Today is Samhain, Really, Unless It’s Not

We celebrate the holy day commonly called Samhain not on one day, but on several. In other words, there is no one contemporary Pagan liturgical calendar.

As I write this, the actual moment in the solar cycle is about an hour away, according to Scott Monahan’s useful archaeastronomy site. (Scott is also the videographer of the epigraphers arguing for ancient Celtic visits to America: Here is his latest YouTube video.)

So take your choice: the Pagan festival occurs on (1) the night of October 31st, (2) November 1st, (3) the full Moon nearest to November 1st, (4) a weekend night nearest to November 1st, (5) the day or night when the Sun is at 15 degrees of Scorpio in the tropical zodiac, halfway between the fall equinox and the winter solstice (Northern Hemisphere). Number 5 is happening right now.

I wonder if the push for official work-and-school-recognized Pagan holidays will force us to pick one of five choices and live with it.

Recently, an old friend complained in someone’s blog comments that our holy day was being “commercialized.” I beg to disagree. Let a thousand Spirit World stores open selling plastic tombstones and sexy witch costumes. The popular holiday of Halloween provides a sea in which we swim.

Wilhelm Reich, nature religionist

When I wrote Her Hidden Children, I gave three pages to Wilhelm Reich, because I felt that his unconventional ideas on the body, sexuality, and life energy had as much to do with the intellectual underpinnings of American Paganism as did, for example, the anthropological theories of Sir James Frazer (“sacred kings” and all that).

Reich was all but burned as a heretic, but now his ideas are getting a second look as his papers are unsealed.

Physician-scientist Wilhelm Reich, best known for his claims of a cosmic life force associated with sexual orgasm, died in federal prison, and the government burned tons of his books and other publications and destroyed his equipment.

But half a century later, a small number of scientists and other believers are working to advance the European-born psychiatrist’s work on what he called “orgone energy” – a theory largely forgotten in the scientific mainstream.

“Personally, I think it’s going to be a long time before all of his work is understood and recognized,” said Reich’s granddaughter, Renata Reich Moise, a nurse-midwife and artist in the coastal town of Hancock.

If you live in New England, visit the Wilhelm Reich Museum. Rent a cottage and try some orgone experiments.

Gallimaufry with Nut Brown Ale

John Barleycorn Reborn is a double CD compilation of dark folk music from the British Isles.

¶ Staying with the British theme: if you see this, you must be in Glastonbury.

¶ Now this is embodied Paganism.

¶ “Sexy witch” Halloween costumes (big this year) require striped stockings. Why is that? The “sluts and slashers” aspect of costuming bothers some Pagans.

¶ Another example of group disfunction?

¶ I missed DOR Day. Next year I won’t. (I do wish bloggers would abandon white-on-black type. The only thing more eyestrain-inducing is purple-on-black.)

Altars at the Student Center

As promised, three of today’s altars at the state university erected for the Day of the Dead (Día de los muertos).


An altar to Vlad the Impaler, also known as Dracula, from the history and art clubs. Club members admitted that it was a bit short on Roumanian content. One girl speculated about an impaled head that she had seen somewhere; all agreed that a big spike would have helped.

After all, he was just a hard-working prince holding off the Islamic menace. For more Vlad-ophilia, read The Historian.


An altar to firefighters.


The Catholic student association altar. Off the the left, out of the frame, was a bottled pre-mixed mojito cocktail, which the builders agreed could not be left there overnight. (Apparently La Virgen likes mojitos.) The place is swarming with students after all.

State-sponsored Paganism

Students are hard at work putting up Pagan altars in the student center. At least that is what it looks like to me, although I am sure that la profesora would differ.

I did not hear about a parade this year, however.

Photos to come.

Witches and Economic Decline in the American Midwest

The GetReligion blog, which covers issues of religion and journalism, takes on coverage of the Witch School’s move to Rossville, Illinois. (Full Chicago Tribune story and video here.)

Jason Pitzl-Waters has posted repeatedly about the various Witch School controversies, so see his blog for the background.

Maybe it is because I am still working to unload my late sister’s white elephant of a house in a small northern Missouri town, but I feel that this is as much of an economics story as a religious one.

But this is America, and we habitually mis-label our debates. We use the language of race and ethnicity to talk about issues of social class. And we use the language of religion to talk about people’s gut-level fears that their little town — and by extension, them — just does not matter any more in the America of Wal-Mart and mega-churches.

From GetReligion: A reader of ours, Christopher, mentioned in a note to us that the story is largely about a community dealing with “economic decline, arson, and drugs.”

I agree. Although I have never set foot in Rossville, I have been in plenty of places like it.

And it is just too wrenching to their self-image for the Chamber of Commerce types to think of themselves as another Salem, Mass., and to promote Rossville that way!

Instead, they probably hope to attract a new factory. But it is not coming.

Rites of Passage

Help a Wiccan college student with a research project on rites of passage by taking this test.

No, I don’t know if she has read Coming to the Edge of the Circle or not, or if she still thinks that Van Gennep is the latest thing.

(I do not know the student personally, but I sort of know her through email lists.)

Or you could just find out how fluffy you are. I hope that your score is a negative number.

Tribal Gallimaufry

¶ Some people think that modern life is cold and heartless and that it would be better to live in a tribe. But what happens when the tribe’s inner circle does not want you? Sometimes it means that you lose your fat monthly check, for one thing.

¶ Blogger/journalist Rod Dreher is heated about about sexy Halloween costumes for little girls. Like a lot of his commenters, I think that the costume pictured would be fun for a kid to wear and sexy only to a pervert.

In 1985, David Garland, now 39, of Liverpool, NSW, did something similar, but in reverse. While bicycling, he was struck by a four-wheel drive. He wasn’t expected to recover from his injuries, but did, only to notice that he could now see and hear things imperceptible to others.

And he ended up Wiccan.

¶ Weirdest search string to bring a reader here lately: this are leaking car, basement, wicca.

A Manufactured Conspiracy in Wiccan Publishing

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:

  1. Llewellyn typically then (and now, I suppose) kept first runs short, usually under 5,000 copies. If sales were good, more copies would be ordered in similar increments. Even one of their top Wiccan authors, Scott Cunningham, was selling only in the mid-five figures at that time.

  2. 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.

  1. But Kelly’s own problems at the time prevented him from ever delivering the manuscript. With no Book 2 in the pipeline, Book 1 was allowed to go out of print — as the majority of Llewellyn titles do after their first press runs. No conspiracy there, just business.

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?

Witches, a Reading List

Library Girl offers a chiefly young-adult reading list on witch fiction.