A Day and a Night in Occult Chicago

A statue of the goddess Ceres tops the Chicago Board of Trade building, as seen from a classroom building at DePaul University.

For the third time in four years, we had a pre-conference event that tied into Pagan studies somehow. (Previously: Montréal, San Francisco.)

This was the Occult Chicago conference organized by Jason Winslade at DePaul University—his take on “Chicago Quarter,” an urban orientation class that all first-year DePaul students must take.

Imagine a bright new student who, however, does not know a Theosophist from a Chicago Bear. Suddenly she (who maybe just took this section because it fit her schedule) finds herself immersed in a world yogis, magicians, witches, astrologers, hucksters, publishers, and — this being Chicago — architecture.

Jason Winslade (black cap) points out the location of the former Chicago Masonic Temple on State Street, accompanied by “Occult Chicago” blogger Rik Garrett, right.

Those of us who attended the one-day version (see also Jason Pitzl-Waters’ review) heard some of the students’ capstone presentations, learned that the first skyscraper in Chicago was built by the Freemasons, listened to representatives of contemporary magical groups, and visited sites and building associated with occult organizations, hauntings, violent deaths, and publishing houses.

Mural on the tenth floor of the Fine Arts Building, Michigan Avenue, Chicago.

One highlight was the Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan Ave., where at one time the Thelemite Choronzon Club held its meetings and the Akbar Lodge of Theosophists had its office.

The Pookah (right)  and friends pursue the skeptical German professor in a Terra Mysterium skit.

Finally came a performance by the Terra Mysterium steampunk theatre troupe. You might think that a classroom would not make the best performance space, but the performance was laced with academic parody, so it worked.

What Happened to Ufology?

When people are still talking and writing books about the Roswell Incident more than sixty years after it happened, you have to wonder if the air has leaked out of ufology.
In Britain, the Telegraph reports,

Dozens of groups interested in the flying saucers and other unidentified craft have already closed because of lack of interest and next week one of the country’s foremost organisations involved in UFO research is holding a conference to discuss whether the subject has any future.

Back in the late 1940s–1960s, I think that there was a sense of movement: first the sightings of unknown “spacecraft.” Then visual sightings plus effects, such as burnt spots on the ground. Then sightings of aliens themselves (following J. Allen Hynek’s classification scheme).

Surely the truth would be learned soon, whether the aliens were benevolent or whether they were not and Earthlings had to overcome their political differences and fight for planetary survival.

But no.

Me, I am of the Jacques Vallée school: They have always been here, living “inside the walls.”

Settling Publishing Issues at the AAR

Trudging through McCormick Place

To complete your quest, you need an elf, a dwarf, a hobbit …

I am sleeping a lot these days, recovering from this year’s American Academy of Religion meeting, held in Chicago’s monstrous McCormick Place convention center. Beware of any architect who designates parts of buildings as a “grand concourse.” That translates as “huge useless spaces that you have to walk back and forth through to get to the important stuff.”

This was the most “businesslike” of all AAR meetings that I have attended. I barely even saw the book exhibit—quite a change from years when I examined every publisher’s booth carefully (unless it was something like IVP or Zondervan) because I had no one to talk to. Now I have to write to all sorts of people with whom I should have liked to have a fuller conversation.

Important publishing news in Pagan studies and Western esotericism: the merger (which I had not discussed) here between Equinox Publishing and Acumen.

Now they are de-merged. It feels like a divorce, with the authors and series editors as the minor children who are assigned to the custody of one parent or the other.

As part of the agreement, certain religious-studies books that were already in production, including one that I spent all spring and summer on copyediting and typesetting, have been assigned to Acumen.

But a number of series editors — including Nikki Bado and me for the series originally called Equinox Studies in Historical and Contemporary Paganism — are moving their series back to Equinox as originally contracted. It’s as though the kid said, “No, I want to go live with Mom. And I will.”

As for The Pomegranate, the editorial pipeline is finally moving, and I anticipate another issue coming out soon. That has been on my mind a lot.

After being in editorial limbo for a few weeks, it was good to get these issues straightened out.

D&D in Ptolemaic Egypt

What were they doing with 20-sided dice? Here is one speculation:

The symbols for eta, theta, and epsilon can be clearly seen. Maybe it was used to determine which frat the ancients were going to pledge, but I’d like to think it was used to roll for hit points for warrior and sphinx classes. Now all we need is for someone to 3D-model this so we can print it out and make up our own ancient Egyptian version of D&D.

I suspect some kind of divination tool myself.

Just a Small Town Ghost Story

An old house in a small town in eastern North Dakota.

The house was once a boarding house for railroad workers, so I am told, as well a private home through the second half of the twentieth century and so far in the twenty-first.

When I go grouse and duck-hunting with my friend G., who has lived there for the decade past, I usually sleep in the enclosed front porch, which is about 8 x 12 feet in size. That room contains a single bed, a desk and chair, a lamp, and a disassembled bookcase — nothing more. (I like that room because I can take my dog outside easily.)

In 2011, I left for the 1,000-mile drive home, went about five miles down North Dakota 200, and wondered where my cell phone was. I stopped the truck and looked — no phone. I went back and with G.’s help searched the 8 x 12 room and the lawn between the front door and where I parked.

“Clarence must have taken it,” he said.

Once home, I went through the truck like a drug agent looking for contraband. No telephone. Nor did it ever appear at G.’s house.

This year, my fifth visit to the house, I kept a close watch on my telephone, and it came home with me safely.

But then I walked into my temporary bedroom and smelled cigarette smoke—a strong smell, as though someone had just finished their cigarette in the little room.

I asked G. about it. He was blasé. He had smelled it, his wife had smelled it, his teenage stepkids had smelled it. (No one in the family smoked cigarettes.)

And I smelled it four or five times more, at odd intervals, not connected with time of day or humidity or anything like that.

G. attributes it to one Clarence Bolz, who owned the house a couple of decades ago. Mostly he haunts the workshop attached to the garage, G. said. Small items sometimes disappear, and now and again G. smells Clarence’s cigarettes.

Such a ghost story would be too minor even for Fate magazine’s reader-submissions column. But it was the first smell-linked haunting that I had encountered.

The ‘Occult Chicago’ Event

Looking forward to this event a lot. It should fortify me for the hard business of a confrontation with a certain publisher’s editorial director.

And keep an eye on Rik Garrett’s Occult Chicago blog. Why don’t you start one for your town?

Gandalf Style?


No, you can’t fool me. This is just Oberon Zell on his way to the supermarket in Santa Rosa.

A Dream, a Dog, and a Forest Fire

A forest fire burning above Hardscrabble Creek.

Last Monday, the 22nd, I came home from a week-long trip. On Tuesday, I was temporarily homeless, a condition that persisted until Friday.

Tuesday’s weather was warm and windy, with the highest gust in the area clocked at 79 mph. Somehow — I still have not heard the definitive story — a tree hit a power line or a power line hit a tree . . . or something — and a raging forest fire began.

Within an hour, fourteen houses plus barns, sheds, etc., near mine had been erased. Eventually that night the fire burned 2,100 acres (850 ha).

M. and I were 45 minutes’ drive away when we saw the smoke. I brandished my county-issued volunteer firefighter ID card, and we passed through four road blocks.

When we arrived home, she quickly left again with the dogs, her favorite faux leather jacket, her laptop computer, a sack of dog food, a bag of apples, a bottle of wine, and the clothes on her back.

She was not sure where she was going, since the road to town was closed to “civilian” traffic.

I left home dressed in my wildland-fire gear, with my laptop too, and also my bunker gear in case I had to face a structure fire. As it happened, it was too late to save any houses — I ended up working until about 9 p.m. chasing spot fires that kept multiplying in the trees along the dry stream bed of Hardscrabble Creek.

I talk about the experience at Southern Rockies Nature Blog here, here, and here.

But there is a part that I left out in that blog.

On the night of the 19th, I believe it was, sleeping my friend’s slightly haunted house* in a small North Dakota prairie town, I had a dream.  In the dream, M. and I were at a house in the woods, although it was not our house and not our woods.

The house had a long gravel driveway (as does ours), and M. was setting up a card table beside it in order to eat a meal out in the sunshine (as we sometimes do). Standing on the steps, I looked down the driveway past her and saw a large tawny animal.

“Wow, that’s a big coyote,” I thought. Then I realized that it was a sort of bleached-out-looking tiger. I wanted her to come to the house right away.

In the morning, I tried to think about associations with tigers. True, we had recently watched the “Siberian Tiger Quest” episode of Nature. (It is excellent.) Otherwise, the only thing that came to mind was William Blake’s poem that starts,

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,

Burning. Forests.

I told M. about my dream during the time when we were staying at a motel 15 miles away, me commuting to the fire house, and she spoke of something that struck her oddly.

At a house about 250 yards away lives a chocolate Lab named Boone. We hear him bark now and then. But on Monday night he bayed all night long, so persistently that M. shut the bedroom window, turned on a fan, and muttered about his stupid owners who would not bring him indoors.  If I ever hear him bay through the night again, I am going to be very nervous.

I do think that events cast their shadows before them, but it is so hard sometimes to know what the shadows signify.

* I will discuss the “haunted” part soon. It was a post that I had meant to write this week.

Pagans in Winnipeg

The trailer to a new documentary, The WinniPagans, focusing on the (largely Wiccan, I think) Pagan scene in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It will be available as video-on-demand — details at the website

Complete with a cute Pagan puppy and a nice shot of Boletus edulis.

Rhetoric: It’s “Classical” Because It Works

“Back to the basics” works if you chose the right basics. (We could debate that.)

“The Writing Revolution,” an article in The Atlantic, argues that attention to basic rhetorical principles — as opposed to expressing your feelings or writing in order to become a better person— helps disadvantaged high school students to succeed.

And so the school’s principal, Deirdre DeAngelis, began a detailed investigation into why, ultimately, New Dorp’s students were failing. By 2008, she and her faculty had come to a singular answer: bad writing. Students’ inability to translate thoughts into coherent, well-argued sentences, paragraphs, and essays was severely impeding intellectual growth in many subjects. Consistently, one of the largest differences between failing and successful students was that only the latter could express their thoughts on the page. If nothing else, DeAngelis and her teachers decided, beginning in the fall of 2009, New Dorp students would learn to write well.