The Inner West is published

The Inner West: An Introduction to the Hidden Wisdom of the West is just out under Penguin’s Jeremy Tarcher imprint, with the publisher’s web page here.

The collection of 20 articles is drawn mostly from the back issues of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions, whose founding editor, Jay Kinney, has edited this new collection. I look at it as a sort of “best of Gnosis,” with a focus on Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, and Gnosticism. Richard Smoley, the second editor of Gnosis and a fine writer on Western esoteric traditions, has several pieces in the collection.

A piece that I wrote about 1991 called “The Unexamined Tarot” is part of the collection; I think that it holds up pretty well after all these years. The collection also includes Judy Harrow’s “Explaining Wicca.”

Another short break from blogging

M. and I are leaving for our favorite small town in the We(s)t Kootenays of British Columbia, which offers bigger lakes, bigger trees, and different mountains than those we see every day. I hope to continue the editing of Her Hidden Children with a goal of finishing the re-write by mid-August.

Blogging should resume after 18 July.

The new issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies is being mailed. Janet Joyce, managing director of Equinox Publishing, dropped off some copies when I was in Bath; otherwise, I would still be waiting to see it, thanks to some start-up glitches in the mailing process. It looks good! Now if we can just get the start-up bugs out of the distribution system. . .

Greek Pagans rile church

Followers of revived Greek Pagan (or Ethnic) religion are indeed able to gain more publicity, thanks to this summer’s Olympic Games in Greece.

On a green meadow at the foot of Mt Olympus, famous in mythical literature as the home of the Zeus and the Hellenic gods, a group of men and women stand dressed in togas in a circle, heads covered with wreaths of leaves, right hands held up as they repeat lines in Classical Greek.

A ritual of baptism has begun, at the end of which about a dozen members of the group will formally cast aside their old Christian beliefs and accept new Hellenic, pagan names.

Read entire article here.

Update: A couple of people have questioned the word “toga” in the article, rightly pointing out that togas were worn by upper-class Roman men, not by ancient Greeks. (A toga was the Roman equivalent of a man’s three-piece suit, you might say.) Not having seen photos, I cannot be sure, but I suspect that the reporter used “toga” ignorantly to mean “ancient garment.”

Under the spell of Sulis (5)

Part 1 Part 2

I have added one video clip to Part 3 and two video clips to Part 4

The Poison Path and Fatal Fronds


While I was in England, M. was Web-searching and turned up the Duchess of Northumberland’s “poison garden,” which I would like to see today. Part of a much larger garden complex that is under construction but still attracting busloads of garden-loving Brits, it has gotten a lot of press.

In a recent article, The Guardian, <sarcasm > official organ of the nanny state </sarcasm>, gets hyperbolic about the terribly dangerous plants. Protect the children! Fence off the catnip!

“Evil-looking flowers,” Caroline? Imagine a potato flower. Imagine it pale yellow with dark brown veins. OK? A plant can be a traditional entheogen without being “evil-looking.” Ah well, she has to promote the product.

Of course, people visit exhibition gardens to get ideas. If, for instance, the duchess gets official approval to grow coca (and being a young, media-savvy duchess she might well get it), others might well think, “I could plant some of that between the rhododendrons.”

LEFT: “Evil-looking” henbane blossom.

Who knows what else adventurous British gardeners might be tempted to try growing.

I have long assumed that some very discreet growers in mild North American climates have brought Mama Coca north of the Mexican border. How useful for that long hike in the Sierra Nevada! Unlike refined cocaine, the natural plant has been used for centuries, it has nutritional value, etc.–all this is in the writing of ethnobotanists like the late Richard Schultes or Wade Davis.

(I owe the phrase “poison path” to Dale Pendell.)

Under the Spell of Sulis-4

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

At today’s exchange rate, it costs US $16.38 to tour the excavated ruins of the Roman baths that give Bath its name. I paid the entry fee twice, last Sunday and last Monday. It was worth it.

Full of tourists as it is, the place still has a presence. Celtic British holy site, Roman temple-baths complex, Dark Ages ruin, medieval hospital for “leprosy” (whatever they meant by that term back then–any skin disease, apparently), 18th-century fashionable watering hole . . . layers on layers. And underneath it all the sacred spring still flows, 13 liters per second, or 250,000 gallons per day, however you wish to measure it.

LEFT: Diorama of a Roman priest with two visitors to the temple-baths complex. The temple of Minerva Sulis is in the background.

I had stayed at the White Hart Inn with seven friends; six returned to their homes in the UK after the conference, leaving just Doug Ezzy and me (the “rude colonials”), so we found new lodgings nearby at No. 3 Caroline Buildings and stayed on. After a “full English breakfast” on Sunday the 27th of June (a meal that seems always to include baked beans–I had forgotten that), we walked to the site of the baths.

They give you one of those audio guide receivers to listen to, as many museums do. Its soundtrack is a little too fond of Roman trumpet blasts, but they also include, for instance, the screamed Latin curse of a woman throwing a scrap of lead with a curse written on it into the sacred spring. Folks used to do that a lot, along with their votive offerings.

By the time I arrived at the dedicatory altars (placed in the sanctuary in fulfillment of someone’s vow) and the tombstones, I was there. I don’t mean some big reincarnational flashback; I’ve had those (maybe), and this was not the same. But I half-lost track of Doug, and the clusters of tourists were in the background. Here, underground as the site now is, I was ready to do it all: to cast my offerings into the water (still done), pay honor to Minerva Sulis (yes), and then submerge myself (sorry, not permitted). Only a clandestine dip of fingers, in defiance of the posted notice (not sanitary!).

Instead, the nearest thing is to go upstairs into the 18th-century Pump Room and to pay 50 pence (90 cents) to a man in wig and knee britches who decorously passes you a glass tumbler full of the water, tasting of rust and sulfur, and drink it down, down, down.

Not enough. Doug and I left to have a quick pint of the local Blackthorn cider with Alan Richardson and his lady friend, Margaret–Alan’s new biography of the magician William Gray, The Old Sod, was recently published by Ignotus Press. And Doug went on to continue his interview of British teen witches for a study that he is conducting together with Helen Berger. And I was up the next morning and back to the Roman baths.

I let the audio receiver hang from its cord, instead just walking the ancient pavements, listening, looking, feeling. And taking pictures. Maybe taking pictures is a votive act itself, sometimes–perhaps there is a paper there or at least a couple of paragraphs. No doubt, had the Empire lasted, the priests of Sulis would be selling disposable cameras at a stall in the temple courtyard–or they would have leased the concession to someone else to do it. Pagan religions, after all, delight in the tangible. The relic, the souvenir–that is one of the Pagan substrata that underly the so-called world religions. We want to experience the gods with all our senses, so a soak would have been nice too. Instead, you get the T-shirts and the Aquae Sulis bath products in the museum shop. Oh well, it’s a handsome T-shirt.

This 3.1 MB video clip pans across the Roman pool (facing east), showing the 19th-century terrace above the pool with Victorian statuary, various tourists, and a glimpse of the abbey in the background.

This 1.4 MB video clip pans from the opposite side, looking down into the entrance to the West Baths.

And then on to Bristol, for a too-short, 24-hour visit with Ronald Hutton, and then bus-bus-airplane-airplane-Jeep and home.

Under the Spell of Sulis-3

Part 1 Part 2

RIGHT: Indigenous Avon skipper

The first evening of the consciousness conference ended with a cruise into the English rain forest, in the company of indigenous shamans. Our boat moved at a stately 5 knots or so down the dark and shimmering Avon, away from the town and into a green tunnel: the sinister Salix, the ghostly Umbellifereae. Techno/world music thumped in the main saloon in the indigenous dusk until, by a deserted mission station at the water’s edge, our indigenous pilot swung the bow around, we returned through the ancient Weston lock, and glided back from the green tunnel into the stone walls of dreaming Bath.

In this video clip, the rain-forest cruise is leaving Bath, heading down the River Avon. Watch your head.

Now here is a ‘Pagan survival’

Is Alexander the Great’s body actually in Venice? In the current issue of History Today, historian Andrew Chugg makes the case that the mummified body of “St. Mark” treasured in Venice might actually be that of the world-conqueror Alexander (356-323 BCE). (Article available online, registration required.) It’s all timed for the movie, of course.

Under the Spell of Sulis-2

But before I could visit the temple of Minerva Sulis, there was the conference to attend. I arrived midway through the first day, 24 June, considerably jet-lagged, after a journey on two airplanes, two trains, and my feet.

Arriving at The Forum, a 1930s movie palace now home of the Bath City Church, I was a little perplexed by the church’s name on the marquee. But the building looked right, and once inside, I knew.

For that weekend, the stage was decorated with potted Salvia divinorum, San Pedro cactus, morning glory, and other interesting plants–not quite the BCC style, I’m sure. But they fit with an auditorium full of psychonauts, astrologers, Pagans, and (mostly Pagan) academics.

We presenters really had only 20 minutes out of the allotted 30, once you subtract the introduction and the question-and-answer period. Some people (like me) still wrote out papers with citations, such for our own security, while knowing that we would have to condense them drastically.

My list of people whom I knew of but had never met included the grand couple of psychoactive chemistry, Alexander and Ann Shulgin, as well as two outstanding astrologers, Robert Hand from the US and Liz Greene from England, not to mention the two German ethnobotanists, Christian Raetsch and Claudia Mueller-Ebeling.

More to come. Meanwhile, some views of Bath.

Under the Spell of Sulis-1

Back from England, I am planning several blog posts as I edit the photos and video clips to go with them.

Left: the base of a column that once helped to support a high, vaulted roof over the main swimming pool in the Roman baths, rebuilt in the 2nd century CE., when the town was known as Aquae Sulis, the waters of the goddess Minerva Sulis.

I spent four days in Bath, the town that grew up around the only significant hot springs in England, which have been a site of worship, therapy, and pleasure-seeking for centuries–and under Roman rule, visitors could have combined all three in a way never since equaled.

To get a feel for Bath, you might imagine what Santa Fe, New Mexico, might have been like if the center of town included the hot springs from Ojo Caliente or Jemez. Like Santa Fe, Bath is clogged with tourists, every third business is a restaurant, and you probably want a fat bank account to live there, and yet, underneath, its energy is flowing.

For me, a bonus to visiting Bath and the nearby port city of Bristol is that when making hotel reservations, etc., I never had to spell out my surname. Everyone was familiar with it.

More soon. . .