Tag Archives: Francesca De Grandis

Ethical (and Unethical) Fey Teachers

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Info about December 2020 update is at bottom of post.

Eagle with Iris in Great Darkness, OutlawBunny.

Ethical (and Unethical) Fey Teachers

Overview: Fey Folk can help us find freedom and joy. But there are evil Fairies, too—the Unseelie. They want to hurt humans. Some witch teachers work with the Unseelie. Honor your wild heart, but stay safe.

Fey Folk Can Help Us Find Freedom, Joy, and Magic

For hundreds of years, fairy glimmers in the woods have beckoned, reflecting our secret longings and illuminating our honest needs. Puritanical moralists insist the Fey are undeniably evil. However, we know better: the Good Folk can help free us from repressive religions and absurd social strictures. (Good Folk is another name for Fairies.) In addition, when we are barraged by a logic that denies magic and miracles, that fairy glimmer reassures us, telling us that mysticism is real and that the wondrous is possible.

But not all dwellers of the fairy realms are beneficent.

The Seelie Queen, Unseelie Queen, and Evil Magicians

For our purposes, this oversimplified definition of Seelie and Unseelie works well:

The Faery Queen (Fairy Queen, Faerie Queen…) is also known as the Seelie Queen and Her court known as the Seelie court. She and Her Seelie want to help us. They devote Themselves to that … when they are not off having a great time dancing, singing, and otherwise carrying on. … And even their joyful activities ring through the cosmos blessing us. However, there is an Unseelie Court–Fairies who are evil. The Unseelie Queen and her followers malevolently perpetuate great tragedy for humans.

And not all fey-touched magicians can be trusted, whether they call themselves Fey, Fay, Fae, Faerie, Feri, Fairy, or Faery.

Fulfill Your Longing and Stay Safe

Sate your hunger for luminous mystery and faerie mysticism, and for the fellowship thereof. However, it’s easy for that ferocious appetite, authentic and important though it is, to blind a person to the following: some individuals with immense glamour and fey power are pawns of the Unseelie Court. Perhaps this happens because power has made them so haughty that they are unwitting dupes for the forces of evil. Or perhaps they themselves become outright evil. Whatever the reason, it does happen.

Silence allows it to continue. I will not tolerate Fey practitioners who molest children, sexually harass students, disregard magical safety, and offer flashy curriculums that lack a moral compass strong enough to withstand the rigors of daily life. That lack of compass leaves many students frustrated and miserable for years because they’re working hard to grow without sufficient measures to guide them toward real spiritual progress. I’m available by phone if you’re concerned about yourself or a friend. I want to support newbies to the community—because they might be especially vulnerable—or anyone else who needs support.

Honor Your Wild Heart and Protect It

Francesca De Grandis, May 2012

While many cautions against the fey realms can be rightly interpreted as disguised attempts to suppress us, and to make us milquetoast, there are valid cautions. Dark mysteries needn’t be an excuse for a teacher to dominate. Wild hearts don’t mean that a teacher can ignore your sexual boundaries. Powerful magic needn’t lack caution. The quest for utter fulfillment needn’t lead to hollow longings or addiction.

There are dark mysteries that are wholesome, wildness that is authentic, satiation that is both attainable and ethical. Powerful magic can be safe. Fey fellowship, wild lovers, and powerful teachers can be both otherworldly and good. I hope you find them all.

If your Faerie heart resonates with what you read on this site, I invite you to my events. My newsletter will let you know about upcoming events, including free monthly Fey rituals via teleseminar or Zoom. Click the banner below to subscribe.

Click this banner to subscribe to my Faerie newsletter. Upcoming events, freebies, and stardust.

Update: December 2020 I expanded on my above essay for clarity. I posted it on this site in 2012 and, before that, in 2008, to friends in a now defunct Yahoo forum. Sadly, the problems addressed by the post continue and happen to both newbies and longtime time witches. However, we can stop this. So mote it be!

Ta Da!

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Announcing the renewal and relaunch, the cosmic—and cosmically comic—revitalization of this here ol’ website. Come one, come all, join the Chaos Circus. To explore the wonders, the fantastic, the massive changes I made to this site, use the newly-added, new-fangled nav bar above. Yup, we got modern conveniences to go along with the ancient mysteries you will find here.

Stardusted Traveler, come get your weary soul shined. Have your spirit refreshed by its own beauty, then shanghaied by its own magic.

Have your peculiar ways oohed and awed at—everyone here, including you, is the main attraction.

Sit in the front row to get a good view. I’ll sit with you. Or get in the circus ring: introduce yourself in the comment field.

Allow me to introduce myself. I am the authentic, the original, the amazing and death-defying Francesca De Grandis. That translates Great Freedom, your purveyor of shamanic wonders and mystical madness. Curator of curiosities, middle management for the Chaos Gods, seer, guide, and utter fool.

I make up fancy phrases to describe myself, like bardic brat. They’re true as tar.

My mother was a fortuneteller, my father hit the road when he was 12, hard traveling. His mother was a “showgirl.” After the war, dad went down south and got into trouble. We don’t know what it was, but the story is “he hung out with hillbillies.” I do remember he loved folk music. This is all truth, it’s family history, told the first time on the web right now. I am an old woman, too old to hide those tales anymore.

That’s a bit of my tale, a bit of my myth—real and honest. Be your myth here. Dragons, Faeries, poets, and other inhabitants of the fantastic, please walk your myths alongside mine, I long for company on the spiritual path.

Tell me a bit of your story in the comment field. I welcome and invite you, praise you and incite you—Join the cosmic circus!

 On a more serious note, Terry Pratchett wrote “Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things.” Ok, quoting Terry is hardly a way to convince most people that I even can be serious. But
I take my work as a shamanic guide and healer seriously, and I am good at it. And I have
fun. Walking an ecstatic path frees you from restrictive either/or rules. And building a convincing persona as Oh-Great-Shaman wouldn’t leave time to serve community. Can I hear a “So mote it be?”
Middle Management for Chaos Gods, Francesca De Grandis

Middle Management for Chaos Gods. Self-Portrait

Magic can be quiet, subtle. I am blessed that, amidst my loud joy and silliness, some people “see” me—just another flawed human whom, for some reason, the Divine uses as a shaman.

I’ll be blogging here, while I continue to blog at my other site . Two blogs with two separate RRS feeds.

As we prepped the relaunch, I started blogging here—just four blogs sharing my personal process renewing the site, and what we revamped. I hope you read them. And this blog has info that will help you find your way around.

Whether you travel with me only on the web, or move into oral tradition with me, whether you post here or I never know you visit, I’m grateful for your wild wyrd ways. Thank you so much for coming!

Please explore the site. I’d love it if you posted feedback. You will be dazzled by dancing Deities, heartfelt happenings, genuine living breathing paradox, and more. 

Revitalizing This Site

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Welcome, old visitors and new!

My friends and I have done massive prep to revitalize this site since late 2011. I’ve been jazzed about adding witchy witch stuff, old-fashioned craft, Druidic wonders, bardic innovations, intelligent blogs, dancing atoms (um, I couldn’t get dancing girls), and more.

 Boys and girls, come one, come all, this site has never been typical pagan.

We are kind of doing a site re-launch. I’m posting this before we do it, so you can read this when you arrive. Welcome, welcome, fellow stardusted traveler.

Past 10 years, the site received few additions and updates, because of my health. Despite that, a strong flow of visitors continued. That was awesome for me, but being able to finally make substantive changes is mega-fun. There are so many wild witchy things I want to do.

I have a mass of pieces written, built up over years.

You’ll see stuff added all the time, a whole new look, and a commitment to beauty of spirit.

 We’ll keep existing material (except bits no longer relevant) —I’m an ol’ witch who doesn’t throw out the tried and true. (This site is your grandmother. Online Wicca since 1995; I’ll tell you about that another time.)

Site navigation: The site is on three servers. (It’s a long and grassroots story.)

As of 2012, new Grimoire entries will be in my blog. Grimoire entries prior to 2012 will not be in the blog. The blog search engine and sidebar help find blog entries specific to your interests. The main Grimoire page will not have links to new Grimoire entries.

Portrait of Roberto Campus, Francesca De Grandis. Roberto kindly helped get the WordPress part of this site up and running.

Part of the long story: 1994, we ran out of space for the site. I couldn’t afford to buy any, so put some pages on the domain of my initiate and dear friend Dawnwalker. Dawn is a trickster extraordinaire and a generous loving heart. (I’m blessed by amazing people the Goddess sends me to train. I may not get zillions of students in my classes, but they’re awesome fellow seekers, we walk together and explore.). Free use of Dawn’s domain meant my site could hold more free stuff for visitors.

So I split the site between the original domain on well.com and Dawn’s, which is feri.com. Dawn, thank you, thank you. I love you. (Dear site visitor, do not confuse my tradition with Feri just because my initiate owns feri.com. Dawn used the term differently than it is used now.)

To revitalize the site, we’ve added a third domain, www.stardrenched.com, which is mostly for the site’s blog. (A long story for a later date).

SolarKing, silk painting, OutlawBunny. At the time of this post, this piece of art is available in my Etsy shop

My cauldron fire burned bright in a 2011 Solstice ritual—the first time I could have a cauldron lit in my home in years. A good sign that the cauldron was relit! My enthusiasm about revitalizing the site has been huge. My internal flame about it is bright. That flame, fueled by love of my Gods and their ways, and by Their endless love of us, is what I share in this post to you. May your hearth fire, heart fire, inner fire burn bright!

It’s a huge site. Even after I announce the “revitalized site” as “launched,” it will take us months if not a few years to work our way through creating a new look, updating text, etc. Omigoddess, there might be sadly needed updates for a while! Please forgive that and wonky layouts, etc., as we learn new software.

Portrait of Kristilee, Outlaw Bunny. Kristilee gave feedback on my site design and provided other important help.

I thank the gods for Kathi Somers, the longtime hard-working Fey-touched webmaster of this site  (a pic of Kathi is at this blog), and for the help of the www.bbs-la.com boys, who still believe that the internet belongs to the people.

Please come back often to see new stuff and changes. I hope you enjoy it because I devoted myself to it for years, and finally have time and health to refocus on it, including adding a blog. Please let me know what you think by posting responses to my blogs.

PS: While I was unable to do much on this site, I have been able to work on my everything-under-the-sun site because of the software on that site. So it has lotsa stuff, including its own blog. Check it out.

Blessing This Site

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Blessing the revitalization of this site and ever-revitalization of my life. The festival of Imbolc approaches. Brid, all the Gods on my God committee (AKA my pantheon, dear visitor to this site—Faerie Gods, Oxala, Exu, Great Trickster Goddess, and all other gods I hold dear), my ancestors, and the rest of the crew, thank you!! The updated site is not ready to show yet, but I want even our process setting it up blessed and bawdy, holy and fun, and of service. May I remember that being whole and centered and healthy during the huge amount of web work needed on this project is in itself a service to the cosmos, Gods, all humans, all beings. May I be my best for the folks helping renew the site, never letting my worry about or ideals for the site’s renewal interfere with me being supportive and fun.

Thank you for being with us in the months of prep needed to get even this far. You bless me.