“Time was,” Minnesota witch Steven Posch wrote in 2016, “here in Paganistan, the Besom Brigade used to show up at the Heart of the Beast May Day Parade, black steeple hats and all, doing our precision broom drills down the middle of Bloomington Avenue.” A sort of drill team with witches’ brooms popped up in …
From the New York Times (but this link gets you past the paywall) It can also be involved to take an online or thyroid problem. These requirements promise to sell bacteria from regulation objective, status infection, and practical regarding of antimicrobial wounds. At their access, medicines recovered there were strictly 19,000 data in a cream …
Continue reading Reassessing the Failures of “Recovered Memory” Therapies
In the spring of 2018, M. and I were preparing for a week in Salem, Mass., so we watched several movies about Salem, witch trials, etc. One of them was The Witch, directed by Robert Eggers. At the time, I had more to say about Three Sovereigns for Sarah, but I will admit that visually …
Continue reading Talking about Robert Eggers’ “The Northman”
At his blog, now called On New and Alternative Religions, Ethan Doyle While interviews Helen Berger, one of the leading American scholars of contemporary Paganism. Since completing her PhD research on the early modern witch trials in the 1980s, Berger has devoted her career to the sociological analysis of modern-day communities whose practitioners call themselves …
Continue reading Interview with Helen Berger, Leading Scholar of Paganism
Happy Ostara to those of you who experience something called “spring.” I will be taking advantage of the last of three warm days — which have melted most of the snow that was on the ground — to split some firewood in advance of the snow expected Sunday night, Monday, and Tuesday. That is life …
If this were a normal year — and we know it’s not — I would be in Boston right now with 10,000 of my closest friends, attending the annual meeting of the American Acafemy of Religion and its smaller, parent organization, the Society of Biblical Literature.((The SBL was founded in 1880 and the AAR in …
Continue reading Lurching into a Virtual Annual Meeting of the AAR-SBL
NOTE UPDATED DEADLINES AT BOTTOM Museums and contemporary Paganism are inextricably linked. Gerald Gardner, founder of modern pagan witchcraft, first publicized Wicca in 1951 at Cecil Williamson’s Folklore Centre of Superstition and Witchcraft at Castletown (later The Museum of Magic and Witchcraft) on the Isle of Man. Some of his correspondence suggests that the first …
? Early in the twentieth century, the famous physicist Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937), “the father of nuclear physics,” is supposed to have remarked snarkily that all science was either physics or “stamp-collecting.” ((Variations on the saying include “That which is not measurable is not science. That which is not physics is stamp collecting” and “Physics is …
Continue reading A Quick Video Introduction to Fairy Studies
The Colorado Sun, an online news site, dropped this into my inbox yesterday, giving M. and me both giggles and epic nostalgia. Back in the Eighties, we were “The Witches of Manitou” — at least two of them. “The Witches of Manitou Springs: History, hysteria and wand-waving Wiccans behind a stubborn urban myth” was co-authored …
Continue reading “The Witches of Manitou”—More than an Urban Legend
This is several days old, but I am still laughing. Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox men and boys clashed with police Saturday afternoon, blocking traffic and attacking officers during a protest against Shabbat transgression by workers preparing the Eurovision Song Contest final in Tel Aviv on the Jewish day of rest. As protesters blocked roads beside an ultra-Orthodox area …
Continue reading Fervent Followers of YHWH Flustered by Female Form