Home > Work > Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
61 " I mean every word of my divine chaos. "
― Thomm Quackenbush , Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft
62 " Hades does not have a runny nose. I know this. The entire Greek pantheon no doubt knows this. For some reason, my nose is unaware of this basic fact of mythology. "
63 " Mythology didn't cease to exist and be useful to Pagans when we gained digital watch technology. "
64 " People who believe their god loves them unconditionally are less able to be controlled through divine terrorism. "
65 " My faith is a tool I employ, a metaphorical context I find apt, but it is inert until placed in a hand that needs it. "
66 " Having had a transcendental experience as a teenager with the assistance of a hallucinogen, Madeline remains certain that the universe is too vast and beautiful to bother with gods. "
67 " Clichés work by appealing to the collective unconscious. They are the Pachelbel’s Canon in D of writing, something familiar the talented can riff off to create a distinct work. I want to subvert tropes, but I have to make sure my audience understands the game first. "
68 " When I see the moon on a clear night, I do say "blessed be" and I remind myself to be grateful to the universe that I happen to exist in such a lovely and wondrous world, even and especially as I can rattle on about magma cooling, abiogenesis, and natural selection. "
69 " Salem has become this... Mecca for Wiccans, but no witches died here. Aside from Tituba, no one practiced anything like witchcraft near here in colonial times. It was a bunch of bored Puritans who thought killing their neighbors at the behest of teenage girls was a fine, Christian form of entertainment and land acquisition. "
70 " The cold reader exploits that the human mind is a whiz at making senses of information, shaping faces out of leaves, finding religious icons on pieces of toast, and letting us believe general sentences and uncertain questions add up to prophesy. "
71 " Cliches work by appealing to the collective unconscious. They are the Pachbel's Canon in D of writing, something familiar the talented can riff off to create a distinct work. "
72 " Any divinity that can't see me as a good witch in street clothes has no business hanging up a shingle as a god. "
73 " If she had some level of theism, we might have a shared theological root from which I could shape holy words. "
74 " I summon worlds into existence employing nothing but ink and paper. "