Category Archives: general pagan community

At Least The Amazing Criswell Had Basic Integrity

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You know, this may not have proved all that accurate at the time, but 40+ years later, some of it is almost uncanny. Almost. [read more!]

The latest Sylvia Browne related drama pisses me off to no end. In fact, most of the time she —or John Edward, or others well-adept at cold reading and lucky guesses— end up on the news, or I see some blog tearing these charlatans a justifiable new one, it pisses me off because this makes any kind of psychic or divinatory artist look bad.

I haven’t gained the modicum of respect and trust I’ve EARNED as a cup reader and hydroscryer (among other techniques of divination) by acting like the smarmy, inconsiderate, egomaniacal douche canoe typical of the famous “psychics” justifiably taken to task by sceptics. Now, while I do maintain that this is a religious practise, the nature of the readings I give is inexact and I make an effort to offer at least two or three possible interpretations of what I’m seeing from this. Like I’ve said, it’s no more or less legitimate than a Catholic confession or Pentecostal exorcism: A good reader helps some people, but not everybody. Sometimes the message seems clear, but sometimes not. I always try to remind people who want to know something more important of the King of Lydia, who asked the pythia if he should go to war with Persia, and she told him that if he did, a great nation would fall —and he assumed that meant Persia would fall, but it was his own nation.

Sometimes things are a little less vague, but I think we diviners and oracles owe it to people to temper this sometimes. Don’t ever hold out on information for additional money, but “think as a mortal”, as they say, remember that sometimes when a Muse is just making shit up, She’ll say it in a way that makes you believe it’s the truest thing in the world (I have no doubt that the Moisai like to fuck with us in the divinatory arts, and on a regular basis, just for the purpose of keeping us in our place), and remember that the Gods only tell us what they want us to know, and if you can apparently function at least as well as Browne, no god has told you everything.

Now, Browne’s apologists clearly know what they’re doing, and they’re taking some of the literal words of Browne’s —paraphrasing and misquoting other words— to blame the victims. Yes, it’s absolutely the client’s responsibility to keep an open mind and consider all possibilitie interpretations of what was said, but let’s face facts: Dead is dead. When a diviner, medium, or psychic tells you “she’s not alive, honey“, that person knows damned well how that’s going to be interpreted. Cos dead is dead. When a purported “psychic” tells you that your daughter was shot in the chest, or that your lover, a 9-11 firefighter who apparently hasn’t been seen since, “drowned”, when that clearly was never the case, it’s time to cut the crap and call shenanigans. This woman is no pythia giving statements that are open to interpretation, she’s running on her own wild imagination and calling it fact, while the bobbing heads that follow continue to make shit up in hopes of making the idiot look better.

I’m going to call this out. Shit like this makes what I do look bad —in part because some people just refuse to see the difference (Browne and Edward and others pull a modern version of the Victorian medium scam, claiming to somehow communicate with dead people; I read the shapes formed by coffee grounds and tea leaves, smoke, ripples on the water, and other objects, and I interpret what that might mean as guided by my Muse —I’m not practising an exact science, but I’m interpreting things that are actually there at least partly intuitively, I’m not claiming to receive communique from people who are not there), and in part because I wholeheartedly believe that Sylvia Browne and John Edward are fakes and cold readers who, at best, have made enough lucky guesses to appear credible. They’re toxic, and no-one with any sense should believe them, give them any amount of money, or even make excuses for their nonsense.

Note: I understand that some people in the pagan and polytheist communities do work that involves oracular trance. I’m not personally comfortable with giving people readings from that sort of method, and my gods know that. I also know that those who do that sort of work and have the best reputations in the community tend to follow this pattern:

1) The people with the best reputations have been doing this for YEARS, and often for years before offering this service publicly.
2) Many of the people with the best reputations for speaking directly with the gods via oracular trance seem to be bonded to a particular deity or spirit (as a “spousal” or perhaps “godslave” sort of relationship), but not everybody. (Also note: Not everybody who has bonded with a deity, even very intimately, is going to be an adept oracle; the gods give everyone different gifts.)
3) They tend not to make public predictions because it’s regarded as a very sacred and very personal service, by its very nature.
4) Their track records tend to be better than even the average cup or card reader (much less charlatans like Sylvia Browne, who really doesn’t have the accuracy rate she claims, especially for her public predictions), and remember, I’m saying this as a cup reader, first and foremost. Hell, one of my friends even had a very personal falling-out with a popular oracle, and in the end my friend even admits, in spite of personal differences, the oracle never relayed an incorrect message from any deity.
5) Some people believe that asking for any kind of money for a spiritual service is “proof that you’re a fake”, but of those who do expect some kind of minimum fee for it, even oracular services, it’s reasoned that not only is time valuable, but that renumeration for a service was a part of their ethical code, and because it’s a matter of ethics, they offer the service either on a sliding scale, a very small minimum fee, or for barter. Usually fees in the triple-digits are the surest sign of a scam, not the asking for a fee, in and of itself.

Related note: I’ve edited and updated my Mantis page. I also might start reading cofee and / or teas locally. The occult shop that was initially interested in hosting me ended up closing down, but a local coffeehouse might take me on, instead. I have the same issue as before, though: I need a single-coil portable burner, to make my coffee (I know this is at a coffeehouse, but I’m very particular about how it’s made), and preferably my own grinder (again: I’m very particular and like to add a little bit of anise or fennel, so it’s best to have my own grinder). I’m still researching the minimum that I could do this for, so wish me luck!

The Apotheosis of The Little Mermaid

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The following is an image and thread procured from Tumblr. Unfortunately, the “first” person in that thread (that I could find) didn’t bother to source the artist, so I have no idea who to credit —I thought it looked like it was by someone whose work i know from deviantART, but I guess this artist just has a similar style. It’s possible it was made by the first person to post / comment, but I have no indication frm this person’s Tumblargh that they’re artistic, since they seem to be one of the thousands of people on Tumblr who seldom posts original content.

the-little-mermaid001

xxdardarxx: The original story of the little mermaid is that she must kill the prince in order to be human, and in the end, she loves him too much and kills herself instead.

[name clipped]: Ok, ok – important expansion: she only has to kill the Prince because the deal was if he fell in love with her she could be human forever, and he didn’t. By which I mean, he was a good person and genuinely nice to her, but he didn’t fall in love. He fell in love with someone else, also perfectly nice – not the seawitch in disguise, fu Disney. The Mermaid is told she can only return to the sea now if she kills the Prince. She goes into the room where he and his lover lie sleeping and they look so beautiful and happy together that she can’t do it.

That’s why she kills herself. And because it was a noble act she returns to sea as foam.

One moral of the story was that women shouldn’t fundamentally change who they are for love of a man, and in theory Hans Christian Anderson wrote it for a ballerina with whom he fell in love. She was marrying someone else who wouldn’t let her dance.

ulfelska: Don’t mean to be particular but I did want to point out that I read Hans Christian Anderson actually wrote this as a love letter to a fellow male writer who was his best friend. Said man was getting married to a woman (Who I believe he may not have loved) and as the story goes, Hans loved him so much he wrote this to symbolize that he was the Mermaid that could never have her prince.

myself (as modpagan): Was going to say this, myself, if I couldn’t find a similar response [to ulfelska]. The “love story for a ballerina” thing was partly invented for the 1962 biopic starring Danny Kaye, who himself may or may not have been a lover of Lawrence Olivier.

The original story also carries the theme that even unrequited love is nobler than revenge [in addition to the argueable theme of "it is unwise to change oneself for love"]. Not the “love conquers all” theme that seems more popular than realistic, but that it’s nobler to act compassionately because of the love, than to act selfishly because it’s unrequited. Disney certainly made a cute story using Andersen’s work as an inspiration, but the morality and themes he infused into his prose are all gone for a basic message of “if you want something bad enough, your Sea God father will give it to you, in the end” [seriously, watch the end of that film; it was a perfect tragedy until Daddy Triton suddenly caves] —which I’m sure is true is your father is a Sea God, but what good is that for the rest of us?

I also really hope I’m not the only one on Tumblr who noticed (even from a young age) that the “returned to the sea as foam” thing seemed an intentional nod to the conception / birth of Aphrodite in Greek myth. ["The Little Mermaid" is] a story about the nobility of compassionate love, so in spite of the fact that I have yet to see one of Anderson’s biographers directly stating the intent of allusion to Aphrodite made there (maybe someone did, but I haven’t read about it, yet), his education was funded, in part, by the King of Denmark, and as was standard at the time for such an education, this would’ve included a fluent familiarity with the Greco-Roman classics, including Platonic philosophy and Classical myth. This is a modern retelling of an apotheosis (as I recall, in the original, as her body dissolves into foam, she becomes a Heavenly Spirit) of Ouranic Aphrodite, in addition to a clear allegory of a chapter in Andersen’s own life (as most of his stories are).

Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always thought this was fairly obvious. Hans Christian Andersen seems to have inserted some clear Classical / Graeco-Roman paganism (and likely allusions to Scandinavian mythology I’m less familiar with) into his works for children, and I’m sure if I find my old volume of his fairy-tales, I could cite other examples. This is the best-known, and most fitting one I can think of off the top of my head, though.

[What's That?] A Brief History of the Witch-Cult Hypothesis and Its Eventual Dismissal

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I've also seen noting genuinely biographical stating she was anything but a supporter of Wicca, though not a Wiccan herself.

I’ve also seen noting genuinely biographical stating she was anything but a supporter of Wicca, though not a Wiccan herself.

Contrary to what you may have been told by Wicca’s critics (invariably the people I have seen make this claim) Margaret Murray did not invent the infamous Witch Cult Hypothesis, she’s just the writer of the most popular 20th Century book on the subject. In the possible (but likely improbable) event that you’re reading this and are completely unaware of what I mean when I say “witch cult hypothesis”, in short, the most popular version of the Witch Cult Hypothesis is the idea that, once upon a time, practically all of Europe was united through two things: A matriarchal society, and a cult of witches/witchcraft that goverened society. The hypothesis typically goes further to claim that the witch cult, in some form, survived not only the eventual patriarchal societies that were clearly in place by the dawn of recorded history, but the eventual dominance of Christianity and continued for at least a few hundred years after that. If you don’t know much about ancient history, it seems plausible –and certainly, the nature of secret societies makes it seem plausible that such a society can remain undetected for centuries without any evidence surfacing over the hundreds of years. tumblr_lfns8gyCT51qa6x5yo1_400 Unfortunately, a lot of what makes sense about an ongoing matriarchal witch cult surviving underground for centuries, if you really think enough about it, you realise how implausible it really is –and moreover, while there certainly were ancient matriarchal societies, including Crete, and sufficient evidence to suggest that there were certainly at least a few more prehistoric matriarchal societies than what survived to the age of history, there was hardly a single, politically unified matriarchy spread all over prehistoric Europe. Furthermore, the idea of a widespread and somehow unified secret society of witches that is or was allegedly “all over Europe” for centuries just seems preposterous, considering things like language barriers and cultural differences.
This was seriously one of the first twenty pictures in an image search for "dianic pagan" that I just did. This is one of the reasons why Dianics are seldom taken very seriously.

This was seriously one of the first twenty pictures in an image search for “dianic pagan” that I just did. This is one of the reasons why Dianics are seldom taken very seriously.

Now, it seems pretty obvious to me why this apparent “bad archaeology” to recons and academic pagans is more a “sacred mythology” to, say, Dianics, but it’s also fair to keep in mind that fewer and fewer who do hold spiritual value in the witch cult hypothesis are taking it literally any-more, though in spite of this, as recently as 2010 (that I know of), during the annual “Pagan Mediatoberfest” every October on cable, at least one in the family of History Channels runs a “Witchcraft” episode of one of their signature documentary series (I forget which one) that presents the witch cult hypothesis as ostensibly historical. John_William_Waterhouse_-_Undine

As I said before, Margaret Murray was not the first to posit the witch cult hypothesis, her version is merely the most popular. The first to write something suggestent of a hypothesis that would lead to the “witch cult hypothesis” would be Karl Ernst Jarcke, a German professor of the early 1800s; though I haven’t read the original German, it seems what he actually hypothesised was that the victims of the witch hunts in Europe were largely part of some degree of pagan survival that the church decreed to be “satanic”. Now, this is something that others have suggested since, at least in some areas, and the idea of an extremely widespread survival of indigenous polytheism essentially all over Europe isn’t a sieve, it does hold some water, just perhaps not as much as some people might want it to. Bouguereau_Pandora-large

The witch hunts largely targeted women in most areas, which actually helps the hypothesis a bit. Especially amongst the lower and working classes, where working mothers have been common since ancient times, women still end up doing the majority of the child-rearing and homemaking. A friend of mine who is an archaeologist once explained to me a practically worldwide phenomenon that when one culture conquers another, marries the women of the conquered people and so on, food traditions remain, and the “conquering” culture ends up changing, in usually subtle ways that are directly related to childhood development –indeed, one of the ways that China ended up eventually “conquering” a culture that, militarily conquered them was by women preserving the culture, basically raising the younger generation with a Chinese cultural identity. waterhouse_the_household_gods-large If a pagan survival was to happen amongst people who put the child rearing largely, if not completely onto women, the women pose a genuine threat to the Christian status quo. Where the hypothesis of an especially widespread pagan survival loses water is in the fact that a large amount of surviving testimony from the accused is of basic Christian subversion, or of people who were clearly having something of a property dispute, or it was clearly class-based, and so on, with more cases where another explanation is clearly the best one, based on evidence —Occam’s razor, often misunderstood as “the simplest answer is the best / correct answer” is actually an assessment of probability and means nothing in the event that further evidence nullifies the “simplest answer”. gage

After Jarcke, Franz Josef Mone, a staunch Catholic, reworked Jarcke’s hypothesis as being both Satanic and Hellenic in origin, and was also the first writer I’ve found to claim the inclusion of human sacrifice and orgies, which is basically in line with the accusations during the witch trials. Next is the French writer, Jules Michelet, who first seriously entertained the notions of classism and sexism in the witch hysteria, and hypothesised that it was women of the lower classes who maintained a pagan survival, and this seemed to influence late 19th Century Native American activist, abolitionist, and feminist writer Matilda Joselyn Gage, who added the notion of widespread pre-historic matriarchy (as an aside, Gage was the mother-in-law of L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, amongst dozens of others, and Baum’s biographers generally believe that Gage’s interest in the witch cult hypothesis was an influence on his witches of Oz). Aradia-title-page Lastly, Charles Leland, an American folklorist, wrote Aradia, which he presented as a sacred text of the witch cult in Italy, but has since been determined to be a composite, including some material that’s likely of Leland’s invention.

Margaret Murray was a British Egyptologist who, at the time she basically consolidated the above ideas, was unable to do field work in Egypt. In spite of a clearly academic background, a lot of historians, including Ronald Hutton, consider her works on the witch cult hypothesis to be unprofessional and discredited. On the other hand, there are a handful of other historians who’ve basically taken out some of her more ridiculous claims (like certain individuals in history, including devout Christians, like Jean d’Arc, were willing human sacrifices of the witch cult), and refined the hypothesis into a hypothesis of incomplete Christian conversion in Europe, which the “witch trials” served a partial function in “correcting” –again, this is assisted by the fact that some of those put on trial were clearly herbalists practicing a craft passed down for generations, but again, this doesn’t amount for everything, and in many cases, the issue is clearly more an iron-fisted quashing of more subversive Christians or “folk Christianity” that, though indisputably “Christian” by modern standards, retained clearly “pagan” elements.

More Isadora Duncan --I can't get enough of this woman.

More Isadora Duncan –I can’t get enough of this woman.

Murray wasn’t completely talking from her arse, and as I recall, she was clearly a fan of Gage, and she certainly had the opportunity to be aware of the precursors to her own version of the hypothesis (though she denied previous familiarity with Jarcke’s and Michlet’s take on the hypothesis) but her more fantastic ideas seem more like something out of a tract by a conspiracy theorist and slipped behind the wiper on a car’s windscreen than history, by today’s standards, and this has certainly overshadowed the more realistic elements that her supporters in current academia prefer to stress and build on.

Damn, Ruadhán, you talk a lot. TL;DR version, pls? kthxbai!

* Contrary to the most common assumption I have personally seen in the pagan community, Margaret Murray WAS NOT the first person who suggested the witch cult hypothesis. The witch cult hypothesis pre-dates Murray’s work on witchcraft by about a hundred years in academia, and the idea may possibly have floated around earlier only to be formalised in the very early 19th Century.
* Murray wrote the most popular version of the witch cult hypothesis, and it incorporated elements of previous versions of the thesis. Some of these elements were more realistic than others. Murray also added some elements, possibly from her own imagination, that are easily regarded as, to use professional terminology, complete nonsense.
* Not everyone discredits the witch cult hypothesis, in its milder form, which is essentially a hypothesis of Europe incompletely “Christianised” prior the “witch trial hysteria” redubbed “The Burning Times” by a popular, though not completely factual, Canadian documentary of the same name circa 1990. There are reasons for and against this “extended pagan survival” hypothesis, and even if it is assumed to be that the hypothesis is a complete theory, considering the known politics of the witch trials, it’s highly unlikely to be a universal theory for every person accused of witchcraft during that time, just one that would be true for some instances and potentially more likely for some regions than others.
* That said, it should go without saying that there was never a Paneuropean matriarchy with an equally Paneuropean witchcraft religion in any historical sense; the closest hypothesis taken seriously in anthro-archaeology today is “PIE society”, which, being a hypothesis, is barely more than coincidence, and has no real evidence of being inherently matriarchal. On the other hand, some Dianics have refined the pre-historic matriarchy of Gage’s imagination into a mythos in its own right; this is no less valid a mythology than Hesiod’s ages of humankind (we’re in the Bronze age, by the way), or the Garden common to Abrahamic religions.

If you came here looking for Aloma Shamanatrix and Matthew Miracle:

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I seem to be a victim of mistaken identity.

It seems this post I made after watching the hot mess of a NatGeo Taboo episode they were featured in, I’ve gotten a lot of hits from people searching for them. In fact, in some searches, that post goes back-and-forth between the #2 or #1 spot on a search for them.

STOP IT.

THIS IS THEIR PROPER WEBSITE!!

Click on the purple text directly above this very line —I know that you can.

This blog has nothing to do with either of them; DO NOT use my contact page in hopes of reaching them to tell them you love them, cos it won’t reach them. Aloma’s email is clearly given on the frontpage of their website —use that. Remember how to use e-mail? I know it takes a little more effort to go back to your email, type an e-mail address into the proper line, think of a subject line, etc…, but oh well, that’s how they do it. She also has added Twitter and FaceBook contact options.

That said, because of my nice blog post saying nice things about them, I’ve since become a friend of Aloma’s, so I do not in any way condone sending them nasty letters and hate mail any more than I approve of you mistakenly sending hatemail to me that is intended for them. If you have nice things to say to them, please tell THEM, not me; they were very disappointed with the Taboo eppie, and have very mixed feelings about people contacting them because of it, so if you liked them, READ THEIR SITE (Taboo left out a LOT of what they’re about), and send kind words and energy their way. If you didn’t like them? Seriously, get a new hobby. I acknowledge that Discord’s energy has a place in the world, but these are two lovely people I’m proud to think of as friends (though regretfully not very close) and they DO NOT need discordant energy.

So let’s recap:

  • I am neither Aloma nor Matthew. I’m a casual friend of theirs, I plan on eventually meeting them, but my name is Ruadhán J McElroy, and I do completely different things, and have a completely different calling. I may love them, be inspired by them, and share some common ground with them, but I’m a completely different person, living in a house, with cats, writing stories about the Mod subculture and making badges (not making improvisational tribal music), eating meats and drinking absinthe…. I’m *so* not them.
  • Aloma and Matthew have THEIR OWN WEBSITE, and also their own E-MAIL, and FACEBOOK, and TWITTER, that can all be used to contact them. Using MY CONTACT PAGE will only annoy me, I will most likely reply to you as if you are quite simple, I will forget to forward your e-mail, and later, when I think about maybe forwarding your e-mail, I will remember my nasty reply to you and assume I’d only be making them look bad by association. IN OTHER WORDS: Don’t use my contact page in hopes of reaching Aloma and Matthew, as it may never reach them.

KTHXBAI!!!

So, Sannion’s in one of his moods…

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See? He even said so, himself. And not to be outdone in hissy-fits, he’s even made a list. [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]

So, cos I encourage this sort of thing, and cos really, there’s a point where I gotta say “oh, hey, missed something there”…

KNOW YOUR ENEMY!

B 4153 This is Anne Rice, everybody’s favourite on-again / off-again Catholic, and best known as the author of (technically two series of) shitty eromantic vampire fiction which may or may not feature an undead Tom Cruise. She’s also author of a far shorter series of novels called “The Mayfair Witches”, which I see consistently popping up on lists of “best pagan fiction” or “best fiction featuring witchcraft / magic/k”. Don’t be fooled –this woman wants nothing more than to destroy your paganism!

Marion Zimmer Bradley 3j And this is Marion Zimmer Bradley. Word on the street is there was once a sexual abuse scandal involving her IGNORE ME!! So, now that we’ve sufficiently turned a blind eye, how about her books? What Goddess worshipper isn’t masturbating furiously over Mists of Avalon? Or The Firebrand? Or the other Avalon books? And apparently she did a series about Atlantis. And other books consistently in lists of “best pagan fiction”. It seems after her flirtation with neopaganism, she rejoined the Episcopal church in the late 1980s / early 1990s, and apparently later Avalon books, co-/ghostwritten with Diana L. Paxson, reflect Bradley’s “walking between Christian and Pagan worlds”, including Priestess of Avalon, a fictionalisation of the life of Helena of Constantinople, the mother of Emperor Constantine and herself a famous early convert to Christianity. Don’t be fooled — this woman wants nothing more than to destroy your pagansm from beyond the grave! (Spooky!)

Things I learned from the aftermath of Fox News’ commentary on Wicca

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What the shit, people!?

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I think I know what it’s like to write for The Daily Show. You know how, at least half the time there’s a two week break on The Daily Show, either Republican candidates make some especially jackass comments, or Evangelists throw a memorial service for all the aborted rape foetuses and vasectomies from the past year, or there’s a natural disaster and the other cable news sources have a meltdown –and because the Fates love to fuck with Stewart and Colbert and Company, it’s going to be another week and a half before they go back on? Of course you know about that. I have a very intimate relationship with that kind of feeling, cos it seems that almost every time I take a break from reading my Google Reader, all hell breaks loose on the blogosphere.

I’m only going to place two links in this post. First, I’m going to link to Your One Stop Shop for the Pagan / Polytheist Controversy. Seriously, all, or at least most of the posts worth reading are compiled there. The author might still be accepting posts to include in the list, so if you’ve said something about this shitstorm that hasn’t already made the list, or if you know of such a post, it wouldn’t hurt to go and suggest it, I imagine.

The other thing I’m going to link is actually a comment, and I’m going to “QFT” here, cos really she summed up a lot of my own thoughts, so I only have to add a bare minimum of additional commentary:

Honestly… I think the controversy around Star’s decision not to be Pagan doesn’t have much to do with the actual definition at all, however loosey-goosey. I think there’s controversy because she has actively cultivated controversy in her online life. She has attacked others more than once for “not really being Pagan,” and when she isn’t attacking them for not really being Pagan, she’s attacking them for supposedly trying to dictate what Pagan “really” means. (I’ve talked on numerous occasions about my complex relationship with the term “Pagan,” and so have many others, without generating the kind of firestorm that’s sprung up over the past few days.) The fact that Star has finally thrown her hands up and decided not to try to claim the Pagan label anymore is not only not all that surprising, but for some of us, it’s actually a bit of a relief and a ray of hope that maybe some of that controversy will die down and we can get back to talking about all the things we have in common and all the things we love about our own unique traditions. —Alison Leigh Lilly

Seriously, I’m glad I wasn’t the first to say it. And really, the most surprising thing to me isn’t that Foster FINALLY decided to make good on her numerous threats to “leave paganism” (really, if you’re surprised by this from her? YOU ARE A MORON WHO DOES NOT PAY ATTENTION!), what surprised me was both how strongly people reacted to this stunt (really, I can’t be one of only two people who’s paid attention), and how thoroughly this gave way to a domino effect, where people who don’t even seem like they know what caused the first ripple and are essentially responding to the second and third ripples.

And cos I’m curious, does anyone have a similar list from the shitstorm a couple years ago when Drew Jacob made a similar proclamation, arguably the first major post of its kind, that lists all the responses and domino effect posts? Cos people are still responding to Drew’s post, almost two years later, and I dunno, I don’t think, even if Foster wasn’t a coward and deleted her G+ status announcement, she’d've really had the same longevity, and I’m curious if the immediate shock to the community was at all comparable to when Drew Jacob posted his?

[ETA: 24-01-2013; 00:18]
H’OK, so, cos I decided to read (and occasionally respond) to the comments in some other posts on the tablet whilst basking in the magic of television, I figured I’d illuminate a couple other comments from others, and ask people to consider the context illuminated by commenter Kallan Kennedy, on this blog, a couple months ago. Remember: Ms Foster has begged a lot of resources from the pagan & polytheist community: She’d mooched a laptop, she’d mooched a move, and she’d unsuccessfully mooched a salary within a month of claiming she was “going to focus on something other than paganism for a while”.

visually impaired: click image for transcription

visually impaired: click image for transcription

visually impaired: Click image for transcription

visually impaired: Click image for transcription

Seriously, you can’t blame people if this is a thorn in their side. It also seems to fit with a pattern of cultivating drama in her online life. Remember how not even eighteen months ago, Star was initiated into Ravenwood tradition Wicca? I can’t find any evidence of what I remember was mention of her covenmates being kind of annoyed with what she *did* share of her initiation online. I remember the post I linked to wasn’t all she wrote about it; I have this vague memory of waking up, going to my computer, seeing an e-mail alert for her first post on the subject, and then clicking it and getting a “post does not exist” page. A few months after that, she seemed to have just casually stopped calling herself a Wiccan. So, I don’t know what happened after her Wicca initiation, but I know it’s pretty danged clear that SOMETHING happened that caused a rift with that, and not too long afterward, she latched onto Hellenism, cos I guess Neoplatonic Theurgy is where all the REAL M4DD SK1llZ are at, or something.

I wouldn’t be too surprised if it turned out that she’s having a genuine spiritual journey here, and all my speculation is just a tad harsh; but I notice patterns in people, like this right here, and I know other people have noticed them, too, and it’s helpful to me (and hopefully others) to actually say something about it.