Ægypt in Northern California: Isis Oasis

Loreon Vigné

In 1957, a young artist named Lora Vigné and her husband moved from Southern California to San Francisco.

“It was 1957, the beginning of the Beatnik era, and we fitted the description,” she writes in her memoir, The Goddess Bade Me Do It!

No poser bohemian, she was already producing commercial ceramic pieces and enamel jewelry of her own design. She opened an art-supply store in North Beach and later a gallery, the Noir Gallery, at Stockton and Sutter streets downtown. Here she is on the cover of I Am a Lover (1961), a photo book of North Beach life at the peak of the Beat era.

(Her husband, Dion, was an artist, experimental filmmaker, and a doomed lover of Miss Poppy.)

By the late 1960s she had a thriving business and owned several properties in the city. She also owned ocelots, having created a large indoor/outdoor space for them between two of her houses, houses located on Isis Street.

A shrine to Isis.

When the city outlawed keeping bigger cats, she went looking for a rural home, which turned out to be an 8.5-acre site in Geyserville, Sonoma County, that had housed a retreat center for followers of the Baha’i faith from the early twentieth century until just recently before she bought it. It came with a lodge, a commercial kitchen,  the original Victorian farmhouse, and a theatre/worship building.

With the vision of Lora, now Loreon, and fellow devotes of Isis, it became Isis Oasis.

On November 18th, the first day of the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in San Francisco, I found myself in a two-vehicle caravan around Sonoma County on what we called the “Mojo and Materiality Tour.” Isis Oasis was the first stop. I was not sure what to expect. Something embarrassingly kitschy?

Loreon (wearing the same Egyptian-style eye makeup as in her old beatnik photos) was soon drinking tea with us all. She and I swapped stories of our visits to Clonegal Castle in Ireland, home of the Fellowship of Isis.

We wandered through the buildings. It is Ægypt in the California wine country—not the fractious, Islamist Egypt of today but an Ægypt of the imagination, where Isis is still worshiped, where there are priestesses, peafowl and big-gish cats, where visitors sleep in bedrooms thematically decorated to evoke Egyptian goddesses.

(Isis Oasis also makes an appearance in Erik Davis’s coffee-table book of California religion, The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape.)

The only question, of course, will be the passing of the sistrum at some future day.

Steps to the large theater and temple.

Isis Oasis was the first stop on the tour. Now that I am home after the train journey, I will soon have more posts about the tour and the annual meeting itself.

In ‘The City’

My dogs would not fit into a backpack. They are not city dogs.

M. and I are about to leave San Francisco after the American Academy of Religion annual meeting After four and a half days of sessions and meetings and breakfast meetings and receptions and in-the-bar sessions and restaurant meals and hurried conversations in corridors ending with an exchange of business cards and a promise to be in touch, I am just brain-dead.

The Contemporary Pagan Studies Group is looking healthy though.

And the noise. Is there some San Francisco ordinance against using sound-absorbent materials in restaurants? Do they cause cancer? Everything seems to be so acoustically “hard” everywhere: stone and painted plaster and mirrors plus the clatter of dishes and glassware—and then you play recorded music.

Jason Pitzl-Waters has been blogging some of the sessions too, and he will be home before I am, so go there for now. Check back here on the weekend!

Pagan Baby Names Go Mainstream?

More Rowans and Sabrinas coming down the road? “Dyan,” however, is not necessarily Pagan. There was this singer-songwriter from Minnesota …

The I-word: Idolatry

Two years ago at the American Academy of Religion, we had a Pagan Studies session with “idolatry” in the title. Sessions are described by posters on easels outside the meeting rooms, and I heard a few snickers from people passing in the corridor.

Inside the room, people were talking about statues, etc., as windows on the divine. One paper compared the ritual treatment, dressing, and so on of a Madonna in a Spanish village with a goddess image in Glastonbury.

At the  Get Religion blog, which examines the journalistic treatment of religion, there was some discomfort with the way a reporter in India wrote of an “idol” of Jesus that had been vandalized. To me it seemed that the word was used merely in a technical sense, but to the blogger it seemed defamatory: “For a Western audience calling a statue of Jesus an idol is thoughtless or a deliberately provocative statement — both have meanings bellow the surface.”

But I doubt if the original article was meant to provoke, merely to describe.

Meanwhile, here is a review of a new novel with this premise: “This is a sprawaling and subversively funny satire centered around two down-on-their-luck entrepreneurs who stumble upon the idea of reviving for-profit idolatry. Selling statues of household gods to the masses, and building a neo-pagan religion around it.”

I think that this has already been done, guys. Have you looked at the Sacred Source catalog lately? “Fair-trade statuary featuring ancient deities” — looks like they are avoiding the I-word too.

(I have blogged on related topics before. See “The Street of the Idol-Makers” and “Casual Labor at the New Age Trade Show.“)

Now there is a somewhat more sophisticated, more nuanced way in which the monothesists use “idolatry.” It is when they accuse people of putting lesser goals ahead of the Ultimate Goal, as they see it.

Here is Catholic blogger Elizabeth Scalia writing at First Things:

But I wonder if it is not the first and greatest sin named by Yahweh and given to Moses, that is most at fault: the sin of idolatry. We have loved ourselves so well; we have denied ourselves nothing and placed too much of what we love between ourselves and God; we have cherished mere things or other people; over-identified with ideas or ideologies and made an afterthought of God, who will not be mocked.

You can find essentially the same rhetoric from Muslims, merely substituting “Allah” for where Scalia, a few paragraphs down, writes “the Triune God.”

Here “idolatry” is not about whether material things can embody a divine presence, but it has become a metaphor for misplaced philosophical or spiritual priorities. I have less quarrel with that. But I still mistrust the implied devaluation of “the material”—not in the sense of a $4,000 wristwatch, but in the sense of the Earth around us.

No Snacks? No Class!

George Parrott, psychology professor at Sacramento State University, cancels class because no one remembered to bring snacks.

Among the no doubt brain-numbing subjects taught by Prof. Parrott is is “Sports achievement and prediction.”  Is that for coaches, sportswriters, or for bookies—and who needs to go to university to learn it?

Extra Esotericism at the AAR

Here is where I will be in a week, if all goes well: the Phoenix Rising Academy’s “additional meeting ” on esotericism in the academy at the AAR meeting in San Francisco.

Seven or eight years ago, it was the Pagan Studies people holding our own meeting because we did not official program status. We got that status in 2005, and for a time had an “additional meeting” as well for grad-student presentations and other forms of discussion, but that is not happening this year.

There is a Western Esotericism program unit now, so it is interesting that there is enough additional material for this meeting too.

Another “Celtic” Illusion Shattered

This may come as a shock to some, but the Asterix the Gaul comics do not present an accurate view of the ancient Gaulish people, according to a new museum exhibit in Paris.

No dolmen-moving, etc.

Next thing, they will be telling us that Vikings did not wear horned helmets like Hägar the Horrible.

Shocking.

On Becoming a Killer of Zombies

At the Pop Theology blog, another attempt to figure out the zombie craze, via review of a new collection of essays, Triumph of the Walking Dead.

It is based on the AMC series, but goes far beyond it.

From a pop theology perspective, the most interesting essays cover morality, meaning(lessness), personhood, race and gender, and redemption. In his essay, “Take Me to Your Leader,” Jonathan Maberry examines post-zombie morality through Rick’s position of leadership among the survivors. The most fitting conclusion, it seems, is to abandon all concerns of (im)morality because existence in this world requires amorality. Craig Fischer‘s “Meaninglessness: Cause and Desire in The Birds, Shaun of the Dead, and The Walking Dead,” offers a brief but fairly brilliant comparison of the three. Examining the “cause ” of the apocalyptic events of each film and the comic book series sheds informative light on the others. While they may all be related, in varying ways, to sexual desire, they could just as easily all be meaningless. Fischer makes a great case for Hitchcock’s The Birds as a “proto-zombie film” (69).

I still lean somewhat to the idea I was playing with last month, that “zombie apocalypse” is a why to mentally prepare yourself for life-or-death situations without having to consider killing your fellow humans. You always here about how a fighter must at least temporarily dehumanize the enemy—what is more “de-human” than a zombie?

Not *My* Ancient Pagan Survival

All right, you have put away the skulls, bats, and dishes for your ancestors, all the while humming, “It’s the Most Magickal Time of the Year.”

It’s time to think about Yule! And to ponder, is this custom an ancient Pagan survival? (Slightly NSFW.)

As for your pre-Christian traditional Yule tree, Obama wants to tax it.  Suddenly embarrassed, the White House has “delayed” the tax.

A Pagan Chaplain at Broadmoor?

And maybe a Rasta too. The BBC reports that the famous high-security psychiatric hospital is “responding to requests.”

A hospital spokesperson said: “Spirituality and religious worship are an important element in supporting recovery from mental health problems.”

Colorado readers of this blog, I apologize if the headline puzzled you. Not that Broadmoor.

Via A Bad Witch’s Blog.