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Lunacy — A Pagan Music Classic Reissued
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Tag Archives: Paganism
‘Small Gods’ Is a Zine about Animism
Edited by Dver, a.k.a. Sarah Kate Istra Winter, Small Gods: An Anthology of Everyday Animism is projected to be an annual zine “featuring art, poetry, and essays describing our relationship with, and giving praise to, the smallest of gods — those spiritual entities who are closely bound to distinct physical forms or locations (whether natural or constructed). thereby limiting their interaction with humans.”
I have an essay in this first issue, “‘Don’t Get Cocky, Kid,’ A Little Lesson from the Locals in the Mushroom Woods.” Other contributors besides Dver include Nimue Brown, P. Sufenas Virius Lupus, Rebecca Scott, Sister Patience, Suzanne Thackston, Lannon, and Elizabeth Starling.
I am especially grateful to Dver for creating Small Gods and look forward to more issues. You can purchase this one at her Etsy shop, Goblinesquerie.
Some of her writings are available on Amazon too. I really liked The City is a Labyrinth: A Walking Guide for Urban Animists, and learned some things from it even though I don’t live in a city. It’s kind of like Randonauting without an internet connection — and more meaningful.
The city is alive with spirits—from those found in remaining natural areas to those who are unique to the realm of concrete and steel. But how can we connect with these spirits, and build a powerful, meaningful localized practice in an urban environment? Polytheist, animist, and spirit-worker Sarah Kate Istra Winter suggests a radically simple approach: walking. Inspired by the field of psychogeography and informed by her many years as a spiritually-minded pedestrian, she examines the ways in which walking can be a devotional and magical act.
20 Years of British Paganism: Free Zoom Lecture with Glastonbury-based Writer Liz Williams
UPDATE: This event has been postponed. I do not know why — I just got the email from “The Zoom Team.” I will post when it is re-scheduled. Sad.
Liz Williams is a science fiction and fantasy writer living in Glastonbury, England, where she is co-director of a witchcraft supply business. She has been published by Bantam Spectra (US) and Tor Macmillan (UK), also Night Shade Press and appears regularly in Asimov’s and other magazines. She has been involved with the Milford SF Writers’ Workshop for over 25 years, and also teaches creative writing at a local college for Further Education. Miracles of Our Own Making: A History of Paganism (2020 Reaktionbooks) is based in scholarly literature but written for an audience of anyone. Many will also have read Williams’ occasional columns at The Wild Hunt. Join us as she talks about life in Glastonbury as a Pagan and also the development and direction of UK Paganism over the last 20 years.
Free of charge and open to all.
Celebrate June 5th – Plant a Tree
June 5th is the feast day of Boniface, an English monk who went missionary-ing among the German Heathens, who put an end to his career in 754. But they did not write the history books. Planting a tree would be an appropriate way to celebrate.
New Issue of The Pomegranate
Links to articles from the newest issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies, (vol. 24, no. 2). These articles are paywalled — but you know a librarian, don’t you? If you don’t, you should.
- “The Religious Biographies of Polish Traditional Wiccans: Leaving the Catholic Church, Conversion to Wicca, and the “Coming Home” Metaphor” by Joanna Malita-Król.
- “How Northern European Pagans Became Christians: A Typology of Reasons for Acceptance of Baptism in Medieval and Modern Literary Sources” by Jan Reichstätter.
- “Land, Property, Asatru” by Jefferson Calico.
- “Fastest-Growing Religion? Reflections on Contemporary Paganism’s Rapid Growth and How Scholars Describe That Which They Study” by Chris Miller.
- “The Maetreum of Cybele: A Fight for Equal ReligiousRecognition in New York State” by Francesca Tronetti.
- Review (free download): Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World reviewed by Scott Culpepper.
“Patrick, Pagans and Party Animals”
A screenshot from Patrick, Pagans and Party Animals, a video about the saint and the explosion of the secular holiday of St. Patrick’s Day.
Jenny Butler, a Pagan-studies scholar from University College Cork, appears at 3:00 and elsewhere to speak up for the “Pagan” dimension of the story.
Requires free Vimeo account.
The Creeping Menace of ‘Paganism’
Dear god! Nature religion! (Illustration by Katie Martin, Getty Images).
Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple and (visiting at) Harvard Divinity School is like someone who steps in dog shit, comes back indoors, and keeps wondering where the smell is coming from.
“We are all children of the same God,” he announces in a essay in The Atlantic (link goes to archived version).
And “we” are opposed to [small-p] “paganism,” which is about power, nature-worship, and wealth-worship. “Hug a tree or a dollar bill, and the pagan in you shines through.”((For Wolpe the exemplar of this “paganism” is, of course, Donald Trump, that notorious tree-hugger. But it’s an election year.))
The rabbi’s essay was not the first to make that point — as I will point out — but it hit at the right time and place, and suddenly contemporary Pagans were asking, “What’ s that smell?”
In her letter to The Atlantic, anthropologist and Pagan studies scholar Sabina Magliocco, “long-time reader of and subscriber to The Atlantic,” lambasted the piece as “misinformed and distorts both historical and contemporary understandings of paganisms in ways that are profoundly damaging to both Indigenous and revived religions.”
Wolpe equates nature with the most violent and base behavior. His fear, like that of so many other monotheists, is that, in the absence of a transcendental ideal of Goodness, we will all turn into savages raping and eating each other.
Halstead’s blog links to other responses to Wolpe’s article. I will mention just two more. The Wild Hunt has also covered this issue, as linked above.
At Harvard’s Program for the Evolution of Spirituality, Dan McKanan and Giovanna Parmigiani posted an open letter to David Wolpe, siscussing how his approach illustrates how hard it is to discuss religion when “many religions define themselves in opposition to other religions.”
One way to do this is to frame the critiques in the most culturally specific manner possible. Judaism did not emerge in response to “paganism” writ large; it emerged in response to the specific religious and political practices of immediately adjacent cultures. But again and again, Wolpe misses the chance to be specific in his critique. Instead, he identifies Donald Trump, Elon Musk, communism, fascism, Friedrich Nietzsche, the QAnon Shaman, and Peter Singer as diverse manifestations of a single phenomenon that he calls “pagan.” This universalizing gesture is especially problematic given the inherent diversity of Paganism.
Later, Dr Parmigiani noted on Facebook that “We heard back from David Wolpe and he appears to be willing to have a conversation with us and the Pagan community at HDS, once the semester starts.”
Holli Emore, executive director of Cherry Hill Seminary, had less luck, telling The Wild Hunt that she had invited Wolpe “to join me one day soon, perhaps on a Zoom call, to chat about how we can better understand each other.”
The rabbi responded, “I have been deluged with advocacies, requests for dialogue and so forth. The article did not and does not address the current pagan [sic] communities nor was it intended to.”
That makes me feel so much better. As she put it, “While his message to me was cordial, it is clear that he has no intention of revisiting his lack of research or redressing the feelings of the many he has slighted.”
The problem is defining Paganism. We have a long history of small-p paganism meaning “outside any [monotheistic] religion.” This is the straw man pummeled by Wolpe and others, such as the British journalist Louise Perry, whose article “We Are Repaganizing” appeared only two months earlier in the interdenominational Christian magazine First Things.((The story about the babies’ bones sounds like the old anti-Catholic folklore that there are babies buried under every convent.))
Her borrowed definition of “paganism” ias not “an interest in entrails or in praying to Jupiter. Rather, [but] a fundamentally different outlook on the world, and on the sacred.”
But Christianity takes a perverse attitude toward status and puts that perversity at the heart of the theology. “God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” is a baffling and alarming claim to anyone from a society untouched by the strangeness of the Jesus movement.
And that led to converting Pagans by the sword, but we won’t go there. Look over here at the cathedral! And furthermore, as the legalization of abortion proves, “the Western world has arguably always remained more pagan than Christian. In some ways Christianity has been more of a veneer than a substantial reality.”((She quotes from Steven Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City.))
The Christian writer Rod Dreher, with two bestsellers to his name (The Benedict Option and Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents), is also promoting the view that there was no morality in the ancient world (outside, perhaps, the imperial province of Judea) until Christianity arrived.((Sorry, Confucius. Sorry, Socrates.))
The book I finished last night, Pagan America, will be out from Regnery in March. The author, John Daniel Davidson, is not really talking about Wiccans and suchlike (though they do get significant mention), as much as he is talking about how the kinds of evils that permeated Greco-Roman culture, and that were eliminated by the triumph of Christianity, are coming roaring back now that Christianity has gone into abeyance in the West
Where does that leave today’s capital-P Pagans? You cannot accept Wolpe’s sidestepping of the issue because there are other singers in the choir, like John Daniel Davidson, who are apparently are happy to mix the two, jumping from “pagan = irreligious” to “Your gods are demons.”
(Davidson apparently wants to junk this silly “freedom of religion” idea and put the government firmly on the side of Christianity — his book’s subtitle is “The Decline of Christianity and the Coming Dark Age.”)
So we cannot get away with offering a pagan/Pagan (polytheist-animist) distinction. The cultural tides are moving. The secular talkers of both the right and left have moved from “Pagans don’t exist” to “they are bunch of silly New Agers” to the point of “viewing with concern.” Pagan readers, don’t be surprised to be asked for your position on sacrificing babies.
The Pagans, the Unicorns, and the Serial Killer
I have complained before about the relative lack of good American Pagan biography and autobiography. John Sulak’s biography of Oberon Zell (b. 1942) and his partner Morning Glory (1948–2014), The Wizard and the Witch was one of the exceptions.((Yes, Morning Glory either invented or co-invented the term “polyamory,” and she was aware of creating a Greek-Latin hybrid.)) While it was first published in 2014, Sulak and Oberon subsequently revised and enlarged it, splitting it into two volumes. The link goes to volume 1.
It’s also a history of the American Pagan movement in the 1970s-1990s particularly, with a West Coast emphasis. In the early 1980s, the Zells lived at Greenfield Ranch, a ranch in the Coast Range near Ukiah, Calif., that had been divided into acreages for back-to-the-landers and, yes, cannabis-growers, which meant the level of paranoia was fairly high. The ranch was raided by drug agents at least once, as I recall.
My friend the Pagan songwriter Gwydion Pendderwen lived there, and M. and I visited several times between 1978 and his passing in 1982. I have not been back since. Obviously much has changed.
In the late 1970s the Zells got an opportunity to live at Greenfield Ranch as caretakers for an absenteee Pagan parcel-owner, and there they practiced a documented but neglected ancient technique for turning new-born Angora billy goats into true unicorns. These went on the Rennaissance Faire circuit—later under the big top.
As Oberon would say, they were hoping to influence “kids who saw the Unicorn and would recognize it for what it was—not a fantasy creature made of moonbeams, just a small white animal with its own kind of beauty and heart and horn . . . . Those kids would make the connections and see that Magkick was possible and then go on to create their own contribution to that unique world-view [and] make their live whatever they want it to be.”1
But something darker was afoot. Another Greenfield Ranch resident helped out with showing the unicorns at Renn Faires, etc., so much so that he was sometimes called “Unicorn Man.”
His name was Leonard Lake, and he was a serial killer, although he had not really started on his murderous path at that time but apparently was planning it. There is plenty about him online, but my introduction to his story came through Episode 1 of the Trace of the Devastation podcast, a true-crime series about serial killers of the 1980s-90s in the California Gold Rush country.
In that episode, “The Unicorn Man,” you will hear Oberon Zell give his own honest self-appraisal of how he and others were fooled by Lake, whom they took to be just another back-to-the-lander, albeit with a more ex-military outlook.
Anyone can be fooled some of the time. Consider this a footnote to Sulak and Zell’s books.
- John G. Sulak, The Wizard and the Witch: An Oral History of Oberon Zell and Morning Glory (Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 2014) 180–81. [↩]
Latvian to Head European Congress of Ethnic Religions
Uġis Nastevičs (Facebook).
Latvian Pagan Uġis Nastevičs, a resident of Riga, was elected president of the European Congress of Ethnic Regions at a meeting in that city earlier this month. He works there as a translator and guide.
The group defines “ethnic religion” as “religion
, spirituality, and cosmology that is firmly grounded in a particular people’s traditions. In our view, this does not include modern occult or ariosophic theories/ideologies, nor syncretic neo-religions.
Delegates from seventeen countries also passed what is called the “Riga Delaration,” which begins with these statements:
We, the undersigned, represent religious communities upholding the traditional, ethnic religions of diverse peoples of Europe. We hold deep reverence for our ancestors, the Gods and Goddesses they worshiped and the worldview and values that they bequeathed to us. Our spiritual traditions are inseparable from our traditional culture, and both require support and protection.
We call on all the governments of the nations of Europe and the European Union to grant our religions the same respect and privileges that are accorded to other religions in European societies and legal systems. We ask for the following specific measures:
Of the items listed, Nastevi?s said that his personal priority was ” to contribute to securing the status and protection of holy places, many of which are getting already vandalized and desecrated.
Ronald Hutton’s Gresham Lectures Available Online
The five lectures that Ronald Hutton gave this past spring in the Gresham College series Finding Britain’s Lost Gods are available for viewing online. Each lasts about an hour.