Finding Relief from Political Advertising

Colorado is considered an important swing state in this year’s election (that’s a first!), so lots of money is being poured into television advertising, both in the presidential race and in the race for retiring Senator Wayne Allard’s seat.

The other problem that our state laws make it almost too easy to initiate ballot issues, meaning that this year’s paper ballot is three (legal-sized) pages long. County clerks warn of long waits on election day.

Since M. and I will be traveling on Election Day anyway — on a train between Chicago and La Junta, Colo., if all goes according to plan — we voted by mail this year for the first time ever.

I will miss the ritual of going down to the old schoolhouse to vote, although there were some problems last time.

But all of a sudden, the back-to-back political ads on TV don’t bother me as much. It is as though they are advertising remedies for a disease that I don’t have. What a relief.

Gallimaufry with Advanced Fashion Sense

¶ Aphrodite Pandemos thumps Allah again. But watch out for Allah’s exploding devotees.

¶ An interview with Sarah Kate Istra Winter, author of Kharis: Hellenic Polytheism Explored.

¶ Adeona is a open-source program that helps you find a lost or stolen laptop computer. It’s named after a Roman goddess.

&para: It’s not too early to think about how you might recast your personal style when you are older: Here is a fashionista blog for older people.

A Ritual with Swan’s Eggs

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.

These Witches Have No Covens

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.

Green Egg Omelette Available for Pre-order

Green Egg Omelette: An Anthology of Art and Articles from the Legendary Pagan Journal will be shipping soon and can be pre-ordered from Amazon with the link above or from the publisher.

Oberon Zell did the heavy lifting: tracking down long-lost contributors, making editorial decisions, and laying out the pages. I wrote a general introduction and shorter introductions for each chapter.

The chapters are organized thematically, with such themes as New Pagans; Old Pagans; Magick, Arts & Crafts; Gender and Sexuality; Power & Politics; and of course a Fiction chapter.

Packing for Cold and Beasts

As a post-equinoctal thunderstorm comes over the ridge, M. and I are packing for a little road trip to see some charismatic megafauna.

I have checked my camera gear, but I really should test the bear spray. (You can guess where we are headed.)

Blogging will be slow or sporadic for the next week.

Encountering the Evil Librarian

She is evil because when I stopped by her office for a chat, she forced me to look at four large cartons of books recently “weeded” from the university’s literature and criticism shelves, forced me, I tell you, with the magic words, “They’re free. Take as many as you want.”

Many (not all) were by little-known writers and critics of the 1890s-1920s. I knew of George Moore, of course, and also recognized the seagoing novelist William McFee, because I had been given one of his tramp-steamer novels, In the First Watch (1946), as a kid. Here was a book of his magazine pieces, Swallowing the Anchor (1925).

And the rest of my finds:

• Pierre and His People: Tales of the Far North (1894) by a Canadian, Gilbert Parker, who turns out to have been a British propagandist, working in secret to bring the United States into World War One.

• Avowals (1919) by George Moore, the Irish novelist and poet.

• Light Freights (1901) by W.W. Jacobs, best known for one of the most chilling short stories of all time, “The Monkey’s Paw,” but chiefly a writer of sea stories.

• The Phantom Future (1897), by Henry Seton Merriman, which Wikipedia says was the pen name of one Hugh Scott, a popular novelist at the turn of the last century.

One box also held a six-volume collection of the poems of Algernon Swinburne, the Decadent and somewhat small-p pagan poet of the Victorian era.

But someone had already spoken for them: the very Catholic Irish-American literature professor, a great admirer of Cardinal Newman, etc. Given Swinburne’s heretical and fairly erotic writing — lots of sex and death — you might say he was an original Goth — is this a window into Professor X’s secret kinky side?

Shamanism and PTSD

A recent article in the weekly Colorado Springs Independent discusses using Michael Harner-style (I assume) shamanic techniques for veterans with PTSD.

Haggins says alternative practices heal what regular therapy cannot. Through shamanic ritual, he says, he can literally return a part of a soul shed on the battlefield. This is the procedure that Unverzagt, hesitantly, agreed to undergo in January.

Crossing a Different Divide


A typical prairie slough in the Sheyenne River drainage. Cookie, a German wirehaired pointer, is looking for sharp-tailed grouse.

I left my hosts’ home in North Dakota on Wednesday for the two-day drive home. On I-94 east of Jamestown, N.D., I saw a sign proclaiming the Continental Divide, elevation 1,400-something feet.

“What the hell?” I thought, being a good Coloradan. “What is the Continental Divide doing here? And so low!”

Then it hit me: I had spent the previous few days along and near the Sheyenne River, which flows into the Red River of the North, which flows into Lake Winnipeg, which in turn discharges into Hudson Bay.

In other words, I had just crossed from the Arctic Ocean drainage back into the Atlantic Ocean’s. Almost immediately the land became drier, with fewer sloughs, and I started spotting a few center-pivot sprinklers. Yikes, the Arctic! And without even entering Canada.

Autumn, however, has progressed farther here in southern Colorado: willows and Gambel oaks are turning color.

The Pulley that Broke the Plains

Photo by Chas S. Clifton

A close-up of pulleys and chains on that operated an old McCormick combine, one designed to be tractor-pulled rather than self-propelled.

I am no expert on agricultural implements, but I suspect that it dates from the 1950s, no later.

It seems to be part of the prairie aesthetic to park obsolete threshing machines, etc., on tops of knolls, either as local landmarks or memorials to farming as it was. (Or because the nearest scrap-metal dealer is 70 miles away.) This one is near Finley, North Dakota.

This post’s title is a weak allusion to the movie The Plow that Broke the Plains, made during the Dust Bowl and something anyone interested in North American ecology should watch.