A Ritual Against Hitler That Really Happened?

Via the Pagan Newswire Collective (should I just have a dateline with “PNC” in it?) comes this link to a witchcraft ritual reportedly performed against Adolf Hilter and the Nazi regime in Maryland in January 1941, which is almost a year before the United States officially declared war.

It was  inspired by William Seabrook’s Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today, originally published a few months before—Seabrook himself is in the photos.

In other words, this is not the Wiccan religion nor any variation thereof but witchcraft in the purely magic-working sense.

Having once worked briefly for one of the old-school, cigar-chomping big-city “press agents,” I immediately wonder if the whole thing was not a collaboration between some publicist and the photographer. In other words, was there media involvement from the beginning? So often, things that seemed to have “just happened” in fact did not.

Second, whether contrived or not, this magical working is better sourced than the more famous Lammas 1940 working supposedly performed by British witches. It was during the summer of 1940 when German invasion of southern England was imminent, until the German High Command canceled the invasion.

That Lammas ritual was fictionalized in Katherine Kurz’s Lammas Night. It was described in Gerald Gardner’s 1954 book Witchcraft Today, in which he coyly describes it as being performed by “witches” but does not say if he was there. (Although he was Wicca’s chief founder, his pose in the book is that of an ethnographer/historian, not a participant.)

They met, raised the great cone of power and directed the the thought at Hitler’s brain: “You cannot cross the sea,” “You cannot cross the sea,” “Not able to come,” “Not able to come.” Just as their great-grandfathers had done to Boney [Napoleon Boneparte, 1804] and their remoter forefathers had done to the Spanish Armada” [in 1588] (104).

The problem is, the only knowledge that we have of the 1940 is Gardner’s say-so. All accounts of it trace back to him. My old friend Evan John Jones was skeptical that more than half a dozen people participated, but I am more skeptical. I think that it is equally likely that Gardner, who served in the Home Guard (before moving inland away from the coast) and wrote letters to newspapers advocating desperate resistance to the expected invasion, described the ritual as something that should have happened.

It is  more attested that Dion Fortune’s ceremonial magic group (and possibly others) were trying to affect the course of the war by magical means.

Paranthropology newsletter

Paranthropology is the “Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal.” From the website:

The first issue of a new newsletter entitled “Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal” is set to be released this July. While the main emphasis of the journal is on anthropological approaches, it will also branch out into other disciplines – psychology, parapsychology, sociology, folklore, history – as a means to explore the way in which these theoretical methodologies interact and shed light on the paranormal.

Download here by clicking the cover image.

San Francisco, Market Street, 1905

A few months before the great San Francisco earthquake and fire, someone mounted an early movie camera on a street car and filmed as the car rolled down Market Street toward the Ferry Building.

Pretty much everything in this movie was destroyed on April 18-19, 1906. It’s a lost world.

I find this movie to be almost hypnotic. The policeman in his helmet … lots of free-range kids about … oh my god, they’re going to hit that horse … no, they didn’t… there goes Martin Eden himself, crossing the street with his manuscript.

…

Part of the same movie is here, but with period music of the early 1900s. Seems less elegiac and more long-ago.

Departed Pagan Elders

On the home page of the Green Egg (now free for download), see a list of “departed Pagan pioneers, founders, and elders.”

I do not think that Dorothy Clutterbuck belongs there, however. She was the unwitting victim of Gerald Gardner’s Gemini sense of humor, I think. But aside from her, these pioneers deserve to be remembered.

The Horror! The Horror!

At The Witching Hour, Peg surveys some lists of best Halloween films.

For pagan-themed horror films, or those including witches, at any rate, you can’t beat The Wicker Man, The Craft, Practical Magic (Griffin Dunne, 1998), The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968), The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968), and The Dunwich Horror (Daniel Haller, 1970).

I would not exactly call Rosemary’s Baby Pagan-with-a-capital-P, but it is still wonderfully chilling as it moves from innocence to realization.

And what about The Call of Cthulhu?

Brewer Reconsiders Witches’ Wit Label

I stood in Cheers Liquor Mart, a supermarket of things alcoholic in Colorado Springs, last Wednesday wondering if I should try a bottle of Witches’ Wit beer.

The “controversial” Witches’ Wit beer, that is, with the witch-burning scene on the label. The brewery had defended the design, and even the artist commented on one blog, in essence, “How dare you insult my artistic vision?! If you could see the painting full size, you would understand.” (Can’t find the link—will add it if I do.)  But of course, it’s bottle-label size.

“We have been accused of inspiring violence against women, and we have been compared to the violence in Darfur,” said Sage Osterfeld, a spokesman for Port Brewing. “It has run the gamut from people saying politely, ‘This is offensive to pagans,’ to people saying we are responsible for all that is wrong in the world.”

Now this tempest in a beer glass has even reached The New York Times. Bowing to the pressure campaign started by Vicki Noble, the brewery will have a contest to choose a new label.

Is the design “hate imagery” against today’s Pagan Witches? Honestly, I don’t think so.  And if it is, it is nothing to do with the modern religion of Pagan Witchcraft in its various forms. (If you want to argue that it is anti-women, go ahead.)

When it comes to the word “witch,” we want it both ways—safe and edgy. As the Dutch scholar Léon van Gulik writes in a paper that will appear in the forthcoming issue of The Pomegranate,

The acquired taste of Paganism is rationalized by upholding a self-image that perpetuates a tension with the secular world without, and sometimes even the non-initiated world within. This tension can for instance be observed in the clinging to the term “witch” in Wiccan circles, the meaning of which clearly differs between insiders—and outsiders.

There in the aisle at Cheers, however, I decided not to reinforce the current label imagery of Witch’s Wit. Because right next to it was another beer with a folk-Catholic-themed label: Maudite (“the damned one”) Belgian-style ale from Quebec. I acquired a taste for Maudite when in Montréal about a year ago, but had not seen any in a Colorado store until now, so into the shopping cart it went.

UPDATE: No, apparently they are going to consider changing the label.

The Most ‘Snarkalicious’ Antiphon

I was going to post Mistress Elvira’s video response to the Christine O’Donnell “I’m not a witch. I’m you” video, but Apuleius at Egregores has a much better round-up, so go watch it there. (Other video responses were corralled at The Wild Hunt a few days back.)

Synchronistically, I was just checking something about the original Apuleius for a book proposal that I am writing. Yes, with the American Academy of Religion annual meeting only a week away, I suddenly feel impelled to show up with something.

Nikki Bado, my co-editor in the Equinox Pagan Studies book series, and I will be meeting with at least one author and one co-editor of an edited collection (not an “anthology,” properly, since it is all or mostly new material).

Spiritual Tourism Drops in Sedona

An only slightly snarky article (it is the New York Times, after all) reports on a decline in “spiritual tourism” in Sedona, Arizona..

Local New Agers seem divided as to whether the economy or the James Arthur Ray sweat lodge deaths are more to blame.

After all the sweat lodge deaths “could have happened anywhere.”

“It was a very unfortunate and sad situation that could have happened anywhere,” said Janelle Sparkman, president of the Sedona Metaphysical Spiritual Association, who attributes the woes that New Age practitioners are experiencing to a lack of disposable income for spiritual needs and not what happened that awful afternoon. “It was not indicative of Sedona or Sedona’s practitioners at all.”

But they happened in oversold Sedona, which has been touristy for much of its existence.

My mother and stepfather moved there in the 1970s. She was teaching at Northern Arizona University, but he had retired and claimed that he could not handle the altitude of Flagstaff (though he was from Colorado), so they lived in Sedona as a compromise.

At that time, Sedona was mostly about art galleries and giving kitschy names to the big rock formations. There was one called Snoopy (after the Peanuts comic strip dog), no less. Young idealist that I was, I found it disgusting. As a newly come-home  Pagan, I was not impressed by the desert chapel either when they hauled me out to look at it.

I had not yet developed the ability to appreciate the touristy stuff in a hip and ironic way!

So between that and some family matters that I will skip over, I was unimpressed by Sedona. When the talk about earth vortices and spiritual power points began, all that I could think of was a rock called Snoopy.

Giving Animal Sacrifice a Bad Name

You know that I am all for polytheism, and I say “All honor to Durga,” but isn’t this a bit much?

The Los Angeles Times reports that more than 40,000 people, many of whom were inebriated, took their sacrificial goats to the Tildiha village temple in Bihar state to pray to the goddess Durga on the last day of the Navratri festival.

“People were vying with each other to get their goats sacrificed first, and they had a verbal duel with the butcher,” Banka district spokesman Gupdeshwar Kumar told the paper.

In the ancient Greco-Roman world, people—at least urban people—often ate red meat only in the context of a religious ritual. James Davidson discussed this matter in Courtesans & Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens.

What is important is that the omission of fish [from the Iliad] helped to construct an opposition between the meat of pigs, sheep and cattle, all of which had to be sacrificed before it could be eaten, and fish, which was quite free of such structures, an item for private, secular consumption, as and when desired. In an important sense, fish-consumption was simply not taken as seriously as other kinds of carnivorousness.

Wikipedia’s entry on hecatomb (sacrifice of one hundred animals) quotes the Homeric passage about what sounds like one big cookout.

Get Right with Tlaloc

On a recent trip to look at some Anasazi / Ancestral Puebloan ruins in northeast Arizona, I took Craig Childs’ book House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest as my guide book.

Driving and backpacking from southwest Colorado down into Sonora, Mexico, over a period of years, Childs interviews archaeologists, walks trails, and examines ruins to try to begin to construct a narrative history of what might have happened in the Southwest between the 11th and 15th centuries CE.

A god’s presence lurks throughout the book but is not revealed until the latter parts. That god is Tlaloc (his Aztec name, but he is cross-cultural), the god of rain,  whose cult he calls “the oldest recognizable religious complex in the Americas.” (But might not some hunters’ gods be older?)

In essence Tlaloc is a rain god and has long been the focus of mountaintop and cave offerings and sacrifices …. Both the symbolic and the practical aspects of Tlaloc religion are very similar to those of the Pueblo katsina religion still practiced in the Southwest (459).

This “pan-American rain god” is still acknowledged in the United States. Climbing a mountain in one of the isolated “sky island” ranges of southeastern Arizona, Childs notes, “Caves throughout the Sky Islands are stashed with wooden katsinas and painted offerings. Hanks of human hair are hung in natural subterranean passages, and precious stones are positioned around springs” (364-5).

His is a religion “centered on the mechanics of water,” the spiritual expression of the hydrological cycle.

Here where we track thunderstorm cells on the NOAA radar via the Web, wishing them to veer north or south and pass over our house, where we monitor the creek levels day by day, water is serious business. (In my newspaper days, I referred to the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District as “the secret government.”  Who needs the Freemasons, Communists, or Opus Dei?  None of them control the water.)

Tlaloc needs a local shrine, and I know just the place, about thirty minutes’ hike from the back door. It will do for a start.