Tag Archives: writing

‘The Super Natural,’ or How to Write about ‘Woo’

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I blogged here before about things disappearing in my house — kitchen utensils, corkscrews, keys, etc. (See “Pixie Problems, or Working Things Out with the ‘Cousins’ (1)” and Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.)

Things have been better since then. There is a pentagram pendant that has disappeared and re-appeared at least three times, but as long as I am wearing it or have it in my pocket, “they” leave it alone.

And then a book disappeared, almost snatched out of my hands.

The book was The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained (2016), a collaboration between scholar Jeffrey Kripal (I think of him as “the professor of woo”) and author and experiencer Whitley Strieber. (The 2017 paperback edition had the subtitle “Why the Unexplained is Real.“)

Strieber had been a novelist with several bestsellers in the horror category, such as The Wolfen and The Hunger, both of which were adapted as movies.1 All this took a new path after publication of his 1987 bestseller, Communion, about his family’s experience with “the Visitors” at their Catskills home in 1985–86. Communion in turn spawned follow-ups, a podcast, and a whole website, Unknown Country, devoted to UFO-related paranormal experiences.

It’s important to note that Communion never states that the “Visitors” were offworld visitors who came from their home planet to study Earthlings, although many people assume that. Blame the thirty-five previous years of “flying saucers” stories and films. The first movie was, in fact, The Flying Saucer, (1950).

What it was, says Jeffrey Kripal, was a Goddess experience — and that was something many readers could not grasp.

Not only did [Strieber] speak his secrets in public, but he also spoke reverently and fearfully of a divine presences that was feminine, that broke and rode him like a horse . . . by so doing he spoke of a presence at the very heart of the unconscious of the religious West, a presence that has been repressed and denied for three millennia. He spoke of Her (151).

Beyond Kripal’s reading of Communion as fundamentally a work of Goddess mysticism, part of the eternal matter of sex, death, and the sacred, this is a book on how to approach these experiences as a writer.

But first, who took my book?

According to Amazon, I bought it in 2018. I found it to be profounding unsettling — and I have been around this block more than once. I think the sentence that stopped me was one of Strieber’s: “The living, who we call the dead, come close to us now, calling to us to open our minds to a new vision of ourselves” (245).

I write “one of Strieber’s,” because the book is arranged in alternating chapters, each author taking his turn. More on that below.

So Super Natural stayed in the bedroom bookcase, where live all the books that we don’t want casual visitors to be noticing. Then came a day earlier this year when I wanted to share something in with my wife. I pulled it off the shelf and set it down (on the bed?), but it was more like something took it, because I could not find it again. She and I both looked, to the point of checking under the bedroom furniture with a flashlight. No book. (And they have not given it back either.)

“OK, housewights,” I said, “Are you more powerful than Amazon?” I re-ordered another hardback copy, this time from an affiliate seller, a Goodwill store in Tacoma. It duly arrived, and it has not vanished. So I could re-read it and attach sticky notes.

‘Super Natural’ as a Writing Guide

I call it a guide to writing about “woo,” in other words, the paranormal, the Other, the unexplained, whatever you care to call it. Quoting William James, Kripal speaks of a “future science” of “radical empricism, that is, one that took every human experience, however strange or apparenty impossible, under its careful gaze without prejudice of assumption. This book is an attempt to practice just such a radical empiricism” (40).

What Kripal in particular has done is set out series of techniques by which scholars can approach something like Strieber’s experience — and which Strieber himself employs to some extent in his chapters.

First is the “phenomenological cut,” just taking the experiences on their own terms and seting aside “the questions of their possible external source, cause, or truth value” (44). It is hard to just describe what is happening without fitting it into your religous framework (or lack of one) or your world view.

There are more: Kripal also discusses techniques of comparison, history, hermeneutics, and erotics.2 For example, in his summary these these approaches, he notes under hermeneutics

Consider the possibility that some of these encounters may be mediated expressions of another form of mind (maybe ours) making contact with the human ego and transmtting some symbolic signal. Recognize that, generally speaking, extraordinary visions and experiences are ot what they seem on the surface, that they must be interpreted. Recognize the roles of fantasy and projection in the production of these potential signals, but do not assume that everything imagined is imaginary. Imagine double. Hone your Hermes practice, your hermenutics (341).

Super Natural is a book that I will return to on its own merits. But I urge anyone trying to work in Pagan studies, esotericism, or around the shunned mystic fringes of any other religious tradition to study is a manual of academic craft as well,

  1. I’ll always remember Susan Sarandon as the reluctant but erotic vampire. [↩]
  2. His scholarly career began with studying Bengali Tantra and the worship of Kali, and he had . . . experiences. So he is not a newbie here. [↩]

‘Small Gods’ Is a Zine about Animism

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Small Gods issue 1, 2024

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

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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.

ZOOM REGISTRATION AND LINK HERE.

Imbolc on Ice

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Look south from Bennett Avenue, the bi-level main street of Cripple Creek, Colorado, across Poverty Gulch (once lined by the saloons and brothels of Myers Avenue), and there it sits, like the citadel of the Ice King.

At 9,494 feet (2,894 m.), the early February winds are still cutting and only the lengthening day suggests any turn toward spring. M. and I, plus my Pagan cousin and her partner, fortified ourselves with food and drink in a crowded restaurant and then zipped up all zippers and headed for the Ice Castle at our designated 6 p.m. entrance time.

The restaurant’s Facebook page said that they were so busy with Ice Castle visitors that they were not taking reservations, but we snagged a table by showing up at 4:30, ahead of the dinner rush.

This castle is a commercial venture. I had seen earlier versions in the ski town of Silverthorne in the 20-teens,and thought it would be cool-no-pun-intended to visit, but I was always on my way to or from somewhere else. Now we had our chance at Candlemas season. I like it when the Sacred Wheel matches up with popular activities, even when the coincidence is not planned.

Daytime must be different, but at night the Ice Castle hits the same sort of Underworld vibe that I get sometimes in Taos at PASEO, the fall art festival, when clumps of dark-clad people walk dim Spanish colonial streets until suddenly illuminated by the flare of a flaming gate or a giant robot or an art work projected onto high adobe walls. (See “The Robot God and the Underworld  Gate.”)

So it was sort of like that but without the writhing silent-rave dancers. There was feasting and good conversation and then a chance to stock my memory with images and sensations.

Cripple Creek is a small place, compared to its height c. 1900 when there were three railroads plus street cars and belching smokestacks. I walked Marco the dog around a little, strolling past some of the buildings I visited during a long-ago bout of ghost-hunting, back before the casinos came in. Those visits produced a little book, Ghost Tales of Cripple Creek, which in terms of copies sold is probably my biggest commercial success. Out of print now, but I see it is still on Amazon. (The photo was taken from the driveway of astrologer Linda Goodman’s house.)

The Pagans, the Unicorns, and the Serial Killer

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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.”

Morning Glory and Angora goat “unicorns.”

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.

  1. John G. Sulak, The Wizard and the Witch: An Oral History of Oberon Zell and Morning Glory (Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 2014) 180–81. [↩]

Witch Like Me

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It is late October, so naturally the best time to publicize Diana Helmuth’s The Witching Year: A Memoir of Earnest Fumbling Through Modern Witchcraft.

It looks to me like she took A. J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (2008) and Wiccan-ized it.

Instead of avoid cloth of mixed fibers (no polyester-cotton blend for him) or seeking an adulterer to stone, Helmuth decides to celebrate the feast of Lammas:

I realized this while reading a book, flipping through some pages, and I go, oh crap. I don’t have the sacred knife. I don’t have an altar. I don’t have anything.

Like Jacobs, she was a “none” who wanted to venture among the savages — actual believers, as she told National Public Radio interviewer Mallory Yu:

I wanted to be thought of as intelligent. So I rejected most religion and most spirituality throughout most of my life.

And then during COVID, and in general, as I got older, the idea of a self-directed religion that promised me a way to have some control over the universe – I think increasingly we find ourselves facing things that really affect us deeply that we have very little control over – right? – climate change, housing prices, health insurance bills, pandemics, who’s going to become the president?

And here’s this religion – this spirituality – that says, you can have an effect on these things that feel so much bigger than you. You just need a couple of candles and some willpower.

There is a long tradition of “among the savages” writing in America. As a young reporter in the 1980s I briefly met a tall but baby-faced guy who, having graduated from Colorado College, as I recall, went back to high school and passed himself off as a senior in order to write about high school from the inside. (At least one female writer has done that too.)

Maybe the best example is a book that was a classic of the Civil Rights Era but would probably never get published now, although it is still in print after sixty years:  John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1961). A white writer from Texas, Griffin, who lived from 1920–1980, decided that the only way he could write about African-American life was to temporarily become one. His experiment was underwritten by the black-oriented magazine Sepia in return for first publication rights. From Wikipedia:

In late 1959, John Howard Griffin went to a friend’s house in New Orleans, Louisiana. Once there, under the care of a dermatologist, Griffin underwent a regimen of large oral doses of the anti-vitiligo drug methoxsalen, and spent up to 15 hours daily under an ultraviolet lamp for about a week. He was given regular blood tests to ensure that he was not suffering liver damage. The darkening of his skin was not perfect

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, so he touched it up with stain. He shaved his head bald to hide his straight brown hair. Satisfied that he could pass as an African-American, Griffin began a six-week journey in the South.

But even Griffin was following the footsteps of another white journalist who made a similar journey eleven years earlier.

So there is a pretty good way to get a book: pass yourself off as a member of Group X and write about it. If you do in graduate school, it is ethnography; otherwise, creative nonfiction.

My Interview about Time Slips, Synchronicity, and a ‘Fairy Portal’

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As promised, my interview with host Timothy Renner of the Strange Familiars podcast has now dropped: “Episode 395, Time Slips and Portals.“

You can play it on the site or download it.1

I tell three stories of “time slips” that happened when I was much younger — just making a start as a journalist, just married . . .

One happened in a medieval castle in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, Ireland, which apparently is well-known to paranormal investigators now, but maybe not so back then, when it was quiet and dusty.((And the Celtic Tiger was just a blue-eyed kitten.)) Not only was my experience temporarily overpowering, but it was “sealed” by a knock-out synchroncity the following year.

One occurred at highway speed on the I-95 bridge over the Susquehanna River. Again

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, it looped around and re-appeared over a business lunch in Colorado Springs.

The third, closest to home, happened when I was gathering the stories that went into a little book called Ghost Tales of Cripple Creek.((The cover photo was taken from a house owned by the famous astrologer Linda Goodman, for what that is worth.))

And then jump forward to 2019, when M. and I were mushrooming, and, it would appear, Someone decided to teach me to be a little more respectful. Or something.

I did not see Anyone, but I did see “the ravine that was not there,” and for a moment almost entered it. The thought of doing that — and beckoning M. to join me — gives me chills even now three and a half years later.

And if my voice sounds a little scratchy, you can put that down to spring allergies.

  1. I always download podcasts and shuffle them onto and off of my iPhone, because I do not always listen in sequence and I don’t want the petty tyranny of some app saying, “Do you still want to subscribe to Podcast X? You have not listened in three weeks!” [↩]

Our Thanksgiving Prayer

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M. and I have this little tradition where every Thanksgiving we read aloud (people who eat with us have to participate) Gary Snyder’s poem “Prayer for the Great Family.”((He says it was inspired by a Mohawk prayer, but you can feel his Pagan-ish form of Zen Buddhism in it too.)) You can say “in our minds so be it” in unison if you like.

Prayer for the Great Family

Gratitude to Mother Earth, sailing through night and day—
and to her soil: rich, rare and sweet
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Plants, the sun-facing, light-changing leaf
and fine root-hairs; standing still through wind
and rain; their dance is in the flowering spiral grain
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Air, bearing the soaring Swift and silent
Owl at dawn. Breath of our song
clear spirit breeze
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Wild Beings, our brothers, teaching secrets,
freedoms, and ways; who share with us their milk;
self-complete, brave and aware
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to Water: clouds, lakes, rivers, glaciers;
holding or releasing; streaming through all
our bodies salty seas
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to the Sun: blinding pulsing light through
trunks of trees, through mists, warming caves where
bears and snakes sleep— he who wakes us—
in our minds so be it.

Gratitude to the Great Sky
who holds billions of stars— and goes yet beyond that—
beyond all powers, and thoughts and yet is within us—
Grandfather Space. The Mind is his Wife.
so be it.

Snyder has been influential in my life since I was in high school, as a poet and in a sort of “What would Gary do?” kind of way.((And we went to the same college, for what that is worth.)) He is an old man now, 91, I think. He won’t be around forever. I would walk in his funeral procession to the pyre, if I could, but I probably will not find out in time to dash to California.

Jefferson Calico Talks Heathenry with Ethan Doyle White

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Click over to Ethan Doyle White’s blog, Albion Calling,  to read a new interview with Jefferson Calico, author of Being Viking: Heathenism in Contemporary America.

Since I acquired this book for Equinox Publishing’s Pagan studies book series, I am happy to see it praised by an astute writer on Pagan history like Doyle White, who called it “one of two important works on American Heathenry that have appeared over the past decade.”

A little bit about Calico’s scholarly journey is interesting:

Many of us have experienced paradigm shifting moments during our educational journeys— those moments of discovery that unfold for us along new and unexpected paths. These moments arise from all sorts of stimuli—disciplined reading, insights from our teachers, and from seemingly random “aha” moments, to name a few. In my own journey, one of those moments came for me in reading Carole Cusack’s Invented Religions (Routledge, 2010) . .  The cumulative effect of that book rescued me from a previously dismissive attitude about new religious movements and opened a new world of scholarly interest. I had entered my PhD program initially intending to pursue research on Islam. However, a conversation with my supervisor—strangely enough about the 1994 Olympics hosted by Norway—caused me to re-evaluate and drew my attention to the growing presence and influence of Paganism in the contemporary world. As I discuss in the introduction to Being Viking, an offhand question in a graduate seminar stirred my initial curiosity about Heathenry and led to it becoming a major interest. A chance conversation with a friend, Dr Thad Horrell, while walking to an American Academy of Religion (AAR) venue in San Diego led to a new line of inquiry and research that helped me to better understand the tributaries of American Heathenry.((You don’t get these experiences on Zoom.)) Rather than one over-riding passion, my interests and work have been nudged along by these sorts of important and transformative experiences.

Read it all here, including the part about being an “outsider” researcher at Heathen events.

“Why Women Need the Goddess:” The Passing of Carol Christ

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Carol Christ 1945–2021

Carol Christ (Unitarian Universalist Women and Religion).

Carol P. Christ, PhD, a foremost figure in women’s spirituality and Goddess religion, passed away five days ago (14 July 2021). She was born in 1945.((Most people said her surname as “Krist.”  Not to be confused with Carol T. Christ, former president of Smith College and chancellor of the University of California-Berkeley.))

Via HecateDemeter, here is an obituary for her from The Girl God blog.

Christ’s first book, about women writers on spiritual quest, is a book of spiritual feminist literary criticism that focused on feminist authors Kate Chopin, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Adriene Rich, and Ntozake Shange. She discovers four key aspects to women’s spiritual quest: the experience of nothingness; awakening (to the powers that are greater than oneself, often found in nature); insight (into the meaning of one’s life); and a new naming (in one’s own terms). She emphasizes the importance of telling women’s stories in order to move beyond the stories told about women by the male-centered patriarchy. Her concluding chapter speaks of a “Culture of Wholeness,” that encompasses women’s quest for wholeness, and she adds that, for this wholeness to be realized, the personal spiritual quest needs to be combined with the quest for social justice.

She published an influential list of books (see link above) and was also known for leading group pilgrimages to Goddess sites in the Mediterranean region. There are also links to other tributes to her.