• Author: vanimp
  • Published: Sep 3rd, 2008
  • Nips & Bites: 2

Raven Kaldera

As I have mentioned before I am pagan, and electic solitary witch. I generally keep most of what I do and practice to myself as it’s my path and I don’t wish it upon others, some notice the pentagram around my neck but that is the only outward sign that I have any interest in that area, some make the assumption that because I have black hair, tend to dress in black and the pentagram mean I am some form of goth *chuckles* but I wanted to share a little something today…

I bought and ordered two new books today *squeeee* … a present to myself for putting up with a monster of an annoying client last week.

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Raven Kaldera is a queer northern-tradition shaman and a pansexual FTM transgendered intersexual. That complicated string of titles translates to someone who was born with an intersex condition, raised female, transitioned to being socially and physically male, and became a transgender/intersex activist. At the same time, he was claimed by the Norse death goddess Hela, who visited him and informed him that he was required to get sex reassignment. “I’m sending you where you’re needed most,” she told him.

He suffered through not only sex reassigment but a protracted illness that culminated in a near-death experience and began to be plagued by gods and spirits afterwards. Afterwards, trying to make sense of what was happening to him, he began to read anthropological accounts of traditional tribal shamans, and realized that he had suffered through experiences that were frighteningly similar to those of tribal shamans of western Eurasia. Further research revealed that a good number of the things that the gods and spirits wanted him to do were things that northern tribal shamans were traditionally expected to do. In spite of being a white American, they had come and taken him anyway. There was nothing left to do but either do the work and live the job, or go mad and die, so today Raven is a northern-tradition shaman in the modern world.

This also led to many workshops on the history of transgender spirituality, exploring such ancient gender-transgressive figures as Agdistis, Lilith, Shiva, Dionysos, Aphrodite Urania, Athena, Baphomet, Obatala, and many others. He is determined to spread the concept of being third-gendered and/or transgendered as the central part of one’s spiritual path, not simply an annoying fact that must be endured in secrecy. He also writes and teaches about the sacred side of BDSM practice and polyamory, using them as part of one’s spiritual disciplines.

I just bought Pagan Polyamory: Becoming a Tribe of Hearts (you can view some of the actual book with this link thanks to google books) and Dark Moon Rising: Pagan BDSM and the Ordeal Path both look like fascinating reads and I am all excited and can’t wait to read them because the pagan aspect is close to my heart. I also found out that the term “polyamory” and it’s definitions actually formed within the pagan community, or simply it was given a name, which has me grinning from ear to ear with pride for fellow pagan folk, so open minded and willing to explore life in their own ways, so further research will ensue hehe as now I am very intrigued.

Raven’s site can be found here

  • Author: vanimp
  • Published: Jun 28th, 2008
  • Nips & Bites: Comments Off

Calling all bookworms…

I nicked this from Dragon Mage hehe who shamelessly stole it from Life or something like it. Lets see how much of a nerdy bookworm I am…

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. Well let’s see.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (bits)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (It was nice to see the original story. All of the movies I’ve seen got this one WRONG)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

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