Over a decade ago I was feeling frustrated over seeing the way most Westerners thought about Tantra. If you're like most people, Tantra is "that sex stuff." Or perhaps you know a bit more about it and thought that it was all about sacred sexuality and extending periods of sexual bliss. In fact, Traditional Tantra consists of some of the oldest, continually practiced Pagan traditions in the world. To say that Tantra is just about sex is like saying Wicca is just about the Great Rite or that the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the worlds fastest production car, is just about its gas cap. [caption id="attachment_12594" align="aligncenter" width="504"] Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Super SportPhotograph

Once I was in a yarn store with a friend. I was teaching her to knit and we were picking out yarn. The yarn she wanted was in a skein not in a ball, so I told her had to wind it into a ball before she started knitting. She asked, “how do you wind it into a ball?” I cannot remember when I learned to wind yarn (or string) into a ball. I cannot remember not knowing. It never occurred to me that someone wouldn’t know how. That happens a lot, when people have known how to do things forever. Shuffling and selecting cards is a lot like that. I tell people to shuffle and draw the cards for the reading. They sometimes look baffled and I realize that they are waiting for instructions,

There are lots of books that can function as powerful resources for magicians, from my own, wide-ranging Modern Magick or The Complete Magicians' Tables to books going into depth on more specific topics such as Geomancy in Theory & Practice, Hands-On Chaos Magic, or Magickal Self Defense. In my experience, however, many magicians today don't start research into magickal practices by going into their book collections; some, quite frankly, don't have many books at all. Instead they depend upon that ubiquitous internet repository of information, Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia. I think it's a great tool. But as I have repeatedly pointed out, Wikipedia is a great place to start research but

Last month, a fabulous new book was released. It's called Merry Meet Again: Lessons, Life & Love on the Path of a Wiccan High Priestess, written by Deborah Lipp. In case you don't know who Deborah is, in a nutshell she is a 3rd degree Gardnerian Wiccan High Priestess who has written several books for Llewellyn on witchcraft and magic, and one on James Bond (not published by Llewellyn!). She was encouraged to start writing after years of experience running a coven and giving presentations at Pagan and Wiccan festivals by a well-timed tarot reading in 1999, and has been at it ever since. In her memoir, she has a lot of stories to tell; things like finding Wiccan training before the