It's Watery Wednesday and with that comes our Community news post of the week: Canadian Pagans gathering; the Wild Hunt looks back at 2014; an Australian kickstarter; Starhawk as model leader?; witchcraft = Wicca, or not?
The Canadian Gaia Gathering Conference (one of the biggest Pagan gatherings in Canada) is open for registration. (They are looking for presenters, too!) The conference for 2015 will be in Edmonton, Alberta May 15th to 18th.
Want to catch up on last year's hottest news stories in the Pagan world? The Wild Hunt's 2014 retrospective should do the trick.
For today's Airy Monday post, at the close of 2014 we look back -- but not just to the year gone past but to the days of our ancestors. Modern Cornish witchcraft traced back to Elizabethan times; a matriarchal temple; bringing Bronze age Cyprus to life; down the way from Stonehenge, Silbury Hill unveils its secrets; a historic and fascinating map of Inuit Arctic "highways."
This archaeology dig was supposed to be for Neolithic remains. The researchers were pretty surprised to find solid evidence of Cornish witchcraft stretching from the 1600's up to the 1970s.
Happy Monday, Beagle fans! It's Airy Monday, celebrating the Element of Air and the realm of the mind. Today, we are concentrating on looking deeper at the "Halloween" witch, including Witch's hats; nude on a broom; reclaiming Halloween stereotypes; academic studies of witchcraft.
Where does the Witch's Hat come from? According to this essay at Salon, the high-peaked hat may have originally been a medieval attempt to identify Jews (who were then associated with devil-worshippers and witches.)
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...
Janet Boyer
I love the idea of green burials! I first heard of Recompose right before it launched. I wish there were more here on the East Coast; that's how I'd l...