• Check out Patheos’ story package on The Future of Paganism. Solitaries? Personal paganism? What’s next? • Musings on that “Nazi” label and whether the climate of the Pacific Northwest encourages “black metal” bands, at Bioregional Animism. • He comes to the festival as a lapsed Lutheran. He leaves as a Pagan—an interview from the [...]
All summer I have been editing and laying out a biography of the American Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944). I just sent the galleys to the writer, a professor in Arizona, and am working on my own corrections as well. There have been the usual hassles—missing “essential” photos, notes that did not match the [...]
The ongoing excacations at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr in Yorkshire has turned up what is now thought to be the oldest house in Britain—10,500 years. Archaeologists describe finding “red deer skull tops which were worn as masks.” “And the artefacts of antler, particularly the antler head-dresses, are intriguing as they suggest ritual activities.” [...]
In the early 17th century, a condemned witch goes to the gallows, saying under her breath an incantation of the Old Religion. Only the incantation invokes the Virgin Mary, Ave, Regina Caelorum, and the old religion is Roman Catholicism, made virtually synonymous with treason during the reigns of Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and James I [...]
Via The Wild Hunt, a story of another Anglican priest with an attraction to Druidism. I’m actually a priest of the Church of England – but with a difference. Though I’m still in “holy orders”, I now work full time as a magician, writer and retreat leader. I’ve been described as a “priest at the [...]
It wasn’t this bad. On Sunday M. and I went up to Salida, Colorado, to catch the last day of FIBArk, the whitewater boating festival, watching competitors come down the frothing Arkansas River as we drove upstream. Our main interest was in the Crazy River Dogs event, which we have managed to attend for three [...]
In the current issue of The Cauldron, a writer known only as “Tof” tells us that Donna Gardner, wife of Gerald, chief founder of Wicca, was lying when she said that she was not involved in the Craft. First, though, Tof tells us, “In all this [biographical summary] there is not evidence of Donna Gardner’s [...]
Although some British Pagans have demanded NAGPRA-style reburial for Neolithic (and thus “Pagan” in some sense) human remains found at the famous ceremonial site of Avebury, English Heritage have decided against doing so. These Neolithic human remains were excavated in the Avebury area by Alexander Keiller between 1929 and 1935. In 2006, Paul Davies of [...]
… like a mass grave. Maybe it helps if said grave is 1,000 years old. To find out that the young men executed were Vikings is a thrilling development. Any mass grave is a relatively rare find, but to find one on this scale, from this period of history, is extremely unusual.
Click over to Pagans for Archaeology, where Yewtree interviews Australian Pagan scholar David Waldron, author of Shock! The Black Dog of Bungay: A Study in Local Folklore, about dogs, folklore, and the Pagan revival. I think a key issue for me was that transmission of symbols, images and ideas from the pagan past are very [...]
