Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Clea Danaan, author of the new Living Earth Devotional and Sacred Land. If you've been paying attention to the current state of the planet, you may be struggling with a pervading sense of doom. Not only do all signs point to dangerous heat, crazy storms, drought, famine, fire, and pestilence—now, not in some future world of our grandchildren's—but there is an added layer of pain for Pagans. This blessed earth, our sacred Mother, is hurting. As Pagans, we feel this pain. We cannot hide behind the idea that science will save us. It might. But in the meantime, our sacred earth is in turmoil. Nor can we hide behind an idea that our religion

In major Western Ceremonial Magick traditions, the altar is described as being a "double cube." That is, it had two equal-sized cubes on top of each other. So if your altar was to be 36" tall, each side would be 18". That's the way I made my first altar. I painted it completely white (representing the spiritual light) and then decoupaged a large pentagram to the top. On one side I decoupaged a poster of the Tree of Life. I used this for many years before giving it to a temple I had been working with. My current ceremonial magick altar is also a double cube, however it is painted black. This is to symbolize the concept that our physical universe, where I do magickal work, is spiritually

For most of my journey with tarot, I always assumed the that the cards told us the truth. As a reader who does predictive readings, I know one of the reasons people often don't predict is that the future isn't written in stone and that things can change, by our own actions and those of others. I also know that we can be wrong. Putting those things aside for a moment, just for the sake of discussion, I wonder if the Divine (through tarot or any other divination method) doesn't always or even ever tell us the truth. Maybe it tells us what we need to hear, for whatever in fathomable reasons. Using a very concrete and simplistic example, what if someone asks if they will ever get back

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Lunaea Weatherstone, creator of a number of tarot decks, including the new Victorian Fairy Tarot. The Hierophant is a card that doesn't seem to get much love from the tarot community. We are a free-thinking bunch, generally speaking, and the Hierophant is often interpreted as being rigid, dogmatic, and spiritually constraining. The Rider-Waite-Smith card shows a throned Pope making a blessing gesture as two tonsured initiates kneel before him. The initiates are clearly in a less-powerful position, and traditionally this card can mean a surrender of spiritual free will to a higher authority. I'm actually rather fond of the Hierophant for a