Recently John Beckett wrote an interesting blog about why he worships the Gods, which reminded me of my own recent guest blog on the Raise the Horns blog about why I worship the Morrigan. John’s post was part of a larger conversation in the blogosphere about the reality of the Gods and their ability to effect people which I have been following in bits in pieces. I find the conversation fascinating, as a so-called “hard” polytheist because it is offering insight into the different viewpoints that exist within today’s wide array of pagan faiths.
Category Archives: By Land Sea and Sky
Translating the Untranslated
If you read the English version of the Cath Maige Tuired, whether its the Stokes or Grey translation, and you compare the English versions to the Irish version you will see that several passages have not been translated at all. It may be because these sections are more difficult to understand, or lacked a poetry that the translators were aiming for, or it may be that these sections – all dealing with prophecy and battle magic – were a bit too pagan for the translators. For modern polytheists studying the material I believe these passages do have great value and so I have undertaken to learn Old Irish and attempt to translate them myself.
For example in E. A. Gray’s translation of the Cath Maige Tuired there is a section she translates as:
Book Giveaway
Goodreads Book Giveaway
Lost in Mist and Shadow
by Morgan Daimler
Giveaway ends October 27, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.
Mysticism and the Morrigan
I’ve always been of a more mystical bent, but its one of the most difficult things to discuss. Not because mysticism is so difficult to talk about but because mystical experiences tend to lose something in the translation. Also one of the first things most people ask is how do I do what I do, followed by how can they do it too, and the answer to some of that is simply…
Random Life Notes and Some Writing Tips
I realize I’ve been neglecting the blog of late, and I apologize for that. I do hope to be back on a regular schedule soon, but I’ve been dealing with a variety of pesky real life issues that take enough of my attention that I just don’t have the time to get any nice juicy blogs done. Bear with me and it’ll get better. Some of this has to do with an increase in the amount of writing I am doing elsewhere, and some of this has to do with child related things, but the end result is not enough blogging time.
To fill you all in on what I’ve been up to in general.
Samhain Poem to the Morrigan
I dreamt last night of honoring the Morrigan at Samhain. In the dream I chanted the following, as if it were a song or sacred prayer:
Experiencing the Other Crowd
One complaint that I see often in the wider pagan/polytheist community is that people of a more reconstructionist bent, such as myself, don’t share enough personal experiences. That’s actually a fair criticism generally speaking. For my part I have been trying to share more, although I have so far found it easier to share numinous experiences, especially those involving the Gods, through poetry. Today I wanted to share a little bit of my experiences with the Good Neighbors. Although everything to do with themselves is tricky, and often carries specific prohibitions about what can and cannot be shared, there are certain experiences that happened which involved more than just myself or which I know its okay to talk about. these are an array of things and involve, naturally, a variety of different kinds of spirits, but nonetheless I’d like to share some here. Hopefully it’ll give people an idea of what these things can be like.
Work In Progress Blog Tour
Well I’ve been nominated by Arie Farnam, author of The Soul and the Seed to participate in the Work in Progress Blog Tour. The idea is to post the first sentence of each of the first three chapters of your work in progress.
My current work is the sequel to my urban fantasy novel Murder Between the Worlds. This book picks up where the last one left off with my protagonist, Allie, trying to get her life back to normal after her attempt to help the police solve a series of murders in the first book. She’s learning that moving on isn’t as easy as she wants it to be, especially since things aren’t as neatly tied up as the authorities all think they are. There’s several mysterious things afoot, from missing girls to arson, and someone is going to a lot of trouble to make Allie’s life unpleasant, but the biggest threat might be the one no one sees at all…
Anyway, here are the first couple sentences/paragraph from the first three chapters of the rough draft. Enjoy!
You May Have Fairy Blood If…
So there’s a post on a major blogsite about 8 ways to tell if you may have fairy blood. The list is heavily prejudiced towards a modern (post-Victorian) view of fairies and specifically of winged flower fairies as far as I can tell. It also includes an array of characteristics that could apply to many people for many reasons, like feeling the need to lighten the mood in serious situations with humor.
Why Plagiarism and Pirating Books Suck
This is expanded and re-posted from a blog I wrote a couple years ago called “The Ethics of Information”
Several years ago I wrote this: Twice in the past week I have seen people post online direct quotes they did not write. One was a prayer and the other an excerpt from a book, but in both cases no source was given, nor was it even mentioned in the original post that the person posting the information wasn’t the author of it.