Stone Circles: Not Just for Neolithic People

“Andy Burnham, who runs the Megalithic Portal Web site and society in Surrey, England, has recorded 253 monolithic circles built in recent decades. And ‘there must be many more in private gardens that we don’t know about,’ he wrote in an e-mail.”

The New York Times profiles a Vermont man who has built more than twenty. And the writer manages to work in the controversial Pagan worship site at the Air Force Academy as well as, you guessed it, Druids — who did not build the ancient stone monuments but who remain associated with them, thanks to antiquarian writers of past centuries.

Mothman: High Strangeness in 1967

The Mothman Prophecies, the late John Keel’s first-person account of a paranormal investigation in West Virginia, may not answer the question of exactly what the Mothman phenomenon was, but it remains one of the best accounts of the shadowy world of paranormal investigation itself. (Skip the movie, except for laughs.)

Here, from the Fate magazine website, is a short article that Keel wrote some years later, discussing the the vortex of strangeness and paranoia that sucked him in back in 1967.

First Impressions from EASR, Contemporary Esotericism Conferences

I did not attend these conference sessions  on the study of esotericism in Stockholm, alas, but several blogging friends did attend. One of them, Sasha Chaitow of the Phoenix Rising Academy, has already posted an initial report, so go read it.

Water Temples of California

Sunol, California, water temple, built in 1910. (From the BF Photo blog.)

At the BF Photo blog, via Roberta X, a photo essay on California water temples. Bay Area readers, does anyone use these temples for bioregional ritual purposes?

From a Hereditary Tradition

I come from a hereditary tradition — of mushroom hunters.

A few dried mushrooms and my favorite book.

I remember my father the forest ranger taking me out when I was ten or eleven to look for them. It was usually raining, and I did not understand what he was seeing, but the activity was somehow important. And we ate them.

Then nothing until I was in my mid-twenties, when M. and I went hiking on the west side of Pike’s Peak (Horsethief Park, if you know the area) one late-summer day.

There we met a number of middle-aged and older German ladies wandering the forest with shopping bags.

They re-initiated me — and initiated her.

It’s like another German “grandmother story.”

(Demographic note: Colorado Springs is a major military garrison town, and troops at Fort Carson frequently go back and forth to Germany, which they have been doing since 1945. Sometimes they get married.)

For a time we got by with what the German ladies taught us. Then we wanted to learn more. But we had moved to a much smaller town, and there were no mycological groups there.

Then we moved again, into an area known for bears and mushrooms. In fact, the Pikes’s Peak Mycological Society frequently organized “forays” (an in-group term, kind of like “sabbat”) into this area.

Dad, a member, bought us a membership too. But that was a drought year, and all forays were canceled. Then he died, and my stepmother died, which pretty much ended our regular trips to Colorado Springs.

We started buying books. Yep, we’re book-taught mushroomers. Every time we go out (we don’t say “foray”), we try to learn a new one—and meanwhile we stick to the half-dozen that we know are good.

Like the Sarcodon imbricatus (hawk’s wing) in the jar. I figured those out from a book.

Two days ago we hit one of our favorite spots, and right off spotted where someone had sliced some Boletus edulis at the base. Everyone goes for king boletes! But they had left pounds and pounds of hawk’s wing mushrooms while they focused on boletes. (We still found some boletes ourselves anyway.)

It’s OK being solitary mushroom-hunters with a few good books and an inquiring (but careful) attitude.

I just wish that Dad was here to share them.

The “2012” Prophecy and Ancient Maya Politics

If you know someone who starts getting nervous as the end of the year approaches because of the “Mayan prophecy,” send them here.

They should be able to understand how it all goes back to the king of one of the ancient Mayan city-states proclaiming how great he was.

The key to understanding the reference to 2012 is a unique title that this Calakmul king gives himself. In the text, he calls himself the “13 K’atun lord”—that is, the king who presided over and celebrated an important calendar ending, the 13th K’atun cycle (9.13.0.0.0). This event had occurred just a few years before in AD 692. In order to vaunt himself even further and place his reign and accomplishments into an eternal setting, he connects himself forward in time to when the next higher period of the Maya calendar would reach the same 13 number—that is, December 21, 2012 (13.0.0.0.0).

“The 10 Most Difficult Books”

If you like reading lists, here is one from Publishers Weekly.

I confess to having read none of them, although I did manage Gravity’s Rainbow, one of the runners-up — twice!

Cultic Objects from the Cult of Fire

I always chuckle at how when archaeologists cannot immediately ascertain the purpose of an ancient object, they describe it as “cultic,” in this case as a phallic symbol.

This tendency was parodied in the steampunk-ish graphic novel Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay, who also created City, Cathedral, Ship, and others.

In this instance, the “phallic symbols” appear to be parts of fire drills. If you have ever watched someone start a fire with a drill  (I have), it does seem sort of miraculous.

The Wheel of the Year Slips its Cog…

. . . to borrow a phrase from another blogger.

This summer has been a tough one, trying to keep the garden alive, always watching for forest fires — fighting a couple of small ones with the local volunteer fire department.

The hummingbirds have been working the feeder hard for weeks — broad-tails and black-chinned, and for the last three weeks, the rufous hummers on their slow way south. I had to rinse and fill it twice a day.

Suddenly, on August 1st, there were noticeably fewer buzzing skirmishers around it. Oh, we still have hummingbirds, but some have left.

After a sort of poor mushroom hunt last week, M. and I went up on our favorite mountain today and had a real wild harvest.

After an early supper, we worked on the veranda until the light was gone, filling the dehydrator and covering two large screens with sliced mushrooms. Dried until they are crispy, they will go into jars for storage. The process actually concentrates the flavor.

The dark closed in faster, and the cool of the evening came more quickly too. The air outside smells of mushrooms from the dehydrator sitting on the outdoor dining table.

It is now late summer.

“Magic Shows” at Lapham’s Quarterly

Via Invocatio: Check the Summer 2012 issue of the online magazine Lapham’s Quarterly for an issue devoted to magic, small-w witchcraft, wonder-working, spiritualism, and carnivores versus vegetarians.

Then go back to Invocatio for more news on the study of Western esotericism.