Really? Witchcraft at Second City Chicago? Magical warding for the building? Or were those “demons” just metaphorical? How come this was not part of last November’s “Occult Chicago” tour?

What is it? Long hair: Whatever the fashion, no woman over 55 should even think of wearing her hair long and loose, unless she wants to look like a mad witch. Hillary Clinton unwisely let her hair down recently and her authority drained away. She would do better to rein it back again neatly. Long [...]

• At The Used Key Is Always Bright, a young boy’s dream of “small gods” intriguingly includes “the god of keys.” • Ivo Dominguez deals with someone who thinks that His People own the idea of four directions, the elements, etc. Via Miniver Cheevy, where there is a postscript. • Christopher Penzcak talks about the Mighty [...]

Religious studies professor Sarah Pike, author of Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community and New Age and Neopagan Religions in America discusses her work at the Religion and American History blog. In a chapter I wrote recently on “Wicca in the News” about changing representations of Witches in American news [...]

Maybe if I had a bookish teenage daughter I would know this, but the boarding-school-for-vampires (etc.) genre has exploded. Here is a typical cover blurb: Two years after a horrible incident made them run away, vampire princess Lissa and her guardian-in-training Rose are found and returned to St. Vladimir’s Academy, where one focuses on mastering [...]

My old friend Oberon Zell of the Church of All Worlds is backing this show because he designed some jewelry for the characters. A Facebook commenter calls the show “the kind of CRAP our spiritual community has had to put up with for decades!” According to the projected TV series’ website, Janet, Crystle, and Tawnya [...]

Homes with candles burning brightly are filled with sexy wood nymphs nightly. As best I recall, that was a couplet from one of Al Manning’s books. I never met him, but from his how-to books and particularly his early-1980s autobiography, Eye of Newt in My Martini, I get the impression of a guy who could [...]

Wear your gray hair long, ladies, says the New York Times, but be careful not to look like “a witch.” The article is tied to a “march” that was clearly a staged publicity event. Still, it resonated with NYT readers, and one commenter even started a blog. That choice [to wear one's gray hair long]  [...]

As I posted earlier, the issue of The Pomegranate now in press has an article about Robert Cochrane, one of the first English witches to use the term “traditional” in opposition to Gerald Gardner’s Wicca, back in the 1960s. In fact, my own current researches are going to force me to grapple with that term [...]

• David Metcalfe writes in depth about the “Mapping the Occult City” event that I mentioned earlier. • The one true religion —  the Church of Aircraft. It has some bizarre rituals too. • Dver on polytheism: “Gods are not characters.” • A rare book on witchcraft — a manual for prosecutors, similar to the [...]