Pagan Standard Times Quotes

“The witch who claims to forbear her magick for fear of causing the next Indian tsunami is really saying that she is powerful enough to kill thousands of innocent strangers when all she meant to do was water her mugwort. She can't be challenged to produce evidence of this, because doing could provoke earthquakes and Africanized bee attacks.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Salem has become this... Mecca for Wiccans, but no witches died here. Aside from Tituba, no one practiced anything like witchcraft near here in colonial times. It was a bunch of bored Puritans who thought killing their neighbors at the behest of teenage girls was a fine, Christian form of entertainment and land acquisition.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“It is difficult to process the sacred masculine when your closest example has been a man smacking you around, verbally degrading you, lording over you, or otherwise proving a poor demonstration of the use of strength.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“I have heard that Paganism is for broken people, but life cracks everyone in some way. We are a religion of healing people.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“She is so free with herself and so certain of her path, something I now cynically believe only comes from not being aware of the infinite multitude of right paths.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“When I lay down on my deathbed, I want to know that I have done all I could to be a first rate human, not a third rate pawn of the gods.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“The Hermit is an important tarot card with much to tell us, but he tends not to be so welcome around the bonfire.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“There is a theory that men do not need Paganism because they have endless avenues of societal power available. Why use spells when one can get a bank loan with little trouble? The world already bends over backward to accommodate men, so why perfect the art of magickally shaping it?”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Paganism is the default of most children, since they excel at magical thinking.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“If you do not need something that it is still useful, give it to someone who will appreciate it before you douse it in lighter fluid in hopes Santa Odin will put a new one under your Yule tree.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Having spent all of my decision-making years as a Pagan of one stripe or another, I have long found it condescending at best to assume one cannot worship the old gods or believe in magick without breaking out the leather bracers, wings, or Ye Broken Olde English.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Any divinity that can't see me as a good witch in street clothes has no business hanging up a shingle as a god.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“When I see the moon on a clear night, I do say "blessed be" and I remind myself to be grateful to the universe that I happen to exist in such a lovely and wondrous world, even and especially as I can rattle on about magma cooling, abiogenesis, and natural selection.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Pagans can be just as monstrous as any other group. They can be murderers, rapists, pedophiles. We need to accept that they are our problem and deal with them. We need to speak against their crimes and challenge them rather than letting our silence make us complicit.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Mythology didn't cease to exist and be useful to Pagans when we gained digital watch technology.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“She had experimented with Wicca eight years ago, found that her spells did not produce the desired results of making her every bully bald and fat, and threw it in the corner of her soul as effete and impractical, as she had with a series of other theological outfits.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Having ascended to some spiritual strength by focusing on the power of the feminine, it is no doubt tempting to wield this strength against that which triggers memories of having once been weaker.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“I cannot let my blood pressure rise because someone wishes to spread his or her bad day around, as if to dilute instead of multiply it.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“I miss more loving someone so deeply that I can't imagine a forever without her kisses.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Most magick I have experienced can be written off as a stew of psychology and coincidence, and I truly believe this is where magick is best worked.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“We can never know how much they deserve our sympathy, but we have to give it unreservedly as they are people innately full of the divine who instead choose to behave infernally owing to poor programming.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Nothing in my beliefs tells me to let my relationship with the divine interfere with romantic love, the friction of sects never getting in the way of the friction of sex.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Our brains want God even as our minds debunk the divine.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“Frequently, people confront us who seemed to be egging the world into calling them on their miserable actions so they can have the pleasure of angry vengeance or an excuse to attract attention. Our compassion cannot be giving them what they think they want, since it is unreasonable to want to be hateful.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“I don't know what my future will bring me and it's terrifying. To stand before this vast expanse and know that the future could take away what matters most simply because that is the nature of indifferent chaos in the hands of wanton boys.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“If she had some level of theism, we might have a shared theological root from which I could shape holy words.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“As compassionate beings, we cannot harm others, not even through our inaction.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“The trouble with psychics is that they convince you that you get this future no matter what you do. It is as though you can cheat the universe out of your experiences, that you need only tweak something here or there to live happily ever after. It allows for spiritual sloth in the certainty of providence.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“I am copacetic with leaning on the sacred, but I need to make sure all the mundane bases are covered before we break out the crystals and incense for a good chant.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft

“It is a challenge to love someone who does not see the divine as you do, and much harder still to date someone who considers your spirituality a design flaw in an otherwise worthwhile human being.”
― Thomm Quackenbush, Pagan Standard Times: Essays on the Craft