Anglican Priest Decides Pagans are ‘Connected’

Via The Wild Hunt, a story of another Anglican priest with an attraction to Druidism.

I’m actually a priest of the Church of England – but with a difference. Though I’m still in “holy orders”, I now work full time as a magician, writer and retreat leader. I’ve been described as a “priest at the edge”. My latest book, The Path of the Blue Raven, describes my own encounters with the Pagan traditions of this land and what great treasures I’ve learned from them.

He probably will not end up losing his day job, unlike his American counterpart William Melnyk.

I don’t think anyone in the Church of England cares that much. The hierarchy is probably just happy to see signs of life. Or even compulsory parish archery practice.

How I Spent My Summer Solstice

Some people just cannot handle the solstice. (The Telegraph, UK)

It wasn’t this bad. On Sunday M. and I went up to Salida, Colorado, to catch the last day of FIBArk, the whitewater boating festival, watching competitors come down the frothing Arkansas River as we drove upstream.

Our main interest was in the Crazy River Dogs event, which we have managed to attend for three of the last four years.

In this photo, the brown dog will be pursuing the aspen pole at upper left as it bobs through a rapid in the downtown Salida kayakers’ water park.

A "river dog" leaps into the Arkansas River after a flying aspen stick.

FIBArk, like the solsticial doings at Stonehenge—I found the first picture in this slide show—marks our beginning of high summer.

To me the quarter days of solstices and equinoxes are “outer” festivals. They should be celebrated with public festivities, whether those festivities are capital-P Pagan or not. Food booths in the park, paddle-flailing kayakers, swimming dogs, the Sun beating down—it’s all good.

The cross-quarter days are for magic.

Teens, Vampires, and Seventeen magazine

If I were still teaching magazine writing, I would be sending students to this blog (which I found on Rod Dreher’s blog).

What a great feature-writing idea, albeit in blog form. (Which all goes to show how publishing is changing, &c. &c., and I am glad not to have to be the one to explain it all.)

In essence, high-school senior Jamie Kelles is attempting to live her life according to the dictates of Seventeen magazine—and blogging about it at The Seventeen Magazine Project.

At one point she realizes that a majority of the mag’s “hot guys of summer” are “associated with a vampire franchise.”

Must be super weird for devoted Seventeen readers when they finally follows all the tips, achieve the perfect tan and “healthy” sun-kissed glow, and then realizes that the ultimate Hot Guy of Summer is just a sexed-up, long-haired version a of pale, nocturnal Xbox gamer .

And then there is more about the senior prom, &c. &c.

If you want more on the literary history of vampires, Michael Sims assesses it  in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

So, wondering how I would find a new angle on vampire stories, I said yes. Anthologizing is a dusty sport, half antique hunting and half literary gossipfest, and I love it. I went home and prowled my shelves and realized how many of the Victorian-era stories I had already read. Why, here’s that pasty-faced bastard Lord Ruthven, by Byron’s doctor and hanger-on, John Polidori, and so obviously based upon Byron himself. Here is Théophile Gautier’s crazy priest, in love with a vampire courtesan and wrestling with his naughty soul. And there were many stories I hadn’t read before—gay vampires, child vampires, even an invisible vampire.

Is Your Teen Involved in Shamanism?

I’ve been out in the woods the last few days, so meanwhile, here’s something on the worrisome increase in teen shamanism.

Your dog could be a shaman’s helper too.

Video Gaming and Lucid Dreaming

Some researchers think that playing video games may help dreamers to have and control lucid dreams more ably.

The first study suggested that people who frequently played video games were more likely to report lucid dreams, observer dreams where they viewed themselves from outside their bodies, and dream control that allowed people to actively influence or change their dream worlds – qualities suggestive of watching or controlling the action of a video-game character.

. . . .

Virtual reality simulators have already been used to help PTSD patients gradually adjust to the threatening situations that plague their waking and sleeping thoughts. If [Jayne] Gackenbach’s hunch is correct, perhaps video games could also help relieve the need for nightmares.

As I recall, Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist credited with inventing the term “virtual reality,” once said that he had hoped that VR technology would be used to give people practice in navigating after-death states of consciousness, what the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls the bardo states.

But that was not what the market wanted, apparently.

Wicca: ‘Terrifying’ but ‘Unobtrusive’

Toward the end of her interview today on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, Samantha Bee of The Daily Show describes being raised by a Wiccan mother whose ceremonies were “terrifying,” even though the presence of the religion was “unobtrusive.”

Well, no one expects comediennes to be logical.

What is funny is hearing interviewer Terry Gross fumble around with the W-word.

You are not going to get a discussion of children and the Craft on that show because Gross is so uncomfortable with the topic–in fact, she would see it as “off-topic.” (It’s her program, after all.)

If you listen, it’s toward the end of the segment, after Bee describes her pubescent crush on Jesus, courtesy of her Catholic school.

The Infrared Signature of Ghosts

Over at my other blog,  I have been posting examples of wildlife photos taken with game cameras (a/k/a scout cameras or camera traps).

Seeking to learn more about how their passive infrared (PIR) detectors work, I was browsing the Web and ended up with South Jersey Ghost Research.

Apparently, PIR motion sensors can be used for ghost-hunting. Here is a tutorial, using the term loosely.

For instance, their diagram makes no sense. An animal as small as a mouse can trip a camera. I have seen it happen. Squirrels definitely will do so. And as for cats, what is in the lower right corner of the PIR-activated camera photo on this page at the Ghosthunter Store site?

Nevertheless, the Ghosthunter Store site confidently proclaims, “When a PIR Motion Sensor detects movement in an area where there isn’t anything visible moving, you have a major unexplainable paranormal event.”

(Unless something did move but was not captured due to digital shutter lag, which happens all the time, particularly in less-fancy cameras.)

Except … I thought that ghosts traditionally were associated with unexplained cold spots in buildings. When did they start emitting infrared radiation?

Clearly, I am not up-to-date on twenty-first century ghost-hunting.

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.