The Winter
(15 Nov. 1966)
Wheelbarrow’s tire is flat, muddy ground now sets
A plaster mould around the folded rubber the first
Cold morning of the year.
Philip Whalen
(1923-2002)
One of the trio of Reed College Beat poets, along with Gary Snyder and Lew Welch, Philip Whalen formlly became a Zen monk in 1973.
I learned a couple of weeks ago that some copies of my book Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America from the second print run were defective.
They are missing thirty-some pages, including the last chapter and the index. If your copy ends around page 160, you have a bad copy.
Other copies may appear to be missing chapter 6.
Call Rowman & Littlefield Customer Service, 800-462-6420, to get a replacement from the newest print run.
When I was an undergraduate, his books were in every dorm room.
Word comes of the passing of Felicitas Goodman on 31 March. She was in her early nineties.
Born to ethnic German parents in Hungary, she attended the University of Heidelburg. She came to the United States after World War II and worked as a scientific translator before entering graduate school as a “nontraditional” student and earning a PhD in anthropology. She taught linguistics and anthropology at Denison University until retiring in 1979.
And then she began to devote herself full time to some very interesting research in the anthropological reconstruction of shamanism, culminating in the publication of her book Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences (Indiana University Press, 1990). Get it if you can, perhaps through some service like Advanced Book Exchange.
I was fortunate enough to persuade her to write the lead chapter of my 1994 anthology Witchcraft and Shamanism.
She purchased some land between Santa Fe and Española, New Mexico, and founded the “Cuyamonge Institute” for the study of shamanism. It never became as large as Michael Harner’s Foundation for Shamanic Studies, but I tend to think of Goodman and Harner as somewhat parallel: anthropologists who “went native.” Goodman, however, taught shamanic techniques perhaps more in Europe than in the United States, particularly in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Nikki Bado-Fralick, one of her former academic students, wrote of her today, “I learned from Felicitas that we need to be brave adventurers in what she called the ‘alternate realities.’ There seemed to be no aspect of the alternate reality that we should not investigate, no spiritual territory that we should not explore. Felicitas warmly and generously gave to others, supporting them in their adventures without pause.”
I have been re-reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the leading entry in the literary genre of “when Classics majors go bad.”
It was first published in 1992, and I did my part for her royalty payments by sending at least three hardcover copies as Christmas presents in 1993. Sales were good, Tartt’s reputation soared, and some readers apparently worshipped at her feet.
Now I think it ought to be declared one of those unintentional Pagan classics like the film The Wicker Man. (The Fortean Times interview with director Robin Hardy is here.)
The Wicker Man’s appeal lay in its portrayal of a fictional yet contemporary Pagan society, rather than its plot. The Secret History is a different sort of drug: it whispers of power and liberation in a seductive Romantic way, filtered through the mind of a 4th-century C.E. Hellenistic intellectual, the kind who would have referred to Christians as “atheists.”
The Reed College alumni magazine came today, announcing the passing of several faculty members of my time there, including my thesis advisor, the poet Kenneth O. Hanson. (I like the way the article calls Greece “the country that he discovered in 1963.” Land ho!)
Regrets: that I never gave his poetics and prosody class the attention it deserved.
Hanson was something of a “Poundling,” an admirer of the poet Ezra Pound. I was much more under the influence of Robert Graves; it was in the summer between my junior and senior year, while helping to build a house in Talpa, New Mexico, for another of Hanson’s friends, Robert Peterson, that I read The White Goddess, was swept away, embraced Her faith, and set out to read virtually everything Graves had written.
Graves’ essays included much criticism of Pound, whom, among other things, he considered uneducated; Pound’s background in Latin was lacking, raw American that he was (both Pound and Hanson had roots in Idaho.)
During one of our thesis conferences (held always in Hanson’s living room), he puffed his cigar, admitted Graves’ fine command of poetic diction, and then added, “But then there is that Moon Goddess nonsense.”
I bit my tongue.
The relationship with your thesis advisor always has multiple levels. While I did not ever become a great admirer of Pound (leaving his politics entirely aside), I did start smoking cigars. Because I was an impoverished student, getting food stamps, walking or hitch-hiking everywhere, the cigars were usually cheap ones, such as Swisher Sweets.
Today I bought a medium-priced cigar at a tobacconist and smoked it, walking up and down the muddy drive, putting away the garbage cans at the cabin, listening to the rushing of Hardscrabble Creek, watching cloud-blurred Venus hanging in the western sky.
My thesis was A book of poems titled Queen Famine, after a line by Graves. In a letter to Peterson that I sneaked a look at after my graduation, Hanson wrote: It was good, he said, but not as good as it could have been. That comment burned into my soul, of course.
Hanson’s example also stopped my cigar-smoking. First, there was the experience of coming home to my little apartment, part of a tall wooden house by the southeast Portland rail yards, and smelling the reek of stale cigars.
Second, I remember stepping into Hanson’s kitchen, where he had a wall-mounted white telephone–a rotary-dial telephone, as most of them were. Under the dial, going all the way around, was a brown smear, left by his cigar-stained fingers as he dialed. I was grossed out.
But I still have my copy of The Distance Anywhere. And I have reached the age that he was when he was my advisor.
I did not want to be one of the 50 people in the English-speaking world who had not read The Da Vinci Code, especially after one of my students wrote a flattering review of it in which I recognized all the elements of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, so I got a copy. Think of it as “Tom Clancy meets Holy Blood, Holy Grail.”
It’s a remarkably Pagan-friendly book, in a generic sort of way.
Apparently, the book’s success has led more Catholics to take a hard look at the Opus Dei organization.
Meanwhile, the book’s success has Christian apologists scrambling! No, he wasn’t married, no no no! All wrong! Evil obscene pagan propaganda!
Here is another attempt.. But all these Christian apologists can do is endlessly quote their four gospels. They do not deal with the notion that 1st-century Jews did not promote celibacy as a religious option. Temple priests, rabbis, kings and shoemakers were all expected to marry and produce children. How would a healthy 30-year-old carpenter/building contractor have evaded that social responsibilty?
Here is something that you won’t read about in The Spiral Dance or most of the other how-to-be-a-witch books. It’s rare, but it happens: covens that claim mediumistic communication with their Craft ancestors. I’ve heard it claimed for followers of Robert Cochrane and small press in Massachusetts and presented as spiritual communication with Alex Sanders (1926?-1988). Sanders was one the leading figures in Britain’s Craft scene in the 1960s and 1970s–a bigger publicity hound than Gerald Gardner, even, but still, according to people who knew him, an effective and daring magician.
As far as publishers were concerned, one of his best assets was his then-wife and high priestess Maxine (b. 1946). The camera loved Maxine. And Maxine, although she broke with Alex in the 1970s, apparently endorses this book: “The contact described within the book was so obviously true it gave me goose bumps.”
This book’s author, Jimahl di Fiosa of Boston, says that the communication began in 1998, ten years after Sanders’ death, and continues to the present day. A new, expanded edition of A Voice in the Forest Is to be published in April 2004.
I never knew Sanders, but I did know several of his students. I can’t say whether the communications are genuine or not, but I’m more interested in the idea of them as yet another example of the constant discourse about Wiccan lineage.
My essay “Ghosts” has been published in the November issue of Colorado Central magazine. Naturally, I’m delighted that the editors, Ed and Martha Quillen, liked it, even though it is probably more “literary” than their usual editorial mixture.
I wrote it last May, composing parts in my head while driving the back roads of Park County, Colorado, on the way home from the trip to Eagle Rock that the essay describes. In some cases, I found myself on the same roads that Dad and I had traveled the previous December on what would turn out to be his last trip into those mountains.
Errata: In the “Florence 2003” section, “windy roads” should be “winding roads.” And I can explain the discrepancy between the number of musicians in the Pearl DeVere funeral-reenactment photos and the text. Really, I can.
Paste at least 500 words of your text here, select the appropriate genre — fiction, nonfiction, blog entry — and see what happens.