Druids In Cars, Going To Festivals

While headed home from a Dedicant Oath rite, we started talking about what it was like to move on from our current roles in modern Paganism, whether those moves were due to life changes, vocational changes, or just coming to a place where it was time to move on. Mike Bierschenk joins Revs. Avende and Dangler on this discussion again, and we our conversation goes a bit everywhere, but it was a good chat. Find us on Facebook, connect with us at Threecranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.

Happy Samhain, friends! One of the great traditions we have as a Grove is that we keep an Ancestor Box. This is a simple box that has been with us for 20 years now, receiving new ancestors and bringing them into our shared community of ancestral family, and becoming a part of who we are. Today, because we were driving home from the Cantlos Druid Moon rite where we opened the box, we reflected a bit on how we interact with it, what's changed in two decades, and the ways we've found to keep the "stuff" in the box connected to their stories. Check us out on Facebook, read more about us at threecranes.org, and find out more about Druidry at ADF.org.

Today, Rev. Avende and our Grove Bard, Mike Bierschenk, travel out to Harvest Nights and bring you along in the car with them, as they discuss the role of the Bard in Three Cranes Grove, ADF, and in ritual in general. Both have served in the role for our Grove, and both have brought their own magical touch to the work. Find us on Facebook, check us out at threecranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.

After Summerland, we're back! Today, we talk about sympathy and contagion in magic: the idea that things that are alike can provide access to each other, either through being alike or containing the essence (Greek: ousia) of a thing. We chat about them as subsets of attraction, referring to the Laws of Magic outlined in Real Magic. We talk a little bit about joss money (AKA "hell notes" or "hell money") as an example, but the majority of this discussion grows out of the need for Rev. Avende to provide access to religious and magical support in their new role as a prison chaplain: how can we provide services to incarcerated individuals, particularly in light of the restrictions that are imposed on them. Rev. Dangler floats his notion of "magic as access" here, probably for the first time publicly, so what you're hearing in the last half of this episode is really an initial oral argument for that definition, and we expect there's more to come on that as it develops. A couple of things get mentioned in this episode, including a collaborative whiteboard image of Epona that we painted in the pandemic, and the Flame of Hope experience in an airport, which we've previously mentioned. Find us on Facebook, check us out at threecranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.

The Summerland Festival is next week, August 17-20, 2023, near Yellow Springs, Ohio! As of publication, you can still register! This week is the final of five episodes we recoded back-to-back about "Managing the Magical," or how we do magical work in certain sections of our rituals. We'll talk about what we consider the "big magical workings" in ADF ritual, the history behind those sections, and how they came to be part of our liturgy, before diving deeply into how we actually do these ritual parts. This week is all about "The Working," which sounds ominous and important: how we do it functionally, and why we do it in ritual. The five episodes are: (Re)Creating the Cosmos (July 13) Opening the Gates (July 20) Taking the Omen (July 27) The Return Flow (August 2) The Workings (today) Find us on Facebook, check us out at ThreeCranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at ADF.org.