Here’s a snapshot of the platform after Mary & I left the train in La Junta, Colorado. 
More blogging soon as I get back into writing. I did manage about 300 words on the issue of “family tradition” (fam-trad) witchcraft before my PowerBook battery got dangerously low as we rolled across southern Illinois
Summer Solstice
Nothing this year in the way of formal outdoor ritual: At the moment of the solstice, I should be streaking across the prairie en route to Chicago aboard Amtrak’s Southwest Chief. But I still check my favorite archaeoastronomy site to know just when it will happen.
Wicca as lifestyle, part 2
Been there, done that, saw no need in buying the T-shirt.
I decided to start Monday with a telephone call to the Eastern time zone, to the Bank of New York, which had messed up a stock transfer from my parents’ estate, and to which I had sent fresh instructions on 21 April.
“We never received them,” claimed the telephone representative, who undoubtedly is told in training to “always blame the Postal Service.”
So, I downloaded new W-9 form and stock transfer form. The latter requires the infamous Medallion signature guarantee, which means a 25-mile drive to Canon City, home of the nearest bank that participates in that program. So if I’m going to Canon City, I might as well replace the sand-pitted windshield on the Jeep TJ (its third in five years). I called McCasland’s glass shop downtown and got an afternoon appointment. I passed the rest of the morning preparing the stock-transfer forms and doing other paperwork. If I am going to Ca?on, I might as well stop in Florence and talk with my insurance agent, because Colorado’s auto insurance law is changing in July. (Called him, made appointment for 1:30).
I left a little after noon, stopping at the Wetmore post office to mail various things, including a packet for the new publisher of The Pomegranate in the UK. (Expect big announcement soon.)
Then 45 minutes with the insurance agent while he explains that the return to tort law instead of “no fault” car insurance means that I need many, many more dollars’ worth of liability coverage.
Then to the UPS store to send a painting by my father to Fritz Muntean, the Pomegranate’s founding editor.
I dropped the Jeep at the glass shop and walked to Fremont Bank, finding an idle vice president to stamp my stock-transfer form with the Medallion stamp. From there it was a couple of blocks to the old courthouse to meet with the county assessor about getting Dad’s name off the deed to some lots in a ghost town near Cripple Creek that he and I owned. It turned out that I need to record a special “personal representative’s deed,” something that I had never asked the estate lawyer to prepare.
Ate a late lunch at Pizza Madness, walked the downtown business district, full of new enterprises that are high on quaintness and low on capital. My slogan for Canon City, based on Mary’s and my six years there: “Canon City, the town that never quite gets it right.” A smelly old cafe that we knew as The Shanty is now The Frying Pan. Loosely painted on its window was “Open 7 Days,” and below that hung a “Closed” sign. OK, so they serve breakfast and lunch only, closing at 2 p.m., but somehow that contrast seemed characteristic of the town.
Went to the library and read an issue of The Economist. I’m too economical to subscribe to it. Drank a cappuccino at a marginal coffee house, Wicked Brew, started up in old house on Royal Gorge Boulevard by what appeared to be a single woman with teenage daughter(s). A bit of cognitive dissonance there: various signs, such as “The fortune teller is [reversible sign] OUT,” and a strategically placed table suggest the occasional presence of a Tarot reader, most likely. Yet nearby was a stack of brochures about The Rapture, suggesting a conservative evangelical Christian presence. You would expect those two influences to be incompatible.
I picked up the Jeep just before five, made a stop at the supermarket, and was home shortly before six o’clock. And there was the day gone. After supper, I wrote the letter to the lawyer, caught up on e-mail, and felt as though I had done something all day but I wasn’t sure exactly what.
Working all week on Her Hidden Children, my book on the early decades of the American Pagan movement, part of the AltaMira Press Pagan Studies series. I’ve written history before, but somehow, writing about events in which I participated makes me feel at death’s door. I turn for inspiration to my beau ideal of a dignified old age, William S. Burroughs.
Here’s a site collecting Pagans-in-the-news articles from all over the place. I started doing the same thing with scissors and photocopier in the pre-Internet 1970s, but it was impossible back then to have this kind of scope. My stuff went into a series of file folders labeled “Witchcrap,” since that’s what most of it was.
What I hope was the last paper work for Graham Harvey’s and my new anthology, Paganism: A Reader went into the campus mailbag today on its way to Routledge, the publisher. The book is a collection of mostly primary sources, so in that way it’s somewhat different from Graham’s earlier anthology, Shamanism: A Reader. The selections in it begin with Classical materials, including “The Hymn to the Moon” (attributed to Homer) and the famous address to Isis from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, in Robert Graves’ translation. What I regret not being able to include (for reasons of space) was Sappho’s poem to Aphrodite, which I always find to be heart-wrenchingly good. But the Emperor Julian’s “Letter to a Pagan Priest” was included, as well as some translations from Celtic and Norse sources that have been important to the Pagan revival.
We have tried to show just a few of the literary influences on the Pagan revival as well, such as Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, as well as many well-known contemporary Pagan authors (Gardner, Valiente, Adler) and some new writers: Judy Harrow, Michael McNierney, and myself.
I was shocked two days ago to learn of the death in late 2002 of Dan Noel, a friend and sometime mentor. I had the privilege of reviewing his book The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities (Continuum, 1997) for Gnosis. He taught me the difference between “imaginary” and “imaginal.”
Here is an interview with Dan about the ideas in that book, including the “lure of the archaic” and the “democritization of the sacred.”
Rediscovering America’s Sacred Ground, subtitled “Public religion and the pursuit of good,” will be on my reading list as soon as SUNY Press releases it. The author is Pagan scholar Barbara McGraw, who “examines the debate about the role of religion in American public life and unravels the confounded rhetoric on all sides. She reveals that no group has been standing on proper ground and that all sides have misused terminology (religion/secular), dichotomies (public/private), and concepts (separation of church and state) in ways that have little relevance to the original intentions of the Founders.”
This story comes courtesy of Gina Oboler on the Nature Religions Scholars list. It quotes Haitian President Aristide as saying, “An ancestral religion, voodoo is an essential part of national identity.”
Priests and priestesses are now asked to register with the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which will allow them to conduct officially recognized marriages, etc.