one of those fundamental basic mistakes that everyone makes, and I made this mistake for probably about 20 years banishing 'negative energy' before I really understood what that meant, and realized it was a mistake. 

#6 Negative energy is GOOD for you, don't banish it. 

Okay, I'm not a sciency kind of person by any means (I was an English major; 'nuff said)... so bear with me here. But this one can really change your life, and you can definitely do your research on this to figure out for yourself if you agree:

- Energy has 2 charges: positive (+) charges, and negative (-) charges. Like a battery, or a circuit, right? We know they are not good or bad-- they're just both necessary to keep energy flowing.

- Your body generates energy and picks it up throughout your day. Charges can get built up in your body as well-- both positive (+) and negative (-).

- Positive charges are actually bad for you. If you've ever heard anything about EMF sensitivity, free radicals (which accelerate aging and cause inflammation), etc. -- these come from the positive (+) charges.

- You get rid of the positive charges through grounding. This can be done spiritually (grounding yourself) or physically (what is popularly called 'earthing'). 

- What is it in grounding/earthing that helps get rid of all those positive charges? NEGATIVE charges. Yes, negative energy.

So when you banish negative energy, you are banishing the GOOD negative (-) energy charge, which prevents you from getting rid of the BAD positive (+) energy charge. 

Anyone who has worked with electricity enough to understand how your house wiring works, you know that you always want to be able to ground. 

Negative energy got a bad rap because of the word 'negative', which people sometimes use synonymously with 'bad'. But negative in the universe is merely the opposite of positive.

Think of the universe like a computer-- what you put in is what comes out. Manifestation takes the path of least resistance. So when you ask to banish negative energy in your room, or in your home, or in yourself, you are banishing the energy that allows you to ground.

When you aren't grounded, you are disconnected from nature. When you are disconnected from the nature, you are disconnected from yourself because you are part of nature. This can lead to all kinds of feeling lousy. 

So, to wrap it up, be more specific about what you're banishing:
- banish negative (bad) emotions and thoughts
- banish negative (bad) circumstances and situations
- banish negative (bad) entities and people
- banish negativity from your life (anything holding you back, useless, harmful, baneful, etc.)

But don't banish negative (good) energy. You need it.

People pay a fortune for earthing mats to have access to negative energy... you don't need expensive equipment, you just need to connect to the Earth, both spiritually and physically. That's a major part of what our religion is about. When you are able to do that, don't ruin it by going on to banish it all away in a spell; you just end up putting yourself in a vicious cycle. 


So I'm going to take tomorrow off from writing, and I'm going to resume with your regularly scheduled Tips for Living Wicca on Monday. I have more daily bombs to drop, but lets take a break from it for a while, or it just starts to be too much negativity (which, is a bad thing-- so I shall get rid of it by going to the beach and reveling in some much needed negative energy). 

My Tip for You Today:  Spread the word. 

Discuss.

Tips for Living Wicca: Daily Bomb #5: The Threefold Law... not what you think it is.

The Daily Bomb was explained in detail in this first Daily Bomb post here. 

In a nutshell, there is a terrible epidemic of misinformation in Wicca... and it is important that Wiccans start correcting it (even if it means re-examining your previous ideas). 

Now that we've cleared up some stuff on the Wiccan Rede, let's move on to another saying that's majorly associated with Wicca.

#5 The Threefold Law was pulled out of Gerald Gardner's fiction.

Once again, many modern Wiccans will tell you that the Threefold Law is is a universal Wiccan rule that everyone adheres to, and the way they talk you'd think it was some ancient wisdom that is never doubted. 

So wrong. Again we have to go back to Gerald Gardner to understand how this particular piece of liturgy came to be blown out of proportion today.

Back in 1939, it's generally accepted that Gardner was initiated into a coven. He wanted to write about Witchcraft in the 40's, but he couldn't because of anti-Witchcraft laws in effect.... but that only meant he couldn't write non-fiction. The laws did not prevent him from writing a fiction novel. 

And he did: he wrote High Magic's Aid-- a fiction novel about sorcery and witchcraft set in the 1100s. Gardner added tidbits about his coven, disguising it as fiction. The Threefold Law was not one of those disguised tidbits.

In High Magic's Aid, an initiation scene includes the quotes,  "Then she said; Thou hast obeyed the law. But mark well when thou receivest good, so equally art bound to return good threefold."

That was it-- just a sentence. And if you notice, the sentence merely says that if someone does something nice to you, you should do nice back times three. It says nothing about a universal pay-back system based on a multiple of thee.

A few years later, the anti-Witchcraft laws were repealed, and Gardner wrote a nonfiction book about Witchcraft. Guess what? Bingo... no Threefold Law.

That's right... the Threefold Law was Gardner's fiction. NOT in his non-fiction.

And what of his own High Priestess and co-creator of Wicca and all it's liturgy, Doreen Valiente, the Mother of Modern Witchcraft-- what did she have to say about all this?

Let's turn to this 1991 interview with Fireheart Magazine:

Fireheart: Maybe it's karma or the threefold return, and they're saying, "We'll give it to her one way or the other."

Doreen Valiente: I don't believe this stuff about the threefold return, you know. I've always been very skeptical about that, but I'm a lot more skeptical than I used to be. The older I get, the more skeptical I get. I don't believe in all sorts of things that I used to believe in.

Fireheart: Where do you think the threefold idea came from?

Doreen Valiente: I think old Gerald cooked it up in one of his rituals, and people took it terribly literally. Personally, I've always been skeptical about it because it doesn't seem to me to make sense. I don't see why there has to be one special law of karma for Witches and a different one for everybody else. I don't buy that. 

In other quotes you can find with a quick search, Valiente says outright she thinks Gardner made it up, and that she's never seen it in any of the 'old books'. And remember: she would have seen it; she reworked all of his liturgy and rituals.

Some people try to connect it to the Hindu concept of karma, and indeed, the Hindus and Buddhists DO have a concept of karma, but it has nothing to do with x3, and it is a very different concept from the Western/Wiccan view of karma. The threefold law got associated with karma later, but it did not come from the concept of karma.

So how did all this Threefold Law stuff become some entwined with Wicca? Mostly Raymond Buckland pushed it in his books. And then people seemed to latch onto it eventually... not everyone; but you wouldn't know that from popular Llewellyn books or the Internet.

Once again I must point out-- if you believe in the Threefold Law, THAT'S OKAY!!!!! I'm not saying you're WRONG for believing it.

The problem comes when people keep telling everyone that this is some kind of Wiccan 'Rule'-- or that ALL Wiccans follow it. Or believe it. Or that it's always been some bit of wisdom at the heart of Wicca. That's simply not true...

My Tip for You Today:  Spread the word. 

Discuss.