I have more reviews coming, but for now, here is a PDF download of the first issue of The Pentagram, August 1964, price two shillings.
As far as I know, it was the first attempt to create a publication for the various branches of British Witchcraft, then only about fifteen years old, and it lasted but a short time.
Consider the paucity of the reading list on page 3.
Confront your misgivings! Join the Rev. Peter Owen-Jones, Anglican priest, into this journey into the deepest heart of darkness — among some ordinary-seeming Australian Witches.
“I’m aware of certain objects, quite frankly, that have always disturbed me.”
A giggle-worthy proof that pith-helmet anthropology of religion lives on. Will the Rev. Owen-Jones go skyclad?
(Via Caroline Tully.)
I am spread a little thin these days, and the below-zero (F.) weather the last few days threw some complications my way too.
Two book reviews are in the works. Here are the previews:
• Stewart Farrar: Writer On A Broomstick, The Biography of Stewart Farrar by Elizabeth Guerra. Workmanlike biography of one of the key Wiccan figures of the late 20th century.
• Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics by Emma Restall Orr, noted British Druid. I am part-way through it and thus far under-whelmed, but I will complete it and write a proper review.
• Meanwhile, if you are a university library (or rich), consider the Handbook of Contemporary Paganism, edited by Jim Lewis and Murph Pizza. Yes, that’s the price. If you thought that American reference books were expensive, consider the Dutch!
A search of the WorldCat library database using the subject category “Witches — Fiction” turns up 1,286 hits, once children’s books have been filtered out, and specifying English-language titles. (Adding films, archival materials, sound recordings, etc., boosts the total to more than 1,500.)
The Widows of Eastwick
If you have read all 1,286, let me know, and I will see that you get a prize.
This is what happens when I go looking to make an interlibrary loan request for one particular book.
The November/December 2008 issue of Archaeology magazine contains an article titled “Witches of Cornwall,” about odd, ritualistic or votive burials of skins, eggs, and other items at a place called Saveock Water.
These burials took place from the 1640s at least through the 1950s.
There is as yet no link to the article (so ask a librarian), but this site gives some of the same information.
The writer, Kate Ravilious, creates a purely hypothetical spell that might have accompanied one of the offerings:
Take a swan and wring its neck. Skin the bird and, under a full moon, lay its skin in a shallow hole with the feathers face-up. Add eggs–five for every child you want to bear. Atop each egg, place the talon of a blackbird and a black stone. Circle the hole three times, clockwise, then close it with a clod of earth. As soon as you are with child, empty the hole, or terrible things will come to pass.
(Wringing the neck of an angry adult swan might be harder than Ms. Ravilious realizes, however. Apparently her magic is not for the faint-hearted.)
UPDATE: Archaeology put a link up.
The New York Times profiles a California water witch (dowser).
How many rural witches are still around is an open question. Water witches have no trade unions — or covens. Few advertise, or dowse full time.
I learned dowsing on a construction job, and I had no “intuitive sense” of where the rural gas line in question was, so I do not buy that explanation of how it works.
There is a national society of dowsers, headquartered in the same little Vermont town where M.’s father grew up. (A civil engineer by profession, he accepted dowsing too.) It used to be all practical dowsers like this guy, but in recent decades the “earth energies” crowd seems to have a growing impact.
Yesterday I wrote a review of The New Generation Witches: Teenage Witchcraft in Contemporary Culture, a collection of papers edited by Hannah Johnston and Peg Aloi, for the upcoming issue of The Pomegranate.
Teen Witches, a fluid and constantly changing group, have been heavily dependent on the Internet, because they are often alone and either ignorant of Pagan groups or not welcome there as full-fledged members–the latter partly a result of the various satanism scares and their blowback onto contemporary Pagans.
In Aloi’s own chapter, “A Charming Spell: The Intentional and Unintentional Influence of Popular Media upon Teenage Witchcraft in America,” she writes how some of the Net-filtering programs such as Cybersitter blocked words such as “witchcraft” or “neopagan.”
Internet censorship and the use of filtering software threatened to shut down teenage pagan internet activity. So one result has been that teens got very creative with the names they gave their sites. Instead of calling it ‘Teen Witchcraft Study Group’ it would become ‘Seekers of the Emerald Moon’ or ‘Oak Grove Musings.’
Honestly, since I never have had to cope with filtering software, this problem and responses to it were not on my radar. But don’t tell me that it is the only reason for some of the extravagant group names one encounters in the Pagan world.
My favorite Bay Area witchy bloggers seem curiously quiet about the appropriation of witchy imagery by the antiwar protesters at Code Pink.
I don’t normally get into politics on this blog, but whatthehell.
From a rhetorical standpoint, I am not sure if anyone’s set political views have been changed by street theater — giant puppets and all that stuff.
You can see from the comments that the Code Pink women are not doing the Craft or the larger Pagan movement any good.
Do you think they would have chosen to dress up as Catholic cardinals or Shiite mullahs? How about some big-nosed Jews?
Or how about dressing in buckskins and feather headdresses, while waving rubber tomahawks in an “antiwar dance.” Oh no, they would never do that. It might be offensive.
No, they pick the stereotype green-faced Halloween witch instead. They parody our religion for their futile cause. Somehow I don’t feel the compliment.
One ex-military Pagan wrote to conservative columnist Michelle Malkin to say he was embarrassed by Code Pink too.
And that is the thing about today’s Pagans: for every lefty pacifist there is one (or probably more) military Pagan.
I wrote a paper on this topic once, during the flap over Wiccans at Fort Hood.
UPDATE, 13 May: One commenter suggests that the green faces may have been PhotoShopped in on Malkin’s page. He could be right; and if so, image manipulation hurts her credibility. However, a photo from the Berkeley Daily Planet, certainly no right-wing source, does show pointy hats and cloaks–but it is from an earlier Code Pink protest. Newer photos seem harder to come by–I suspect that the Berkeley news media by now regard Code Pink as just part of the weather and turn instead to stuff like fraternity stabbings.
Cora Anderson, co-founder of the Feri (Faerie) tradition of Witchcraft with her late husband, Victor, has left this life at the age of 93.
Jason Pitzl-Waters links to some tributes to her. There is more at the Andersons’ LiveJournal community and at Thorn Coyle’s blog.
Her book Fifty Years in the Feri Tradition
I did not know the Andersons, except for hearing stories from Gwydion Pendderwen of his apprenticeship with Victor. One major source of the Feri Craft was Max Freedom Long’s take on Hawaiian huna magic. (Wikipedia entry here.) From what Gwydion said, the Andersons were wildly eclectic, typical of Craft teachers of the mid-twentieth century. Bear that in mind when you read her book.
¶ When monotheists turn violent (which is often): Mormon missionaries vandalize Catholic shrine in southern Colorado. Mormon higher-ups ask forgiveness of Blessed Mother. That was a joke. Actually, they apologized to the San Luis, Colo., town board: one quasi-theocracy to another. They also want to build a huge church in the little town.
¶ Indigenous religious leaders meet about environmental crises. News of the meeting did not apparently make it to the BBC, for instance. I applaud what they are doing, but, unfortunately, they need better media relations. Or else to invite some Pagan bloggers such as Jason.
¶ Wicca is the “designated Other” for comics artists too.
¶ Maybe the Church of Google monotheists would not behead unbelievers.
¶ No pardon for Helen Duncan, convicted under the 1735 Witchcraft Act. (Earlier post here.)