Several years ago I had done a few posts seeking to clarify confusion around popular things on social media relating to specific pagan holidays including Yule, Samhain, and ‘Ostara’. I’ve never done one for Bealtaine mostly because I haven’t seen a huge amount of misinformation about it being shared around. That is starting to change, at least a bit, so today I thought I’d tackle a couple of…
Category Archives: Living Liminally
Current List of All My Published Work
Bibliography
Articles
“Healing
Ritual for the Ocean Waters”, Circle Magazine issue 109 summer 2011
“A
Gaelic View of Samhain”, Celtic Guide, vol. 1 issue 10 Oct. 2012
“Celebrating Imbolc with the Family”, Air n-Aithesc, vol.1 issue 1, Feb.
2014
“The Witch, the Bean Feasa, and the Fairy Doctor in Irish Culture”. Air
n-Aithesc, vol. 1 issue 2, Aug. 2014
“Finding the…
Ask Me Anything – fiction
Its been a while since I did an Ask Me Anything style blog and also a while since I wrote about my fiction so I thought that would be fun to do today. I’ve collected some questions from social media and am answering them here for everyone. Feel free to add additional questions in the comments if you’d like. Nicole: What’s your favorite fictional book that you have written?My answer: That’s…
Theosophy’s Impact on the Pagan View of Fairies
Note: In this piece I’m going to be making some generalizations which may not apply to all neopagans but which do hold true for a majority that I have looked into. A main influence on the neopagan view of fairies, which is rarely acknowledged, is theosophy and more particularly the writings of Helena Blavatsky. Blavatsky herself is a controversial figure, accused of rampant plagiarism by her…
2022 Recap
This year has been a challenging one for me but I kept moving forward, and I wanted to offer a quick recap here for everyone.I had four articles published in magazines this year:
“Imagining Fairyland”, Pagan Dawn, Imbolc issue, 2022 no 222
“The White Elephant in the Room: Racism and Diversity in Fairy Belief”, Witches & Pagans Magazine, issue 39, 2022
“Fairy Queens and Witches”, Pagan Dawn,…
Pre-Christian Celtic Fairylore?
I recently shared a comic by Zach Weinersmith which featured a ‘traditional Celtic folklore fairy’ who, at one point, mentioned stealing a human soul for the fairies’ tithe to Hell. I shared it because the comic is funny but unsurprisingly – because social media is what it is – received some pushback from people over the idea of the tithe to Hell which they felt was problematically Christian in…
Top 10 Horror Movies
Since we’re into October I thought it would be fun to do a list of my top 10 favourite horror movies – feel free to add your own in the comments. Outside of a few close friends most people probably don’t know that I’m a big fan of the horror genre. I’ve watched horror since I was about 12, saw Halloween for the first time, and fell in love with the entire concept. Probably less surprisingly my…
Following the Pleaides
As some people are aware for the last four years I have been researching the Pleiades from a spiritual perspective and working to create a system of rituals connected to it. As we approach the four year anniversary of the experience in Iceland which led me onto this path I wanted to recap how things have gone so far. image of Pleiades by NASA, public domainI’ve talked about the approach I was…
Tolkien, Stereotypes, and Diversity
I’ve written here before about representation and racism in fairy media and later expanded that into a full length article which was published in Witches & Pagans magazine under the title ‘The (White) Elephant in the Room: Race & Identity in Fairy Lore’. In both of these pieces I emphasized the diverse descriptions of fairies, elves, and other Otherworldly beings that we find across folklore and…
Folklore in Legend
The 1985 movie Legend is often classified as a dark fantasy but it contains many themes from older folklore. So today lets look at some of the folklore we find in the film and how it is incorporated into the story. 1551 woodcutting of a unicorn https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_unicorn._Woodcut_after_C._Gessner._Wellcome_V0021193.jpgSpoilers ahead:For those unfamiliar the movie tells the…