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.

The sameness of ski towns

Because of the poor spring snow conditions, on the 22nd we put the skis in their rack on the Jeep and drove over Frémont Pass from Leadville into Summit County, the heart (or other metaphorical internal organ) of Colorado’s ski industry. After walking around the business district of Frisco, driving to see if my uncle’s former cabin on Lake Dillon is still there (it’s not, apparently), and walking around the business district of Breckenridge, Mary had an observation: “These ski towns are all the same.”

RIGHT: View down 7th Street in Leadville, Colorado, which has not yet succombed to being a ski town.

In what way, for instance, does Main Street in Breckenridge differ from Elk Avenue in Crested Butte? Answer: Main Street in Breckenridge is longer and slightly wider.

At the core, the old mining town, Historic Register plaques in place–bars, ski/snowboard rentals, antiques shops, real-estate offices, interior decorators (for the million-dollar-plus trophy homes), boutiques for “adventure apparel,” real-estate offices, restaurants, souvenir stores, maybe a lone museum (“Our Mining Heritage”), real-estate offices.

The next ring out: newer commercial buildings–the professional offices, the municipal offices, the fire station, the police department.

Then the condominiums with names like Edelweiss.

Then the upscale subdivisions for the “trophy homes”, so often named with the “The (blank) at (blank)” formula that is supposed to exude classiness to buyers in Denver or Dallas. Example: “The Turds at Elk Meadows.”

The other formula applies to ski towns built from scratch, such as Vail, in which case there is no core, only Bogus Bavarian or whatever style was in favor at the time of construction, with an outer ring of tasteful strip malls.

One visit to Summit County per decade is enough.

On the plus side: Weber’s Books, 100 S. Main in Breckenridge, tiny but well-stocked, had an autographed copy of Mary Sojourner’s new collection of essays, Solace.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, the decor and nomenclature of Colorado ski towns relied heavily on the ersatz-Austrian, sort-of-Swiss, or bogus-Bavarian model. Everywhere you looked (and still look, in some cases), was “Alpen-this” or the “Something Haus” or “Hof.” For the full flower of the bogus-Bavarian 1960s, visit the older parts of Vail.

It’s not just Colorado, of course. Park City, Utah, has its Edelweiss Haus condominiums; if I had $10 for every “Edelweiss” and “Haus,” I would be much richer. (The Edelweiss flower does not bloom in the Rockies except on signboards.) Now, when I see these Berchtesgarden School houses, restaurants, etc., I think that they should be next in line for historic preservation, after the Mining Boom structures of the late 1800s.

Over the equinoctal weekend, Mary and I took a room at the Mining Boom-era Delaware Hotel in decidedly non-Bavarian Leadville. (It has an “Alps Motel,” that’s all.) We put in a few miles of cross-country skiing on snow that was turned to mush and slop by a week of unusually warm weather. On Sunday, we skied to the Tennessee Pass Cookhouse for lunch.

On the wall were several Tibetan-style Buddhist pictures: a mandala and a landscape of a Himalayan monastery. Right next to the last was a painting of the Cookhouse itself, done in the same Tibetan style. Is that going to be the next trend? The Cookhouse itself is a big yurt (or ger, as my friends who have visited Mongolia insist that it should be called), possibly produced by this firm or someone with a similar product.

LEFT: The Tennesee Pass Cookhouse

What comes next, the Potala Condominiums? A few people are already raising yaks, I know. Trendy-Buddhism already has a toehold in interior decorating and, for a local-history angle, the CIA trained fighters in the doomed early 1960s Tibetan resistance movement just down the road at Camp Hale, the old mountain-troops base.