Notes from Pantheacon! Part Two

Feb 25, 2008 16:31

Here are the rest of my notes from Pantheacon!



30 Years of Wiccan Interfaith: What Have We Learned?
  • Things we have to offer:
    • Consensus decision-making
    • Non-exclusive religion -- "What works for you, works. Fine. We don't have to agree."
  • Things we can learn:
    • Vocabulary to express theological background -- to better understand our own and that of other religions.
  • Tools we have:
    • ecological awareness in spirituality
    • Ritual
  • Tools others have:
    • hierarchical organizational skills
  • Patrick McCollum said: other faiths need pagans in interfaith because we talk about things from their religion they have let slip away. We can also act as intermediaries and open up dialog because we're so different from them.
  • Macha Nightmare said: When talking about paganism, always use qualifiers! "Most pagans..." "Many pagans..." "often" "seldom" etc.
  • Cherry Hill Seminary has an interfaith course!
  • Image of religions as islands, with bridges between them. Sometimes we have to go out on the bridges and talk even if we live comfortably on the islands.
  • Interfaith groups often work on things not about religion - clean drinking water, for example. Interfaith can be about working together with other faiths on important issues. When you succeed, it opens hearts and lets you connect as two people instead of two religions.
  • Glenn Turner: interested in interfaith between pagan sects.
  • Don Frew: pagans have a lot of interfaith experience compared to many other religions. Pagans can offer green mysticism. Don is friends with anti-interfaith conservative Christians because as a pagan, he's less of a threat than liberal Christians.
  • Don Frew: Appreciative inquiry is a tool/worldview vital to interfaith. Not looking for what's wrong but looking at what's right, what the ideal would look like. Discuss faiths via human experience. Instead of "what do you believe," "how did your faith help you with...?"
  • What can one person do? Write letters, for one thing.
  • Organizations: United Religious Initiative, Interfaith Alliance, conjure.com, Swords to Ploughshares

Walking Between the Worlds Panel
This was mostly a bunch of different folks talking about their experiences and histories as pagans who are well known in a different context. It was pretty cool. Good bits:
  • Orion Foxwood: There is no mundane world, it's all magic - it's just which robe you put on.
  • If you see a need and no one is doing it, that's the Gods telling you to step up.
  • Jerrie Hildebrand: "I chose to walk with my fear and be in service."
  • Beware burnout! Take care of your body. Also be sure to stay connected with other communities, not just pagan.
  • Book recommendations: Recovery from Rescuing, Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin

Peeling the Cosmic Onion
This is the divination panel held every year at Pantheacon, and I can't recommend it highly enough. It's pretty loose in format - each of the panelists talks a little about their own divination systems, and then they do readings for folks in the audience. I was lucky enough to have a reading done by Lon Milo Duquette from his Tarot of Painful Truth, a system of reading the tarot he developed. He suggests everyone make their own - take the trump cards from your favorite deck, and on a day when you are feeling really truthful and honest, sit down with the cards, and for each one, ask "how would I bust myself as this card?" Write it down. The Tarot of Painful Truth is for when you are in desperate need of painful truth -- being called out on your bullshit. My reading was awesome and I will probably be posting about it separately at some point when I've worked through it a little more.

Iron Pentacle Working w/veedub
This was really interesting. I'm always eager to check out other Feri folk and check out their ritual style. V's is a bit talky even for me, which is saying something, but I found it very intriguing. I also got a great quote from her: "We are Her children, we are Her Self; there is no part of us that is not of the Gods." That is worth meditating on.

Promethean Spark Ritual
This was awesome -- in a very different way from the Feri ritual at last year's con, but it was still awesome. I cannot recommend the Feri priests' rits highly enough to future P-con goers. Seriously.

Kink Magic w/lupabitch and teriel

There wasn't a ton of new stuff here for me, as I've read Raven Kaldera's book and read Lupa and Tay's LJ's. I was still really glad I went, though, as it gave me some interesting food for thought. Interesting bits:
  • Idea of writing a sigil on a mirror and raising power into it -- either through the frustration of a narcissist like Lupa at having her reflection obscured or through physical means.
  • Divination thorugh sex magic - kink leads to an altered state of consciousness which is good for scrying.
  • Energy work for kink play - draining energy, using energy for bondage, charging a finger with fire energy and "burning" the person, etc. If you drain magic, remember to give it back!
  • Use sub as an altar for a ritual honoring that sub - ie, have them hold a pose or lie on a table or whatever, set the altar up on them, and then hold a ritual glorifying their outside-the-scene self.
  • Binding collar - blood magic on the leather, sigil carved into the leather, etc.
  • Advice: "don't poke the vanilla people" -- ie, don't aggravate the more mainstream pagans. Keep the peace. A lot of more mainstream pagans are upset by kinky pagans. Don't make it worse by annoying them.
  • Advice: be out to as many people as you can, especially those who love you. It's harder to fear something when someone you know and love is that way.

The Guardians of the Feri Tradition with faerywolf
  • Different Feri lines work with different numbers of guardians.
  • Guardians ~ angels, celestial beings. They came from beyond the stars and taught us all sorts of things. They're fallen angels, in the sense of a falling star, from celestial to earthly.
  • Guardians are associated with directions and elements but are way bigger than that. Working with them changes you.
  • We don't know if the names we use for them are their names or the names of the beings to whom they hold allegiance. (Storm said this, and I do not entirely understand what he meant by it; please comment if you have insight!)

The Three Souls in Feri Craft w/Morpheus Anima
  • Sticky One/Fetch/Etc.
    • Arises from life force and feeds that life force to the other souls.
    • Connected to the life force in the earty.
    • Communicates through non-verbal stuff. Anything that gives you pleasure or causes fear speaks to Fetch. Goosebumps, butterflies in the gut, and so on, are all Fetch.
    • Immediatism: the more mediated an experience is through something, the more alienated we are. (eg, playing music > listening to live music > listening to a recording). Fetch responds to more immediate experiences.
    • May take an animal form.
    • Blood is the medium of Fetch power - things that connect to Fetch often make blood pound and shine with adrenaline.
    • What delights you? Not talking about stuff like favorite ice cream, what causes you to feel radiantly alive? That is a connection to Fetch.
  • Talking Self/Shining Body/Etc.
    • Arises from eliectrical and mental activity of nervous system.
    • Responds directly to media, print, etc.
    • Society strongly supports being in Talker consciousness, which makes spiritual practice hard. Buddhist idea of monkey mind -- to do spiritual stuff, need to calm talker down.
    • Do need Talker in spiritual experiences, htough -- so we remember them. But in alignment, not dominance!
    • Reflects mood and emotion - aura colors, etc.
    • Fetch is deep, instinctive, unbidden emotions, while Talker is surface mood, feelings, and sentiments in response to the world.
  • God Self/Holy Dove/etc.
    • The part of us that is God Herself.
    • Active in religious, ecstatic experience.
    • Its voice is very quiet, and requires meditative work and attunement to overcome distractions and hear.
    • Gives us our moral sense of honor and truth.
    • Its medium is spirit.
    • Talked about in culturally specific images. For example, the Celts have the bird of valor, the warrior's blackbird, the Hero's Light.
    • Often seen as winged, like the winged celestial beings (angels, etc).
    • GodSoul is the part of us that knows why we're here.
  • Concluded with an astonishing alignment meditation I cannot do justice to in text.
  • From the Q&A: Fetch speaks the language of the fey and animals and can navigate the underworld/faery realms. Likewise, GodSoul knows the heavenly realms. once we know the forms of these two souls, we can move into those animal forms to traverse those realms.

Magic, Blogging, and Web 2.0
This was a fun panel! Lots of suggestions for things I didn't already know about.
  • Irreality, WeaveSpin
  • Google Groups now has all the usenet groups on it. Some good stuff. Also they have the complete archive since 1992!
  • Lots of great discussion about privacy and how open to be online. One of the hosts said he isn't trying to keep anything totally private (because that's essentially impossible), just control the order in which people find things a bit. There are firms whose job it is to run internet background checks on people, so if you have pagan stuff out there under your real name, it will be found. It's just a matter of time. I said that I never put anything online that would utterly destroy me if it were connected with me personally by anybody. It's just not worth it. Once something's up, it lives on in the internet archive even if you take it down, so it can be found. Sure, I have this journal - but I don't fool myself into thinking that having a different handle and separate email addy keeps me anonymous. It's like talking at a party - keeping one's voice down doesn't protect you from being overheard, it just makes it less likely than if you were speaking loudly. The only way to not be overheard is to shut the hell up.

That's everything, I think. Pantheacon freakin' ruled. I'm already looking forward to next year, and seriously considering volunteering to help out with the Feri Hospitality Suite currently under discussion. :)
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