On the Road

M. and I are traveling right now, and, genius that I am, I forgot to bring the cable that connects camera to PowerBook, so I cannot even post any pretty pictures. Expect some link-rich posting soon.

I have been reading book proposals and Pomegranate papers. I find it hard to do serious writing while on a pleasure trip, but this kind of work-related reading does not bother me because it is the kind of work that I enjoy. I can probably read more closely because I do not feel pressured, if that makes sense.

It’s Robert Heinlein Week

Maybe you had forgotten that July 7, 1907 was the birthday of SF great Robert Heinlein? I certainly had, but thanks to the InterWebs, now I know.

The always-iconoclastic Steve Sailer gives snapshots of Heinlein’s novels, including Stranger in a Strange Land, which had such an effect on the American Pagan movement via the Church of All Worlds:

– Heinlein’s 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land evolved much like Nabokov’s Lolita. Both writers began working on their respective scandalous magnum opuses about 1949, figuring that while they weren’t publishable at present, American norms were changing fast enough that they would be publishable eventually. Both ended up long and self-indulgent.

– After a fast-paced opening, Stranger in a Strange Land bogs down badly. It reads like a few cokeheads lecturing some credulous potheads on everything under the sun. Still, what a great title it has, maybe the best by any novel ever. The Prophet Abraham’s description of himself is borrowed to describe a new prophet, a human raised by Martians, who comes to a satirical America. And one plot detail — how the First Lady’s astrologer was influencing the President — turned out to exactly foreshadow the situation under Ron and Nancy Reagan!

Gallimaufry

¶ Is a Celtic bowl the Nazi holy grail? Probably not, but it might inspire a Dan Brown-wannabe.

¶ On Sunday we leave on a trip to the Mendocino coast. We are taking Amtrak most of the way. Some of our friends seem to think that we are eccentric for preferring cross-country trains. After all, air travel is so much smoother.

¶ You knew that chimps and elephants painted. But did you know that trees can draw? (Via Mirabilis.)

¶ Australian writer Glenys Livingstone has put her book on ecospirituality, PaGaian Cosmology, online at the PaGaian website.

¶ Jason Pitzl-Waters is blogging as he works on a book about Pagan music.

The Street of the Idol-Makers

Last Monday I drove to Denver for the last day of the International New Age Trade Show (West) at the Merchandise Mart, partly to see friends and also to check out the

Books, New Age and World Music, CD’s and DVD’s, Aromatherapy Bath and Body Preparations, Apparel, Candles, Crystals, Tarots and Divination Tools, Heath and Wellness Herbal Remedies, Incense, Jewelry, Native Traditions, Metaphysical Supplies and Greeting Cards.

I had not visited that show (it’s wholesale only) since 1997, when I was signing copies of Sacred Mask, Sacred Dance at the Llewellyn booth. (They were not about to fly John Jones over from England, even though he wrote 75 percent of the book.)

The Llewellyn booth this year was big, but the energy seemed low. Nobody made eye contact. Maybe the staff had partied too hard the night before. I snagged a free 2007 Tarot reader for M. and left.

When M. worked for Celebration Books in Colorado Springs, she also had to work some of their metaphysical fairs–the same stuff, but at the retail level. (The two businesses are now owned separately, I understand.)

Walking the show, I could not help but notice how little has changed in the 20-some years since we first went to a metaphysical fair, other than the shift from videotapes to DVDs.

But there is one big change. In 1981 there was no Pagan merchandise sector. Now here was the Mythic Images booth next to Maxine Miller Studios and Celtic Jackalope (love that name), followed by Sacred Source and Dryad Design.

With all the divine images, it was like the Street of the Idol Makers.

Off to the side was King-Max Products with its bland Chinese manager representing a whole line of Gothy knick-knacks and kannabis kitsch and some very NSFW statuary. (You can’t even see it on the website without an account.)

I just wonder if the Chinese worker painting the statuette of a voluptuous woman receiving cunnilingus from a wolf thinks that that is a common occurrence in America.

Eight Things You Did Not Know

I was kicking around the idea with some Pagan bloggers of posting “eight things you don’t know about me — and two of them are false.”

It’s almost a direct steal from the movie Breach, which I loved. (Big Chris Cooper fan that I am.)

Someone took me up on it, so out of fairness here is my list:

1. I have never worn a tuxedo.

2. My brief first marriage was a disaster. We were both just too immature.

3. I am somewhat allergic to horses, which is a nuisance when you’re a small-town Western kid.

4. My first childhood memory is of rabbits.

5. For four years, owls helped to pay my mortgage.

6. I attended four high schools in grade 11, partly due to having problems with authority.

7. I had no formal Wiccan initiation.

8. I worked several years as a technical writer for a well-known aerospace company while taking graduate classes in religion.

A Wiccan Wedding & the Strangeness of Memory

My wedding to M. was conducted by the HP and HPS of our coven at a Forest Service group campground near Colorado Springs. The campground reservation cost $10 or $15 back then, and the wedding finished with a potluck feast. I think we paid for some cheese and champagne. My sister baked a cake. Invitations were photocopied.

M. worked then as a state parole department investigator. The agents from her office brought us some gift or other—and also presented her with a homemade necklace of chicken bones. Cop humor.

My mother, who had been invited (I couldn’t keep her away) brought a bunch of her relatives, who had not been invited. One Southern Baptist cousin pronounced the ceremony “an abomination.” (He manages to be friendly enough, however, on the rare occasions that we see him.)

The attendants passed a tray of (hippie whole-wheat) moon cakes for the guests. Everyone took one except my mother. “Come on, Mother,” my sister said, “When in Rome . . . “

“No,” Mother said, stiffening her Anglican spine, “I’m not Dru-ish.” I guess being outdoors in a grove of pines made her think of Druids.

We had not bothered to explain that this was a Wiccan wedding, wrists tied, blood drops in the chalice, the whole bit. We figured we would just go ahead and do it.

For M.’s Irish-American stepmother, there was no problem: We just said it was “Celtic,” and she was happy. And her father was satisfied simply to see that the wedding license was genuine.

M.’s brother-in-law played his guitar, and her younger brother shot a video. Her family, although nominally Catholic, was never terribly judgmental—except for one odd thing that M. learned only earlier this month.

For thirty years, her sister-in-law has been thinking that Witchcraft involves sacrificing small animals, yet she knows that M. is all for protecting animals. So she has lived with this contradiction for decades. On M.’s recent visit to their home, she said that she had seen some ferrets in our house at the time of the wedding, and she had always assumed that they were the intended sacrificial victims.

But we never had ferrets! We never had any caged animals, just cats (then) and dogs (now).

Memory is a very strange thing. Hopefully all has been made clear now.

The Sun High in The Sky

Here is the news from Stonehenge. No human sacrifice though, if that is what is was. But The Guardian gloats:

Today is the summer solstice, and the druids have taken over Stonehenge to commemorate their ancient rites. Today’s festival at Britain’s most charismatic monument is based on a cultural fantasy, behind which are dark facts.

At the moment of maximum Sun-iness, I shall probably be drinking cappuccino in Colorado Springs somewhere. M. and I need a city day.

For some substance meantime, drop by Quaker Pagan and read Cat’s two-parter on her spiritual journey: Part 1 and Part 2.

Gallimaufry

¶ Cthulhu’s pact with Russia exposed. Was Tim Powers prescient? (Via Dr. Hypercube.)

¶ “I did everything right out of the Necronomicon, and the candles didn’t even flicker.” Read it all at Pagan Snark.

¶ And an academic muses on Goth’s wan stamina.

¶ An employee of the same metaphysical bookstore where M. once clerked has an odd experience.

Post-travel update

I came home Saturday night the 16th with a flourishing head cold that I probably picked up on the previous Monday’s flights between Colorado Springs and South Carolina. It manifested on Thursday morning–that interval seems like about the right incubation time–and made the last three days of the conference I was attending much less fun.

M., meanwhile, had left on June 6 to see relatives in St. Louis. Her return trip on the 11th was disrupted, but this time, Amtrak did right by her–nothing like the trip last winter where we ended up taking a cab from Philadelphia to Washington.

She was supposed to meet the westbound Southwest Chief in Kansas City, but it had derailed on its way from Chicago. This time, Amtrak put her and other delayed connecting passengers in the nearby Westin Hotel. And the next morning she was able to continue on to Colorado.

People on the derailed train were bused to KC. Several told her that the engineer had handled the derailment–possibly caused by vandalism–like a pro. There were no serious injuries, which is one thing that I like about trains: the wrecks are more survivable.

Meanwhile I “enjoyed” a series of virus-laden metal tubes. No big problems, although we sat for twenty minutes on the tarmac in Chicago, passengers fanning themselves with the safety cards from the seatback pockets, while a problem with one engine’s bleeder valve (??) was corrected. It was not as bad as Rod Dreher’s experience with Delta:

This is going to be a miserable summer for air travel, with sprawling terminals serving as Dante-esque cities of woe. Abandon hope all ye who enter here – and don’t forget the Advil.

So I did almost none of the writing that I hoped to do outside the conference sessions, there on a beautiful campus with wireless access everywhere. Yesterday I finished, I hope, an anthology contribution that has been hanging over my head. Now on to some book reviews and an article revision.

The Wee ‘Oss in Cornwall and California

Folklorist Alan Lomax’s 1953 film of the Padstow, Cornwall, May Day festival, Oss Oss, Wee Oss! is now available on DVD, together with the Pagan hobby horse procession from Berkeley, California, and an updated film from Padstow in 2007.

Order before July 3 for free shipping.

You can also see small video clips from the original 1953 documentaryon the Web.

A nice touch: the two-sided DVD has both NTSC and PAL formats, so it can be watched anywhere.