Tag Archives: publishing

Smile When You Say ‘Tradition,’ Partner

Last week I found in my campus mailbox the first (only?) issue of Tyr: Myth-Culture-Tradition, a new journal focusing on Asatru-Odinist-Heathen thought. It’s quite a bit like The Pomegranate started out to be for the more broadly defined Pagan community (including A-O-H), before The Pom morphed into a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. The first issue of Tyr was dated June 2002. I cannot find a web site to link to, but here is one online review. (UPDATE: Link is dead, so I removed it)

I’m always interested in what Joscelyn Godwin has today on esoteric subjects–here, he writes about the man who put the T in Tradition, Julius Evola–and on the evolution of the followers of the Indo-Europeanist Georges Dum?zil. But the trouble is, you never know when you are going to step over the edge when reading Tyr. Turn the page and someone is claiming that the his Heathen rock band’s music “resonates” with people of European origin because “DNA will out, you know.”

Uh, yeah. I once thought that that was why I was so thunderstruck the first time that I heard bagpipes playing when I was a child–my sliver of Scottish ancestry. On the other hand, I always liked blues music too–even did a blues show on my college FM station. Maybe my banks-of-the-Mississippi River ancestry is more important than DNA? Who knows? This “blood and soil” stuff so easily can be warped.

More information: Utrdisc@aol.com

Subscriptions US $16 domestic; $25 foreign (airmail)
Ultra, P.O. Box 11736, Atlanta, Georgia 30355

The Pagan cover-design dilemma (again)

Graham Harvey, my co-editor on the Paganism Reader, tells me that Routledge editors are still agonizing over a cover design. Admittedly, the one shown in the online catalog is pretty pedestrian.

It seems that there are only three choices for Pagan books.

1. A tree
2. A standing stone, as on Michael York’s Pagan Theology.
3. A Pre-Raphaelite female figure in earth tones, as favored by Kensington/Citadel and other publishers of how-to books.

We will see which one we get.

Middle Initials, part II

All a misunderstanding between Graham and the copy editor. I had signed my introductions, for example, to the Emperor Julian’s “Letter to a Pagan Priest,” with my initials. I had thought that Graham was doing the same with his; that’s a common practice with some encyclopedias, for example. But apparently he had not, so the editor was asking if it was important for me to have my initials on my entries.

Of course not, if that’s not the book style. What a commotion.

The Middle-Initial Problem

Now that The Paganism Reader (see July 10th entry) is in production with Routledge (pub. date early 2004?), the odd little queries from the copy editor are starting to come in. The latest involved my middle initial. It is all right to have it on the cover, but must I be referred to as “Chas S. Clifton” inside?

That’s an American preference, said my co-editor, the inestimable Graham Harvey.

It makes no difference to me, I responded, although I do want the “S.” on the cover because all my other writing has it. Is it really an American preference? I have no idea. But, come to think of it, I cannot think of too many British authors using middle initials.

Actually, I’ve always thought that “Chas Clifton” was not a good combination for pronouncing out loud. But I’m stuck with it since I picked “Chas” as a nickname when I was 10 or 11, because I did not like being “Charlie.”

We’re Covered

This looks to be the almost-final cover design for The Pomegranate, courtesy of Mark Lee of Hardcore Design.

Somewhere along the way the word ‘international’ was added to the subtitle. Perhaps that’s Janet Joyce’s doing. We’re international, multicultural, transtemporal, and biodiversified.

And now a word from the competition: the Association for Esoteric Studies and the Society for the Academic Study of Magic.

The Pomegranate is reborn!

After a hiatus of nearly two years while we sought a new publisher (a process that began at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Denver in 2001), The Pomegranate: The Journal of Pagan Studies has a new publisher and will resume print publication in May 2004.

As the new editor, replacing Fritz Muntean, I have signed a contract with Equinox Publishing, a new firm started by Janet Joyce, formerly academic editorial director at Continuum’s London office. The Equinox Web site is not fully put together yet; check it at the end of August.

–The Pagan Studies book series

–The daylong Pagan Studies conference at AAR-SBL in Atlanta

–And now the return of The Pomegranate, heir, in a roundabout way to Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion and to Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Esoteric Tradition.

This will be the year that Pagan Studies happens at AAR-SBL, a slow process that has been building since 1995, when Dennis Carpenter and Selena Fox organized (and then dropped out of) the first Pagan scholars’ meeting there.

Wiccan Books Need ‘Earth Tones’?

A couple of months ago, Judy Harrow, author of several worthwhile books on Wicca, mentioned to me that publishers–or at least one of her publishers–have decided that such books’ covers require (1) a pre-Raphaelite female and (2) earth tones. Check out the cover of Devoted to You, an anthology on the Pagan deities that she recently edited for Kensington Books. See what I mean?

In my darker moments, I wonder if Wicca has gone from being a mystery religion to a fashion statement in fifty years. If you’re young, unconventional, angry at the world, you announce, “I’m Wiccan.” You don’t, however, want to say “I’m a witch,” because then people expect you to “do things.”

As for larger Paganism, check out this page of so-called Pagan blogs. Exactly what’s Pagan about it. (UPDATE: The link was dead, so I removed it.)

Reprinting "Crafting the Art of Magic"

A round of discussion on the Nature Religions Scholars Network e-mail list about the desirability of reprinting Aidan Kelly’s book on the origins of Gardnerian witchcraft, Crafting the Art of Magick Book 1 (there was no Book 2), which came out a decade ago from Llewellyn Publications. Although primarily based on textual criticism applied to the Book of Shadows, the book did make some strong points about the 1940s-1950s Wiccan revival, particularly the point that Gerald Gardner and friends were creating a new religion and that that was something that humans do. On the other hand, apparently valuable parts were edited out of the Llewellyn edition, there were editing errors, etc.

I may check with the editorial director at Llewellyn to see if she would entertain the idea, but I suspect I will hit a stone wall, based at least partly on how personally miffed Carl Weschcke seemed to be back in 1992 that Kelly had not delivered the ms. for the sequel. And despite the publication of Gus DiZerega’s Pagans and Christians, there is still that Llewellyn prejudice against “scholarly” books.