I played this game with friends on another site and the responses were quite creative.

  Here’s how the game works:  Take the next letter of the alphabet and give YOUR pagan-based (or not) associations of 3-5 words beginning with that letter.

 I’ll  start us off with the letter “A”:

Aconite – A poisonous plant found throughout the Rocky Mountain and Pacific Coast states in higher altitudes. Also known as Monkshood and Wolfsbane, the whole plant is poisonous and can be absorbed through the skin.  I just wrote a novel chapter about this plant, titled “Poison as a Teaching Tool.”  A man in my writer’s group brought in the catalog of a nursery in Canada that sells all of the baneful herbs, both as seeds and plants. It might be fun to dabble…

Age – def. 1: ‘The part of an existence extending from the beginning to any  given time.’ Ok, so does that mean if I’ve reached a major milestone in life, I get to start again? Def. 2: ‘To acquire a desirable quality by standing undisturbed for some time.’ Hmm. Seems to me a little agitation from time to time actually helps the aging process. Def. 3:  ‘To bring to a state fit for use.’ Oh so true. It takes years of training to develop an attitude that works, and many years after that to learn to use it. In my last job, my company VP and I met with a client to solve a billing issue.  About half-way through the discussion, one of the executives launched into a diatribe, disagreeing with everything I’d just said. I calmly pushed back my chair, folded my documents and told him, “If you’d like us to leave, we will.” The room went deadly quiet. I looked at him steadily, until his company CFO asked to hear my solution, and suggested to his co-worker that he step outside and calm down.  After back-talking through my 20’s, working my ass off to get ahead in my 30’s, and back-pedaling during confrontations in my   40’s, I had finally learned to look at the silliness that’s endemic to work and call it out. And it felt good.   

Akashic Records – The term akashic is from a Sanskrit word meaning “etheric” or “of the spirit.”  Occultists adopted the term for the body of knowledge found on the astral plane.  Later, in the early twentieth century, Car Jung related the akashic records to his concept of the collective unconsciousness.  For Jung, this was a realm beyond our higher selves or soul selves in which all actions, thoughts, ideas, and works that ever were, are, or will be were kept.   Isaac Bonewits calls it the  Switchboard. Whatever the name, it’s an intriguing idea:  A collective information bank of past and future lives, to which we all have access if it has meaning for our current situation. Like a single blade of grass sprouting from its underground web of roots, a soul reaches up to the daylight of this world, only to return again, reach again, and return again, until eventually it withers and breaks down into basic minerals, to be absorbed by the other roots. We are truly, and utterly, linked.    

Altar – It’s a place in my home where I can sit in stillness to sort through my values – and desires – to get to the heart of what I really want in my life.  Over the last few months, my altar has become more personally integrated and less ‘high ritual’ in tone and use. These days I’m using it to remind me of current goals, and to infuse those goals with energy.  Right now I have the outline for the next three chapters of my novel sitting on my pentacle.  Every time I walk by it, I am reminded of that 2009 goal, to work toward submitting a finished manuscript to an agent/publisher by year end.

Aradia – The crescent moon goddess from Tuscany has been on my mind lately, since I referred to her in my last novel chapter. Aradia is the daughter of Diana, the hunter-goddess, and the god of light, Lucifer, so she represents the blending of light and dark principles.  In my book, Nicholas, my main male character, refers to her because he intends to disregard the modern ‘harm none’, and instead do what has to be done. “Remember, it was Aradia, Queen of the Witches, who taught her followers to poison their enemies,” he reminds his companion. Yes, there are dark times ahead for Nicholas.

OK now, who wants “B”???