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.

Put Away the Maypole …

Zombie Awaress Month Gray Ribbon campaign. . . and load all the guns, because it’s Zombie Awareness Month.

Supporters of Zombie Awareness Month wear a gray ribbon to signify the undead shadows that lurk behind our modern light of day.  From May 1 through May 31, concerned citizens take this small step to acknowledge the coming danger.

My ‘Third Law’ in Action

Over at The Juggler, Sara Adrian links to a video clip of a bunch of Scots demonstrating Clifton’s Third Law of Religion: It’s not a real religion unless it has torchlight processions.”

And remember, ritual precedes myth, not the other way around.

More Field Work from Miskatonic University

It began with the unprecedented Vermont floods of 1927 . . .and a visiting scholar’s investigation.

Check the blog and trailer of a noir-ish movie in progress based on H.P. Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness. Very well done!

Is Lovecraft the “shadow” of Zecharia Sitchin?

(Via Odious and Peculiar)

Gallimaufry with Grosbeaks

Black-headed grosbeak, evening grosbeak, downy woodpecker. Photo by Chas S. Clifton

First black-headed grosbeak of the season (left).

If it’s Beltane, why I am still splitting firewood? Usually I observe the rhythms of the “Celtic” year by turning off the furnace at Beltane and relighting it at Samhain, using just supplemental wood heat otherwise. Not this year.

But during a brief sunny interval yesterday morning, the first black-headed grosbeak of the season landed on a feeder, and I snapped a quick picture through the window. That’s a downy woodpecker on the shadowed side, and up above, facing the camera, a male evening grosbeak—they have been hanging around for a couple of months, an unusual “irruption,” as birders say.

Other stuff:

•  The Beltania music festival happens next weekend, just down the road. The weather still looks iffy. A friend on a Colorado Pagan email list said that spring weather is “manic depressive.”  My own mental image for Beltane is snow on lilac blossoms.

• I liked this quote from an interview with Lon Milo DuQuette at Patheos:

I have a new book coming out in November (from Llewellyn) titled Low Magick — It’s All in Your Head, You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is. It’s autobiographic and contains stories of magickal operations I’ve done over the years. The title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, facetiously using the term “Low Magick” to refer to any magickal operation one actual performs rather than those one just talks or argues about.

• Jonathan Ott, who gave us the world “entheogen,” had his home destroyed by fire, needs help.

• An article on depression and dreams offers this:

In the 1970s, psychologists noted that people suffering from depression also report more dreams than average. In fact, people who are clinically depressed may dream three or four times as much. The quality of REM dreams (also called “paradoxical sleep”) is different too: more intense emotions, more negative themes, more nightmares, and more unpleasant dreams, in general.

And consequently depressed people often sleep worse. It’s a vicious circle.  Processed food is also linked to depression—another vicious circle. Feel low -> eat worse, etc.

• The Pagan Newswire Collective has two new group blog projects: The Juggler, on the arts, and Warriors & Kin, about issues facing past and current Pagan military personnel. They will be added to my blogroll.

Real Estate and the Dead

My niece, a real estate agent in central Missouri, called me today with welcome news: The sale of her mother’s (my oldest sister’s) home was finally closed today, four years after my sister’s death.

It’s hard to sell a house when the real-estate market is depressed, as it has been since 2008. It is hard to sell one of the biggest houses in a economically depressed small town, no matter how well restored it is. It is hard to sell someone’s house when, perhaps, their “crossing over” was not easy.

Last winter, however, I was reading Robert Moss’s The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead: A Soul Traveler’s Guide to Death, Dying, and the Other Side, a book that I will have more to say about in a later post. (Thanks to Anne Hill for telling me about it.)

Something hit me:  As trustee and thus de facto manager of her properties, I had dealt with lawyers, tenants, ex-tenants, insurance agents, city and county government, and via my niece, the on-site manager, with contractors, inspectors, and potential buyers.

When I went back to Missouri in March 2006, I was preoccupied with tenant issues at another building, not to mention straightening out other issues that my sister’s death left unresolved.

But I forgot one thing. I was so busy inventorying the “big house’s” contents and thinking about water damage on the porch roof, etc., that I forgot to cleanse it.

Gods below, man, and you call yourself a practitioner.

This is the fourth time in my life that I have served as an executor or personal representative or trustee for someone who died. When you are the youngest kid, everyone expects you to outlive them, so they name you in their will  to clean up behind them. I have seen the same pattern in other families.

In two out of three previous cases, I received pretty definite confirmation that the deceased had made it to the Other Side successfully. (Although my stepmother and I were close, perhaps the absence of a blood tie meant that I was not on the mailing list, so to speak?)

But the message on my sister was much more ambiguous, which troubled me.

In all those previous instances, the homes of the deceased had sold relatively quickly. Of course, they were in more desirable areas—not in depressed little Missouri railroad towns.

Reading The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead, something hit me. My sister loved to restore old houses. In fact, a friend of hers once joked that she liked houses better than people. Was she still holding on to this one? Was that one reason why two or three deals on it had fallen through?

I called my niece about it. And I sent her a copy of the book, which she said brought her to tears, for she had been having her own dream-life issues with her mother. I asked her if she could arrange a cleansing.

(My niece is a sort of eclectic Jew—my family is nothing if not religiously diverse.)

She said she would get some sage or something and do it herself, for she agreed that we had been remiss not to cleanse the house.

A couple of months later, the house was under contract again. This time the deal went through. Maybe the federal government’s tax credit for homebuyers—which expires today—had something to do with April 30th being the closing day as well.

All I can say is that after we finally cleansed the house, we got a buyer.

And I am so relieved.

That Wicked Man

Aleister and Rose Crowley, 1910

Via Plutonica, a Life magazine  slideshow on Aleister Crowley and his influence on pop culture.

I had not known that Sidney Blackmer played his character, Roman Castevet,  in the occult thriller Rosemary’s Baby, partly on impressions of Crowley.

When the movie came out, I was too young to appreciate the depth of its scariness, let alone know who Crowley was. I should watch it again.

Vampires of Santa Fe

Corn plant grill work in Acequia Madre neighborhood, Santa Fe, New MexicoA week ago I walked through a snow squall on Cathedral Place in the heart of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and thought, “Santa Fe needs a vampire novel.”

I had in mind something like Anne Rice meets Jake Page meets Michael McGarrity.

It turns out that a Santa Fe-based writer, S.M. Stirling, has in fact been writing in that vein (heh).  Here is his protagonist, hanging out in the Plaza, pondering an eternal Santa Fe question—shopping or museum-ing:

A homeless man was approaching, ready to ask for a handout; leathery skin and rank scent and layers of tattered cloth. She glared at him and found the weakness—a blood-vessel in the brain ready to rupture, weakened by drugs, bad feeding, alcohol and stress from the untreated chemical imbalances that rode him more savagely than even her kind could do. She pushed. The world shifted slightly as might-be switched to is, like a breath of cold air up the spine and a tightness that went click and released around the brows. The man collapsed.

Adrienne rose and stepped by him; it would probably be minutes before someone noticed it was more than the usual unconsciousness. She’d planned on spending the afternoon at the O’Keefe Museum, or possibly shopping for jewelry, but…

Sample chapters of the book, A Taint in the Blood, are available at his Web site. Stirling seems to have a fondness for superhuman characters who, we might say, clean out the weak, which fits with the literary-vampire ethos.

(Earlier mentions of Stirling’s work here and here.)

Santa Fe might be called the New Orleans of the West, only “earthy” in an elemental sense rather than “watery.”

It caters to tourists and offers them a good time. Tourist Santa Fe, selling High Culture (art and opera) to Texans (and others) co-exists with governmental Santa Fe just hundreds of yards away—after all, it has been a provincial capital since 1608.

But underneath . . . layers and layers. Ethnic balkanization and people cherishing hatreds and triumphs that go back centuries. Martyrs and massacres.  Deep roots in the earth.