Ghost story

Boulder, Colo., Wiccan priestess Morwyn has a piece in the current (August 2005) issue of Fate magazine, titled “Exorcism Spanish Style,” based on an incident that occurred to her in Santiago de Campostela in 1997.

She owns Dunraven House, the latest incarnation of magical-supplies business that has occupied her since the 1970s–she told me once that she was inspired by similar such stores catering to followers of Umbanda and Candomblé that she encountered when in Brazil on a Fulbright fellowship.

I always tell my nonfiction-writing students that Fate is the place to try to sell a true ghost story.

Banned at Borders?

I was trying to track down a report that The Love Spell: An Erotic Memoir of Spiritual Awakening, by high-profile Wiccan lawyer and priestess Phyllis Curott, had been yanked from bookstores after pressure from social-conservative Christians such as these.

I cannot find anything so far to substantiate that rumor.

What is probably worse, in her social sphere, is getting the snarky treatment from Veiled Conceit, a blog devoted to sarcastic deconstruction of New York Times wedding announcements.

The Potter menace

To my mind, the best thing about the Harry Potter books is that kids like to read them, and I generally think that Reading is Good. But I never made the important connection noted by Christian blogger Dan Edelen: Wicca is the first world religion produced in the United Kingdom. J.K. Rowling lives in the UK also. It’s no coincidence!

As ever, don’t skip the comments.

UPDATE: In a different sort of bitchfest, blogger Lindsay Beyerstein has all the links on Terry Prachett’s denunciation of Rowling for not being a proper fantasy-genre writer.

It really pisses [Pratchett and Neil Gaiman] off that such a huge commercial success isn’t counted squarely as a coup for the fantasy genre.

On the other hand, they really don’t like the fact that a card carrying non-fanboy is kicking asses all over the best seller lists.

There is a sign on the border of every ghetto: “Sal si puedes. Get out if you can.”

“Witches” who were about to die

The walls of a dungeon in Palermo, Sicily, have yielded grafitti left by condemned prisoners in the 17th and 18th centuries. Some of the prisoners would have been condemned for sorcery, says this account.

Anyone dragged [to that dungeon] was unlikely to emerge alive as the Inquisition was notoriously ruthless with suspected heretics, soothsayers, blasphemers and friends of the Devil. “In fact, many of the victims were simply intellectuals or artists whom the Church considered a threat to its power,” explained the head of restorers, Domenico Policarpi.

Indeed, the average Sicilian back then was probably illiterate and incapable of writing anything much on prison walls.

Extreme Academia

The normally serious people at the American Association of University Professors have produced this.

If, like me, you know these programs only from being occasionally trapped in a high-rise hotel room, this site can help.

Sample: Average Joe

Journal editors deliberately select mediocre articles for their next issues. No one notices.

Pagan archives

I recently sent my eighth carton of Pagan magazines, dating from the 1970s to last year, to the University of California, Santa Barbara.

That particular UC campus is known for its religious-studies department. J. Gordon Melton, a well-known scholar of new religious movements, is also affiliated with the university, although not on the religion faculty. (From an academic perspective, Wicca, Asatru, etc. are “new religious movements”, regardless of claims of antiquity that some people make for their traditions.)

Melton brought his own huge collection of material from his Institute for the Study of American Religion to the university library’s American Religions Collection. That collection is now being digitized, which should make future study easier.

My last carton contained issues of Enchanté, Hole in the Stone, The Druid’s Progress, and some other now-discontinued Pagan ‘zines.

It’s a hard choice: part of me wants to save everything indefinitely, the way some people save old car parts. The other part of me says that I am not in the archive business and that giving these publications to a real archive will make them available to others, not to mention freeing up significant shelf space in the garage (which can then be filled with Jeep parts).

There are a few boxes of back issues that I do hold on to: Green Egg, the best national Pagan magazine of the 1970s-80s; The Cauldron, continuously published for nearly 30 years now; Nemeton, a West Coast Pagan magazine from the 1970s, and my rarity, issues of The Pentagram, a British Craft newsletter published for a short time in the mid-1960s.

Road trip

Suitably stocked with guns and whiskey, M. and I leave today for the Wyoming border. Tomorrow, in daylight, we plan to travel north on the old smugglers’ route, past the desolate frontier fortress of Baggs, and moving quickly through the lawless caravan town of Rock Springs, thence north toward the fantasy kingdom of Jackson. There we plan to annoy the trout in the water of the Snake and do other things. Blogging will be erratic.

Changing My Religion

No, you won’t see this blog recategorized or bounced from Blog Heaven (I hope). I mean my automotive religion.

After a process of conversion that began in 1997 but like all conversions had its precursors, M. and I have moved from the Volkswagenkirche to the Cult of Jeep.

It’s the woman’s fault, of course. I only bit the apple, uh, Wrangler, because she asked me to.

In 1977, before we were married, M.’s Dodge convertible was failing and, with my guidance and promise to do maintenance, she bought a used 1970 VW Bug. That car went through fire and flood, war and revolution, before we finally let it go about 1990.

It was followed by a 1969 pop-top camper bus (1982-94), a 1980 Rabbit pickup truck (1990-1997), and a 1984 pop-top Vanagon camper (1994-2005). The ’69 bus went to a woman who was born in 1969.

The Rabbit pickup was M.’s daily driver, but its low ground clearance and so-so snow performance were a hindrance after we moved into the mountains. One day she expressed a desire to have a TJ/Wrangler, and after some time had passed, lo, there was a Wrangler in the garage. And many a snowdrift it has blasted through (only occasionally having to be dug out).

Then I bought a neighbor’s ’73 CJ-5. And Granville King’s bible replaced the gospel according to John Muir on the automotive bookshelf.

It was only a matter of time. Parts for the Vanagon were becoming rarer, although we had a great European-car mechanic to keep it running. Its camping function was replaced by a pop-up trailer and a Jeep Liberty to pull the trailer with; and last Saturday I sold the Vanagon.

Now we are pure Jeep cultists and can do things like complain about anachronistic Jeeps in movies such as Patton.

Maybe Dad started it,bringing home National Guard Jeeps and giving us kids rides when we were little. And I liked his Forest Service Willys wagon, although he preferred pickups. (But he had two Wagoneers, so it’s famtrad.) And I still somewhere yearn for a yellow Commando like one of the cool girls in my high school drove. You know what they say: It’s like coming home.

Hogwarts versus Cherry Hill

BeliefNet offers a side-by-side comparison of a certain wizard’s school versus real-life Pagan seminaries.

Click the graphic on the sidebar for more of the wacky world of BeliefNet’s religion blogs.

Historic preservation leads to . . . polytheism?

Those fun-loving Wahabi Muslim clerics in Saudi Arabia fear that preserving historic buildings in their holy city of Mecca–even sites associated with the prophet Muhammed himself–might lead to polytheism.

Their reasoning is so convoluted that I cannot easily summarize it. But an Arab architectural historian (apparently) says, “They (Wahhabis) have not allowed preservation of old buildings, especially those related to the prophet. They fear other Muslims will come to see these buildings as blessed and this could lead to polytheism and idolatry.”

So it is better to let them be bulldozed. (Does the developer pay off the clerics?) It’s a pity that this Saudi blogger felt afraid to keep blogging: he would have had some interesting comments. Read his archives.

Letting women drive cars leads to polytheism too. But you knew that.