Winners of a a Pagan fiction contest will be included in a new collection forthcoming from Llewellyn Publications. The contest was co-sponsored by BBI Media, and the judges named three winners:
• Grand prize, $500, and publication in PanGaia magazine, to “A Valkyrie Among Jews” by April
• Second prize, $250, to”Black Doe” by Vylar Kaftan
• Third prize, $100, to “Dead and (Mostly) Gone” by Deborah Blake
I updated the book review page of my personal web site.
I am reading Lesley Hazleton’s Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible’s Harlot Queen, which I picked up at the Doubleday booth at the AAR-SBL meeting.
Somewhat as Robert Graves did in King Jesus decades ago–but with better sourcing–she takes a familiar Bible story and re-tells it from a different perspective.
Jezebel (Phoenician “Itha-Ba’al” — woman of the Lord) was a Phoenician princess united in a political marriage with Ahab, who was actually one of the more militarily and successful Israelite kings of the Omride dynasty. The Bible slams him for not being hard enough on polytheists, however.
As queen and then as queen mother, she plays the political game as best she can before falling victim to monotheistic religious violence incited by the prophet Elijah. It’s telling that Hazleton describes Elijah as issuing a fatwa against her: He is nothing but a forerunner of the Islamic preachers of today, urging the young men to blow themselves up in the name of Allah. When the Bible speaks of “companies of prophets,” I see the Taliban.
The story is told in the the Book of Kings, which Hazleton supplements with what archaeology has since learned about the kingdom of Israel.
It has been many years since I looked at 2nd Kings. It is supposedly a chronicle of Israel and Judah, but as Hazleton says, “It has the logic of a dream.” But I was reading Jezebel with the Bible in my lap for cross reference (Hazleton provides ample citations.)
Jezebel’s grandniece,known to the Greco-Roman world as Dido, helped to establish the city of Carthage, Rome’s military and commercial rival. But Dido’s real name was Elitha, which via the Carthaginian colonies in Spain became “Alicia,” or so Hazleton claims. Meanwhile, Jezebel–Itha-Ba’al–became “Isabelle” (or Isabella or Isobel) by the same route.
Margaret Murray, the English archaeologist who cast Paganism as the “Old Religion” in early modern Europe, claimed that “Isobel” and its variants (along with Joan) was among the most common names of women tried as witches. (Is that why Björk chose it?) But, really, I think that that was because it was a popular name, not because it was a “witch name.”
¶ Having watched most of the “Thin Man” movies out of sequence, M. and I finished tonight with the last of them, Song of the Thin Man. It is notable for its proto-hipster dialog in some scenes and what I am sure are well-veiled cannabis references, slipped past the Hollywood censors of the day. I have a vision of a 21-year-old Allen Ginsberg, watching it and going “Yeah, yeah!” “Best minds of my generation,” check. [Hidden] drug references, check. [Euphemized] “negro streets,” check. Insane asylum, check. Jazz, check. It’s almost all there. But no overt references to Patterson, New Jersey.
¶ A friend writes, “I am finally reading Her Hidden Children!! It is wonderful, Chas. Intelligent, concise, thoughtful, and respectful as well. Lovely, bravo, you are my hero. It is well written and pleasant to read. Your style flows like water over glass, never stumbling over complexities or data.”
I can’t marry her, so do I put her in my will? Flattery goes to a writer’s head like a big glass of cheap sherry!
¶ You should bookmark Jason Pitzl-Waters’ music blog, A Sweeping Curve of Sound. “Music, Blasphemy, Idolatry.” I’m in. Links abound, including to his Pagan music podcasts.
I have started reading Aidan Kelly’s Inventing Witchcraft: A Case Study in the Creation of a New Religion, published by Thoth Publications but also available from Amazon.
In simplest terms, it’s an enlargement and reworking of Crafting the Art of Magic, Book 1, which Llewellyn published in 1991–Kelly’s study of the origins of modern Wicca, based primarily on textual criticism of various versions of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows.
Kelly published one earlier article on the BoS in my own zine, Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion, which had a run of four issues from about 1984-1986. It is sort of fun to see it referred to again. (It is available for download here.)
Because there was only Book 1 and no Book 2 back 15 years ago, a whole conspiracy theory has arisen, for example, that American Gardnerians somehow had the book suppressed. Even Thoth’s copywriters can’t resist: the back-cover copy reads, in part, “When the first edition of thisbook was released, conservative Gardnerian Witches attempted to suppress it….Even though its first printing quickly [!] sold out, the original publisher, faced with death threats and boycotts, agreed to abandon the project…”
Horse shit. Elephant dung. Monkey poop. Here are some facts:
Shortly after Crafting was released, I flew to Minnesota to spend a couple of days with Carl and Sandra Weschcke, who own Llewellyn, and then-acquisitions editor Nancy Mostad, discussing the series that I was editing for them and possible other projects.
On our way to dinner the first night, Carl asked me if I knew when Kelly would send the ms. for Book 2. He wanted to publish it. After thirty years in the occult publishing business, he probably treated the displeasure of his reading public less seriously than he treated Minnesota mosquitoes. Death threats indeed. Controversy is good for publishers, as Thoth is obliquely admitting by trying to manufacture some.
Since Amazon advertises used copies of Crafting at prices from $46 to more than $150, you get much more by buying the new book, despite the cover hype. I have some minor issues with it — I wish that it more reflected research into Wiccan origins done since the first book was written — but it is still worthwhile.
Thoth also has reprinted Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki’s The Forgotten Mage. It is a key background book in the emergence of contemporary Paganism from the milieu of early 20th-century ceremonial magic and esotericism.
UPDATE 10/25: Greetings if you came here from Wildhunt. (Thanks, Jason.) As I hope I made clear in my response to one commenter, I don’t want to turn a discussion of this dubious book marketing into a pro/con discussion about Dr. Kelly and his difficult relationship with other American Gardnerians. Don’t want to go there, OK?
Library Girl offers a chiefly young-adult reading list on witch fiction.
In the dream last night I was at some kind of Protestant Christian youth camp, headed by the stereotypical big, extroverted, 30-something youth minister.
A teenaged girl was supposed to be baptized, but the minister had to leave suddenly, so he asked me to baptize her. His request presented two problems:
1. I did not know how this denomination performed the ceremony. 2. Would a baptism by Pagan me be valid anyway?
I shoved issue #2 aside while searching for the book—a sort of combination prayer book and textbook—that would tell me how to perform it. I remember looking up “baptism” in the index: there were multiple page references.
As dreams do, this one trailed off with no clear resolution. The girl was not feeling well and wanted to postpone the baptism—or something.
The deam revealed its meaning, I think, in one detail: my English department colleague J. was in the dream. He was one of the camp counselors. He did not play a part in the dream-plot, but I saw him waiting in line at the camp dining hall.
The dream is not about religion but about my teaching career, which will end (at least for now) when my resignation takes effect at the end of spring semester.
J. is one of the younger professors. He and I have talked about his taking over some of my minor administrative chores and also my office, which is nicer than his (windows!) and more convenient to the classrooms that we both use. In that sense, perhaps, he is “waiting in line.”
J. is a strong classroom teacher. A former Marine, he sometimes impersonates his drill instructors in the first-year composition classroom, but in a light-hearted way that the students appreciate. (I don’t know that he does it in his critical-theory classes, but maybe I should eavesdrop more.)
As for me, I need to look up whether “burnout” is one word or two. The zest is gone, although I am still looking forward to the spring nature-writing class. Right now, I have a folder full of essays from my creative-nonfiction class to critique. Those students all have some writing talent and their pieces are interesting to read , but I have to flog myself into actually writing the comments on them that they expect. On some level, I am not a “believer” anymore.
Ironically, I am probably looser and more at ease in class now than I ever was, knowing that I have the freedom of the short-timer. Maybe I learned something about how to teach writing in the last fifteen years. But now my time for research and writing is worth more to me than it was fifteen years ago.
¶ I have nothing against the Good People, but I don’t think they belong in law courts.
¶ Wicca: it really is a fashion statement.
¶ Francesca Howell, author of Magic with Gaia, speaks at an Italian Paganism conference (YouTube). Crappy video, probably from a cell phone, but interesting English and Italian soundtrack. How do you say “public outreach” in Italian, anyway? She was formerly at Naropa University but currently is living in Milan.
Pagan performance-studies scholar Jason Winslade is interviewed at the TheoFantastique blog on Witchcraft and the entertainment industry:
Let me first say that I have a hard time coming up with any examples of “real witchcraft” or “real magic” in television or films. As you rightly state in your blog, any portrayals of these phenomena are inevitably fantasy with fancy special effects and things flying around. Any practitioner will tell you that this does not happen. At least they do not in the waking world. (Of course, this begs the question what “real magic” actually is – ask 3 practitioners and you’ll get 5 answers. Certainly “real” magic, with the exception of ritual, is much more of an internal process, and thus doesn’t lend itself to special effects extravaganzas). Some programs may incorporate sound magickal philosophy and metaphysics but their application is ultimately fantastical.
TheoFantastique is written by John Morehead, who also writes Morehead’s Musings, where he has a special interest in Christian evangelism to new religious movements.
In the heart of the English Fen County, Pluvialis is spitting . . .
. . . chips and blood. I am crackling with furious static. Any minute now, small pieces of paper, coins and pens are going to drag themselves across the tabletop, bent and pulled towards me by the immense, bending-the-laws-of-physics fury I’m experiencing right now.
She has been reading Jason Pitzl-Waters’
comments on the upcoming film version of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising.
Let’s set it in America?
Let’s get rid of “all the Arthurian and Pagan stuff”?
Let’s give Will Stanton a twin brother, stolen by the dark?
The Rider a love interest?