• Technoccult is now called Renegade Futurist, although the old URL lingers. If you miss the “occult” part, they have suggestions.
• Staying Alive is a blog about academic survival — fictions and realities.
• This Lively Earth is Priscilla Stuckey’s blog on writing, animism, and other forms of nature-based spirituality.
Living a cable channel-free life, I never saw Mad Mad House, but if you did and you want to read a performance studies-based analysis, I direct you to Jason Winslade’s “You’ve Got to Grow or Go”: Initiation, Performance, and Reality Television” (PDF file).
At the center of his analysis are the reality show’s “alternate” characters, including the prominent Australian Witch Fiona Horne:
The five Alts were Fiona the Witch, Ta’Shia the Voodoo Priestess, Don the Vampire, Art the Modern Primitive and Avocado the Naturist. The use of just the first names and their “Alt” title was prominent in the show’s promotional materials and title sequence, in which their heads were placed paper doll-like (in South Park fashion) on small drawn bodies in cartoonish settings accompanied by equally cartoonish sound effects. For instance, a bubbling cauldron sound and a witch cackle accompanied Fiona’s brief scene. Further, these constructed characters exist as iconic figures in such settings as the Deliberation Room, where their gaudily painted portraits also feature prominently in the title sequence. These touches unapologetically fetishize and exoticize these characters and their “alternative” beliefs, perhaps to present them as more of a challenge to the mainstream contestants, who were predominantly young, white, upper middle class, and, if they had any religious affiliation, Christian.
Jordan Stratford, Gnostic priest and writer in Victoria, B.C., blogs about possible prejudice against present-day Gnosticism on the part of the Wikipedia cabal.
My own experience with Wikipedia is tiny — making minor edits on three or four articles — but I know that there are people who must spend hours every day on it.
Other stories about “revert wars” and similar cyber-squabbles involving political figures are common enough, so I can believe that one or two judgmental editors could mess with (in this case) Gnosticism too.
For some reason, Pagan-related articles have fared better. But I know that some of the Pagan editors are the same folks who were on the former Compuserve Pagan forum circa 1990–people who spend an awful lot of time in cyberspace.
As for modern Gnosticism, another trove of articles exists at the website of the former Gnosis magazine. Founding editor Jay Kinney is himself a priest of the Ecclesia Gnostica, a contemporary Gnostic church started by Stephan Hoeller (who thus far is still in Wikipedia.)
There might be a lesson here about depending too much on Wikipedia?
This call for contributions to an edited collection comes from editor Brandy Williams’ blog.
Megalithica Books, an imprint of Immanion Press (Stafford, U.K./Portland, OR, U.S.A) is seeking submissions for an anthology on women working in the magical communities, particularly in communities where women have not been extensively published or in which women face stereotyping and misunderstanding within and without the community. These communities include (but are not limited to) groups and individuals working in the Golden Dawn, Thelemic, Aurum Solis, Alchemy, Chaos, and Experimental Fields.
Women have been involved in traditional and ritual magic since the late Victorian era. However women are often viewed as tangential to these communities or as soror mysticae, assistants to the magician. Today women are actively involved in ceremonial magical groups and lodges, alchemy, chaos magic, and Experimental Magic, overcoming stereotypes and creating new visions of magic within the communities.
A missive showed up in my inbox lately, written by some Wiccan Web denizen, who although in a coven (this part was confusing) had had some sort of vision or revelation involving the number 1734, which led him/her/it to my Witches’ Voice piece on the so-called “1734 Tradition.”
I say “so-called” because I think that there is less there than meets the eye. I am too young to have known its founder, Robert Cochrane, but I did know people who knew him, such as Evan John Jones — who himself was never sure of Cochrane’s bonafides.
Something you learn along the path is that magickal ability does not always come packaged with moral uprightness. Actually, the Catholic Church says much the same thing in its doctrine of ex opere operato, meaning that the sacrament is still effective even if the priest is a sinner.
In North America, the “1734” (it’s a message, not a date) tradition derives from a series of letters that Cochrane sent over a few months in the mid-1960s to Joe Wilson, then serving in the US Air Force. The two never met; Cochrane’s suicide interrupted the correspondence.
When you read those letters–or Cochrane’s lengthier correspondence with the English magician William Grey–you can see him hinting at Great Mysteries, playing a game of “I’ll tell you one of my secrets if you tell me one of yours first,” and suggesting that students try a new technique, which, if it is successful, the teacher will then claim to have known about all along.
He had the mojo, but he also (somewhat like Alex Sanders) had an inferiority complex about the Gardnerian Witches, who had a ten-year head start. His response was to claim access to traditions more secret, more traditional, more ancient–and then try to find evidence for them.
On this side of the pond, Gardnerian Witchcraft had arrived in book form in the 1950s and in person (the Bucklands) in the early 1960s. The interest in the Craft, however, was far greater than one “legit” Gardnerian coven could meet. Consequently, all sorts of new forms of American Wicca sprang up. The Cochrane-Wilson letters were copied and passed around, becoming one form of non-Gardnerian “traditional Craft” that people could recycle to show that they too had the Real Old Stuff.
This new mix of Pagan, ceremonial magical, old-school occultism, and other elements flourished in Southern California, of course. If you read Ann Finnin’s The Forge of Tubal Cain, you get a lively who-said-what-to-whom first-person narrative of the Los Angeles-area Craft scene in the 1970s–including some discussion of links between the Society for Creative Anachronism, other SF-fantasy fandom and the Pagan movement, an area that has not been researched enough.
Finnin and her husband Dave have been group leaders for more than 30 years, and part of The Forge of Tubal Cain is devoted to issues of running a coven, avoiding problems, building a group mind, and so forth.
The remainder of the book gives portions of the training and ritual used in their group, the Roebuck, which may be seen as an extensive ritual and religious system based partly on Cochrane’s sketchy teaching and inspiration. I recommend it, primarily as a chance to hear the thoughts of Craft elders talking about the things that work and the things that don’t.
Pridian at Codex Celtica wraps up news on various movies and movie re-makes based on ancient history.
The killers of Thomas Becket as “The Wild Bunch”? Gag me. But this part is interesting:
A feature version may be in the works to wrap up the unresolved plot strands of the award-winning HBO/BBC TV series Rome, which dramatised the dirty-politics underside of Rome’s transitional period from republic to virtual monarchy amidst civil war. The TV series ended abruptly story-wise when the 3rd series was cancelled in mid-term. The original kernel of it was a reference in Caesar’s Gallic Wars memoir to two ‘ordinary’ soldiers who recover the Legion’s captured brass eagle. The original plan was for 5 seasons, the last focussing on how the Roman authorities dealt with the troublesome rise of a certain ‘messiah’ in Palestine, but cancellation led to this subplot being abandoned and other plotlines combined into highlights. The primary source seems to have been Suetonius’s gossipy Lives Of The Caesars.
Count me in for that.
My days this week were split between book-editing, another writing project, and fire-fighting — or worrying about fires.
In late January I joined the little rural volunteer fire department, which seems in a way to embody what the Founders meant by “militia” back in the 18th century.
M. and I also signed up as volunteers for the Colorado Division of Wildlife — we have had one training day and no projects yet, but that will change.
Tonight, Saturday, and Sunday I will be involved with more wild-land fire training. That is our main concern — stopping wild fires that threaten structures — rather than structure fires as such.
I have a stack of books to review. It is a lot easier to think about writing on a day like today: cloudy, a wisp of drizzle in the air, not much wind.
Hypatia of Alexandria, born c. 355 (?) and murdered by a Christian mob in 415, was a Neoplatonic philosopher and mathematician—math and philosophy were more intertwined then than they are today.
Her life and death are part of the plot of Agora, a forthcoming movie directed by Alejandro Amenábar. You can see a trailer here (thanks to Jason Pitzl-Waters for the tip).
Her killers were fired up by one Cyril, a bishop of Alexandria and now a saint of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. Hypatia, after all, was not a Christian, was upper-class, was an intellectual, and worst of all, was a female intellectual.
(Patriarch issues fatwa, followers riot and kill — the usual pattern.)
In the movie, a slave falls in love with Hypatia. Not very likely: one of the old stories told about her is that when one of her students was attracted to her, she threw a used menstrual rag in his face. It was a philosophical lesson–that he should love eternal beauty, not the beauty of the flesh.
Hypatia of Alexandria is supposed to be a good reconstructed biography. For a shorter discussion of sources about her life, go here.
I want to see Agora but I am also a little afraid to see it. It might push too many buttons. Sometimes I think the fourth century CE is still with us in the cultural-religious conflicts we see around us.
¶ Kitty Burns Florey advocates teaching handwriting in schools: “Educators I talked to claim that kids master reading more easily when they write a word as they learn it: the writing process keeps their attention focused as they match symbol to sound.”
¶ In my former home of Manitou Springs, Colo., a goddess figure is re-named.
¶ I knew about Graham Harvey’s book Animism: Respecting the Living World,but I did not realize that he had created an excellent Web site to go with it.
I like magazines. I have worked for three, owned one (still going), and sold freelance articles to a bunch of others. I taught university classes in magazine-writing and production.
So when Vol. 1, No. 1 of Thorn, subtitled Paganism in the Silicon Age, hit my mailbox, I was eager to read it.
Having made various cynical comments in the past about “Wicca as fashion statement,” I was a little amused to see two fashion layouts in the magazine. One, “Creation Myth: Intelligent Designs from the Descendants of the Sun Gods,” showcased Peruvian textiles. The models looked like models, and I am not sure where the photos came from. (Ex-editor that I am, I always look closely at credits, trying to determine what was in-house content and what was not.)
More fashion. The magazine’s centerspread, “Phos: Primal Wear in the Forest,” shows two designer/models looking sullen and “alternative” in their own designs. No word on where to buy them–or if you can–whereas the Peruvian clothes were at Saks.
Don’t get me wrong. I like Thorn. It’s a generational thing—in the publishing sense.
Having worked much of last summer on Green Egg Omelette: An Anthology of Art and Articles from the Legendary Pagan Journal, I had plenty of time to reflect on its content. Green Egg was — and is — about visions of Pagan spirituality and culture, much of it speculative.
Thorn, however, takes Pagan culture for granted. As far as I can tell, that is a Good Thing. Not that such culture is a finished product, no way. And it is still minuscule in the overall picture. But it exists.
The magazine has good writers, a wide range of articles, and most of all, the opportunity to help define what Pagan culture is. Blogs like this one are fast but fragmented. Books can take a long-range thoughtful look at what has happened and what might happen. Magazines, meanwhile, have enough lead time to get thoughtful articles but come out frequently enough to be more or less current.
From a media point of view, I think there should be a place for Thorn—and for its competitors, such as PanGaia, newWitch, and, yes, Green Egg.
I like the fact that you can subscribe with PayPal, but being conservative about these things, I would include a blow-in or bind-in card for people who want to use other payment methods.
Since Thorn is published quarterly, it is alternating print issues with online issues–the February 2009 issue is now available, with a report from PantheaConm, an interview with paranormal-romance author Sherrilyn Kenyon, and a thoughtful piece on the threat from racial-supremacists to the Pagan movement.
I have mixed feelings about this approach. Magazine-guru Samir Husni, a journalism professor who studies the industry, pans the whole e-zine concept: “So it is beyond me to understand why people, very creative people, spend so much time to create what they call “e-zines” that do nothing but imitate ink on paper.”
He wants the Web to do what it does well—short prose, sound, video—and print to do what it does well.
Green Egg has switched to sending subscribers a PDF file of the print magazine—you print it yourself. Switch email addresses, though, and you’re in trouble.
I want there to be a place for print magazines with good artwork and articles that you can curl up with, so I subscribed to Thorn and wish it well.
A publisher friend of mine says that Sunset magazine helped define “Southern California” for a generation. We need the Pagan magazines to do the same for Pagan culture generally.