Between the Worlds

Between the Worlds: Notes from the Threshold by Sarah Kate Istra Winter.

With 20 years of experience as a devotional polytheist and spirit-worker, Sarah Kate Istra Winter presents a second collection of short essays and poems examining a life in the company of gods and spirits. A companion to Dwelling on the Threshold, Between the Worlds covers a wide range of topics, including localizing reconstructionist traditions, resisting distractions from the spiritual path, exploring altered states of consciousness, problems in the pagan community, the importance of discernment, communicating with the divine, animism in practice, deepening devotional relationships, the challenges of mysticism, and working magic in both worlds at once.

This is holy Work, but it doesn’t come with a map. For those wandering through these often mysterious lands, the knowledge and guidance shared within these pages will provide some small illumination of the road ahead.

158 pages, 6×9″, paperback, published February 2017.

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CONTENTS

Introduction
Warning Label
They Arrive
Saying Yes
Apart from the Crowd
Choice
It’s Enough Just to Do the Work
What the Spirits Call You
Ways of Being Spirit-Married
A Typology of Spirits
Less Like People
Who Shows Up
Courting Madness
Entheogen Use in Spirit-Work
A Note on Techniques
Initiatory Ordeals
Not-Doing
Sleep as Altered State of Consciousness
Engaging with the Spiritual in the Physical World
A Pathwalking Technique
Divine Inspiration
Bluebeard’s Wife
Where to?
Dealing with Repercussions
Illness and the Work
Burned by Group Contact
The First of May
Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
The Only Choice
No Shortcuts
Give
Is It Worship?
Why We Worship
On Faith, the Gods, and the Nature of Reality
Ποικιλομητης
Presence and Power
Some Thoughts on UPG
Hearing the Gods
How We Speak to the Gods
Beyond the God-Phone
Super-Local Polytheism
Where the Gods Are Found
Place, Power and Persons
Gods Not Our Own
Hunter of Hearts
A Different Kind of Closeness
Thoughts on Being a Dionysian
Not for Wimps
My Dionysian Festival Cycle
Moments from a Solitary Anthesteria
Types of Offerings
Devotional Practices
Shrine as Repository of Past Rituals
Reconstructionism
The Problem of Temples
A Little Rant on Miasma
Ergot and Eleusis
Greek Questions
Ceasing Cultus
The Mask Is Not a Metaphor
Making Room
Enjoy the Silence
Avoiding Mental Miasma
Taking a Moment
The Long Haul
Do Not Stop Your Devotions
Giving the Gods Their Due
Gods Are Not Characters
Worship Them
Instructions
Gods Beyond Functions
Interactions and Intersections
What You Know
Recommended Resources
About the Author