Fleeing with the Idols

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This was the Summer Turned Inside Out. Blogging and a lot of other things (fishing trips, home improvements, were suspended at the end of June.

Pausing on the way down from the mountains, looking homeward anxiously,

In the early morning of June 29th, a tree fell against a power line in a little 1950s-vintage mountain subdivision perhaps thirty minutes’ drive away. Local firefighters responded, but the west winds blew and the pines were thick. They called for help from nearby departments (but not mine, for jurisdictional reasons). It got worse.

The fire had the little town of Beulah in its sights. Known as the Aspen Acres Fire, it burned more than 102,000 acres (43,000 ha), destroying almost two hundred homes and many other structures, including an iconic park lodge.

But then it thought, if fires think,1 “What about those people over there? I don’t stop at county lines.” On the morning of July 2nd, we were put on “pre-evac,” which to me meant go ahead and air up the tires of the camping trailer while hoping that we did not have to go anywhere. But by late afternoon the word came down: “Go.”

We ended up on friends’ horse property outside Pueblo: they were super-helpful, Marco the dog could hang with their big dogs — but it was not home, and I had an hour’s drive to the firehouse, on the days I worked.

But I had forgotten about the outdoor shrine! I was used to one- or two-night evacuations, not two weeks,

There it was, back in the trees, with its small roofed box holding god and goddess statues, the little altar, some other objects . . . It used to be screened by junipers and scrub oaks — not any more! A bulldozer had gone within a few feet of one sculpture at the “gate,” and the sawyers’ chainsaws opened up the view.

I wonder if anyone realized what they were looking at. Meanwhile, I scooped up the images and moved to the house, because the “army” would be back.

After the fire was contained, they had to mitigate (sort of) the environmental damage they had done. All the trees and brush cut to slow the fire’s spread were piled in “slash piles.” Those had to be chipped. I cajoled a couple of supervisors into doing the chipping on site rather than hauling the branches to the central chipping spot, I wanted the chips for mulch. And I high-graded all the big pieces for firewood before the chipping crew showed up.

And they need at a minimum to dig water bars (angled trenches built up on the downhill side) in the dozer bars to divert rainwater to one side or the other that it would not turn the dozer scar into a gully.

Revegetation? That was up to me (and Nature). So off I went buying “reclamation mix” grass seed at $10–$14 per pound. I’m ready now, just waiting for first frost.

But the shrine? Maybe there’s a lesson there. Maybe it had been too concealed. You can’t see it from the road. I think about rebuilding it more with stone — I have lots of sizeable stones lying around, ripped up by dozer and track hoe. I can’t bring back the screen of trees, obviously. But there will continue to be something,

Download This Free Book on the Witches’ Sabbath

Cambridge University Press is making a new book free to download.

Imagining the Witches’ Sabbat: Visions of Darkness Since 1900 is a new work by Ethan Doyle White. He is author of several academic works on Wicca and Witchcraft and a member of the editorial board of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies.

Of all the dark visions to haunt the cultural imagination, few have proven so pervasive as the witches’ Sabbath or Sabbat – an idea born in the fifteenth century. The Sabbath, however, did not remain there, and this Element explores some of the ways in which the witches’ Sabbath has been reimagined since 1900. It considers how early twentieth-century scholars, most notably Margaret Murray and Montague Summers, took it as evidence of a real witches’ religion, and how later historians like Carlo Ginzburg drew upon it in their search for ancient shamanisms. It examines how occultists such as Gerald Gardner, Austin Osman Spare and Andrew Chumbley integrated sabbaths as key elements of their own new religions. Finally, it outlines the role of the Sabbath in literature, film and television, where it has continued to terrify and titillate.

This free download is availalble only through July 17, 2026. Print copies can be ordered too, of course.

The Light of Midsummer Shines

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From the oracle deck Jesper Toad (The Enchiridion Magistellus: A Visual Handbook of the Witches’ Art)

People of Wheat: Decoration Day on the High Plains

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Twiiter user Clay Scott @scottwestacre) who raises wheat in southwestern Kansas, posted this video on Memorial Day — once known as Decoration Day, from the custom of decorating graves on that day.

He wrote, “Decoration Day. We place wreaths of wheat each year on the graves of family and friends. We have done this for decades as our tribute to service and remembrance. It was a tough sort this year but everyone will be grateful for the crop no matter what it looks like. Always the best.”

The religion scholar in me wants to know: what is their background? Mostly Catholic or mostly Protestant? Was this a custom in the Old Country? And where was that?

Prairie Kansas has — or had — many ethnic enclaves. For instance, further northeast, around Great Bend, there is a heavy Catholic presence based on immigration from Poland,southern Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. Little country crossroads churches with names like St. Xavier’s.

But cycles of growing and reaping are forever, John Barleycorn holds hands with Dumuzid. Seems “Pagan-ish” to me.

What Wines to Pair with Esotericism?

Cover of Ægypt by John Crowley, 1988 edition

John Crowley’s novel Ægypt came out in 1987. It gained three sequels: “The series describes the life and work of Pierce Moffett, a history professor who prepares a manuscript for publication even as it prepares him for some as-yet unknown destiny, all set amidst strange and subtle Hermetic manipulations among the Faraway Hills at the border of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania” (Wikipedia).

Ægypt is set in the late 1970s (Crowley’s preferred title for it was The Solitudes—follow the link for longer plot summary). The imaginary Hudson Valley (?) town of Blackberry Jambs seized my imagination, because at the point of my life my wife and I had ended up in Cañon City, an unglamorous small town in Colorado, both unemployed or unemployed (1987 was the “bottom” year of my life), and I, at least, wondered if I would ever leave or if this was the quiet backwater in which I would build some kind of writer’s life.

My first introduction to Crowley’s writing was Engine Summer (1979), an America-after-the-Big Collapse story, that has stuck with me. Little, Big gets more attention, maybe because of the large part played by the Fae in it. Phil Ford and J. F. Martel of the Weird Studies podcast gave it an entire episode, with the assistance of Erik Davis.

Unlike Little, Big, the Ægypt books do require some familiarity with the Western esoteric tradition, which is bookish. If you don’t know of Giordano Bruno, or the magickal partnership of John Dee and Edward Kelley, a lot if going to go right past you,

Or the scene in the prologue where ten-year-old Piece Moffatt (the main character), a Catholic boy in a Kentucky mining town, rises early to serve as an altar boy at 6:45 a.m. weekday Mass, and stumbling off into the predawn thinks, “I’m not from here. I’m from someplace different from this.”

That’s a big foreshadowing, (There is more on the novels’ structure here.)

But to this re-reading, I can add one thing: wine pairings! Such has my taste changed since my first reading in that little 1908 smelter worker”s cottage.

I have selected two wines to go with the reading because I can do that now. The Theurgist (red blend) comes from the Abbey Winery in Cañon City, so there is that connection, while Lapis Luna (Stone Moon) winery in Lodi, California, makes a red blend whose label proclaims, “This way one gets to the stars.”

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When a Blanket Is as Weird as Bigfoot

A traditional Hudson’s Bay blanket in “Queen Anne” colors.

Encounters with the paranormal — the Other, as some say — can change people, Some have a “UFO” encounter and are never the same, often psychologically damaged. Some encounter Bigfoot or other cryptids and are sort of afraid of the dark ever after.

On the other hand, one Bigfoot experiencer whom I interviewed had created a sort of shrine to his encounter in his home: photos, drawings, newspaper clippings, etc. It struck me as a kind of “material religion” thing.

This experience of mine is much less awesome. It involves bedding — wool blankets. Just fabric, no critters. But it was still weird.

I got this Hudson’s Bay “point blanket” from my mother in the 1990s. The “points,” the thin black lines, identified the blanket’s size when folded on a shelf in the trading post or the Hudson’s Bay Co.’s later department stores.

It not only spoke of tradition, but it was damn fine blanket that went on the bed every October — until October 2024.

That year I went to the bathroom cupboard where sheets and blankets are stored. There sat a zippered plastic blanket-storage bag. I could see the off-white wool of the folded blanket within.

I pulled it down, unzipped it, and took out a off-white heavy wool blanket. It was not my Hudson’s Bay blanket though, but another one — creamy-white with two thin blue stripes up the middle. I had never seen it before, that I could recollect.

The Hudson’s Bay blanket was gone. I have never found it. The replacement blanket is on the bed now, although the time to take it off is rapidly approaching.

The “other” blanket. Where did it come from?

This is the second winter with the “replacement” blanket, which is a fine blanket, but not the right one. The house wights, or whoever, have not chosen to switch them back.

But do I blame the house wights? They go mainly for shiny objects, although there was that one episode involving a book. This feels different. It feels like life was a train running down one track, and someone switched it onto another parallel track. I look around, and it all seems the same: Same wife, same house, same dog, same Jeep, and so on and on.

(Maybe in the Hudson’s Bay blanket timeline, the house burned in a forest fire or some other bad thing happened. But how would I know?)

So a little bit like the UFO experiencers, I am shaken at some level. It’s like something told me, “You’re not really in control as much as you think you are.” And what do you do with that?

Light It Up like a Roman

Archaeologists at Pompeii are trying to figure out what incense its residents burned in their homes.

The study is part of a growing interest in so-called “sensory archaeology,” which seeks to reconstruct not only objects and spaces from the past but also the sensory experiences associated with them. The aroma of burned incense, mixed with the smoke of local plants and possibly with wine poured as a libation, formed an essential part of communication with the divine in the domestic sphere.

One residue detected is that of elemi, the gum of Canarium Luzonicum, a tree that grows in tropical forest in such locales as Madagascar and Philippine Islands. “It is still intensely fragrant and perfect as an ingredient in solid perfumes, salves, cremes, cosmetics, incense blends and moustache wax recipes,” says one online seller.

So there was quite a journey involved, either across the Indian Ocean or up the eastern coast of Africa through the Red Sea to one of several ports, then overland Alexandria (no Suez Canal then!) and back into a ship to Italy.

Household shrine in the Casa del Larario del Sarno (I.14.7) with statuettes of Lares, a lamp and a censer. Credit: Pompeii, Archivio Fotografico inv. D964

(Household shrine in the Casa del Larario del Sarno (I.14.7) with statuettes of Lares, a lamp and a censer. Credit: Pompeii, Archivio Fotografico inv. D964)

“Grape biomarkers” are also mentioned, so apparently people were pouring out wine into containers on their altars, which seems perfectly normal.

Upcoming Zoom with Robin Douglas, Sasha Chaitow

Two leading scholars of contemporary Paganism will be live on Zoom this weekend: Robin Douglas has a book in press with the Equinox series on Pagan studies: The Pagan Revival A Documentary History of Modern Paganism, 1700-1950.

Sasha Chaitow is also widely published, including in The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies. Lately she has focused on is an independent scholar of Greek cultural history whose work focuses on ancient, Byzantine, and modern traditions. She is the author of Son of Prometheus, a new study of Horapollon’s Hieroglyphica, and forthcoming studies of Byzantine demonology and of living Greek magic.

You can find earlier podcasts in the Coming to the Center series on Cherry Hill’s YouTube channel. This Sunday’s podcast should turn up there later. There is even one of me (looking sleepy out on the front porch) from 2024 and running on about contemporary Paganism.

Are the House Wights Studying the Renaissance?

Most of my stories about how the “critters,” the house wights, the Borrowers (to borrow a term), or whatever they are like shiny objects.

There was the still-missed Norwegian salad-serving fork. Corkscrews vanished a couple of time. Another big serving fork disappeared and then reappeared, lying in plain view in an empty dish rack. Two rings of keys vanished from a spot on top of a filing cabinet. One later reappeared elsewhere (and there might be a naturalistic explanation, I admit), while the second was gone for good.

A few months ago they branched out into books. It was a one-time thing as far as a I can tell. (Well no, what happened to that Allan Kardec book?) There is a kind of a switcheroo in this one.

So I was musing about the history of the Tarot, and I wanted to look for something in Joscelyn Godwin‘s The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance, but I could not find it on the shelf where it was supposed to be.

The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance recounts the almost untold story of how the rediscovery of the pagan, mythological imagination during the Renaissance brought a profound transformation to European culture. This highly illustrated book, available for the first time in paperback, shows that the pagan imagination existed sidebyside often uneasily with the official symbols, doctrines, and art of the Church

I looked and looked. No book. No problem, I’ld order a used copy from the Big River. In due time, it arrived. I opened it and left it on my desk. Shortly after, it disappeared, leaving only the wrappings.

I ordered a third copy, and in a few days it arrived, as seen the photo. Meanwhile, the original book “re-appeared” — I put that in quotes because because it is quite possible that this was nothing paranormal but just me mis-remembering where I had put it. Every little weirdness does not bear the fingerprints of The Other. Sometimes I outsmart myself.

But somewhere there is a copy of The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance, and I would like to know who is reading it.

A Pagan Studies Scholar, the Shah of Iran, and a Return to Aryan Native Faith

As I write this, tens of thousands of Iranians (or let’s call them Persians) are demonstrating against the government of murderous black-turbaned mullahs who let the 1979 revolution and promptly immersed Iran in wars and supporting terrorism.

In many cases, this demand for a government is coupled with a desire to return to the Old Religion, which for them means Zoroastrianism.

Reza Pahlavi, son of the shah (king) who was deposed in 1979 and himself a US resident, has issued video statements supporting his revolution. I read that many protestors are chanting his name. He remains the crown prince, so if Iran becomes a constitutional monarchy, he would be shah.

His father, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980) was dying of cancer when he fled the country. He spent some time in a New York City hospital, where a member of his medical team was a nurse named Loretta Orion.

She, in turn, earned a PhD in anthropology, and became interested in the contemporary Pagan movement and in particular She wrote Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revived (1994) and It Were As Well to Please The Devil as Anger Him: Witchcraft in the Founding Days of East Hampton (2018), about a 17th-century witchcraft case on Long Island, New York.

I met her at the American Academy of Religion meeting in Philadelphia — 1995, I think, which would fit, since her book was just out then. There was no Pagan studies group yet, for we were just starting to find each other. She and I went out for a pizza slice or something, and she told me about attending to the shah, which all seemed kind of like ancient history by then.

And now the Pahlevi family is back in the news, and my feed on X is full of Persians saying how they can’t wait to get rid of the alien Semitic religion imposed on them by force (Islam) and go back to their Native Faith of Zoroastrianism, which has managed to cling on because it qualified as “heritage.”

Incidentally, “Iran” and “Aryan” (in its original sense) are at root the same word. So the Aryans want their old religion back.

So the (original) Aryans — some of them — want their Native Faith back, only in this case it is more or less monotheistic, but not always. If Iran/Persia is reinvented as a more secular republic, who knows what flowers might bloom?