Tag Archives: American religion

Spirits, Photography, and the Burned-Over District

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Why was the Eastman Kodak Company founded in Rochester, New York, not far from the town of Hydesville (now part of Arcadia Township), where the Fox sisters birthed the American Spiritualist movement? Is there a connection between photography and spirits?

Esoteric photographer Rik Garret tof Chicago says yes, and he has launched a YouTube video series, of which this is the first episode.

He briefly mentions the Burned-Over District, which is a religion-scholar’s term for the part of northern New York (and in adjacent Vermont), where numerous new religious movements and personages started or flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Andrew Jackson Davis, the “Poughkeepsie Seer,” was just one — Shakers, Mormons, and other movements either started or began to grow there. “Burned over” refers to the “fires” of revival movements that swept the area in the Second Great Awakening, which “reflected Romanticism characterized by enthusiasm, emotion, and an appeal to the super-natural. It rejected the skeptical rationalism and deism of the Enlightenment.”

You could say that we are still feeling it.

 

Thoughts after a Funeral

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A member of my little rural volunteer fire department died last week at the age of 47.((It was not a line-of-duty death; other causes)) So the chief, the treasurer, and I put on our rarely worn dress uniforms for the funeral — M. came too — and we went off to a little rectangular funeral chapel in a nearby town for the “celebration of life.”

The chief had quickly put together a quickie memorial display of an American flag in one of those triangular presentation boxes plus the man’s structural-fire helmet, which went onto the table with the urn and some other items, flanked by flowers and two easels holding collages of photographs. Pretty standard stuff these days.

But along with that, you had people sitting in rows and whispering too each other. The building was too hot (aren’t they always?). The music was canned vaguely spiritual pop — the only lively tune was “Spirit in the Sky” with its hard-driving opening chords — from way back in 1969.

The rent-a-cleric gave a [put deceased’s names here] eulogy, tripping over the fact that while the man’s legal first name was “Larry,” most people there knew him as “Scott” or “Scotty.” (His business cards read “Larry ‘Scott’ Lastname.”)

When the widow rose to speak — a tall, lanky woman clinging to the lectern for support, wracked by sobs — Scott’s mother rose and started waving her arms — the funeral director rushed up from the back of the chapel and led her away. She was not overcome by sadness, oh no, she apparently hates this woman, who was her son’s second wife.

The older woman came by the fire station two days later, wondering if any of her son’s personal items were there (they were not). She said she was “not allowed” to go up to his house, which is up on a ridge further on up the road. After she left, we looked at each other, and the words “mother-in-law from hell” were heard.

I ask that if I have a memorial service some day, there will be no recorded music. I think of these quasi-Protestant funeral-home services I have attended, where the rent-a-cleric sits on a bench gazing into the middle distance while some ghastly piece of “praise music” plays on cheap speakers.

If I cannot have live music — a harper playing “O’Carolan’s Farewell to Music” would be good — then just go straight to the fun part: “The evil bastard is dead — drink up!”  Fire a volley to scare away ghosts. Please don’t sacrifice my dog(s). Then go home.

Pagans, we need to do better than what I sat through last Tuesday. I know that some people are doing it.

More Links — Hand-Forged Ones At That

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Utility seax from Fay’s Forge

• At Fay’s Forge you may buy “knives, swords, and do castings from the Celtic, migration, Anglo Saxon, and Norse cultures.” Support your local shieldmaiden.

• Probably it would be more accurate to say that the planned Black Mass terrifies some Christians in Oklahoma. And before you dump on Oklahoma, remember that Harvard University backed down from a similar proposal!

• I have ordered this book: Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East.

With Daesh slaughtering and enslaving Yezidis and Mandeans, etc., “disappearing” may not be an exaggeration. As a long review in The Revealer asks,

Will the funeral pyres of the Zoroastrians still alight the dusks of Iran and India? Will the Copts still maintain the well where Mary and Joseph quenched Jesus’ thirst upon the flight into Egypt? Will the Samaritans still smear the blood of the lamb upon their lintels as their ancestors in bondage did? Will the wooden idols of the Kalasha look out at the unforgiving and cragged landscape of the Kush? What of the Yazidis who believe that God is so benevolent that even the devil can be saved? Or the Mandaeans who whisper secrets in the language of the Magi and the Chaldean wizards?

“Religion Watch” Available Online, Open Access

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I am putting in a plug for Religion Watch (slogan: “Looking beyond the walls of churches, synagogues and denominational officialdom to examine how religion really affects, and is affected by, the wider society”), published at Baylor University and a good source for scholars of contemporary religion.

The current issue leads with a short article, “Religion goes undercover as publishers seek to reach the ‘nones’“, with this intriguing sentence: “There is also the trend of targeting the ‘dones,’ those who have left their faiths, often with autobiographical accounts of leaving and then rediscovering spirituality and religion.”

Will we see “post-Pagan” memoirs in that vein?

Grappling with Workshops and Festival Culture

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Heartland’s sponsor

Earlier this week I sent in my workshop descriptions to the Heartland Pagan Festival, whose organizers kindly invited me to present.

Now I get to be anxious for two months — can I do it? My experiences with turning my own writing into festival material has been, let’s say, sort of mixed. My last piece was a general entry on contemporary Paganism for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion — definitely not festival-workshop material.

They ask me my needs: day or night, chairs or outdoors, and all I can think of is to ask for a whiteboard, because if I can’t write at least a few things, I will feel crippled. That is what twenty years in a university classroom does to you — my thoughts go automatically to syllabi and reading lists — probably not what the festival crowd is looking for.

Florida Pagan Gathering

Florida Pagan Gathering

My last big festival was the Florida Pagan Gathering in 2009, I think, while the last smaller one I attended was Beltania here in Colorado three years ago, which used to be about twenty minutes’ drive from home, before organizers moved it to a more populous area.

Pagan festivals have changed, to be sure. The first gatherings I attended in the late 1970s were more like “cons”: they were held in hotels and they had a high ratio of lectures, talks, and panels to ritual. Music, when it happened, was someone with a guitar in their hotel room, or whatever band was playing in the bar.

And I do remember people writing equations on blackboards: there were a few engineer-witches who argued that magic occurred on the electromagnetic spectrum, like radio. (Discuss in the comments if you like.)

Llewellyn’s Gnosticons in Minneapolis, perhaps the biggest of the era, included all kinds of occultists, witches, astrologers, etc. in order to fill the bill.

Then camping festivals began. Various groups had had their own campouts for years, but I think the Pagan Spirit Gathering of 1980 was the first one to be nationally advertised as open to all compatible attendees.

The tradition established by the multi-day open-air Protestant Christian “camp meetings” of the early 19th century (including trance, ecstasy, and sexual excitement) was now re-established by the Pagans!

In the pre-Web 1980s and early 1990s, festivals spread Pagan music and ritual practices more and more, along with workshop topics. But then another change occurred: a move towards more professionalization. No more Morning Glory Zell with her guitar doing Gwydion Pendderwen’s latest song — now you get Wendy Rule or Sharon Knight and Pandemonaeon.((I’m a big fan.))

When I attended FPG, I was surprised that many campers not only put a lot of work in creating and decorating their camps, but then they just stayed there, skipping not just workshops but the Big Ritual and concerts. (At some point of size, do you lose the communal feeling?)

Which brings me back to the idea of workshops. At a music-focused gathering like Beltania, workshops are something less than an afterthought. The grounds are pretty dead (except for the Maypole erection) during the way, coming alive only in the evening when the headline performances start — or at least that was my experience.

That’s a lot to compete with when your focus is academic, as mine is. I admire Ronald Hutton’s ability to work a Pagan crowd, staying true to his profession of historian while still giving a Pagan-positive message. Maybe that works better in Britain when you can be talking about ancient Pagans, such as Lindow Man — he is definitely in the “murder victim” rather than the “human sacrifice” camp, but he can argue his case without making you feel bad that you took The Life and Death of a Druid Prince: The Story of an Archaeological Sensation as holy writ the first time you  read it.

So come the end of May, I might be asking as I have in other situations, “What would Ronald do?” (WWRD).

In a larger context, I wonder about workshops at festivals in general — not that I don’t appreciate the organizers giving the opportunity to try some material on a live audience — if anyone comes — if they are not busy sleeping off the previous night’s festivities.

But “cons” can have more of an intellectual focus than camping festivals do, don’t you think?

Meanwhile, I have started notes on two presentations with the working titles of “Nature Religion: You’re Doing it Wrong” and “Did Witches Ever Fly?”

The Passing of Carl Weschcke

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Carl Llewellyn Weschcke

First, the official announcement from Llewellyn, then my comments.

It is with profound sadness we share the news of Carl Llewellyn Weschcke’s passing. He passed peacefully on Saturday, November 7 surrounded by family. He was 85.

Carl Llewellyn Weschcke was Chairman and the driving force behind Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd., the oldest and largest publishers of New Age, Metaphysical, Self-Help, and Spirituality books in the world.

Weschcke was a life-long student of a broad range of Metaphysical, Spiritual and Occult subjects which led him to the purchase of the Llewellyn publishing company in 1961. He relocated the company to his home on Summit Avenue in St. Paul. The mansion was said to be haunted and became the subject of many investigations and news stories through the 1960s and 1970s and remains well-known to this day.

Authors and booksellers referred to Weschcke as “the Father of the New Age” because of his early and aggressive public sponsorship of Astrology, Magic, Metaphysics, Paganism, Parapsychology, Tantra, Wicca and Yoga. Weschcke and Llewellyn contributed to the burgeoning New Age movement in the 1960s and 1970s, sponsoring Gnosticon Festivals, opening an occult school and bookstore, and publishing the occult newspaper Gnostica. He is a former Wiccan High Priest and played a leading role in the rise of Wicca and Paganism during the 1960s and 1970s. In the fall of 1973 Weschcke helped organize the Council of American Witches and became its chairperson.

He has a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from Babson College, studied Law at LaSalle University, and advanced study toward a doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Minnesota. In 1959 he was elected president of the NAACP’s Minnesota branch and elected Vice President of the ACLU’s Minnesota branch. In addition to book publishing he has worked in the pharmaceutical industry, furniture manufacture, and real estate management. With Llewellyn, he has worked in all aspects of the business and has co-authored ten books with Dr. Joe Slate of Athens, Alabama.

Carl is survived by wife Sandra and son Gabe. Sandra is President and Treasurer of Llewellyn Worldwide and Gabe serves as Vice President. They plan to carry on Carl’s legacy championing of alternative approaches to mind, spirit and body.

Arrangements for a memorial will be forthcoming.

I had the privilege of staying with the Weschckes at their home in Marine-on-St. Croix for a few days in the early 1990s. (Although no formal offer was made, I think that Carl was hoping that I would come on board as an editor.) That four-book “Witchcraft Today” series that I edited for them in the 1990s was his idea.

It’s true that he came from a line of German doctors and pharmacists, and originally he worked in the family pharmaceutical firm that made over-the-counter medicines—cough drops and the like. He told me he used to look from his office window at a former soft-drink bottling plant—the building that later become the Llewellyn headquarters in St. Paul.

He did not start the company, but he and Sandra grew it from a small publisher of astrological almanacs and the like into its present form. He even added “Llewellyn” as his middle name.

Another memory: having just a few hours to examine his private library, which filled a three-car garage (or was it a four-car?). It was like the whole history of esotericism in America, but I think that astrology was perhaps always his first love. Although their son, Gabe, was groomed to take over the business, at that time—twenty years ago—I did not feel that he shared the love of the astrology, Pagan, New Age, etc., product line. That does not mean that he cannot be an effective manager though.

Someday, Pagans Will Have Harlem’s Problem Too

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I have been hearing of this for a while — “spiritual tourism” in Harlem.

Although gospel music is part of the heritage and spirit of the neighbourhood, some have suggested that scenes in local churches are starting to resemble a Hollywood movie. Tourists visiting have become an issue of contention, to the extent that some are now shut out of services.

Shrinking from gentrification on one side, some of Harlem’s well-known historically black churches, famous for their gospel choirs, are overwhelmed on the other side by tourists (many of them European, I am told).

Others report that their church stopped letting tourists come to services because of the disrespect and rudeness they exhibited. For example, in some cases, as soon as the “praise and worship” or music ended, they got up and left.

The scale is much, much, much smaller, but I think back to the Wiccan wedding that M. and I conducted here in Colorado in the 1980s for an American guy and his Thai bride — they met while students at Colorado College.

Her relatives orbited the circle like electrons, camcorders whirring. It really put me off. I was not used to multiple electronic devices during ritual — not “in circle,” but “right outside of circle.”

The bride’s father was some kind of United Nations functionary — he lived in Italy — and after the wedding he did take us all to a Thai restaurant in Denver, where he ordered without reference to the printed menu, and we had a delicious feast, while his daughter made sarcastic remarks about the king of Thailand, whose portrait hung on the wall.

That made up for the uncomfortable ritual just a little.

But imagine if Pagan ritual theatre begins to attrach attention outside our community. We will have to adapt. Some already have — watch this video of a recent Greek Pagan procession through shopping and entertainment districts of Athens. As opposed to lining up in rows in pews, I think that the procession is a quintessential Pagan large-group ritual. And maybe some day the tour buses will be there too.

The Blue Moon Made Me Do It

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A northern Florida sheriff speculates that the deaths of a family were “ritualistic” murders.

“The time of death on Tuesday also coincides with what’s referred to as a blue moon, which occurs every three years.”

According to the Associated Press version, linked above,  which “faith or religion” the sheriff had in mind was not made clear. Not so in the local press — in case you could not guess.

Or is this more like those many instances when archaeologists who cannot explain an artifact’s use label it as a “ritual object”?

It Gets Better: Wiccans Push Back

This is how today is different from the “Satanic Panic” of the 1970s–80s. The Internet makes it easier to push back. “Wicca experts slam Florida sheriff for linking triple murder to ‘witchcraft.'”

Leading experts and practitioners of Wicca and other pagan [sic] religions have slammed a Florida sheriff’s department after police announced that a triple murder was a “ritualistic killing” linked to “witchcraft”.

Pagans Rebuild after the Sockeye Fire

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As a volunteer firefighter who also has had to evacuate myself three times in ten years because of forest fires, I am pretty accustomed to media coverage of such catastrophic events.

This one from Channel 2 in Anchorage is pretty normal : “One thing left standing after Willow wildfire: an outhouse.” And yet it is about a Pagan retreat center. So the “news” to me is that this particular loss and rebuilding is treated as unexceptional, and the Pagans come across as everyday Alaskans, not as weirdos.

About that outhouse — maybe it survived because it was geometrically simple and did not catch embers. Or maybe the fire just swirled around it.

Renn Faire: “Disneyland for Rednecks”

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An abandoned Rennaisance Faire site near Fredericksburg, Virginia (Roadtrippers.com).

“Wiccan, as well as satanic, symbolism was in nearly every gift shop.”
— from a Yelp.com review of the Georgia Rennaisance Faire, quoted in Well Met (237).

Rachel Lee Rubin’s Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture is, obviously, not about contemporary Paganism, but the two topics cross paths occasionally, as the quote above shows. Reading made me think once again that most studies of Paganism in the United States, at least, tend to shy away from class issues, although gender issues are plowed through in all directions.

Yes, the “redneck Disneyland” description comes from someone in the book. And there is this quote from a participant about Renn Faire visitors as a whole: “The ones who hate their [mundane] jobs wear really great costumes.” When you think of a song like “Take This Job and Shove It,” what social group comes to mind?

Rubin traces the Renn Faire phenomenon from one created in the mid-1960s outside Los Angeles as a fundraiser for the left-leaning Pacific Radio network. So that was “countercultural” in the 1960s sense. But it is not the 1960s anymore. Who goes to Renn Faires? The (mostly) white lower-middle and working class, I would say.

Somewhat like the Renn Faires, the Pagan movement in America was mostly birthed by leftish intellectual bohemians (but not totally). Decades later, should the movement still be described that way? I don’t think so. But who is researching this question?

And apparently the “crackpot religion” of Wicca is one of those currently countercultural things to have found a home on the Renn Faire circuit, along with homosexuality and polyamory (216).

As H-Net’s reviewer wrote,

At least two questions drive the narrative and analysis of Well Met. One concerns the potential centrality of the Renaissance faire to our understanding of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. Is the faire essential to the story of hippie explorations into communalism, antimodernism, and craft revival, as well as rock and folk music revivals? Rubin gives a resounding, and rather persuasive, yes. Another question that the author specifically poses in her introduction is, “To what concrete personal, political, and cultural uses can a group of Americans put a past that, for the most part, is not their own?” (p. 3). Answers to that question have evolved over the faire’s history.

There is (who knew? not me) a chapter devoted to a subgenre of romance novels set at Renaissance Faires, of which I can say only that that is not as strange as romance novels set in Amish communities, which is another subgenre.