Strangeness. Back before there was an Internet, dear readers, I clipped and photocopied newspapers and magazine articles on Wicca, other Paganisms, etc., and sorted them into folders labeled “Witchcrap 1970s,” “Witchcrap 1980s,” and so on. Eventually, printed-out Web pages joined the rest. Why the name? Because so much of it was crap, but at least it kept the idea out there.
Dear readers, I have to say that this past “season of the witch” has been extraordinary! I have so many bookmarked links that this will be a two-part blog post (or three-part). So . . . in no particular order, it’s “Best of Witchcrap 2018”!
• Those of us in the know know that the heartland of America is the heartland of Paganism, so a title like “Occult Rituals in the Backwoods of Wisconsin” should not raise any eyebrows. After all, who else is in the backwoods of Wisconsin? Circle Sanctuary, that’s who. This one is not really about Paganism, however, so much as it is about murder and “Goatman.” You know, teenagers summoning Satan and all that. Not Selena Fox.
• In Britain, the ever-so-earnest Guardian newspaper asks, “Why Are Witches So Popular?” Since it’s the Guardian, the answer must be that “this new wave is linked to the bubbling cauldron of contemporary politics.” Move along, nothing religious to see hear. No invisible friends — Karl Marx said they don’t exist.
• Meanwhile, in Pagan-friendly but officially Lutheran Iceland, “Icelanders abandon National State Church, as old pagan Ásatrú continues to grow.” The Pagan Association of Iceland claims 1.2 percent of the population, all of whom could fit into Colorado Springs with room left over. But still, I do feel that 1 percent is a kind of tipping point, the point where “they” have to take you seriously. Also, 6.9 percent of Icelanders are registered as “nones.”
I am punting on this post, referring you instead to this one by John Beckett on this year’s new holiday (greeting cards will be available next year, I am sure): “Celebrating Wolfenoot as a Pagan.”
Yesterday I celebrated my friendship with A Certain Dog by cleaning up all the piles of vomit he created, indoors and out in the dog run, after eating . . . a bunch of deer parts he found in the woods, near as I can tell. Plus his breakfast.
I tried telling him that he did not have to eat it all at once, but could bring some home in his carrion bag. Did he listen?
I am reading one of the Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child “Agent Prendergast” mysteries right now ,Crimson Shore.
Pendergast is a New Orleans-raised rich eccentric (New York mansion, manservant) with a twenty-something assistant/ward, Constance, possessed of “an old-fashioned beauty.” He has FBI credentials, but apparently answers to no one in the J. Edgar Hoover Building on a regular basis, instead taking cases that engage him intellectually.
Crimson Shoreis set in a lonely, decayed Massachusetts fishing village1 and the plot involves events in Salem in 1692. And someone once was walled up in a wine cellar and left to die — there is your Edgar Allen Poe reference, as the characters make clear. Lovecraft? How about a reference to the Necronomicon delivered with a literary elbow to the ribs? Also mysterious creatures in the salt marshes.
So is that more like theMurder, She Wrote TV series meets Poe, etc? A little toward the “cozy” end of the spectrum as opposed to the hard-boiled “police procedural” end?
“What I would like you to do, Constance, is to go to Salem tomorrow morning. I understand there are many attractions, including a ‘Witch house,’ a ‘Witch Dungeon Museum,’ and the famous Witch Trials Memorial, not to mention the ‘Witch City Segway Tour.'”
“Segway Tour? Surely you’re joking.”
“More to the point, Salem is also home to the Integrated Wiccan Alliance.” He passed her a card. “A certain Tiffani Brooks, also known as Shadow Raven, is head of the league and the leader of a coven there.
Constance took the card. “Wicca? White magic? And what am I supposed to find out?”
When I was a kid, I read some condensed version of the Iliad for young people. I did not understand the gods.
After all, I was raised to be a Christian. In the Bible, YHWH was supposed to take care of his special people, the Jews, although sometimes he expressed his care and concern . . . oddly. The Christians continued that idea with themselves as the special people, and so on with other monotheistic religions. Obviously, God favored the “good guys.”
In the Iliad, the Greeks are the “good guys,” near as, although the Trojans are not especially villainous, just the other team. But the story is told from the Greeks’ point of view. Yet some of the gods favored on side and some the other. How could that be?((You don’t really hear about the Trojans’ religion as a separate thing.))
That is the polytheistic view of life. The world is a mess. The world is beautiful. The gods are eternal (or as good as). The gods work at cross-purposes, and sometimes humans are caught between them.
Meanwhile, I see some Pagans convinced that they know how the gods vote — or would vote, if they could produce a photo ID at the polling place.
Are these the same Pagans who sneer at that subset of evangelical Christians who apparently think that Jesus is a Republican?((After 2,000 years of worship, he is definitely a god. And maybe he is a Republican. Or like in the TV version of American Gods, there are multiple Jesuses and one is a Republican.))
If you are really a polytheist, then you must accept that the gods do not vote. Their values are not always aligned with our day-to-day political values. Really, what does Aphrodite care about Colorado’s proposal to change the redistricting process or about who wins the race for Pueblo County coroner? Should I consult Hekate about my congressional candidates?
In the context of discussing a Heathen theological question, Galina Kraskova puts the issue this way:
On the other hand, statements such as, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” might be comforting but do represent a kind of crypto-monotheism, especially when people capitalize History and treat it as a force equivalent to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic Only God.
This “history” is apparently quasi-sentient and going somewhere other than to its own destruction. It is no coincident that the statement is attributed to a Unitarian minister.
Some Pagans I know (or know of) are working with various American archetypes ((I use Salmon too!)) in the sense of asking protection and blessing, which is OK. It’s like always ending a spell with “Or something better.”((It is always good when you can rid yourself of annoying people by blessing them.)) That means not ordering the gods around: “[Deity], cause [Candidate] to win the election!”
In the mundane world, stories like “Witches Hex Kavanaugh” are great clickbait.((For readers outside the USA, the article refers to Judge Brett Kavanaugh, recently added to the US Supreme Court after a contentious confirmation process in the Senate.))
Here is the old-line conservative magazine National Review, suffering from a drop in circulation, taking a clickbait-ish shot at “progressive” Witches:
And there was a pre-parade: on October 24, the Catrinas parade. The photos above are from the Catrinas parade, but you might have a hard time telling the difference.
We could not afford much at the gift shop, but I bought this poster, which commemorates a signal event in the Pagan history of North America — the time in August 1680 when the different Pueblo tribes, separated by language and geography,((It is at least 350 road miles from Ohkay Owingeh (San Juan Pueblo, where the revolt was planned) to the Hopi villages. Teenage boys ran the distance—an event recreated in 1980.)) rose up simultaneously, killing Christian priests, destroying churches, and chasing the Spanish settlers back to what is today Mexico.((The Spanish did, however, come back in the Reconquista of 1692. It is often called the “bloodless” reconquest — as in this somewhat-biased link — but it was not. Calling it the ‘bloodless reconquest” perpetuates the myth that the simple natives welcomed the Catholic priests.))
The poster has hung by my desk in three or four different houses.
Two things recently brought the Pueblo Revolt back to my mind.
For one, last month American bloggerGalina Kraskova linked to a Hindu blog, which itself was about “How Japan Dealt with the Christian Threat.” (This followed an earlier post by the same blogger on “Japan’s Defeat of Christianity and Lessons for Hindus.”) In short, during the early 17th century the Japanese shoguns all but eliminated the Catholic Christianity that had been spread by (mainly) Portuguese missionaries among the population. Their tactics included threats, torture, imprisonment, and a sort of Buddhist Inquisition.((For the movie version, see Silence, 2016, directed by Martin Scorsese.)) Now the Japanese approach is endorsed by some Hindus who advocate restricting or eliminating Christian missionary activity in India.
Pottery jar by Virgil Ortiz from “Revolt 1680/2180.”
Ortiz’s Revolt storyline transports the viewer back more than 300 years to the historical events of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, and then hurtles forward through time to the year of 2180 – introducing a cast of characters along the way. Though the narrative will be largely based on the Revolt 1680/2180 storyline that the artist has been developing for some time, Revolution will focus on the Aeronauts and other main Revolt characters: Po’Pay, Translator and the Spirit World Army, Tahu and her army of Blind Archers, Runners, and Gliders. Set in the future of 2180, the pueblos are in chaos, the invasion of Native land continues, the scourge of war rages everywhere. The Aeronauts summon their fleet and prepare for extreme warfare against the invading Castilian forces. Desperately, the Aeronauts search for any remaining clay artifacts from the battlefields. They know that challenges and persecution will continue, so it is imperative to preserve and protect their clay, culture, language, and traditions from extinction.
If you can be in Colorado Springs over the next three months, the museum is open Tuesday-Sunday.
One of my camera traps captured this bull elk in late August 2016, four years after that hillside burned. Now look at the thick grass!
I have written a little about the intersection of hunting and ritual, but today I would ask you to read Jeremy Climer’s blog post “The Importance of Rituals to the Hunt.”
Before we go any further, we should define both “tradition” and “ritual” because people often use them interchangeably. Although traditions can be religious in nature, ritual is more specific to spiritual matters. So, for the sake of clarity in this article, we will use “ritual” to describe spiritual matters and “tradition” to describe non-spiritual matters.
Most rituals, even for Christian hunters like myself, originate from our pagan ancestors. Some of these rituals are pre-hunt and some of them are post-kill. As humans, we have always asked for blessings before the hunt and given thanks for our success after it. This is not so different than the pre-planting rituals and the post-harvest rituals in our agrarian history. We need food to survive, so we ask for assistance and when we’re full, we express our gratitude in hopes that our appreciation will be looked upon kindly when it comes time to ask for assistance again.
Climer lives in northern Colorado, but he was kind enough to rendezvous in Florence, a southern Colorado town that I visit weekly. (Try the Pour House coffeehouse if you are there.)
My first writing on Craft hunting ritual was published in 1992, in the chapter “Witches and the Earth” in Witchcraft Today, Book One: The Modern Craft Movement, that being a four-book series that I edited for Llewellyn in the 1990s. It included a description of pre-hunt ritual performed by my hunting partner and myself.
When I look out my window,
I am reading one of the Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child “Agent Prendergast” mysteries right now 
