{"id":8749,"date":"2017-09-18T21:55:34","date_gmt":"2017-09-19T03:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8749"},"modified":"2017-09-18T21:55:34","modified_gmt":"2017-09-19T03:55:34","slug":"lets-have-more-writing-about-pagan-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8749","title":{"rendered":"Let’s Have More Writing about Pagan Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

I used to complain about the dearth of American Pagan biography <\/a>and autobiography<\/a>. Michael Lloyd’s Bull of Heaven: The Mythic Life of Eddie Buczynski and the Rise of the New York Pagan<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>and John Sulak’s The Wizard and the Witch: Seven Decades of Counterculture, Magick & Paganism<\/em><\/a> made a big dent in that, but we could use more.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, we could use more nonfiction writing too!\u00a0 Currently, much Pagan nonfiction comes in two flavors. First is the how-to-be-a-better-Pagan genre, which has kept Llewellyn in business all these years. I have done my part to contribute to it.<\/a><\/p>\n

And there is the blogger-ish “Oh, look what a devoted devotional polytheist I am \u2014 I spent half a day assembling a playlist for my evening devotions. Here it is!”<\/p>\n

What I want to see more of is just good writing on what it feels like to be Pagan. Hence I have come to admire Eric Scott’s writing, including his novella The Lives of the Apostates\u00a0<\/a>or this Wild Hunt <\/em>column on a trance-possession ritual at a Pagan festival last May.<\/a><\/p>\n

Afterwards, while talking about my friend\u2019s difficulty coming down from the possession of the mask, the ritual\u2019s high priest held mixture of concern and scientific questioning. The masks had been enchanted to deactivate upon removal, a sharp and seamless conclusion to the ritual, but Eris had still been laughing in my friend\u2019s ears at the time she went to bed. The kill-switch had gone awry somehow; something must have been wrong with their masks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not “what should you do” but “what was it like?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I used to complain about the dearth of American Pagan biography and autobiography. Michael Lloyd’s Bull of Heaven: The Mythic Life of Eddie Buczynski and the Rise of the New York Pagan\u00a0and John Sulak’s The Wizard and the Witch: Seven Decades of Counterculture, Magick & Paganism made a big dent in that, but we could […]<\/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":[1],"tags":[10,127,284,99,252],"class_list":["post-8749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-american-religion","tag-festivals","tag-kansas","tag-masks","tag-trance"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-2h7","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6128,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6128","url_meta":{"origin":8749,"position":0},"title":"Orthography and the Modern Pagan","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 2, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"One thing I did at the recent American Academy of Religion annual meeting was stop by the University of Chicago Press booth and get the name of the managing editor of the press's Manual of Style, which is the holy book, all 1,028 pages of it, for editors of academic\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":180,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=180","url_meta":{"origin":8749,"position":1},"title":"Wicca and the Navajos Continuing\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 4, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Wicca and the Navajos Continuing my uploading of essays and papers to my web site, I have now added one of my favorite pieces of Pagan autobiographical writing, Malcolm Brenner's \"A Witch among the Navajos,\" which originally appeared in 1998 in Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions. Far\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10568,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10568","url_meta":{"origin":8749,"position":2},"title":"Pagan with a Capital P","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 28, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"In editing the current issue of The Pomegranate, one of my \"favorite\" issues came up again: whether or not Pagan is capitalized. American scholars and Pagan authors tend to say yes. There has been a small campaign to convince the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook, widely used in the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Letter-P.gif?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10938,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10938","url_meta":{"origin":8749,"position":3},"title":"How Do You Write to a Pagan Author?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 7, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"I got this email last week from a publishing firm that I had never heard of. I did my due diligence \u2014 I looked at their website and read an article about them from Publishers Weekly. Apparently their nonfiction business model is to do deep data analysis and see what\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"publishing\"","block_context":{"text":"publishing","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=publishing"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":31,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=31","url_meta":{"origin":8749,"position":4},"title":"The Pomegranate is reborn!","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 4, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"After a hiatus of nearly two years while we sought a new publisher (a process that began at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in Denver in 2001), The Pomegranate: The Journal of Pagan Studies has a new publisher and will resume print publication in May 2004.As the new\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1284,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1284","url_meta":{"origin":8749,"position":5},"title":"Too Much Pagan Writing is Too Bland","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 15, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I wish Pagan writers would stop giving advice and writing bland how-to articles. A lot of what makes Pagan magazine publishing is its bias towards advice-giving. That and poor graphic design, in some cases.Look at Circle magazine, for example. Circle reminds me too much of the bland publications of cookie-cutter\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\/8749","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=8749"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8764,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8749\/revisions\/8764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}