Category Archives: Uncategorized

Is Starhawk (still) Jewish?

Terry Mattingly of the religion-and-journalism blog GetReligion has posted recently on the difficulties of determining Jewish identity, both for Jews and for journalists.

His post is based on the National Jewish Population Survey of 2000-2001; the link is to a longer article that he wrote. What caught my eye was his line about “non-monotheistic religion,” but then he mentions Islam (?!). And here I was expecting some exploration of the prominence of certain Jewish Pagans.

The survey defined a Jew as someone whose “religion is Jewish, OR, whose religion is Jewish and something else, OR, who has no religion and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing, OR, who has a non-monotheistic religion, and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing.”

I guess people like Mimi “Starhawk” Simos belong in a “hard-to-define, niche spirituality” to newspaper religion writers, to quote Mattingly’s blogging colleague, Douglas LeBlanc.

Here is Jewish commentary from Starhawk’s home town, but it focuses on the dating and marriage issues.

Creating Pagan Identity

Back at my campus office, I discovered a review copy of Witching Culture by folklorist and anthropologist Sabina Magliocco. The publisher’s cover blurb calls it “the first ethnography of this religious movement to focus specifically on the role of anthropology and folklore in its formation.”

I think the meatiest section will be the last, Part III, “Beyond Experience: Religion and Identity” with its two chapters, “The Romance of Subdominance: Creating Oppositional Culture” and “‘The Heart is the Only Nation:’ Neo-Paganism, Ethnic Identity, and the Construction of Authenticity.”

I am just starting to read it, but I can already see that Magliocco takes on the problem of why, in the face of all historical evidence, so many Pagans cling to the myth of the Burning Times and of the antiquity of Wicca, as though it really was a direct survival of the Stone Age and not a twentieth-century creation. She seems to view these issues through the lens of “identity politics,” which probably is as valid an approach as any. I look forward to spending more time with the book.

Why we go to British Columbia

We go to British Columbia to see the big trees, like this Western red cedar in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park. Although these mountains are well inland–they are the Western ranges of the Canadian Rockies–they catch the storms and produce landscapes that feel in places like the Pacific coast. Here is M. “in church,” with a choir of hermit thrushes.

The Mystery of Wicca Lake

No, that’s not the title of another of Llewellyn Publications’ ventures into “occult” fiction. It’s a question that has been bothering me since my return from British Columbia.

That area of SE British Columbia was settled in the 1890s, first by miners. Ninety years later–1983–the provincial government set 49,893 hectares aside as Valhalla Provincial Park, which includes the Devil’s Range, Lucifer Peak, the Devil’s Couch (another mountain), and other unfortunate names. (Why the Christian Devil gets so many interesting geological features named after him is a paper that I have always wanted to write.)

Other features have names more in keeping with the “Valhalla” theme, which also undoubtedly explains the naming of Thor’s Pizza in nearby Nelson.

Hiking into the Devil’s Range, M. and I came across Wicca Lake, which our otherwise authoritative hiking guide referred to merely as “a tiny lake on Drinnon Pass.” Wicca Lake? Devil’s Range? OK, that’s unfortunate, but the scenery is great: here is one professional photographer’s version.

It’s funny how the memory of how places got their names often vanishes rapidly, within a generation or two, unless they were named after famous people or obvious physical characteristics. I have asked one Canadian Wiccan with a wide geographical knowledge of B.C.’s mining districts if she knows, but so far, no response. I will post one if I get one; otherwise, if you have a solid answer, post a comment.

The Inner West is published

The Inner West: An Introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West is just out under Penguin’s Jeremy Tarcher imprint, with the publisher’s web page here.

The collection of 20 articles is drawn mostly from the back issues of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, whose founding editor, Jay Kinney, has edited this new collection. I look at it as a sort of “best of Gnosis,” with a focus on Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and Gnosticism. Richard Smoley, the second editor of Gnosis and a fine writer on Western esoteric traditions, has several pieces in the collection.

A piece that I wrote about 1991 called “The Unexamined Tarot” is part of the collection; I think that it holds up pretty well after all these years. The collection also includes Judy Harrow’s “Explaining Wicca.”

Another short break from blogging

M. and I are leaving for our favorite small town in the We(s)t Kootenays of British Columbia, which offers bigger lakes, bigger trees, and different mountains than those we see every day. I hope to continue the editing of Her Hidden Children with a goal of finishing the re-write by mid-August.

Blogging should resume after 18 July.

The new issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies is being mailed. Janet Joyce, managing director of Equinox Publishing, dropped off some copies when I was in Bath; otherwise, I would still be waiting to see it, thanks to some start-up glitches in the mailing process. It looks good! Now if we can just get the start-up bugs out of the distribution system. . .

Greek Pagans rile church

Followers of revived Greek Pagan (or Ethnic) religion are indeed able to gain more publicity, thanks to this summer’s Olympic Games in Greece.

On a green meadow at the foot of Mt Olympus, famous in mythical literature as the home of the Zeus and the Hellenic gods, a group of men and women stand dressed in togas in a circle, heads covered with wreaths of leaves, right hands held up as they repeat lines in Classical Greek.

A ritual of baptism has begun, at the end of which about a dozen members of the group will formally cast aside their old Christian beliefs and accept new Hellenic, pagan names.

Read entire article here.

Update: A couple of people have questioned the word “toga” in the article, rightly pointing out that togas were worn by upper-class Roman men, not by ancient Greeks. (A toga was the Roman equivalent of a man’s three-piece suit, you might say.) Not having seen photos, I cannot be sure, but I suspect that the reporter used “toga” ignorantly to mean “ancient garment.”

Under the spell of Sulis (5)

Part 1 Part 2

I have added one video clip to Part 3 and two video clips to Part 4

The Poison Path and Fatal Fronds


While I was in England, M. was Web-searching and turned up the Duchess of Northumberland’s “poison garden,” which I would like to see today. Part of a much larger garden complex that is under construction but still attracting busloads of garden-loving Brits, it has gotten a lot of press.

In a recent article, The Guardian, <sarcasm > official organ of the nanny state </sarcasm>, gets hyperbolic about the terribly dangerous plants. Protect the children! Fence off the catnip!

“Evil-looking flowers,” Caroline? Imagine a potato flower. Imagine it pale yellow with dark brown veins. OK? A plant can be a traditional entheogen without being “evil-looking.” Ah well, she has to promote the product.

Of course, people visit exhibition gardens to get ideas. If, for instance, the duchess gets official approval to grow coca (and being a young, media-savvy duchess she might well get it), others might well think, “I could plant some of that between the rhododendrons.”

LEFT: “Evil-looking” henbane blossom.

Who knows what else adventurous British gardeners might be tempted to try growing.

I have long assumed that some very discreet growers in mild North American climates have brought Mama Coca north of the Mexican border. How useful for that long hike in the Sierra Nevada! Unlike refined cocaine, the natural plant has been used for centuries, it has nutritional value, etc.–all this is in the writing of ethnobotanists like the late Richard Schultes or Wade Davis.

(I owe the phrase “poison path” to Dale Pendell.)

Now here is a ‘Pagan survival’

Is Alexander the Great’s body actually in Venice? In the current issue of History Today, historian Andrew Chugg makes the case that the mummified body of “St. Mark” treasured in Venice might actually be that of the world-conqueror Alexander (356-323 BCE). (Article available online, registration required.) It’s all timed for the movie, of course.