I Will Be Interviewed for the Cherry Hill Series. Meanwhile, Check Out These!

Register here for the live cast

I am not a Pagan teacher, Witchcraft influencer, or anything like that. Usually i see myself as the person approaching a panelist at an American Academy of Religion session, saying, “Would you consider turning your paper into an article for The Pomegranate?” Kind of a behind-the scenes person.

I figure I will talk about the state of Pagan studies in academia, about Pagan history in the Anglosphere, and whatever other skeletons I can drag out of the closet. (Holli Emore, Cherry Hill’s executive director, is interested in a 1980 case where a Wiccan leader was charged with murder after a Halloween shooting in the Texas Panhandle.)

I did my term as co-chair of the Contemporary Pagan Studies unit, but under the AAR system (which is wise), you get five years, and then it is someone else’s turn, so that they can get the professional exposure, make connections, and bring in fresh ideas.

So this interview will be live-cast on Zoom but later put on up on the Cherry Hill site to watch for free, along with others, such as these Pagan scholars:

Graham Harvey, who got us all saying “contemporary Pagan” instead of “Neopagan” and whose book on animism is becoming ciassic.

Caroline Tully, prolific Australian scholar, Pagan organizer, and associate editor of The Pomegranate.

Giovanna Parmigiani, author of a new book on southern Italian Pagans that I will be discussing more soon.

And there are more!

Animal Sacrifice: Are They Doing It Wrong?

Possible animal sacrifice location
A possible animal sacrifice location in the Howard Beach area. J.C. Rice (New York Post)

The New York Post had two articles recently on apparent animal sacrifice in the Jamaica Bay area of Long Island (politically in both Brooklyn and Queens).

Animal Sacrifices on the Rise in Queens with Chickens, Pigs being Tortured in ‘Twisted’ Rituals” appeared on September 7, 2024.

Animal sacrifices are surging in Queens, with chickens, pigs and rats being tortured, mutilated or killed in “twisted” religious rituals in parkland surrounding Jamaica Bay, The Post has learned. 

In a little over a month, at least nine wounded animals or carcasses have been discovered in the federally-managed Spring Creek Park in Howard Beach and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in Broad Channel — including five live pigs with partially severed ears.

Creatures recovered from the revolting scene also include a near-dead baby rat tied up in a bag with chicken bones; a freshly decapitated chicken head; a live hen in distress; and a dead dog with its neck snapped.

Ethnographically, the article adds, “Jamaica Bay has been a popular religious site among members of the Hindu Guyanese and Indo-Caribbean diaspora living in nearby neighborhoods, including Richmond Hill and Ozone Park..”

The Post was back on September 14th with “Feds, City to Crack Down on Animal Sacrifices in NYC’s Jamaica Bay after Dog-Carcass with Snapped Neck, Wounded Pigs Found. Mobile lights were to be installed to thwart the evil cultists operating under cover of darkness! I wonder how that worked out.

“Feds, City” should talk to their colleagues in South Florida about this problem. It was there, after all, that a legal case arose that led to the Supreme Court’s verdict in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah. For a good backgrounder on the case, listen to Heather Freeman’s Magic in the United States podcast episode on the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye. (A print transcript is also available at that link.)

In essence, per the Court, animal sacrifice for religious purposes is not illegal in the United States under the First Amendment.

Animal sacrifice pops up repeatedly in the Bible. Many Muslims partake in qurban (animal sacrifice) at the feast of Eid al-Adha. Some Orthodox Jews have a practice of waving a live chicken overhead while praying on Yom Kippur Eve, then slaughtering it for a meal according to the kosher rules. And Christians describe Jesus as the Supreme Sacrifice, some descibing themselves as “washed in the blood of the [sacrificial] Lamb.

A. J. Jacobs, a non-religious Jewish writer in NYC, devotes a semi-humorous section of his book A Year of Living Bibically to attempting to join Hasidic Jews iin this ritual.1

Pagan studies scholars have tended to skirt sacrifice in the Afro-Diasporic religiions, which is why Heather Freeman’s podcast was an exception. There has been some writing on blót in Asatru, which may include sacrifice, starting with Michael Strmiska’s 2007 article “Putting the Blood back into Blót: The Revival of Animal Sacrifice in Modern Nordic Paganism.”

Animal sacrifice was a key religious practice of the pre-Christian peoples of Germanic Northern Europe. It is now being revived by some modern Pagans who reconstruct pre-Christian Germanic religious traditions, drawing on medieval Icelandic literature as well as Anglo-Saxon literature and other related sources (155).

Jefferson Calico’s 2018 book Being Viking: Heathenism in Contemporary America devotes an entire chapter to the topic, examining its social, religious, and ethical contexts, noting that “Eating the sacrifice2 becomes a sacred as well as a dissenting act that calls into quesion and occasions a critique of secular, mainstream American eating practices” (314).

Sacrifice means to make something sacred by connecting it to the divine, yet when it comes to the Jamaica Bay incidents, I have so many questions. Were all these animal remain the product of sacrificial rituals?

The Asatru would have eaten the “blotted” pig — were the ones found abandoned by some urban homesteader? A dead dog? Killed in ritual or killed to cause pain to its owner? Baby rat? (Mom made him get rid of it?). Cops3 operate with simple categories. What happens when you make a collar and end up in court being grilled4 by a First Amendment lawyer? Is it easier just to put up some lights than sort out the perpetrators, when some are criminals and others part of a protected class?

  1. Subtitled “One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible,” the book describes his attempt to follow all the Hebrew Bible’s rules while living in New York City — with a very patient wife. []
  2. As is normally done in most cultures. []
  3. Like vegans. []
  4. Pun intended. []

Bloghouse-Keeping

On a computer or tablet, you will see the sign-up box in the right-hand sidebar. On a smartphone, you have to scroll scroll scroll down past the recent blog posts to find the Subscribe button. The blog is free and always will be.

Almost all posts on Letter from Hardscrabble Creek are mirrored on the Facebook page, and there is a link for that in the sidebar too. Mobile users will have to scroll down and down to find it. You can also follow it on MeWe.

Expect more posts on the field of Pagan studies soon!

‘The Super Natural,’ or How to Write about ‘Woo’

I blogged here before about things disappearing in my house — kitchen utensils, corkscrews, keys, etc. (See “Pixie Problems, or Working Things Out with the ‘Cousins’ (1)” and Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

Things have been better since then. There is a pentagram pendant that has disappeared and re-appeared at least three times, but as long as I am wearing it or have it in my pocket, “they” leave it alone.

And then a book disappeared, almost snatched out of my hands.

The book was The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained (2016), a collaboration between scholar Jeffrey Kripal (I think of him as “the professor of woo”) and author and experiencer Whitley Strieber. (The 2017 paperback edition had the subtitle “Why the Unexplained is Real.“)

Strieber had been a novelist with several bestsellers in the horror category, such as The Wolfen and The Hunger, both of which were adapted as movies.1 All this took a new path after publication of his 1987 bestseller, Communion, about his family’s experience with “the Visitors” at their Catskills home in 1985–86. Communion in turn spawned follow-ups, a podcast, and a whole website, Unknown Country, devoted to UFO-related paranormal experiences.

It’s important to note that Communion never states that the “Visitors” were offworld visitors who came from their home planet to study Earthlings, although many people assume that. Blame the thirty-five previous years of “flying saucers” stories and films. The first movie was, in fact, The Flying Saucer, (1950).

What it was, says Jeffrey Kripal, was a Goddess experience — and that was something many readers could not grasp.

Not only did [Strieber] speak his secrets in public, but he also spoke reverently and fearfully of a divine presences that was feminine, that broke and rode him like a horse . . . by so doing he spoke of a presence at the very heart of the unconscious of the religious West, a presence that has been repressed and denied for three millennia. He spoke of Her (151).

Beyond Kripal’s reading of Communion as fundamentally a work of Goddess mysticism, part of the eternal matter of sex, death, and the sacred, this is a book on how to approach these experiences as a writer.

But first, who took my book?

According to Amazon, I bought it in 2018. I found it to be profounding unsettling — and I have been around this block more than once. I think the sentence that stopped me was one of Strieber’s: “The living, who we call the dead, come close to us now, calling to us to open our minds to a new vision of ourselves” (245).

I write “one of Strieber’s,” because the book is arranged in alternating chapters, each author taking his turn. More on that below.

So Super Natural stayed in the bedroom bookcase, where live all the books that we don’t want casual visitors to be noticing. Then came a day earlier this year when I wanted to share something in with my wife. I pulled it off the shelf and set it down (on the bed?), but it was more like something took it, because I could not find it again. She and I both looked, to the point of checking under the bedroom furniture with a flashlight. No book. (And they have not given it back either.)

“OK, housewights,” I said, “Are you more powerful than Amazon?” I re-ordered another hardback copy, this time from an affiliate seller, a Goodwill store in Tacoma. It duly arrived, and it has not vanished. So I could re-read it and attach sticky notes.

‘Super Natural’ as a Writing Guide

I call it a guide to writing about “woo,” in other words, the paranormal, the Other, the unexplained, whatever you care to call it. Quoting William James, Kripal speaks of a “future science” of “radical empricism, that is, one that took every human experience, however strange or apparenty impossible, under its careful gaze without prejudice of assumption. This book is an attempt to practice just such a radical empiricism” (40).

What Kripal in particular has done is set out series of techniques by which scholars can approach something like Strieber’s experience — and which Strieber himself employs to some extent in his chapters.

First is the “phenomenological cut,” just taking the experiences on their own terms and seting aside “the questions of their possible external source, cause, or truth value” (44). It is hard to just describe what is happening without fitting it into your religous framework (or lack of one) or your world view.

There are more: Kripal also discusses techniques of comparison, history, hermeneutics, and erotics.2 For example, in his summary these these approaches, he notes under hermeneutics

Consider the possibility that some of these encounters may be mediated expressions of another form of mind (maybe ours) making contact with the human ego and transmtting some symbolic signal. Recognize that, generally speaking, extraordinary visions and experiences are ot what they seem on the surface, that they must be interpreted. Recognize the roles of fantasy and projection in the production of these potential signals, but do not assume that everything imagined is imaginary. Imagine double. Hone your Hermes practice, your hermenutics (341).

Super Natural is a book that I will return to on its own merits. But I urge anyone trying to work in Pagan studies, esotericism, or around the shunned mystic fringes of any other religious tradition to study is a manual of academic craft as well,

  1. I’ll always remember Susan Sarandon as the reluctant but erotic vampire. []
  2. His scholarly career began with studying Bengali Tantra and the worship of Kali, and he had . . . experiences. So he is not a newbie here. []

‘Small Gods’ Is a Zine about Animism

Edited by Dver, a.k.a. Sarah Kate Istra Winter, Small Gods: An Anthology of Everyday Animism is projected to be an annual zine “featuring art, poetry, and essays describing our relationship with, and giving praise to, the smallest of gods — those spiritual entities who are closely bound to distinct physical forms or locations (whether natural or constructed). thereby limiting their interaction with humans.”

I have an essay in this first issue, “‘Don’t Get Cocky, Kid,’ A Little Lesson from the Locals in the Mushroom Woods.” Other contributors besides Dver include Nimue Brown, P. Sufenas Virius Lupus, Rebecca Scott, Sister Patience, Suzanne Thackston, Lannon, and Elizabeth Starling.

I am especially grateful to Dver for creating Small Gods and look forward to more issues. You can purchase this one at her Etsy shop, Goblinesquerie.

Some of her writings are available on Amazon too. I really liked The City is a Labyrinth: A Walking Guide for Urban Animists, and learned some things from it even though I don’t live in a city. It’s kind of like Randonauting without an internet connection — and more meaningful.

The city is alive with spirits—from those found in remaining natural areas to those who are unique to the realm of concrete and steel. But how can we connect with these spirits, and build a powerful, meaningful localized practice in an urban environment? Polytheist, animist, and spirit-worker Sarah Kate Istra Winter suggests a radically simple approach: walking. Inspired by the field of psychogeography and informed by her many years as a spiritually-minded pedestrian, she examines the ways in which walking can be a devotional and magical act.

Step Aside, John Barleycorn

See the Shaggy Parasol mushrooms? They were not there two or three days ago. Yet Lammas comes and they burst forth, full of fungal goodness.

Here just north of the Colorado-New Mexico line, August is the heart of mushroom season. You can find them at other times too, but your foragers are itchy-footed when the late-summer rain clouds collect along the mountains.

All Paganism is local, so I am thinking: Who is our mythic mushroom guy? He is not cut down to be reborn — he just appears overnight.

The Small Gods of Editing

This is me, preparing for an evening of copyediting articles for The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies.

There is in fact a small shrine within arm’s length of my desktop computer, but I usually don’t have so many open flames on it.

This image of the Roman official (?) comes from a huge set of photos of Celtic Gaulish and Roman re-enactors, which you can see here if you use Facebook.

The costuming and sets are the best I have ever seen, outside of HBO’s Rome miniseries, of blessed memory (but still streamable).

Academic Publisher Introduces Camouflaged Editions?

I was one of the outside readers1 for a volume in Cambridge University Press’s enormous “Elements” series, The New Witches of the West, by Ethan Doyle White. (Link is to Amazon US) To find that title, go to the main page and drill down from Religion to New Religious Movements.

I was supposed to be paid in book credit, but when I went to order my chosen books, there were computer problems. (Interestingly, as I write this, the press’s website announces, “Last updated 27/06/24: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues.”) So I wrangled a cash payment and ordered the book I most wanted from, yes, Amazon.

In late June I received a complimentary copy of The New Witches of the West. I read the back-cover text then opened the book, only to find myself reading one of the “Elements in the Philosophy of Biology,” namely Social Darwinism by Jeffrey O’Connell and Michael Ruse.

This Element is a philosophical history of Social Darwinism. It begins by discussing the meaning of the term, moving then to its origins, paying particular attention to whether it is Charles Darwin or Herbert Spencer who is the true father of the idea. It gives an exposition of early thinking on the subject, covering Darwin and Spencer themselves and then on to Social Darwinism as found in American thought, with special emphasis on Andrew Carnegie, and Germany with special emphasis on Friedrich von Bernhardi. Attention is also paid to outliers, notably the Englishman Alfred Russel Wallace, the Russian Peter Kropotkin, and the German Friedrich Nietzsche. From here we move into the twentieth century looking at Adolf Hitler – hardly a regular Social Darwinian given he did not believe in evolution – and in the Anglophone world, Julian Huxley and Edward O. Wilson, who reflected the concerns of their society.

This got me to thinking. Just a glitch in the print-on-demand system (assuming CUP are doing that)? A one-time glitch, or did multiple copies ship out with the mismatched cover and contents?

There are, sadly, regions in Academia where it might be safer to be seen with a book on witchcraft (providing it is transgressive, stunning, and brave) rather than one containing names like N******* and H*****. Maybe this is just like the pre-smartphone days when kids pretended to read their large hardbound social studies book (or whatever) in class while secreting a comic book inside. Fake book covers are still a cottage industry.

  1. That job involves assessing an author’s proposal or manuscript and making suggestions for improvement. []