As the nights lengthen and the leaves take on their autumn colours, many of our cities prepare for a seasonal festival dominated by dark and frightening imagery. Ghosts, skeletons, hags, nocturnal creatures such as cats and bats, and grinning monster faces peer out at us from shop windows. Much of it is [...]
It’s the night before the Spiral Dance, our community’s annual huge celebration for Samhain, more generally known as Halloween, the ancient feast of the ancestors and honoring of the Beloved Dead, which long predates the Christian feast of All Souls. The Spiral Dance is the biggest, most elaborate ritual our community, [...]
Alison Shaffer, Meadowsweet & Myrrh
We were in the dream, deeply, all of us abandoned to the dark and nervous landscape of nightmare.
There were so many of us, all strangers, all lost in what might have been a vast forest of ancient trees, their rough bark twisted with vines, or what might [...]
In this article, I’d like to share an odd little sequence of synchronicities in my life. They led me to think long and hard about the spiritual path I’ve chosen and how it relates other paths people are following these days.
In the summer of 2006, the day [...]
My mother-in-law warned me that boys are different from girls. “I never bought my boys guns,” she said, “but they’d chew their toast into the shape of a pistol.” Of course, I assumed that I would never have her problems. My boys would be perfect angels far more interested in Botticelli and Brahms than in bazookas. “Come read to us from the works of Emerson, Mother!” they would beg. “Can we please listen a little longer to the sonata?” Right. Not so much. Every day I listen to the sounds of starship battles and the clanging of imaginary swords. I hear the shrieks of the dying and the battle cries of enraged warriors on the great bloody battlefield of my living room sofa. What happened?
At some point the warriors have to come home; they grow old and watch their grandchildren playing. The farmers get tired of paying taxes and losing their sons in battle. Continual warfare drains a culture of energy, honor, and the favor of the gods, no matter how much gold and how many slaves are brought home. And a careful reading of the great pagan epics shows that their authors were profoundly aware of this.
The C&R training was originally developed alongside that for the Prison Service. The air fair stank of testosterone and the environment was, as you can imagine, massively macho. It was an acknowledged fact that after a team of care staff had been trained in a hospital, the number of physical restraints escalated for a short period, presumably indicative of the hyped up, wanting to be “blooded” state induced in the trainees. We were trained to teach the techniques over a period of five days. The training was focused entirely on physical skills. We would teach staff to restrain and relocate violent individuals to a safe place and then we would say to them “and this is where would use your communication skills.”
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Voices on VoPP
- TPH on The Iliad: Pacifism in Ancient Greece
- An Interview with Brynneth | Voices of Pagan Pacifism on Peace in Ritual and Daily Life
- likesun on The Iliad: Pacifism in Ancient Greece
- The Wild Hunt » Pagan Community Notes: Bonewits’ Papers, Pacificism, Theology, and more! on Submission Guidelines
- Welcome: A Pre-Launch Announcement | Voices of Pagan Pacifism on Submission Guidelines
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