“Once upon a time there was a girl whose father and mother died when she was still a little child. Her godmother lived all alone at the end of the village in a little house, and earned her living with spinning, weaving, and sewing.” So begins the Grimm Brothers’ tale “The Spindle, the Shuttle,…

The boughs do shake And the bells do ring, So merrily comes our harvest in, Our harvest in, our harvest in, So merrily comes our harvest in. “Harvesting” Nursery Rhyme Bells, like drums, are very old instruments that have played important roles in many aspects of human life. For centuries, they have been part of…

One thing I’ve begun to notice as I look more closely at fairy tales is that there are many more “witches” in them than previously believed, and that many of the beloved characters that are portrayed as helpless damsels in distress actually employ quite a bit of agency. Quick note: I put the word “witches”…

Chickens are humble animals. They’re heavy, mostly earthbound birds, spending their days pecking at the ground, clucking or crowing (not exactly musical), bobbing their heads as they strut around the farmyard. In media, they’re often depicted as fussy and silly — think Foghorn Leghorn and Prissy in Looney Tunes cartoons, or Lady Cluck in Robin…

Thus, her mirror represents the ability to see through the ‘veil’ that mystics say separates the visible and spirit worlds. – Skye Alexander, Mermaids (200). When I spirit journey, more times than not I enter the Otherworld through glass of some sort — a mirror or a window — a technique that has a long history in…

I’ve been reading Claude Lecouteux’s Witches, Werewolves and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages, which I was lucky enough to find at my local library. It’s a fantastic examination of the Double (also variously called the fylgja, familiar, fetch, etc., depending on where you’re looking) and the role it played in medieval and…

Several months ago, I decided to write down and formalize my own cycle of holidays. While I’ve been inspired in some ways by some of the Wiccan and Celtic holidays, not all of them have meaning for me and I don’t feel comfortable celebrating them. I realized that I need a cycle of holidays that…

The biggest philosophical and spiritual influence in my life is Taoism, and it has been for around seven or eight years now. I was introduced to it in an undergraduate humanities class, and it resonated with me immediately. The texts (primarily the Tao Te Ching and the Chuang Tzu) express a lot of the things…