Tag Archives: journalism

1971: Witches in Bellbottoms, Talking Heads

Here is a 1971 documentary from the BBC that is supposed to be about witches. But at the time it was made, no one was making much effort to sort out the new Pagan Witches, anthropological and folkloric witches, and Satanic witches of the Church of Satan variety. So what you get is all of them! Plus talking heads — academics, clergy, exorcists . . .

Like so many of the paperback “I go among the witches” books of the time, the filmmakers interview a few of the most public Pagans, such as Doreen Valiente (who should get equal billing with Gerald Gardner in creating Wicca), Alex and Maxine Sanders, and others. But they quickly run out of interview subjects — there were not too many in Britain back then — so they start skipping around: a famous murder case with a possible (folk) witchcraft connection, desecration of graveyards, the evil grip of Satanism, and so forth, to fill up their 49 minutes.

I write about this period in Chapter 4 of Her Hidden Children: “The Playboy and the Witch: Wicca and Popular Culture.” Looking at a number of paperback books on the American scene, I created a rough spreadsheet of places visited and people interviewed. It was interesting how much overlap there was. There seemed to be a “witchcraft trail” that the writers followed — you could imagine it starting at the Warlock Shop/Magical Child store in New York City and ending at Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey’s house in San Francisco.

What is missing at this moment from the outsiders’ view is an overall sense of the new Paganism, at least until Hans Holzer’s 1972 book, The New Pagans. Even the participants themselves were just coming to the view that Wiccans, for instance, might share a Pagan outlook with Druids — the new Druids, that is. We often forget how deliberately isolated those covens were (“We can’t circle with Coven XYZ because it would mean sharing our secrets!” Really, I heard stuff like that in the 1970s.)

Serious academic study of the new Paganism(s) would not really get rolling until the 1980s. For instance, during the 1970s Robert Ellwood, Jr. at the University of Southern California was writing Alternative Altars: Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America (1979), which would offer some theoretical models applicable to the new Paganism, but he did not incorporate it into his discussion in that book.

Welcome, visitors from The Wild Hunt. Look around a bit.

(Thanks to Renna in Denver for the link.)

Pentagram Pizza: It’s Revived Again

pentagrampizza¶ At Pagan Square, Rebecca Buchanan rounds up children’s books featuring Norse gods and heroes.

Bright Spiral is an online comic about occult initiation. Trippy and complex.

¶ “Chilled-out multitasking hipster psychics don’t seem so eccentric anymore” and “We are in the middle of an occult revival.” Again.

Green Egg is back as a print magazine. And don’t forget the “Best of” anthology, for which I wrote a bunch of chapter intros.

Paganism Coming in from the Cold?

British SF writer Liz Williams explores the social position of “paganism” (yeah, the Brits can’t find the shift key) at The Guardian and asks if we are coming in from the cold.

In essence, Pagans are muddling through, what with our tolerance for eccentricity, etc.

(And if we are, who is “Control“?)

Journalism and the AAR-SBL

Journalists are few at the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature’s joint annual meetings.  But the New York Times‘ Mark Oppenheimer, searching around for “the narrative,” noted that some fraction of the participants wore flowing robes and weirdly remarked about people carrying hefty reference books, as  Steven Ramey notes in his fisking of Oppenheimer’s reportage at the Bulletin for the Study of Religion blog. (My take: Oppenheimer saw books and just guessed at what they might be.)

My frustration at Oppenheimer’s representation of the AAR/SBL conference illustrates the limits to the descriptive aspect of both ethnographies and the news.

As for the Pagan studies sessions, no one from the Pagan Newswire Collective showed up, which might be a better thing than the sort of odd reporting that PNC produced last year in San Francisco. PNC is providing community news announcements in the regions that it covers, and  it has one pretty good blog, The Juggler. But I sense a loss of momentum.

Todd Berntson of Pagan Living TV, which is I think still in the start-up phase, attended the “Mapping the Occult City” pre-conference event and did some on-camera interviews with some of the presenters. I expect that that video will be available before long.

I know from my own reporter days that it is hard to attend a big meeting and get “the story.” You hope for a newsworthy keynote presenter, or maybe you find someone colorful to profile in a news feature.  “Mapping the Occult City” could have been presented as a documentary, since it included an architectural tour and a performance, as well as talking heads. Maybe at least those interviews will be archived some place.

Distrust of Mainstream Media Grows, and That Is a Good Thing

It is now 22 years since I worked as a journalist, and about four years since I last taught a class that was cross-listed with the university’s Department of Mass Communications.

I had six years in daily newspapers — not a career, but enough to learn the ropes — plus some magazine work.

The Gallup Organization is out with polling data, appropriate for an election year, about growing distrust of the news media.

The lede:

For the fourth straight year, the majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 57% who now say this is a record high by one percentage point.

A key graf with implications for the business side:

Lower-income Americans and those with less education are generally more likely to trust the media than are those with higher incomes and more education. A subgroup analysis of these data suggests that three demographic groups key to advertisers — adults aged 18 to 29, Americans making at least $75,000 per year, and college graduates — lost more trust in the media in the past year than other groups, but the sample sizes in this survey are too small to say so definitively.

Quite simply, editors no longer totally decide what is “news.” In the old days, they did. The managing editor of one paper where  I worked had written a master’s thesis on that very topic: agenda-setting. He also once pronounced to the staff, in response to some citizen’s complaint that we had not covered Event X, that “a newspaper is not a public utility.”

In other words, we had no obligation to cover an event, a political candidate, or anyone’s activities if we were short on staff or just did not think it newsworthy.

Now, however, you see even the big papers and networks reacting — slowly and creakily — to news stories that germinate in blogs or other types of “citizen media.”

In addition, the exposure of things like the Journolist scandal or other examples of blatant bias get rapidly circulated online.

What New York Times public editor Arthur Brisbane said about  the newsroom’s “culture of like minds” is true at many papers. I saw it when I was in my twenties, in both print and broadcast media,  but outside of journalism graduate programs — and maybe not even there — where would I have discussed it?  Who would have cared? Now some people specialize in pointing out media bias.

Where I am going with this? I liked newspaper work on many levels, but I can think of some smug editors and reporters who deserved to have their cages rattled. I like that there are multiple channels of information now, even if some of them are unreliable. (Not to mention criminal.) It’s still better than the alternative.

 

How Many Gods Are There? Vote Now!

It must be a slow news day, because the Denver Post’s daily news poll is about God . . . or Goddess . . . or the Gods.

“Hard”  polytheism is running at less than 2 percent, so if you can’t vote early, vote often.

I doubt than anyone is going to do anything useful with the data anyway.

What’s Your Religious IQ?

As I blogged yesterday, too much reporting on religion is written by people who are religiously illiterate — and, sometimes, proud of it.

Every reporter at least ought to score well on this quiz from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Go ahead, take it. Fifteen questions — it’s easy*.

Note that it is the “U.S. Religious Knowledge Quiz,” and at least two questions are specific to America’s religious history. Nothing about the Pentecostal Christians, though. Couldn’t they have worked the Azusa Street Revival into it?

*Yes, I scored 100, but this is what I do.

Reporters Miss the Religion Story and Their Readers Lose

We rightly complain that Pagan matters are poorly or perfunctorily covered in the news media. Jason Pitzl-Waters writes many blog posts sorting through news coverage and pointing out its failings (and occasional successes).

But the problem is bigger than us. Even the the major world religions’ roles in the news are overlooked or misunderstood by reporters whose frequent secular bias and lack of education leads them to disdain religious issues. How often, for example, does coverage of the incipient civil war in Syria mention that it falls right along the Sunni-Shiite Muslim divide?

In a blog post titled “Don’t Know Much about Theology,” Walter Russell Mead makes what should be the obvious point.

Even where religion isn’t driving conflict, it plays a powerful role in the way people understand their own personal identities and life stories and in the way they interpret world events. Turkey, Iran, Israel, India, Pakistan, Nigeria: in these countries and in many others, it is impossible to understand contemporary politics without a deep feel for the religious identities and traditions that shape the way the people of these countries perceive and interpret political and historical realities.

A lot of news stories are missed or misunderstood, he says, and he’s right. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

Stop in at Get Religion for daily coverage on how the news “professionals” mangle or miss the religious element in the news.

Of New Agers, Nazis, and Vin Chaud

People described variously as “hippies” and “New Agers” apparently view a mountain in the French Pyrenees as some sort of a refuge from the upcoming apocalypse (you do have that on your calendar, don’t you?).

A rapidly increasing stream of New Age believers – or esoterics, as locals call them – have descended in their camper van-loads on the usually picturesque and tranquil Pyrenean village of Bugarach. They believe that when apocalypse strikes on 21 December this year, the aliens waiting in their spacecraft inside Pic de Bugarach will save all the humans near by and beam them off to the next age.

Of course, no one actually interviews any of them. That would require work, and this is just one Oliver Pickup of The Independent free-associating at his keyboard.

For decades, there has been a belief that Pic de Bugarach, which, at 1,230 metres, is the highest in the Corbières mountain range, possesses an eery power. Often called the “upside-down mountain” – geologists think that it exploded after its formation and the top landed the wrong way up – it is thought to have inspired Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Since the 1960s, it has attracted New Agers, who insist that it emits special magnetic waves.

Let’s see, the travelers in Journey to the Centre of the Earth enter lava tubes in an Icelandic volcano, and Close Encounters is set at Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, but hey, when you’re Oliver Pickup, one mountain is as good as the next.

There should be something here for researchers into new religious movements though.

Esotericism for Laughs at The Telegraph

A fairly lightweight article on Freemasonry in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph produced this classic response in the comments:

All MPs are Freemasons. So are all civil servants. It’s too late to do anything about it. We’re in control and you better keep quiet and get used to the fact.

By the way, do you know where your kids are? Shouldn’t they have been home by now? If I was you I’d phone the police immediately. Make sure and tell them you’re a widow’s son. It’ll help.

But what was even better was this juxtaposition of photo and unrelated headline elsewhere in the newspaper:Queen Elizabeth, her daughter-in-law, and grand-daughter

The unrelated headline was to a news story about African witchcraft and the “witchcraft torture murder” of a 15-year-old boy in a family of African immigrants to the United Kingdom.

So we can presume that no subeditor at the Telegraph was thinking “Crone, Mother, Maiden” at the photo of Queen Elizabeth, her daughter-in-law, and granddaughter-in-law. (Is there such a term? The Duchess of Cambridge, to those people who keep track of aristocratic titles.)

Thanks to Jenny Blain for the photo.