Tag Archives: Wicca

The Mystery of Wicca Lake

No, that’s not the title of another of Llewellyn Publications’ ventures into “occult” fiction. It’s a question that has been bothering me since my return from British Columbia.

That area of SE British Columbia was settled in the 1890s, first by miners. Ninety years later–1983–the provincial government set 49,893 hectares aside as Valhalla Provincial Park, which includes the Devil’s Range, Lucifer Peak, the Devil’s Couch (another mountain), and other unfortunate names. (Why the Christian Devil gets so many interesting geological features named after him is a paper that I have always wanted to write.)

Other features have names more in keeping with the “Valhalla” theme, which also undoubtedly explains the naming of Thor’s Pizza in nearby Nelson.

Hiking into the Devil’s Range, M. and I came across Wicca Lake, which our otherwise authoritative hiking guide referred to merely as “a tiny lake on Drinnon Pass.” Wicca Lake? Devil’s Range? OK, that’s unfortunate, but the scenery is great: here is one professional photographer’s version.

It’s funny how the memory of how places got their names often vanishes rapidly, within a generation or two, unless they were named after famous people or obvious physical characteristics. I have asked one Canadian Wiccan with a wide geographical knowledge of B.C.’s mining districts if she knows, but so far, no response. I will post one if I get one; otherwise, if you have a solid answer, post a comment.

A delayed reaction to Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s NPR pieces

Two weeks after blogging about it, I finally listened to National Public Radio reporter Barbara Badley Hagerty’s interview with the (mostly) teenaged Wiccans.

A thought struck me: Is Wicca still the only religion that requires a rebuttal? In this base, Bradley Hagerty goes to some teens at some big evangelical church in Colorado Springs for quotes about falling into Satan’s clutches and that sort of thing.

Elsewhere in her series, someone outside that church discussed the Pentacostal Toronto Blessing, but it was still within an overall Christian context.

One non-rebuttal voice was the manager of Celebration, the leading New Age (for lack of a better term) bookstore in Colorado Springs. Twenty years ago, when Celebration was much smaller, that job was filled by the notorious MC herself. Originally, the woman who started Celebration, Coreen Toll, was highly skeptical about Paganism, being at the time pretty much of a “white light” New Ager herself.

To her credit, Toll, who started quite small (one shelf of astrology books and a rack of imported India-print dresses in one room of her house) and built the store up from there, later developed an apprecation of Paganism in its various forms (Ka-ching Ka-ching).

More Wiccan History

“The Founding Fathers of Wicca,” a graduate-school paper by Susan Young, currently at the University of Alberta, explores Aleister Crowley’s liturgical and other influence on Gardnerian Wicca. It was published in Axis Mundi: A Student Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, whose article index is here. The paper is in downloadable PDF format, about 180 KB.

Paganism on National Public Radio

This week, National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” program has been running a series on new religious movements, including Paganism. The initial segment, which includes an interview with J. Gordon Melton of the Institute for the Study of American Religion, can be heard online here.

If I am able to hear Thursday’s segment on Wicca live, it will be picked up from KRCC’s repeater somewhere on the highway around Wagon Mound, New Mexico.

That’s right, the notorious M.C. and I are going on the road for a few days. Blogging will resume around the 19th.

A Voice in the Forest

Here is something that you won’t read about in The Spiral Dance or most of the other how-to-be-a-witch books. It’s rare, but it happens: covens that claim mediumistic communication with their Craft ancestors. I’ve heard it claimed for followers of Robert Cochrane and small press in Massachusetts and presented as spiritual communication with Alex Sanders (1926?-1988). Sanders was one the leading figures in Britain’s Craft scene in the 1960s and 1970s–a bigger publicity hound than Gerald Gardner, even, but still, according to people who knew him, an effective and daring magician.

As far as publishers were concerned, one of his best assets was his then-wife and high priestess Maxine (b. 1946). The camera loved Maxine. And Maxine, although she broke with Alex in the 1970s, apparently endorses this book: “The contact described within the book was so obviously true it gave me goose bumps.”

This book’s author, Jimahl di Fiosa of Boston, says that the communication began in 1998, ten years after Sanders’ death, and continues to the present day. A new, expanded edition of A Voice in the Forest Is to be published in April 2004.

I never knew Sanders, but I did know several of his students. I can’t say whether the communications are genuine or not, but I’m more interested in the idea of them as yet another example of the constant discourse about Wiccan lineage.

More on ‘Bast’

A reliable source tells me that as of two years ago, Edghill was heading an ‘ultra-conservative’ Gardnerian coven. Maybe that outcome fits better than my hypothesis of disillusionment with the contemporary Wiccan scene. Or maybe it’s the same thing.

The ‘Bast’ Mysteries

I recently bought Bell, Book, and Murder, the 3-in-1 edition of Rosemary Edghill’s “Bast” mysteries: three short mystery novels set in 1990s Manhattan whose protagonist is Karen Hightower (Craft name “Bast”), a thirty-something graphic designer. Her design business is called High Tor Graphics, both a pun on her name and a tribute to a famous SF novel.

While the mysteries are not always tightly plotted and leave lots of “Now why did he do that?” questions in the reader’s mind, Edghill has a firm grasp on the Pagan scene, with its coded language and social nuances.

I read the first two in the series soon after they came out, but I never got around to the last one, Bowl of Night (1996). Although I’m a long way from New York City, I thought that I recognized a few people that I knew and some places too, thinly disguised. Was that Judy Harrow? John Yohalem? Bast’s coven, Changing–does that sound a bit like “Proteus”?

Reading all three in quick succession, though, made me think they they charted Edghill’s gradual disenchantment with the Pagan scene. By the end of the trilogy, Bast drifting away from the rest of Changing coven and trying out in her mind the possibilities for finding a new high priest (she’s Gardnerian) and forming her own. But I would bet that if there were a fourth book, it would show Bast as a solitary, more emotionally disconnected from the world of gossipy metaphysical bookstores, festivals, and other Pagan dress-up events.

In the first book, Bast says, “The day I discovered that all Witches don’t believe in magic was a great shock to me.” Now I do not know Rosemary Edghill at all. I have never read her fantasy novels nor her romance novels. But I wonder if someone who writes fantasy was hoping to find a certain magic in Wicca, but she did not find it–and so she moved on.

Evan John Jones 1936-2003

On the 2nd, Catherine Bundock, John’s daughter, notified me that he had died at home in Brighton (Sussex) on Sunday evening. I met John via letter and telephone in the early 1990s, when at the suggestion of Carl Weschcke, president of Llewellyn Publications, he contributed a chapter to my anthology Witchcraft and Shamanism, the third book in Llewellyn’s Witchcraft Todayseries.

We did not meet in person until 1999, after we had worked together on Sacred Mask, Sacred Dance, a book which is about 80 percent John and 20 percent mine, at most.

I’ll miss John’s wry take on politics (Pagan and secular), Army life and life in general. A veteran of British campaigns of the 1950s in Malaysia and Suez, he retained a fascination for certain now-obsolete vehicles, such as the M2 halftrack, and I had just located a historic halftracks poster that I had been planning to send him as a gift.

There is a room for him in the Castle.

You can read John’s chapter on Robert Cochrane, magister of the Clan of Tubal Cain, online.Sacred Mask, Sacred Dance is out of print but still available second-hand through such sources as Advanced Book Exchange.

LEFT: John Jones, left, and Robert Cochrane, in about 1965.

Dave and Ann Finnin of the Ancient Keltic Church contributed this recollection.

On Sunday, Evan John Jones, author of Witchcraft: A Tradition Renewed and Masks of Tubal Cain exited this earth plane at the age of 67. While we were deeply saddened, we were not surprised. John had been suffering for the last ten-or-so years from emphysema and would wheeze while he puffed on the hand-rolled cigarettes he refused to give up. I suspect that he passed suddenly because the red-eared Hounds of Annwyn had to sneak up on him when he wasn’t looking. They wouldn’t have gotten him any other way.

We first met John Jones in the summer of 1982. He was a short, stocky Welshman with a pugnacious square jaw and flaming red hair who lived with his wife and three children in a neat little house on the outskirts of Brighton. We had contacted him through a mutual friend with question regarding the writings of Roy Bowers (a/k/a Robert Cochrane). John had been in Roy’s group during the1960s and for the next twenty years (plus three visits and countless letters and phone calls), he gave us enough information and insight so that we could continue to explore Roy’s system on our own.There is no way we can adequately express our gratitude to the man who was our teacher and guide for over two decades. What he taught us was priceless and we will miss him.

Dave & Ann Finnin

Clan of Tubal Cain

Wiccan autobiography, lack of

I have been reading High Priestess: The Life & Times of Patricia Crowther, which, admittedly, is a reworking and revision of two earlier autobiographical books by this English Wiccan priestess, Witch Blood! and One Witch’s World.

Why do American Witches never write their memoirs? The nearest I have seen is Margot Adler’s Heretic’s Heart: A Journey through Spirit and Revolution, and even it is more about her “Red diaper baby” childhood and adolescence, dealing with the Craft only toward the end. Are we afraid of being put down for being “self-centered”? I can think of some people whose memoirs I would love to read, frankly.

Pokemon the Pagan

Here is a scholarly controversy that I had been unware of: whether there is a conflict between the teachings of Wicca and of Pokemon. That assumes that Pokemon has “teachings,” of course.

Meanwhile, getting ready for a workshop on traditional European entheogens next summer, I’m enjoying revisting Eliot Cowan’s Plant Spirit Medicine.

Wicca’s appeal among the young

Wicca’s Wicked Appeal among the Young

The Catholic news agency Zenit offers this interview with journalist Carlo Climati, author of a book called “Young People and Esotericism,” on the growing menace of Wicca.

Sample quote: “If one wants to succeed in atttracting a girl, one doesn’t have to buy an amulet but give her a bunch of flowers.”