Ancient Ways

The 26th annual Ancient Ways Festival will be May 13 – 17, 2009, the weekend prior to Memorial Day. The theme is “Seeds of Change”: Manifest the Culture of Abundant Blessings. This is a pre-registration-only event; last chance is May 10. Register online with PayPal by May 10 or mail it in.  www.ancientways.com/festival/2009festreg.html  Cost: $70/4 nights, $60/3n, $50/2n, $40/1n (deduct $10 from registrations before April 15.) Fees include: camping, workshops and rituals.

Come gather, shop, camp, sing, dance, laugh, play and open to a life filled with joy, power, and magical abundance!
T. Thorn Coyle will be joining us with workshops and a community ritual - The Open Heart Births Seeds of Possibility - on Saturday night. Musical groups Hobbyhorse and Land of the Blind will entertain us along with our own drumming circle and talent show.
Some events already scheduled are: a Daily Heart Circle, nature walks, Sacred Fire making by friction, Faerie Fotos (bring your wings and dress up), Didjeridu healing, star gazing, stories about the constellations, a Necronomicon workshop/ discussion, Freyr and Freyja Blot, Talent show (Fri. eve.), Pirate party (Fri. night), Aphrodisiac Foods (Sat.), Daily Practices for transformation (Sat.),  Guerilla Gardening (Sun.), Sex, Will, and Magic: Opening to Life Power with T. Thorn Coyle, and Engaging the Warrior's Heart with Thorn.
Send us a description of any workshop you plan to lead and time preferred, so it can be included in the festival program. (Last minute bulletin board sign-ups are OK.) All large rituals must be scheduled in advance.
AND for Saturday night’s main ritual, save your change!  Bring along fists full, pockets full and jars full of coins for money play and money magic. We will fill a cauldron with coins. The money we collect at the ritual will be donated to Solar Cross a pan-magical, non-profit religious organization building an urban temple and spearheading funding for such projects as Pagan Prison Ministry, Hospice and Elder Care, research, education, and ordination. For more information, see T. Thorn Coyle’s site,
www.thorncoyle.com/home.html . She is also author of the popular "Kissing the Limitless" and "Evolutionary Witchcraft".
All vendors will be contacted by the vendor coordinator after they register. A booth is in addition to registration, and $50 before April 15, and $60 after. We expect a great group of vendors again.
Join us in the stone circle dancing half naked by the firelight under the moon and stars to live music. Join us for the Pirate party at the 3 boats planted in the ground. (This year’s party will honor Jack Darkhand.) Join us in this wonderfully secure, safe and “just us” site. We hope to have an inflatable pool for us to cool off in along with a hot tub. This is an intimate and friendly gathering where everyone is staff and contributes to this coop event. Community work is expected from all participants. If you have any comments, or questions about the festival, please email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . We also plan to coordinate food for the community dinners, and kitchen. The website should have a page of a food list that people can volunteer to bring or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
Stone City is a Pagan center located in the wild hills of California's Diablo Range, just outside the San Francisco Bay Area, in eastern Santa Clara County. Stone City is dedicated to creating sacred spaces for ritual, worship of Pagan deities, and community gatherings. All Pagan faiths and traditions are welcome. Visit www.thestonecity.org

PantheaCon 2010 will be at the DoubleTree again. When the contract is signed, we will post the confirmed hotel rate on the website. I am working to get better service and menus for the food areas put into the contract, so they must comply with making healthy and vegetarian options available. Approximate hotel daily rates will be: room $95; parking $8

What is PantheaCon? We got a suggestion for the website that there should be a description of the Con, what it is, why someone would want to go to it. I’ve been so close to it all these years that I can’t really see it clearly in the way someone else might. What I am asking the community is for your ideas and descriptions on “What is PantheaCon?” Please email them to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Thanks.

Next year’s theme is: Back to Basics
We want to encourage the programming of skills for the next 50 years, things like survival skills, or spinning or home gardens or…. You get the idea. And maybe discussions of what as pagans we want to see for our society in the wake of this economic melt-down and what ways pagans can help our friends and towns weather the current down-sizing of our consumer lifestyle. What do we do as a community for our elders, our inherited libraries, our unemployed or needy pagan community members as well as those of our greater communities? What kind of world can we as pagans help develop with our reverence for nature?

A workshop at PantheaCon last year was called Peak Oil & the Pagan Community by John Michael Greer and was based on his book, “The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age”. It emphasizes the inevitable transition to a lower energy world without the opulence of our current over-consuming lifestyles. The big question is how can we cushion the transition to a more sustainable world for an inheritance for the next 7 generations? We will have copies of his book. If you want to order it from us, just phone the store for orders, 510-653-3244.