On February 20 through 23, 2025, ConVocation will celebrate its 30th year as a Michigan convention for magical people. First founded in 1995, ConVocation has been hosted in various hotels around southeastern Michigan before finding its new home in Ypsilanti in 2024. Moira Payne, ConVocation 2025’s Program Chair and President of the Magical Education Council of Ann Arbor, hopes this new home will be permanent.
Posts tagged #pagan
Apostasy: Terraforming Tradition as the Crow Flies
Apostasy isn’t easy. I grew up in a rural community in the foothills of the Smokey Mountains. We attended a backwoods United Methodist church which, as far as backwoods religion goes, was not the worst. While I was not barraged every Sunday with hellfire, brimstone, speaking in tongues, or snake handling, our church services were characterized by oppressive silence both literally and philosophically. Alienation and gossip were the means by which order was enforced. All are condemned to whatever degree one cannot conform.
The Parliament of World Religions Returns to the Shore of Lake Michigan
Religious leaders from around the world converged on the shore of Lake Michigan this past summer for a convening of the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago. For one week, the McCormick Center, which normally plays host to auto shows and pop culture conventions, was filled with priests, pastors, monks, nuns, rabbis, imams, swamis, and various other devotees of world religions.
The Witches of West Michigan Offer Spiritual Community for All
Just a decade ago, being casually invited to such an event would have been unthinkable to me. There were no public-facing witchcraft groups within easy reach of my Michigan hometown at the time. Even though I knew many local people had an interest in the Pagan spiritual arts, practice groups were generally underground and by invitation only.
Sacred Smoke: Smudging, Smoke Cleansing, and Purifying Your Space with Intention
Smoke permeates the air. You can see its path and how it spreads. There can be no place that is missed in a place where there is smoke. In so many ways, the smoke takes our hopes and desires and carries them away to be spread across the world. Given this, it’s not surprising that it has been used in spiritual and religious ceremonies around the world and across virtually all cultures. The first recorded use was with incense used by Egyptians as far back as 2500 BC, but it was also being developed in practices in China at the same time. Religious use of incense is prominent in Buddhist, Taoist, and Shinto shrines. These practices saw the burning of incense to be a way of purifying the surroundings and bringing forth Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Gods.
Double Double, Toil and Trouble: The Appeal of Witchcraft and Paganism in the Modern Era
You see it in Newsweek, CNN, and other news websites that report on spirituality and esoteric culture like Quartz and Gaia. You see it through phenomena such as Instagram’s 300k+ subscriber feed to Hoodwitch, Youtube’s explosive growth of tarot readers, and gray or shamanic witches offering online tutorials and looks into their family traditions of Celtic witchcraft, and Wiccan seasonal ceremonies. Wicca, witchcraft, and paganism have long had an important perch within Crazy Wisdom Bookstore’s book sections, and local Wiccans, witches, and pagans have long been written about in The Crazy Community Wisdom Journal, but all these related areas are experiencing exponential growth, both locally in earth-religion-friendly Ann Arbor and on the national scale.
