Guttershaman: Authenticity, Part 2

“Where there is money, you have cheats. The two go together.” — Eric Cantona “Send lawyers, guns and money — the shit has hit the fan.” — Warren Zevon Previously on Guttershaman. . . I was looking at how modern Western “Shamanism” is a mix of ideas borrowed from various native traditions (often without either respect or understanding). [...]

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 [...]

Guttershaman Halloween Special – The Gutter Press and the Tribe of the Strange

“The majority is always sane.” — Larry Niven, Ringworld “Happy Halloween, ladies . . . Nuns — no sense of humour.” — The Kurgan, in Highlander All my life, the stories that have spoken to me have invariable been from what are usually considered the “lesser” kinds of storytelling — science fiction, comics, B-movies, horror, fantasy. Why? Mostly, because [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Guttershaman, Part 4: Authenticity

  “Of course the Chinese mix everything up — look at what they have to work with! Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoist alchemy and sorcery. We take what we want and leave the rest, just like your salad bar.” — Egg Shen in John Carpenter’s Big Trouble In Little China (Disclaimer: I am, to quote Jim Jarmush’s [...]

The Great Work of the Holy Guardian Angel

“Angel” is a word that carries even more baggage than “soulmate” — baggage that goes back thousands of years to the beginnings of Judeo-Christian theology. While the most common definition of the word tends to be “messenger of God,” that raises the further question of “what is God?” and that’s a question I’m not going [...]

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 [...]

Guttershaman, Part 3: Working Magic

  …hoodoo’s no different than regular praying. The prayers are always answered, just that sometimes the answer’s no.” — Bill Fitzhugh, Highway 61 Resurfaced   (Disclaimer: This is not a how-to guide for spell-casting. It’s a quick look at some of the background and theory. I take no responsibility for the results of anyone mistaking the below text [...]

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 [...]

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