Tag Archives: witchcraft

1971: Witches in Bellbottoms, Talking Heads

Here is a 1971 documentary from the BBC that is supposed to be about witches. But at the time it was made, no one was making much effort to sort out the new Pagan Witches, anthropological and folkloric witches, and Satanic witches of the Church of Satan variety. So what you get is all of them! Plus talking heads — academics, clergy, exorcists . . .

Like so many of the paperback “I go among the witches” books of the time, the filmmakers interview a few of the most public Pagans, such as Doreen Valiente (who should get equal billing with Gerald Gardner in creating Wicca), Alex and Maxine Sanders, and others. But they quickly run out of interview subjects — there were not too many in Britain back then — so they start skipping around: a famous murder case with a possible (folk) witchcraft connection, desecration of graveyards, the evil grip of Satanism, and so forth, to fill up their 49 minutes.

I write about this period in Chapter 4 of Her Hidden Children: “The Playboy and the Witch: Wicca and Popular Culture.” Looking at a number of paperback books on the American scene, I created a rough spreadsheet of places visited and people interviewed. It was interesting how much overlap there was. There seemed to be a “witchcraft trail” that the writers followed — you could imagine it starting at the Warlock Shop/Magical Child store in New York City and ending at Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey’s house in San Francisco.

What is missing at this moment from the outsiders’ view is an overall sense of the new Paganism, at least until Hans Holzer’s 1972 book, The New Pagans. Even the participants themselves were just coming to the view that Wiccans, for instance, might share a Pagan outlook with Druids — the new Druids, that is. We often forget how deliberately isolated those covens were (“We can’t circle with Coven XYZ because it would mean sharing our secrets!” Really, I heard stuff like that in the 1970s.)

Serious academic study of the new Paganism(s) would not really get rolling until the 1980s. For instance, during the 1970s Robert Ellwood, Jr. at the University of Southern California was writing Alternative Altars: Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America (1979), which would offer some theoretical models applicable to the new Paganism, but he did not incorporate it into his discussion in that book.

Welcome, visitors from The Wild Hunt. Look around a bit.

(Thanks to Renna in Denver for the link.)

Excavating Witches

It was the obligatory Halloween content over at Bones Don’t Lie, but I had too much else on my plate to link to it then.

The question is, how can you tell if a buried ancient skeleton was that of a witch (in the anthropological sense)? Does the mouth full of iron nails mean something?

And by the way, what happened to the bodies of the “witches” of Salem?

Those latter unfortunate victims gave birth to such a present-day tourism boom that I am waiting for the local promoters to stage a “discovery,” as was done for King Henry II with “Arthur” and “Guinevere” at Glastonbury Abbey. (Assuming that you accept the explanation that the 12th-century “discovery” was a money-raising ploy to help rebuild the burnt abbey.)

Pentagram Pizza: Should You Print Out These Links?

pentagrampizzaItems that deserve more commentary, but are not getting it today:

• From  MIT Technology Review: When we read books on paper, do we retain more than when we read on a screen?

• Re-creating the sound of ancient musical instruments, sometimes with synthesizers.

• A review of Apocalyptic Witchcraft, from Scarlet Imprint.

• At The Journal of Hofstadr Hearth, Alfarrin rethinks the blot in terms of Neolithic and Paleolithic, Aesir and Vanir, reciprocity and sharing. With a big shout-out to Paul Shepard!

• Related issues here at “Heathens in the Military: An Interview with Josh and Cat Heath, Part One,” at the Norse Mythology Blog.

Magick and Improvisational Comedy

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?

It Makes Women into ‘Witches’

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 hair may say “I’m seductive”, but it seldom says “I have authority”.

You can be sexual or you can have authority, says the Telegraph, one of Britain’s national newspapers.

This is the same fashion argument that the New York Times made two months ago: As commenters noted there too, it’s an argument about sexuaity, and whether older women should express any.

Is there some kind of p.r. campaign going on here?

Around the Pagan Blogosphere

• 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 Dead and the idea that “There is a part of the Inner Planes, the Other World, which is called Witchdom. There you may learn much, if you can contact it. There are spells and chants, dances and music and such woods and streams as delight the hearts of witches.” That came from a “channeling” done by Doreen Valiente in the 1960s; make of it what you will.

Sarah Pike on Witchcraft and American Religion

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 media since the 1960s (Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media, 2012), I argue that reporters today rarely depict Witches as evil or satanic, even though stereotypes from the 1960s and 1970s of sexy young female Witches or cuddly cookie-baking elderly Witches-next-door still remain. In the past 25 years since I entered my first occult shop and started asking questions, the boundaries between categories like religion and magic and the differences between “folk,” “popular,” and “institutional” religion are treated with more nuance. And scholars of American religions are more likely to take traditions like Wicca seriously than they did when I was a graduate student, because Neopaganism has become firmly established across North America and formally recognized in government branches and institutions such as the military and prisons.

Read the rest.

Hogwarts for Vampires

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 magic, the other on physical training, while both try to avoid the perils of gossip, cliques, gruesome pranks, and sinister plots.

Margot Adler and I were discussing vampire books about four years ago, when her quest to read them all had passed ninety titles. Cradle-Marxist that she is, she was trying to understand the vampire craze as being somehow a critique of capitalism.

I don’t think so—and definitely not in the Young Adult classification. Check out this list of suggested titles, linked from a website of a public library near me.

It could be more work for Joseph Laycock, the go-to guy in religious studies for vampire-ology, but he has moved on to otherkin, of which more anon.

RELATED? “We are more interested in the zombie at times when as a culture we feel disempowered,” [Clemson professor Sarah] Lauro said. “And the facts are there that, when we are experiencing economic crises, the vast population is feeling disempowered. … Either playing dead themselves . . . or watching a show like ‘Walking Dead’ provides a great variety of outlets for people.”

Ghost Girls: Witchcrap or Pop Occulture Fun?

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 are three attractive girls that share a close-knit sisterhood with a decidedly macabre twist. The girls were drawn together by their penchant for the unusual, supernatural – all having supernatural abilities themselves, which set them apart from the rest of the ordinary world. The “Ghost Girls” enclave is based at a haunted old Victorian house in Southern California.

And the editor in me is screaming, “How do you base an enclave?” The “girls” themselves might be based in a haunted et cetera.  Hello, dictionary please. But with all the hours of cable programming to fill, someone will probably pick it up.

Consider it another link in the evolution of the “Hollywood Witch.”

 

Candles and the Eco-Witch

LED-light pseudo-pillar candles, with remote control.

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 have been the house with of the Sterling Cooper Draper Price advertising agency—or perhaps of its hypothetical Los Angeles branch office.

My first Craft teacher always had candles burning, and before then there had been the highly aesthetic literature professor at Reed College who held class in his home, where the walls were covered in black felt and racks of votive lights burned in every room.

And I had my altar boy days behind me—I liked candles.

When we got together, M. and I burned lots of candles: ritual candles, nightly dinner table candles, meditation candles, et cetera. But then she got religion about candles. Most of the candles you buy are petrochemical-based (parafin), and when you burn them, you are putting some unfriendly stuff into your household air.

It is kind of like running a diesel engine indoors. So for some years, we cut way back on candle-burning except during (a) electrical blackouts and (b) outdoor use.

Meanwhile, a friend gave us a big beeswax pillar candle, which is now on the dining table — kind of like this. Nice, but not cheap. Maybe that is why St. Luke’s Episcopal Church always had donors for each week’s beeswax altar candles. (The big paschal candles were probably partly parafin.)

Another friend recently tossed in some soy-based tea candles as lagniappe on an order of — wait for it —  battery-powered LED candles. (Suitable for homes with toddlers or in areas of high fire danger.) We use them indoors  in one of our many votive-candle holders.

At Natural Grocers I recently picked up a box of palm oil-based tapers. But there are environmental issues connected with palm oil plantations too. It’s another case where “green” is not as earth-friendly as you might hope.

What is an environmentally conscious Witch to do?

RELATED: A video on getting wax out of fabric.