The Warrior

Some of the littlest things are big to Jeff Deck, who is traveling the country in search of mistakes.

May angels bear him up.

Meme: Passion Quilt

Ambulance Driver has tagged me in a post about teaching.

I let his request rattle around in my brain during spring break, hoping for inspiration. And by doing so, I violated Rule 1, which is "Don't wait for inspiration. Start writing." (But, Professor, I was on vacation!)

AD writes, "If I had but one message I could pass on to my students and my child, what would it be? What lessons am I most passionate about?"

Here are the full meme directions:

• Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.
• Give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post "Meme: Passion Quilt."
• Link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

As I wrote recently, I am leaving the classroom. Passion is at a low ebb right now: I just want to get through the next month.

What keeps me going

What keeps me going is this: More time in the woods. No more saying that I can't go hiking or hunting or fishing because I have papers to grade.

So as a teacher of (among other things) nature-writing, I would like my students to know that at least some of the time you need to be in your "Pleistocene body," walking, moving, looking, listening.

And when you do write--anything--all the clichés are true:

"Once you pass your twentieth birthday, technique counts for more than inspiration." (And if you are in rhetoric class, it counts more before you are 20.)

"Books are our grandparents (thanks to Gary Snyder for that one).

"Writing is thinking."

"Use an action verb."

And my favorite: "The first million words are just for practice."

Now that I have stumbled through that (I suck at profundity), I tag Cat Chapin-Bishop, Gus diZerega, Macha, Anne Hill , and Mary Scriver.

The Pagan Anthology of Short Fiction

Winners of a a Pagan fiction contest will be included in a new collection forthcoming from Llewellyn Publications. The contest was co-sponsored by BBI Media, and the judges named three winners:

• Grand prize, $500, and publication in PanGaia magazine, to "A Valkyrie Among Jews" by April

• Second prize, $250, to"Black Doe" by Vylar Kaftan

• Third prize, $100, to "Dead and (Mostly) Gone" by Deborah Blake

In lieu of doing actual work ...

I updated the book review page of my personal web site.

Jezebel the Polytheistic Princess

I am reading Lesley Hazleton's Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible's Harlot Queen, which I picked up at the Doubleday booth at the AAR-SBL meeting.

Somewhat as Robert Graves did in King Jesus decades ago--but with better sourcing--she takes a familiar Bible story and re-tells it from a different perspective.

Jezebel (Phoenician "Itha-Ba'al" -- woman of the Lord) was a Phoenician princess united in a political marriage with Ahab, who was actually one of the more militarily and successful Israelite kings of the Omride dynasty. The Bible slams him for not being hard enough on polytheists, however.

As queen and then as queen mother, she plays the political game as best she can before falling victim to monotheistic religious violence incited by the prophet Elijah. It's telling that Hazleton describes Elijah as issuing a fatwa against her: He is nothing but a forerunner of the Islamic preachers of today, urging the young men to blow themselves up in the name of Allah. When the Bible speaks of "companies of prophets," I see the Taliban.

The story is told in the the Book of Kings, which Hazleton supplements with what archaeology has since learned about the kingdom of Israel.

It has been many years since I looked at 2nd Kings. It is supposedly a chronicle of Israel and Judah, but as Hazleton says, "It has the logic of a dream." But I was reading Jezebel with the Bible in my lap for cross reference (Hazleton provides ample citations.)

Jezebel's grandniece,known to the Greco-Roman world as Dido, helped to establish the city of Carthage, Rome's military and commercial rival. But Dido's real name was Elitha, which via the Carthaginian colonies in Spain became "Alicia," or so Hazleton claims. Meanwhile, Jezebel--Itha-Ba'al--became "Isabelle" (or Isabella or Isobel) by the same route.

Margaret Murray, the English archaeologist who cast Paganism as the "Old Religion" in early modern Europe, claimed that "Isobel" and its variants (along with Joan) was among the most common names of women tried as witches. (Is that why Björk chose it?) But, really, I think that that was because it was a popular name, not because it was a "witch name."

Gallimaufry with Cocktails

¶ Having watched most of the "Thin Man" movies out of sequence, M. and I finished tonight with the last of them, Song of the Thin Man. It is notable for its proto-hipster dialog in some scenes and what I am sure are well-veiled cannabis references, slipped past the Hollywood censors of the day. I have a vision of a 21-year-old Allen Ginsberg, watching it and going "Yeah, yeah!" "Best minds of my generation," check. [Hidden] drug references, check. [Euphemized] "negro streets," check. Insane asylum, check. Jazz, check. It's almost all there. But no overt references to Patterson, New Jersey.

¶ A friend writes, "I am finally reading Her Hidden Children!! It is wonderful, Chas. Intelligent, concise, thoughtful, and respectful as well. Lovely, bravo, you are my hero. It is well written and pleasant to read. Your style flows like water over glass, never stumbling over complexities or data."

I can't marry her, so do I put her in my will? Flattery goes to a writer's head like a big glass of cheap sherry!

¶ You should bookmark Jason Pitzl-Waters' music blog, A Sweeping Curve of Sound. "Music, Blasphemy, Idolatry." I'm in. Links abound, including to his Pagan music podcasts.

A Manufactured Conspiracy in Wiccan Publishing

I have started reading Aidan Kelly's Inventing Witchcraft: A Case Study in the Creation of a New Religion, published by Thoth Publications but also available from Amazon.

In simplest terms, it's an enlargement and reworking of Crafting the Art of Magic, Book 1, which Llewellyn published in 1991--Kelly's study of the origins of modern Wicca, based primarily on textual criticism of various versions of the Gardnerian Book of Shadows.

Kelly published one earlier article on the BoS in my own zine, Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion, which had a run of four issues from about 1984-1986. It is sort of fun to see it referred to again.

Because there was only Book 1 and no Book 2 back 15 years ago, a whole conspiracy theory has arisen, for example, that American Gardnerians somehow had the book suppressed. Even Thoth's copywriters can't resist: the back-cover copy reads, in part, "When the first edition of thisbook was released, conservative Gardnerian Witches attempted to suppress it....Even though its first printing quickly [!] sold out, the original publisher, faced with death threats and boycotts, agreed to abandon the project..."

Horse shit. Elephant dung. Monkey poop. Here are some facts:

1. Llewellyn typically then (and now, I suppose) kept first runs short, usually under 5,000 copies. If sales were good, more copies would be ordered in similar increments. Even one of their top Wiccan authors, Scott Cunningham, was selling only in the mid-five figures at that time.

2. Shortly after Crafting was released, I flew to Minnesota to spend a couple of days with Carl and Sandra Weschcke, who own Llewellyn, and then-acquisitions editor Nancy Mostad, discussing the series that I was editing for them and possible other projects.

On our way to dinner the first night, Carl asked me if I knew when Kelly would send the ms. for Book 2. He wanted to publish it. After thirty years in the occult publishing business, he probably treated the displeasure of his reading public less seriously than he treated Minnesota mosquitoes. Death threats indeed. Controversy is good for publishers, as Thoth is obliquely admitting by trying to manufacture some.

3. But Kelly's own problems at the time prevented him from ever delivering the manuscript. With no Book 2 in the pipeline, Book 1 was allowed to go out of print -- as the majority of Llewellyn titles do after their first press runs. No conspiracy there, just business.

Since Amazon advertises used copies of Crafting at prices from $46 to more than $150, you get much more by buying the new book, despite the cover hype. I have some minor issues with it -- I wish that it more reflected research into Wiccan origins done since the first book was written -- but it is still worthwhile.

Thoth also has reprinted Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki's The Forgotten Mage. It is a key background book in the emergence of contemporary Paganism from the milieu of early 20th-century ceremonial magic and esotericism.

UPDATE 10/25: Greetings if you came here from Wildhunt. (Thanks, Jason.) As I hope I made clear in my response to one commenter, I don't want to turn a discussion of this dubious book marketing into a pro/con discussion about Dr. Kelly and his difficult relationship with other American Gardnerians. Don't want to go there, OK?

Witches, a Reading List

Library Girl offers a chiefly young-adult reading list on witch fiction.

The Dream and the Job

In the dream last night I was at some kind of Protestant Christian youth camp, headed by the stereotypical big, extroverted, 30-something youth minister.

A teenaged girl was supposed to be baptized, but the minister had to leave suddenly, so he asked me to baptize her. His request presented two problems:

1. I did not know how this denomination performed the ceremony. 2. Would a baptism by Pagan me be valid anyway?

I shoved issue #2 aside while searching for the book—a sort of combination prayer book and textbook—that would tell me how to perform it. I remember looking up "baptism" in the index: there were multiple page references.

As dreams do, this one trailed off with no clear resolution. The girl was not feeling well and wanted to postpone the baptism—or something.

The deam revealed its meaning, I think, in one detail: my English department colleague J. was in the dream. He was one of the camp counselors. He did not play a part in the dream-plot, but I saw him waiting in line at the camp dining hall.

The dream is not about religion but about my teaching career, which will end (at least for now) when my resignation takes effect at the end of spring semester.

J. is one of the younger professors. He and I have talked about his taking over some of my minor administrative chores and also my office, which is nicer than his (windows!) and more convenient to the classrooms that we both use. In that sense, perhaps, he is "waiting in line."

J. is a strong classroom teacher. A former Marine, he sometimes impersonates his drill instructors in the first-year composition classroom, but in a light-hearted way that the students appreciate. (I don't know that he does it in his critical-theory classes, but maybe I should eavesdrop more.)

As for me, I need to look up whether "burnout" is one word or two. The zest is gone, although I am still looking forward to the spring nature-writing class. Right now, I have a folder full of essays from my creative-nonfiction class to critique. Those students all have some writing talent and their pieces are interesting to read , but I have to flog myself into actually writing the comments on them that they expect. On some level, I am not a "believer" anymore.

Ironically, I am probably looser and more at ease in class now than I ever was, knowing that I have the freedom of the short-timer. Maybe I learned something about how to teach writing in the last fifteen years. But now my time for research and writing is worth more to me than it was fifteen years ago.

Gallimaufry in italiano

¶ I have nothing against the Good People, but I don't think they belong in law courts.

¶ Wicca: it really is a fashion statement.

¶ Francesca Howell, author of Magic with Gaia, speaks at an Italian Paganism conference (YouTube). Crappy video, probably from a cell phone, but interesting English and Italian soundtrack. How do you say "public outreach" in Italian, anyway? She was formerly at Naropa University but currently is living in Milan.

Witchcraft on the Screen and on the Page

Pagan performance-studies scholar Jason Winslade is interviewed at the TheoFantastique blog on Witchcraft and the entertainment industry:

Let me first say that I have a hard time coming up with any examples of “real witchcraft” or “real magic” in television or films. As you rightly state in your blog, any portrayals of these phenomena are inevitably fantasy with fancy special effects and things flying around. Any practitioner will tell you that this does not happen. At least they do not in the waking world. (Of course, this begs the question what “real magic” actually is – ask 3 practitioners and you’ll get 5 answers. Certainly "real" magic, with the exception of ritual, is much more of an internal process, and thus doesn’t lend itself to special effects extravaganzas). Some programs may incorporate sound magickal philosophy and metaphysics but their application is ultimately fantastical.

TheoFantastique is written by John Morehead, who also writes Morehead's Musings, where he has a special interest in Christian evangelism to new religious movements.

The Dark is Rising . . . on Film

In the heart of the English Fen County, Pluvialis is spitting . . .

. . . chips and blood. I am crackling with furious static. Any minute now, small pieces of paper, coins and pens are going to drag themselves across the tabletop, bent and pulled towards me by the immense, bending-the-laws-of-physics fury I'm experiencing right now.

She has been reading Jason Pitzl-Waters'
comments on the upcoming film version of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising.

Let's set it in America?
Let's get rid of "all the Arthurian and Pagan stuff"?
Let's give Will Stanton a twin brother, stolen by the dark?
The Rider a love interest?

Animal, Vegetable . . . Wiccan?

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is novelist Barbara Kingsolver's new nonfiction book about her family's year of eating locally. Or to quote the blurb: "With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it."

The book has a Web site with more information, recipes, and local contacts. All good.

But consider this excerpt from the late-June chapter on Kingsolver's experiments with cheese-making:

I'm not sure why, since it takes less time to make a pound of mozzarella than to bake a cobbler, but most people find the idea of making cheese at home to be preposterous. If the delivery guy happens to come to the door when I'm cutting and draining curd, I feel like a Wiccan.

Wiccans (a) do clandestine things in the kitchen, (b) make cheese, (c) are preposterous, (d) all of the above?

This Will Be My Only Harry Potter Post Ever

Megan McArdle examines the failures of magics and economics in the Harry Potter books.

Yet in the Potter books, the costs and limits are too often arbitrary.

A patronus charm, for example, is awfully difficult--until Rowling wants a stirring scene in which Harry pulls together an intrepid band of students to Fight the Power, whereupon it becomes simple enough to be taught by an inexperienced fifteen year old. Rowling can only do this because it's thoroughly unclear how magic power is acquired. It seems hard to credit academic labour, when spells are one or two words; and anyway, if that were the determinant, Hermione Granger would be a better wizard than Harry. But if it's something akin to athletic skill, why is it taught at rows of desks? And why aren't students worn out after practicing spells?

(Via Instapundit.)

Read a M*F* Book

You have wonder what Zora Neale Hurston would say at seeing her work promoted in this video:



Maybe she would be cool with it. (Definitely NSFW, by the way.)

(Via an LJ community for desperate librarians.)

Occult Renaissance Nears its End (?)

Dump your Llewellyn stock*—the occult renaissance is about to end.

Or so wrote the ceremonial magician Louis T. Culling in his booklet Occult Renaissance 1972-2008, published in 1972 (suprise) by Llewellyn Publications, price one dollar.

He explains his chronology like this:

[T]he entire field of the Occult had a tremendous upsurge of activity and interest beginning roughly in the year 1894 and lasting roughly to 1936. In that year the doors to the "mysteries" were closed and Occultism has been in the "dark ages" though 1971.

That golden era, Culling claims, produced the Theosophical Society and the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn, while a silver era from 1900-1936 produced Aleister Crowley's post-GD work as well as that of Dion Fortune, Paul Foster Case, Marc Edmund Jones, and many others. After 1936 came "low-grade claimants and tricksters."

Oddly, Culling avers that "the wave of popular interest in astrology and the various occult subjects occuring from 1968 to 1971 really has no part in the genuine Occult Renaissance that starts in 1972" (emphasis in the original).

It's all based on a 72-year astronomical cycle, with each 72 years representing one degree in the precession of the equinoxes.

The 1972 renaissance was supposed to bring increased understanding of sex magick, a more "receptive and sustaining, hence feminine," version. (Not what you read in Crowley's magickal notebooks, which Culling calls "projective.")

What interests me is that Culling interrupts his discussion of sex magick to talk about ecology, which he defines as "preseving all forms of life for Man's SPIRITUAL TRANSCENDENCE." He illustrates spiritual growth through contact with nonhuman life by a story he wrote for the Defenders of Wildlife magazine in 1966 called "The Trader Coyote." He writes that people who observe Nature closely "study and observe the manifestations of Divine Inteligence operating in Nature so that consciously (and unconsiously, subconsciously) they may make spiritual rapport with nature and become true NATURE WORSHIPPERS." (Capitalization in the original.)

And, yes, he puts in a good word for Wicca, quoting from the Grimoire of Lady Sheba, which Llewellyn had published about the same time.

As an occultist and magician, Culling rejects explanations of the universe as operating by chance. He expects that the great new understanding of the 1972-1998 period will be that a "Directive Intelligence" drives evolutiion and that by understanding this intelligence, we will learn what Man is slated to become.

Here is the irony of prophecy. Indeed, today more and more people reject evolution-by-chance. Instead, they turn to a heavy-handed, literal-minded evangelical Christian version of "intelligent design." Rather than seeking any occult purpose inevolution, they wish to reject it altogether.

In their psyches, advocates of intelligent design feel that there must be something moe than a mechanical universe. So did Culling the occultist. But he wished to proceed with an attitude of exploration and learning, whereas theirs is an attitude of rejection and deliberate ignorance. They have their own low-grade claimants and tricksters.

*That is a joke. Llewellyn is a privately held company.

It's Robert Heinlein Week

Maybe you had forgotten that July 7, 1907 was the birthday of SF great Robert Heinlein? I certainly had, but thanks to the InterWebs, now I know.

The always-iconoclastic Steve Sailer gives snapshots of Heinlein's novels, including Stranger in a Strange Land, which had such an effect on the American Pagan movement via the Church of All Worlds:

- Heinlein's 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land evolved much like Nabokov's Lolita. Both writers began working on their respective scandalous magnum opuses about 1949, figuring that while they weren't publishable at present, American norms were changing fast enough that they would be publishable eventually. Both ended up long and self-indulgent.

- After a fast-paced opening, Stranger in a Strange Land bogs down badly. It reads like a few cokeheads lecturing some credulous potheads on everything under the sun. Still, what a great title it has, maybe the best by any novel ever. The Prophet Abraham's description of himself is borrowed to describe a new prophet, a human raised by Martians, who comes to a satirical America. And one plot detail -- how the First Lady's astrologer was influencing the President -- turned out to exactly foreshadow the situation under Ron and Nancy Reagan!

Gallimaufry

¶ Is a Celtic bowl the Nazi holy grail? Probably not, but it might inspire a Dan Brown-wannabe.

¶ On Sunday we leave on a trip to the Mendocino coast. We are taking Amtrak most of the way. Some of our friends seem to think that we are eccentric for preferring cross-country trains. After all, air travel is so much smoother.

¶ You knew that chimps and elephants painted. But did you know that trees can draw? (Via Mirabilis.)

¶ Australian writer Glenys Livingstone has put her book on ecospirituality, PaGaian Cosmology, online at the PaGaian website.

¶ Jason Pitzl-Waters is blogging as he works on a book about Pagan music.

Let's Hear It for BP605.W53!

When you visit a university library that uses Library of Congress call numbers, are you tired of finding books on Wicca in the BF's along with abnormal psychology?

(For example, my book Her Hidden Children is at BF1566 .C55 2006. At least The Paganism Reader made it into the BL's, the religion category.

But now, according to a professional librarian on one of the lists that I read, things are changing:

It took them long enough.... but not nearly as long as the change from Moving pictures to Motion pictures.

If anyone cares, here's what the official subject heading looks like, complete with cross reference and literary warrant:

053 0BP605.W53
150 Wicca
450 Wica
550 Neopaganism
550 Witchcraft

And there's now a specific LC classification number as well. Dewey number is 299.94.

More Posthumous Recognition for PKD

Maybe he was on to something: "Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come" by Brent Staples in the New York Times.

The science fiction writer’s job is to survey the future and report back to the rest of us. Dick took this role seriously. He spent his life writing in ardent defense of the human and warning against the perils that would flow from an uncritical embrace of technology.

I would phrase that slightly differently: SF writers, I think, more often take some aspect of life today and develop its possibilities.

(Via Communion of Dreams.)

Gallimaufry

¶ All genuine religions have torchlight processions (Clifton's 3rd Law of Religion), but how do you make a torch? This guy has answers. For more Neolithic fun, make your own rock-and-plant-fiber oil lamp. He has instructions for that job too. It's all a metaphor for living.

¶ I have been remiss in not thanking Anne Hill for her review of Her Hidden Children.

¶ Summer library program yanked after claims of witchcraft. That's Greenville, South Carolina. I will be in nearby Spartanburg all next week. Luckily, I do not own any tie-dyed T-shirts. (Via Wren's Nest.)

¶ Some Danish Pagans decided to make a religio-political statement--with a large stone. Take that, Harald Bluetooth!

¶ Some Greek Pagans are now able to use ancient temples, although bureaucratic delays persist.

Gallimaufry

¶ Now this is a poorly written headline.

¶ As John Leo would explain in "Thoughts on Good Writing", the headline writer needs to "work to avoid the dead idioms that we all seem to carry in our heads."

¶ Weirdest search string to bring someone here in the past month: "Is the vagina of the pagan priestess a holy place?" (punctuation supplied). Discuss among yourselves. This site was the top search result.

¶ They are using laser analysis on the Book of Kells, and, coincidentally, the Vikings are headed for Ireland.

Gallimaufry

¶ Here in Colorado, Rocky Mountain PBS' group of stations weights their offerings heavily toward programs like Lawrence Welk and Antiques Roadshow. When they really want to be cutting edge, such as during fund drives, they run a John Denver special.

Having once been peripherally connected with the antiques trade, I actually enjoy Antiques Roadshow sometimes. M., however, makes some comment about the "white-shoe crowd" and leaves the room. I wish I had been watching when an Austin Osman Spare painting was discussed. Did anyone mention ceremonial magic and Borough Satyr?

¶ PanGaia managing editor Elizabeth Barrette has a a new poem published in the fantasy webzine Lorelei Signal. She also has a book in the work on writing Pagan spells, poetry, and ritual texts. She reminds us that PanGaia's fiction-contest deadline is June 24.

¶ This may be just too obvious, but anyway... If you work at an organization that is cyber-security obsessed, where you frequently have to change your network password, why not encode a magical intention into your password? For a writer, something like "Public@tion08". And, look, it's a "strong" password with a non-alphanumeric character.

¶ BeliefNet's Blog Heaven site has been cleansed of non-monotheists. No Buddhist bloggers, no Hindus, no Pagans. And yet I hear that BeliefNet is still trying to get some Pagans to write essays for the main site. Do we even need them, with all the Pagan sites and forums out there?

¶ Stop whatever you are doing and read this. Then bookmark the blog. It is one of the best out there.

Dionysus, Jesus, Castaneda

After watching the BBC take on anthropologist - novelist - sorcerer Carlos Castaneda, M. and I rented another documentary about him. Enigma of a Sorcerer was released in 2002. It is available through Netflix, but it is only for the hardcore student of neo-shamanism as phenomenon.

Since it is only a collection of interviews (including the late Dan Noel), someone had the bright idea to put pulsating "psychedelic" backgrounds behind each talking head. "I need Dramamine," M. said, turning away from the screen.

Amy Wallace, one of Castaneda's inner circle of lovers-students in the 1990s and author of a memoir about that time, was another of the persons interviewed.

Watching both videos, however, you see how Castaneda was somehow possessed by Dionysus--just like every other death-defying savior with a circle of women: Krishna, Jesus, Joe Smith, Carl Jung (compare his "valkyries" to Castaneda's "witches.") Gurdjieff too, probably.

Soteriology--the various doctrines of salvation--all suggest the story of the God of variousness whose salvific function is well known in the Orphic cult. His name is Dionysus.

So writes David L. Miller (not to be confused with this David Miller) in The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses (1974), a book a little ahead of its time.

All promised the overcoming of death. Castaneda, according to the interviews, offered a non-ordinary death--to disappear "bodily into the Second Attention"--to his followers. After he expired from liver cancer in 1998, at least one of his lovers went alone to Death Valley, where her bones were later found. Three of the "witches," Florinda Donner Grau, Taisha Abelar, and Carol Tiggs, also killed themselves, Wallace claims. But she offers no details as to when and how--she just thinks that they must have done so.

Actually, had the BBC wanted to do real journalism, they could have found out who cashes the royalty checks from all of Castaneda's books. I assume that they go to Cleargreen, Inc., the organization that he set up to incorporate his teaching methods.

Castaneda even has his own "Saint Paul," Victor Sanchez, who fills the role of the person who never met the Teacher but who claims to be passing on his methods.

Maybe the woman we call Mary Magdalene was either a composite figure or possibly only one of a group of her Dionysian teacher's intimates. There could be a book there . . .

See, this is fame

In the postal mail and email:

1. Two fat envelopes bearing mss. of how-to Witchcraft books from publishers who want my name on a cover blurb. Neither came from Woodbury, Minnesota, however. How quickly they forget, eager to move on to the hot new titles in astral sex.

2. An email from someone who shares my surname. My name had come up both her genealogical research and her Pagan research, so "[I] believe that I am supposed to contact you." Her son is a "sorcer" with a "great destiny" too. Yowie.

They claim descent from the Cliftons of Cornwall. Maybe so. It's a geographical name (meaning, literally, farm under/by the cliff), so it can pop up anywhere the Angles and Saxons went, but my family lore always said that we came from some Cliftons in the north of England, possibly County Durham.

Of course, family lore and $2 will get you a cup of Starbucks coffee.

3. A Colorado author wrote me a letter, wanting permission to reprint photos from my first-ever book(let), Ghost Tales of Cripple Creek.

"You are hard to track down!" she writes.

If only. See item no. 2.

I could not write books without them.

The interlibrary loan librarians.

Even more heartening is [the] observation that interlibrary lending is "the only professional service I can think of in which the provider pays the cost." The faith our libraries show in the ability of that service to somehow, someday, contribute to a greater good is remarkable, and yet usually goes unremarked.

The greatest resource sharing our libraries practice is sharing their faith in us.

Prince Charles, thatch, and the collapse of civilization

The Prince of Wales recently was quoted as saying McDonald's restaurants "should be banned" (in the United Arab Emirates, if not the UK).

What do we call that, "nutritional mercantilism"?

Although I admire him for his environmental work and his line of organic foods, I laughed pretty hard at Steve Stirling's fictionalized version of the prince in A Meeting at Corvallis, the final book of his post-Collapse trilogy. (Yes, I know, trilogies . . . )

I have mentioned Stirling's fairly realistic Wiccan characters, but the third book offers an England where now-King Charles rules, and he has imposed his aesthetic taste on as much of the nation as he controls. Houses must have thatched roofs, while farmers and laborers must wear the old cotton smock when they work outdoors. "De national dress, mon," says a Jamaican immigrant turned farmer.

Update: Alice Thomson calls the prince a true prophet.

Mysteries for our troops overseas

Shulawitsi, the Little Fire God, member of the Council of the Gods and Deputy to the Sun, had taped his track shoes to his feet. He had wound the tape as Coach taught him, tight over the arch of the foot.

Those sentences open Tony Hillerman's Dance Hall of the Dead (1973). I read them probably in the early 1980s, back when the Santa Fe-based author of mystery novels was largely a cult favorite in the Southwest. Cruising down US 666 back then, you would watch your rear view mirror for Officer Jim Chee, who in my imagination does not look like Adam Beach.

After those two sentences, I was hooked.

I picked up a copy of Dancehall of the Dead today along with some other paperback thrillers (Elmore Leonard, Patricia Cornwell, Carl Hiassen) at Hardscrabble Books (appropriate name, eh?) down in Florence. Two old ladies were discussing Hitler, whom they seemed to think had been born a Jew. (Where do they get this stuff?)

When I finish the books, they will go into a box for Operation Paperback.

Operation Paperback collects books (and some magazines) for American military personnel in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. You register with them, and they give you a list of recipients who will turn share the books.

To pacify local members of the "Religion of Peace," who might otherwise blow a gasket, there should be no pictures of scantily clad women, so be careful with the motorcycle and lowrider magazines if you are mailing to certain countries. (The Web site will explain.)

US Highway 666 is no more, of course. Certain wacko members of the "Religion of Love" lobbied the feds to change its number, lest they be forced to drive on the "Highway of the Beast." Sheesh.

Pagan fiction-writing contest

Llewellyn Publications and BBI media (publisher of PanGaia, Sagewoman and New Witch magazines) are sponsoring a Pagan fiction-writing contest.

Judges are Diana Paxson, Elizabeth Barrette, and Anne Newkirk Niven.

Stories may incorporate aspects of any genre. Previously observed examples of Pagan fiction, which have inspired this Award, include but are not limited to stories about contemporary Pagans and the challenges they face in the ordinary world, mythic fiction, urban fantasy, historical fantasy/alternate history, science fiction about Paganism in the far future, paranormal romance, visionary fiction, weird mystery, and slipstream. Use your imagination.

Ted Haggard and Elmer Gantry

Over supper, I suggested to M. that perhaps Rocky Mountain PBS' scheduling of Elmer Gantry as their Saturday night classic movie tonight had something to do with the downfall of the well-known megachurch founder Ted Haggard.

"Of course!" she said. "I assumed that the minute that I heard about it."

This 1960 film version, starring Burt Lancaster, covers only a short part of Sinclair Lewis' novel. To quote Wikipedia:

Although he continues to womanize, is often exposed as a fraud, and frequently faces a complete downfall, Gantry is never fully discredited and always manages to emerge triumphant and to reach ever greater heights of social status. The novel ends as the Rev. Gantry prays for the USA to be a "moral nation" and simultaneously admires the legs of a new choir singer.

The novel traces the opportunistic Gantry through quite a variety of religious organizations, including a New Thought group.

Before there was New Age, there was New Thought, which is essentially the same thing except without the benevolent Space Beings from the Pleiades.

Instead of today's War on (Some) Drugs, Elmer Gantry is set against a background of Prohibition and the corruption of government and public morality that it produced.

Yes, the 1920s may seem like a long time ago, but the novel holds up well as a mirror to the seamy side of American religion. You can recognize all of its characters as you move down the American religious smorgasbord.

As for Ted Haggard, I am sure that he will be back in the public eye some day. He has not given up his Web domain.

This is going out to all my writer friends

True, I drink cheap wine. But I eat good meat. There is an expression for my condition: The wolf is at the door. But I want the wolf at the door. I am tired of living in a world without wolves.

Charles Bowden

Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

The Invisible College online magazine

Bridging the gap between the print Pagan magazines of a few years back (Green Egg, anyone?) and Websites that you lose interest in, what with the flaming pentagrams and white-on-black type, The Invisible College is a downloadable magazine in PDF format. Entheogens, trances, shamanism, art . . .

In fact, one contributor is Diane Darling, formerly of Green Egg.

"Invisible College" has a couple of antecedents. Sometimes it is a nickname for The Royal Society. But that nickname itself comes from a time -- typically the 16th century -- when science and esoteric thought were not so far apart, with the same men studying astronomy as science and casting horoscopes.

Fifty-two pages. Worth (dare I say) printing out.

Poem on Bridget's Day

The Winter
(15 Nov. 1966)

Wheelbarrow's tire is flat, muddy ground now sets
A plaster mould around the folded rubber the first
Cold morning of the year.

Philip Whalen
(1923-2002)

One of the trio of Reed College Beat poets, along with Gary Snyder and Lew Welch, Philip Whalen formlly became a Zen monk in 1973.

For the Second Annual Bridget in Cyberspace Poetry Reading.

Problem copies of Her Hidden Children

I learned a couple of weeks ago that some copies of my book Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America from the second print run were defective.

They are missing thirty-some pages, including the last chapter and the index. If your copy ends around page 160, you have a bad copy.

Other copies may appear to be missing chapter 6.

Call Rowman & Littlefield Customer Service, 800-462-6420, to get a replacement from the newest print run.

Remembering Richard Brautigan

When I was an undergraduate, his books were in every dorm room.

Felicitas Goodman

Word comes of the passing of Felicitas Goodman on 31 March. She was in her early nineties.

Born to ethnic German parents in Hungary, she attended the University of Heidelburg. She came to the United States after World War II and worked as a scientific translator before entering graduate school as a "nontraditional" student and earning a PhD in anthropology. She taught linguistics and anthropology at Denison University until retiring in 1979.

And then she began to devote herself full time to some very interesting research in the anthropological reconstruction of shamanism, culminating in the publication of her book Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences (Indiana University Press, 1990). Get it if you can, perhaps through some service like Advanced Book Exchange.

I was fortunate enough to persuade her to write the lead chapter of my 1994 anthology Witchcraft and Shamanism.

She purchased some land between Santa Fe and Española, New Mexico, and founded the "Cuyamonge Institute" for the study of shamanism. It never became as large as Michael Harner's Foundation for Shamanic Studies, but I tend to think of Goodman and Harner as somewhat parallel: anthropologists who "went native." Goodman, however, taught shamanic techniques perhaps more in Europe than in the United States, particularly in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Nikki Bado-Fralick, one of her former academic students, wrote of her today, "I learned from Felicitas that we need to be brave adventurers in what she called the 'alternate realities.' There seemed to be no aspect of the alternate reality that we should not investigate, no spiritual territory that we should not explore. Felicitas warmly and generously gave to others, supporting them in their adventures without pause."

A Voice in the Forest

Here is something that you won't read about in The Spiral Dance or most of the other how-to-be-a-witch books. It's rare, but it happens: covens that claim mediumistic communication with their Craft ancestors. I've heard it claimed for followers of Robert Cochrane and Gwydion Pendderwen both. Gwydion was a friend of mine, too, and I've had some experiences there, but I don't go for pestering the Mighty Dead on a regular basis.

About three years ago I read the first edition of A Voice in the Forest, published by a small press in Massachusetts and presented as spiritual communication with Alex Sanders (1926?-1988). Sanders was one the leading figures in Britain's Craft scene in the 1960s and 1970s--a bigger publicity hound than Gerald Gardner, even, but still, according to people who knew him, an effective and daring magician.

As far as publishers were concerned, one of his best assets was his then-wife and high priestess Maxine (b. 1946). The camera loved Maxine. And Maxine, although she broke with Alex in the 1970s, apparently endorses this book: "The contact described within the book was so obviously true it gave me goose bumps."

This book's author, Jimahl di Fiosa of Boston, says that the communication began in 1998, ten years after Sanders' death, and continues to the present day. A new, expanded edition of A Voice in the Forest Is to be published in April 2004.

I never knew Sanders, but I did know several of his students. I can't say whether the communications are genuine or not, but I'm more interested in the idea of them as yet another example of the constant discourse about Wiccan lineage.

'Ghosts' in print

My essay "Ghosts" has been published in the November issue of Colorado Central magazine. Naturally, I'm delighted that the editors, Ed and Martha Quillen, liked it, even though it is probably more "literary" than their usual editorial mixture.

I wrote it last May, composing parts in my head while driving the back roads of Park County, Colorado, on the way home from the trip to Eagle Rock that the essay describes. In some cases, I found myself on the same roads that Dad and I had