You're not REALLY going to eat that.

Blessings Darlings!

Back in May I posted about eating weeds, and how bitter some of them are.  And WAY back, when I reviewed the Hunger Games books, I posted about how the author had clearly never eaten the dandelions she had her characters eat and enjoy.  And folks in Pagan groups online seem to post ALL THE TIME about edible wild plants - "And the seeds of plantain and etc can be ground into flour and cooked and eaten!"

Well, yeah, they can be.  But the odds are you aren't going to enjoy eating them.  That we know that they can be eaten is not a celebration of edible weeds so much as a commentary on how desperate folks have been in the past, by folks who are NOT desperate, and have never eaten them, today.

Yes, for us preppers and, probably, for us pagans it's important to know options that you have.  But that has to be coupled by having actually DONE the things you are telling others can be done.  Armchair knowledge without experience is 99% useless. 

I LIKE bitter foods, and can't eat most wild greens without 1 - only harvesting the youngest leaves; 2 - soaking them in several changes of CLEAN water before cooking 3 - cooking them; 4 - mixing the with other foods to help hide the bitterness.  My husband does NOT like bitter foods - if I was to assume that, in time of Great Need, I could feed him them, and I'd find out right quick that he'd ot be able to choke them down.  And a friend HAS gathered and ground seeds from plantain, cooked it, and found it pretty much inedible. 

"Intellectually knowing" that something can be done, "Intellectually knowing' how to do something, is not at all the same as having done it. This is both a prepper and an occult fact. 

Put down the book. Turn off the internet. Go out there and DO SOMETHING.

Frondly, Fern

Tea Time

Blessings Darlings!

I'm at my desk with a hot cup of tea, preparing to do a bit of divination by reading tea leaves.  This is NOT something I'm good at, instead, it's a skill I'm still learning.

And I bumped up against a limitation of this as a form of divination.

See, I'm checking out the not-visible results of doing a bit of a hex.  Normally, using Tarot cards, I could pull a card each for effectiveness, how doing it would effect me, how doing it would effect those around my target.  Mix, pull, interpret.  Pretty straight forward.

That's not how it works with tea leaves, at least for the readings I'm practicing now.  I'm just doing, for this divination, a 'how will this work out over the next month' reading, not a 'let's look at every house of the zodiac' reading.  (I DO plan to learn that later, but I really don't speak astrology).  So I would have to have one cup of tea for each and every one of those questions. 

That's a lot of tea to have, especially on a hot day.  My bladder just looked up at me and said "Really?  REALLY?"

So ... I'm just asking how it would effect ME. Because I'm that way today.

Now, what the heck does that elephant mean?

Frondly, Fern

Egregores

Blessings Darlings!

Every group that lasts long enough has it's own egregore. To be clear, I'm not talking about Facebook groups here (tho some certainly do have one), I'm talking about groups out in the real, not digital, world. They are sentient psychic entities. They are created by the group mind, and then once created have a strong influence on the group mind.

We're all in multiple egregores, of course. A family usually has one - you might have one for your nuclear family, one for your mother's side of the family, and one for your father's side. Your workplace, if you have one, has one. Political parties have them. Hobby groups have them. Schools have them. A founding group of like minded folks get together to work on some goal, the psychic energy and will coalesce over time, and - rather like cosmic dust building enough mass and gravity that fusion starts and a star is formed - a sentient entity forms.

Every occult and/or spiritual study group, if it's around long enough, develops an egregore. Every coven. Every tradition. A coven IN a tradition is, obviously, part of at least two egregores.
Gerald Gardner, IMNHO, with his rather extensive occult experience, consciously set up the egregore for Wicca (just as he consciously set up the religion). He set up ways to become a part of the egregore, because that is what occultists DO.

We can call the entity the egregore of Lineaged or Traditional Wicca.

Decades later ... came Eclectic Wicca. It seems to me that it's based on Outer Court/not initiated/not part of the Lineaged Traditional Wiccan Egregore information about Wicca. Does it have an egregore? Sure. Does it have the same Egregore that Lineaged Traditional Wicca has? No, because to be come part of that egregore, Gardner set up a specific way to join THAT egregore - initiation, done in a specific way, and by an person who meets specific qualifications.

Is Eclectic Wicca a 'valid spiritual path'? Yes.
Is Eclectic Wicca the same thing that Traditional Lineaged Wicca is? No.

Now, I'm willing to bet that there are folks who agree with this.

And I'm willing to bet that there are folks who disagree with this.

So, let's discuss.

Frondly, Fern