Paganism

Boy Scout helps Pagan food pantry

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LANSING, Mich. – Recently Bill Ehle, director of the Lansing food pantry Pagans in Need, received a phone call from a pantry in nearby Grand Ledge. The pantry’s representative “was trying to arrange food help for a person in the Lansing area,” Ehle said. When Ehle requested the standard information, the woman reveled her pantry was run by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, a Protestant Christian denomination. “She said, ‘You’re OK with that?’ ” Ehle recalled.

Paganism

Artist Kathleen Edwards creates Witches’ Calendar

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SAN ANSELMO, Calif. – Artist Kathleen Edwards had an “evangelical Christian childhood with a troubled mother” and a father who “went along with the program,” she says. She and her sister “were not allowed to watch hardly any television,” the 62-year-old Edwards says during a phone interview from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area. “Way back then there were no video games. We made up worlds.”

Those worlds included a “crowd of characters” they created and portrayed in improvised plays, including Lyn with her “protruding neck tendons,” her children Spotty the rabbit and the girl Hoa with the frozen face, and two male witches, Ronnie and Culeeps.

Paganism

Smithsonian Channel’s Sacred Sites explores ancient mysteries

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DUN LAOGHAIRE, Ireland — When David Ryan, a documentary film writer and creative producer, witnessed a Druid ritual in his native Ireland a few years ago, he was shocked – literally. Ryan and his colleagues with Tile Films, an Irish documentary production company, were filming Sacred Sites: Ireland, a pilot for a proposed series on such places around the world. “We did some filming in the Slieve Bloom Mountains with a group of local Druids who do rituals in honor of the ancient Celtic gods,” Ryan said during a Skype interview from his office in Dún Laoghaire just south of Dublin. “One of the Druids — quite an old man, a very nice man — brought me around the back of a farmhouse and showed me two standing stones. He said, ‘There’s an energy between these – put your hands out.’

“I was like I suppose your typical, skeptical 21st-century male,” said Ryan, who matter-of-factly noted he’s an agnostic when asked about his spiritual path.

Paganism

Pagan bookshelf: Egregores, Pooh, and more

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TWH – Book-loving Pagans (is that redundant?) may want to check out new works on psychic entities known as egregores, Mesoamerican shamanic rites, sacred geometry, and a nature-loving bear named Pooh. Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny by Mark Stavish (Inner Traditions, paperback, $16.99, 140p.)

Egregores, Mark Stavish writes by openly citing wiktionary.org, is “an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people.” Stavish explores the concept by delving into such writings as the Book of Enoch (an ancient Jewish text), and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’s Transmission of the Etheric Link ritual with its talk of an “astral tunnel” and the order’s belief that “astral entities need devotion to increase their own power.”

Other works Stavish references include Valentin Tomberg’s anony  mously published Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism (Tomberg believes all egregores are “demonic,” Stavish writes), UFO investigator Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Matagonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, Julius Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World, H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, the works of Kenneth Grant, and even Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. Sometimes Stavish’s quick-paced romp may leave readers more tantalized than fulfilled. Stavish notes that Lovecraft established a circle of friends with writers that included Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth and others in order to share ideas and inspiration.

News

Documentary film casts ‘Enlightenment Spell’

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SALT LAKE CITY – Filmmaker Joshua Samson was “writing a silly little short” some years ago and decided one of his characters would be a witch. “I didn’t want to rely on Hollywood stereotypes about who Witches are,” Samson said. “I knew Wicca existed but I didn’t really know much about it. I decided to start doing some research and build up my knowledge base so I could write a more realistic character.”

The more he read, the more fascinated he became. “Down the line I had conversations with someone who would make some offhand comments about Witches or Wiccans, and I realized that people know even less than I knew starting out,” he said.