For the three or four of you who don’t read Boing Boing, that compendium of wonderful things is currently in the midst of hosting guest-blogger Mitch Horowitz author of “Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation” (which I mentioned recently here). So far he’s blogged about what the occult is exactly, classic esoteric texts, the American spirit, and the popularity of Saint Expedite.

“One of the most interesting aspects of folk religion in America is the enduring figure of Saint Expedite … Simply put, Saint Expedite is the patron of those who need help in a hurry: with jobs, relationships, money, etc. In Brazil, he is the venerated helper of people looking for work; in America, so says Wired magazine, he is the “patron saint of the nerds,” i.e., a figure who can help untangle internet connections and the keep communications networks flowing; to church authorities he is merely an icon of “popular religiosity” who never historically existed.”

While this certainly isn’t Boing Boing’s first foray into all things occult, it does seem to be the first time they’ve approached the topic in such a enthusiastic and sympathetic manner, so kudos to them. To keep track of Horowitz’s posts, you can follow Boing Boing’s guest-blogger tag. As for Mitch Horowitz himself, he’s been just about everywhere promoting his new book, from The Washington Post to NPR. I guess releasing your book about America’s occult roots right around the same time a mega-popular fiction writer is tackling some of the same subjects does pay off.

Yesterday’s post concerning the state of the Pagan press and Pagan periodicals has generated some interesting commentary on the continued survival of print publications and the future of Pagan news. Many seem to have accepted that the Internet is where you go to get up-to-date information concerning the Pagan community. Baruch Dreamstalker admits that he “long ago gave up dead-tree media as a source of “hot” Pagan news”, while Erynn Rowan Laurie opines that “Print can never hope to keep up with developing stories”. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, one of the strongest voices concerning the future (or lack of future) of print media comes from professional journalist Victoria Slind-Flor.

“I guess my question is why Pagan print media should escape the fate of the rest of print media? Bottom line, as I see it, is that we’re three-quarters of the way through a major technological revolution in journalism and print is not a media that will survive … We Pagans are smart savvy users (and, in many cases, creators) of the Web. We know and love the immediacy of Web communication. And I doubt very much we’ll ever embrace any form of print journalism again. Why get our Pagan information at the speed of post-office delivery when we depend on all our other information sources at warp speed?  Over the years I’ve contributed pieces to most of the Pagan print publications. And I have to say they largely share the same faults: they were/are produced on a shoestring, are indifferently edited, come in unattractive formats, and are published on irregular schedules at best. So why would anyone expect them to survive?  I wish them all well, but I am not sanguine about their prospects of survival. On the other hand, I’m immensely impressed with what Pagans are doing in Cyberspace.”

It wasn’t all bad news for Pagan publishing, Michael Night Sky argued that we should “support what printed zines do, serve the greater Pagan Community.” Night Sky also stated that he couldn’t imagine a would “without printed pagan magazines”. Finally, Jordan Stratford praises the PanGaia/newWitch merger, and agrees that “the “Abraxas” lit-mag style is the way to go – semi-annual publications of meatier articles, professionally edited, and landing in the $15 – $20 range”. Have something to add? Why not join the conversation?

Turning our attention outward, let’s look at some recent developments in the Pagan blogosphere and beyond. First, Chas Clifton announces that fellow Pomegranate editor Michael Strmiska has started a new blog entitled The Political Pagan. There is already a facinating post up about Nazism, Paganism, and Christianity, so be sure and add him to your blogrolls and feed-readers. Speaking of Nazis, over at Beliefnet, Pagan blogger Gus diZerega has a two-part essay exploring a Pagan perspective of fascism.

“People who don’t know much history, or are blinded by their ideological preconceptions, have often argued that Pagan religion has a tendency towards devolving into Fascism. I’ve encountered such stuff over the years, and had a debate with Peter Staudenmaier in the journal Pomegranate on this issue with special reference to environmentalism.”

Moving on from fascism and Nazis into the (slightly) less controversial topics of polyamory and Woodstock, we find the Get Religion blog covering both. First E.E. Evans wonders why recent high-profile coverage of polyamorous relationships have left out the religion angle, specifically the religions that are (generally) more welcoming to polyamorous families.

“While this particular triad is not, polys are also engaged in religious communities. Among them are Unitarian Universalists, pagans and those who represent other faiths. There’s no discussion of the religious connections here. But does the existence of approximately half a million polyamorous families mean that “traditionalists better get used to it?” That’s at least debatable. It’s also snarky, distracting readers from taking the piece seriously.”

This blog has tacked the, sometimes tense, issue of polyamory within modern Paganism in the past, and you can expect that conversation to continue as polyamory (and its intersections with modern Paganism) continue to gain mainstream attention. Meanwhile, Terry Mattingly explores the recent journalistic love-fest over Woodstock’s 40th anniversary, and how that pivitol festival changed religion in America.

“Now, on the religion side of the equation, you knew that someone was gonna connect the dots — Joan Baez and “Amazing Grace” right on over to Ravi Shankar — and make the argument that Woodstock is, in many ways, the tipping point that turned religion into spirituality for the Baby Boomer generation and, thus, for America. We’re talking sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and do-it-yourself visions (often a combination of the previous three ingredients).”

The 1960s certainly did see modern Paganism, specifically British Witchcraft and various home-grown faiths, take root. But was Woodstock the “tipping point”, or simply the last gasp of the free-love/anti-war hippie era as it morphed into back-to-the-land movements, identity politics, and more mainstream/populist political endeavors? Woodstock may continue to reverberate through Protestantism, but in my mind the 1970s were far more influential a decade on the development of today’s religious diversity.

That’s all I have for now, have a great day!

I just wanted to quickly note that fellow Pagan blogger (and published author) Dianne Sylvan has an editorial up at the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section.

“I have been a Neo-Pagan since I was 16 years old. I’ve written pretty extensively about my religion both online and in print, and have taught classes on the subject. Yet when people ask me what, exactly, I believe, I still have to stop and think about it for a moment.”

Check out the whole thing, and feel free to leave your comments at the site.

The inevitable collision of The Wild Hunt and the Pagan Centered Podcast has finally happened. In the just-posted episode 107: New Media In Paganism, I spend over an hour chatting with Dave about Pagan unity, the Pagan blogosphere, why the legal struggles of Santeria practitioners are important to Pagans, and the future of Pagan journalism. You can download the show directly, here. The show is also streaming at the Pagan Radio Network (as is my own podcast, A Darker Shade of Pagan).

In other “stuff that I do that isn’t The Wild Hunt” news, my article on influential Pagans for the 50th (and last) issue of PanGaia is available for free download from the PanGaia web site. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention, author J.C. Hallman, who I interviewed a couple years ago on this site, has released a new short story collection entitled “The Hospital For Bad Poets”. In one of the stories, “Dalyrmple”, Hallman honors me by giving one of the characters my last name (Pitzl-Waters). A shame though that my fictional existence had to be cut so short!

Pagan author, teacher, and ADF Archdruid Emeritus, Isaac Bonewits explains his increasingly sporadic blog activity, and admits to having some issues with this whole “blogging” thing.

“I’m still a bit unclear as to what a blog is really for, if one doesn’t have something important to rant about day after day.”

I find it difficult to believe that someone of Bonewits’ infamy doesn’t have something to rant about day after day (or at least a couple times a week), I also find it odd that someone who has contributed to Daily Kos in the past isn’t quite sure about the many and sundry uses for the blogging platform (and ultimately a “blog” is just a transmission tool for content). However, I do agree that merely ranting every day isn’t that sustainable, that’s why most of the really successful blogs don’t simply climb up on soap-boxes and howl into the digital void. They share wonderful things, talk about books, promote music they love, provide you tips and tricks to an easier life, and discuss feminist issues. Heck there are even Pagan blogs who manage to find news items to share every day.

Ultimately, I think Bonewits portrays an interesting (and growing) development. Like many people, he’s doing most of his online discussion and interaction on Facebook, and as robust social networking sites become ever more ubiquitous, fewer people will feel the need to create a blog to establish themselves on the Internet. This is a good thing, not everyone is suited to a blogging platform, and we are now reaching a point where there are many ways besides the traditonal long-form regularly-updated blog to get one’s ideas and ideals across. That said, if you are looking for great regular Pagan blogging content (aside from mine, of course) just look to my blogroll, or the in-depth Blog Elysium for a cornucopia of choices, approaches, and points of view.

The past couple years haven’t been particularly good ones for the mainstream “old” media. Magazines have been folding left and right, and newspapers haven’t been doing much better. The slow and gradual transition from “old” to “new” media has been unnaturally hastened by the massive economic downturn and bad business decisions by the big media conglomerates. In the wake of their failure to make the web pay (enough), newspapers have asked for antitrust exemptions while old-media defenders have called news aggregators (like Google) “parasites” that will usher in an age of political corruption. As for the world of religion-based reporting it truly is the best of times and the worst of times. There is more religion content availble to the consumer than ever before, but many professional journalists bemoan the death of religion sections, and the lack of trained religion-beat reporters who “get” religion (and are avidly critical of the new-media up-and-comers).

Certainly the Pagan community hasn’t been immune to this rough transition. Several anecdotes seem to point to strains and belt-tightening, and the recent merger of Pagan magazines PanGaia and NewWitch mirrors the troubles faced by the larger less-niche publications. As Pagan commentary and journalism has (seemingly) contracted in the print world, it has exploded on the Internet. Thousands upon thousands of Pagans hit the Pagan blogosphere’s “A-List” (Gus diZerega, Chas Clifton,  Patti Wigington,Thorn Coyle, and myself, among several others) on a regular basis for news and opinion, while the ever-timely (and unafraid) Pagan Centered Podcast has racked up over 150,000 downloads of its show. However, the question remains of how journalism aimed at the Pagan community will ever “pay” in the same manner that the once-dominant publications do. Some, like Thorn Magazine, have attempted to create a print-online hybrid, but it’s too early to tell if that project will continue to thrive in the longer-term.

So what is the future of journalism, and what does it mean for “professional amateurs” like myself who service niche information markets like the modern Pagan community? Two recent essays really give some clarity as to the extent of what’s coming, why it will almost certainly get worse before it gets better, and why we have reasons to hope for a brighter media tomorrow. The first is from author Steven B. Johnson who reminds us what informaiton gathering, especially niche informaiton gathering was like before the Interent, and why the tech and political news worlds are showing that the future isn’t a barren news desert but a rich news rainforest ecosystem.

“The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in … today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years. So instead of starting with the future, I propose that we look to the past. To use that ecosystem metaphor: the state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth. I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself.”

Johnson sees a future in which the “old media” establishment become massive filtering organizations, using their editorial skills to provide clear and accurate narratives on important news. Becoming part of a “bottom-up” news distribution system and economy, that advertisers and news agencies will eventually find a way to make the new media economy work for them (though not without further casualties in this unnatually hastened transition). While Johnson talks about a hopeful media future that includes all players at the table, New Media consultant and teacher Clay Shirky bluntly reminds us that when you’re in the middle of  revolution all bets are off.

“That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify. And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to. There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”

One thing I rarely see mentioned by defenders of “old media” is that proponents of  new media rarely want newspapers or magazines to fail, or for journalists to lose their jobs, they merely understand that the current upheaval is going to play out no matter what we do. You can’t unring a bell, and you can’t stuff the genie of digital media back into its bottle. As Shirky says, we are in the midst of a revolution, and we have no idea what exactly the future will look like. I hope for Johnson’s lush ecosystem, but we can’t be sure.

What will the “pro” model of Pagan journalism look like in the future? Will it be the slick and academic-minded site Patheos? The corporate-backed blogs of Beliefnet? The massive “everyone gets a say” editorial page of the Newsweek-backed On Faith? Maybe even a renassaince of Pagan periodicals? Perhaps it will be something none of us ever saw coming. Looking at the last few years, I can’t say what the future of media and journalism will truly be, but I do know that Pagan journalism has grown in a variety of ways. Our community is more personally empowered than ever to inform, communicate, and ignore ineffecient gatekeepers. In the “old” mainstream media Paganism was treated as a fad, or a joke, or a “human interest” story stuffed into the “lifestyle” section. We had to wait for months for any news from our own periodicals, and those were often (due to the nature of scheduling) more interested in “evergreen” material than in what is happening in the here and now. Thanks to the citizen journalists and determined aggregators we have more “news” for Pagans than ever before, and if we’re lucky, a successful business model will emerge in that will allow for timely Pagan reporting that actually pays.

Several folks have written in to alert me that Pagan scholar Murphy Pizza has become the official Minneapolis Paganism Examiner for Examiner.com (the ultra-conservative funded pay-for-pageviews blogging site). This is exciting news because Murphy Pizza’s dissertation is about the history and formation of the Pagan community in the Twin Cities (aka “Paganistan”), so you could not ask for a better local commentator. In her first entry Pizza explains the unique character and long history of the Pagan community in Minnesota’s Twin Cities.

“A number of years ago, one of the Pagan priests in the Twin Cities coined the name “Paganistan” for the long-lived and feisty Pagan community here. It was tongue-in-cheek, but the name has stuck; it’s a name that the Twin Cities Metro Area Pagans have proudly taken on as a moniker. Many people are surprised to hear that the Twin Cities boasts the second largest contemporary Pagan community in the US (only San Francisco’s Bay Area is larger). Often, they are equally surprised to discover that it has its formative roots as far back as 1972, when the Gnostica Bookstore was holding spiritual seeker classes on topics like magic, contemporary Witchcraft, and other occult traditions down on Hennepin Avenue … It isn’t only the size that makes Paganistan a unique and vibrant community. It also has been a religiously innovative community both in terms of the creation of traditions and practices, and in the way it expresses a diversity of paths and organizations.”

I wish Ms. Pizza a long and healthy blogging career. The Pagan blogosphere needs more local community-oriented coverage, so hopefully this will start something of a trend (I anxiously await Salem and Bay Area-centric blogs). So be sure to add her to your blogrolls and rss-readers ASAP!

I’ll be on the road today and unable to effectively blog, so in the meantime why not check out the latest episode of my podcast A Darker Shade of Pagan, and take a peek at the recent blog posts by fellow Pagan bloggers Chas Clifton, Gus diZerega, and the ever-vigilant Wren Walker of Wren’s Nest (you should also feel free to share links to articles, podcasts, and blog posts that you felt were particularly inspiring or thought-provoking this week in the comments). Cheers!

Since Patrick didn’t actually cast the literal or metaphorical snakes out of Ireland, I see no issue in wishing my Irish, Irish-descended, and Irish-loving readers a happy St. Patrick’s Day. Avoid the green beer, that stuff is just nasty.

“St. Patrick casting out the serpents”

Meanwhile, check out the interesting blog responses by James R. French and Brendan Myers to a recent Witchvox essay entitled “Where Have All the Gardners and Crowleys Gone”.

We all know I’ve had my issues with religion mega-site Beliefnet over the years, but I have to give credit where credit is due. The site, since its purchase by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, has tried to reach out to the various religious communities that regularly visit and make use of its services. One recent initiative has been to add several new blogs, many dedicated to a particular faith tradition. Now the Pagan community is (finally) getting its due with the addition of Gus diZerega as an official blogger.

Gus diZerega

I need to emphasize that this is A Pagan’s blog.  We are a spiritual tradition whose members are held together by common practices far more than by common beliefs.  It has always been so in Pagan cultures.  From Classical times to the traditions of African Diasporic religions of today and those of our indigenous peoples as well, broadly Pagan traditions have always been of this nature.  NeoPagans be they British traditional Wiccans, Celtic Reconstructionists, Asatru, Druids, or any of many other new traditions, may appear bizarrely eclectic and turbulent from a scriptural perspective, but we fit right in with our own history.  We do not much fight or argue over dogma, unless someone ventures to speak for us all on those matters.  I do not want to try.

I couldn’t think of a better candidate to start off a more productive relationship between Beliefnet, the various faith communities represented at that site, and the wider Pagan community. Gus is author of “Pagans & Christians: The Personal Spiritual Experience”, and co-author of the much-praised “Beyond the Burning Times: A Pagan and Christian in Dialogue”. A veteran Gardnerian Wiccan with 25 years of experience under his belt, he is also a political scientist who is helping to start a new online academic journal. I advise my readers to head over to the new blog and say hello, add it to your blogrolls, and particiapate in this new venture (I’ve heard rumours that if this goes well, they might want to add more Pagan voices). For more about Gus and his beliefs, check out my recent interview with him.