• Check out Patheos’ story package on The Future of Paganism. Solitaries? Personal paganism? What’s next?
• Musings on that “Nazi” label and whether the climate of the Pacific Northwest encourages “black metal” bands, at Bioregional Animism.
• He comes to the festival as a lapsed Lutheran. He leaves as a Pagan—an interview from the Pagan Newswire Collective’s Minnesota bureau. (I’m waiting for the Prairie Home Companion parody of their piece.)
• Did a witch’s spell burn down the pub?
All summer I have been editing and laying out a biography of the American Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944). I just sent the galleys to the writer, a professor in Arizona, and am working on my own corrections as well.
There have been the usual hassles—missing “essential” photos, notes that did not match the text, etc.—but we are working through all of that.
I mentioned the project on Facebook once, and got a response from a former student who was raised in the Assemblies of God, one of the larger Pentecostal denominations (the largest, says Wikipedia).
She had heard about Aimee when she was younger, but thought of her as a “scary” person.
Having lived with Aimee’s biography for six months, there is much that I could say about her, but “scary” is not a word that I would use. (I sent the student a PDF of the chapter about Aimee’s revival tour through Denver in the early 1920s.)
Do Pentecostal Christians send their elders down the memory hole as effectively as Pagans do?
Or does that process happen in all religions that do not have formal processes of canonizing saints or the equivalent—something that fixes them in memory?
I am still waiting for a serious academic biography of Gerald Gardner, who is after all the founder of a world religion, now that Wicca is in India, Brazil, Germany, and other places.
No doubt many young Wiccans have either (a) not heard of him or (b) think that he was some “scary” old guy.
Philip Heselton (interviewed here), the author of two earlier books about Gardner, is supposed to have a new biography coming out from Thoth, although as of today I cannot find it on their fancy-but-unsearchable website.
I judged the earlier books as being strong on research and legwork, but weak on analysis and contextualizing. Credulous, even. There is probably still room for a biography written by someone with a background in discussing new religious movements.
Meanwhile, Oberon Zell is at work on some new encylopediac work about “wizards of the world.” He has been trying to convince me to a write an entry about Gleb Botkin. Now there is someone who should be kept from sliding down the memory hole of Pagan history as well.
The ongoing excacations at the Mesolithic site of Star Carr in Yorkshire has turned up what is now thought to be the oldest house in Britain—10,500 years.
Archaeologists describe finding “red deer skull tops which were worn as masks.”
“And the artefacts of antler, particularly the antler head-dresses, are intriguing as they suggest ritual activities.”
(Red deer are essentially the same as North American elk.)
So there you have it: antler headdresses and masks go way back.
Despite the recent slump in housing prices, the Star Carr home, originally built for a cost of three flint choppers, is now worth at least fifty bear skins.
In the early 17th century, a condemned witch goes to the gallows, saying under her breath an incantation of the Old Religion.
Only the incantation invokes the Virgin Mary, Ave, Regina Caelorum, and the old religion is Roman Catholicism, made virtually synonymous with treason during the reigns of Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and James I of England.
Considerations of treason would go over the heads of the Pendle witches, however, a group of mostly poor rural women in northern England caught up in an atmosphere of religious turmoil and fear of invasion from Catholic Spain.
Based on court trial records, Mary Sharratt’s Daughters of the Witching Hill tells a generational family story of “cunning women,” folk healers in a popular Catholic tradition (like Mexican curanderas) whose conduct becomes criminalized after the “stripping of the altars” and the destruction of popular Catholicism in the mid-1500s.
In a way that reminds me a bit of some of Mary Stewart’s work, Sharratt follows three generations of women struggling with poverty and seeking the doubled-edged respect and fear of being capable of healing—and thus also of cursing.
To be honest [says Bess Southerns, the grandmother] I didn’t give a toss about the Pope in Rome or any plots in faraway lands, but I yearned for the sense of sanctity and protection that hung over us then [before the Protestant Reformation], the talk of miracles and wonders, a prayer and a saint to ward us from every ill and the solace of the Blessed Mother. Now we’d been left to stand stark and unshielded, to bear whatever cruel lot Providence cast our way.
When Bess, also known as Mother Demdike, risks teaching the making of clay images to a friend’s daughter, Annie, the girl responds, “Are you saying that anyone who moulds clay might work witchcraft, Mother Demdike? Then there’d scarely be a landlord left alive.”
Whatever we might say about the talk of familiar spirits appearing as dogs and boys that the accused witches revealed at their trial, Sharratt treats these as real elements of the plot, giving the story a Gothic edge that moves it beyond the Christian world and suggests why today’s English Witches might still look back four hundred years and wonder just what was happening in Lancashire.
This publisher’s video “trailer” lets you see the novel’s physical setting.
Via The Wild Hunt, a story of another Anglican priest with an attraction to Druidism.
I’m actually a priest of the Church of England – but with a difference. Though I’m still in “holy orders”, I now work full time as a magician, writer and retreat leader. I’ve been described as a “priest at the edge”. My latest book, The Path of the Blue Raven, describes my own encounters with the Pagan traditions of this land and what great treasures I’ve learned from them.
He probably will not end up losing his day job, unlike his American counterpart William Melnyk.
I don’t think anyone in the Church of England cares that much. The hierarchy is probably just happy to see signs of life. Or even compulsory parish archery practice.
Some people just cannot handle the solstice. (The Telegraph, UK)
It wasn’t this bad. On Sunday M. and I went up to Salida, Colorado, to catch the last day of FIBArk, the whitewater boating festival, watching competitors come down the frothing Arkansas River as we drove upstream.
Our main interest was in the Crazy River Dogs event, which we have managed to attend for three of the last four years.
In this photo, the brown dog will be pursuing the aspen pole at upper left as it bobs through a rapid in the downtown Salida kayakers’ water park.
A "river dog" leaps into the Arkansas River after a flying aspen stick.
FIBArk, like the solsticial doings at Stonehenge—I found the first picture in this slide show—marks our beginning of high summer.
To me the quarter days of solstices and equinoxes are “outer” festivals. They should be celebrated with public festivities, whether those festivities are capital-P Pagan or not. Food booths in the park, paddle-flailing kayakers, swimming dogs, the Sun beating down—it’s all good.
The cross-quarter days are for magic.
In the current issue of The Cauldron, a writer known only as “Tof” tells us that Donna Gardner, wife of Gerald, chief founder of Wicca, was lying when she said that she was not involved in the Craft.
First, though, Tof tells us, “In all this [biographical summary] there is not evidence of Donna Gardner’s involvement, even occasionally, in the witchcraft practised by her husband.”
And then s/he proceeds to “find” some. Examples:
1. Donna was supposed to have been photographed “in witch vestments and posing with a ceremonial sword in her hand.”
But we all know that that Gerald Gardner’s idea of “witch vestments” for women consisted of a necklace and nothing else.
Thanks to Philip Heselton’s legwork, we know that Gardner was involved in other esoteric and magical groups in the 1940s before the founding of Wicca circa 1950. Could not these vestments pertain to one of them?
2. Donna apparently “knew some details of Wica [Gardner’s spelling] rituals at a time when they were known only to insiders.” But the time period is not given, and there is no source for this statement—it is just asserted.
3. There is allegedly a high priestess’s symbol on her gravestone. That is interesting, if true, but no photographic proof is offered.
Sloppy speculation like this article is just one more reason why I wish that someone would write a critical biography of Gardner—I would love to see it in Equinox’s Pagan Studies series, which I co-edit.
Aidan Kelly, who started the biographical ball rolling back in 1991 with Crafting the Art of Magic, assumed that Gardner and Edith Woodford-Grimes (“Dafo”) were lovers and that she was, at least for a time, the first high priestess of Wicca in the early 1950s. (I have some concerns with the Wikipedia entry, but at least it has her photo.)
She certainly seemed to be on the scene much more than Donna did. And new religious movements often start under messy circumstances that later followers try to clean up and sanitize.
Although some British Pagans have demanded NAGPRA-style reburial for Neolithic (and thus “Pagan” in some sense) human remains found at the famous ceremonial site of Avebury, English Heritage have decided against doing so.
These Neolithic human remains were excavated in the Avebury area by Alexander Keiller between 1929 and 1935. In 2006, Paul Davies of the Council of British Druid Orders requested their reburial. English Heritage and the National Trust followed the recently-published DCMS process in considering this request, and went out to public consultation in 2009 on a draft report which set out the evidence and different options.
English Heritage and the National Trust have now published a report on the results of this consultation, and a second report on the results of a public opinion survey. Our summary report concludes that the request should be refused for four main reasons:
- the benefit to future understanding likely to result from not reburying the remains far outweighs the harm likely to result from not reburying them;
- it does not meet the criteria set out by the DCMS for considering such requests;
- not reburying the remains is the more reversible option;
- the public generally support the retention of prehistoric human remains in museums, and their inclusion in museum displays to increase understanding.
I expect that the Pagans for Archaeology group will be pleased.
… like a mass grave. Maybe it helps if said grave is 1,000 years old.
To find out that the young men executed were Vikings is a thrilling development. Any mass grave is a relatively rare find, but to find one on this scale, from this period of history, is extremely unusual.
Click over to Pagans for Archaeology, where Yewtree interviews Australian Pagan scholar David Waldron, author of Shock! The Black Dog of Bungay: A Study in Local Folklore
I think a key issue for me was that transmission of symbols, images and ideas from the pagan past are very fragmentary, complex and ambivalent. People are very quick to throw the “Pagan Survival” label around because they so badly need to feel a connection to the past and a feeling of pastness in what they do. People can also be very quick to deny connection to a Pagan past when debunking. One thing that was really apparent to me when doing my research on the Black Dog of Bungay from a local history perspective, was that it is not a zero sum game. Let’s look at the Black Dog of Bungay for example. There are fragments in the myth from the Celts, Vikings and Romans for example. However, if I was to speak to a 16th century Puritan in Bungay he may not even know what a Celt was and would certainly take offense at the suggestion his view of the attack on St Mary’s church by a Black Dog or “Devile in such a likenesse” was Pagan.
He makes some interesting points about how folklore incorporates outside interpretations, digesting them, and presenting them as truly indigenous and original. Worth a read.