My Reading...

Somehow or another I had in my possession a set of cards and a book. The title is Angelic Messenger cards by Meredith L. Young-Sowers. It was printed way back in 93...I was looking for something else at the time and was like "Where'd these come from?" Not that I remember much from back then, having had a baby and all that entails...But I don't remember buying them or being given them by my SIL...I had done a blog about Angels and I thought about whether I had any angel cards and these came to mind...

The cards aren't like a Tarot deck as there's only 42 and 6 wild cards. And they relate to 6 different aspects of spiritual energy: Reflection, Partnership, Integration, Alignment, Rejuvenation and Nourishment.

"All of these aspects are the basis for a balanced life and are the essential elements of our inner life."

She goes on to say that Angels can speak to us through flowers because they are the "faces of our Angelic teachers and can be manifested in any way that brings beauty and inspiration."

All of the images on the cards are of close ups of various types of flowers, done by Carol Duke. They're gorgeous truth be told...I take crappy pictures, so I know GOOD ones...

As for the reading, I've been going through the book and looking at the cards. On Beltaine, I put them under my pillow because that charges your cards with your energy. And I did the reading last night...

The first reading suggested was to shuffle each of the 6 sets of cards separately, then draw one card from each stack. That would give you a baseline for other readings.

It is called the "Opening to the Energy of Love" spread.




The first card is for Reflection: Becoming Aware of your Divine Self. I drew #4 Awareness. The Present Challenge for this card is Gaining Spiritual Insight as you release past emotional pain. You have drawn this card to further awaken your spirit and to help you feel safe as you break through past limitations. The Spiritual Opportunity is that you are entering a powerful time of spiritual insight because of your desire to learn from past negative experiences. You are emerging through past pain, loss, fear, rejection or abuse to assume a more dramatic and visible means of working to heal other living things.

The second card is for Partnership: Growing Spiritually within Relationships. I drew #14 Inner Authority. The Present Challenge for this card is Gaining Confidence in using your inner wisdom to sustain relationships. The Spiritual Opportunity is to take a long hard look at the future you hope to create and realize that your life will never be totally clear of obstructions or factors that need resolution. You can step up to today's opportunities because you have the seeds of spiritual love and awareness already in your life.

The third card is for Intergration: Establishing an Inner Harmony between Body, Mind and Spirit. I drew #21 Emergence The Present Challenge for this card is Surrendering to your own Inner Power and overcoming the need to control the Outcome of the events in your life. The Spiritual Opportunity for this card is that the emergence of love in your heart is already underway. You are in the right place for Spiritual Emergence even if you have problems remaining unsolved and questions remaining unanswered. Accept that you are part of a larger plan and that each day you will discover more of the part you play in it.



The fourth card is for Alignment: Performing Meaningful Work that grows from your Divinely Inspired Life Purpose. I drew #22 Purpose. The Present Challenge is Discovering your Means of Service and living it unconditionally. The Spiritual Opportunity is to help you realize that you are well served to focus on your inner nature. What you do willingly and effortlessly opens your heart to love and leads to the enhancement of your own goodness and self-worth, thus manifesting into the tangible means of service you seek or desire to deepen.

The fifth card is for Rejuvenation: Participating with Nature in the cycles of Life for your Personal Reward. I drew #35 Change. The Present Challenge is Accepting that your larger Life Goal is to grow in Grace and find Union with all living things. The Spiritual Opportunity is to take heart and believe in the significane of the changes still taking place in your life. Your inner mind urges you to give, share, cooperate, love and honour other living things because these are the qualities offered by a loving heart and an awakened spirit. When you are afraid that accepting the present changes will bring more pain or fear, consider that the opposite is more likely true.

The sixth card is for Nourishment: Choosing Thoughts, Foods, and Emotional responses that give you Spiritual Fulfillment. I drew # 42 Sustenance. The Present Challenge is merging your Guidance from your Angelic Teachers to help you love Yourself. The Spiritual Opporutnity is, as you grow through challenges to your physical health and the continued well-being and growth in your relationships, your spirit is sustaining and strengthening you and encouraging your acceptance of lasting well-being. Unconditional love for self and others, fairness, compassion, understanding, lack of judgement-all are qualities that emerge when individuals are sustained by their spirit and they know it.

The truth be told, I have never,ever done a reading for myself or someone else where I felt such a connection to what the cards were saying...In the first place, I've always been aware that I NEEDto be outside or working with animals. It's good for my soul and for the people around me. Especially them LOL The reading made me cry and made the hair on my arms raise up because it was so spot on...Usually, it's like blah blah whatever, but Holy Sheepdip Batman...this one was friggin scary!!! As I was reading what the book said, I felt like a close friend was telling me these things...

The first card did it for me. It was so truthful. I had a crappy childhood. You can do this that or the next thing...like Astral project or simple easy spells...noone can do that. you're lying...etc. I KNEW I could...I was bewildered that noone else could, supposedly. Being punished for being able to do what others couldn't wasnt't fair...and that hurt badly.

The second card sort of went along with that...noone believes you, but you believe in yourself. And you keep telling yourself that you've done nothing wrong, THEY'RE wrong, and backwards and close minded, and they won't let themselves be any different.

Number three was like being a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis. It was like being a phoenix rising from the flames. I went through hell and back, but came through with my soul and heart more or less intact.

Number four, well, that's my job(s). I work at a Chain petshop. In this one, I take care of the small and furry things...My previous one, I was the Jill of All Trades. I transferred because my previous boss was an idiot and clueless about good animal husbandry...I love animals...I have some that are favourites and some that I could care less about, but I care for all of them equally. I make sure that they have food and water, go to the vet if they're sick. Get Luvvins if they want. Even a kind word to a mouse or a piece of cabbage for a hamster, a raspberry from my garden for Sir Nicholas the turtle, or a minnow for the garter snakes, a prayer for a dead bird and a millet spray in the body bag, or rescuing earthworms from puddles for 1 Good Karma Point a piece...By showing by example that all creatures need compassion and love from the lowliest worm to the majestic hawk, that is my purpose.

Five, look to the seasons...the world is always changing...you have to change with it...Way back in the 60's and 70's the hippies were singing and chanting about the Age of Aquarius...now that we are actually THERE, look at all the wonderful openness that witches and pagans can now almost universally enjoy. I KNOW there's pockets that will never ever see eye to eye, but there's more similarities than differences between Christians and polytheists.

Six, The Cosmic Dope Slap with a large Pleco that I received from this reading was amazing!!!The hopefulness will hopefully sustain me for a long time...It's not food for the body it's food for the soul...Having a satisfied and full soul will cause ripple effects to others around you. It can be like the Dadga's cauldron which will never empty. Or your heart will overflow with joy and you'll sing and dance in your yard while the neighbours call the guys with the nets and the coat who's sleeves tie in the back...but dammit I will be the happiest person in the Asylum because I will have learned all these lessons...

Beltaine!!! Happy May Day!!!

Yesterday was my 21st Wedding Anniversary...can't believe it's been that long and I'm not in jail or insane. LOL

And YES, we did be married on a Witches' Holiday...I always knew that I wanted to be married on one of our special days and there was no way that my Grandmother would let me get hitched on Halloween...that woulda been WAAAYYYY to weird.

We have a mixed marriage: I'm an Eclectic Pagan and he's Greek Orthodox...he had learned not to ask if I'm standing outside with candles burning...even though he DID ask about the walking stick in the snow at Imbolc...

I was looking on line for nice and easy solitary rituals...I can't exactly stand out in my suburban neighbourhood skyclad and howl at the moon...no matter HOW MUCH I would love to...
DH wouldn't respond well to the neighbours with their pitchforks and flaming torches...

I found this one first(http://www.globalgoddess.org/oracle/beltane2008/ritual)and decided that the ingredients would be good for my Beltaine altar...My garden is lousy this year. I have all of TWO tulips and maybe a dozen daffodils...my crocuses have come and gone and the neighbours cut the lilac tree to a stick...grrr...


So after I work I went to make the craft store rounds...to get fake flowers. I have the proverbial Black Thumb...I've even killed air plants...

The second link was good too:They have for all the big holidays.
http://www.celestialtides.com/Coven/bos/invocations.html
Invocation to the God Pan for Beltane
The Bale fires burn ever so high on this Eve
The ruddy glow of flesh
Flashing in and out of the Darkness
A night blessed by the rod and cup
A glimpse of tanned skin
Sweat matted hair
A curve
A horn

Hail Pan, Dance amongst us
Our souls are moved by Your pipes
Our bodies ache for Your touch
Warm, Healing, Invigorating

Burn us with Your lusty touch
That our concentration will shine as embers

Consume us with Your eternal music
Moving us freely to explore the world around us

Cleanse us of our inhibitions with Your wildness
So we can more fully celebrate our existence

Inspire us with Your passion
To engulf ourselves in this work

Be pleased to be with us in our circle
For Your very being is our being
Feeding each other throughout time and space
Blessing All who seek Your Caress

Blessed Be


Thanking the God Pan at Beltane
Hail Pan

We thank You for Being here this Eve
And we are truly thankful and blessed
By burning us with Your lusty touch
By consuming us with Your eternal music
By cleansing us with Your wildness
By inspiring us with Your passion
We are reminded daily of our connection to You
Be blessed and honored as we bid farewell

Blessed Be

So when I finally(sigh) do the ritual, sometime this weekend, I'll use my vase of fake tulips, my honey/oat candle, my mini cauldron with birdseed, my Psyduck glass or my chalice with grape juice, and Hershey's Dark Chocolate Truffle Kisses.

I'll put on one of my flute music CD's and see what happens...

I've always been sympathetic to Pan...he's got a major bum deal...

Pan (Greek Πάν, genitive Πανός), in Greek religion and mythology, is the companion of the nymphs,[1] god of shepherds and flocks, of mountain wilds, hunting and rustic music. His name originates within the Greek language, from the word paein, meaning "to pasture".[2] He has the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, in the same manner as a faun or satyr. With his homeland in rustic Arcadia, he is recognized as the god of fields, groves, and wooded glens; because of this, Pan is connected to fertility and the season of spring.

In Roman mythology, Pan's counterpart was Faunus, a nature spirit who was the father of Bona Dea (Fauna). In the 18th and 19th centuries, Pan became a significant figure in the romanticist movement of western Europe, and also in the 20th century Neopagan movement.[3]

Wiki has such great links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_(mythology)

This is what drives me over the edge: Pan is the Devil...gimme a break!
"It was Margaret Murray who said that the gods of the old religion become the devils of the new. Jesus ended his life on earth in the southern part of Judea in Jerusalem. The death of Christ heralded the birth of a new religion which would bear his name. As this new religion grew and spread, all, or almost all, it came into contact with became its enemy. The common people, content in their style of worship were suddenly heathens, sinners and enemies of the one true God. The pair of opposites was now Paganism and Christianity. As Christ represents Christianity, Pan represents Paganism. Pan was soon to become the Christian Devil, Satan incarnate. But before this Christian conception took hold, Pan was a god.

What was there about this frolicking god of the glen that made him so odious to the new Christians? Wherein was he Satanic? Perhaps in his sexual exploits. He is known to have seduced several nymphs. He also boasted that he had coupled with all Dionysus' drunken maenads.The episode related above wherein Pan seduces the Moon points to the Christian belief that Satan is able to disguise himself and seduce chaste women. The similarity between the Church Father Origen's description of Satan and the features of Pan is very obvious.

Pan represented freedom of spirit, natural instincts, sinless love. In some parts of the world, prior to the advent of Christianity, women were free, untrammeled by rigid rules of moral conduct, and therefore, when the new religion made its debut, women were called sinful.

Now we draw closer to the reason Pan might have been viewed as Satan, why the figure of Satan as handed down to us consists of goat's feet, horns and black hair. (The statue of the god Min, the Egyptian Pan, was daubed black.) Pan came to represent the freedom of spirit and love of Nature which could be viewed only as works of the Devil. Pan and women were allies, friends, lovers. All were guiltless, without shame. As some scholars have it, guilt is the cornerstone of the early Christian faith. Woman was guilty by virtue of being woman. Saint Clement announced that "Every woman should be overwhelmed with shame at the very thought that she is woman." Here we have it in a nutshell: pagans had no guilt, no shame, no sense of sin. Thus Pan became the paragon of guilt, the embodiment of sin, and the patron of that horrendous human weakness - sex. Obviously, like gods and goddesses, and rites and ceremonies before him, Pan had to be either syncretized, suppressed or subordinated. True to form, the Christian Fathers incorporated Pan into their pantheon - as Satan. Pan could not be annihilated for too many people loved, adored and worshipped him. He could not be extirpated from the hearts and minds of men and women. So he was simply 'evilized'. This Christian act was felt everywhere; the repercussions were wide ranging. The Christian God was said to have killed Pan."

Buncha Horse Pucky if ya ask me!
The Great God Pan still lives in all of us. When we see the deer run by, listen to the babbling brook, hear the wind in the trees and feel the wildness in our souls, you have to KNOW that he is still around...