Tag: California

Ægypt in Northern California: Isis Oasis

On By Chas S. Clifton3 Comments
Loreon Vigné

In 1957, a young artist named Lora Vigné and her husband moved from Southern California to San Francisco.

“It was 1957, the beginning of the Beatnik era, and we fitted the description,” she writes in her memoir, The Goddess Bade Me Do It!

No poser bohemian, she was already producing commercial ceramic pieces and enamel jewelry of her own design. She opened an art-supply store in North Beach and later a gallery, the Noir Gallery, at Stockton and Sutter streets downtown. Here she is on the cover of I Am a Lover (1961), a photo book of North Beach life at the peak of the Beat era.

(Her husband, Dion, was an artist, experimental filmmaker, and a doomed lover of Miss Poppy.)

By the late 1960s she had a thriving business and owned several properties in the city. She also owned ocelots, having created a large indoor/outdoor space for them between two of her houses, houses located on Isis Street.

A shrine to Isis.

When the city outlawed keeping bigger cats, she went looking for a rural home, which turned out to be an 8.5-acre site in Geyserville, Sonoma County, that had housed a retreat center for followers of the Baha’i faith from the early twentieth century until just recently before she bought it. It came with a lodge, a commercial kitchen,  the original Victorian farmhouse, and a theatre/worship building.

With the vision of Lora, now Loreon, and fellow devotes of Isis, it became Isis Oasis.

On November 18th, the first day of the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in San Francisco, I found myself in a two-vehicle caravan around Sonoma County on what we called the “Mojo and Materiality Tour.” Isis Oasis was the first stop. I was not sure what to expect. Something embarrassingly kitschy?

Loreon (wearing the same Egyptian-style eye makeup as in her old beatnik photos) was soon drinking tea with us all. She and I swapped stories of our visits to Clonegal Castle in Ireland, home of the Fellowship of Isis.

We wandered through the buildings. It is Ægypt in the California wine country—not the fractious, Islamist Egypt of today but an Ægypt of the imagination, where Isis is still worshiped, where there are priestesses, peafowl and big-gish cats, where visitors sleep in bedrooms thematically decorated to evoke Egyptian goddesses.

(Isis Oasis also makes an appearance in Erik Davis’s coffee-table book of California religion, The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape.)

The only question, of course, will be the passing of the sistrum at some future day.

Steps to the large theater and temple.

Isis Oasis was the first stop on the tour. Now that I am home after the train journey, I will soon have more posts about the tour and the annual meeting itself.

In ‘The City’

On By Chas S. Clifton
My dogs would not fit into a backpack. They are not city dogs.

M. and I are about to leave San Francisco after the American Academy of Religion annual meeting After four and a half days of sessions and meetings and breakfast meetings and receptions and in-the-bar sessions and restaurant meals and hurried conversations in corridors ending with an exchange of business cards and a promise to be in touch, I am just brain-dead.

The Contemporary Pagan Studies Group is looking healthy though.

And the noise. Is there some San Francisco ordinance against using sound-absorbent materials in restaurants? Do they cause cancer? Everything seems to be so acoustically “hard” everywhere: stone and painted plaster and mirrors plus the clatter of dishes and glassware—and then you play recorded music.

Jason Pitzl-Waters has been blogging some of the sessions too, and he will be home before I am, so go there for now. Check back here on the weekend!

Beatnik Witches

On By Chas S. Clifton2 Comments

Aidan Kelly’s Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches, which has circulated in digital form for some years, can now be purchased as a book from Amazon, with new material added.

As the San Francisco counter-culture teeters on the edge of the Psychedelic Era, a group of twenty-somethings, open to spiritual experiment (and other sorts of experiments), find themselves morphing into something that they do not quite a have a word for  . . . Druids? Witches??

Built from recollections and interviews, it is a picture of people creating a new religion based on a heady mix of reading, ritual, and inspiration.

 

Seeking AAR Pagan Studies Papers

On By Chas S. Clifton

After reading the Call for Papers, now is the time to submit proposals for the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group’s sessions at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting.

We have two topics this year:

What does Pagan studies offer to academic analysis and critique? How do historical constructions of “paganism” form or misinform contemporary Pagan hermeneutics? How do studies of Pagan practices contribute new notions of religion and/or new methods to understand lived religion? Can Paganism be read as a form of religiosity transcending Wicca? Can the study of Paganism illuminate difficult areas regarding the body, sexuality, the dead, celebrity “worship,” or material spirituality?

West Coast Paganism in the 1960s–1970s. Bay Area “occulture” versus British Wicca? Were there cultural predecessors — the German-derived “Nature Boy” movement, dietary reformers, sexual reformers, Beats, other occultists, and esotericists? What was the West Coast Pagan influence on grassroots organizing and democracy modeling in America? What was the influence of Alan Watts, Esalen, and the “California Cosmology” on Paganism? What theories of new religious movements were tested against West Coast Paganisms?

The meeting will be held  in San Francisco November 19-22, 2011.

All proposals must be submitted through the online system. If you are not currently an AAR member, you may create a temporary login ID and password.

The deadline is March 1.

Still “Chasing Margaret”

On By Chas S. Clifton3 Comments

Years ago, during my research leading up to the writing of Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America, I went through a period of fascination with science-fiction/fantasy writer Margaret St. Clair (1911-1995), seeking her books on the SF shelves of used bookstores in various cities.

She and her husband, Eric,  were perhaps the first Gardnerian Witches on the West Coast, having flown East to be initiated by Ray and Rosemary Buckland in the early 1960s.

This blog’s first incarnation was a column in various Pagan magazines, and one of those columns was called “Chasing Margaret”, being my attempt to restore her memory and literary reputation in SF.

Blogger Tim Mayer has kept up the chase for her forgotten works and blogged about several of them at Z-7’s Headquarters. Here is a partial list:

Three Worlds of Futurity (1964).

Message from the Eocene (1964).

The Dancers of Noyo (1973) This novel is not only prescient, but it still gets under my skin, although the geography did not become real until I visited the Mendocino coast.

The Games of Neith (1960).

Change the Sky and Other Stories (1974).

The best of the lost has to be “The Goddess on the Street Corner”. It’s a sad tale which would have fitted into The Twilight Zone. The story concerns an alcoholic pensioner who finds an ancient Greek goddess on a city street. He takes her home and feeds her bourbon, hoping to restore the deity’s powers. The story has a bitter sweet ending, which was not entirely expected.

I would like to find that one.

San Francisco, Market Street, 1905

On By Chas S. Clifton4 Comments

A few months before the great San Francisco earthquake and fire, someone mounted an early movie camera on a street car and filmed as the car rolled down Market Street toward the Ferry Building.

Pretty much everything in this movie was destroyed on April 18-19, 1906. It’s a lost world.

I find this movie to be almost hypnotic. The policeman in his helmet … lots of free-range kids about … oh my god, they’re going to hit that horse … no, they didn’t… there goes Martin Eden himself, crossing the street with his manuscript.

…

Part of the same movie is here, but with period music of the early 1900s. Seems less elegiac and more long-ago.

Passing of Feraferia’s Svetlana

On By Chas S. Clifton
Fred and Svetlana of Feraferia in the 1960s.
Fred and Svetlana of Feraferia in the 1960s.

Svetlana Butryn, wife of Fred Adams, founder of the small but influential West Coast Pagan group Feraferia, passed away last Thursday, May 6, after a long period of ill health. She was 75.

Fred himself died in 2008.

Feraferia had a “only in Southern California” quality to it, arising partly from the neo-Romantic ethos of raw foods, sunshine, and nudism that took root there as long ago as the 1890s and early 1900s, the era of the “nature boys,” mixed with a looking back to classical Greek religion as a model for its path.

Cruising into the Future that Was Not

On By Chas S. Clifton6 Comments
US Navy airship Macon over San Francisco, c. 1933
US Navy airship Macon over San Francisco, c. 1933

When I was about eleven, I went through a period of fascination with dirigibles (rigid airships). What technology could be more emblematic of futures that never were?

The photo above comes from a site devoted to photos of the US Navy’s Macon, which was based at Moffett Field on the San Francisco Peninsula in the early 1930s.

It is rare to see pictures of the interior: the bridge, the sick bay, the sailors’ bunks. (The Macon crashed off Big Sur in 1935.)

It’s still possible to tour the California coast by airship. I should do that some time.

(Via Roberta X.)

BeliefNet Article Looks at Wiccan Chaplain’s Lawsuit

On By Chas S. Clifton

As mentioned here previously and at The Wild Hunt, Patrick McCollum, volunteer Wiccan prison chaplain in California, has sued the state to overturn a policy of hiring paid chaplains only from certain religions.

A new article at BeliefNet summarizes the case. Excerpts:

Supported by interfaith scholars and church-state separationists, the Rev. Patrick McCollum argues that the state policy has the “pernicious effect” of depriving inmates of other religious backgrounds from getting the services they need and deserve.

The court challenge began when McCollum, 59, a prominent leader in Wiccan and correctional circles, applied and was rejected for a full-time position as a chaplain in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

“When I got to the personnel office, they refused to give me an application to apply for a state job because they knew that I was a Wiccan,” said McCollum, director of Our Lady of the Wells Church in Moraga, Calif., and leader of the National Correctional Chaplaincy Directors Association.

“They never reviewed my qualifications.

 Religious-studies professor and lawyer Barbara McGraw responds to an amicus brief in the case–from a conservative Christian group supporting the state’s position–here:

In other words, genuine Christianity supports religious rights for all. Christianity was not at the founding, nor is it now a monolithic “ism” that justifies the domination and suppression of others–not even Wiccan/Pagans.

An amici curiae brief on McCollum’s side filed by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Anti-Defamation League, and other groups is also available (PDF file).