Oceania Has Always Been at War with Lemuria

51119-243x366The Los Angeles Review of Books offers a review of two books on Ray Palmer, the Shaver Mystery, and pulp-esoteric publishing of the 1940s–50s: The War Over Lemuria and The Man from Mars : Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey.

From the review:

Of course, the underground worlds of Richard Shaver did not spring full grown from his brain, no matter how fevered it might have been. Subterranean adventure has long been a staple of science-fiction. Even more to the point, the belief in the existence of subterranean civilizations itself has a long history, and not just among the ancients who believed in one form or another of an underworld abode of the dead.  Indeed, there are other instances in which fictional stories about the underworld have been regarded by some readers as revealing a hidden, sometimes religious truth. The Shaver Mystery, it turns out, is not without precedent. John Cleve Symmes’s hollow-earth novel Symzonia (1820), Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril: The Power of the Coming Race (1871), and Willis George Emerson’s The Smokey God (1908) are all examples of fictional tales of underground civilizations that have been treated as true accounts and the source for religious belief by some members of the Theosophical and occult communities. Shaver’s stories are darker than the similar works that preceded them, but Palmer’s claim that Shaver’s tales contained truths about the hidden world under our feet is part of a long tradition.

Ray Palmer went on to found Fate magazine, which has done several retrospective articles on the Shaver Mystery over the years. Until 1988, Fate was published in Chicago, which just adds to that whole “occult Chicago” meme. (See also the work of occult journalist Brad Steiger.)

Around the Pagan Blogosphere, 25 August 2013

Some bookmarked links are piling up, so let’s clear them away.

¶ Lee Morgan: What happens when a writing project turns mysteriously magical:

It wasn’t long before the story, its characters and underlying mythic themes came to life in very tangible ways for me. Not only did I start to dream about the characters who would inform me of what their ‘future’ should hold, but other friends dreamed about them and sometimes it wasn’t easy to tell if they were the character from the book or being ‘gloved’ by a spirit or god they were aligned to mythically in the book. The characters have become what is known in the western Occult tradition as “egregores’” or thought-forms.

¶ Via Forging the Sampo, a link to a post on “The Survival of Animism in Russia — and its Destruction in the West,” which, given the source, you know will focus on Finnic peoples,

¶ But never underestimate Russian xenophobia, now aligned with resurgent Orthodoxy, which has led, among other things, to the closing of the only Mari-language primary school that served this partly-Pagan nation.

¶ 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.

Parking Lot Polytheism

Photo from PeopleofWalmart.com

Meeting the priestess might be . . . interesting. (Original source.)

“Please Don’t Blog Your Book”

From an interesting post by Anne Hill, chock full o’ links, called “How to Blog and When Not to Blog,” I was led to this one by Jane Friedman, “Please Don’t Blog Your Book.”

In other words, most plans for turning blog posts into books do not work. A few have. There might be a few exceptions, she suggests, such as self-help topics. If it’s going to work, she says, you have to be “laser-focused.”

Not me. No lasers here.

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“?)

Blog Carnival of Animism

The August animist blog carnival had the there of Birds, and you can find it linked on Animist Jottings here.

There is quite a bit there, so go visit.

Keep the Weird in the the West

Indianapolis blogger Roberta X muses on the literary sub-genre known as “Weird West.”

Sometimes that means sort of H. P. Lovecraft-meets-Wyatt Earp, sometimes other things.

My introduction was the online graphic novel Tex Arcana, back when the Web was still young.

If your reading tastes don’t go that direction, here are Montana novelist Ivan Doig’s favorite Western reads.

Once when I asked a prominent historian what he thought of the many writings by Stegner, novelist and English-department star at Harvard and Stanford, about the background and the West, he didn’t hesitate: “He hits the nail on the head every time, damn him.”

Yep, every book that Stegner built (they always feel “built,” like Robertson Davies‘ stuff, but that is a Good Thing) was solid as the proverbial brick shithouse.

New Article on Polish Paganism

Via Scott Simpson, who is quoted in it, “Pre-Christian Slavic Beliefs are on the Rise in Poland” (PDF file), from the Krakow Post.

“The native faith movement as a whole is loosely organised and doesn’t
have a strong dogmatic component, it is actually less about faith – as in
‘correct belief’ – and more about being faithful, living the lifestyle,” said
Scott Simpson, a scholar of religious studies at the Jagiellonian University,
and a co-author [sic] of a recent study of Eastern European neo-paganism.

Scroll to page 22 and watch out for extraneous commas.

A Medical Origin for Norse Monsters?

This is what happens when a parasitologist/archaeologist muses on the origin of mythology. It gets interesting at about the 6:30-minute point.

And this is a very famous turd in English archaeology.

Druid Sex Magic

Many things come to mind when I think of Druids, but sex magic is not one of them.

Silly me. I did not know about “fundamentals of Celtic sex magic,” etc.

Actually, Ronald Hutton was planning to put this in his next book, but now someone has beaten him to it.