The Dodman’s Craft

Before there was an Internet–back around 1980–Mike Nichols of Kansas City published a lively Pagan ‘zine. He has been writing and teaching classes on the Craft for decades.

Nowadays, as Wren Walker of The Witches’ Voice says in her foreword, if you do a Web search on “Samhain” or “Midsummer,” your results page will feature “Mike Nichols.” A lot.

Or you could just pick up his new work, The Witches’ Sabbats, and get it all in one place in the convenient, battery-free, cross-platform book interface, published by Acorn Guild Press.

The writing is witty–Despite the bad publicity generated by Thomas Tryon’s novel, Harvest Home is the pleasantest of holidays–and in some places, such as his astrological reading of the story of Llew and Blodeuwedd, has echoes of Robert Graves’ search for deeper meanings in myth and folklore.

And it’s indexed.

Contemporary Paganism is often referred to as “nature religion,” but in practice that most often is a religion of what I call “cosmic nature,” in other words, an attempt to attune oneself with cosmic or planetary cycles, most often through seasonal ritual. The Witches’ Sabbats is a state-of-the-art handbook for practitioners. It even includes a chapter on building or interpreting outdoor alignments with standing stones or poles.

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Animism, Disney, and Morels

It started when someone passed on a quote from an article in the August 2005 issue of Vanity Fair about Disneyland:

I thought about everything it was and it wasn’t, the cornucopia of image, illusion, and icon, and realized, very much to my delight, that Disney is a freaking pagan cult, that this goody-two-shoes American institution is promoting a primitive, animist religion dedicated to investing everything with life, to animating everything from teacups to trees, from carpets to houses, from ducks to mice, with the pulse of human aspiration.

Graham Harvey, author of the newly published Animism: Respecting the Living World, commented,

Interesting that ‘animism’ is still defined as the projection of life onto inanimate objects. Wikipedia’s animism article and the discussion pages also evidence the same debate–well, it does now that I’ve added some stuff about the ‘new animism’.

I also thought of what Colorado writer David Petersen said in On the Wild Edge: In Search of a Natural Life, published recently by Henry Holt:

These days, our annual morel quest has matured to the level of ceremony, complete as all hunting is for me, with rituals and taboos. This confession provides, I must hope, a passable transition into a brief explication of my own personal spirituality, which I call neo-animism . . . .In sum, here’s how it seems to me: if you depend on wild nature for your physical and mental well-being (as we all do, whether we know it or not); if you desire a sustainable, workable, and healthy human society and crave a sense of belonging, spiritual permanence, and personal worth; and if you agree with Aldo Leopold that the collective human destiny is tied inextricably to the fate of the natural world, then you naturally become a homespun animist. (pp. 122-4).

And speaking of morels, here is a new book available on hunting them.

Cross-posted to Nature Blog.

On the Front Burner*

Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen are the editors of a new anthology, AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man

Contributors include the always-perceptive Erik Davis and Sarah Pike, whose work I have mentioned here before.

*Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Love and fungus

M. and I went mushrooming today in the Wets. The local news had carried the story of yet another lost mushroom hunter, so she kept reminding me that she had no sense of direction and it was my job to get us back to the Jeep.

We found a couple of good king boletes and also a patch of “Hawk’s wing,” Sarcodon imbricatus.

It was a new mushroom to us, but I sat down on a stump, whipped out my copy of Mushrooms of Colorado and decided that it would be OK.

Still, before tasting the main dish tonight at supper, I lifted my fork to M. and said, “I want you to know that I always loved you.”

“Have some more mushrooms,” she replied.

That’s how we keep the magic in our marriage.

Wicca’s Charm revisited

I briefly mentioned Wicca’s Charm earlier, but now Jason Pitzl-Waters links to an interview with author Catherine Sanders that includes this priceless evaluation:

It’s a great resource for parents trying to understand why their teenager has suddenly started to wear all black and dance in circles around the backyard trees.

What about the dogs (cats, hamsters, etc.)?

I cannot agree with uber-blogger Glenn Reynolds, who said, “I think you should leave the dogs behind” when evacuating New Orleans (or elsewhere, I presume).

I have a contract with my dogs: You be good dogs, and I will see to your needs, take care of your injuries, and try to guarantee you a good death as well. There is a contract with the cat too, although some provisions are different.

Starving on a rooftop is hardly a good death, for one thing. I can see why some people would rather stay on than leave without their four-legged family members.

But dogs and other animals were left behind, and some people are trying to rescue them, although that effort does not receive the coverage of the people rescue. The Bark’s blog has collected a list of Web links to organizations helping out, like the Louisiana SPCA.

Cross-posted to Nature Blog.

We’ll drive cattle through your festival

According to the Colorado Springs Gazette, a planned Pagan event in the little High Plains town of Ramah had produced all sorts of bigotry.

Last month, the Secret Garden Coven decided to hold a fall festival as a fundraiser for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital. Organizer Jerusha Doucette-Johnson said she paid a deposit Aug. 19 on the building. Then she distributed fliers in Calhan, Simla, Ramah and other towns advertising the festival, which will include a ball, craft show and midnight ritual.

…all to be held at that bedrock institution of small-town life, the American Legion hall.

[O]ne man said he didn’t want the pagans pushing their religion down his throat. He then asked whether [Doucette-Johnson] would be open to a Ku Klux Klan meeting in her front yard, she said…. The same man also said he could organize a cattle drive through the area to ruin the festival.

My Aryan fire-and-cattle cult tops your goddess worship, by Indra!

The friend who brought my attention to this article remarked, “Doesn’t it seem that Crazy Season (otherwise known as Samhain madness) is starting a littlee early this year?”

I think that she is right. I was in an Albertsons supermarket yesterday, and a clerk was stocking the shelves with black and orange candles and plastic skulls.

UPDATE: A member of the ColoPagan e-mail list who attended the meeting notes, “The Klan comment was actually, ‘I should invite the Klan to have a rally outside of this thing.’ The American Legion Hall has since agreed to allow the proceedings to take place and over ruled the booking manager who was swayed by the reverend. The reverend was also invited to speak the invocation over the dinner portion, but refused to accept or decline the offer.”

There might eventually be more information at the Earth Spirit Pagans web site.

Coyote’s Ten Commandments

You know Coyote, right? Culture hero of a thousand misadventures?

Suppose he came down from [sacred mountain of your choice] with 10 commandments. They might look like this. (Thanks to Infidels of Every Denomination.)

Pagan Carnival

Visit The Wildhunt Blog for the latest Pagan Carnival.

Requiem for a city

Trying to prepare to teach tomorrow’s classes, I have been depressed all day about a city that I knew only as a visitor. This Washington Post writer has me beat, of course:

For those of us lucky enough to have come of age in New Orleans — even more than for the tourist who falls for her instantly — the decadent majesty of the city is like a forbidden love. You want desperately to explain the depths of your enchantment, but you know in your heart that others will acknowledge it merely as an easy infatuation or a passing fling. You know they will never awaken at night drunk on the coffee-and-banana fragrance of her docks or the beery sweat of her pre-dawn streets or the humid hum of her streetcar summers. How could they ever understand the depth of your passion?

I find myself going here compulsively.

Did the Tarot card readers of Jackson Square keep turning up The Tower all last week? (If they did not, someone will create a fictional work in which they did.)

M.’s and my experience of being refugees for all of four days last July did make me more sensitive to scenes of people fleeing their homes. In this case, though, it would not surprise me if people from southern Louisiana and Mississippi will probably still be living in tent cities a year from now, a semi-permanent class of refugees.

[A]ccording to Shea Penland, geologist and professor at the University of New Orleans. “When we get the big hurricane and there are 10,000 people dead, the city government’s been relocated to the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain, refugee camps have been set up and there $10 billion plus in losses, what then?” he asks.

Interestingly, that was published five years ago.

UPDATE: God punished New Orleans because it was a wicked city, just in case you were wondering. (Link from Andrew Sullivan.)