I've been meaning to do one of these for a while, but life kept distracting me.

1. My body. It puts up with my abuse and my spite and my disappointment without ever taking it out on me. I don't get sick very often, and I can do so many wonderful things: dance, run, walk, laugh, drink, without having to worry about whether or not it will hurt or whether I am capable.
2. I am gainfully employed in a terrible economy.
3. I have a caring, supportive boyfriend.
4. I have caring, supportive friends.
5. I have caring, supportive parents.
6. Fall weather.
7. Sunshine.
8. Good music.

Many pagan societies buried their dead with grave goods - objects of importance to the deceased or objects that would be helpful to the deceased which could be symbolically transferred to the deceased in the afterlife.

For the sake of this prompt assume that you agree with the idea of grave goods and believe in some sort of afterlife in another realm of existence even if you do not.

What things would you want to take with you to the next life and why?

I'm still split on what I want done with my body, never mind my stuff. Part of me appreciates the permanence of a burial, as opposed to cremation or donation to science. But part of me is inclined to say: the body by that point is a husk, is nothing, and has no more ties to what I was (or whatever I will be by that point, if anything). That same part is inclined to say that it will be my posessions that will contain my remains, so to speak—if only metaphorically.

The vast majority of them I would want given to charity—pay it forward—or given to surviving loved ones. Were I to be buried with grave goods, I can only think of one: my Karelian necklace.



It's an old Finnish good luck/protection charm. The bells scare away evil spirits; the horses see the future and the past. I can think of nothing else to take with me on a trip to the other side.

Moon transiting my IC, and all of a sudden I'm filled with overwhelming feeling of "home" and sense of rootiness, belonging.

Transiting Mars opposing my natal Mars? Time to rage!

Mars is going to be hanging out in Leo for the next nine months. That's right in my fifth and sixth houses (my sixth house cusp is at 18* Leo).

I've also got my natal Venus and Mercury in Leo. Hmmm?

As if believing that Tarot readings can impart meaningful insights, or that the complex, multi-layered art of astrology can give you direction and purpose in life, automatically makes you a hysterical, gullible loon.

This is what happens when people refuse to educate themselves about whatever it is they're doing: they perpetuate untruths and (unintentionally) conform to unflattering stereotypes. This touches back on my previous entry for pagan_prompt, which is why I'm even bothering to answer. If people employed a little rationalism with these things—a little grain of salt— this stereotype of the slavish devotion to this or that school of occult thought wouldn't have such a stronghold on the collective Western imagination. I'm a tremendous science nerd, and while I'll be the first to admit that the scientific community is not without its faults, what occult practices gain through the scientific method trial-by-fire mode of experimentation more than makes up for whatever fluff ends up burning off.

What values and virtues do you believe should be universal for all pagan paths - not just your own - and why are these virtues/values important? How should they be practiced?

I'm going to diverge from the answers I've already seen, and where they're going, and say critical thinking, if only because that's something everyone should employ on a day-to-day basis. But to put a pagan spin on it, a lot of pagans follow paths based on an exaggerated/completely fabricated history, or don't look objectively/rationally at their spellwork and magical systems.

Not that I'm trying to squash together Science and Faith, either; I'm a firm adherent to the idea of Non-Overlapping Magesteria, as Stephen Jay Gould talked about in Rocks of Ages. But a great heaping help of common sense never hurt anything.

Going hand-in-hand with that, I would also have to say sense of humor. As important as it is to take everything you read and do with a grain of salt, it's important to be able to laugh about it as well.

And all of a sudden I find myself hypersensitive and on edge. Perhaps the fact that it was transiting my own natal Mercury had something to do with it. Today it hangs around my Venus, we'll see how that goes.

Or could it be that a moon in Leo makes children even more hyperactive and childish, which makes my job a lot more difficult.

Mercury is retrograde, but fortunately it seems to be a fairly tame one so far, at least for me. But the moon is currently hanging out in my own Sun sign of Cancer (today it was actually conjunct my sun), so I've been feeling more all right than normal. I hadn't been feeling quite like myself for a while—that stopped, thankfully, and then for a few days I was just coasting. But now I feel back in my element again. Hopefully that will stay on even after the moon leaves Cancer this Tuesday.

Yesterday and today were the best days I've had in a while. Yesterday I went out with friends of mine for fine German beer and delicious Korean food. Today, I milled around and was generally a lump—but that's okay, because I've been coming down with a cold. I have a new sense of energy, new purpose, new orientation, new everything. The self-destructive spiral I was on seems to have stopped itself.

I figured I would feel a bit better once the moon was in Pisces, my own natal moon sign, but I didn't expect that much better. Now to keep that feeling and connection going through this Aries moon.

Interestingly enough, I spent much of this weekend sleeping and didn't wake up until the moon was in Aries. Fitting to spend the last moments of a Pisces moon in dreamland, eh?

Three cards I drew about what's going on in my life: external stressors, internal stressors, and advice

( The Hermit, Death, and The Star. )

I'm at such a frustrating place with Tarot. I feel like my cards aren't really "speaking" to me, for some reason. There's so much to learn, I realize—so much information out there and I don't know where to start, it's absolutely overwhelming. Even if I have been reading for a few years now. It's like I've gotten so far, and now there's a wall in front of me, and I don't know how to get by. Unsurprisingly, this is also where I am with astrology.

What am I doing? Why? These are questions I need to answer. Right now I don't know if I can.

No, not really, but as I've been keeping astrological track of the moon, I've begun thinking about how it might explain my days.

Moon in Sagittarius, transiting my natal Saturn and Uranus? No wonder I've been feeling shitty and out of sorts and all over the map.

Since sometimes I can find the court cards rather confusing, I've taken to playing with my deck with the court cards method I found a few months ago whenever I feel a sort of shift in personality.

( What's going on? )

Solar Return chart and also reading under the cut here.

( What's in store? )

I felt the need to toy with my court cards again.

( Anybody home? )

Of course, the downside of a Moon in Taurus (since it's not without its faults) is that it becomes stubborn, fixated, intractible, and possessive.

( Embedded video here )

Check out the bad acting 7 minutes in.

Anything to make a buck or two, I suppose.

The 6 of Coins came up in a reading recently, about what I had to learn from a fellow I've just met. Most talk of this card is about charity and giving back, usually to a community and usually in a monetary sense. So what does this have to do with (non-romantic) relationships?

The 6 of Disks (or Pentacles, or Coins, or whatever you prefer to call it) is associated with the Moon in Taurus. The Moon is exalted in Taurus, where the calm, stable energy keeps the Moon's mood swings on a leash. Taurus also provides the physical resources necessary for all of the providing and nurturing that the Moon wants to do. Likewise, the Moon's sensitivity provides a lot of "aesthetic fuel" for the beauty-loving Taurus, delighting in a moving story just as much as luxurious silk sheets or decadent chocolate cake.

It seems that whenever I get this card in readings, though, it almost never has to do with money explicitly. I think people too often forget that Pentacles is about intangible things like self worth and how we value ourselves in addition to just simply "money," especially in cards that seem to be as explicitly about finances as the six is. This situation, for example, has very little to do with finances.

Rather, this is a card about learning how to give appropriately and—I think more importantly—about learning not to rely "on the kindness of strangers" for validation. The Moon in Taurus loves itself, after all, and doesn't need anybody else's say-so to feel good about themselves.

The name for this card in the Thoth deck is "Success." Giving back—an interesting way to conceptualize success. Too often we think of success as something static, unmoving, but really, "success" in that sense is an illusion. Too often we consider the 4 of Disks "success," and yet what happens to that success? More lasting success is in the more dynamic, give-and-take exchange of the six. "The only thing permanent is change," which is a lesson the 6 has learned while the 4 has not.

Easy enough to apply to money, but what about the intangible things I mentioned earlier? Well, if I'm dependent on other people around me to constantly supply me with the love and validation we all need...that's a very one-way relationship, not very fluid, not very dynamic. I need to learn to give (keyword for the 6 of Coins, I think) love to myself (and to other people!). When we give money to charities, we also give our sympathy—if we weren't at least a little sympathetic, we wouldn't give, after all. Or, more cynically: "I'll give you fifty bucks to take away my guilt." And when we receive, we likewise receive that measure of sympathy.

But we can only help others after we've helped ourselves.

Sometimes everything you've ever wanted floats above
It's stickin' out its tongue and laughing, while
Everything that anyone could ever need is down below
Waiting for you, know this

There's never gonna be a moment of truth for you
While the world is watching, ohh ohh
'Cause all you need is the thing you've forgotten
And that's to learn to live with what you are.

—Ben Folds, "Learn to Live With What You Are"

Do you honor your ancestors in your tradition or practice? If so, how do you honor your ancestors? Are there any ancestors, excepting parents, who are especially important to you?

Under normal circumstances, I informally honor my ancestors by keeping a small "family shrine," where I keep tokens of ancestors from both sides of the family in a place of remembrance (a prayer book from my Dede, a graduation teddy bear from my parents, a penny collection from my Pop-Pop, photographs, etc). Ancestor veneration is (from what I understand) big in Slavic traditions anyway, but I've always held my ancestors in a place of honor, even before I became a "pagan." On my father's side, they were immigrants and made signficant sacrifices to come to America when they did; if they hadn't made those choices, I wouldn't be here today.

For fear of losing those things in transit, however, I left my family shrine at "home" when I moved across the globe for a year-long tenure teaching English. Now I simply have my Russian Tarot of St. Petersburg with me, reminder enough in its own way, as regards keeping in touch with Baba Tess.

Someone in pimp_my_altar had an ancestoral shrine set up to "Men Who Loved Men," as a way of acknowledging the history and legacy of homosexuality—not ancestors by blood, but people who nonetheless helped shape and create his identity and the world he lives in today. The thought of doing this with feminist icons is appealing, though I don't know who I would and wouldn't include. In any case, my bachelor pad lacks the requisite space for it, so I'll have to put that idea on hold for a while.