So what better Yule gift for your loved ones than Mystic Mayan Protection Cloaks? (Link probably NSFW.)
Mojo and Materiality: 300 Goddesses
The bulk of Morning Glory Zell's goddess-image collection is in these cabinets.
After Isis Oasis and Lucky Mojo, the final stop on the pre-AAR annual meeting “Mojo and Materiality” tour was the home of Oberon and Morning Glory Zell of the Church of All Worlds.
They contribute to Pagan “materiality” through through their business, Mythic Images, which features Oberon’s and other designers’ statues, plaques, and jewelry.
But they also have a huge collection of occult and Pagan-related images and objects of their own, gathered and created over the past forty-some years.
Morning Glory uses these images in workshops on the Divine Feminine, and is prepared to discuss the stories, cultus, and relationships of each one. We did not have time for a full workshop, of course, but she gave a sort of hands-on meta-presentation about how she does them.
My only regret is that the sun had set, so we could not see the grounds and outside shrines.
Mojo & Materiality: Lucky Mojo Curio Co.
Mexican devil image, left, from Lucky Mojo. Candle from Montréal Pagan Resource Centre, both on my desk.
When the AAR met in Montreal in 2009, we not only had our first session on idolatry/materiality from a Pagan perspective, but also the Magical Mercantile Tour of Pagan and occult-related shops and meeting places.
This year’s tour revisited the concept under a slightly different name, a tribute to our second stop, the Lucky Mojo Curio Co. in Forestville, Calif. (The first stop was Isis Oasis.) The tour was made possible by Julie Epona and Morning Glory Zell of the Church of All Worlds.
Lucky Mojo employs a small staff in mail-order product sales, hoodoo lessons, and counseling. The first thing you see when walking up to the shop is a shed painted with a version of the “See Rock City” advertisement painted on barns throughout the Southeast and Lower Midwest.
The shed displays an iconic Tennessee advertisement.
The Rock City ad not only sets you up for what has been described as Lucky Mojo’s “1930s Memphis” aesthetic, but since founder Catherine Yronwode has a background in graphic-novel and comics publishing, I suspect that it might also be a reference to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.
Catherine Yronwode in her shop.
That is Lucky Mojo: ironic, postmodern, humorous—but still serious.
My other souvenir is a classic wooden-handled cardboard fan, of the type handed out by funeral parlors in the pre-air-conditioning era. One side shows a soppy portrait of Jesus as The Good Shepherd, while the other advertises the ambiguously named Missionary Independent Spiritual Church, located adjacent to the shop and office.
Interior of the "smallest church," with Catherine's partner, Nagasiva Yronwode, peering in the window, and the Good Shepherd fan and devil figure (also shown above) on the table.
It has just a small table and two chairs for card readings, etc., plus altars for placing help requests according to their elemental correspondences.
In the spirit of Hoodoo and rootwork, the “smallest church” is cheerfully casual about theological categories. As Tayannah Lee McQuillar writes in Rootwork, “[Rootwork] has no pantheon or priesthood. It refers only to a set of healing and spell practices, and the practitioner can be whatever religion they wish.”
What If Dr. Seuss Had Written . . .
. . . The Call of Cthulhu?
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.