Category Archives: Uncategorized

Tarot Thoughts — And Eden Gray’s Surprising Story

I decided to get more serious about Tarot after all these years. Maybe some day people will see me as a wise old man, but I will need some props – 78 of them, to be precise.

I actually learned to use the I Ching in a superficial bohemian way before I encountered the Tarot, The former probably matches the last year of high school, when I was being educated in these things by a 20-year-old from North Beach (San Francisco), who became a sort of honorary big sister, and when all “alternative” spiritual practices came from the East.1

I finally touched Tarot cards as a college freshman, eventually buying my own pack, which given the options of the time was of course the “Rider Tarot” (today better called the Rider-Waite-Smith deck), from Samuel Weiser, Inc. It came with the obligatory “little white book,” but of course a student soon wants more. The most accessible how-to book at the time was Eden Gray’s The Tarot Revealed, which was matched with that deck. She included a section on Tarot meditation, but essentially this was a bigger, better version of the little white book.

That name “Eden Gray” sounded like a pseudonym through: an unusual first name balanced with a plain English last name. I did not think much about it; I wanted the “woo,” not the history. My wish list included reading in a night club, and I did it — once — it went OK but I was not asked back. A slow midweek night, what can I say? And then other things like grad school got in the way.

Mary K. Greer, the grande dame of American Tarot, wrote a short piece about Eden Gray in 2008 (they knew each other). As Priscilla Pardridge she was the good-lookingl daughter of a well-off Chicago businessman. Born in 1901, she defied Daddy’s wishes and ran off to the bright lights of Broadway. She was a reasonably successful actress on the stage, in radio, and a few movies,2 before taking a metaphysical turn in the middle age. (You may have heard that narrative before.)

Mary Greer writes,

Eden Gray ran a bookstore and publishing company called “Inspiration House,” one of the few places where a person could buy tarot cards and take tarot classes in the late 1950s and ’60s. Her customers complained that the available books were not easy to understand, so she spent weekends in the country coming up with a more accessible way of approaching the cards.

Read the rest at Greer’s blog: “Eden Gray’s Fool’s Journey.“

Time passed, and I bought some other books too, getting more interested in the history of the cards. But when my paperback copy of The Tarot Revealed wore out, I bought another one, just out of loyalty/

  1. In another timeline, she was probably my first lover, but not in this one. ↩︎
  2. Eden Gray was in one movie with Ronald Reagan, where they shared their interest in astrology, says Mary Greer in the linked article. ↩︎

Communitas Populi Romani, a New Roman Pagan Group

Luca Fizzarotti, center, pours water on hands during a ritual with the Communitas Populi Romani, Feb. 10, 2024, near the Forum in Rome. (RNS photo/Claire Giangravè)

Luca Fizzarotti, center, pours water on hands during a ritual with the Communitas Populi Romani, Feb. 10, 2024, near the Forum in Rome. (RNS photo/Claire Giangravè)

Religious News Service notices Communitas Populi Romani, a Pagan group organized in 2013.

In the beginning, the group focused on reenactments and history, but it slowly shifted toward becoming an officially recognized religious group. There are 20 or so members, said Donatella Ertola, who joined the group in 2015 and now organizes meetings three or four times a month in the places that are closest to the original temples spread across Rome.

“We all believe in the gods, we make rituals at home, we have devotion temples at home, we have our priests and officiants,” she told RNS, adding that this is a “niche community that has been growing recently.”

But I had to laugh at this: “When I met her, she said, ‘I am pagan and vegan,’ and I thought ‘Great! I am celiac!’” said Pieri, who works as a sound technician.

Because what is the real religion of today? Diet. And however your therapist describes you in categories of the DSM-5, or its Italian equivalent.

Still I like that they are trying to reactivate old sacred places while simultaneously not feeling the need to dress up like the ancestors.

‘Paganism and Its Others’ — A New Special Issue of The Pomegranate

“Paganism and Its Others, a double issue that has been in the works for rather a long time, is finally published, including, among other things, discussion of Pagan-identified units on both sides of the Ukraine invasion and also perhaps the definitive (so far) article on Czech Pagan black metal music.

Here is the introduction by guest editor Michael Strmiska (free download).

You will find links to all the articles here.

But they are expensive, you say. You do have choices. Are you at a university with a religious studies program? If you are on the faculty, suggest a Pomegranate subscription to your library, and all the students will get online access. If you are not a professor, try to persuade a professor to recommend it to the library. Or use interlibrary loan; you should be able to that online nowadays.

If you visit a publicly supported college or university, you may still have interlibrary loan privileges as a “community member.” And even small public libraries are plugged into networks with access to all kinds of materials. Just ask. You might be surprised.

Finally, the online article preview will provide info about the author’s whereabouts. Universities have online directories in most cases. Sometimes a polite email explaining your interest in someone’s article might just get you a PDF.

What Does ‘Pagan Persistence’ Look Like?

For more than a century, scholars and Pagans (who are sometimes the same people) have debated the persistence — or not — of Pagan ideas and practices into the Chritian era. This is the question that Robin Douglas and Francis Young examine in Paganism Persisting: A History of European Paganisms since Antiquity.

Reviewer Ethan Doyle White writes in Reading Religion:

“Trying to escape the binary between the “hermeneutic of survival” and the “hermeneutic of concoction” that have historically dominated discussions on the topic, Douglas and Young outline a ‘hermeneutic of persistence,’ maintaining that “elements of paganism continued to exist in post-classical European society, constantly ready to be revived and reanimated” (2). Even while pre-Christian religions themselves essentially became extinct in most of Europe, images and ideas from those traditions persevered, allowing them to be adopted and reutilized by later individuals, some of whom considered themselves Christian, and others who were actively seeking replacements for Christianity.”

Get your library to order it or buy some expensive English electrons.

YouTube Episode Explores Pagan Music

Slovak religion scholar Michal Puchovský’s new YouTube channel, 15 Grams of Religion, offers a new video on “What Makes Pagan Music Pagan?”

Not long ago, Puchovsky published a paper in The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, on the Pagan musician and teacher Žiarislav, titled “Actually, I’m Pagan Thanks to Music: The Role of Žiarislav’s Music in the Life of Modern Pagans in Slovakia,” which was based on his master’s thesis.

Žiarislav has his own YouTube channel, and here is maybe his best-known music video.

Have a Happy All-These-Things Festival Weekend!

(image by Grok 3, which was having trouble with “Feliz” and “Cinco”)

The Power and Sorrow of Gododdin

Two things arrived together in a package from Amazon: a new Bluetooth mouse, currently in use, and leading Welsh poet Gillian Clarke’s new version of Y Gododdin, titled The Gododdin: Lament for the Fallen.

I first encountered the poem in my early twenties — was it while shelving books in the college library, being puzzled by the Welsh title, and taking it off the shelf? Or a little later?

I had read some of the classics of heroic literature: the Iliad of course, Beowulf in my Old English class, “The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel” and other Irish tales, the Arthurian stories — this was different.

There was no narrative. Something had happened, something heroic but disastrous. A force of three hundred or so post-Roman British cavalry (armor, flowing cloaks, no stirrups, Christian), probably accompanied by foot soldiers — maybe PIctish allies — attacked a larger Saxon/English force (Heathen) at a river ford in what is now northern Yorkshire. Almost all them died in three (four?) days of fighting, even while cutting deep into the larger force.

This happened in the late sixth century, when what is now Britain was a patchwork of kingdoms. “Gododdin” is the name of a tribe, with the “dd” pronounced as “th.”

The work is attributed to the famous Celtic British poet Aneirin, written with a “strict pattern of alliteration, syllabic stress and rhyme . . . an aide-memoir for listeners to hold the poem, recite and pass it on” (viii). It’s impossible to replicate that in English, hence the challenge for translators. Think of it as a garland of flowers, each one named for an individual warrior, a pair, or a trio.1 Here is one:

Cadfannan

Before the cattle rose in the east, he raced to war,
his soldiers drilled, shield-shatterer.
Weapons rang before the bellowing herd,
belligerent Beli, border guard,

gold-torqued ox, mounted, grizzled warrior,
bone-headed boar at the dangerous border;
‘Lord save us who calls us to heaven,’
he roared, raising his javelin,

Cadfannan, praised soldier,
no doubting he trod armies under.

Or of one of the survivors, Cibno, the poet says

Cibno, wordless when war was done,
took communion on his return.

More than shields were shattered. Yet why do we care?

In 2007, I wrote a post titled “Mars and Venus Are in Love.” It was partly a response to a then-new book, A Terrible Love of War, by James Hillman (1926–2011), a psychologist in the lineage of Carl Jung, famous for titling another of his books We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy–And the World’s Getting Worse. Hillman’s “archtypal psychology” is far-reaching, and it spurns a lot of pop psychology clichés, like the whole idea of “growth“:

Hillman, with his profound intellect, disarming charm and a suffer-no-fools-gladly attitude has shaken up all that they were sure about (note-taking, diagnosing, medicating, dream work, the importance of cure) and takes on politics, architecture, soul-making and other topics that therapists thought were outside of their purview.

For all his often cap-A Archaic attitudes, however, Hillman was a man of Modernity, of the World War II generation, and like many he no doubt asked, “Why do we still have wars?” His book on war tries to answer the question, yet I felt in reading it that he was frustrated that there was no easy answer. In the end — back to polytheism — it more or less comes down to “We have war because Aphrodite desires Ares.”

As another of his readers asked, “What if Aphrodite were akin to Pan? What if she valued, not war, but Ares himself, a man-god, a relationship, a lover, yes, a lover, not a warrior?“

I have enormous respect for Hillman, although his path is arduous. Like some Witches, he suggests that a “soul” is not something you are born with, but something that you build through your life and works.

But sometimes I wonder if the answer to the war question is even more chthonic than “Venus Loves Mars.” Maybe it is simply that Earth needs blood. Humans need blood poetry, “a rousing rhyme for a bright-clad band.”

My Thoughts on Pagan Studies, in Podcast Form

In February I was interviewed by Robin Douglas, an independent scholar in London who has published in various places, including The Pomegranate, and is the co-author of a new book, Paganism Persisting: A History of European Paganisms since Antiquity.1

So you can hear a sort of scratchy-voiced me (winter respiratory crap) talking about the field and some of its background. Religion Off the Beaten Track is carried by a number of the podcast sites, including Apple podcasts and Spotify.

I have been editing an issue of Pomegranate on Eastern European Paganism, and a lot of the writing from that area reminds me Anglosphere Pagan studies in the 1990s–2000s. It’s what I call “scouting,” which is the first step in writing about any new religious movement: Who are they? How many of them are there? Where did they come from? Are they friendly?

And then once you have done that, the fun begins. Challenge the accepted notions, like whether contemporary Paganism(s) are the “fastest-growing religion.” Examine the interaction of magical religion and the fashion industry. It’s all wide open.

  1. Sadly, even the Kindle version is made from very expensive English electrons. Publisher’s site here. ↩︎

We Love Trees, and We Live with Their Bodies

A masticator (forestry machines) pulls a pine trunk. A bucket truck is in the background.

A forestry “masticator,” which mulches small trees and large branches, is here used to pull a ponderosa pine trunk off a hillside.

On Thursday, February 27th, M and I went on a city shopping trip, returning mid-afternoon. I heard a chainsaw running and thought it was a neighbor cutting road. Then another saw coughed to life, and another. Three sawyers in red hardhats were working in the pines between our house and the county road.

They worked for the electric co-op whose lines cross our property on the way to the neighbors. Those power poles were erected in the mid-1960s, I assume, when this land changed from scrubby, low-value ranch land to exurban homesites. A photo from our porch taken in the 1970s gives a clear view of another neighboring home with just little pine trees coming up. Now they are not so little.

A pine fell. “Those trees are living beings!” M cried. And they are. But we were standing on wooden floors in a wooden house that is partly heated with wood, for all that I seek out dead trees (victims of mountain pine beetle + fungus) whenever I can for firewood.

The crew was back on Friday. M. took the dog on a longish walk in the national forest while I drove a temporarily incapacitated friend on a series of errands. When I came back the tracks of a masticator ran here and there, that being a machine that “eats” branches, small trees, and stumps and leaves behind a coarse shredded mulch. I know someone who operates a masticator for a private forestry outfit, quickly thinning dense conifers to reduce fire risk around ski areas and mountain mansions.1

The foreman knew that we burned wood—almost everyone around here does—and he had the sawyers cutting logs into rounds and leaving them piled here and there. So fewer trees, but probably three cords of wood, at least.2

M. went off Saturday to see a friend. I stayed home.

Those fresh-cut white stumps. I took some whiskey and honey around to the bigger ones, left offerings, and chatted a little with them. On Sunday I started consolidating some piles, just to keep track of them. The wood is wet and heavy.

The crew returned on Monday, cut some more. On Tuesday a climber went up into the highest pine, probably more than 100 feet tall, with a hand saw to cut a “window” through the limbs. That tree is not coming down, I told the foreman. He agreed.

How do I react? Which “me” is reacting?

The forester’s son?. He automatically wants to thin the pines and to select the straightest, strongest trees for survival.

The sometime wildland firefighter? He’s happy to see fewer trees within 40 yards of the house and is also happy with the thinning. He wants to get cut out yet more small stuff.

The exurban homeowner? He is OK with some thinning, but hates to lose any visual barrier around between house and road and house and neighbors. He wants to sit on the porch and see nothing but green, which is his wife’s feeling too.

The Pagan-animist? Just thanking the trees. The oldest were probably from around 1940. Most of this forest is post-1960s, produced by taking off the cows and keeping wildfire out of a foothills subdivision.

This land then has not always looked this way. In the future it may well look different too. Right now, I step outside grateful to be here on this day.

  1. They also can “treat” the debris left from clear-cutting, instead of building labor-intensive “slash piles” and then burning them when the weather is right. ↩︎
  2. A “cord” is a stack of firewood 4 x 4 x 8 feet. Some firewood sellers may not live up to that though. ↩︎

A ‘Cookbook’ for Tarot

When I was in college and learning to cook, I looked at a lot of cookbooks — books owned by my friends who were “foodies” avant la lettre. But the trouble with cookbooks is that they were one self-contained recipe after another.

“What I need,” I thought, “was a ‘process’ cookbook. It would say something like, ‘Here is What Makes a Cream Soup.’ And then it would offer suggestions on how you could make a cream soup with mushrooms or mourning doves — or whatever.” Instead of just giving This Recipe and then That Recipe.

Years later, I did encounter such a cookbook, but I am here not to talk about it but about Rhyd Widlermuth’s A People’s Guide to Tarot: A Primer for Everyone, which to my mind does much the same thing.

Wildermuth has taken a sort of “process” approach that many authors do not. He begins with the “inner logic” or grammar of the Tarot, its cycles and its narratives. And he notes how the aces, twos, threes, fours, etc. of each suit represent similar stages in the world of that suit, each being one of the four archetypal element

Sixes are really nice cards, primarily because they speak to the period of growth and the success that comes after we face and resolve the crisis of the fives.

The esoteric meaning of the sevens is that the represent the introduction of the spiritual or external into the six earthly planes. A simpler way of putting this is that they’re what happens when an unknown complicates everything that we thought we knew.

And then he offers a page of text about each card, much like the “little white books” that come with most decks, or like any number of guidebooks, but more approachable than many of those.

The thing is, I like the messiness of the Tarot. I like that fact that it combines an Indo-European four-element system with with a Renaissance symbology (the major Arcana) that speaks of the subtle survival of Pagan elements in the 15th–16th centuries when when they were preserved by masquerade—or LARPing if you prefer. (For more on that, read Joscelyn Godwin’s The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance. )

Golden Dawn-style magicians who tried to hammer and pry the cards into congruence with the Hebrew alphabet or some other system just did violence to the Tarot, which is motherless and fatherless and owes no deference to anyone. Maybe in that sense it is “the people’s.”