Pagans Protest at the Daily Mail (UK)

As many readers may know—especially those who wander over here from The Wild Hunt—the Druid Network in the UK recently received official recognition as a charity, something similar to getting federal 501(c)3 tax status in the United States.

The process they went through was described in greater detail by Alison Shaffer, a guest poster at The Wild Hunt.

Francesca, an American living in London, puts a different face on Paganism at the Daily Mail protest. Photo: Mani Navasothy

The news prompted a snarky column by one Melanie Phillips at the Daily Mail, Britain’s second-largest newspaper, titled, “Druids as an official religion?”

Will someone please tell me this is all a joke. Until now, Druids have been regarded indulgently as a curious remnant of Britain’s ancient past, a bunch of eccentrics who annually dress up in strange robes at Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice.

Of course there was an online petition, which has been or will soon be delivered to the Daily Mail. But last week a few Pagans carried to the protest directly to the newspaper’s offices.

More links here about the petition and what happened.

“The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock”

A new biography of Ida C. Craddock, late 19th-century practitioner of esoteric religion and “sexologist,” discussed at the Religion in American History blog.

Veronica Lake for Halloween

The Australian blog Sexy Witch has featured some promotional materials from the 1942  movie I Married a Witch lately.

It starred Veronica Lake, who filled the “perky petite blonde” slot in several “screwball comedies” of the 1940s, together with banker-turned-actor Fredric March as the descendant of her 17th-century persecutor.  Internet Movie Database has more about it.

I saw it years ago, was thinking along the lines of “Let’s rent it for Halloween,” and discovered that Netflix does not have it.

Apparently I rented it in the 1990s from another mail-order video-rental company that no longer exists, but which had a large library of off-beat, foreign, vintage, and “art” movies.

So we will watch Sullivan’s Travels instead.

UPDATE: “Why You Should Watch Classic Films.”

Prayer-candle Experiments?

At Egregores, an overview of the prayer-candle industry: “First of all, the mass produced, low-cost nature of the Prayer Candle makes it an inviting template for experimentation. To the right kind of mind, every Prayer Candle has “your crazy idea HERE” emblazoned across it.”

Today Show Goes Silly on Halloween

It’s more than silly to Lenore Skenazy, who calls it the “outrage of the week.”

She is the feisty author and blogger at Free-Range Kids. Anyone who has any contact with kids under 12 ought to be reading her.

Imagine if the Today Show guidelines had been in place when Charles Schulz wrote, “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” The Peanuts gang would be inside at a “safe” party organized by grown-ups, with various adults warning them about eating too much candy, wearing loose costumes (these can make you trip!) and wearing tight costumes (these can cut off your air supply before you know it and God knows how many kids have died of tight-costumitis!), and everything else, including running, skipping, laughing (you could choke!) and wearing costumes that scare the other kids. Because nothing even the teensiest bit frightening should ever happen to kids at all. Even on Halloween.

I don’t even have kids of my own, but I read her regularly. And I was able to share this with her last month and get a Tweet in return.

Survey on Pagan Elders

Here’s another survey, part of research being done by Aline O’Brien, president of the Cherry Hill Seminary board of directors, “exploring the concept of eldership in contemporary Paganism.”

Two Surveys on Pagans and Politics

A Pagan professor friend, Michael Strmiska, is researching political attitudes among American Pagans and Heathens.

He has created two brief surveys on Survey Monkey and invites to you take one of them from the appropriate category:

If you follow an Asatru or related path, take this survey.

If you follow a different Pagan path, such as Wicca or Druidism, take this survey.

The results should end up in a paper eventually, and I will report them when I can.

Need to Put a Little Zip into Your Initiations?

Try the giant human centipede. As the man said,

Do you wish to separate the jolly good fellows from the dour sour pusses from those who seek to ASCEND TO THEIR SIDE DEGREES — but you suffer from lack of imagination when it comes to constructing elaborate hazing rituals and DEVICES?

For those times when a dark room lit by candles is not enough.

Equinoctal Musings

According to the cosmic clock, I must have experienced the fall equinox about the time that I checked into the Trade Winds Motel in Valentine, Nebraska, last Wednesday evening.

The next day I would be driving through miles of the Sandhills, the climax prairie ecosystem, homeward bound from the annual North Dakota sharptail grouse hunt.

From a ritual perspective, I am never quite sure what to do about the equinox. Years ago, a member of our coven suggested that the quarter days (equinoxes, solstices) were “outer” while the cross-quarter days were “inner.”

In other words, you do magic at Samhain and party at Yule. (Of course, Samhain, which falls this year the evening of November 6 in North America, has its “outer” companion, Hallowe’en.)

So, “outer.” It could be a harvest celebration. We are cleaning out the garden ahead of the first frost. Wednesday is the last pickup at our community-supported agriculture farm. We had a brief but intense mushroom harvest in August—now the greenhouse is full of drying tomatoes.

A friend posted on Facebook that the equinox made him ready to go elk hunting. I get it. But it is on Samhain that I have more than once stood shivering and watching at the edge of an aspen grove as the sun sinks away.

Home thirty-six hours after the equinox, I took the dogs for their morning walk. A Townsend’s solitaire was calling in the woods, its winter call, just one note whistled slowly again and again.

When I heard that winter call, I felt as though the gears of the cosmos had just gone “clunk.” Something had changed. And maybe that is the equinox’s outer manifestation.

A Movie That Takes Dreaming Seriously

The best part about watching movies in the little mountain town is that after driving the four-block length of Main Street, we enter the darkness, winding through hills and a long canyon, then a mile of gravel road, and then home.

It lets the movie’s spell slowly fade, which is helpful after watching Inception.

(The second-best thing is that the little theatre’s sound-system does not rattle your fillings, unlike a typical Tinseltown movie box.)

In the game of describing movies in terms of other movies, I thought of a hyperdimensional Flatliners with the Gnostic overtones of The Matrix and a faint, faint whiff of Lost Horizon.

Anne Hill, who has better access than I to first-run movies, blogged about Inception last month.

Today [unlike the ancients], we say that we “had” a dream, and believe that dreams come from within us, like a cough, a bad mood, or a stirring in our souls. We worry that dreams reveal something disturbed in our psychological makeup, or we try to explain them away by saying they are just random brain activity. “Inception’s” success as a thriller stems in part from turning the tables on our “scientific” understanding of dreams, and bringing back the more archaic fear of dream-meddling from without.

She links to Robert Waggoner, who writes on lucid dreaming—read his post, “Ten Things I Like about Inception.”

If you step outside of Plato’s physical cave and stumble into Plato’s lucid dream cave, who’s to know?

I still think that not enough teaching about the Craft talks about dreaming and its power. Even though Inception is mostly about corporate espionage, exploding cars, shoot-outs, and derring-do, I admire a movie that takes the dreaming world(s) seriously as realms that interact with this one.

Do you know if you are dreaming right now?