Tropic of Night

If I had to describe Michael Gruber’s new novel Tropic of Night in Hollywoodese, I would say that it’s “(Miami crime writer) Edna Buchanan meets (ethnobotanist) Wade Davis.”

Detectives, sorcerers, preschoolers, santeros, this world, the otherworld, all handled deadpan:

“I read threat in the way they were standing: two Latina women in tan servant’s uniforms, a dark woman with shopping bags, with a little girl and an older boy in tow; a zombie; two thin Oriental guys in cook’s whites speaking Cuban Spanish, and a very fat copper-skinned woman with a cane and a palm fan, all typically what you would find at any such corner in low-rent Miami, except maybe for the zombie.”

Thanks for the tip to Steve Bodio, whose own latest book is Eagle Dreams.

The Masonic conspiracy

The wacko Islamic jihadis are not obssessed only with the so-called worldwide Jewish conspiracy, says New Statesman writer Nick Cohen, they also are keeping alive the fantasy of the evil worldwide Masonic conspiracy! Read more here.

Why do they always take her picture?

Pagans are not the only ones complaining how certain flamboyant figures (example or example) get media attention whether they are “representative of the community” or not.

Religion-beat journalist John Dart (April 1 entry) shows that that complaint is heard in other religions as well, because, he suggests, religion-beat reporters’ input is not heeded.

Now we will see if the Druids’ curse still works

Magic planned against stone circle vandals.

Pagans and Jedis, O My!

The Sunday Herald reports results of a recount of religious affiliation in Scotland, paid for the the Pagan Federation in the UK.

Thanks to Cat McEarchern, American doctoral student at the University of Stirling, who says that he thinks the Pagan numbers are low.

Church of the Eternal Source co-founder dies

I learned just recently of the passing in January of Don Harrison, one of the founders of the Church of the Eternal Source.

Since he was a teenager in the 1940s, Don had been drawn to ancient Pagan religion. In 1967 he started to publish a modest neo-pagan discussion magazine in Los Angeles, which he called Julian Review after the Emperor Julian.

Later, through the pioneer Southern California Pagan group Feraferia, Harrison met Harold Moss and Sara Cunningham, who joined him in founding the Church of the Eternal Source in August 1970 as an umbrella for groups and individuals wishing to follow reconstructed ancient Egyptian philosophy and religion.

In addition to creating many items of art, furniture, and temple furnishings based on Egyptian prototypes, Harrison wrote three historical novels, The Spartan, The Alexandrian Drachma, and The Lion Warriors.

(My thanks to the Rev. Harold Moss, CES, for the photo and information.)

Mutilation bad, murder … well, OK

I thought that the right-wing bloggers might have made this one up, but it’s true. The Council on American Islamic Relations, a self-described civil-rights organization, issued a press release condemning the mutilation of the bodies of the four American civilians killed in Falujah, Iraq, on Wednesday, 31 March.

The Washington-based Islamic civil rights and advocacy group cited a tradition of the Prophet Muhammad that prohibits mutilating bodies (Hadith 654.3).

Not the murders, mind you. Evidently the killing was Islamic. But mutilating corpses and hanging them from a bridge over the Euphrates River is un-Islamic.

The Pagan Olympics

The Olympic flame has made its from Olympia to Athens, but not everyone is happy. A lone voice speaks out: The Olympics are Pagan and idolatrous. “I believe that our best response to the Olympics is to go on the offensive for the kingdom of God”

For others, it’s a sort of Greek civil region, according to this piece in Kathimerini.

Wolves in Colorado and in . . . Scotland?

While the Colorado Division of Wildlife tries to figure out what to do with the grey wolves that are coming south, I just learned that there is an effort underway to reintroduce wolves in the Scottish Highlands. Still more here.

Here in Colorado, the private Colorado Wildlife Federation says that there is 66-percent public support for the wolves. I have often wondered what it would feel like to live in a place like the UK with no four-footed predator larger than a badger (and feral dogs, I suppose).

Gerald Gardner in the 1940s

Capall Bann have published Philip Heselton’s second volume exploring the origins of contemporary Wicca, Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration. (Am I the only one who thinks that that title seems awfully Harry Potterish?) Capall Bann’s distribution is not great outside the UK, but North American readers can order it here.

Heselton continues to do a fine job ferreting out information on Gardner and his associates: letters, obscure publications, even Ordnance Survey maps from the 1930s showing whose house was located in relation to someone else’s house. He is an outstanding researcher. Read this book and you will learn about many interesting things tangential to Wiccan history, such as the beginnings of organized nudism in the UK. (Those “Moonella” people were a hoot!)

Unfortunately, Heselton is blinded by the myth: the hidden coven at the Rosicrucian Theatre, Gardner’s purported 1939 initiation in Dorothy Clutterbuck’s house, the alleged Lammas 1940 ritual to stop the planned German invasion–all of it. (And, at one time, so was I.)

Instead, Ronald Hutton’s suggestion in The Triumph of the Moon, that there was no Wicca as a consciously Pagan “Old Religion” until about 1950 or 1951, is more likely true. Heselton’s new evidence actually supports that conclusion even better than did Hutton’s, but Heselton, a “true believer”, will not admit it.

Throughout the 1940s, when Gardner supposedly was already a Wiccan initiate, he was chasing after other religious credentials. He was ordained by an esoteric splinter of mystical Christians, the Ancient British Church, part of the maverick “Old Catholic” movement. He joined the Druid Order. He persuaded Aleister Crowley to give him credentials in his magical order, the OTO.

Do these seem like the actions of a man who has already found what he was looking for?

When Gardner does does find — or co-create, with Edith Woodford-Grimes (Dafo) — what he is looking for, he commits himself totally to promoting it, which he does with Wicca in the 1950s.

Heselton’s account of how Gardner financially backed and supplied exhibits for Cecil Williamson’s Witchcraft Museum on the Isle of Man leads me to speculate still further. In May 1951 Gardner writes to Williamson about how he can “fake up” this item or that for the displays, such as ritual swords. I begin to wonder how much of Wicca was created in a hurry in order to supply a “back story” for the museum exhibits. In order to have an exhibit about witches, we must have witches.

The repeal in 1951 of the Witchcraft Act of 1735 after the Helen Duncan affair during World War II was a wonderful “cosmic coincidence.”

As Aidan Kelly pointed out in Crafting the Art of Magic, his own study of Gardnerian origins (published by Llewellyn in 1991, now out of print), Gardner was always the only source of information about the “Southern Coven of British Witches.” I do not see Heselton really developing any alternative authoritative source, although he fills in many gaps in the narrative.