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  Instant Tarot: Your Complete Guide to Reading the Cards by Monte Farber and Amy Zerner, published in 2017 by Weiser Books, Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC, Newburyport, MA 01950, soft cover, 259 pages. Instant Tarot is published as a paperback, with a color cover printed on typical soft-cover stock, measuring 8 ½ by 5 ½ inches. The interior pages consist of black and white card images and nicely-sized typeface printed on white paper. Instant Tarot is different from most of the how-to-read-the-Tarot books available to students and enthusiasts of the Tarot. This book uses a system for understanding and interpreting the cards in a traditional Tarot deck that is based on…

The Druid Year, Solstice/Equinox/Cross-Quarter Day Impulses, 15 moons, and Sacred Alphabet Twenty years ago, when I began my Celtic path, my inner druid guides suggested I make flower essences for all the sacred trees over the cycle of one year. And it was good advice, for I could feel the spirit of each tree through its particular 24-day moon, all 15 of them. And I was also guided to do simple ceremonies for the eight equinox/solstice and cross-quarter high holy days of the druid year. As the year went along, it was easy to feel the portals of spirit these days truly are. I was guided to draw the Ogham…

  that was the day we ate the fat fable. grandmother stuffed it with chopped leeks & herbs. made it savory with the usual platitudes. a thick rich moral gravy. later she told us the tale of our father as a little boy on the stone steps in albany. wrestling with angels. we always loved that one. laughter & tears. she could always spin a stirring story. once while walking she pointed to a house & told us of the family that had lived there. “they won the daily lotto,” she said. “millions of dollars. how far they fell.” the wheel of fortune. from heaven to hell.   *** About…

Adding a Spindle to the Wheel of the Year As I wrote this, I was finishing up work for the day to head home to get ready to celebrate my 5th wedding anniversary with a quiet dinner at one of our favourite fancy restaurants. Though my husband is not pagan, we did a handfasting with cords of orange, brown, green, and silver in a beautiful loft space gallery that used to be a piano factory. It was an overcast day that rained on and off, and we didn’t care, as long as we had each other and were surrounded by our friends and family. We bound ourselves to one another,…

        ______________________________________________________________________________ Cover art: The God & Goddess    By: Sondra Hefner of NautyCrow Studio I don’t always know where a painting will end up when I start. I wanted this one to express the balance I try to maintain in my life and hopefully also express some love. ______________________________________________________________________________     Welcome to the October/Samhain Issue of PaganPagesOrg.   This month we are fit to Burst with great Information, Spells, Book Reviews, and So Much More!  Including all the information you could possibly need for Samhain.  Here is a peek at what’s inside:     Samhain, for many on a Pagan path, is “the biggy”, the festival of…

    Without question, my favourite Sabbat of all, is Samhain, a time where the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest.  The celts celebrated this as New Year, it’s also the last of the harvest festivals before winter sets in.  One of the things I love the most is reading up on the folklore around this Sabbat, and we all know how thick with stories it is, but I love it, I love to think of people setting a place at their dinner table for their dead ancestors and people putting candles in their window to guide the souls on Samhain night.  I do think it has become…

Death (The Death Card is from the artist Ciro Marchetti http://www.ciromarchetti.com/)** This month, since we are heading toward Samhain and Halloween, we will return to the Major Arcana, and talk about Death. The Tarot Major Arcana card Death, that is. Once we take a closer look at this card, you will come to understand that the Death card rarely foretells death of the physical body, and it really is something to be celebrated, not feared. Before we begin, let’s remind ourselves of some terms. If you know them, go ahead and skip down to where we talk about the traditional image of the card. There are 22 Major Arcana cards in a…

“All of the Darkness, while we are created by Light. “Minerva’s Owls” tells the story of where we came from and how we got to where we are now; of how we came from the Goddess, the world-wide worship of the Mother and matriarchal, women-affirming societies to a war-like God and technology driven societies. It tells the story of how the balance of the world, and our own individual balance was disrupted, while the Feminine was buried within, and by the Masculine. It is why the balance is disrupted still. Using her personal experience with yoga and what it has taught her, along with individual chapters on each chakra, Ms.…

Day of the Dead   Samhain, for many on a Pagan path, is “the biggy”, the festival of all festivals, and much of this is to do with the day’s association with the dead and thus ghosts, spirits and other things otherworldly. It’s generally celebrated on October 31st although in Gaelic the word actually means “November” so the festival being named thus would seem to indicate that is to be celebrated at the start of November. This is probably because the Celts believed a new day started at sunset, so when fires were lit on the 31st October as the sun went down, it was already Samhain, the next day,…

  Who is a Witch is beautifully written by Rowan Moss. The illustrations are also beautifully done by T.S. Lamb. This is the first book in the Pagan Children Learning Series.   This book covers the topic of who is a witch and what witches do. The book explains everything in easy to understand language. For words that may be harder to understand, the writer included a glossary at the back of the book.   Who is a witch explains that almost anyone can be a witch, and that you cannot tell just from looking at someone. It shows that witches come in all shapes, forms, colors, and backgrounds. It…