Occult Garden Parties

This post was originally written for The Many Pen-Names of Morgan Drake Eckstein under the title--The Amazing Adventures of Meltdown Girl (How losing access to Amazon is affecting my production schedule)  Sign up to receive the monthly Essay of Doom (every 13th of the month)   It is official. After twenty-five years of peace among the leaders of Denver’s Wiccan community, the Second Denver Witch War has started. And I am the first causality of DWW2. Happy, happy—joy, joy—right?  Yes, it is going to affect the production schedule—as in “Everything is on hold until further notice.”  Why? Because some witch thought that it was a suitable punishment for me to have my Amazon author account terminated. Me and my wife chose not to march in lock-step with a Big Name Witch, and now we need to be punished for our wrongful disobedience.  Nice, right? I am guessing that this is going to be another case of putting lipstick on a pig, and claiming that it is about “Community service, and not elevatin

[The following was sent to my All-in-One mailing list, serving all my acknowledged pen-names. You can sign up here for my mailing list ] After holding out hope forever—me and my hopeless causes—sadly I must report that my annual OFM (Open Full Moon) ritual scheduled for October 31 is officially cancelled. Quite simply, me and Khari could not figure out a way to make it safe for us to gather this year. You don’t realize how important a bathroom is until you don’t have access to one. And it was figuring out how to let attendees use the bathroom that stumped us. And once we saw the problem, we couldn’t un-see it. We had solved all the rest of the problems, but we could not solve this one. Well, not in a way that wouldn’t become a piece of zombie apocalypse performance art. Context for the one reader who hasn’t see my dog and pony show, I picked up a habit of openly washing my hands between every step taking and making orders when I was working by myself at Loco Gyro. Some of t

Ahh—f**k it—the work-in-progress “Hail and Welcome” is going to be what it is going to be. Each and every person who is going to be upset with the book, all those individuals have already kicked me to the curb for the unacceptable shift in my writing voice. I can either wrestle with my muse every inch of the way; or I can give into the demands of my muse and write a book that I enjoyed creating.   

  Take this quiz to see if you better off with a pickle as your occult leader. If your fearless leader . . .  . . . can’t say, “I don’t know” . . . . . . can’t cite their source . . . . . . can’t say, “I changed my mind” . . . . . . can’t say, “I made a mistake” . . . . . . can’t say, “I am sorry” . . . . . . claims to be the only qualified teacher . . . . . . has two sets of rules: One for their allies, and another for everyone else . . . . . . declares events that call their Holiness in question TOP SECRET . . . . . . trademarks terms and names that existed long before your leader was born . . . . . . blames you for their bad behavior . . . . . . starts to make personal, business, and healthcare decisions for you . . . . . . goes out of their way to cut you off from your support network . . . . . . uses their followers to satisfy their Ego, Sexual, and Monetary needs . . . . . . is unwilling to share the spotlight with others . . . . . . believes that their poli

Any book I write about public Wiccan ritual has to include this quote: “ We ask you not to enter in Perfect Love and Perfect Trust because there are people here you do not know, but rather we ask you to enter with an Open Mind, a Willing Heart, and leave your differences at the door. ” –Alia Denny, mother of open Wiccan ritual in Denver, CO [RIP] We miss you Alia.

PreviousBlog / TBH-MasterList / NextBlog Welcome to the Tarot Blog Hop--the exciting game show where crazy Tarot bloggers compete to write entertaining essays connecting Tarot with some randomly selected topic pulled from a hat. Everything you see here is improvised--written mere moments before the Hop went live. Yes, that is right--Everything is made up and the points don't matter. I am not saying that Drew Carey is the Spirit Animal of TBH wranglers . . . but I am not saying that he is not either. Jay, our wrangler for this Tarot Blog Hop gave us the following prompt: Whether you have a ritual for working with your deck(s) Are you superstitious when it comes to letting others touch your deck If you work with clients do you have a routine/ritual prior to a reading Do you read for yourself / the world, if not would you ever seek guidance from them And my response was something along the line of a scream that sounded a little like this--"I have no ritual, no r

PreviousBlog / MasterList / NextBlog Welcome to this round of the Tarot Blog Hop. The theme for this TBH is Fables, Fortunes and "Once upon a time." And now for our feature presentation . . . Because my cards have been abused. Submitted for review by Artemis Mackenzie, Headmistress of Hairyboils School of Witchcraft and Roguery—Chancellor Sister Soice (that is pronounced Zoice, not Seuss) observation notes of Professor Rowan Whiteadder’s Illuminated History 101 class on Sol Day, Haregg Maatis, cycle of the Zombie Pox, in the third regnal year of the First Pharaoh. . . . after three hours of lecture on the fables and myths of Tarot, Varcus Wilvelivaenythyng the Infinite, son of Kantvork “Vully” Wilvelivaenythyng the Square Root—Dukemage of Zharkdom, and Queen Beslie Thornincide the Negative One, better known by one and all as Wibble, was still not convinced that all he knew and believed about the origins of Tarot was completely forged and falsified. Flanked by his