Views from the Cyberhenge

Arthur and I had a blast on Saturday (into the wee hours of Sunday) at Jeff Mach’s Totally Normal Event. The vendors room had art, musical instruments, jewelry, furry/erotic costumes, books, video games, and some of the most amazing, er, “toys” I’ve seen in a long time. I did a number of tarot readings with the erotic Nybor Deck and the brand-new Pirate Tarot (which Arthur had given me for Fathers Day), both of which worked very well.

By a bizarre series of “coincidences,” the other people that were supposed to appear on the Magic for World Domination panel never showed up, so I was “forced” to reveal the secrets of the Illuminati all by myself. Later that evening, I moderated a panel on Magical Mavericks with Deborah Friedman, a gender-bending Wiccan priest/ess and heretical Hebrew Kabbalist on my right, and Arthur Moyer, inventor of Omnimancy, a completely intellectual system of magic in which deities and other spiritual entities are unimportant, on my left. Deborah was horrified to find herself the magical conservative on the panel, but we had a lot of fun arguing.

My son Arthur didn’t make it back to our room till 6:00 am or so, but he had a smile on his face, so I didn’t ask any questions that a parent wouldn’t want to hear the answers to.

On Sunday morning, I was videotaped by a team from Vidgle.com called Con Goer doing a tarot reading for their interviewer. This should be up on their site by July 3rd or so (I’ll post a direct link when it is).

If you’re looking for subculturally friendly fun in New Jersey, stay in touch with Jeff Mach’s posse.

The server that hosts Real Magic School came down with a virus this weekend while I was at the Totally Normal Event, but the techs are busy injecting cybernetic penicillin and the site should be back to perfect health in a day or two.

In the meantime, we’ve been contacted by several excellent teachers who want to join the faculty — including a real rocket scientist! We’ll be sending out responses to them in a few days as soon as we finish the syllabus guidelines, but we’re thrilled at the response so far. Stay tuned for more news as it happens!

Visit A Totally Normal World
This is the Ning group set up for the extravaganza where I’ll be spending my weekend. On Saturday I’ll be riffing on “Magic for World Domination!” I wonder what I’ll say…

(See the blog post about The Totally Normal Event below for more info.)

What kind of bizarre mind conceives of such an event? Here is Jeff Mach’s “About Me” from the organizing site that the picture above sends you to:

Past the blasted barrens, beyond the goblin heath
Where all light is from fire, and even time has teeth,
Beyond the sight of sanity–where all things may occur,
Where smoke takes shapes which waken memories that never were,
Sitting on a medium-sized bluish rock
is a fax machine.
It works pretty well, considering that it’s plugged into a
basilisk,
but it’s very rare for a moment to go by
without it being chewed by a hydra,
stepped on by a brachiosaur,
cursed by the Warlock of the Everpain Tower,
hacked by the Cyberfreaks,
molecularly displaced by freakish atom storms,
worshiped by 13th-century Flemish knights,
dusted for fingerprints,
mind-melded,
shot at,
nibbled on,
or sliced into sushi and thrown, at random, through the
gateways of a billion pinstriped alternate worlds.
Which means that sometimes, just sometimes, the message comes
out a little funny.
So. That’s where I get my ideas.
Where do you get yours?

So now you know!

Real Magic School has really taken off and we now have over 1700 students! Phae and I can’t write enough new course material fast enough for all these eager students, so we are looking for qualified people to join our faculty. We need folks who can write both beginning and intermediate courses on all the mundane arts and sciences as they relate to magic, parapsychology, Paganism (Paleo-, Meso- and Neo-), mysticism, and “the occult,” especially from non-monotheistic points of view.

At Real Magic School we prefer teachers to have at least Bachelor-level degrees in mundane topics and a decade or three of study and practice in their fields of expertise. Unfortunately, like our friends at the Grey School of Wizardry during their first years, we have as yet no funds for faculty salaries, though we hope to have them within five years. Authors will, however, find the process of writing classes to be a very helpful way to get feedback on first drafts of manuscripts, as the Grey School teachers have discovered.

We would like to attract Pagan scholars of many different points of view to join the adventure of creating a body of academically sound, yet magically and spiritually useful, materials to educate future generations of Pagans and occultists. Our long-term goal is academic accreditation as an online college offering Associates and Bachelors Degrees.

We have nine academic departments at Real Magic School:

Dept 01: Magic and Ritual Arts
Dept 02: Psychic and Divinitory Arts
Dept 03: Mundane Arts and Sciences
Dept 04: Traditions of Magic and Mysticism
Dept 05: Philosophy and Polytheology
Dept 06: Pagan Studies
Dept 07: Magical History
Dept 08: Clergy Training
Dept 09: Weird Studies

If you would be interested in teaching at Real Magic School, send an email with your background and the topic of your proposed course to me via “Headmaster AT RealMagicSchool.com” or to Phaedra via “Headmistress AT RealMagicSchool.com” with “Teacher Proposal” in the Subject line.

I am currently working on two books: a full-length work on the laws of magic for Llewellyn Worldwide and a guide to Neopaganism for Red Wheel/Weiser (both coming out in 2010). While I own a lot of books on these topics already, I would love to hear of new anthropology and sociology texts that would be useful. The Laws of Magic will be the more formal of the two, while the Field Guide to Neopaganism will be a short, breezy look at all our colorful subspecies and habitats.

I’m also working on two new sites to offer my wedding officiant and other ceremonial services (child blessings, funerals, etc.). The sites will be Unusual Ceremonies.com and Hudson Valley Civil Ceremonies.com (there’s nothing at either site yet but a parking page). For the former site, I’m looking for good (royalty free) subcultural wedding photos I can use to illustrate my willingness to do pirate, sci-fi, medieval, leather, naturist, or other sub-culturally themed weddings (most clergy are much too stuffy to serve these subcultures). The latter site will be aimed at folks wanting secular, agnostic, or atheist ceremonies and will be a bit more sedate! :)

Phae is working on cataloging our ten-thousand book library at Library Thing (search under both our names), and is about halfway done. She’s also collecting notes for a book on magic and the senses (as yet unsold) and selling Select Comfort Sleep Number™ beds (send her an email via “phaedrao AT aol.com” for info on these).

We’re both working hard on writing new classes for our RealMagicSchool.com online school of Pagan and General Occult Studies. We’ve started recruiting other teachers (see next post) to help with the workload of 1700+ students.

I’m waaaaaay behind on keeping up with my pages at Facebook, Linked In, Live Journal, MySpace (two pages!), Tagged, TG Alchemy, etc. Search for me and you’ll probably find me.

And in my copious free time, I read tarot cards at a local restaurant (Reality Bites) in Nyack, NY and on-line via various chat programs (email me for details, put “tarot” in the Subject line).

And that’s why it takes so long for me to answer my email!

The Totally Normal Event is where I’ll be on June 28th, 2008 at the Hanover Marriott in Whippany, NJ. “What’s that?” I hear you asking…

The Totally Normal Event takes place in a universe much like our own, only one in which most fantasy, mythology, and science fiction is essentially true. The idea is that, under the guise of being some sort of convention for normal humans who dress up, we’re actually those creatures of myth, disguised. Not disguised very well, mind you, but still.

Within the event itself is an enormous world of entertainments, performances, workshops, pleasures, panels, parties, and entertainments.

I’ll be there to sign books, read tarot cards, and present a seminar on Magic for World Domination! Then I’ll listen to folk and filk singing (maybe do some myself) and Goth fave Voltaire, watch pirates chasing ninjas (and vice versa), enjoy The White Elephant Burlesque Society, and generally have more fun than may be legally allowed.

The event attracts Pagans of all varieties, sci-fi and fantasy and horror fans (and authors!), geeks, rennies, vampires and werewolves, pirates, ninjas, and other ne’er-do-wells that bump (and grind) in the night. It’s run by Jeff Mach, who also runs the Wicked Faire and other amusing escapes from the tedium of day-to-day “reality” (as the mundanes call it) in New Jersey. Be there or be three-dimensional…

I was more than a little disappointed, as a Druid and as a Stonehenge fan, with the National Geographic Channel’s program called “Stonehenge Decoded.”

First off, the title was stolen from a famous book, Stonehenge Decoded, by Gerald S Hawkins. This was the book that first suggested that the famous stone circle was a neolithic “computer,” designed to predict various astronomical events such as solstices, equinoxes, eclipses, and more. While the television program referred to the solstices and equinoxes being observable there, neither eclipses nor Hawkins’ name were mentioned.

The program was mostly fluff. I saw about twenty minutes of solid information concerning archaeological discoveries made in the early 2000s in the area surrounding Stonehenge, mostly involving a huge seasonal village that was there. The rest of the two hours was melodramatic “reconstruction” of possible pre-historical scenarios.

To be completely fair, I did find the archaeologists’ linking of the nearby Woodhenge to Stonehenge via newly discovered “avenues” to be enlightening and their theory about processional routes plausible. Then they repeated for the dozeneth time the only special effect their video editors seemed to know how to do: exploding the sun into a giant fireball.

More importantly, current details and theories about Stonehenge were missing. The computer reconstructions of Stonehenge did not include the second “Hele Stone” that originally framed the summer solstice sunrise. While I predicted thirty years ago that there would probably have been one, the pit in which such a stone sat was discovered only a year or two ago. Without it, the romanticized ceremonies shown in the program had the sun rising directly over the remaining stone.

A number of scholars have recently pointed out that moving multi-ton stones twenty-five miles would be a lot easier and faster in winter than in summer, yet the program assumed the latter, turning the movement of one stone into a dramatic six month trek.

In short, the program was a few years obsolete before it was broadcast. Maybe if they had spent less time on cheezy special effects and over the top drama, they might have needed less production time and could have included newer materials.

I give this program only one menhir out of three!

I’ve been thinking about same-sex marriage recently (no, I haven’t got a boyfriend!), but in terms different from what the public is currently debating. In light of the recent California Supreme Court decision mandating equal marriage rights (and rites?) for same-sex couples, I thought I’d share them.

The Religious Reich’s war against same-sex marriage is only part of a larger picture. Perhaps if it is framed in the context of creedism, rather than just that of homophobia or heterosexism, we can create more effective strategies to stop it.

At the rock bottom of the RR’s theocratic agenda is an appeal to creedism. They believe that they have a “right” to shove their particular (and often peculiar) doctrines down the throats of every man, woman, and child on the planet. This is true whether you are discussing Christian or Islamic Fundamentalists (Jewish Fundamentalists only want to force their doctrines upon people living in Israel or in Hassidic communities elsewhere).

There are plenty of new and old religions in the world, with millions of their members in the USA, who do not agree with the sexual, reproductive, or marital doctrines of conservative monotheism. Why should one group of religions be able to use the power of civil law to enforce their doctrines and deny others’ doctrines?

The fact that Judeo-Christian-Islamic creedists are a voting majority in America is no more relevant to our civil rights than the fact that racists and sexists were once (and in some places still are) the majority of US citizens. The tyranny of the majority is specifically restrained by the constitution.

I advocate fighting this battle over marriage rights, reproductive rights, sex education rights, and all related issues in terms of resistance to creedism. The old protest phrase, “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries,” cuts to the heart of RR bigotry. Their views are rooted in the Torah, Bible, and Koran, so monotheistic creedists are “obligated” to be homophobic and opposed to all sexual freedom issues, just as they were once “obligated” to be racist or sexist.

People are entitled to have any sort of religious beliefs or non-beliefs they like. They are not entitled, under the US constitution, to force all other citizens to live under those same opinions, whether they call them “God’s Law” or anything else.

It may be easier for those of us who are (more or less) “straight” to use the “Homophobia is creedist” frame, but we might all consider using it in appropriate circumstances. Let’s make creedism as socially unacceptable as racism and sexism, and perhaps heterosexism will become equally unacceptable.

Go to www.beyondmarriage.org for some additional interesting thoughts on this issue. I think Robert Heinlein would be pleased at their goals.

As a Neopagan Druid, I’ll be happy to perform same-sex or multiple marriage ceremonies for anyone who asks me to do so. I consider it an obligation of my priesthood. Of course, I would hope that the couple/triad/quad/etc. would help out with any subsequent legal costs!

I just spent a couple of hours in what was probably a futile effort over at Amazon.com to write comments about dozens of glowing reviews of a really, really, really bad book about Druidism. I stopped after realizing that I was beginning to lose my temper about the gullibility of my fellow human beings. People who want to believe pleasant-sounding nonsense will do so, no matter how much science, scholarship, research, art, or spiritual experience you throw at them.

This is the flip side of good books disappearing for lack of reviews—bad books becoming big sellers because so many readers substitute personal preferences for judgment. When people who actually know what they are talking about (what we like to think of as the reality-based community) say that a book is bad and proceed to explain why, they are trashed as being ignorant, biased, or jealous of the author’s success. Celtic scholars, historians, linguists, mythology experts, botanists, priests, priestesses, magicians, etc. (in this particular case) and others, some with decades of experience, are brushed off as irrelevant.

After going through six out of seventeen pages of reviews of a work I consider utterly wretched, and commenting over and over again to correct the same factual errors from people bragging about their two or three years of experience, I finally realized that in the age of the Internet everyone’s opinions are considered of equal value and that all I was doing was planting seeds for those same people to come trash my books with bad reviews.

I know that there are many people in mainstream academia who feel somewhat the same about my books as I do about the sorts of books I’m discussing here. They consider themselves the reality-based community, because they “know” that all (or at least all competing) religions are “false,” that there “is no such thing” as magic or ESP, etc. This is the burden that a 21st century magician/psychic/priest bears: we know the stuff we do is real, because it works often enough to show patterns of behavior we can gradually depend upon. We also know that there are lots of con artists out there willing to fleece the gullible and unwary.

All this particular magician/psychic/priest can do is write and teach the truth as best I can, always studying new material and updating my views in the face of new evidence. Trying to stop either the cynics pretending to be skeptics or the true believers pretending to be experts (based on the three or four books they’ve read) is equally futile. Putting out really good books (slowly, oh so slowly), in the hopes that they will reach as many people as the mass-produced, hyped-up, heavily-marketed garbage, or at least outlast them in the marketplace of ideas, may be just as futile—but it’s all I can do.

It’s like pushing back the tide with a broom…

From EarthHour.org:

On March 31 2007, for one hour, Sydney made a powerful statement about the greatest contributor to global warming – coal-fired electricity – by turning off its lights. Over 2.2 million Sydney residents and over 2,100 businesses switched off, leading to a 10.2% energy reduction across the city. What began as one city taking a stand against global warming caught the attention of the world.

In 2008, 24 global cities will participate in Earth Hour at 8pm on March 29. Earth Hour is the highlight of a major campaign to encourage businesses, communities and individuals to take the simple steps needed to cut their emissions on an ongoing basis. It is about simple changes that will collectively make a difference – from businesses turning off their lights when their offices are empty, to households turning off appliances rather than leaving them on standby.

We’ve already put all our energy vampires on powerstrips, including the TV and cable boxes, so we can turn them off when we’re not awake and at home. Not only does this save on our electricity bills, it helps lower energy consumption as a whole by a tiny amount. If everyone did this, we could reduce the “need” for more polluting power plants to be built.

On March 29th, from 8:00-9:00 pm wherever you are, turn off the lights!