Author Archives: Chas S. Clifton

Judy Harrow

Judy Harrow, one of the most influential East Coast American Wiccan priestesses and a damn fine writer too, is no longer with us.

You can read tributes at The Witching Hour blog, on a Facebook page, and elsewhere, I am sure.

From The Witching Hour:

As an author she contributed to a number of notable anthologies, including Rites of Passage and  the excellent Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft. Her first book, Wicca Covens was published in 1999, and her second, Spiritual Mentoring, in 2002. Judy’s leadership skills were apparent in all of her writings, as they were in any conversation about modern pagan witchcraft.

‘Weird Tales,’ Hex Signs, and Folklore

Joe Laycock examined the mythologies behind True Detective. (I have not seen it, being much the same situation as Jason Pitzl-Waters.)

Religion scholar Philip Jenkins has suggested these two sources—contemporary Satanic Panic and the “weird tales” of pulp horror—are connected. He suggests that it was the weird tales authors of the 1920s, notably Lovecraft and Herbert Gorman, who first introduced the idea of secret, murderous cults into the American consciousness.

¶ Those so-called “hex signs” on Pennsylvania Dutch barns? They have little to do with witches and magic, notes librarian of esotericsm Dan Harms in a book review.

From time to time, I’m asked if The Long-Lost Friend has anything to do with hex signs, those beautiful star and flower figures that decorate the barns across much of eastern Pennsylvania and adjacent areas where German settlers made their homes.  The answer is, “Not really,” with a follow-up about the possibility of a mystical link that might or might not be present.  Hex Signs provides us with answers to these questions, and much more.

¶ Speaking of folklore, Ethan Doyle White notes a free online special issue of the journal Folklore, focusing on folklore and Paganism. Lots of good material there.

Animist Blog Carnival — Dreams

The March Animist Blog Carnival, on the theme of dreams, is hosted at Pray to the Moon.

We have a more modest collection of writings for this month. But, being an avid dreamer, I am not at all surprised. I find more often than not, when I begin to prattle about dreams, the response is invariably, “I don’t dream,” or “I never/rarely remember my dreams.” However, I also find that those people who are in tune with the dreamworld never disappoint in their storytelling.

Ayahuasca Tourism and Pagan Holidays

Kira Salak, a writer for National Geographic, has a good article published on her ayahuasca pilgrimage to Peru.

But she can’t call it a that. It was “a lark,” at least the first time:

And then there is me, who a year ago came to Peru on a lark to take the “sacred spirit medicine,” ayahuasca, and get worked over by shamans. Little suspecting that I’d emerge from it feeling as if a waterlogged wool coat had been removed from my shoulders—literally feeling the burden of depression lifted—and thinking that there must be something to this crazy shamanism after all.

And so I am back again.

I have read a lot of put-downs of this sort of journey. The term “ayahuasca tourism” is tossed around, along with the presumption that any such experience cannot possibly be “authentic,” whatever that means.

Such an attitude may suit neo-puritans, but it is profoundly un-Pagan.

In the collection Anthropological Research on Contemporary Tourism (thanks to Amy W. for the citation), Nelson Graburn offers a “Working/Traveling Matrix,”

                                          Stay                                      Travel

 Voluntary                     “Doing Nothing” at home                  Tourism and/or recreation

Compulsory/Serious    Work, incl. school & housework       Occupations requiring travel

What I see in this is the attitude that if you are not getting paid to travel, it’s not real, and that if it is not work, it is not serious travel.

Think of those times when you have met someone — or maybe said about yourself — who claimed to be a “traveler” but not a “tourist.”

Imagine someone leaning against a wall two thousand years ago outside the sacred precinct of Delphi, sneering, “Look at that — another bunch of rich oracle tourists.” (Well, there were the Cynics.) But a scholar of religious tourism in ancient Greece writes,

Many tourism scholars however have begun to recognize that the differences between what is a tourist and what is a pilgrim is not as large as was once thought. These scholars have coined a new term, the religious tourist, to describe those travelers who seem to bridge the gap between the traditional definition of a pilgrim and the traditional definition of a tourist.

Maybe a contemporary writer has to describe her trip as “a lark” in order to distance herself from the fact that it might be a pilgrimage, leading some of her readers to dismiss her as a “religious wacko.”

Phallephoria 2014 — Honoring Dionysus in Athens


Two things.

1. “Phallephoria, the carrying of a phallus in procession in honor of Dionysus. For the first time after almost two thousand years, Phallephoria was celebrated in Athens.”

And that is tremendous. There is also a longer, 30-minute YouTube video

Although the weather looks rainy in the video, was it always so, archaeologists wonder.

2.  After thirty-some years of attending festivals, I know that the Wiccan ritual model of casting a circle is not the solution for big groups—too much standing around and waiting. Instead, the quintessential Pagan large-group creation of ritual space should be by processing, whether in the streets or the open country.

And the Greeks do a good job with masking too.

New Moon, Pine Tree

moonthrupine
Some months I am so relieved to see the New Moon, and this is one of them.

Caffeine and the Sun God

As a freezing fog swirls through the pines, I lift my coffee mug and think of the sun — and coffee!

solarroast

Solar Roast’s emblem.

Thursday was a much warmer day: M. and I went to Pueblo for supplies, and after a stop at Hercules Liquor for beer and wine, had a late breakfast at Solar Roast Coffee, whose emblem is Apollo Helios in his chariot.  (They use solar power for roasting the beans, an idea that started in western Oregon but did not stay there — not enough sunshine.)

A early-20th-century depiction of Daz Bog (Wikipedia).

And then at the grocery store I picked up a bag of Daz Bog coffee beans — another solar-connected deity. The gods and heroes are everywhere in the marketplace.

The Wikipedia article on caffeine says nothing about its divine patrons, but it seems obvious what is going on.

In his wonderful Pharmakodynamis, the section on Excitantia, Dale Pendell lists correspondences for caffeine — Planet: Sun, of course, and these, among others:

  • Realm of Pleasure: Brain
  • Rock: Granite
  • Season: Winter
  • Sign: Canis Major
  • God: Hermes
  • Goddess: Fortuna
  • Social Event: New Job

Outside, the fog is spitting graupel. Two wild turkey hens scratch under the bird feeder, looking for seeds that the little birds kicked down. Canis major is sleeping by the fire.

Journalistic Cliches and Their Academic Cousins

My least-favorite journalistic cliche is “time will tell.”

Despite the president’s charm offensive, some pundits say that the world will end next Tuesday. Time will tell.

Read the whole list of 150 here.

As a journal editor, I could make my own list, particularly those stupid bits of wordiness that get between the reader and an actual thesis statement, in which the writer actually takes a position on the issue.

Some sample candidates:

I plan to explore the intersection between . . .

In this paper I will argue  . . .

This article compares . . .

Get out of the spotlight, academic writer, and say something about something.

New York’s ‘Occult Revival’: Everything Old Is New Again

From The Revealer (see blogroll under Religion and Journalism): “Chapel Perilous: Notes From The New York Occult Revival.”

There’s been a magical revival happening in New York City for two to three years,” Damon Stang, the “shop witch” for Catland Books in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, told the New York Times last year. “I think it’s a nostalgia that people have for a sense of enchantment with the world.”

There is some material evidence that a new interest in magic and esoteric subjects is growing. Catland itself, an active center for pagan rites and magical ceremonies, opened last February. The Times article, which appeared ten months after opening, is an indication of that interest, although it was albeit a local-color piece called “Friday Night Rites”  in which the shop was erroneously located in  Williamsburg. More substantially, NYU hosted its first annual Occult Humanities Conference in October — a gathering of researchers, practitioners and artists from all over the world who engaged in work with the occult and esoteric. The Observatory, Park’s home base, has been offering well-attended lectures on magical topics since 2009, including a few by Mitch Horowitz. . . . .

In the academic study of religion, “the occult” is neither settled as a term nor a community. At its most basic level, it indicates a kind of hiddenness — a concealed truth. In popular usage, this usually means pagan nature worship, witchcraft, spirit communication, magic and other fringe religious ideas. The scholar Catherine Albanese, in her magisterial A Republic of Mind and Spirit, investigated many American practitioners of these forms as “metaphysicals,” a particular variety of religious actor for whom the power of the mind and the existence of a concealed “energy” within the body and the world, are essential. It’s a useful term, but hardly ever applied outside of the academy. The people I met at the conference preferred the words “occult” and “esoteric” to describe their interests, often using them interchangeably. How can a revival be studied when it is unclear what, exactly, is being revived?

Worth reading, among other things, for the reminder about Robert Anton Wilson’s idea of the “chapel perilous.” I could tell stories . . .  and I am certain that you could too.

Cross-Cultural Collection on Popular Religion Includes Paganism

The edited collection Religion, Tradition and the Popular examines “experiences of spirituality in combination with commercialization and expressive performative practices as well as everyday politics of identity. Based on innovative theoretical reflections, the essays take into consideration what the transcultural negotiation of religion, tradition and the popular signifies in different places and social contexts.”

Two contributions speak to contemporary Paganism in particular:

• Stefanie v. Schnurbein,  “Germanic Neo-Paganism: A Nordic Art-Religion?” (243–60).

• René Gründer, “Neo-pagan Traditions in the 21st Century: Re-inventing Polytheism in a Polyvalent World-Culture,” ( 261–82).