Druids In Cars, Going To Festivals

How do we take the ancient lore in context of our modern lives? This week again, Rev. Avende and Mike Bierschenk travel home from Trillium 2024 (after a mid-drive coffee pick-me-up), and they talk about squaring their practice with the lore that's out there, leaving things behind, and moving forward from those experiences. Where else will you find a consideration of questionable necromancy, tempered by considerations of how we may be useful to our descendants? About halfway through, the discussion turns to a meditation on places where ancestral knowledge is missing, and what we can do in our experience to honor that tradition, and make it our own. Find us on Facebook, check us out at threecranes.org/podcast, and consider supporting us at threecranes.org/donate.

Traveling home from Trillium 2024, Rev. Avende and Mike Bierschenk discuss how the omen reading went at the main rite. Inspired by the Spirits, they tried a new omen process, which has since become a new casting cloth in the two years since (you can see a picture of it, as well as the original omen inscribed in the sand, in the linear notes on our Podbean page, if you are reading this description on a service that doesn't transmit images). There's a great discussion about the different sorts of divination we've seen and the hope we have to see more inventive divination methods in the future. We even managed to locate the original audio from the omen in this Trillium rite, so you'll find that spliced in at the end of the episode, before the outro music kicks in. (Spoiler alert: this omen will be referenced in the next episode as well.) Find us on Facebook, check us out at threecranes.org/podcast, and consider supporting us at threecranes.org/donate.

Today, we talk about one of the administrative tasks required of us as priest: the reporting aspect of maintaining our credentials is a time-intensive process that brings up a lot of feelings for us, yet it reveals a lot about our work. It rolls back around to the idea of journaling as a practice, which is a different way of looking at these reports than we often experience. We talk a bit about unexpected lessons around divination journaling as part of this as well. You can find Rev. Dangler's "pretty" report on his Patreon (where you can get the answers to the reporting questions he couldn't answer in the podcast), and Rev. Avende's "legible" report on their website. You can also find the Three Cranes Grove, ADF, newsletters in our Newsletter Archive to see those omens we've recorded, and check out Rev. Avende's list of "Things No One Told You About Being a Priest." Find us on Facebook, check us out at threecranes.org/podcast, and consider supporting us at threecranes.org/donate.

Today, Jacque and Rev. Dangler discuss their relationships with Nehalennia, a Belgic goddess who is known from a series of votive altars, and a modern working temple at Colijnsplaat, which you can visit! The other one mentioned is in Archaeon, an archaeological park in The Netherlands. You can also see a picture of the elephant on the ceiling of the church at Lucerne. We mention the Crane Breviary and Guide Book, which you can find on Lulu or at The Magical Druid, and the Nehelennia Oracle by Bela Síol, which goes in and out of print; the best link we have today to this deck is the author's Facebook page. You can read our friend Molly's review of the Nehelennia Oracle Deck for some additional context and pictures. Find us on Facebook, check us out at threecranes.org/podcast, and consider supporting us at threecranes.org/donate.

Recorded in May 2025, right after Wellspring, we have a returning guest, Jacque, who is along for the ride to talk about "Druidry at a Distance." Jacque introduces us to the Virtual Fire Protogrove, which meets virtually via Zoom a couple of times a month to be social and do ritual. This Grove is a way to find conneciton and work together even though they may not be physically close to each other. We talk about different ways of communicating in ritual and over distance, including in our in-person rituals. We talk a bit about ASL in ritual, and the process of taking photos for Rev. Avende's Installation rite, along with many other experiences that either create or bridge distances in our lives. Find us on Facebook, check us out at threecranes.org/podcast, and consider supporting us at threecranes.org/donate.

This is the episode that would have kicked off Season 7 if we'd released it in 2024. We recorded this one in February of 2024, when we were blessing houses at our annual Anagantios rite. We discuss what we love about Trillium as a festival as we prep for the festival season. If we sound excited, it's because we definitely were, and that excitement was well-founded! We talk a lot about what it's like around the fire, what we hope it will be like when we arrive and help with the work of running this festival. We even talk about what Rev. Avende might do for a workshop... so you should send us ideas about both the podcast and maybe what workshops we should do. Even though this was recorded earlier, do it :) Find us on Facebook, check us out at threecranes.org/podcast, and consider supporting us at threecranes.org/donate.

Are we back? We're definitely back. After a couple of years of changing experiences, Rev. Avende and Rev. Dangler are making a run at a new season. This episode, recorded in January 2026, was recorded after a few of the ones you'll hear after this one, because this is our real "Back in the Saddle" episode. Rev. Dangler has been writing, and dealing with health stuff over the last year, and has picked up the #TendingTheFlameOfHope work in our current times. Rev. Avende is almost a year into their first term as Archdruid of Ár nDraíocht Féin: A Druid Fellowship (ADF) and a variety of new career opportunities. We'll talk more about those as we go (and there are some previously recorded episodes to touch on those aspects, too), but we want to invite our listeners to send in requests and ideas for future episodes, especially those of you who might have been waiting to hear about things we haven't gotten to yet, or questions you might have about previous episodes. Find Rev. Avende's book about raising children, Kindling Sparks, and Rev. Dangler's books about Divination, High Days, and Lunar Magic (and probably others) at The Magical Druid. Find us on Facebook, check us out at threecranes.org/podcast, and consider supporting us at threecranes.org/donate.

While headed home from a Dedicant Oath rite, we started talking about what it was like to move on from our current roles in modern Paganism, whether those moves were due to life changes, vocational changes, or just coming to a place where it was time to move on. Mike Bierschenk joins Revs. Avende and Dangler on this discussion again, and we our conversation goes a bit everywhere, but it was a good chat. Find us on Facebook, connect with us at Threecranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.

Today, on the way out to a Dedicant Oath Rite, Rev. Avende and Rev. Dangler travel with Mike Bierschenk on the way out to State College, and chat on a topic we've been meaning to get to for a while: what does it mean for us when our deities are jerks? Myths and legends are full of some really awful things that the spirits do to each other, to humans, and even to animals and plants. How do we navigate those waters? Content Note: You've read the stories about deities and how they interact with others. This episode doesn't stray too deeply into specifics, so we aren't sure a trigger warning is necessary, but we are talking about deities behaving poorly, so be aware. Our audio is a little odd on this episode as we figure out how to mic up three different people in the car, but we're hopeful it comes through well. Sorry if it's a little unbalanced or quiet, but we should have that fixed next episode; it was a good conversation, but we only have one source, unfortunately. Find us on Facebook, check us out at Threecranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.

Happy Samhain, friends! One of the great traditions we have as a Grove is that we keep an Ancestor Box. This is a simple box that has been with us for 20 years now, receiving new ancestors and bringing them into our shared community of ancestral family, and becoming a part of who we are. Today, because we were driving home from the Cantlos Druid Moon rite where we opened the box, we reflected a bit on how we interact with it, what's changed in two decades, and the ways we've found to keep the "stuff" in the box connected to their stories. Check us out on Facebook, read more about us at threecranes.org, and find out more about Druidry at ADF.org.

On our way out to a Druid Moon rite, we took a moment to chat about a festival Rev. Avende had been to recently: Harvest Nights! Long one of our favorite festivals, Rev. Avende had made the trip without Rev. Dangler this year, and so you can listen along as he hears all about what he missed. Find us on Facebook, check us out at Threecranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at ADF.org.

Today, Rev. Avende and our Grove Bard, Mike Bierschenk, travel out to Harvest Nights and bring you along in the car with them, as they discuss the role of the Bard in Three Cranes Grove, ADF, and in ritual in general. Both have served in the role for our Grove, and both have brought their own magical touch to the work. Find us on Facebook, check us out at threecranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.

We continue our conversation from our previous episode with how we do magic for others: how we decide what sort of magical work to do, who to do it for or with, and how we divide out our magic by audience and type of work. We also talk about magical work for hire, and the boundaries we set around that. Find us on Facebook, check out our Grove at ThreeCranes.Org, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.

After Summerland, we're back! Today, we talk about sympathy and contagion in magic: the idea that things that are alike can provide access to each other, either through being alike or containing the essence (Greek: ousia) of a thing. We chat about them as subsets of attraction, referring to the Laws of Magic outlined in Real Magic. We talk a little bit about joss money (AKA "hell notes" or "hell money") as an example, but the majority of this discussion grows out of the need for Rev. Avende to provide access to religious and magical support in their new role as a prison chaplain: how can we provide services to incarcerated individuals, particularly in light of the restrictions that are imposed on them. Rev. Dangler floats his notion of "magic as access" here, probably for the first time publicly, so what you're hearing in the last half of this episode is really an initial oral argument for that definition, and we expect there's more to come on that as it develops. A couple of things get mentioned in this episode, including a collaborative whiteboard image of Epona that we painted in the pandemic, and the Flame of Hope experience in an airport, which we've previously mentioned. Find us on Facebook, check us out at threecranes.org, and learn more about Druidry at adf.org.