Connor - Llewellyns 2014 Witches Companion

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

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Llewellyns 2014 Witches Companion 2013 Llewellyn Publications, Woodbury, Minnesota, USA.

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First e-book edition 2013

E-book ISBN: 9780738739724

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Cover art Tim Foley

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Contents

Provocative Opinions on Contemporary Topics

Kerri Connor

Boudica Foster

Michael Furie

Elizabeth Barrette

Cassius Sparrow

Linda Raedisch

Mickie Mueller

Estha McNevin

Day-by-Day Witchcraft

Barbara Ardinger, PhD Using Creative Visualization to Make Your Life
More Magical

Emyme

Lisa Mc Sherry

Deborah Lipp

Lexa Olick

Blake Octavian Blair

Jymi x/ (Reverend Variable)

Practices, Rituals & Spells

Melanie Marquis

Elizabeth Barrette

Deborah Blake

Susan Pesznecker

Thuri Calafia

Gede Parma

Raven Digitalis

Everything Old Is New Again

James Kambos

Tess Whitehurst

Dallas Jennifer Cobb

Diana Rajchel

Michael Furie

Laurel Reufner

Blake Octavian Blair

September 2013 to December 2014

Calendar with Holidays and New & Full Moons

Community Forum

Provocative Opinions on
Contemporary Topics

Three Generations of Pagan

Kerri Connor

I was Pagan long before I knew what Pagan was.

Though I was born and raised in an Evangelical Protestant church, I had never felt comfortable in that environment. I heard and saw too many things that didnt make sense, left me with a bad feeling, or just made me feel like I was surrounded by hypocrites. I was expected to listen, not questionand to do what I was told, but not do what I saw others around me doing. It was frustrating and disheartening. I continued to go to church as I was told, but I never felt good about it.

One day when I was sixteen years old, my friends and I were hanging out at Wendys house. She pulled out her Ouija board, and we began trying it out. We soon discovered that certain combinations of people worked better on the board than others. We didnt know anything at the time about mediums or channelers. What we did know was that we were communicating with what claimed to be the spirits of loved ones we had lost.

In order to preserve integrity, we did not allow anyone to work on the board while communicating with a loved one of their own. We wanted to make sure no one was moving the planchette to give more accurate answers.

What we found was that the vast majority of the information we received was correct. The people working the board had no clue what the answers were to some of the questions that were asked, and yet almost every verifiable answer was correct.

During this session, one of the spirits we communicated with was my own mother, who had passed away when I was eight. We began asking questions that were unverifiable, such as, Are the streets of heaven really paved with gold? Such questions may seem silly, but the answers we received were surprising. Though we were told that heaven was beautiful and full of nature, we were also told that it wasnt like we thought it was. We couldnt get answers to some of our questions. Many of the answers were things like, You arent ready to know and Some things must be experienced to be believed.

When I first began learning about Paganism, it was a big no-no to raise your children in your own faith. This meant that a whole lot of children were growing up with no type of spirituality whatsoever.

These words opened a new world to many of us who were in that room that day. We began doing a lot of research. Our town library didnt have any informationshocking, I know. We went to the next town over, with a much larger population, and started by researching Ouija and then spirit boards.

Of course a lot of information we found at first said that the board was the work of the Devil and was controlled by demons, but we knew it didnt feel that way. So we kept digging.

Eventually we found information on Spiritualism, which then led us to Witchcraft and Wicca, and finally to all sorts of different aspects of Paganism and Neopaganism.

Some of my friends freaked out and ran back to their Christian ideas and churches, but Wendy and I both continued reading, learning, and evolving. We ended up going our own separate ways eventually, both physically and spiritually.

I had to work pretty hard to learn about Paganism. In the mid-1980s, there werent a whole lot of books available, especially where I lived. In our quaint Christian town, there were no bookstores other than the Christian bookstore. There werent any metaphysical shops, and there also wasnt any Internet access to look up information or to connect with others of like mind.

My training took place in what I could find and in the natural world around me. As I grew older, more information became available. The Internet was soon in everyones home, making a world of information available to those who knew how to find it.

My beliefs and ideas also changed over the years. While I started off learning about and practicing Wicca, there were some aspects I did not feel comfortable with. I ended up making a drastic change and began working with Egyptian gods and goddesses instead. Finally, I began feeling a strong draw to my Irish roots, and my practice turned to Druidry, where I have been happy and content ever since. The group I runThe Gathering Grovedoes not claim any one pathway. Instead, we are a mixed bunch that share and combine some of our beliefs. We tend to keep our public rituals on the more generic side, working simply with God or Lord for our masculine deity, while the feminine divine is known as Goddess or Lady. In our private rituals, we use whichever pantheon we subscribe to individually.