sceaducræft

seeking the Old Ways

  • Cosmology [Túatha Dé Danann, 1]

    ©2023 michael raven

    It is with some hesitation that I start this post series, as I’ve contemplated just how I should begin. Do I work up from the bottom-up or approach the discussion from a top-down perspective? In the end, the discussions contained within my head that I try to express in these pages is in reality a tangled weave of ideas that are intra-dependent, where one understanding develops and informs another which then eventually informs the original understanding. It has hardly been a linear process over the thirty-five or so years since I started delving into these ideas and trying to make sense of the similarities and differences of perspectives and understanding.

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  • Elements of dreaming [09Oct23]

    ©2023 michael raven

    Rough notes of a lucid dream weighted with what appears to be deeper meaning…

    A grizzly finding a spirit crow, large grey wolf in its den. Offended by the interlopers, the grizzly attacks. Wolf and I defend, returning violence with violence. Crow observes in silence.

    Neither side gains the upper hand though, of wounds, the grizzly has many. Wolf and I manage to avoid all but the most superficial wounds. My blade is dull.

    Grizzly shapeshifts into the Spirit of the Woods: hooves, antlers, standing bipedal. Autumn leaves swirl around, I slip outside of the den to escape while wolf delays the Spirit. The hills outside are slick with heavy snow and I cannot climb away on the rocky hillside, so I bury myself in a snowbank, hoping to be passed by.

    Her voice calls me by my secret name, so secret I’d forgotten it was mine. She tells me to come out now, there are matters we need to discuss.

    Crow observes in silence.

  • Observations of ritual celebrations [Core, 1]

    ©2023 michael raven

    One of the things I’ve been playing around with for the past couple of years now has been trying to create a cohesive conceptualization of seasonality, deity and cosmology — and trying to understand the impact of agrarian influence on these elements on what had previously been a hunter/gatherer economy on some of these concepts.

    Much of our current popular conceptualization of what our forebears might have believed in terms of cosmology seems to neglect that there was a period when agriculture and animal husbandry were new technology and that there was a previous age, the Neolithic [lit. “new stone-like”] period, where conceptualization of the cosmos was not centered upon an annual harvest cycle.

    And, yet, some of those remnants still cling after a post-agricultural revolution and were honored.

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  • The premise behind this site

    ©2023 michael raven

    People who are familiar with my primary site will likely know that, for the past 35 or so years, I’ve been a wayfarer of sorts when it comes to my spiritual beliefs and the long journey I’ve made that has brought be full circle to where I stand now: back at the beginning.

    Without going too far into the weeds, my spiritual journey has taken me to most of the world’s primary religions (and/or their various offshoots), quite a few of the secondary ones and not a few of the more esoteric belief systems, all in an attempt to understand, to find some kind of “truth”, whatever that might be.

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