Pagan bloggers for human rights

From a Pagan perspective, human rights are inextricable with the concept of our relationship with the planet and the non-human persons we share it with. Peace, justice and the elimination of poverty are intimately connected with sustainability.

Many Pagans are concerned with the right of Pagans to practice our religion without harassment, and also with eco-activism. We also care a lot about human rights everywhere, e.g. in Tibet, and the rights of women and LGBT people. One of the statements in the Charge of the Goddess is that all acts of love and pleasure are Her rituals - and most Pagans take that to mean all forms of consensual sexuality, including gay/LGBT sexuality. So we are very happy about the recent ruling in California that same-sex marriages are now legal there.

Recently a number of Pagans and people of goodwill from other religions banded together to try to save Fawza Falih, who was accused of witchcraft in Saudi Arabia. And Angela at Nine Ravens publicised a campaign to save the witch children of Nigeria. (I also started a Facebook group for that one.) I frequently publicise petitions on my blog.

South African Pagans celebrated Human Rights Day on 21 March.

I am not sure that there is a specifically Pagan theology of human rights, except perhaps the idea that we are all children of the Goddess, or manifestations of the Divine (and that includes other-than-human people). Since our deities are held to be immanent in the universe, and each one of us is potentially divine, and the divine is manifested in an infinite diversity of forms, then each person must be allowed to develop in their own unique way (provided it harms no-one else). Pagan ethics tend to be very much about practice and praxis rather than about absolutes. But we do have our values:

Pagan religions are generally characterized by Earth-based spirituality, belief in the interconnection of all life, personal autonomy, and pantheism or polytheism. Pagans value diversity, good works, living lightly on the Earth, individual freedom, personal responsibility, community service, gender equity, and spiritual development.

Pagan bloggers - if you took part in the blogging for human rights day yesterday, please post a link in the comments.

[Hat-tip to Methodius for alerting me to the existence of the human rights blogging day]

Pagan groups

I wanted to do a post about LGBT Pagan blogs, blogs from Pagans of specific traditions (Heathenry, Religio Romana, Wicca, Reclaiming, Druidry, CUUPS/UESN etc.), Pagan authors' blogs, and so on, but it's quite difficult to find stuff via Google BlogSearch.

So if you belong to one of these groups, and are aware of other bloggers from your tradition, why not write a post about them with links to their blogs (like my German Pagan blogs and French Pagan blogs posts) and post it to metapagan.community?

French Pagan blogs

I searched for paganisme on blogsearch.google.fr/

La Littérature et la Paganisme has several interesting posts, including one with a poem about the last Pagan Emperor, Julian (translation of post about Julian).

L'Aube des Dieux has an excellent post about Spinoza's views on the immanence of the Divine and the relationship of his ideas to those of modern Pagans (translation of post about Spinoza). In fact, all of the posts on this blog look worth reading - I will visit it again.

Religions de la Terre has an interesting post about Berber funerary monuments in Algeria (translation here).

Again, it was difficult to find stuff. If you're a French-speaker with a blog, please post it in the comments. MetaPagan has 38 readers in Canada and 3 in France, so there must be some French blogging going on!

German Pagan blogs

I just did a quick Google for heidnisch, Hexen, and Paganismus to see what I could find in the German Pagan blogosphere. Searching for Paganismus produced the most results.

• Erich at epix blurb has a post up about Beltane (translation of Erich's post here).
• Polly Oliver (clearly a Terry Pratchett fan) has a post about why witches in folktales are always depicted as ugly old women (translation of Polly's post here).
• Luna Hedgewitch has a post about the iconography of Paganism, and trying to find a satisfying depiction of the Goddess that expresses the inner picture in the mind's eye (translation of Luna's post here).
• Kunoichininjas bemoans the difficulty of finding a coven (translation of Kunoichininjas' post here)
  

But there doesn't seem to be a lot of German blogging about Paganism, that I can find.

Hindu temples Google maps mashup

Wow, there is a Google maps mashup of Hindu temples.

Map My Temple
Map My Temple is a user submitted Google Map of temples in India. Users can submit photographs and details of temples and plot their location on a Google map.

The home page of the site shows a Google Map of all the submitted temples. Clicking on a tab of an individual temple opens an information window with a short description of the temple and a photograph. Clicking on the photograph takes you to an individual page on the chosen temple. The page contains a fuller description and a zoomed in Google Map of the temple's location.

I challenge the Pagan geek community to come up with something similar using the Google maps API for Pagan sacred sites. There is an interactive map on the Megalithic Portal site, but the interface is a bit clunky.

Duality synchroblog

• Is duality really a figment of your imagination? (Dream Builders)
• Duality and Beyond (Quaker Pagan Reflections)
• Duality - Love With Its Back Turned (Aquila ka Hecate)
• Seeing Number 11 and Symbolic Duality (Symbolic Meanings)
• On What Are These Things Woven Back And Forth?: Thoughts on Duality (ReligionThink)
• Jewish Duality vs. Dualism (Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism)
• ARCHETYPES Part 2: Archetypes in Duality (When Isis Rises)
• Maybe: Pagan Thoughts on the Limits & Uses of Duality (FULL CIRCLE * Earthwise News & Notes)
• The Dual (Paleothea: the Ancient Goddess)
• Vertical Dualism of Mother Earth and Father Sky (Mythology Synchroblog 3) (Mahud: Between Old and New Moons)

Beltane is coming

My favourite festival (and that of other Pagans too, so it would seem) - the encapsulation in one festival of the joyous Pagan expression of love and sexuality in all its forms - glorious life bursting from every tree, flower, animal and bird.

Bo and Justine have been a-Maying in the woods, in one of the most beautiful descriptions of a ritual that I have ever read:

It began to get dark as Justine and I pushed on into the wood, a soft dusk-mist greying the wash of bluebells. Hazel and sweet-chestnut trunks were very black under a roof of green. A great tit swung his unchanging two notes out over the twilight, as though skimming stones on the surface of a lake. (Read on...)

Narbled Gonsense offers a meditation for Beltane based on a Waterboys song:

Then you begin to notice that something is happening. You feel different, something more intense than before. This feeling is sweeter, it emanates from inside of you, from inside your heart. You can hear your heart beating. It’s like an engine burning in your chest. It feels vast, an ocean of fire. Then emotion runs through you, like a quickening. Its like all the loves of your life rolled into one. You feel spectacularly and absolutely alive.

Hecate suggests that we should let go of our notions of the 'perfect' ritual and get Dionysian, let our hair down:

As you prepare this week for Beltane, for the fire festival on the high hills, for our religion's most important celebration of acts of love and pleasure, I hope that you feel free to let go. Goddess knows, I mean to.

She also offers a Mary Oliver poem for Beltane:

Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?

Pagan LJ communities

One of Livejournal's unique features is the idea of a community journal that anyone can join and post to.

There are several Pagan LJ communities. The links below are to searches for keywords, so the results may contain a lot of not very useful stuff.

• Celtic Reconstructionism
• Cochrane, 1734, Mohsian
  
• Druidry
• Feri
  
• Heathenry
• Kemeticism
  
• Paganism
• Pantheism
  
• Polytheism
  
• Quaker Pagan
  
• Reclaiming
• Religio Romana
• Romuva
• Thelema
  
• UUs (some are Pagans)
• Voudun, Santeria, Umbanda, Lukumi, Candomblé
  
• Wicca

Have I missed any traditions? Add your own in the comments!

Nine Noble Virtues

Last year, Bernulf at Expanding Inward produced an excellent article about the Nine Noble Virtues of Heathenry. There are also individual articles about the first six.

• Courage
• Truth
• Honor
• Fidelity
• Discipline
• Hospitality

two new widgets

I have added two new widgets to the sidebar of MetaPagan.

The first is a new category for editors' picks - the blogposts that we, the editors, think are the best of Pagan blogging. This is a moderated group on Ma.gnolia (another social bookmarking site that works slightly differently to del.icio.us).

The second is a polling tool where you can vote for the best of Pagan blogging (and add your own choices). Non-Pagan readers can vote too.