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