Witches Keeping Silent

One coven that I used to circle with when visiting their city was big on the old Magicians’ Pyramid: To Know, To Will, To Dare, To Keep Silent.

Sarah Lawless, the “Witch of Forest Grove,” thinks that there should be more silence, writing in a post called “Oversharing Witches“:

I was taught not to share. Specifically, I was taught not to share who my familiar spirits are, to not share the exact names of my deities, not to share what my unique abilities are, not to share recent spells I’ve performed, and to only talk about my tradition when asked (especially by elders) and never say more than the absolute least I possibly can. You’re probably laughing at me because I write a witchcraft blog that’s all about sharing knowledge, practices, and experiences… but hold that laughter. Have you ever seen me state exactly what all of my animal and plant familiars are? Have you ever seen me list the names of all the ancestors I work with? Have you ever seen me state exactly which traditions I trained in? You may have even noticed that I tend to use nicknames and epithets for the deities I work with rather than their actual names. I tend to skirt around a lot of things about myself. This blog is more of a giant Sarah iceberg and you’re only ever seeing the tip.

I see her point, although what I see in too many Craft blogs is just recycling of other people’s stuff instead of sharing secrets!

Mothman, John Keel, and Weirdness

Io9,com offers a reflection by on the “Mothman Prophecies,” both the 1975 book by John Keel and the subsequent 2002 movie with Richard Gere, which has little in common except the title and infamous bridge collapse.

Grabianowski’s article is a level-headed examination of the “flap” of 1967, about which I can say little—I wasn’t there. Maybe it did all start with the sudden, startling flight of a barn owl, viewed by people keyed up by the excitement of social transgression and (probably) anticipated sexual activity.

(The “seven feet tall” part is possible too—I’ve mistaken a jackrabbit for a deer when one suddenly jumped up in front of me at dusk—your eyes can play tricks.)

John Keel’s subsequent book went way beyond those particular events, describing how even his act of trying to report on them put him into a sort of “twilight zone”  of inexplicable happenings.

Grabianowski is leery of its reporting:

Somehow, in five years, Keel went from a plain denial of any Mothman-Silver Bridge connection to one of the most elaborate and bizarre cryptid tales ever told, with himself as a central character. The clues to what sparked the change come, again, from the published letters of Keel and [Gray] Barker. To put it bluntly, in much of their paranormal and UFO writing they were “taking the piss.” As Barker put it in a 1970 letter, “the kookie books are about all that I can sell these days. I lost the ‘sensible’ subscribers…long ago, so I get a kick out of letting it reflect the utter mental illness of the field.” Lurid tales sold a hell of a lot better than dry investigations that didn’t find much of anything, and there was always some portion of the public gullible enough to swallow any story whole. So that was how they made their living.

I did not read Keel’s Mothman Prophecies until the early 1980s. (It is still in print.) When I did, I was surprised at the “twilight zone” stuff, because my own youthful adventures in investigating certain phenomena had put me into a similar zone, where, among other things, just being in “the field” caused people to act strangely, to turn on each other, become wildly paranoid, etc. No drugs involved.

So I had to respect the book for that aspect—whatever “Mothman” was, paranormal investigations can leave you with one foot on “the other side,” in a strange psychological space.

Here is a YouTube video of Keel speaking about Mothman, etc.

Who You Calling ‘Digressive’?

A review from the July 11-18, 2011, issue of The New Yorker. The Waterstons, in particular, should get more credit as early Pagan-friendly (or Pagan-inspiring) musicians.

Starting Over as a Virgin (Or Else)

When I was a teenager, I remember hearing some slightly older female friends cracking up over the line, “Let’s go to California and start over again as virgins.”

Only it should be “Toronto,” not “California,” the reason being that you do not want your Muslim husband to beat you.

Lina, 20, is originally from Afghanistan and isn’t surprised the surgery is now available in Canada.

“My friend heard that it was going on in Saudi Arabia because people fear their husbands,” she said.

“If she doesn’t get it done, then they are going to find out that she wasn’t pure on the wedding night, but if she does get the surgery done, they could find out that she wasn’t pure and got this surgery in secret, which would be very bad.”

File under “Desert Monotheisms.”

Theology Spam—Who Knew?

You hear the word “spam” and you probably think about Viagra, “genuine” Rolex watches, and corrupt West African government officials with bags of money to share.

But do you think about theology? I did not until yesterday, when I received a message from “Terry Denson” with the subject line “A Pagan Writer’s Blog.” Since that happens to be the subtitle of this the blog, I expected the content to be something about Paganism.

Instead, “Terry Denson” announced that he or she writes “articles for [name of site], a website dedicated to providing students with the information and tools needed in order to purse their theology degree.”

The website links mainly to obscure schools you never heard of, like Grand Canyon University, “a private Christian university.”

And then “Terry Denson” wants me to link to his or her article about creation versus evolution.

If there is one contentious topic that I have never heard Pagans discuss, it is “creation versus evolution.” All this “science versus religion” stuff seems like a non-issue in Pagandom, at least in my experience.

In yours?

 

This Is My Independence Day Blog Post, Sort Of

I don’t have an original Independence Day blog post. I am still in recovery from yesterday.

So in keeping with recent posts on learning the gods of your region, go and read “Conversations with Columbia.”

Hoodoo You Read?

Hoodoo & Conjure Quarterly is a new journal on Southern magic and folklore, and you can buy it on Amazon.com (follow link above).

Contents of the first issue:

Denise Alvarado: “The Origin of the Root,” “Dirt Dauber Nests,” “Conjure Artist profile: The Georgia Mojo Man,” “A Goetic Ritual: Magickal Doll to Raise the Ghost of a Loved One”

Sharon Marino: “Bat’s Blood,” “Secrets of Sex Magick: Explore Your Sexual Fantasies with the Help of the Guede,” “St. Martha Dominadora Love Domination Candle.”

Matthew Venus: “What is Real Hoodoo?” “Bottle Spell for Prosperity”

Madrina Angelique: “Buying Cemetery Dirt”

Alyne Pustanio: “Haunted New Orleans Folklore: The Devil Baby of New Orleans: Fact or Fiction?”

Chad Balthazar, “Planetary Magick and the Venus Love Tub Lamp”

Papa Curtis, “A Short Look at Witchcraft and Self-Defense in the Diaspora”

Carolina Dean: “Shoe and Foot-Track Magick”

Dorothy Morrison,: “The Real Dirt on Visiting the Dead”

Aaron Leitch: “The Return of Psalm Magick and the Mixed Qabalah”

H. Byron Ballard: “Cove-Witches and Curanderas: Traditional Healers and Magic-Women in Modern Appalachia”

And there are several formulas for magickal oils and powders, a little lagniappe (that’s Cajun for a little something extra) magick, a free conjure doll baby template, and a historical text related to Voodoo in New Orleans by Lafcadio Hearn.

Maybe these are people who don’t worry about whether there are pentagrams on the tombstone—they are there for the graveyard dirt.

‘The Magical Battle of Britain’

“The Battle of Britain” usually refers to the German bombing campaign during the summer of 1940, planned to lead into a seaborne invasion across the English Channel.

Gerald Gardner claimed that the “Southern Coven”  performed a ritual in the New Forest at Lammas 1940 against the threatened invasion. Based on my reading of the evidence, or lack thereof, I don’t think that this ritual took place as he described it.

Nevertheless, telling about the ritual fifteen years after it supposedly happened was part of his claim that Wicca was an indigenous British religion  that could repel the “foreign invader,” Christianity. (And if alive today, Gardner would probably add Islam as well to the list of invaders.)

Whereas we have only Gardner’s after-the-fact claim that the Lammas 1940 ritual occurred, another esoteric group was indeed fighting Nazi Germany on the astral plane—Dion Fortune’s Fraternity of the Inner Light.

“The Magical Battle of Britain,” by Dave Evans and David Sutton, is available at The Fortean Times.

The authors describe how Fortune’s group conceived of their magical battle, designed to strengthen British will power and stop the invasion, even if its effects are hard to quantify compared to those of the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force, and the Army.

Some of her followers believe that the workings ruined her health, leading to her death a few years later.

And they quote a well-known scholar of esotericsm who comes to this conclusion:

Possibly such tales of magical warfare are simply one of the ways, as esoteric scholar Professor Wouter Hanegraaff describes, in “which magic­ians seek to legitimate magic to the wider society as well as to themselves” in the modern era.


Pour Me Another

 

Old-school brewing ingredients (Smithsonian)

Researchers create old brews. Really old brews.

The truest alcohol enthusiasts will try almost anything to conjure the libations of old. They’ll slaughter goats to fashion fresh wineskins, so the vintage takes on an authentically gamey taste. They’ll brew beer in dung-tempered pottery or boil it by dropping in hot rocks. The Anchor Steam Brewery, in San Francisco, once cribbed ingredients from a 4,000-year-old hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumerian beer goddess.

And here I am drinking a bottle of Heineken—it seems so bland without the  mugwort. Do those Amsterdam brewers have a beer goddess?

“I keep telling people that beer is more important than armies when it comes to understanding people.”

Online Egyptological Magazine

Egyptological is a free online magazine devoted to ancient Egypt.

It offers “papers, articles, brief items, reviews and reports, all discussing the rich world of Ancient Egypt.”

One current article discusses how civil unrest in Egypt right now leads to (surprise!) more looting of archaeological sites.