“Witchy” Cave Is New Obstacle to Mine Expansion

The western Colorado town of Glenwood Springs is split by Interstate 70, the Colorado River, and railroad tracks. The currently limestone mine is the tan blotch at upper left (Colorado Sun).

When I went to graduate school, I wanted to write a paper on how so many interesting natural sites have “Devil” or “Devil’s” in their name. Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming might be the best-known in the United States.((The federal government has been confused by the possessive apostrophe since the early 1900s.))

There are several “Devil’s Kitchens,” “Devil’s Playgrounds,” etc. Not too far from where I live, a circular valley adjacent to the canyon of the Arkansas River in central Colorado is known locally as either “Big Hole” or “Devil’s Hole.”

I thought that maybe I could trace the proliferation of “Devil” names back to a literal interpretation of the (sometimes) Christian teaching about Satan being “the prince of this world,” but the topic never fit into any class I took and definitely not with my thesis topic, so the database printouts, etc., still rest in a file cabinet across the room.

Meanwhile, the operators of a limestone mine near the town of Glenwood Springs, Colorado, want to expand it drastically.  But something “witchy” is in their way.

Descending into the Witches' Pantry cave.

Caver Kathy DuChene descends into the Witches’ Pantry (Colorado Sun).

Where you have limestone, you have caves. (See much of Missouri and Kentucky, for example.) In Glenwood’s case, while the town started as a mining camp, it grew into a Victorian-era resort, with a well-known geothermal pool overlooked by a massive Italianate hotel, the Hotel Colorado.1 There are several other hot springs and caves open to the public — the “historic” Fairy Caves became a tourist attraction in 1886, complete with electric lights.

In fact, in 2018 the National Caves Association Convention held its annual meeting there — that is the trade group for operators of private cave tours. Now, conveniently and fortuitously, the discovery of a new cave has been announced, whose presence might be another obstacle to expanding the limestone mine.

After subsequent explorations last fall, the [finders] wrote a report detailing their discovery — including warm, moist air blowing from fissures leading to lower levels, potentially indicating a connection to geothermal systems that feed the city’s hot springs below — and submitted it to the [Bureau of Land Management] for review as the agency analyzes the expansion plan.

In other words, if mining geothermal system extends out into the area that the company wants to mine, the expanded mine would put the hot springs themselves in danger and, consequently, much of the town’s recreation-based economy.

I smiled at this part:

The pair named the cave — the first new cave found in the area since 1985 — Witches’ Pantry after the pile of animal bones they found below the steep entrance.

“Like bones stored for cooking a witch’s brew,” Rhinehart said.

I suppose that is better than calling it “Devil’s Cave.” Just a little. You can see some photos at the link.

  1. I have stayed there, part of an informal attempt to stay at places that Theodore Roosevelt also frequented. [↩]

Mescalito Meets Calligraphy Class

Death is a whorl, he said.

Given my choice of text, what do you think that I had been reading back in my dorm room?

Cleaning out a stash of frames, mats, framed photos, some of Dad’s old watercolors, etc. today, I found this.

It is work from my beginning calligraphy class at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where the study of calligraphy shaped the visual identity from the 1940s–1980s in particular, and to a lesser extent today.

My teacher, the former monk Robert Palladino, was forced out in the 1980s, apparently by a cabal of humanities professors who felt that calligraphy was just pretty writing but not really intellectually serious.That is my take on it; in his interview Palladino says that his half-time job was sacrificed so the studio arts program (always an orphan) could hire a full-time sculptor. But I think that he was too nice a guy (and hampered by his half-time appointment) to be an active player in the game of faculty politics and to build alliances to fight for his program. (I saw something similar happen to two other professors, who had in common that they were female and foreign-born.)

The professors who sneered at calligraphy were wrong, of course. If you took Lloyd Reynolds’ or Palladino’s courses, you ended up getting a whole history of the Western tradition, since the study of calligraphy — like music  history — brought with it lineages of thinkers, rulers, and texts. And in everyone’s favorite anecdote, the fact that Apple co-founder Steve Jobs sat it on one of Palladino’s classes influenced the screen fonts and graphics of Macintosh computers a decade later.

Since 2012, an effort has been made to bring back the formal study of calligraphy via “the Scriptorium.”

Me, I just took one semester’s worth. I was a little overawed by my roommate, who sucked down calligraphy like oxygen and went on to become a professional calligrapher and graphic designer in San Francisco. I was a toddler scribbling on the wall with a crayon compared to him.

Goodbye to Witches’ Voice — Pagan Space Tries Again

Witchvox is now officially over, and Thorn Mooney has written a reminiscence/tribute about how it affected her earlier life

WitchVox helped me start countless book clubs, three college Pagan groups, launch two websites, and form my own coven, once I was ready. It made me feel less alone, and came with the added benefit of my parents, bosses, and school bullies not knowing it existed, which meant that it felt private and safe in a way that Facebook never will. It was an archive—a testament to the weird, wonderfulness of the community I was just getting to know, and would come to devote my life to.

I admit that I made only modest use of The Witches’ Voice, answering occasional emails from people trying to make connections in Colorado.

The new Pagan Space logo.

Meanwhile, Pagan Space  is back, with a slogan “Be You, Be Pagan!” and this pitch: “Would you consider inviting your Facebook friends to a community just for Pagans that does not censor your speech or sell your private data?” They have chat rooms, a marketplace, pages (in the Facebook sense), and so on. Not all the links are working, and some just lead to placeholder text (“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet”), but some people seem to be using it.

Everyone bitches about Facebook, but can anything else do the same job?

Fimbul Winter and the Plague: The Horrible Mid-6th Century

The mid-6th century must have been a terrible time in the Mediterranean world, in Western Europe, and probably other places as well.

Raids on Britain following end of Roman ruleIf you look up “the plague of Justinian,” you will find that much has been written on a bubonic plague outbreak during the rule of the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian, peaking around 540–541 CE. Apparently that is part of a larger disaster that started around 536.

David Keys, author of Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization, speculated that this plague, which spread from the Middle East to Britain (if not farther), might have contributed to the collapse of Romano-Celtic Britain in the face of Anglo-Saxon invasion, despite the best efforts of King Arthur (whoever he was).1 That hypothesis is based on assuming that the Romanized Britons had more trade contact with the Mediterranean world, which exposed them to the plague, whereas the English were more isolated. But who can say for sure?

I was introduced to Catastrophe by my friend and mentor, the English witch Evan John Jones, who had bought it shortly before I visited him in Brighton, and I stayed up late a couple nights speed-reading it after he and Val, his wife, had long gone to bed.

All that concatenation of volcanic eruption-plague-and climate change was brought back to mind by this article, “The Long, Harsh Fimbul Winter is not a Myth,” subtitled, “Probably half of Norway and Sweden’s population died. Researchers now know more and more about the catastrophic year of 536.”

Reconstructed Bronze Age house in Norway, typical of houses built up until 536 CE (Wikimedia Commons).

In essence, massive short-term climate changes slammed Scandinavia, northern Germany, and the Baltic region in the 530s, leading to abandonment of farms and settlements and the projected deaths of up to half of the peoples there.

“First came the Fimbul winter that lasted three years. This was a warning of the coming of Ragnarok, when everything living on Earth came to an end.”

This is how the story of the long harsh winter, called the Fimbul winter in Norwegian, begins, both in Norse mythology and in the Finnish national work of epic poetry, the Kalevala.

But why are stories that warn of a frozen end-time found in Nordic mythologies?

* * *

[Swedish archaeologist Bo] Gräslund was first to suggest that the Fimbul winter was a real event, and that it took place in the years after 536. He also pointed out that the 13th century Icelandic historian Snorre in his book Edda was not only concerned that it was very cold and the winters were snowy — Snorre was also concerned because there were no summers for several years in a row.

Whereas David Keys looks toward a volcano in Indonesia as the culprit, the Scandinavians are suspecting an eruption in Central America or Mexico:

“This must have happened somewhere near the Equator. Maybe it was El Chichón volcano in southern Mexico,” [climate scientist Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist] said.

The tiny particles from the two volcanic eruptions remained in the atmosphere for several years, leading to strong cooling in the northern hemisphere. Ljungqvist points out that there are now a number of studies of annual rings in old trees that confirm this.

He points out that the cumulative effect of two huge volcanic eruptions in the years 536 and 540 was what made this cooling quite exceptional and very long lasting.

The archaeological evidence is chilling, no pun intended:

In Denmark, archaeologist Morten Axboe found that large quantities of gold and other precious metal jewellery were sacrificed right after the climate shock.

Axboe’s theory is that these sacrifices were actions of desperate people. They sought to mollify higher powers and asked them to bring the sun back into the sky.

* * *

In Rogaland and the surrounding areas, until the disaster 1500 years ago, there were many skilled goldsmiths.

Both they and their craft disappeared.

The same thing happened to the many talented potters who had lived in western Norway before the Merovingian Period, from Jæren in the south to Sogn in the north.

It would take another thousand years before equally fine pottery was made in Norway.

You can’t blame people for thinking that this was The End, or at least a good preview of what The End would look like.

And one more item: The inscription on this 6th-century runestone from south-central Sweden appears to have been influenced by the horrible winters.

  1. Roman forces had been withdrawn from Britannia in the early 400s and that colony more or less written off, although Britain retained a lot of Roman culture for a time. [↩]

“Pagans,” a Short Documentary Film


Oooh, scary Pagans! We spend a lot of time with the curtains drawn, gazing at candles, right. We wear black robes . . .  Seriously, there is some good stuff here: Pagans, a short documentary.

To tell the story of the dramatic rise of neo-paganism in America, though, you quickly run into a roadblock. “No two pagans seem to agree on the same definition” of paganism, Iqbal Ahmed, who spent two years researching a large community of pagans in Southern California for his short documentary Pagans, told me. Because of this confusion, Ahmed said, “it’s no wonder that relatively informed laypeople might have still have misconceptions about paganism.”

In fact, Ahmed came to the world of paganism with his own set of preconceived notions. “Paganism conjured images of ’80s films about satanic cults,” he said. “I envisioned blood rituals, pentagrams, and hedonism.” Pagans, which is featured on The Atlantic today, aims to dispel some of this haze. By focusing on an intimate community of pagans who live within 200 miles of one another and often worship together, Ahmed’s film showcases paganism’s diversity of people and beliefs. “I found pagans of every ilk,” Ahmed said. Among his film’s subjects are teachers, social workers, and PTA members who engage in various pre-Christian practices steeped in ceremony and superstition.

This Is the Real “War on Christmas”


From a hardcore Muslim Instagrammer:

Shaykh Ibn Al Qayyim said “Congratulating the non-muslims on the rituals that belong only to them is haraam by ijmâ (consensus), as is congratulating them on their festivals and feasts by saying: ‘a happy festival to you’ or ‘may you enjoy your festival,’ and so on. If the one who says this has been saved from disbelief, it is still forbidden. It is like congratulating someone for prostrating to the cross, or even worse than that. It is as great a sin as congratulating someone for drinking wine, or murdering someone, or having illicit sexual relations, and so on. Many of those who have no respect for their religion fall into this error; they do not realize the offensiveness of their actions. Whoever congratulates a person for his disobedience or bid’ah (innovation) or disbelief exposes himself to the wrath and anger of All?h.” [Ahkaam Ahl Al-Thimmah]
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See, Ibn Al Qayyim was a renowned Shaykh of Ahlul Sunnah from over 600 years ago. On top of that, he mentioned this statement with reference to the Ijmâ (consensus) of that time! An ijmâ (consensus) is when every single scholar agree on a certain matter and none of them disagree over it, so this is something we haven’t even had for hundreds of years. So if you want to say, “Nah maybe he’s wrong”, surely the other hundreds and thousands were not all wrong!
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Tell your friend/family, or Abu Fulan who talks a lot, or your misguided Shaykh who gives you a fatwa for celebrating Christmas; tell them they have no authority to overwrite an ijmâ.

#tawheedvision #shirkmas #shirk #tawheed #christianity #christmas #carol #jesus #allah #makkah #madinah #polytheism #monotheism Reposted from @tawheedvision

And then you have the monotheists who say, “We all worship the same god.” Somehow, I don’t think that phrase means what you think it means. At least polytheists can say, “Well, maybe Yahweh and Allah are not the same god, and we can make room for that, at long as you are not trying to kill us according to the instructions in your holy book.”

Have a wonderful Yuletide, y’all.

Happy Yuletide!

“Witness of Another World” is a Powerful Documentary about “Visitor” Encounters

Aside from an occasional excursion, I am not much into UFO studies. It was years after it came out that I read Jacques Vallée’s1 Passport to Magonia, and it shaped my thinking.

I put its thesis like this: Instead of chugging through interstellar space to Earth, the UFO-nauts have always been here. “They” appear in many different shapes, some humanoid, some not, as it suits their fancy. Sometimes They just like to mess with us for reasons we do not understand. Or in more refined language,

As an alternative to the extraterrestrial visitation hypothesis, Vallée has suggested a multidimensional visitation hypothesis. This hypothesis represents an extension of the ETH where the alleged extraterrestrials could be potentially from anywhere. The entities could be multidimensional beyond space-time, and thus could coexist with humans, yet remain undetected (Wikipedia).

Back in the 1970s, Vallée and his wife flew to Argentina to investigate the case of Juan Pérez, a 12-year-old boy from a gaucho family in northern Argentina. Sent out one morning to bring in the family herd, Juan saddled his favorite horse, Cometa (Comet), and rode off into the pastures. On his ride, Juan encountered . . . something . . . that seemed to be a typical flying saucer. Tying Cometa to the craft’s ladder, he went up into it, he said.

There he encountered two beings. When he went home and told his story, he soon became a UFO celebrity. Cometa, however, sickened and died mysteriously only a few days after the encounter.

Juan’s life was wrecked. Call it PTSD. Call it a bad case of susto (soul loss). He fled the ufology scene. He ended up a fifty-ish bachelor, living an isolated life with just his dogs, working seasonally on neighboring ranches and otherwise alone.

There he was until an Argentine filmmaker, Alan Stivelman, decided to reunite him with Vallée, with whom he had had a good relationship as a youth. Vallée was enthusiastic about the plan — all he wanted was a couple of months to study intensively to improve his Spanish.

Stivelman’s documentary, Witness of Another World, is just beautiful movie-making. Whether on Argentinian pampas or up north in the jungle villages of Guaraní Indians, who play an important part in the documentary (Juan has some Guaraní ancestry) or exploring the texture’s of Juan’s crumbling house, it is good to look at.

It is a story of a man brought back from the edge, a spiritual rescue mission, where ufology meets shamanism meets a compassionate reunion of old friends —  the eighty-year-old scientist and the grown-up but still frightened gaucho boy.

You can rent it (download) for $4.99 or buy it (download) for $12.99. It is on Amazon Prime as well.

Listen to what Jacques Vallée has to say about “the phenomenon,” his term for the whole UFO/demon/fairy/visitor complex. Watch what the shamans do. And remember that “They” are not necessarily our friends.

Bonus: On his Dreamland podcast, Whitley Strieber interviews director Alan Stivelman, with contributions from Jacques Vallée.

  1. Born in France, Vallée has spent most of his life in the US. His career includes astronomy, software engineering, venture capitalism — and UFO studies. [↩]

Witchcraft Cycles and the Official Witch of LA

“Official Witch” Louise Huebner with Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, late 1960s.

Jason Mankey’s Raise the Horns blog (in the sidebar) carries his look back over the previous decade, “Paganism & Witchcraft in the 2010’s.” I urge you to read it.

I would like to add just a little bit of nuance to one passage:

Until recently Modern Witchcraft was generally tied into some sort of spiritual system. Most of the self-identified Witches I knew twenty years ago talked at least a little about the sabbats or maybe “the Goddess.” Today that’s no longer really the case and “Witchcraft” seems to be associated more simply with just “magic.” There are some who will argue that it’s always been that way, but I disagree. Books on Witchcraft emphasized a variety of different things, a lot of today’s Witchcraft simply focuses on magickal practice.

Apparently I am one who disagrees, because it feels like we are swinging back to the 1960s–1970s, when there were books out on witchcraft that had nothing to do with Wicca; in fact, few people have ever heard of Wicca. But everyone has heard of witchcraft.

To continue ….

I interviewed Amanda Yates Garcia recently and read her book, much of her story was familiar to me because we are of a similar age, however . . . With the exception of Michael Hughes I didn’t know any of the people who blurbed her book (rare for me in the Witch-world), and I’m pretty sure Yates Garcia and I have never been to the same event. That’s not a knock on her (or I hope, me), just an example of the two parallel Witchcraft worlds that exist today. She’s operating in a different sphere than I am on Patheos and at Llewellyn, and that’s OK, but it seems more common today than it did 20 years ago.

Here again,we have cycled around. Amanda Yates Garcia immediately reminded me of Louise Huebner (1930–2014), who got herself named Official Witch of Los Angeles County in 1968. Here is her story how how it happened.

She claimed to have learned witchcraft from her mother and grandmother. Someone has put her 1969 album Seduction through Witchcraft up on YouTube, so you can experience it yourself. Different media, same shtick, am I right?

“A lot of today’s Witchcraft simply focuses on magickal practice”? That is true and probably will continue to be true.

Religious Scholars Incognito

The AAR’s 2019 annual meeting graphic.

When you are a scholar of religion, sometimes you forget how seriously people take religion.

Riding across New Mexico this week on Amtrak’s Southwest Chief, M. and I went to the dining car for supper. All the tables seat four, and to save space and facilitate service, if there are fewer than four of people, the steward will seat others at your table (or you at theirs) to fill them up. To some people, this is social event; others just greet you politely and then ignore you.

We had just one companion, however, an older man who introduced himself as “Fred.” I don’t know how it came up, but he said that he wrote books on various topics, including theology. (Uh-oh.) Also, he said, he had produced a new version of the Bible in 21st-century English. (What a concept! No one has thought of that before!) It became clear that his theology is very conservative.

He asked what I did. I said I had worked as a newspaper journalist and magazine editor, which is perfectly true. I did not say that I was on my way to the annual joint meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature, because if nothing else, many people will think you are Bible Answer Man or something.

Like the time I was riding a shuttle bus between my Chicago hotel and the McCormick Place convention center and the bus driver shut the door, looked over his shoulder, and said, “I bet you gentlemen know when Jesus is coming back.”

I let the Protestants on board handle that one.

My encounter with Fred, though, was mild compared to what another friend encountered on her trip to San Diego this year:

[I spent the flight] listening to some techbro explain to the Dean [of a certain seminary] how he and his friend started their own church based on self-actualization through electronic dance music.

He ended the plane ride by making the Dean make a Facebook video for his gurufeed (his words) about what he was grateful for and the great synchronicity they had.

I thought about trying to send the Dean a rescue party, but the Southwest flight attendants wouldn’t allow it.

If you are shy or just feeling anti-social, sometimes it is better not to say that you are a religion scholar.