
Let's face it, Hans Holzer was not exactly the sharpest athame in the circle.
And there's the wonderment of the thing: that even through such flawed tools as ourselves, do They work Their will in the world.
Hans Holzer (1920-2009) was, by all accounts, an interesting guy. Born in Vienna, he PhD'd in Classical Archaeology (assuming this wasn't one of those invisible degrees that occultists are so good at conjuring out of the Air), emigrated to Chicago, and wrote 120 popular-press books on subjects arcane and occult.
In so doing, he gave hundreds of thousands of us our first leg-up into the Old Ways.
Though not exactly the brightest candle on the altar, Holzer had the nose, and the sense, to understand that the rise of the Modern Craft and the New Paganisms were profoundly interesting phenomena, and so—years before Margot Adler did it smarter and better—he traveled across Contemporary Pagandom interviewing the Movers and Shakers who were to become the First Generation of American Pagans. Then he wrote books about them.
In this way, Holzer became an invaluable chronicler of that shining generation of thinkers and doers who created Modern Paganism. In some cases—as with his interviews with Ordún of Chicago's Sabaean Temple—he preserved a record of brilliant and path-breaking work that has since gone largely forgotten.
To be sure, Holzer had his limitations. Often he simply didn't understand his informants. Again and again in his writings, Holzer tries to translate what his interviewees are saying into plain language. Frequently he just plain gets it wrong, transforming the insightful into the banal. That's the danger of interviewing one's Betters.
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Twelve will get you thirteen, Anthony, that that book was his The Truth About Witchcraft, by far Uncle Hans' best-researched book
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I remember reading a Holzer book back in the 70's. I can't remember the title. I am almost certain that I made a few notes for f
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Credit where it's due: it was Holzer and his New Pagans that took the P-word out of the pagan ghetto and began to give it cultura
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For me it was "New Pagans." I was in SoCal when Feraferia, CAW and CES were all active (and I was a member of the latter two) and