News

Broomsquire sweeps into Pagan festivals

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DEWY ROSE, Ga. – Soon after Dan Donaldson and his late father, Ralph, began making arty yet functional brooms and selling them at crafts festivals in 2008, they noticed some curious customers. “From time to time we’d have a customer come by and sort of wave their hands near the wood and they would be in deep reverie, concentrating pretty heavily,” Donaldson said. “It would be a Witch trying to feel for energy from the various different broom handles, but it took us a while to find that out because most of them didn’t volunteer a great deal of information. It got to the point where we could spot one by how they approached the broom as it was hanging on display.”

Donaldson, an “agnostic in all senses” who “tried other paths and just never felt called to one,” said that “Paganism wasn’t even on our radar.

News

Pagan librarians rescue books, preserve history

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TWH – Michael Smith, acting director of the New Alexandrian Library, became spellbound as he was packing up books and materials recently donated by the Theosophical Society of Washington, D.C., including four decades of bound volumes of Theosophist magazines dating to 1901. One of Smith’s husbands, Jim Dickinson, became perturbed. “When we were boxing up the Theosophical Society library, my husband Jim yelled at me – a lot,” Smith said, chuckling at the memory. “He kept saying, ‘Put the book in the box so we can move it.’ It was such an incredible collection of all sorts of esoteric topics that I had never seen before.”

Thanks to two Pagan-centric institutions — the New Alexandrian Library, located near Georgetown, Del., and the Adocentyn Research Library, a similar enterprise located in San Francisco’s East Bay — Pagans and the general public alike now have access to thousands of Pagan, metaphysical, and esoteric books and periodicals, including rare and out-of-print works. Both libraries continue to accept donations of Pagan and Pagan-related books.

Culture

Crow Tarot ready to take flight

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SEATTLE — Marguerite Jones knows the real-life, headline-making story of the little crow girl in Seattle. “Every day the crows would leave her trinkets, and her mom has lost something out of her wallet and the crows brought it back to their house,” said Jones, a Seattle resident who’s also a crow aficionado herself, and has been ever since feeling a mystical connection to the birds while growing up south of Boston. After enduring the “worst month of my entire life” in July 2017, including the possibility of becoming homeless, Jones said, she discovered the crows had left her a trinket of sorts: the inspiration to create a tarot deck based on the birds. An artist who had studied at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan, Jones planned only to “take all the art to Kinko’s and print off a deck for myself.” Then things happened quickly for the self-described “accidental solitary witch.” The result: her Crow Tarot is pre-selling like gangbusters on the Indiegogo page she created, and the deck should be in the hands of her patrons by October. Meanwhile, U.S. Games Systems, one the world’s premier publishers of tarot and oracle cards, is scheduled to issue the deck in January.

Australia

Pagan scholarly journal to focus on art, fashion

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MELBOURNE, Australia — Witchcraft, says Caroline Tully, an honorary fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, “has become glamorous – and I’m not talking about its traditional faerie glamour, but fashionista glamour.”

That glamour, as well as “Witches of Instagram,” painters, fiction writers, film, music, and more will be explored in a special issue of The Pomegranate: the International Journal of Pagan Studies focusing on Pagan art and fashion. Tully, a Witch and Pagan priestess, will be the guest editor of the issue, and she has put out the official call for papers for that edition of the peer-reviewed journal; submissions are due June 15, 2019. “Paganism is inherently creative because of its this-worldly, rather than other-worldly, focus,” Tully said in an email interview with The Wild Hunt. “There is a wide spectrum of aesthetic expression that manifests in the materiality[sic] of Paganism, in the ritual objects we use, the way we design rituals, our robes (or lack thereof), direct — bodily — contact with deities, ecstatic expression, sexuality, and the general artistic legacy of all forms of ancient pagan religions that we are able to draw upon in order to create our religion and rituals.”

Tully is well-credentialed for her role as guest editor of the Pagan art and fashion issue. Along with being a Witch and scholar, she’s also an artist and writer.

News

Pagan Music Awards near fan voting deadline

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WEST PLAINS, Mo. — Fans of Pagan music have until Aug. 1 to vote for the second annual Pagan Music Awards, which will be presented Sept. 14-15 in Nashville, Tenn. The awards are presented by the International Pagan Music Association.