{"id":832,"date":"2007-03-10T23:01:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-10T23:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=832"},"modified":"2007-03-10T23:01:00","modified_gmt":"2007-03-10T23:01:00","slug":"wicca-elf-and-insomnia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=832","title":{"rendered":"Wicca, ELF, and insomnia"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had a lot of trouble sleeping this past week. Too much waking up with full bladder around 5 a.m. and then being unable to return to sleep, sliding instead into the pre-dawn jim-jams. “My Wasted Life” and other such perennial themes.<\/p>\n

Pre-dawn wakefulness always reminds me of one of the first Church of Wicca<\/a> Samhain seminars that M. and I attended in 1977 or so. We were among the \u201cyoung folks\u201d at those gatherings–there was a larger middle-aged contingent that was less into religious Pagan Witchcraft and more into dowsing, remote viewing, experiments with ESP, energy healing, and various kinds of \u201cfringe science.\u201d <\/p>\n

Several of the men, including, of course, Gavin Frost<\/a> and Loy Stone<\/a>, had been trained as engineers and had an engineer\u2019s pragmatic attitude towards magic, broadly defined.<\/p>\n

One speaker gave a talk about the military\u2019s experiments with extremely low frequency radiation (3\u201330 Hz)<\/a>, which is utilized by our navy and the Russians to communicate with submerged submarines. He suggested that these nefarious experiments were causing mental disturbance in humans\u2014possibly because the frequency chosen was close to the Earth\u2019s own natural radio frequency\u2014after thirty years I do not remember exactly. <\/p>\n

To prove his point, he asked the audience if they were frequently awakened around 4 a.m. Hands shot up around the room. <\/p>\n

All I could think about was that with at least four time zones represented, \u201c4 a.m.\u201d was not just one moment. <\/p>\n

But later, as I aged, I realized that four o\u2019clock was a fine time to lie awake and think about all the failures and worries of your life, and that doing so just seemed to be part of middle age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had a lot of trouble sleeping this past week. Too much waking up with full bladder around 5 a.m. and then being unable to return to sleep, sliding instead into the pre-dawn jim-jams. “My Wasted Life” and other such perennial themes. Pre-dawn wakefulness always reminds me of one of the first Church of Wicca […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[22,6],"class_list":["post-832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-weirdness","tag-wicca"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-dq","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":873,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=873","url_meta":{"origin":832,"position":0},"title":"Wicca and Christianity","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 10, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I have not yet seen it, but English scholar Jo Pearson has a new book, Wicca and the Christian Heritage. Amazon-UK link here.From the publisher's catalog:What is Wicca? Is it witchcraft, Paganism, occultism, esotericism, magic, spirituality, mysticism, nature religion, secrecy, gnosis, the exotic or 'other'? Wicca has been defined by\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Christianity\"","block_context":{"text":"Christianity","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=christianity"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5113,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5113","url_meta":{"origin":832,"position":1},"title":"Wicca, Recategorized by Librarians, Now by Booksellers as Well","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 19, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"In 2007, the\u00a0 news was that books on Wicca were re-categorized by the Library of Congress from BF (psychology, abnormal) to\u00a0 BP 600, a sort of catch-all for \"other beliefs and movements.\" A new Dewey Decimal number was assigned as well, for libraries using that system. Now the change is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"libraries\"","block_context":{"text":"libraries","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=libraries"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3707,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3707","url_meta":{"origin":832,"position":2},"title":"Wicca without “Woo”","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 8, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I linked earlier to one of Eric Steinhart's series of discussions and critiques of Wicca from a non-theistic philosophical perspective. Here is the last, apparently, on Wicca without the \"woo\": It\u2019s probably not possible for Wicca to renounce the culture of woo.\u00a0 But an atheistic nature-religion in the United States\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13198,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13198","url_meta":{"origin":832,"position":3},"title":"The First Wiccan Book Published in India","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 7, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"A little more than twenty years ago, in the preference to his landmark study of contemporary Pagan Witchcraft, The Triumph of the Moon, the historian Ronald Hutton wrote that \"the unique significance of pagan [sic] witchcraft to history is that it is the only religion which England has even given\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"India\"","block_context":{"text":"India","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=india"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/ANI-20221216115613-300x205.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3910,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3910","url_meta":{"origin":832,"position":4},"title":"“Wicca Man” Trailer","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 6, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Here is the trailer for the new British documentary on Gerald Gardner, theatrically introduced by Ronald Hutton rather like an episode of the archaeology program Secrets of the Dead. Britain's Wicca Man - (C) Matchlight from Matchlight on Vimeo. I am happy to hear Professor Hutton say that Wicca was\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"England\"","block_context":{"text":"England","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=england"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3644,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=3644","url_meta":{"origin":832,"position":5},"title":"An Atheistic Critique of Wicca","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 30, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Blogging atheist Eric Steinhart, writing at Daniel Fincke's Camels with Hammers, turns his rhetorical guns on Wicca. He thinks that a \"woo-free Wicca\" might be tolerable. There are a number of separate posts, and I have not read them all. But I get the impression that he is engaging with\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}