Tag Archives: publishing

Playing with Databases

A search of the WorldCat library database using the subject category “Witches — Fiction” turns up 1,286 hits, once children’s books have been filtered out, and specifying English-language titles. (Adding films, archival materials, sound recordings, etc., boosts the total to more than 1,500.)

The Widows of Eastwick is at the top of the list, as ranked by number of libraries holding the book. Anne Rice is heavily represented in the first listings as well.

If you have read all 1,286, let me know, and I will see that you get a prize.

This is what happens when I go looking to make an interlibrary loan request for one particular book.

Green Egg Omelette Available for Pre-order

Green Egg Omelette: An Anthology of Art and Articles from the Legendary Pagan Journal will be shipping soon and can be pre-ordered from Amazon with the link above or from the publisher.

Oberon Zell did the heavy lifting: tracking down long-lost contributors, making editorial decisions, and laying out the pages. I wrote a general introduction and shorter introductions for each chapter.

The chapters are organized thematically, with such themes as New Pagans; Old Pagans; Magick, Arts & Crafts; Gender and Sexuality; Power & Politics; and of course a Fiction chapter.

Gallimaufry with Ink and Paper

Zines live on. That was me once, even down to the hand-cranked mimeo machine many years ago. A poet friend told me — in all seriousness — that “after the revolution” I would still be able to do mimeograph reproduction with used, dirty motor oil. Of course there would be no electricity.

¶ Some people should avoid sword-swinging magic? (Via Law and Magic Blog.)

¶ Jason has that one and more witches in the news for the wrong reasons.

¶ In India, the Virgin Mary is a goddess. (Via Non-Fluffy Pagans.)

Pomegranate 9.2

I’ve been remiss in not noting the contents of the latest issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies. Videlicet:

• “The Quandary of Contemporary Pagan Archives,”
Garth Reese,

• “The Status of Witchcraft in the Modern World,” Ronald Hutton,

• “Kabbalah Recreata: Reception and Adaptation of Kabbalah in Modern Occultism,” Egil Asprem

• “Putting the Blood Back into Blót: The Revival of Animal Sacrifice in Modern Nordic Paganism,” Michael Strmiska.

And the book reviews.

Abstracts are online, and the book reviews may be downloaded in their entirety.

Gallimaufry with Bar Graphs

• Learn all about American religious affiliation from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life — until you get to us. We are in the “Other Faiths” category under (sigh) “New Age.” Notice how the Jews and Hindus score highest in education, the evangelical Protestants and JW’s lowest.

• Utra Press, the publishers of the journal Tyr now have their own web site.

• Isaac Bonewits is starting his own magick school. Jason Pitzl-Waters has the details.

After the Witch Queen Steps Down: Maxine Sanders’ Fire Child

In the 1960s, when Pagan Witchcraft started to gain widespread media attention, Maxine Sanders (b. 1948?) was one of its visible faces. A tall willowy young woman with bleached blonde hair, she was married in 1965 to Alex Sanders (1926-1988) for whom the Alexandrian tradition is named.

He was older, charming, verbal – she was photographed, his words were recorded. That’s her on the cover of my early hardback edition of Stewart Farrar’s 1971 book What Witches Do, long hair flowing, eyes downcast towards the chalice.

Now she talks — in print as opposed to classes and lectures — in a valuable autobiography, Fire Child: The Life & Magic of Maxine Sanders, ‘Witch Queen’.

The book is not what it could have been. Material is not always straight-forwardly organized, punctuation is erratic and unclear, and words usedly mistakenly (“taught” for “taut,” “vice” for “vise,” that sort of thing). I fault the publisher.

Still, this is an important book. Sanders gave her life to the Craft in a way that few have, and she admits she paid a price: two failed marriages (Sanders, in the end, preferred men), financial hardship in the early years, breast cancer, and, most of all, the hardship of being always on-call in her role as priestess.

Marriage with Alex had been rather like a working relationship. Unconsciously, we sacrificed the more personal and sharing aspects of a normal marriage.

To read Fire Child is follow a trail of ups and initiations, rituals and happenings, magical politics, festivals and and visions.

Yet it is also a frank admission of the dangers of magickal religion. Coming from a background of intense, small-group work, she is prone to opinions such as these:

The modern Craft is a victim of its own success. Its tremendous growth since the heady days of the 1960s has outstripped the availability of experienced and reputable teachers, who in former days would themselves have served an arduous apprenticeship before being judged worthy to passon the tradition – and then only to a few.

(And she admits that even in her own group that rule was not always followed.)

Witchcraft is so often perceived as a young person’s religion that it is good to read a mature priestess’s thoughts. Maxine Sander has gone through the fires – media celebrity, high-profile religious leadership, magic, suffering. Her book is valuable – “full and candid,” to quote Ronald Hutton’s cover blurb. I recommend it.

Gallimaufry: It’s Traditional

¶ When an ill-informed blogger writes that “Wicca Attempts to Control Life” on a right-wing site, commenters weigh in. The gist: (a) religion has nothing to do with politics or (b) all religions are bogus. It’s nice to see street-level libertarianism thriving.

¶ Maxine Sanders’ new autobiography Fire Child: The life & Magic of Maxine Sanders, ‘Witch Queen’ is on my to-read list. She says the first mid-1990s draft was it badly written, self-indulgent and absolute rubbish. And then she adds something that is true of all memoir-writing:

When I did start work on Fire Child there were details that were not recorded in my magical diary and should have been. However, magical life is often repetitive and would have proved boring to the reader. On reflection, the differences between memory and diary entries made fascinating personal analysis.

Update: Another reviewer discusses some inconsistencies in the book but still recommends it.

¶ Volume 3 of TYR Myth-Culture-Tradition has been published, and I am just starting to read it.

This third issue is a big one, 530 pages, with articles such as Nigel Pennick on “Weaving the Web of Wyrd,” Joscelyn Godwin on “Esotericism without religion: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials,” and Christopher McIntosh on “Iceland’s Pagan Renaissance,” plus many pages of book and music reviews. Impressive.

A Feeling of Accomplishment, Sort Of

I feel all loose and floaty, for I have just completed . . . a book review.

It was all of 1,100 words. It took me three days. That’s sad–I should be able to write 1,100 words just loosening up my fingers.

But it was of a book that I admire and for an academic journal in which I am trying to publish a longer article (not The Pomegranate but another journal.)

So it was almost like writing a response paper: “The authors make points X,Y, and Z. Which one was salient? Which sentences should I quote?” And so on.

Obviously, I cannot post the review here before it appears in the journal, but at some point maybe I can make a link from my book review page.

Gallimaufry is not a Irish Word.

¶ Dude, it’s like this secret Irish slang, you dig? So don’t be a twerp–glom onto this.

On the other hand, be careful of enthusiastic folk etymologists with a pocket dictionary and an agenda. It could just be a gimmick.

Time and Mind is a new journal of postprocessual archaeology: “The journal features scholarly work addressing cognitive aspects of cross-related disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology and psychology that can shape our understanding of archaeological sites, landscapes and pre-modern worldviews.”

¶ Blogging will be light for the next few days. I have to ride the big silver snake to Southern California and the American Academy of Religion annual meeting. Berg should have a booth there–maybe I can find the journal.

So many bloggers go to events and post pictures of exhibitor booths and shots of happy people in hotel bars. I will try to avoid that — unless I get something really good.

I will be checking out the possibility of freelance work too, which adds an extra urgency to the trip.

A Manufactured Conspiracy in Wiccan Publishing

I have started reading Aidan Kelly’s Inventing Witchcraft: A Case Study in the Creation of a New Religion, published by Thoth Publications but also available from Amazon.

In simplest terms, it’s an enlargement and reworking of Crafting the Art of Magic, Book 1, which Llewellyn published in 1991–Kelly’s study of the origins of modern Wicca, based primarily on textual criticism of various versions of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows.

Kelly published one earlier article on the BoS in my own zine, Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion, which had a run of four issues from about 1984-1986. It is sort of fun to see it referred to again. (It is available for download here.)

Because there was only Book 1 and no Book 2 back 15 years ago, a whole conspiracy theory has arisen, for example, that American Gardnerians somehow had the book suppressed. Even Thoth’s copywriters can’t resist: the back-cover copy reads, in part, “When the first edition of thisbook was released, conservative Gardnerian Witches attempted to suppress it….Even though its first printing quickly [!] sold out, the original publisher, faced with death threats and boycotts, agreed to abandon the project…”

Horse shit. Elephant dung. Monkey poop. Here are some facts:

  1. Llewellyn typically then (and now, I suppose) kept first runs short, usually under 5,000 copies. If sales were good, more copies would be ordered in similar increments. Even one of their top Wiccan authors, Scott Cunningham, was selling only in the mid-five figures at that time.

  2. Shortly after Crafting was released, I flew to Minnesota to spend a couple of days with Carl and Sandra Weschcke, who own Llewellyn, and then-acquisitions editor Nancy Mostad, discussing the series that I was editing for them and possible other projects.

On our way to dinner the first night, Carl asked me if I knew when Kelly would send the ms. for Book 2. He wanted to publish it. After thirty years in the occult publishing business, he probably treated the displeasure of his reading public less seriously than he treated Minnesota mosquitoes. Death threats indeed. Controversy is good for publishers, as Thoth is obliquely admitting by trying to manufacture some.

  1. But Kelly’s own problems at the time prevented him from ever delivering the manuscript. With no Book 2 in the pipeline, Book 1 was allowed to go out of print — as the majority of Llewellyn titles do after their first press runs. No conspiracy there, just business.

Since Amazon advertises used copies of Crafting at prices from $46 to more than $150, you get much more by buying the new book, despite the cover hype. I have some minor issues with it — I wish that it more reflected research into Wiccan origins done since the first book was written — but it is still worthwhile.

Thoth also has reprinted Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki’s The Forgotten Mage. It is a key background book in the emergence of contemporary Paganism from the milieu of early 20th-century ceremonial magic and esotericism.

UPDATE 10/25: Greetings if you came here from Wildhunt. (Thanks, Jason.) As I hope I made clear in my response to one commenter, I don’t want to turn a discussion of this dubious book marketing into a pro/con discussion about Dr. Kelly and his difficult relationship with other American Gardnerians. Don’t want to go there, OK?