The council of British Druids have been working through the night to restore ley lines which have been damaged by recent storms. Many households have been without spiritual energy throughout the Yuletide holiday which has affected psychic connections in many parts of the country. A spokesman for the Druids commented; ‘We are doing all we can to restore the lines during the traditional pagan festival of Winter Solstice and we hope to have positive energy flowing freely between Glastonbury and Stonehenge by the weekend.’
Isis Gets Some Ink*
A fairly straight-forward article on one of the Denver area’s longer-lived occult bookstores, Isis Books, appeared in Sunday’s Denver Post.
“Makeshift Egyptian temple” is not quite right, though. The building used to be a mortuary with columns out front (where the limos used to pull up) that lent themselves to an Egyptian-inspired paint scheme.
The store started in Denver on East Colfax Avenue, not far from Hubcap Annie’s, the used hubcap store, which gives you a sense of the neighborhood.
If I remember correctly (always debatable), the first owner wasn’t making a go of it, and her landlord, this Jewish guy with no interest in Paganism, etc., took over. Karen Charboneau moved up from clerk to manager to owner, overseeing moves first to a bigger space on Colfax and then to the close-in suburb of Englewood, as well as developing a large mail-order operation.
*My reference point is always printing, not body art.
“Block like an Egyptian”
Too late for Yule, but isn’t there a Kemetic-reconstructionist gift-giving festival for which these would be perfect?
And give the copywriter a raise.
When Trees Disappear
First, the background story. Back in 2011, I wrote about making an offering to Tlaloc, Southwestern god of the hydrological cycle (among other things), at a tiny mountain spring near my home.
The spring is high on the side of a ridge, fed by that year’s snow and rain, which meant it often dries up in late summer.
It had its guardian, a three-foot-long (92 cm) rattlesnake, whom I encountered several times.
The area was thickly forested in ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, and Gambel oak — too thickly, to my eye. (This is what comes of being a forester’s son.) The pines were thick — in some places they lay like jackstraws, toppled by the chinook winds of winter.
When this slope burns, I thought, it will burn like a volcano. And it did, on October 23, 2012, a date seared into my memory.
October 23, 2012: The spring would be just left of the brightest area. My home is on the other side of the ridge.
I took this photo at dusk, bracing my pocket camera against a corral post (one of the ones that was not burning like a candle) while waiting for the the fire engine I was working on to be re-filled with water at the landowner’s well. It was too windy for air tankers, too close to darkness for hand crews to hike up there, so it just burned, while I implored the west wind to keep pushing the fire away from my home.
M. and I returned in November 2012 to see if we could find the little spring again with all the landmarks gone. For instance, there was a boulder that I called Bonsai Rock because of the tenacious little evergreens growing out of cracks in the stone. Not anymore.
Fisher the dog did what he does best, finding animal parts in the woods (including a bear cub’s paw) but even that activity seemed sadder.
We returned again in May 2013 to make an offering at the spring. During the previous month, the Bureau of Land Management had hired a contractor to re-seed the area with a grass mix by helicopter. The purpose was to get something growing and stabilize the slopes against the summer thunderstorms. It worked. We had adequate summer rains (not like the storms and flooding in northern Colorado), and by late summer the slopes were almost lush, as the photo below will show.
October 2013: A bear cub drinks at the spring.
I put my most expendable scout camera up there from late September until a couple of days ago — although the batteries died some time in November — which is how I got the photo. The best part is to see the spring running—you can see water flowing down the right-hand edge of the photo.
December 2013: Winter scene, with the spring off in the middle distance.
All this is prelude to thinking about how an animistic/polytheistic outlook copes with such changes to the land. No, it is not like someone paved it over and put up a Family Dollar store. Something will come back—the scrubby Gambel oak has re-sprouted, and there were wildflowers last summer, but the ponderosa pine and Douglas fir will be much slower to return. I probably won’t see this valley forested again.
I will never forget walking around a week or two after the fire, when the slopes just felt nuked. Crows overhead were the only life—the rattlesnake guardian almost certainly died, if tree roots were being burned underground.
The little seasonal spring, however, remains as sort of natural shrine, a focus for hope and continuity, bear cubs and wild turkeys.
A Song for the Winter Solstice
Thea Gilmore, “Sol Invictus,” with photos taken in and around the Horseshoe Lake nature reserve, Yateley, Hampshire UK.
Pentagram Pizza: An ‘Apocalypse’ for Witches
¶ From Scarlet Imprint, Peter Grey’s Apocalyptic Witchcraft. In its review The Daily Grail said,
Grey sets out to explicate a perspective on the familiar symbols and stories of witchcraft in the West which has little truck with the formalities of scholarship, the sensibilities of the Wiccan paths or the white-light Newage perspective. His is a witchcraft both messy and impudent, one that stinks of mud, blood and spunk — in a good way. One where the oft-ignored or sidelined aspects — the legends of human sacrifice, poisons, curses and The Devil Himself — are both represented and, on some level, embraced.
¶ Once again, local authorities are deeply unimpressed by a legal defense based on “sacred prostitution,” especially when the woman involved is trying to get a license for a Colorado marijuana dispensary.
¶ The list of polytheistic devotional books (and some Pagan SF) published by the Biblioteca Alexandrina continues to grow. I have one and should get a couple of others.
Gamers and Ghost-hunters
What gaming I do has been on computers rather than consoles, so this is a development I missed—using the new Xbox for ghost-hunting.
Ever since the release of the Kinect motion sensor controllers in 2010, gamers have been posting videos of “Kinect Ghosts” detected by their Xbox 360. The Kinect prompts you when a new person is in the room, a phenomena dismissed as a glitch by most users if they’re alone. However there are hundreds of videos on youtube of not only ‘someone not there’ being detected, but these ‘ghosts’ also using the motion controller to operate the system.
It makes sense, really. Ever since the invention of the flash camera and the tape recorder, not to mention other instruments, people have been trying to record photos, audio, temperature anomalies, and other “hard” evidence of ghosts.
The blog posts links to this YouTube video of a “Kinect Ghost,” and from its links you can find others.
Have you tried it?
Wicker Man, Wicker Masks
One of the Armagh Rhymers’ masks, via The Bosky Man.
At The Bosky Man, Andy Letcher tells how playing a gig at the Ludlow Medieval Fair let him to meet an Irish band whose members perform wearing wicker masks, made by a 90-something-year-old Irish mask-maker who is the last of his kind.
That’s a pity because both invoke an odd, almost indescribable atavistic feeling. It seems to me extremely important that we all should know that feeling first hand, that we should experience it at key moments in our lives and in the yearly round of winter, spring, summer, fall. For whatever else the feeling is, it’s the sense of being brought up sharply against something Other, and you never know, that might just save us from ourselves.
I agree; in fact, I helped to write a book about that subject.
Colin Wilson 1951–2013
A prolific writer on mysticism and the paranormal, among other things, the English author Colin Wilson has passed on. In the video (audio recording, really) he discusses some of his work and personal experiences.
What Did Jesus Know about Rome?
Jesus healing the centurion’s servant. Paolo Veronese, 16th century (Wikimedia Commons).
An interesting short essay in which a historian conjectures just how much Jesus of Nazareth would have known about the Roman Empire, in which he lived. The assumption is that he spoke Greek as a second language; otherwise, how did he communicate with Pontius Pilate, not to mention the centurion of the miracle?