I follow a lot of people here (on Tumblr), and most apparently don’t understand that it’s not just the outside package that is beautiful, but the internal personality, attitude, love and joy that shine out that combine to make someone beautiful.

Yes, the outside package is what people react to first.  Yes, it is the one that most will judge you on first.  But just like a Christmas Present, sparkly gold paper and nice ribbons do not make the Popeil Pocket Fisherman any better.  Just like wrapping an iPad in the comic section of the newspaper doesn’t detract from the present.

However, since humans are visual oriented, presenting an attractive outer casing is what seems to be important in the very short term.  Yes, beautiful people are more desirable to be around, they are more envied, but that is ONLY because people who look at them ONLY see them as the outer casing.  Just as if you only saw the gold wrapped package or the comics wrapped package.  The casing would be what you would judge on first.

And we are even warned against this.  ”Don’t judge a book by its cover.”  ”Beauty is only skin deep…” and many other such sayings warn us that it’s not the casing, the package, the wrapping that is important, but the contents of the mind, soul and spirit.

So I see people worried about their appearance to the exclusion of all else, and I get very sad.  I get upset when I see someone who only thinks that attractive appearance is what is important.  Hey, I like looking at pretty things around me too, but to stay around those pretty things there has to be more than just pretty appearance.  Because beauty fades, the nicest flower in the world will whither, and the most gorgeous gown will rot with time.  But the personality and the internal qualities are what will last.

I’ve known many girls in my life.  The beautiful ones are very rarely the ones who stay “beautiful” and “thin” and “tanned” and “fit” and “skinny” three or more years after I come to know them.  There are a few like that, but most understand that while their looks may have initially turned my head and had me look at them, the contents of their character are what kept me around.

And I’ll tell you something else.  It’s the “sad, weird” people I enjoy spending time around.  Cookie cutter personalities like are shown on Mean Girls or Bring it On are not anything that interests me.  But the girl with an armful of books, the one who wears spiked hair or a collar, the girl with the black makeup and the pale complexion, THOSE people are interesting.  They have a persona they want to show, and they apparently are willing to show it and be contrary to society rather than trying to conform and blend in.

Those people are worth the time to get to know.

So, ladies and gentlemen, no matter who you are, please revel in yourself.  Yes, put on an attractive appearance but understand it is not the appearance that will keep someone around.  The gestalt of you is what keeps someone.  And understand that even if this person over here left you, it is their loss due to you being a beautiful creature.  Someone else will be with you and the others, well, they have to content themselves with the Pocket Fisherman.

Astute readers of my Journal will have already noticed that the name has changed.  That’s what should be.  But let me tell you why.

As you may have read in earlier entries, I’m transitioning from Male to Female.  Well, in recent months I’ve made some major strides forward in that regard, namely I’ve come out to everyone I know that I’m transitioning, and I’ve legally changed my name from my male moniker to a more female name.

With this change came a LOT of soul searching, a lot of meditation and a lot of discussion with the Gods.  Finally after a long time, we all determined that I am Their daughter just as much as I was Their son.  I am Their Priestess and still Their Priest.

Confusing?  You bet you.  About as confusing as being female, dressing as female, being called “She” and “Her” and “Miss” and still being called “Dad” by my daughter.  But that’s okay, things take time, and I’m only partway through the hormone treatment.

So, with the new name, new gender and the acknowledgment of the world at large, I rededicated myself one morning near Samhain.  I abandoned the name Daven and took the name Erin to be my magickal working name.

You may be able to see some of the changes.

Juliet:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

So, the name of the Journal is changing to Erin’s Journal.  But the content is not.  It will still have the same content as any you have come to expect.  The look and feel will be the same.  It may have more personal focus and changes based on crossing gender lines and still being a representative of the Gods.

I am going to be taking time over the next months to find and change all references to Daven’s Journal and replace them with Erin’s Journal.  I am going to do this gradually since it will take some time for you, the reader, to adjust to this change too.  Everyone knows Daven’s Journal, but it will take time to realize that it is the same site as Erin’s Journal.  Thus the “new and improved” logo upstairs.  Hopefully by keeping something the same, it can become normal, then we gradually phase out the various elements of Daven and replace them with Erin.

But also, like the Shattered Tower, this is a change that has happened and cannot be undone.  But also like Death, it’s one that has been a long time in coming.

(Note from Daven: This is a song my daughter made up when she was 4 years old. It’s interesting.)

Horned One

By Rhiannon Landrum

Horned One tells me a story
Horned One tells me a story
Of rainbow smiles in all of my dreams.
Horned One tells me a story

A rose is gone to please
To take of the Goddess
To make me please

Horned One tells me a story
About flowers dancing in my head
He tells me about his adventures in my head.

Stars light your path.

Originally posted 2009-11-11 18:54:16.

PantheaCon has no personal effect but I feel the need to contribute to the discussion of the issues that have been made public.

The comment on the Wildhunt by Z Budapest that follow prompts my response.

“This struggle has been going since the Women’s Mysteries first appeared. These individuals selfishly never think about the following: if women allow men to be incorporated into Dianic Mysteries,What will women own on their own? Nothing! Again! Transies who attack us only care about themselves. We women need our own culture, our own resourcing, our own traditions. You can tell these are men, They don’t care if women loose the Only tradition reclaimed after much research and practice ,the Dianic Tradition. Men simply want in. its their will. How dare us women not let them in and give away the ONLY spiritual home we have! Men want to worship the Goddess? Why not put in the WORK and create your own trads. The order of ATTIS for example, (dormant since the 4rth century) used to be for trans gendered people, also the castrata, men who castrated themselves to be more like the Goddess. Why are we the ONLY tradition they want? Go Gardnerian! Go Druid! Go Ecclectic! Filled with women, and men. They would fit fine. But if you claim to be one of us, you have to have sometimes in your life a womb, and overies and MOON bleed and not die. Women are born not made by men on operating tables.”

It is on this comment that I want to speak out.

I am a transwoman myself. I was born in a male body, but I have always felt that I was a female, born in the wrong body. This has been a condition of my life. This means that in all likelihood my brain is wired like a female’s brain, and I can and do empathize with many female issues of the day.

• I fear being raped.
• I fear being attacked by those who don’t understand me and my life.
• I wish to have children of my own body.
• I have raised my daughter when she was younger.
• I have taught her to be proud of herself as a woman.
• I have helped and tried to talk to her about female issues, including telling her about her period and other such “female-only” topics.
• I have given her much advice on relationships, and reveled in her relationship with her lover.

Do these make me a woman? Probably not.

However, having the internal plumbing of a female doesn’t either. Here’s what we can look at:

1. Am I genetically a female? No, I’m not.
2. Do I have a period and bleed from my uterus? No I don’t.
3. Do I have the biological ability to give birth to children from my body? Not yet.
4. Do I have hormones of a female in my body? Yes I do.
5. Do I have the mood swings associated with estrogen and other female hormones? Yes I do, and I have for long before I had HRT.
6. If I take a pregnancy test, will it be positive? Yes, it will.
7. Can I lactate from my breasts? Yes, I can.
8. Do I have to worry about HPV and Breast Cancer? Yes, I do.
9. Will I have a subcutaneous layer of fat, making my skin softer and a bit more squishy? Yes, I do.

However:

1. Do women who have a hysterectomy bleed from their uterus? No they do not. Are they considered women? Yes.
2. Are infertile women considered women? Yes they are.
3. Do women who have mastectomies still have access to “women’s Mysteries rituals”? Yes, they do.
4. Do women who have had their cervix removed still have access to a women’s bathroom? Yes, they do.
5. Are people who go to work in paying jobs outside the home, who have two X chromosomes considered women? Yes.
6. Are AFAB who put on a tuxedo and boxers considered to be female? Yes.

Yes, these lists are a bit scattered. See, assigning gender to a person is slippery.

I can have all the sexual organs of a female, transplants work. I can have someone’s uterus, fallopian tubes and ovaries implanted in myself, and I can have things redesigned, cut and changed around so that I can have all the same equipment to carry a fetus to term and give birth to it.

That is, if I had the money for it.

Does that make me more of a woman? Does it allow me to enter the “sisterhood of the bloody week”? Will that give me access to “feminine mysteries”?

I worship a goddess. Does that make me a girl? My wife worships a God, does that make her male? Is it that my wife has a female name, and I have a name that is typically assigned to a male?

What standard are you using to define who is and is not a particular gender? Is it ultimately genetics that tell you which you are?

If I can find a AMAB who has two X chromosomes, can he enter into the Sacred Sanctums of the Goddess? Or will he be denied too?

See, in my mind, the problems is not “who can participate”. The problem is “What defines gender” and that has ALWAYS been the problem.

I don’t have a problem, really, with those who want to have a AFAB ritual. I truly don’t. But when an intersexed person comes in who has a vagina, uterus and all the equipment, along with a penis and tries to participate, and they are turned away, is that truly what the Goddess wants? Will only lesbians be allowed into those rituals next?

Z. says that women are born, not built on a table. I can see and I actually agree with that. However, a woman who has an extra appendage has it surgically removed still a woman? If they have a rhinoplasty, are they women? If they have a facelift, are they still a woman? What if they have a “Vaginal Rejuvenation” as in getting a facelift for the lower lips? What if they are in an accident and have to have a complete Vaginoplasty? Are THEY still considered women?

Is the difference a matter of what we grew up with? How we were taught? Do I have to be beaten up by boys who don’t like me to be a woman? Do I have to learn how to cook and sew, how to put on makeup? How to walk with a book on my head? What about having a relative molest me, or a stranger who wants to grab my “private parts”? Do those make me a woman? Do those experiences make me closer to the Goddess? Will I commune more successfully with the nurturing mother, and the self-centered maiden or the wise crone if I have been abused sexually?

Here’s the central question: If a person who was assigned male at birth, who has had ALL of the above happen to them, rape, abuse, being beaten for being gay, for being too effeminate for being too swishy, for not liking to play football, a person who has studied how to provide a loving and happy home, who takes care of children, who looks and acts and has the hormones of being a female, if they tried to declare “I am Woman, hear me roar!” and stood out and asked to be allowed to be with her sisters, is it right and the Will of the Goddess that those who were assigned female at birth continue to abuse them by saying “no”, or would the Curse of the Goddess fall upon them?

A drag queen who revels in being a parody of a woman? Sure, deny them. Someone who does it for humor? I can see that too. Someone who only crossdresses because they get a sexual thrill out of lacy underwear? I can get behind those who want to deny them a place in the Circle. But someone who has had every, EVERY thing happen to them that you think makes a female, other than the genetic accident of XX instead of XY, why do you insist on continuing the abuse? Have they not suffered enough? Will YOU, Z., will you personally stand before the Goddess with them and say “They are not a woman”?

I think that is the central problem here. You say you speak for the Goddess, that you are Her representative on the Earth. Yet, you are spewing EXACTLY the same discrimination that the other Churches and religions out there do in denying this person the ability to be who they are. Hell, the Muslims don’t have a problem with TransGender people, they are commanded in the writings of Muhammad to be whom they are, and those who feel they are female should be female, living that way, even if they don’t have the equipment.

You are right in that there were groups in the past who would change themselves to be more like the Goddess. They would keep to enclaves where they could be with their own kind. But I want you to think of something for a minute: How do you know about them?

The men of the day wrote down about these deviants and about the weirdoes who cut their balls off so they could sing female parts. They told stories about men who dressed and acted like women, as they derided and made fun of those deviants. There was no place for them in any aspect of “Western” society. The Native Americans treated the berdache people as the sex they wished to be. The Japanese did the same. They weren’t hunted and hounded. They were allowed to live their lives as they chose, identifying as they chose.

So how is what we have now progress?

To those who have problems with these “men” being included, I say to you; Yes, I can see your point. Men should not be part of those rites of femalehood. But when someone goes through two, three, four and more years of effort to be female, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to correct a genetic mistake, all to be simply who they are, if you can HONESTLY say that they are mocking the Goddess in that effort? Will you continue to kick them when they are asking you to treat them as a Sister?

I can tell you that it has been my experience that many male groups would welcome FtM transsexuals with open arms. Why are you so threatened by a person who wants to be treated as a woman being included in your rituals? Shouldn’t women be allowed at all rituals that celebrate womanhood?

I would think that you, as a true Goddess-loving female, would want to celebrate any form of womanhood. That to have a ritual dedicated to bringing a new woman into the fold would be something to bring joy, not something to be disrespected.

Or do you plan to stop having “coming of age” rituals for girls who start their menses too? After all, they aren’t women but they want to be women, and a little blood does not a female make. After all, I can bleed.

And think about this: Here is a male, someone who has male privilege, who you allege has a lot of power in our society, is VOLUNTARILY deciding to become a minority, a female. They are giving up their “place in society”, as you seem to suggest, to move down the ladder of empowerment, right to the bottom as a transwoman. They will have no rights to anything, they will get the short end of being female, they will get the hate of being a “failed male”, the bad parts of being gay, all of it, heaped together. They will be denied the use of ANY bathroom in public, because the women don’t want them in their bathroom and the idea of being forced into a men’s bathroom is repugnant. They will live with fear EVERY DAY that someone will spot them as a transwoman, and that they will be killed with sticks and bricks. They will be killed and the cops won’t do anything. They will be beaten by the cops too and no one will believe them.

Why all the hate and rejection? Because they are the person they were meant to be.

And you will be adding to that. Think about it.

Originally posted 2011-03-02 00:07:09.

I’ve been putting off doing this article for some time. This is due (in part) to life.

Life, when it smacks you, really smacks you. There were many things that I expected to happen, several things that didn’t happen that I thought would, and things that I didn’t see coming and had no clue about.

And guess what? That’s the topic of this article.

Mostly this article is going to talk about a trend that I’m seeing in Mainstream Wicca (as opposed to Traditional Wicca) and that’s the “One Book and I’m a Witch” attitude that is being espoused by many authors these days. They state (either outright or implied) that all you need is to read their books, follow their Way and you too will be a 20th level High Priest Warlock in Squirrel Society and authorized to act as the high priestess of any ritual there.

Not on your life. Not on your best day, not on MY best day and absolutely no chance of this happening.

It means you read a book. That’s all.

In Wicca, as in many other mystical traditions, personal experience is paramount. Knowing what is going to happen because you have done this before or because you have encountered a similar situation before is critical to this path. Knowing how to deal with Situation X because you have had this situation before is damned near a requirement.

There are going to be those who read this article and go “nope, I’m a High Priest Warlock, and I know what I’m doing. High Lady Suffandnonsence said so.” There will be those who think that just because I’m saying that experience trumps most forms of knowledge that I’m off my rocker. These are the very people that need this article the most.

It’s been said that Experience comes from Good Judgment and that Good Judgment comes from Bad Judgment. This is one of those statements that could have been said by anyone and it’s so important and pervasive that it transcends any one person’s cerebrum. This is a Universal Truth.

Book knowledge is good, but learning from a book can only take you so far. It can give you the framework to base experience on, but without that experience, the framework is useless.

An analogy of this would be a house. Take the house frame. It’s the foundation, the wall skeleton with the studs and window frames, then the floor joists and that framework, and so on till you get to the roof and the ridgepole of the house. That’s fine, but no one is going to be able to live in that house. All it is is a skeleton of wood that COULD potentially become a house.

It’s not until the drywall is attached to the studs, the floor is nailed down, the shingles put on, the water pipes run, the electrical wiring put in place, the doors hung that it becomes a house. A very important component is the insulation that protects guards the house from attack. That is what experience does to the framework of book knowledge.

Book knowledge can tell you about what you MAY have happen to you. It can tell you about the situations you might be in, and how the author dealt with them. It can tell you that if you feel this that you shouldn’t panic, it’s supposed to happen. But in reality, the book can only describe what the author has had happen to them, not what you may have happen to you.

Everyone has different feelings during a ritual, during a spell and during an initiation. That’s one of the Mysteries of Wicca and any other tradition that has transcendental experiences as part of its mysticism. When you get to the part where you have to feel something, my experience in the EXACT same situation is going to be different, if only because I am using my own mind with my own “spin” in it to interpret those experiences. This is what a subjective experience is. It is subject to your interpretation and only what you perceive.

Two people going through the exact same experience at the same time are not going to report the same thing happening to a third person unless they compare “notes” afterward. This is one of the reasons that police HATE witnesses to crimes, since every witness is going to have a different experience. The only way to have the same experience is to swap stories of what happened before reporting it to a third person.

Back to our house analogy. Both of us have the same framework to hang our experience on. When we finally get around to putting different experience in the house, our shingles may be different colors, the drywall may be from two different companies, the pipe may be routed in different ways, the electrical wiring may take a different route to the various points in the house and may terminate into plugs that are in differing locations. This is okay; these are little stylistic differences that make us unique. But the lights still turn on when I hit the switch, I can still run a computer, my head is still dry when it rains, and when I flush the toilet it still travels through the pipes.

This means that with experience, the framework now can function more fully as it was intended to do, and it can support more and more experience. Little stylistic differences are immaterial in the overall picture; the bare functions of this house are exactly the same no matter how many differences like this are pointed out.

“What about a construction company?” you may ask, meaning what about the “row houses” who are all built by the same company and who all are almost exactly the same. Good thought, but look at the statement closely, “almost exactly the same”.

No matter who it is, no matter what group is training them, what order or religion it is, there is no way to have the exact same set of experiences happen to another person, so it’s useless to say that your experience and my experience, even though we are both members of the same coven and have been trained identically, are the same. They are not the same and never will be.

The general overview and the gross characteristics are going to be the same, granted. But when I learn something, I may have a slightly different “take” on it, or understand the material a bit differently from you. While this makes us of the same group, I cannot say that I have the same knowledge as you do, other than in what we were taught. You may have had insights to your knowledge that I have not had.

So no matter what company builds our houses, or even if they follow the same exact blueprint and get the materials from the same companies, there will still be differences. Slight and subtle differences (the placement of the nails, where seams are located for floorboards and drywall and so on), but differences nonetheless.

Now, I have talked about the Framework (the book) and the Finishing (experience), now to talk about the Decorating (intuition).

Because your experiences and my experiences will be different, and I may have a different insight from you, my way of doing things will be different. I may even understand that it’s not necessary to do (whatever) but that I can substitute (this and that) for what I was doing. This is the intuitive process that makes for a great Priest, Priestess, Wiccan, magickian or practitioner. It is the customization and the stylistic stamp that will be on your personal practice.

This “stamp” is not a bad thing. It is an individual expression. Crowley said that Magick is the Science and Art of causing change yadda yadda yadda. This is the Art process, where you take your experience, which is hung on the framework of books, and temper it with your understanding into something that works for you and your mind. Make absolutely no mistake here, EVERY religion; EVERY transcendental process has this element in it. If not, it would be worthless to the individual practitioner.

Yes, Christianity has this element too. The core teachings are the same, Jesus is the savior, the Bible, the moral structure, God and Satan and so on. This is where the details get fiddled with, and it becomes very important as to whether or not you have a kneeler at your bedside or a home shrine to Mary. This is why there are so many sects of Christianity.

The same is true for Wicca and Druidism and Asatru and Chaos magick and on and on. Each of these spiritual paths has a time when you are allowed to put your own stylistic mark on the beliefs and practice them for yourself.

In our house analogy, we have the frame and the finishing done. This means that this house is ready for human habitation and use, but it’s not very pretty. It can be used, exactly as is, but no one is going to like it like that for very long. So, the house is cleaned up, paint is applied, carpet laid down, tiling done, furniture moved in, beams and so on stained, lamps and window treatments placed, and plants are put about the home. For it is now a home, something one person can be happy to be in and to live in and with. They have a place to sleep, a place to eat, a place to relax, a place to lounge about on the floor, a place to bathe and so on. Each of these places reflects their personality and their wants and needs. Therefore it is THEIR home. Doesn’t matter that the same exact wall studs appear in EVERY house around them, or that the same company which built their house built 40 other houses nearby, or that the layout is the same as all the other houses around. Nope, this is THEIR house and only theirs for it has their marks all over it.

It is the same thing in religion.

Now it has the marks of the individual practitioner, and it is customized for them and only them. It is THEIR religion in a way that could not happen any other way. It is meaningful and it answers their needs.

My wife pointed out something that needs to be mentioned at this point. There IS a maintenance phase that fits both these analogies. In both a religious structure and in house building, there is a phase where you maintain it, either the religion or the house. Maintenance of a religion consists of attending rituals, interacting with your gods, teaching and so on. Maintenance of a house is what is important to you in terms of the beauty of your house. This is just as individual as decorating the house. And it is necessary as well, since if you don’t use your religion and practice it, you loose it or fall away.

Having looked at the proper way of doing things, let’s spend the rest of this article looking at what happens if the “house” isn’t built to code.

First problem: Adding various elements together that don’t belong together without the knowledge or experience to make them work properly and having no structure to support them. Here you have an empty lot, it has beautiful bushes, a fountain, trees, a couple couches, some carpet, wallpaper laying around, a lamp or two standing up. It looks nice, but the substance of this home doesn’t exist. The decorations are nice, but there is no place to put any of them, and the first strong wind that comes along will blow away much of what is there.

This is the “one book and I’m a witch” or Fluffy Bunny syndrome run rampant. It looks wonderful, and the fantasy is astounding. It is pretty and seems comfortable, but the first hint of a storm or challenge, and it starts falling apart.

This comes when all that exists are the stylistic elements, the incorporation of unicorns and dragons into the religion, the myths of other lands as examples to be used, the invocation of Kali as a mother figure. All these elements actually work if there is a house to put them into, a framework to support them, but when left naked and alone on the lawn by themselves, they look absolutely stupid.

And what’s worse is the resistance that is encountered when a construction worker comes along and says that there’s a storm coming. All this beautiful furniture needs to be under shelter or it will be ruined. The owner fights and argues, cries and wails, and may deny the very existence of the storm. IF s/he becomes convinced of the need of the shelter, a tarp may be thrown over everything, and left. The person in question thinks that this tarp is sufficient to protect his/her wondrous possessions from anything, without ever seeing just how fragile that shelter is.

The solution is simple: Move everything into storage, and start building the foundation. Once the framework and the house are finished, everything can be moved in, placed where it should be, and it will work as a whole. Additionally, all of it will be protected from others, sheltered from the elements and so on. It will also become very plain which elements work and which don’t. But until the fluff actually admits that there is a need for something more solid than a tarpaulin, no progress can be made.

I know a lady, a good friend, whom I met under the fluffiest of circumstances. A friend of hers and I had an encounter, he asked her and many others to look at what I had said and they had a good time ripping it to shreds. Come to find out that she was not a fluffy idiot, as I had believed, but rather someone who had been badly misled by her friend. When she and I started talking, all the stylistic things I had seen from a distance that initially turned me off of her (and had me labeling her as fluffy) I actually saw for what they were, individual marks. I hadn’t seen her house for all the topiary bushes of dragons, motorcycles and unicorns in the way. But once I saw the house, they all worked together and presented a complete whole. At which point I said, “Okay, her home is not for me, and *I* wouldn’t want to live there, but it works for her.”

The lesson here is that just because you can’t see the home, does not mean it’s not there. There are irredeemable fluffiest out there, those that don’t know when to cover their stuff. But what could be taken as an excess of squishy marshmallow may just simply be you seeing only the surface of something that goes much deeper. So don’t be quick to judge.

Second problem, ONLY experience with nothing else.

Okay, this could be a major problem. It means that you do three times the work than if you just did things right from the beginning.

Imagine that you have the drywall, the floor tiles, the carpet, the siding and the shingles ready. So you start constructing the house from these materials. Except the drywall won’t stay standing unless you brace it against itself, using twice the drywall you might under other circumstances. The siding you nailed to the outside of the house is falling off since it’s only nailed to gypsum drywall, and the pipes are running all over the house, exposed since there is no place to put them. Sockets for lamps and electrical power are laying on the floor, and the power isn’t running to them since there is no way the Inspector will let you turn on the power to this “house”. There’s no second story since no matter how careful you are, you will fall through the plaster that is used on the ceiling.

So, your wall collapses, injuring people. You jury-rig something to hold it up. Then the pipe bursts since it’s not supported right and the joint isn’t done properly. That puts water all over the place. It takes out another wall, and ruins the carpet. So you fix that and buy new walls and carpet. It goes on and on and on ad nauseam.

Eventually, you start building a frame for the walls to hang on. Glory be! That works! So you keep building the wall framework. You take the carpet out and put down a floor. Then you go back and add a ceiling and so on. Holy crud, you now have a house. There is no foundation, and there are probably many things you missed in building a house like this, but it’s up and you stay dry. It may still fall down in a high wind or a storm, and Gods help you if there is an earthquake, but you have something that looks like a home. You have to be careful of the placement of your furniture, and forget about finishing some things since you are running around trying to keep the house erect.

This is what only “street smarts” does to you. You have to get your framework from the school of hard knocks, and Gods above does it knock hard. Many times there is a complete meltdown before there is ever a chance to correct the mistakes made out of pure ignorance.

There is actually a lot to be said for learning like this. Primarily among those strong arguments in favor is that you learn to do things that people say can’t be done. You have a thought about substituting a cigar for the athame. Your reasoning is that a cigar is phallic; therefore it looks like a wand. A wand can be substituted for an athame in other rituals; therefore the cigar can substitute for an athame. I laugh. “That’s fluffy-speak,” says myself. I say it can’t be done.

You go and try it anyhow. Since this is a ceremony for summoning Mars, it works much better than anticipated. You do a little looking and find out that one of the herbs sacred to Mars is tobacco. Ah HA! You exclaim, and shove it in my face. You were able to do this because you didn’t know it could not be done that way. Like putting an electrical outlet in the middle of the floor.

Classical training has some serious flaws, one of the biggest being that it ossifies and codifies the way of doing things into almost a holy writ, without allowances being made for those who actually can do it other ways and succeed. Improvisation and intuition are discouraged until it’s almost too late. Experimentation is not allowed since doing things THIS way is traditional.

Learning on your own is free of that flaw, and reasonable sounding associations can and do happen all the time. Still, there are many times when there are reasons for doing things the traditional way, most of which can be summed up in two phrases. Precedent and what works.

The experimentation and discarding of what doesn’t work is already done. What is left is what works. Learning through experience means that you will have to repeat someone else’s mistakes before you find his or her successes. So you may find, through long and laborious effort, that it’s much better to go clockwise around the Circle when casting it, and going counter clockwise seems to unravel it for some reason. This could have taken you years of effort to discover, when spending ten minutes training under an already experience teacher would have given you the same information and reasoning.

It takes quite a bit of additional time, effort and energy to do the entire discovery on your own. The trade off is that you may be able to do things those others say can’t be done. While it’s not worth it in my opinion, your mileage may vary.

As far as precedent goes, magickally any action creates a resonance in the Spirit Worlds, and that resonance adds energy to the spell or ritual. Doing it the same way every time pulls upon that energy and helps the ritual along.

The last problem in this essay is the “only framework” problem.

This is the chronic “I read a book” set that irritates so many. Just having the framework is as bad as only having the decorations. The difference here is that this state is curable.

Think about it, the foundation may be there, the walls may be framed out, but there is nothing keeping out the rain, there is no place to go to the bathroom, no bed to lay down on. All you have is the skeleton of what COULD be a beautiful house.

It’s being able to recite lists of associations for deities without knowing anything about the individual deities’ personalities to understand WHY that deity likes red and not green. With this, you will not be able to do anything when it falls outside the limited range of what you know.

Let’s say for a second that you want to call up a goddess of love to help you get a lover. You know red is the color of romance, so you use red candles to do your ritual with. Aphrodite shows up. You think “Great! Who’s better to help me than the goddess of Love herself?” Except you don’t know that Aphrodite, while certainly being a love goddess, is also a goddess of lust and infidelity, as evidenced by her bribery of Paris. So instead of romantic love and faithfulness, you get a lover who jumps from bed to bed to bed because of a need for sex, and who leaves a trail of broken hearts in their wake. You got what you wanted, but you didn’t know what was going to happen because you only knew a limited amount and had no experience to back it up. Please, don’t try saying to a deity, “I wanted what I meant, not what I said.” Scorch marks are hard to clean up.

Had you some experience to back up the framework of the tables of association; you may have remembered Aphrodite’s myths and how she acted toward others. (And if you really want to have your head spin, check out Artemis Diana of Ephesus.) You may have remembered that red is most commonly associated with passionate love, while yellow is the color of a steady love, a committed love and white is pure love. You may have known, from having seen other love spells go bad, that Cupid has two sides to his personality.

Fortunately, as I said back in the beginning of this essay, this bad judgment will bring experience that is the forerunner of good judgment or wisdom. If you have the learning curve of a snail, you will learn from this incident and do better next time. So the next time you work with Aphrodite, you will remember this incident, or you will work with a deity that you already know.

The point of this diatribe is that Experience costs. The best and easiest way of doing things, be they religious, magickal or just in life, is to build the framework first, from various studies (books or school or tutoring), take that knowledge and apply it in your life to gain experience, then put your own personal interpretation on your combination of studies and experience to have a system that is uniquely you.

Added to this is responsibility. If you are teaching others, you should be careful to teach the framework, share your experience, and keep your stylistic stamp to yourself unless and until you see that your student can handle and separate your interpretation of things from their own.

Don’t knock any one stage as being unnecessary. Intuition and understanding are just as important as the book knowledge. Conversely, don’t make the mistake of thinking that any one stage is the be-all, end-all of how to do things. One dowel does not a structure make; it’s only when you have three supporting legs that the tripod is born, and the tripod is one of the most stable structures there is.

Originally posted 2009-11-11 21:42:19.

Okay, in an attempt to raise money, I’m going to be offering a service for sale.

Ask me your questions, any questions.  I’ll do a tarot reading and tell you what you need to know and do.

What are my qualifications you may ask?  Well, I’ve been doing tarot readings for the last 14 years.  I became Wiccan and started studying the Tarot, my wife taught me everything I know about it and she should know since she’s been doing this for the last 40 years and taught three other tarot readers that I know of, possibly more.  Since then, I have worked as a professional Tarot reader with Kabrina’s Psychic Answer (a phone in TV Psychic service) which is now defunct, leaving there because of not enough calls for when I could work.

I was able to support my family on what I made as a TV Psychic.  So I do know what I’m doing.

Finally, I went to private practice, doing readings for myself, my wife, friends and those I know in various forums.  Generally I didn’t charge money for those readings, but there was a quid pro quo exchange of energy and effort to those readings.  I’ve even had good reviews on these.

Now I offer you the chance to get your reading done by me.

I use the Robin Wood deck to do these readings since it’s the one I have been working with since I began.

I have three levels of readings, one that is $15 for one question and answer, using a five card yes/no or a ten card Celtic Cross spread depending on how complex the question is.  One is a reading (spread of my choice) answering one complex question.  That’s $30.  The last is answering two complex questions for $50.

I have one more spread that I can do but it has never taken less than an hour, but it is a thorough life reading called an Astrological Spread.  Given that it will be even more complex with having to interpret EVERY card in the deck, I’m not even going to consider doing that one for less than $90.  But it is a very good spread to understand what is going on around you and in various aspects of your life.

I also have one unique reading I do.  It’s called “The Bondage Spread” in which you are shown what is holding you back and how to get free of this.  It takes an hour to do and costs $25.  But hopefully with it you will see what you need to do to get free.

So, click below to get these readings.

Be warned that I may contact you for additional information, so your email address HAS to be correct and I do need your name.  A picture of yourself would be very helpful as well.  All readings and additional information are shredded upon completion so you don’t have to worry about that.

Testimonials

Some testimonials with contact information. These clients have kindly consented to have their names and contact information listed for you to ask about the readings they received from me. Hopefully this and any questions that they answer will allow you to feel more comfortable in purchasing a reading. Please do contact them if you have questions you feel uncomfortable asking me about the reading.

“A few months ago I had Daven do a generalized reading for me, just to see what another reader could find that I’d overlooked; I’ve been reading for a decade and I’m pretty good on my own, but sometimes it’s best to get a second opinion. What I got from Daven was an excellent (though sometimes surprising) assortment of cards and his interpretations thereof that really pinpointed some areas I’d missed, and made a few situations I’d been wondering about more clear. The details are personal, but I’ll say this–I highly, highly recommend Daven as a reader.”

Lupa
Author of “Fang and Fur, Blood and Bone: A Primal Guide to Animal Magic” and
“A Field Guide to Otherkin
chaohippie (at) excite (dot) com
http://www.thegreenwolf.com

“I found Daven’s readings to be well done. He is very concise and clear in his presentation. He isn’t one for mincing words- and he won’t cater to the ego. He’s straightforward and professional. I would recommend him to other people for readings with no hesitation.”

Hope Jackson
hcjaxn (at) yahoo (dot) com

Keep checking back here for other information. I plan to have a sample reading up on one of my spreads so you can see for yourself just what the reading consists of and how I interpret the cards for you.

Originally posted 2009-11-06 22:53:30.

On Livejournal and Dreamwidth there is a Pagan Meme going around. I’m going to fill it out but it’s not going to be exactly like what the author anticipated. There are some of these questions that are invasive and not relevant to anything other than me.  My answers are in red and comments are in green.  But I have comments in the regular answers too.

But the rest is interesting. So, take a look.

B A S I C S //

Do you have a magical/Pagan name? Yes. (never asks what that name is, only if I have one.)
What does it mean? “Daven” means “to pray” in Hebrew. I picked it because of another lifetime I had.
How did you find Paganism? Lots and lots of research in metaphysics and parapsychology.  Been interested in those topics since I was little.
How long have you been practicing? Continuously, about 19 years now.  Been reading and experimenting since I was 4.
Solitary or group practitioner? Yes.  I practice my way, and I celebrate holidays and other such community things with my wife.
What is your path? Druid, Seax-Wica, Witch
Are you out of the broom closet? Out.  Been out for about 14 years now.  But just because I’m out does not mean I’m confrontational or “in your face” about it.

D E I T Y //

Who is your patron God? My Lord Herne the Hunter
Who is your patron Goddess? Lady Rhiannon of the Birds
What Gods do you worship? I honor Fuji, The Morrigan, The Dagda and most of the Irish Pantheon (as well as most of the Welsh Pantheon).  I respect them and talk to them, I remember them at holy days, I thank them for blessings, but blind worship, no I don’t.
Do you fear darkly aspected Gods/Goddess, or rather respect them? Let’s get one thing straight, this fear of the “dark” is stupid.  Everyone has a part of their psyche that is hateful and mean, parts that we try to overcome when dealing with others. Gods and Goddesses have this part too.  EVERY deity is “dark” and every deity is “light” as well.  You cannot ignore the dark.  It is there.  Without the dark parts, you wouldn’t know what the light parts were.  You HAVE to have that contrast to understand the whole of existence.  Do I fear it?  No.  Do I acknowledge it?  Definitely.
Do you worship the Christian God? Why in the thousand sacred names of Vishnu would I worship a God that has NO PART in my religious pathway?  Reading the texts where He speaks to his followers, He states outright that He is a jealous god and that you can’t have any other god.  And he also authorizes the killing of people who worship a deity other than him.  If I wanted to worship that deity, I would have remained a Mormon.
Do you ever worship animals? Same answer.  I honor the Animal Spirits, respect them and take counsel from them, but I don’t worship them.  Respect and honor, not worship.
Or plants? Now you are getting silly.  No I don’t worship trees or grass, I respect the beings in nature and I try not to exploit or waste them when I do use them.

N A T U R E //

Do you regularly commune with nature? Yes
Ever walked barefoot in the woods? Yes
Taken a camping trip just to talk to nature? Used to do it all the time.
Describe the moment you felt closest to Mother Earth? I can describe events that had me closer to the Gods and all of reality, but not one specifically that drew me closer to “Mother Earth” as in the living/breathing planet and all that is on it.
Do you have a familiar? No.  I have a cat who looks to me for everything, who has picked me as her person, but she’s not a familiar.
Have you ever called upon the powers of an animal in ritual? Once or twice calling on the Spirit Animals to help with their Medicine.
Or a plant? No
Do you hug trees? Been known to.
Give them gifts? I take care of them when I can.  If I have to harvest part of a tree, I make sure that I take care of the injury afterward.  I guess you could see that as bringing it a gift.
What is your favorite flower to work with? None
What is your favorite tree to work with? None

W H E E L . O F . T H E . Y E A R //

What is your favorite holiday? Samhain. Feeling the transition from one part of the year to another is magickal.
What is your least favorite holiday? Samhain.  I hate the commercialism and the secularism surrounding a beautiful holiday.
Have you ever held a ritual on a holiday? Duh.  Yes.  Try to do it that way every time.  Now you are just getting silly.
Ever taken a day off work to celebrate a Pagan holiday? No.
Do you celebrate Yule on the 21 rather than the 25? Yes.
Have you ever felt the veil thin? Every ritual I do, which is what is supposed to happen.  If you don’t feel it thin, then you are doing it wrong.
Ever danced the Maypole? No.
Know what the Maypole symbolizes? Some of the symbolism, but it is not part of my practice and I’ll leave it for others who do incorporate it in their religion.  This is another silly question.  It makes assumptions that need not be made.
How do you usually celebrate the Pagan holidays? Quietly with my wife and daughter, in our home, remembering the Gods and the meaning of the holiday.  Stories and mead, teaching and learning.

D I V I N A T I O N //

Do you use Tarot? Yes
Do you use runes? Learning them.
Do you use a pendulum? Have one, no opportunity to use it yet.
Do you use dowsing rods? Not a water witch (another silly question).
Do you use astrology? I use it to find out what the general trend of someone or something is.  I don’t use it as a predictor of the future.  Too many things can influence an event for the stars to be accurate.
Any other form of divination? Omens, animal behavior, listening to the Gods, looking ahead on timelines, and being aware of consequences.

S P E L L S //

What was the first spell you did? I don’t remember.
What was the latest? I ate breakfast.
Ever done a love spell? No (revis, not to target a specific person into loving me, but to bring someone who could love me into my life, yes).
A job spell? Yes.
A healing spell? Yes.
What was the most powerful spell you’ve ever performed? Marrying my wife.
What deities do you usually call on? Herne and Rhiannon

(Let me explain why I answered these this way.  A spell is anything that will bring you your desired object/outcome.  I wanted to not feel hungry, so I ate.  I wanted to be with my wife for the rest of my life, so I married her.  The Harry Potter spells that this meme is asking about are not what a spell is, and most of those don’t work anyhow.  It’s the subtle spells that make the most change.)

C R Y P T O Z O O L O G Y //

Do you believe in Vampires? Yes.
Werewolves? No. (as in the classic half man/wolf shown in “Thriller” and “An American Werewolf in London”.  In people who can shift their mind and soul to that of a wolf, taking on their aspects and qualities… yes.)
Shapeshifters? Yes.
Elves? Yes.
Faeries? Yes.
Dragons? Yes.
Nymphs? Yes.
Sprites? Yes.
Mermaids? Yes, but it is more Merfolk than just the women.
Sirens? Yes.
Satyrs? Yes.
Ever “seen” any of the above? Yes.
Ever talked to any of the above? Yes.
Ever used any of the above in magic? Yes (another stupid question, define “used”.  Called upon a Dragon to help me do something in a ritual?  Yes.  Taken control of them and making them do it all for me?  Not on your life.)
Do you have one of them as a personal guardian? Here’s another stupid question.  I have friends on the astral who are all of the above and more, I watch their back, they watch mine.  Is this a “personal guardian”? No.  This is two people watching out for each other.

(I have no clue what this section was supposed to tell about me.  All these creatures exist on the Astral plane, you can interact with any of them that you want to.  It is not some huge secret.  Do I believe they exist on the material plane here?  Yes, with caveats.  They all were here at one time or another, and as Mankind rose in prominence, they retreated to the Astral, where they are staying now.  Until we learn to live in harmony with others, that is where they will stay.)

R A N D O M //

Do you see a rabbit, a man or a woman in the moon? I see craters and shadows and seas that take on the shape of a man’s face, a woman AND a rabbit at different times.
Own a cat? Yes.  (relevance?  I has none)
When you meditate, what does your happy place look like? I don’t have a “happy place”.  If you mean my Astral Temple, it is complex, if you mean the meeting place I go to so I can talk to the Gods, that’s something else.  If you mean the landscape that I find inside my head, that’s even more different.  Another silly question.
Do you work with Chakras? Since they are part of our bodies and since I work with Energy, I guess I do.  Haven’t done anything directly with them.
Do you believe in past lives? Yes.
If so, describe a few briefly: No, I don’t think I will.  It has no bearing on anything.
Do you believe in soul mates? Yes, as long as you define it as someone you have been with in other times and places that you are with again and again.
Do you have a spirit guide? Several, if you define this as someone who teaches me who does not have a corporal body.
Is it always love and light? Not even close.  You can’t know light without knowing the dark, as I said above.

I think that this entire meme is one of those “tell us about your woo so we can be impressed with how special you are” things.  It makes too many assumptions about what my path is and how I walk it.  It assumes that I follow a Wicca-lite canaric faith, and that it is a “faith” not a knowing. It assumes that this is a question of “having faith in” meaning that your default attitude is “it doesn’t really exist”.  I take offense at that assumption.  This seems to be more “introduce yourself” than anything else.

I need to write my own meme that makes more sense.

Originally posted 2011-01-11 07:09:53.

Originally posted 2009-11-15 02:12:38.

Well, I am finally in a position where I can talk to you all about where the H*LL I’ve been these last several weeks and what has been happening.

1. I have a job. It’s not a permanent job (not yet), but it is a 33 week contract that is temp to hire. It’s doing phone support at Dell. So, most of my time has been being spent taking their training classes at the Dell Campus here to learn how they want me to do things, and what I’m going to be supporting. The kicker is that I will be making nearly as much as I was when I was full time employed at Direct, and that means that my paycheck should be able to support the family again.

To say I’m totally over the moon about this is to minimize just how happy about it I am. Yes, I have to get used to a new sleep schedule again, shifting to daytime, but I should be able to pick my schedule once I actually get on the floor and start doing the support. I think I’m going to like this job, but I do have to see it and do it before I actually can say so definitely.

2. Magickally, I’ve been dealing with a lot of shit from Japan and the whole earthquake/tsunami and such. It’s taken up the majority of my sleeping times having to deal with it. But, that is slowing a lot since I started the job. Everyone knows I need my sleep so I can concentrate at work, so that’s backed down a lot. There’s still some things I have to deal with, but they tend to be minor.

Right now I’m helping out another in their lands, coaching and trying to help them deal with their people and various problems they are having. The dead just have no real respect for someone that’s still alive, you know?

3. I’ve been a bit ill lately. Probably the crud you get whenever you have 40+ people in one room and talking/breathing the same air.

4. On the transgender front: Fate is conspiring to keep me moving forward with no excuses. Turns out there is a guy I’ve made friends with at work who is engaged to a transgirl, whom, coincidentally enough, rides the bus I take to get to work. They are both active in the trans community and have kinda latched on to me as a friend they can both help and associate with since so many of our likes/dislikes are damned near the same. I mean, how many trans people do you meet that are into to tech, play tabletop RPGs, like Doctor Who and Criminal Minds, and so on? Not a lot, but that’s what has happened.

I’m out of my hormones, but that should be taken care of when I get my first paycheck. It will be only two weeks without them, so I don’t think that will be a huge killer of the progress I made, but you never know. When I get insurance again at the first of the month, I can go to doctors and start getting healthy again.

5. I’m actually losing weight again. When I lost my membership to the Y, I gained all the weight I had lost back. But right now I’m walking home from one point in the trip home from work. It’s not that far, just about a mile, but it is definitely having an effect on my waistline. That and the subliminal program I started with my mp3′s that I listen to.

It wasn’t that hard to do either. I got Audacity, found a microphone, wrote a list of affirmations I wanted to listen to. Then I recorded them all into one audio track, edited it down so that they were sounding nice. Then I copied that track over and over, shifting them a bit so that they didn’t have the same words starting and stopping all at once. Once I had 40 repetitions of the same stuff layered into one gabble of sound, I copied it and placed THAT on the other ear, so now I have 40 in the left ear, the same 40 in the right ear. Then I reversed the track so that I had 40 going forward and 40 going backward in the left ear, the same in the right ear. I combined them all into the “master subliminal track”, reduced the volume to where I could barely hear it as garble static, then added them to my MP3′s that I listen to in my player. Been listening to JUST them any time I leave the house to go anyplace. I think they are working since I’m wanting to eat less, exercise more, and I’m having a better outlook on my life and so on.

6. I went out last night in Joy’s clothes, made up and so on. Had a good time too. It was just a bit of “interesting” in my internal reactions. At first I was nervous, but then I got calmed down since the only people who would be seeing me were other transpeople. That was nice. To be able to just be myself for once.

So what’s next? Keep going on the job. Keep working and earning money (which is a hell of a relief in and of itself). Then get my paychecks, pay bills to get them off our backs, pay back my family who has loaned us money to keep going. THEN go shopping for more golf shirt tops for me, since that’s the “standard” at Dell. It’s more casual than that, but I don’t want to go more casual than that. Maybe in a couple weeks start going to stores and getting Joy clothing, and at least I’d have someone to go with.

Once I get into a routine with work and being off, I’ll probably have more spare time to socialize on DW and LJ, Tumblr and Twitter. That’ll be nice. They won’t let me do any of that at work for some reason. Yes, I can go on the Internet, but only WORK RELATED, no social networks, not even G-Mail. I set it so that I can forward all my gmail to my work email, and I can at least SEE it even if I can’t reply.

It’s just going to take some time.

I do want to say that for those of you NOT reading me on Daven’s Journal or on the RSS feed, you can come and comment to ANY post I have on Daven’s Journal by signing in with your OpenID from Dreamwidth, Livejournal, Twitter or many other places. Or you can even sign up for an account on the Journal, and you can have your own icon here.

So that’s it for now, I have to go and do some chores in the kitchen.

—————-
Now playing: The Painter
via FoxyTunes

Well, just got an email from a lady who wanted some very specific information from me, so that she could judge the “correctness” of the Journal by what I had to say. She wanted, in effect, my Pagan Resume’.

So, I’m going to do something that I rarely do and that is talk about myself. BUT, I’m also going to put it behind a “cut” so that it’s not super-public where any idiot with an RSS reader can see it, they actually have to click on a link to get this information.

So, if you are using an aggregator like Thunderbird, click on the link to this post and read it in full if that is what you want to do. If you found this page through the actual blog, then you will have to click on the “more” link below to see the rest of it.

Okay, first off I have to say that this information in here is very personal. The other thing I have to say is that most of this is covered in other places around this site. Next it’s going to sound like I’m name dropping, but I’m really not. Last, believe me, don’t believe me, it’s entirely up to you.

Well, I started this journey when I was 4. I learned about NewAge philosophy and metaphysics from my Grandmother, who was one of the most gifted Healers I have ever met. She had all three gifts for Healing, Mind Body and Spirit. I learned the Mind and Spirit, with a little talent in the Body healing. Others in my family got other talents. So I guess that makes me Granny Trad, although she would have been highly insulted had you called her a witch.

She was Christian. New Age Christian to be sure, but Christian nonetheless. She was highly freaked out when I told her that I was Wiccan and a Witch when I finally came out to her. It was the one time I really was nervous and scared and needed approval from someone and it was devastating to me. But, she was open minded enough to look at the situation and the dynamic between Mary and I, and the two of us and our daughter, and tell me after a five day stay with her, that she had thought about it and it didn’t matter who I prayed to so long as I was a good person, and that I was a good person.

But that would come much later.

She and I spent many days talking about metaphysics, mysticism, Bigfoot, the Pyramids, past life regressions, hypnosis, trance, ritual, psychometry, telekinesis, telepathy, the thirteenth planet, the harmonic convergence, aliens and UFOs, Atlantis, The Bermuda Triangle, Buddhism, other Gods, nature and Gaia, IDIC, and all those things that the New Age movement has incorporated into itself. I can probably speak reams on all of this, simply from the volume I read when I was young.

I’m the only 14 year old I have heard of who read “Journeys out of the Body” in a week, and spent the next year practicing it. The only problem I really had was the volume of material I was taking in and how I wasn’t assimilating it. I could read a book and remember what it said, but I didn’t necessarily remember what book it came from. When I would go back to check a fact, I couldn’t find it again.

In some ways I think I did shock people in the amount of knowledge I already had when I started in Wicca. I didn’t have to have past lives explained to me, I already knew about it and was able to discuss things with the teachers on that topic that they may not have thought about. And that happened more than once.

I vividly remember sitting on my grandmother’s counter and talking to her about auras and the colors and what they meant. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them and it was a subtle distinction that she appreciated. I was treated like a grown up by her and I learned immense amounts with her and from her. Shinto beliefs and Zen and the collected works of Alice Bailey were all mine to grasp.

We moved to Georgia and the Mormons found us. That was an interesting time. On one hand they had me locked into a prison of dogma and rules and guilt, but on the other hand they not only understood but actively looked for manifestations of the Holy Spirit to talk about. They encouraged you to use your natural gifts in those areas and to not suppress them (that is, if you were male). And they were willing to talk about the spinning room effect from prayers.

I stayed Mormon for 8 years, and while it wasn’t the most pleasant time of my life, it allowed me to see things I may have missed. And I kept studying on my own for that time. Crystals, the crystal skulls, psychokenesis, mythology and demonology, AD&D and related disciplines and so on.

Oh, yes, I was a gamer geek. And that’s where the next twist to this story is to be found.

See, I knew from what I had been reading that all that detailed in the game was real. If not on THIS world, then in other worlds. I had a familiarity with the Astral Plane, the Ethereal plane and other realms, and knew what I was talking about to speak on things like what a “Magic Missile” was. I read fantasy and I had an imagination. That, by the way, is the use I find for paper RPGs like that, training the imagination and the visualization areas of the mind.

I was shocked to discover just HOW many metaphysically aware people were involved in gaming. EVERYONE I knew, with just one or two exceptions, had an awareness of otherworlds and so on, most just didn’t know what they knew and didn’t know how rare it was to not be headblind. Out of better than 100 people who I gamed with regularly, only two didn’t have any metaphysical gifts. The only qualifier here is that most of them didn’t have any skills or knowledge in metaphysics, but about a dozen did and we gravitated to each other.

This is where I met the father of my heart, Frank. He is a Vietnam Veteran, Special Forces, 35 kills to his credit (one out of a sound sleep with the assassin’s own knife, after he had killed about 8 other men in his barracks), 5 black belts and belts in about 20 other styles, half Cherokee and half Sioux (that he told me), who is one of the nicest people you ever wanted to meet, whom children instantly love and run to for protection, who my 2 week old daughter fell asleep on when she wouldn’t go to her grandfather and he spent the next 4 hours barely breathing with this beautific smile on his face of wonder. The man who gave me reasons to live and to become the best person I could and who guided my studies.

Can you tell I love the guy? He is what I try to be every day.

There was also a Wiccan in that group. She kept her beliefs very quiet and didn’t speak on them much. But while *I* was oblivious, others weren’t. She had the courage to be interviewed for the local paper’s required Halloween interest article. And that’s how I was introduced to Wicca.

When I read that article, I felt like I was free to give a name to what I believed. But my coming home to Wicca would wait for the Army interfered.

I joined the Army and discovered something; It wasn’t for me. They wanted me to change who I was completely, to conform and to be a cookie cutter. Unfortunately while I will do that for some, the Army wasn’t it. So I spent a year and a half looking at some beautiful scenery, learning things like how to type, and being in stasis. I practiced several times what I had learned, and I wanted to astral project, so I meditated and did what I could. My roommate made fun of me in so doing. But I kept going and eventually I was thrown out because I was fat.

I came home and the next major turning point in my life and this journey occurred. I met my wife.

A little background: my best friend in the world Keith is also very metaphysically aware and he and I collaborated on a lot of projects together, one of those being gaming conventions. We did security for DragonCon on years 3, 4, 5 and 6 and DixieTrek on three years, one of them the very last. So we knew the gamers and the con goers as well as working together with metaphysics. I spent all kinds of time playing and got VERY good at things like BattleTech.

Well, Keith convinced me to go to DixieTrek and work the security on it. Since it was a smaller convention and I didn’t have anything to do, I went. I did my normal job of wandering around, being “free safety” and handling problems as I came to them, instead of sitting in one place bored out of my mind. I got very good.

One of the jobs I assigned myself was the “con party patrol”, in which I go and check the parties out and see how things are going, if there is underage drinking and so on. I would patrol those and participate as I needed to in order to blend in. The Klingon parties were always fun, and I think the most boring party I have ever been to was the “Beauty and the Beast” fan party. Twelve people sitting around and watching every episode back to back to back without a word being said. Mind-numbing.

What does this have to do with anything? I met my wife there. She was hostess at a con-suite setup and was being the baby sitter. The lady who was nominally in charge was no where to be found, and Mary was the one running things. She had her daughter and brand new baby granddaughter there. Her son was also in attendance. I dropped in, saw open bottles and hung around a bit. It was quiet and low key, but there was gaming going on, as well as a chess tournament and a puzzle competition. The puzzles were those metal twistie puzzles and you had to figure out how to get them apart and back together again.

Mary was running the gaming. I wandered over. It was Star Wars. I watched and went back to my patrol later. About 2 AM I went back and they were JUST starting a new game. I made up a character and started playing.

In the middle of this, Keith shows up and tries to get me to go to the Dealer’s room to secure it and play Battletech. Since I was a Battletech fiend, my refusal was a shock. He pulled me out and we spent a few minutes in the corridor talking about what was going on. I wound up staying and playing, much to their disappointment.

SOMETHING was calling me to be in that room, and I’m glad I was. There was the normal group of people who were metaphysically aware as normal. I thought nothing of it. But Mary was there and she was a neat old lady. I found out that she was old enough to be my mother, and I scared the hell out of her by grabbing her collar at one point in the game. She was like “easy son, it’s a game…” to which I said “yes, I know it is, I’m acting.” I think that cemented her interest in me,

Time passed and I lost track of them, since the contact phone numbers she gave me were still in my pocket when I washed my shirt. (I used a BDU top for my “con shirt”, woodland camo with various pins and patches, including a House Steiner patch.)

But as the fates would do, I found them again through her daughter. At the time Dragonware Hobbies was my home and I spent a lot of time there, the only time I wasn’t there being when I was sleeping in my car due to a falling out with my mother, or at my job. The rest of the time I basically lived in Dragonware. And I met her daughter again. She had moved into the area with her husband and their child and were looking for a place to game at.

It turned out that they were also Wiccan. Fam Trad with HIS mother. She was the High Priestess of a coven in the area. At the time I had moved away from Wicca to magick and witchcraft, so I was willing to study and learn to a point, not jump in the Wicca bag whole. And they had a copy of Buckland’s Complete Book of Witchcraft.

I devoured that book. I read it cover to cover in a week, and re-read it four times over the next two weeks. I cross referenced some of the works I had on hand, like “the Practical Guide to the Runes”, and started on my Wiccan journey. And I also spent days talking to Mary about everything.

Let me explain this a bit. I would talk with whomever about what I knew in regards to metaphysics, learning and swapping. I taught Frank about Mormonism, Frank taught me about how the martial arts philosophies dovetailed with metaphysics. Keith and I would spend days discussing the many worlds theory and astral projection. But it was in two to three hour bursts since we all had lives.

For Mary, I gave that up. She and I started talking and it was like something went *click* in both of us. There were times when (literally) we would start talking about metaphysics and tarot and runes and AP and spirituality and would talk about it for the next 17 hours until she had to go to work again, just to do it again when she came back to see me. And it was seeing ME, not her daughter. Apparently she got VERY addicted to me VERY fast.

But we would spend a long time talking and discussing things. Mostly metaphysical, but also life, philosophy, maturity and so on. Apparently she became addicted to me very rapidly.

I spent a lot of time with her learning and teaching, thinking and discussing. Most of my personal gnosis and epiphanies happened during that two years while discovering who I was and my personal spirituality. And I found that Seax-Wica seemed to fit what I perceived the world to be. Plus I had been in communication with Rhiannon of the Birds and Herne the Hunter for some time (this is the point where they Chose me to be Their Priest) and also with my daughter Rhiannon and also Michael the Archangel. I learned even more from Them, finding out and learning and rediscovering.

A lot of the instruction I have had is either direct revelation from the Gods, book learning, personal gnosis or a culmination of a thought process. I have had little formal training in a coven setting. I have had some however.

Patalee Glass-Koentp was one instructor of mine. She and I hung out at “Flight of the Phoenix” in Grand Prairie in Texas for some time. I attended her beginner’s classes, and she is the one to FIRST call me a High Priest. Before that I had called myself a priest or a devote’, but she anointed me with that title. This was the second night of being at her class, when she asked me to present Seax-Wica to everyone else as to what it was. From then on, I have called myself a High Priest, but not until then. I was very upset to learn that she died.

Raymond Buckland and I met each other through the medium of the Internet and the Seax-Wica lists. There was a whole melt down with the Seax tradition and he and I crossed paths. I count him as a friend of mine, and something of a mentor (considering I learned Craft basics and principles from his works, it’s not surprising). I believe he counts me as a friend as well.

Trish Telesco; She and I met through another author, AJ Drew. She was active on his board, and very vocal in her defense of Raymond, but AJ was insisting on attacking Raymond. I showed up to that board, walked into the middle and explained everything, and finally got Raymond and AJ talking to each other, when things got cleared up. But apparently the aspersions that AJ and Trish cast at each other were too much, and she left. I have talked with her multiple times since, reviewed her books and I definitely consider her a friend. (And she’s got a cruise for us coming up in 2006 over Valentine’s Day. Go to it if you can. It looks to be fun.)

AJ Drew. He and I met due to the previous altercation. There has since been some bad blood, but I learned from him as well.

Dorothy Morrison. I met Dorothy first when I reviewed a pair of her books and she found the review. I was in the process of reviewing another book of hers and wrote her JUST as she found my review. We kind-of hit it off since I was honest with her and I consider her a good friend.

Fritz Jung and Wren Walker: I worked with them both on The Witches Voice (specifically the Cats of the Craft section) for some time. I had more contact with Fritz. That section was closed down and we lost contact, but every now and then we come back into contact with each other and discuss things. Mostly idea-spinning and sharing of thoughts, where we seem to have a similar outlook.

Sannion: Helenistic Pagan, not one that you would consider a Wiccan and Druid to have as a friend, but he and I hit it off from the sheer intelligence of essays written. I have an immense amount of respect for his intelligence and ability to see through to the heart of the subject, and to say all this succinctly. His “Wiccan Fatwa” is a scream and I have learned much from him. He reads my livejournal and this RSS feed and I read his. I consider him to be a good friend.

Obsidian: For some reason he seems to credit me with saving him from fluffy-dom. All I suggested was that he not take the name “Taliesin” since everyone used that name. This seems to have made a difference. He is welcome in my home any time he chooses to show up.

Triskel: Discordian Priest Irreverand Hugh, fairly well known in the Discordian Circles, I count as another friend. He and I see eye to eye as to the nature of Chaos and why things are the way they are.

Carl McColman: I met him at The Real Witches Ball in Columbus Ohio. Turns out that he’s from my old stomping ground. He knows where the monastery is in Conyers, right next door to the owner of Dragonware Hobbies with whom I spent many months at different times. He and I hit it off and I owe him some beers. It was a shock to see him go back to Catholicism, but I understood why he did and hold no animosity toward him. Can’t wait to get together with him sometime soon again.

Lisa McSherry: Ma’at is the lady I met through the Journal when she was taking one of my classes and we simply started talking. Apparently I taught her a lot, and I’m glad for that. She is another friend of mine.

Kenn White: DarkOwl is one of those people that if you know him, you expect everyone to know him. I met him when I started researching Druidism and his essays taught me a lot. I joined his budding Druidic Order and learned even more. My brother if I could have chosen one, we are bound even tighter by the oaths we swore.

In each and every one of these cases, excepting Patalee, I met them through the Journal. And I didn’t really try.

The motivations for creating this website: Mostly it’s preservation of my thoughts. I wanted a medium to preserve what I learned and came to understand, and apparently it made sense to others. I was shocked and flattered to find people reading what I had to say and learning from it, as well as recommending it. That gives me all kinds of warm-fuzzies. To learn that the people I learned from are coming and learning from me, well, that’s flabbergasting.

So, the Journal was started to teach a few others about what a Druid is so they could role play them well. And things kind of snowballed from there. I have changed the focus from what others believe and teach to what I know and believe, to save it for my daughter and her children. I plan on setting up a perpetual trust to pay for the hosting and bandwidth. I have it on good authority that in the 2200′s or so, Daven’s Journal is still up and running as well as teaching.

If that’s true, it surpasses my dreams.

Other than that, I’m here. This is Daven. It is not all that Eric Landrum (my real name) is, for a lot of who and what I am is irrelevant to this. But spirituality and metaphysically, this is my place and my thoughts. I’m slowly going through and cleaning out that which is inaccurate and what is not mine, to segregate what IS me from that which is not. I’m rather proud of this Journal, it’s taken 6 years of work so far.

Oh, I officially dedicated myself (Buckland’s Self Dedication Ritual, and the Seax-Wican self dedication) on August 19, 1992. I was initiated into the ODU on October 29, 2003. So I’ve been doing this for some time and studying it even longer. The Journal has been going since October 1999.

So there it is. This is me. There are a few other pages that are relevant:

My Biography
Site Dedication (my tribute to Grandma)
My Feelings about my wife
The purpose of the Journal

Originally posted 2005-09-13 14:43:06.