The End of World War 2 in Honolulu

VJ Day, Honolulu Hawaii, August 14, 1945 from Richard Sullivan on Vimeo. (The sound track was obviously added later—those 1940s home movie cameras did not record sound.)

Catharine, my stepmother, was there, I think. After her first husband, a Navy ensign, died when his ship was torpedoed in 1942,  she ended up in Hawaii working as some general’s secretary.

I wish she were still alive that I could show it to her and get her reaction. She had just bought her first computer a few months before she died in 2003.

That is all.

Donna Gardner a Wiccan? Unlikely.

In the current issue of The Cauldron, a writer known only as “Tof” tells us that Donna Gardner, wife of Gerald, chief founder of Wicca, was lying when she said that she was not involved in the Craft.

First, though, Tof tells us, “In all this [biographical summary] there is not evidence of Donna Gardner’s involvement, even occasionally, in the witchcraft practised by her husband.”

And then s/he proceeds to “find” some. Examples:

1.  Donna was supposed to have been photographed “in witch vestments and posing with a ceremonial sword in her hand.”

But we all know that that Gerald Gardner’s idea of “witch vestments” for women consisted of a necklace and nothing else.

Thanks to Philip Heselton’s legwork, we know that Gardner was involved in other esoteric and magical groups in the 1940s before the founding of Wicca circa 1950. Could not these vestments pertain to one of them?

2. Donna apparently “knew some details of Wica [Gardner’s spelling] rituals at a time when they were known only to insiders.” But the time period is not given, and there is no source for this statement—it is just asserted.

3. There is allegedly a high priestess’s symbol on her gravestone. That is interesting, if true, but no photographic proof is offered.

Sloppy speculation like this article is just one more reason why I wish that someone would write a critical biography of Gardner—I would love to see it in Equinox’s Pagan Studies series, which I co-edit.

Aidan Kelly, who started the biographical ball rolling back in 1991 with Crafting the Art of Magic, assumed that Gardner and Edith Woodford-Grimes (“Dafo”) were lovers and that she was, at least for a time, the first high priestess of Wicca in the early 1950s. (I have some concerns with the Wikipedia entry, but at least it has her photo.)

She certainly seemed to be on the scene much more than Donna did. And new religious movements often start under messy circumstances that later followers try to clean up and sanitize.

In which I am not the expert after all

A few days ago, a university student in Australia copied me on an email to an American Heathen reconstructionist:

Hail! I sent the following to [name] seeking advice; perhaps you could offer some advice as well?

It was about wishing to set up an Australian branch of the group, but the writer had some reservations:

I am indelibly Australian, and there are qualitative differences between the psycho-spiritual make-up of Australian people – not to mention distinct political and social predispositions – and that of other folk from far away. Perhaps to a singular degree in the Australian case, these different requirements and tendencies are an outgrowth of not only our historical experience, similar in some senses to America, but our unique climate and geography as well

All interesting questions. There seems to be some tension in reconstructionist groups between adapting to the present and Doing It Like The Ancestors Did, not to mention Dressing Like The Ancestors.

True, sometimes we go backwards in order to go forwards. (Ernst Kris, a Freudian psychologist, wrote of “regression in service of the ego”—a non-rational dip into the unconscious in the service of creativity.)  The weakness of the reconstructionist impulse is the need to find an ancient warrant or precedent for everything.

That way lies stagnation.

I was more impressed by a comment someone once made on the Julian Society listserv, which can be paraphrased as follows: How would the old Pagan religion(s) look if it/they never had been interrupted by Christianity?

Now there is a thought experiment!

If you look at ancient Rome, there was no one Pagan religion—and there were non-theistic philosophical schools, like the Epicureans, as well.  But you had everything from the simplest household cults to the most abstractly intellectual Platonic teaching. What would have prevailed?

My thought is that there would not be the distinctions we make between “religion,” “art,” “science,” and so forth, with people declaring allegiance to one but not the other, but rather much more interpenetration of all these realms.

I suggested that thought experiment to the Australian. He wrote back:

I do appreciate your response; however, I mixed your email with someone else’s during the sending process.

So much for being an international expert. Instead, you get this blog post.

Don’t Teach My Kid Greek Mythology

From a report on the school-board meeting from our county’s weekly newspaper:

Sheri Shreve was upset that fourth graders were learning Greek mythology and seeing pictures she felt were inappropriate for children.

Yes, your fourth-grader might end up at a liberal arts college like Bryn Mawr and join the Pagan Club.

Fate Magazine Headed for the Other Side

I am preparing myself for life without Fate magazine.

Since 1948, the  digest-sized monthly—later a bi-monthly—has been a reliable (at least in the publishing sense) source for ghost stories, UFO reports, speculative archaeology, Fortean news, and other manifestations of the weird and unexpected.

All viewpoints were welcomed, so articles often completely contradicted each other.

Often the most interesting stories came as reports from the readers of paranormal experiences, encounters of the recently dead, and so forth. There was a certain sameness to these, but perhaps that meant they were true—or else it meant that everyone followed the same cultural template. Or both.

Llewellyn Publications bought Fate in 1988, perhaps hoping to make it what Gnostica, their earlier house organ, had been in the late 1970s—a mix of articles with ads for Llewellyn books.

Some of the long-time readers complained then that Fate was becoming too Wiccan. That is one thing you would learn from all those reader reports: quite a few Americans follow a home-grown metaphysical religion that happily calls itself Christian while including ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, and all the rest.

When Llewellyn pulled the plug, ownership passed to a former employee, Phyllis Galde, who kept Fate going, although eventually reducing publishing frequency to bi-monthly.

This spring, it occurred to me that the “bi-monthy” had turned into semi-annually. It seemed like a long time since an issue had arrived in my mail box.

More time went by, and then I got an email saying that the Sept.-Oct. 2009, Nov.-Dec. 2009, and Jan.-Feb. 2010 issues were available—as PDF files. Eventually they put something on the web site too.

So I had the choice of reading them on the screen or printing them at my own expense if I wanted to read them in bed before turning out the light in hopes of a dream of Bigfoot. 😉

The magazine death pool is so close you can smell the fetid waters.

Fate’s blog keeps putting up new entries, but discussion of the magazine’s own fate is oddly missing.

The economics must be rough. Perhaps this is a case of flat advertising revenues versus rising printing and mailing costs.

PDF files are not the answer, and a Web version of the magazine would have to be re-thought from the ground up.

Then there is the whole question of shorter attention spans and lower reading comprehension on the Web (which is why so many blog comments are so stupid, particularly on the political blogs—people just read one phrase and start ranting before digesting the whole little essay).

But if Fate goes under, popular metaphysical religion will have lost an enduring voice.

Time Is Flowing By

Canada geese and goslings on the Arkansas River, Fremont County, Colorado

Canada geese and goslings on the Arkansas River

I have new blog posts in the works, but I had to take off Tuesday and go fishing in the Arkansas River above Cañon City, where these Canada geese were parading up and down the bank, the parents seeming to ponder whether the goslings could handle the current yet. (Of course they could—in the slacker water.)

Imagined ‘Witches’ Affected by Ukrainian Law

Jason Pitzl-Waters recently mentioned a new moral panic in Ukraine that includes laws against psychics and divination.

Gambling and artistic depictions of nudity are also affected.

The Pagan connection to the latter? Igor Gaidai, a Ukrainian photographer whose compositions claim to invoke pre-Christian times, is the reporter’s example of who the crackdown is affecting, as noted last July.

In his photo studio and gallery in the center of the Ukrainian capital, he displays his various projects, including one called “Saman,” which hearkens back to a “pre-Christian era” when “witches” roamed the earth. In it, naked women are depicted in various poses with brooms, as if in mid-flight, and are meant to glorify “the power of feminine energy, beauty and wisdom.” His main display window also exhibits four young nude mothers, partially covered by their equally nude infants.

(Link may be NSFW, depending. Via Sexy Witch.)

Passing of Feraferia’s Svetlana

Fred and Svetlana of Feraferia in the 1960s.

Fred and Svetlana of Feraferia in the 1960s.

Svetlana Butryn, wife of Fred Adams, founder of the small but influential West Coast Pagan group Feraferia, passed away last Thursday, May 6, after a long period of ill health. She was 75.

Fred himself died in 2008.

Feraferia had a “only in Southern California” quality to it, arising partly from the neo-Romantic ethos of raw foods, sunshine, and nudism that took root there as long ago as the 1890s and early 1900s, the era of the “nature boys,” mixed with a looking back to classical Greek religion as a model for its path.

Stuff [blank] Culture Likes

First there was Stuff [bourgeois bohemian] White People Like, which produced various imitations, such as Stuff Black People Like and Don’t Like.

And in the religion field, Stuff Christian Culture Likes, by a blogging PK—and now its imitator, Stuff Pagan Culture Likes.

And there is Stuff Jewish Young Adults Like.

Surely this trend is not exhausted? What do Parsis like? But it looks like only the first produced a book deal.

(Hat tip:  Plutonica.)

An African Investigates Her Own Traditional Religion

It’s not that I have nothing to blog about, more that I have too much, and if I tried to write it all, nothing else will get done.

All that aside, I suggest you pop over to Egregores and read an interesting piece by a Christian urban West African (Ghananian) journalist who decides to investigate her own country’s traditional religion.

Her attitudes and observations are, to me, an interesting mix of the culturally familiar and the unfamiliar.

So when a new acquaintance invited me to the meeting of traditional believers this weekend, this is what went through my mind… I cannot say for sure that African traditional religion is evil. I cannot say for sure that it is good. I know that I have been preconditioned to consider it evil. I also know that I do not know. I would like to find out, but I’m scared of the whole affair. My fear is an irrational fear. It is a fear of the unknown. I wanted to confront that fear. Because every time I confront my fears, I grow. Plus I was curious.
So I went.

It’s part of a series of posts on African traditional religions in conflict with Christianity and Islam that you can find at the blog—scroll to the bottom of the post for more links.