Lupa’s Den – In Defense of BINABM

If you’ve read much of my writing, either online or in books (especially DIY Totemism), you’ll know that I have a tendency to advocate working with totems other than the Big, Impressive, North American Birds and Mammals (BINABM) that so often show up in totem animal dictionaries. I’ve worked with extinct totems, microscopic ones, and [...]

The Horse Totem – A Way of Passage

Several years ago I happened across a program on cable about non-violent horse “breaking.” I don’t recall the trainer’s name, but I still recall the method: The horse was in an arena with a high wall, no visuals to the outside; the trainer stood in the center with a long rope. The trainer kept tossing [...]

Lupa’s Den – Thinking About Dead Animals

Over on my LiveJournal, I have a significant number of furries on my friend list; I’m not a furry myself, but I enjoy the artwork folks post, and we tend to have other things in common as well. (Lots of pagan furs, for one thing!) Something that got posted a few weeks back was some [...]

Book Review – Ancestral Airs

Ancestral Airs Verda Smedley Dim Light Books; 1st edition (2008) ISBN: 978-1934703304 700 pages Reviewer: Lupa   As I was reading this book, I was trying to figure out where to fit it into the categories on my blog. On the one hand, it’s purportedly a reconstruction of a culture 6,000 years old; this includes extensive research into botany, mythology, history and [...]

Lupa’s Den – Creepy-Crawlies and Heebie-Jeebies

I had a nightmare last night — about bugs. Scorpions, spiders, biting flies, centipedes, and other creepy-crawlies that could potentially do damage to the soft flesh wrapping my endoskeleton. (Why couldn’t it have been butterflies? Or snails?) Back when I was a kid, I spent countless days when the weather was warm overturning rocks to catch [...]

Lupa’s Den – Animal Totems in Context

In my decade-plus of being a pagan and magician, animal magic and animal totemism have always been my main focus regardless of what paradigm I was working in. Since I began practicing shamanism in earnest back in 2007, I’ve become much more aware of how interconnected everything really is. While I was already an active [...]

Lupa’s Den: Scrub Jays in the Garden

When I moved to Portland, OR in 2007, one of the first locals to greet me wasn’t human. Instead, I found the trees outside my first apartment to be full of scrub jays. These gray and blue corvids have a similar place in the urban ecosystem here that their cousins, the blue jays, did back [...]

Lupa’s Den: Shrine to Dead Critters

Recently, my husband Taylor and I moved to a new home. This, of course, meant uprooting everything, packing it into boxes, bins and bags, and trucking it across town (thankfully the day before Snowpocalypse 2008 hit the Pacific Northwest!). After about a week of recovery, I had the time and energy to reconstruct my ritual/artwork [...]

Book and Cards Review – Animal Powers Meditation Kit

Animal Powers Meditation Kit: Spiritual Guidance from Your Totem Teachers by Monte Farber and Amy Zerner Zerner/Farber Editions, Ltd., 2006 43 pages, 12 cards, 1 CD, 12 pendants Reviewer: Lupa I have found the totemic answer to the “Teen Witch Kit.” There has been a recent fad ever since Silver Ravenwolf came out with her kit in 2004. A number of [...]

The Dictionary Dilemma

Animal magic always has been and probably always will be my favorite form of esoteric study and practice. I’ve been fascinated by critters since I was barely old enough to toddle around on my own; I’ve had many pets, and I was always the kid out in the woods catching garter snakes. So it was no [...]

Next Page »