Before M. and I left on this trip, someone mentioned a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit at the big Peabody Essex Museum in Salem. As it happened, the exhibit ended just before we arrived, but that’s all right — we can visit a whole museum devoted to her painting in Santa Fe whenever we are down there. …
Continue reading The Southwest Follows Us to Salem & Salem Follows Us Home
Wouldn’t you like to live in an enchanted world, where everything in nature brought messages from gods and spirits? The New England Puritans did so, but with a smaller cast of characters: their God and their Devil. But there were lots of messages all the same: If your cow died, if lightning struck your house, …
Continue reading The Best New Book about the Salem Witch Trials
We arrived at the apartment in “Witch City” ( Salem, Mass.) a little after 11 p.m.after a 100-mile drive, two Amtrak trains, a Boston taxi, a MBTA train (picture) and a Lyft car ride.
The eastbound Southwest Chief, which originates in Los Angeles, rolls into La Junta, Colorado, at sunset. A near-miss in Chicago: the sleeping car attendant had lined up everyone’s bags on the platform, which is a dimly lit. I found my carry-on bag, rolled it into Union Station, down the corridors to Amtrak’s Metropolitan Lounge, and …
Continue reading The Trip to Salem: Southern Colorado — Chicago
Prompted by J. W. Ocker’s A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts, M. and I held a little Salem film festival. (We skipped The Lords of Salem.) In order of creation, we watched these three movies: Three Sovereigns for Sarah (1985), Hocus Pocus (1993), and The VVitch (2015). …
Last November, during the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Boston, I made a quick trip to Salem, Mass., with some fellow Pagan studies scholars. It was only one afternoon—long enough to visit some of the witchy shops, a magickal temple, the Charter Street cemetery, and a few other sites. No time for the maritime …
Continue reading Witches, Sea Captains, and Art — We Go Back to Salem
From Philip Jenkins’ Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality, which I am reading as part of some research on changing attitudes towards shamanism: In 1882 when a group of Zuñi emissaries visited Salem [Mass.] . . . they congratulated the citizens for their ancestors’ determined response to the witchcraft problem. Through the 1890s, …
Continue reading Hanging the Salem Witches was a Good Idea, said the Zuñis.
During the 1980s, real people went to real prisons on the strength of children’s fantasies. Many of these were people who operated preschools and had devoted their lives to child care. The 1987-90 McMartin Preschool trial, described as the most expensive criminal trial in American history, produced no convictions–but you can imagine the effect on …
Continue reading Martha Coakley Sounds like a Salem Witch-Hunter
Cambridge University classics professor Mary Beard recently suggested that today’s Hellenic Pagans were inauthentic because they did not sacrifice animals. Set aside the Pagans for a moment. What about Jews? A small but controversial movement in Israel wants to revive Temple-based religion, including sacrifice. The present-day Sanhedrin Court decided Tuesday to purchase a herd of …
I have been seeing a flush of Pagan-related articles in Anglosphere news media lately, so many that it feels like October, which is usually the only time we are noticed.((Possibly with a smaller peak around Yule.)) One reason may be upcoming coronation of King Charles III.((I might as well say it: when I was young, …
Continue reading Yet It’s Not October: Paganism in the News (Part 1)