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.
A few years ago, when I was on the board of a local environmental-education group, I helped organize a couple of presentations by the staff of Mission: Wolf, a sanctuary located one county south of me. As part of their mission, “Socialized ambassador wolves travel nationally, offering public education while stimulating people to care about and respect nature.”
Often they have the audience sit in a circle on the floor, if the group is small enough, and the leashed ambassador wolf comes around to give each a quick sniff. If you get a wolf kiss (and I have), that’s supposed to be something special.
One day last summer, M. and I were at the farmers’ market in Florence, Colo., and people from a different, smaller, wolf sanctuary were there. They seemed less focused on environmental ed. and more on magic, in the form of “Cheyenne, the Healing Wolf.”
I don’t see it on the web site, but the people from this second sanctuary insisted that their oldest wolf could diagnose cancer and other illnesses. They were less into teaching about wolves in the wild and more into presenting these predators as healing beings.
Third, at the beginning of October, M. and I returned to Yellowstone National Park for the first time in some years. Our last visit, in fact, came just before the reintroduction of wolves to the park in the mid-1990s.
And how the northern edge of the park, in particular, had changed. There were wolf tourists. Every pull-out between Mammoth Hot Springs and the northeast entrance contained serious-looking individuals with spotting scopes and expensive telephoto lenses, scanning the hillsides of the Lamar Valley. The nearby Slough Creek Campground, which used to be half-empty in autumn, is always full.
Imagine, if you have not seen one, a full-size tour bus with wolves painted on it, picking up forty or so hikers who have been on a wildlife walk to look for . . . wolves, of course. When someone sees a wolf, the news spreads around the park by “bush telegraph.”
Not everyone is keen on wolves, however. I spotted this sticker on a truck in Cooke City, Wyo., just outside the park.
Cat Urbigkit’s Yellowstone Wolves: A Chronicle of the Animal, the People, and the Politics is a definitive history of the issue.
But I think that is the minority view. It is as though we have flipped 180 degrees from when Barry Lopez wrote Of Wolves and Men in the 1970s. He was trying to convince readers that wolves were more than mere vermin. Now they are emissaries of nature religion, furry saints.
American nature religion often has a therapeutic slant, that’s for sure. “The wolf will heal you.” It’s a change from “The wolf will eat you,” but is it any more truthful from the wolf’s point of view?
• 
When M. and I left our hotel room on Tuesday, the lobby was full of the crackle of police radios. Everywhere you looked in downtown Chicago, there were cops standing around.
These are some kind of federales outside a federal office building on Jackson Street.
I was happy, therefore, to get home and learn that the huge crowds at Barack Obama’s rally were mostly good-natured and that there was no celebratory rioting.
• I will be watching for progress on rebuilding the Temple of Artemis.
• When Obama made his ill-considered remark about those of us in flyover country “clinging to guns and religion,” my first thought was to wonder which religion(s) he had in mind. Oleg Volk, a Russian-born photographer now living in Tennessee, created an image that mirrors my thoughts.
• And this post on “alternative” gun culture is all about others who don’t want to be victims, such as the Pink Pistols.
Checking some of the post-AAR blogging, I see people listing book purchases from the publishers’ exhibit. Here are mine:
• The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction. (I should also get Kocku’s Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge, and I need something by the discipline’s éminence grise, Antoine Faivre, such as Access to Western Esotericism.)
• Doug Cowan’s Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen. That’s research material too. Doug is one of those scholars who manages to teach effectively, write a lot, and still have a life.
• Ordered for later delivery, Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain.
If I come away from this year’s AAR annual meeting with any one Big Idea, it is that I am glad to see Pagan Studies moving away from “Wiccans and Odinists,” as Jone Salomonsen put it, and towards a broader sense of a “a way to think about religion” (or religious behavior). Our joint session with the Religion and Popular Culture Group started the weekend off well, and presenting a co-written work-in-progress paper and slide show there got me thinking about how I want to return to the whole nexus of nature religion, civil religion, and small-p paganism as well as thinking about capital-P Paganism.
Meanwhile, the election that has lasted forever is almost over!
Last night, from the 23rd floor of the Chicago Hilton Towers, I looked down a floodlit, fenced-off portion of Grant Park, where Sen. Obama’s victory rally will be held. The mayor has “suggested” that businesses in this part of town close at 3 p.m. on Election Day. No doubt they expect a riot if Obama loses — and probably if he wins as well, by the same mob-logic that caused violence and destruction in Philadelphia when the Phillies won the World Series.
One of the benefits of eating in Chicago’s Greektown is that it almost feels like a religious act when the restaurants are named Zeus and Venus. (“Venus” is Aphrodite — in Greek — on the screen-savers at the waiters’ computer terminals.)
Going out to eat becomes embodied religion. “Corpospirituality,” as Michael York would have it.
My friends are in awe of the Cyprian’s Mousakas Tsoukas.
When I booked this hotel, across the street from the Chicago Hilton Hotel, the AAR‘s main annual meeting venue, I had no idea that it was only a block from one of Chicago’s Powell’s bookstores. M. and I are in deep trouble.
I restricted myself to just two purchases today: Anna Reid’s The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia and Giorgia Geddes’ Nichivo: Tales from the Russian Front 1941-43. Both count as “research.” (Those are Amazon links, but you can search Powells’ inventory through Advanced Book Exchange.)
And given the heavy emphasis on book-buying at AAR, I still do not understand why someone does not set up a “pack-and-ship” booth in the exhibit hall!
The coffee shops are filling up too: “My dissertation advisor thinks I should go for publication, so he’s being real hard on me.”
Good luck with that.
Here is a spooky story, worthy of Fate magazine. Political writer (and Orthodox Christian) Rod Dreher has his own ghost-story post.
I post this from the Wireworks cafe in Pueblo, partway through our journey to the train station.
I hope that I have everything I need for a successful conference session:
Doing a paper on the Day of the Dead at two Southwestern universities, plus attending a Samhain ritual. Too much?
I’ll try to post more as the meeting continues.
Writer Dianne Sylvan blogs on her early Pagan days — books, groups, Marion Zimmer Bradley …
But my favorite paragraph was this one:
Good god, Pagan websites used to suck. Remember MIDI files of Enya and spinning flaming pentacles? Black star-flecked background with violent purple lettering in 20 point font? Remember when cut-and-pasting Scott Cunningham was all you had to do to make your Geocities site popular?
Oh yeah. But I think I still have a folder of flaming-torch and spinning-pentacle GIF files somewhere on my hard drive. Do you think they might ever become retro-cool?
Since there won’t be any on-time Hallows blogging from me this year, here is an early sampler:
¶ Rod Dreher finally sees autumn arrive in northern Texas.
¶ A Halloween column: “Hitchhiking in the Land of the Dead.”
¶ A pastor’s rant against Halloween, via The Gods Are Bored.
¶ Since I won’t be able to take any photos this year, here are some of last year’s Day of the Dead altars built by students at Colorado State University-Pueblo. For some reason, the Vlad the Impaler altar has been drawing a lot of Google hits for the past two weeks …
in the 1970s. He was trying to convince readers that wolves were more than mere vermin. Now they are emissaries of nature religion, furry saints.
. (I should also get Kocku’s 
, and I need something by the discipline’s éminence grise, 
.)
. That’s research material too. Doug is one of those scholars who manages to teach effectively, write a lot, and still have a life.
would have it.
and Giorgia Geddes’ 
. Both count as “research.” (Those are Amazon links, but you can search Powells’ inventory through