LIBRARIES MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY I [J 9‘ EAST LANSING, MI 433244043 ( I! -/= cf [ I) This is to certify that the dissertation entitled APPROACHING THE SACRED GROVE: THE ORPHIC IMPULSE IN PAGAN RELIGIOUS MUSIC presented by Christopher W. Chase has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree in American Studies Major Professor's Signature 93/27/07 Date MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record. To AVOID FINES return on or before date due. MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested. DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE 5/08 K:lPro[/Aoc&Pres/ClRC/DateDuo.indd APPROACHING THE SACRED GROVE: THE ORPHIC IMPULSE IN PAGAN RELIGIOUS MUSIC By Christopher W. Chase A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY American Studies 2009 ABSTRACT APPROACHING THE SACRED GROVE: THE ORPHIC IMPULSE IN PAGAN RELIGIOUS MUSIC By Christopher W. Chase Contemporary religious Paganism (also called Neo-Paganism) is an emerging area of study for scholars of religion in the United States and elsewhere. This dissertation analyzes Pagan religious music in the context of a more general recurrent religious impulse encoded in literature, music and ideology. Among studies of contemporary American Paganism, few have examined the internal logies of musies created and distributed within the Pagan community. This dissertation discusses Pagan music in terms of its relationship with folk ideology, theology, ecclesiology, humor, youth, and Christianity. This dissertation utilizes discourse and image analysis of prerecorded music, reviews, journals, sheet music and handouts from Wiccan, Druidry, Asatru, Church of All Worlds, and Thelemic sources. This work finds the dominant themes of Pagan music centering around rituals of sacred time, erotic and filial love, humor and theological kinship with sacred beings both within and beyond the world. Minor thematies of cultural polities, civil integration and resistance to modernity are also discussed. The dissertation concludes that the religious music of American Pagans is profoundly influenced by discourses of resistance, individualism, congregationalism, and eestatic tellurism. Copyright by CHRISTOPHER w. CHASE 2009 This work is dedicated to all my daughters. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................... viii INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 1 Religious Music in America ................................................................... 3 Triangulating The Field .......................................................................... 9 Whither (Neo)Paganism? ................................................................... 19 The Meaning of Music(k) .................................................................... 22 Methodology in Pagan Studies ............................................................ 26 Structure and Organization .................................................................. 38 CHAPTER 1 THE ORPHIC IMPULSE: AMERICAN DISCOURSES OF PAGANISM AND MUSIC ............................................................................................... 42 Pagan Discourses in the United States ............................................... 46 Pagan Love and Primitivist Fear ......................................................... 54 The Serpentine Orphic: Sensual Natun'sm in Anglophone Contexts ............ 59 The Orphic Pan .............................................................................. 64 Orphic Paganism meets the Questing Mythos ....................................... 70 Conclusion: Landscapes as Orphic power source .................................. 73 CHAPTER 2 "THE ONCE AND FUTURE PAGANS": FOLK, FILK AND HARRY SMITH ............................................................ 81 The Romantic Folksong Movement: Child, Sharp and \Mlliams...... ............85 Establishing The Ritual Year Through Music ......................................... 92 Filking and Musical Paganism .............................................................. 99 Harry Smith: Social Spellmaker ........................................................... 105 Summary Conclusion ................................................................................... 109 CHAPTER 3 LOVE AND RELATION IN THE ORPHIC TRADITION: CASE STUDIES IN MUSICAL THEOLOGIES .................................................................................................... 112 Goddess Telestics ....................................................................................... 1 15 F ilial Theologies ........................................................................................... 1 17 Ecclesial Musicologies ................................................................................. 123 Sacred Persons: Yemaya and Brigid ........................................................... 127 Thelema: Music for the New Aeon ............................................................... 134 Summary Conclusion ................................................................................... 148 CHAPTER 4 CAUTION: ORPHICS AT PLAY: HUMOR AND THE 'CHILD' IN PAGAN MUSIC ............................................................... 151 Play as Humor and Parody ........................................................................... 156 'Child-ness' as Social Location of Play and Protection ................................. 160 Youth as Musical Otherworld ........................................................................ 176 Summary Conclusion .................................................................................... 180 CHAPTER 5 INTERRELIGIOUS FRAMING, INTRACULTURAL POLICING: SINGING THE "OTHER" ................................................................ 183 Intratextual Music[k]ing ................................................................................. 192 Musical Apostasy, Harmony and Authenticity .............................................. 196 Horizons of Inclusion: Citizenship and Pluralism .......................................... 204 Horizons of Exclusion: 'Degeneracy' and 'Ossification' ................................. 212 Summary Conclusion .................................................................................... 220 EPILOGUE ............. 221 Implications of the Study ............................................................................... 224 Further Explorations ...................................................................................... 226 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................ 229 Primary Sources ........................................................................................... 229 Secondary Resources .................................................................................. 237 DISCOGRAPHY ................................................................................................ 244 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Soundtrack cover to MGM's Pagan Love Song, 1950 ............... 57 Figure 2: Loke E. Coyote’s Rhythms of Spring Compact Disc ............... 158 Figure 3: Pagan Kids’s Activity Book front cover ................................... 170 Figure 4: "Pagan Cowboy Joe: Random Chants” from Green Egg....,....203 Figure 5: Songs of the Earth (1989) front cover ...................................... 207 Figure 6: Songs of the Earth print, page 3 .............................................. 208 Figure 7: Circle of Song (1999) front cover ............................................. 208 Figure 8: Songs For Earthlings (1998) front cover .................................. 208 vii Introduction I first became interested in the study of music and religion in a roundabout way. I was busy arriving and adjusting to Michigan State University when I read an essay by George Lipsitz, one of the deans of the discipline of American Studies. Lipsitz recounts a story about a jazz musician, Clark Terry, hired for the Duke Ellington Orchestra in the early 1950’s. Rather than ask the young trumpeter to display his formidable skills and talents, Ellington insisted that Terry instead take the time to critically listen to the Orchestra he wanted to play with. After balking, Terry agreed and began to listen for the silences and spaces that needed filling, as well as which ones needed to be left alone. Ellington’s injunction to the young trumpeter paid off, and instead of overwhelming the Orchestra and trying to outshine others in technical virtuosity, he m for what was necessary to contribute at that time and place.1 Lipsitz used that story about Clark Terry and Duke Ellington to prod scholars in his field to start listening around them for underappreciated and under-addressed sources of power. Lipsitz made the bold claim that the most sophisticated cultural theorists in America were neither critics nor scholars, but rather artists, writers, and musicians such as “Laurie Anderson, Prince, David Byrne and Tracy Chapman.” In struggles over meaning and resources, perhaps these were some of the voices worth investigating and interrogating. 1 George Lipsitz, “Listening To Learn and Learning To Listen: Popular Culture. Cultural Theory, and American Studies," American Quarterly 42, no. 4 (December 1990): 615—636. I immediately identified with the study of music because I’ve always been a musical person. Having played and otherwise participated in music at the secondary and collegiate level, I was also fortunate to have grown up in a household that took music, poetry, literature, and ideas very seriously. I not only developed a love of classical music at an early age, but also I fell in love with well—known pieces of Christian sacred hymns (“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” “Be Not Afraid”) and kept going back to those pieces time after time. This was still true even as l cultivated a love in high school for 20th century Minimalism, from Phillip Glass’s “Satyagraha” to John Adams “Christian Zeal and Activity.” At the same time, I had always been deeply intrigued by religion. As a young Latino growing up in middle-class Roman Catholic home, I helped get the “Feast of the Nativity” ready for the locals who came over in early January, and spent long hours staring at the Virgin of Guadalupe candles we had in the living room. I fell in with a group of Beatles music fans, and quickly developed an affinity for George Harrison, both as a musician and as an intensely spiritual person. His open use of classical Hindu instruments and embrace of figures such as Ravi Shankar challenged me to expand my musical horizons and connect the affective spheres of music and religion in human life. But it wasn’t until I read Lipsitz’s essay and defended it as an important theoretical contribution (to my professor and peers) that I began to think more deeply about the cultural study of music, and the importance that the study of music has for telling us more about who we are as Americans. Despite the absence of religion among the currently fashionable humanistic triad of explanation (gender, race and class), its importance in the history of American discourse can hardly be exaggerated. “Myths" and “symbols,” the earliest subjects of the classic works in American Studies, have been well-investigated fields in Religious Studies for some time already. As a flashpoint for the recent “culture wars,” the topic of religion is never far from the clashes over resources and ideas that make up the social and intellectual history of the United States. Nor is the raw fact of continual religious pluralism and the unease of intercultural co-existence a new one. From the earliest inhabitants and their lifeways to their encounters with various Spanish and French Catholics, English Protestants, and Muslim/Indigenous slaves from Africa, religious patterns, perceptions and misperceptions created some of the most enduring and intractable problems. Derided as “pagans,” the term nonetheless survived in the American imaginary as associated with nature appreciation, religion and worship of wilderness. In Religious Studies, “Pagan” is one of the most notoriously slippery terms. An immense variety of beliefs, interests and practices have been described (both favorably and otherwise) under this rubric. Paganism (just like the study of religion itself ) is a discourse with an extended and controversial history. Religious Music in America This dissertation is focused around the topic of contemporary Paganism and its music. This term is meant to be more descriptive than prescriptive. There are certainly musics that many Pagans would consider “traditional” but also Pagan or allied with Pagan causes. These have included both Western historical folk ballads and indigenous musics of various religio-ethnic groups outside the domain of the major “world religions” (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism). As other researchers have pointed out, the line between ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ is not always a hard and fast one.2 As this dissertation will discuss later in detail, part of what Pagan music seeks to accomplish is the work of creating, reinforcing, and testifying to the “authenticity” and power of the religious tradition in question. At times this means that music is positioned as ’traditional’ in order to take advantage of the solidifying power of historical perception. Songs and chants with a recent pedigree might be framed in practice as having an ‘ancient heritage,’ or having been expressed in different forms throughout time. At other times, new musics will incorporate material from older sources so as to create a referential “thread” -— a traceable lineage of rhetoric designed to bring to bear both the power of the traditional and the creative impulse of the recently ‘channeled.’ In traditions that self-consciously attempt to re-create past religions, the words of ancient hymns, translated, might be set to modern melodies in order to make them accessible to a target audience. Or hymns that were recovered from an ancient text might be repositioned in a radically new liturgy to invoke their heritage and add to the contemporary ritual’s power. In most cases this music, 2 Peter Dunbar-Hall and Chris Gibbon, Dead/y Sounds. Deadly Places: Contemporary Aboriginal Music in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2004), 16. like its Transcendentalist and literary predecessors, deliberately seeks to be “religious, physical, passionate, [and] incantatory.”3 Just as the language of religious music is the language of relationality, so scholars of both indigenous and American religious musics have placed a great deal of emphasis on belonging and metaphorical exchange. And it is here that these discourses engage in their own counterpoint. lndigeneity has been defined as the quality of belonging to a place, or at least ‘affirming’ that one belongs to a specific place.4 At the same time, if there is a single most commonly shared metaphoric language among historical American religious musics, it is a continuous obsession with the land itself. As Philip V. Bohlman points out, the manifold differences in musics become apparent most often in relation to the I! “ land. Whether framed as a place of utopia or diaspora, “Babylon, Zion,” or “Egypt,” land and living in it is among the utmost concerns for American religionists. American religious music tends to reflect a collective mentality, reflecting both the need to both imagine a unified whole and police the boundaries of the distinctive through the transmission of behavioral and belief codes. In turn this rests upon the common experiences of arrival into a strange land, and the proliferation of radically different religious communities within close contact. Phenomenologically, religious music serves as a channel for means of ecstatic communication through the infusion of power, or as a means for liturgical 3 James Edwin Miller, Karl Shapiro and Bernice Slote, Start With The Sun: Studies in Cosmic Poetry (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1960) 4, 170. 4 Karen Ralls-MacLeod and Graham Harvey “Introduction,” Indigenous Religious Musics (Burlington: Ashgate, 2000) 4. address and response. Like other cultural artifacts, sacred music accumulates additional meanings over time, layered and even disjunctive in content. These accumulations often occur for involuntary as well as voluntary reasons. No one person or community, trying as it might, can claim exclusive use of musical metaphorical language. Music bears the markers of community exclusion, exile, and conquest. In sociological terms, music is part and parcel of creation and maintenance of a religious "habitus." But this always occurs in a broader web of contexts--economic, political, and otherwise. For David Stowe, even at its most radically pluralistic and sectarian, stories and narratives from the Hebrew Bible have become and maintained a predominant place in American religious music, and by extension, American religious life. The story of Exodus, in many ways, is the story of Mormons, Shakers, African-Americans, 19th century Esotericists, and Sun Ra's "Afro-Futurism."5 But this is certainly not true for all. For analysts such as Stephen Marini, there are multiple and fundamentally pluralistic “usable pasts" to be accessed, depending on the community.6 For music to be religious music, for Marini, it must contain some form of mythic content, and participate as part of a conscious, intentionalfieffort at ritual action-—action that seeks to move everyday participants out of everyday awareness into a space of shared mythic consciousness and creative community. Writing in a pluralistic context, Marini allows for the occurrence of music outside a specific ritual space or performance, suggesting 5 David Stowe, How Sweet The Sound: Music In The Spiritual Lives of Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). 6 Stephen A. Marini, Sacred Song In America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003); that religious intentionality combined with ritual performance in some way marks a given music as ‘religious.’ Thus, he allows for phenomena such as Amerindian Pow-Wow musics beyond specific spaces. This allows him to suggest that sacred song functions at its most basic level by allowing its participants and audiences to personally "engage with a mythic past." But there is a serious difficulty for Marini’s overall study of music in American religion. He uses postmodern/secularization theory for Protestants and Jews, while assuming indigenous modalities for Amerindians and Latino- Americans. Unfortunately, Marini’s attempt to survey New Age and Neopagan musics suffers the most. It is rendered misguided by its lack of accurate history of New Age and Contemporary Paganism, and a simple conflation of the two. Marini counts the latter to be largely a subset of the former, when recent studies suggest a much different, and more complex relationship. There exists at least two well-known publishers of sacred Pagan music (and other musics too), Serpentine and Ladyslipper Music, and many artists who have roots in folk, ecstatic drumming, and other genres beside Gardner's orchestral material, yet these are either invisible or relegated to a single paragraph. lnexplicable is Marini’s omission of the few existent academic treatments of Pagan music. Marini's efforts at understanding “New Age” music (in the strict sense) are somewhat better, but highly abbreviated, especially compared to the attentions given other musics in the book. The history of New Age is much more complex than either "nature religion" or Pythagorean sound theory, two subjects that form the basis of Marini's analysis of New Age music. It is at this point we can turn back to general themes in American religious music, and locate some of the major issues that will emerge in this study. Pagan music (as all American religious music is to a great degree) is affective music. In the American context, this should be no surprise, given the primacy of the Hebrew Bible as a source for allegory, metaphor and narrative in Christian religious music. David Stowe characterizes Moravian hymns as "impassioned, full of vivid imagery of Christ's atoning blood and a nearly erotic emphasis on communion with Christ." Though not erotic in nature, hymns of the radical Christian utopian “Shakers” were certainly affective. Producing visions of ecstasy, celestial kingdoms and "divine communication," they danced in the set of affective relationships that has been part of the Christian tradition, especially its mystical subtraditions, since its earliest days. Even in the political and religious mainstream of music in the 18th and 19th century United States, William Billings’ patriotic hymns produced "enchanting" and "ecstatic" erotic songs. This dissertation stands on the shoulders of Stowe and Marini’s contributions to the study of American religious music. On the one hand, Stowe’s thesis prioritizing the Hebrew Bible in American music is in need of further scrutiny, especially among a community often claiming to openly resist that particular tradition. On the other hand, it is imperative to understand Pagan music apart from the overly simplified New Age context that is so problematic, and instead within a larger cultural conversation over the meaning and definition of what “Paganism” is and who is worthy (or unworthy) of that term. As we will see, many people with differing agendas have used that term with different results in mind. What then are the salient influences that have shaped Pagan musicking in the United States in a quest for its own authenticity in this land? How is religious community imagined and reproduced? In a minority tradition with a history of oppositionality to the dominant culture, where is the role of “American-ness?” Triangulating the Field The concept of Paganism has an extensive intellectual history, even just in the post-Renaissance era. In the literary sense, the word “pagan” (as a personal descriptor) is conceptually significant for a number of authors, such as Sacher—Masoch, Dante, Alice Walker, John Steinbeck and the nature writing of Thoreau and Whitman. Apart from the literary sector, there is an extensive polemical record as well. In 1902 ZitkaIa-Sha, a Sioux activist wrote an anti- Christian manifesto published in the Atlantic Monthly, called “Why I Am A Pagan.” Contemporary Christian culture and evangelism have made extensive use of Paganism, referring to both secular humanism and Harry Potter-style literary witchcraft. Sometimes this is also used to describe ancient religious traditions, such as Hinduism.7 Scholars investigating different forms of contemporary Paganism have sometimes failed to recognize the evolution of a multivalent context of conflicting representations in both Euroamerican cultural memories. An extensive intellectual archaeology of these representations, to my knowledge, has never been undertaken, and so to begin to talk about Paganism 7 Carl Braaten, Either/Or: The Gospel Or Neopaganism, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1995). is to already enter into a discussion already shaped by discursive forces we barely understand. Having said that, there is no alternative but to go forward, for already scholars have made claims and counterclaims (both explicit and implicit) for a category of religious belief and practice referred to as “Neopaganism” or “Paganism. In the early 1990’s, the University of Chicago press published a volume by Catherine Albanese, entitled Nature Religion in America: From The Algonkian Indians to the New Age. In this volume, Albanese examined threads of what had previously mostly been classified (if it was classified at all) under historian Sydney Ahlstrom’s term “harmonial religion.” Albanese argued that Nature, as a source of sacrality or taboo, was a prominent if often subterranean theme throughout much of American religion. Moreover, Algonkian Indians, Transcendentalist authors, Puritans, republicans, wilderness preservationists, and New Agers had all, in their own way, found a way of connecting and reinventing Nature as a central nexus point in their beliefs and practices. This is not the place for a general discussion of Albanese’s work, but it is the place to point out several themes that later emerge. First, Albanese does not shy away from using the term “pagan” or “heathen” (a companion term) for religious themes she finds throughout her study, especially with regard to nineteenth- century canonical figures such as Henry David Thoreau. In addition, she examines Goddess spirituality as an important manifestation of Nature Religion. While Goddess spirituality is wider than those who call themselves “Pagans,” Albanese links it most closely with feminist 10 witchcraft practitioners such as Zsusanna Budapest and Starhawk, while centering it in the category of New Age religion. Goddess religion as practiced by these individuals and their communities is an organic, protean practice of immanent and manifest divinity. Albanese sees this in the vein of the Transcendentalists and even the Algonkians, whose experience of “Nature” was not abstract, but rather a concrete series of relationships with Power, Places, and Other-than-human Persons. The evidence Albanese cited was mostly strong, coming from anthropological accounts, personal journals and published writings, and her study showcased clear thematic patterns. It is not surprising, then, that subsequent wider discussions of Paganism throughout the early 1990's focused on its “Nature Religion” aspects. Some aspects of her study were weaker, and Albanese was hard—pressed to show that certain facets of “Nature Religion” (such as the doctrine of correspondence) were traceable to early Puritan and Algonkian sources. Other scholars, especially those involved with European folklore and history, have since been moved to add to the emerging picture of these traditions. Albanese was concerned to draw out a significant and understudied part of the American religious landscape. While she did not ignore gender or neocolonial issues in her study, her task as a historian was primarily to take seriously portions of American religious history that most others had not.8 The work did not valorize Paganism so much as it constructed a useful framework to 8 Robert S. Ellwood, J. Gordon Melton, and to a lesser extent, Sydney Ahlstrom have been the longtime exceptions to this trend. 11 examine facets of popular and elite religiosity. Nonetheless, as contemporary Pagans have evolved a more public presence, they have adopted Albanese's terminology of “nature religion” or “earth religion” as a categorical framework for their own practices, as well as the term “Neopaganism.”9 In 1997, Graham Harvey published a comprehensive survey volume, called Contemporary Paganism: Listening People, Speaking Earth. Harvey took some aspects of previous popular/ journalistic accounts and added chapter by chapter coverage of Druidry, Shamanism, Heathenry (Norse Paganism), Witchcraft, and theological ‘Earth Mysteries.’ Harvey affirmed and reinforced the conclusion that Paganism was a religion (or a religious orientation) defined much more by ritual practice than belief. In addition, Harvey made the claim that Paganism was a religion at home on the Earth, an organic ‘philosophy of life,’ that held little place for transcendence or an afterlife. To be sure, Harvey’s work provided a survey of what many Pagans have come to call the ‘Otherworld,’ but the bulk of the volume is a discussion of ritual practices centered on conceptions of cyclical time and manifested divinity. As this summary implies, Harvey’s approach was openly phenomenological. It took categories largely used by Pagans themselves and investigated their interrelationships. Human histories of religious development, when discussed at all, develop within the context of the segmented chapters, thus promoting a sense of ‘Paganism’ as a unified religious system with divisions 9 Sarah M. Pike, Earth/y Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2001 ), 23; An extensive investigation of the Pagan adoption of “nature religion" as a category is discussed in Chas Clifton, Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2006). 12 similar to ‘denominations.’ Yet Harvey’s research was largely undertaken in Britain, and he presents these religions as recent developments within a European context, far more than an American one. There is no explicit sense in Harvey’s work that Paganism is a “world religion,” even as the phenomenological typology begins to look more and more like comparative religion. Harvey’s use of sources was markedly different than Albanese’s. He I‘ instead relied largely on interviews, observation, and Pagans’ own self- conceptions (published and othenivise) as the starting ground for his work. Given the context that words such as “Pagan” and “Witch” have had in cultural memories discussed earlier, this was not an inappropriate choice of sources or approach. Most other attempted accounts of contemporary Paganism(s) up to that point either had serious factual deficiencies, or were published as apologetics on Pagan popular presses. Partly to counterbalance sensationalistic accounts, Harvey downplayed some of the more controversial aspects of Paganism, even as he stridently defended its claim to the name. It is in the subtitle of the book: “Listening People, Speaking Earth” that an implicit hint of universalism beyond its European borders emerged. After all, why couldn’t indigenous peoples be seen in the same way? Harvey’s editorship of other works, including readers on shamanism and indigenous religions,'gave rise to the notion that there were implications perhaps not fully explored in his own interpretive framework of Paganism. In Harvey’s defense though, he largely inherited a popular definition of “Paganism” as largely self-conscious reconstruction and re-adaptation of ancient traditions from Europe and Egypt. 13 While this failed to capture some elements, Harvey’s European areas of research largely left him without troublesome American counterexamples.1O Until the late 1990’s, Harvey’s motives are easily discerned from his strident tone. He clearly believes Paganism is a vital aspect of contemporary religious practice. His phenomenological framework and survey format were intended to get others to take this marginalized area of studies seriously. This is not an uncommon political stance for scholars of indigenous religions, shamanism and Paganism to take. Simply trying to focus attention on new religious movements as a legitimate area of scholarly inquiry can carry a stigma, even today. Given the subaltern status Paganism has as a “religion” in the larger world of scholarly religion, it is difficult for scholars not to be drawn into having to defend themselves for the very subject they study.11 A very recent volume less known among practitioners than Harvey’s Listening People, Speaking Earth, is Michael York’s Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion (2003). York’s study is audacious, and has become a lightning rod in the Pagan Studies community, even though it could be argued as merely representing the logical conclusion of earlier trends. In it, he redefines Paganism, and claims it as a kind of cross-cultural root religious activity worldwide. Shrine Shinto, Chinese folk religion, and vernacular Hindu practices (festivals, and puja) are all redrawn as Pagan practices. York defines Paganism in three separate realms: religion, behavior, and theology. However, they all 1O Harvey has begun to address this in his later work. See Graham Harvey, Animism: Respecting The Living World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 11 Sarah Pike, New Age and Neopagan Religions in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 38. 14 share a core thematic set. All Pagan religions, behaviors, and theologies are chthonically and relationally oriented. By this, York means that sacrality is manifested in the world within a set of tightly interrelated layers of reality. Thus, Pagan ‘othervvorlds’ may be coterminous with this one, and deities installed through human action are different from humans more in degree than in kind. In other words, they are more like other-than-human persons than transcendent personalities. Idolatry, apotheosis, animism, polytheism, corpospirituality, geosacrality, phallicism, vitalism and devotional reciprocity are just some of the characteristics linked to Paganism as belief and practice. In fact, York explores Paganism far more in the temples of local Hindu deities than in the American Goddess movement. York places most American Neopaganism on the fringe of Pagan worldwide practice, arguing that its dominant use of archetypes and Goddess monotheism place it closer to what he calls “gnostic” or “transcendent” types of religiosity, rather than Paganism. However, his description of Pagan practices would find a niche in some popular cultic religious practices in monotheistic traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, that otherwise are certainly not considered “pagan” traditions. And this is part of York’s point—Pagan religious practice is often less reflective, more praxis and results-based, and concerned with this-worldly matters. Practitioners of most traditions that already refer to themselves as ‘Pagan’ do not dispute these last conclusions nor would Hutton or Harvey dispute them. The ‘problem’ lies in the scope of the traditions covered. 15 In his introduction to Pagan Theology, Michael York acknowledged that the term “Pagan” had a very long and pejorative history, especially entangled with colonialist and missionary interests. However, he chided other scholars for avoiding making those same connections for purely political reasons. In a sense, he said, the missionaries and colonizers were correct. For York, these parties took their opponents‘ religions seriously enough to understand and record them as fundamentally different in operation from their own traditions. In one sense, York may have a point. Albanese and others have cited diaries and recorded conversations between Amerindians and Whites during periods of early contact that seem to suggest that this indeed occurs.12 Of course, though, it is equally possible to find accounts where indigenous peoples were recorded as having no religion or simply a demonic inverse of the missionaries’ religion.13 In any case, York argues that since missionaries and colonizers saw legitimate thematic continuity in their opponents’ religions, and since that continuity is really there, then we as scholars ought to be able to use that same term to describe it. And if these forms of religion are worldwide, we ought to call it a form of “world religion.” Paganism is indeed properly referred to as a distinctive religious typology, rather than a specific religion in itself.14 'Abrahamic" religions, such as Judaism, 12 Daniel K. Richter, “War and Culture: The Iroquois Experience,” in American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers From European Contact To Indian Removal 1500-1850, ed. Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell (New York: Routledge, 2000), 283-310. 13 David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1996). 14 This is consistent with Graham Harvey’s approach, in which Paganism is understood as a facet of Animism alongside Maori, Ojibwe and Aboriginal Australian traditions. Harvey, Animism; A similar conclusion is implied, if not stated directly in other works. See Jordan D. Paper, The Deities Are Many: A Polytheistic Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005); 16 Christianity, and Islam, share a common set of phenomenological constituent components. All of them originated in a fairly small geographical area under the influence and interaction with both each other and Zoroastrianism. All are largely (if perhaps not exclusively) monotheistic in ontology. All profess to have written scriptures that serve as the ultimate guide of a specific, divine, universal revelation. Another set of religions we can call "Dharmic." These traditions, I emerging originally in South Asia, all share a similar language and structure, even as they have often clashed and conflicted with one another. Orthopraxic religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism all share a circular notion of time, taking place in a world of unreality (Samsara), with concepts such as dharma and karma guiding the prescriptions for human activity and religious worship. Sikhism, more historically focused on orthodoxy and a singular concept of religious authority, still shares much of the language and structure of other traditions, even as its inheritance from mystical Islam sets it apart from other traditions. "Paganism" as a broad evolving typology characterizes historical and contemporary orthopraxic religious traditions grounded in geocultural localism. Ancient traditions such as Greek and Roman traditions held the domain of the Gods as co-extensive with the reaches and realms of their respective political empire. The public worship of state deities reflected these concerns, as did often the practices of mystery cults. John Michael Greer, A World Full Of Gods: An Inquiry Into Polytheism (Tucson, AZ: ADF Publishing, 2005). 17 Indigenous peoples and their religious traditions are often co-terminous with their larger culture and geography, as the God(s) of the Hebrews may indeed have been before the Assyrian assault and the Babylonian Exile. More specifically, Pagan religious and cultural traditions construct what I call a "socio- sacred network." This network is a fluid web of connections and sacred Power flowing between Persons and Places, only some of which are “living” or “material” in the ‘Western’ sense. In this typology, indigenous religions may share deep phenomenological patterns in their internal logics. This is not to collapse or conflate them in a naive reductionism, any more than noting relevant similarities between Sikhism and Jainism reduces them to the same level. But for both indigenous and Pagan traditions, this web of connectivity extends between different but related levels of ontological reality, challenging secular bifurcations of "living" and "dead." Indeed, this protean polyvalence is at the heart of Pagan theologies. Pagan traditions may regard Sacred Persons as human entities and reserves of Power. They may consider them as “Other-than-human” beings, or as powerful ancestors. Sacred Persons may be co-existing races of PeOples dwelling in neighboring but fundamentally different environments than humans. At auspicious times, all of these may be true for a given tradition. Sacred Persons often demonstrate a continuing theme of Paganism: gender, personage, and divinity are intimately linked together. If there is a distinction between many indigenous ethnic religious traditions and contemporary Pagan traditions, it is not so much one of kind, but rather 18 degree and temporality. All of these traditions tend toward open polytheism, pantheism, and/or panentheism, depending on the circumstances facing the community. Often this will be coupled with diffuse and decentralized religious authorities among the different human and Other-than-human leaders of its movements. In contrast, "Places," another source of sacred power in Pagan traditions, are generally immobile respective to the practitioner. They can be features of the environment that predate human development, or authorized individuals using ceremonies and gifts obtained from Other-than-human Persons can construct them. Pagan religious traditions, in keeping with the concept of orthopraxy, tend to place a high degree of value on experience, rather than belief or speculation. This in turn leads toward emphasizing embodied (or somatic) “bodily” knowledge over revealed or intellectual knowledge. Whither (Neo)Paganism? Given this typology, it is important to point out that not all practitioners are in agreement about the relationships between these different traditions, often citing political concerns and historic oppression.15 In many of the early volumes of both scholarship and practice in Paganism, authors used the term “Neopaganism” as a category in order to separate it out from ancient patterns and to avoid political conflicts. Others of a most hostile bent have also deployed “Neopaganism” in attempt to delegitimize this religious community as a new 15 An excellent discussion of the hermeneutics of religious borrowing, as well as the political stakes involved can be found in Chapter 4 of Pike, Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves. 19 tradition and far from the alleged nobility of ancient Greece or Rome.16 Practitioners sometimes also prefer the term “Neopaganism” to deliberately signify a nascent, Aquarian-age ethos overcoming the monotheistic traditions that historically attempted to eliminate indigenous traditions. There are scholars that still prefer this terminology, even though its origin is generally credited to insiders.17 I On other hand, authors such as Michael York, Graham Harvey and Chas Clifton have argued for the category of “Paganism,” or “Contemporary Paganism," suggesting that after multiple generations of religious Paganism in the 20ml215‘ century, there is little use for the term “Neo.” Clifton and Harvey regard “Paganism” as an umbrella term for those religionists inspired by both indigenous traditions worldwide and pre-Christian traditions of Europe, who seek to “evolve satisfying and respectful ways of dealing with the wider, Other-than- human world.”18 Scholars such as these (and I include myself here) tend to refer and investigate more specific tradition names within a broader family of Paganism (such as Wicca, Goddess worship, Druidry, Thelema, Asatru, and Kemeticism). In this context, “Neopaganism” can still be useful to demarcate periods of time and development, rather than typology. “Neopaganism” and other similar terms, such as “Paleopaganism” and “Mesopaganism,” have been in use 16 Carl Braaten, Either/ Or. 17 James R. Lewis ed., Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996). 18 Chas S. Clifton and Graham Harvey, eds. Introduction to The Paganism Reader (New York, Routledge, 2004) 1. 20 by practitioners (and some scholars) since the early 1970’s.19 It is important to note that some scholars (like Clifton) make a distinction between “paganism” as an aesthetic or literary impulse and “Paganism” as a ritually-guided religion. I disagree with this bifurcation, as it is an idiosyncratic ‘presentist’ distinction over- privileging those ‘religious founders’ so often charged with inventing Wicca or other traditions, and a distinction almost completely absent in discussions of religion otherwise. As Philip Heselton and Ronald Hutton have shown, all the cultural ingredients for the emergence of Wicca, including poetic prayers, were already present in the 19th century long before the ascent of Gerald Gardner. In my study of the Orphic impulse, the protean nature of paganism, like other religious impulses, resists such distinctions. Scholars of Western Esotericism in particular have recognized this problematic, referring to classicists such as Richard Payne Knight as “pagans” in their full sensibilities: aesthetic, literary and religious.20 Contemporary Pagan traditions, in the United States, are part of the most recent explosion of new religious movements that has taken place, and they have been affected by the history this geolocalism has inherited. While 19 “Paleopaganism" is used by some practitioners to refer to ancient traditions of the Middle East, Celtic and Hellenistic world. When used, “mesopaganism” refers to revivals of Paleopaganism with a heavy degree of “Judeo-Christian” content, such as Masonic Druidry, Aleister Crowley’s and Glen Botkin’s movements. These forms date from the Renaissance to the present day. The latter two examples are discussed in Chapter 3. Philip Emmons Isaac Bonewits, Real Magic: An Introductory Treatise On The Basic Principles of Yellow Magic (New York: Coward, McCann & Geohagan, 1971 ), 259. The terms “paleopaganism” and “mesopaganism” have not found wide acceptance yet, although I consider them useful in certain contexts and some scholars do use them. The term “neopagan” also coined by practitioners, does enjoy wide acceptance, although not undisputed. 20 Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994) 1. Godwin’s chapter “The Worship of the Generative Powers" is ideologically at home among 19th and 20'h century impulses as much as those of the 18th century, the time period covered in this section of Godwin’s work. 21 Amerindian culture, immigrant Muslim / Vodoun slaves, and Buddhist/Taoist mining and railroad laborers from China assured the religious diversity of the early United States, the Second Great Awakening produced a cultural dominance of Arminian theology, evangelical revivalist practice, and almost incalculable numbers of splintering Protestant sects. Short-term and long-term new religious movements influenced by utopian and millennial expectations exploded onto the American scene. Some movements, such as the Shakers and the Oneida Perfectionists, were relatively small and short-lived. Others, like Christian Science and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) have proved influential in both numbers and overall endurance. As the 19'h century drew to a close, the open appearance of Sikhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Theosophy among both the immigrant working community and intellectual elites heralded the arrival of all the most significant world religions to American shores, as well as the some of the most provocative religious ideas. Small wonder it is, then, to find the Church of Aphrodite conducting services in the 1930’s on Long Island. The camp meetings of the Second Great Awakening have their parallels in the summer festivals common to Pagans, some of which take place close to Burned-Over districts of the early 19th century. The language of karma and the Dharmic traditions has been picked up and used in common parlance by Pagans and others.21 21 And yet, there are examples of sacred tellurism and Goddess acknowledgement in other 19th century NRMs. It is not uncommon for Pagans to cite Mary, Mother of Jesus in Christianity (and Islam) as 3 Goddess. Both the Shakers and Christian Science have linked God with femaleness in their theologies. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints also has a thealogy of a Divine Mother, and refers to the Earth as ‘mother.’ Moses 7:48-50 (Pearl of Great Price); Linda 22 The Meaning of Music(k) “Her name is Aphrodite and she rides a crimson shell, And you know you cannot leave her for you touched the distant sands. With tales of brave Ulysses; how his naked ears were tortured By the Sirens sweetly singing.” 22 Like the Sirens’ call, the question of music’s meaning may appear to be deceptively easy to approach. But it requires us to think a little deeper into the nature of music than might be done by the casual listener. Music, as part of what might be called “aural modes of production,” is never some self-existent monad. Rather, it is one aspect of an embedded field of relations between humans and that which humans encounter, whether personal or impersonal. This is no less true in the case of religious music, which includes as part of musical relationship the possibility of worship, veneration, consecration, and prayer. Religious music can be an even larger challenge to grasp. Visual and textual components of religion are often studied as visually-based modes of knowledge, but adding a religious dimension to acoustic modes of cultural production complicated conceptions of listening and judgments about who constitutes a “listener.” As musicologist Simon Frith (1998) tells us, listeners and their judgments about music are not "just subjective," but rather, "self-revealing."23 Those who listen to music sometimes react to a specific song, but just as often are reacting P. Wilcox, “The Mormon Concept of a Mother in Heaven,” in Line Upon Line: Essays On Mormon Doctrine ed. Gary James Bergera (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989) 103—114. 22 Cream, “Tales Of Brave Ulysses," Disraeli Gears, Atco Records 33232, 1967. 23 Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On The Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 5. 23 in comparison to other listeners, musical pieces and life circumstances. Critics, fans, and listeners make cultural judgments using music as a way to negotiate and procure cultural capital by means of personal and social agency, always within social, political, and other cultural frameworks that already exist. Some ways of analyzing music used by vernacular listeners blend over from film into music evaluation--such as taste, technique, and craft. Among musicians (who are usually listeners too) other types of judgments/critiques from within embedded relationality are also made, from emptiness to in/comprehensibility to selfishness and creativity.24 Musicologist Christopher Small (1998) goes even farther, contending we need to jettison the notion of “music” as a noun entirely. Small’s solution is to resort to the verb -"to music." To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, listening, by rehearsing, or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is commonly called composition), or by dancing.” This is true for active participation or more passive participation, and Small means it in a descriptive, not prescriptive sense. To take part in any sense is, for Small, the important overall aspect, for it refers to the forging/foregrounding of (already existent) relationships. Listening, as embedded relationality, becomes not only receptivity in a single direction, but one site within a circulating, interconnected set of sites as well. Small’s emphasis is not on explicitly political characteristics of knowledge, but on metaphorical, 2“ lbid., 49, 7o. 25 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 7-9. 24 gestural, and somatic characteristics. In fact, Small cites the contributions of American philosopher Mark Johnson, who argues that metaphorical thinking identified with reactions to music (or musicking) are dependent on shared somatic (bodily) knowledge held by a group of people. According to this school of thought, we must have shared metaphors to have shared metaphorical relationality. To ‘music’ is to use this metaphoric language of gesture and emotiveness, with "no set vocabularies," and as such musicking can evoke complex and contradictory meanings via these somatic knowledges. Gestural language and metaphorical thinking are not closed, so they can be interpreted and reinterpreted again.26 With Frith and Small’s perspective in mind, we can understand “Pagan Music(k)ing” as a taking part in musical performance that speaks to shared metaphorical and “bodily” knowledge of those who consider themselves Pagans.27 Sometimes this can take place by listening. Sometimes it takes place in a set ritual activity, where the bodily knowledge of the practitioner(s) and the gestural knowledge of the music combine to form a synergistic gestalt of communion, ecstasy and worship. Sometimes this can take place with musical performance understood by both the performers and the listeners as “Pagan." But sometimes, especially in a marginalized or subterranean religious 26 lbid., 51-59. 27 This is echoed in one of the only specific treatments of Pagan music to date, covering mainly ritual performances and songs learned at festivals. See Sabina Magliocco and Holly Tannen, “The Real Old Time Religion: Towards an Aesthetic of Neo-Pagan Song, Ethnologies 20(1), 175— 201. Wendy Hunter Roberts, unlike most other scholarly authors, significantly includes prerecorded Pagan ‘musick’ as part of her thealogical sources. See Wendy Hunter Roberts, “In Her Name: Toward a Feminist Thealogy of Ritual" in Marjorie Proctor-Smith and Janet R. Walton, ed. Women At Worship: Interpretations of North American Diversity (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993) 137-162. 25 community, this can take the form of (re)interpreting and appropriating musics not explicitly developed with those religious communities in mind. In all cases, examining music (and musicking) has the potential to give extensive insight into the nature and practice of a religious ethos. For just as musics are embedded in a larger set of human relationships, so they can serve as points of departure and return for those interested in understanding religious communities. This is the general aim of this dissertation. Methodology in Pagan Studies This dissertation relies heavily on primary source information, drawing on a variety of materials in the process. One reason of course, is that dissertations must make a significant original contribution in the scholarly field(s) to which they pertain. In order to make a research project of this scope relevant to the interdisciplinary paradigms of American Studies and Religious Studies, methods common to these disciplines must be employed. In turn, employing these methods assumes several important axioms. First, sustained multi-generational religious impulses are inherently worthy of study. Second, these impulses never proceed in isolation, but both affect and are affected by other discursive fields. And lastly, this dissertation asserts that it is both possible and desirable to understand the historical and discursive connections (and disjunctions) between heretofore seemingly isolated phenomena. 26 By building upon these axioms, this dissertation has constructed a framework in order to understand discursive music(k)al elements contributing to the historically-effected consciousness of contemporary religious Paganism. Each chapter takes a different area of primary source content, and seeks to discover what ‘anchor points’ of understanding have discursively emerged from that field. In terms of discursive connections, “Pagans often look to various points in the past, both real and imagined, in order to create a usable present, and those actions can be traced through lyrics, articles, liner notations, artwork and sometimes even chord progressions. As these anchor points are discovered, they are brought into relief so that other aspects of the religious discourse can be understood through reference to these nodes of understanding. By attempting to parse the internal discursive logics of the primary sources, the religious music of American Pagans can be understood within both Frith’s “self-revealing” hermeneutic and Small’s relational mode of understanding. While indebted to both religious studies and American studies, this dissertation recognizes that it takes place within the nascent field of “Pagan Studies,” an area of studies just beginning to take shape. While Pagan Studies is indeed a relatively new academic discipline, attempts to write and publicize authoritative interpretive studies are not. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, there was a rush of popular investigations into American witchcraft and Paganism. Some of these titles were written by people involved in the “Craft,” others claiming only professional interest. Books such as Martin Ebon's Witchcraft Today (1963), Susan Roberts’s Witches USA. (1971) and several by 27 Hans Holzer, such as The Truth About Witchcraft (1969), The New Pagans (1972), and Confessions Of a Witch (1975) summarize the genre well. These books typically took a casual approach, whereby a journalist moves from contact to contact writing informally about his or her experiences with little phenomenological or historical analysis. Later in the books, more attention is given to beliefs and the internal logics within the practitioners’ ritual lives, so that the study ends on a note of superficial anthropology and folklore. At the same time, some religious insiders came forth with their own popular press books. Raymond Buckland, the progenitor of Gardnerian witchcraft in the United States, began with two books, Ancient and Modern Witchcraft - (1970) and Witchcraft From The Inside (1971). Sybil Leek, the underappreciated American popularizer, offered Diary of a Witch (1969) and The Complete Art of Witchcraft (1971). Leo Louis Martello wrote his own duo, Weird Ways of Witchcraft (1969) and Witchcraft: The Old Religion (1972). These volumes often vacillate between an historical and anthropological approach, claiming an ancient past whereby the religion of Paganism/Witchcraft (the two are often conflated) was the indigenous practice of European folk. Citing authorities such as Sir James Frazer, Mircea Eliade, Herodotus, Robert Graves, Eliphas Levi and Erich Neumann, these texts also drew upon folklore, occult and anthropological material to make their case for an unbroken continuous tradition of witchcraft interrupted (at the elite strata) by the imposition of Christianity. The authors then present themselves as the inheritors of this tradition and stewards of its cultural recoVery. 28 In both cases, methodological seeds were sown for both practitioners and scholars later. At the core of both styles of books was an emphasis on pseudo- anthropological description of (on the one hand) what witches and Pagans looked and acted like, and (on the other hand) what such practitioners should look and act like. Both descriptive and normative impulses were carried forth. Perhaps the ultimate skillful combination of both approaches was the enormously successful and still published Drawing Down The Moon (1979) by NPR journalist, social activist and witch Margot Adler. All of these works created a cultural feedback loop, as people interested in Paganism from a religious perspective consumed these “studies” and used them to construct their own traditions. Those already in touch with nascent publishing ventures like Green Egg soon became aware of these other texts, as Green Egg and other periodical publications alerted their readers to the presence of these books and in turn some books made references to Green Egg or its parent organization, the Church of All Worlds. In Susan Roberts’ case, she was asked and agreed to write for a later Pagan publication, ending her contribution with a hallmark of spellcasting, the words “so mote it be!” The next methodological phase was characterized by three different approaches. First, the cursory attempts at history embedded in the journalistic investigations developed into a growing historical discourse, along with accompanying controversy. Aidan Kelly, a prominent practitioner who had earned a PhD from Graduate Theological Union, published a historical work, Crafting the Art of Magic (1991) on a trade press arguing that Wicca was entirely created by 29 the British Civil Servant (and anthropologist) Gerald Gardner. Later he authored a personal memoir of his own involvement in Paganism since the 1960’s (Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches: A History of the Craft in California, 1967—77) and also discussed the local history of some other groups practicing in California at the time. Doreen Valiente, the British witch who was initiated by and worked with Gardner crafted her own memoir of her experience (The Rebirth of Witchcraft, 1989) but the landmark history remains Ronald Hutton’s UK-centered Triumph of The Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, published in 1999, augmented by Chas 8. Clifton ’3 Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America (2006). In a similar vein, the archaeological and folk anthropology found embedded in both Gardner’s writings and the early American journalistic investigations gave way to more sophisticated forms of ethnography. Indeed, this has remained one of the main modes of investigation within Pagan Studies, especially for sympathetic researchers. The first significant member of this genre, Tanya Luhrmann’s Persuasions of the Witch ’3 Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (1989) has become widely known, not in the least because the community in which her ethnographic investigation took place reacted quite negatively to the book’s publication, accusing Luhrmann of dishonesty and acting in bad faith. Other authors, such as Allen Scarboro et al., (Living Witchcraft: A Contemporary American Coven, 1994), Helen A Berger (A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States, 1999), Sarah M. Pike (Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: 30 Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community, 2001), Jenny Blain (Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy and Neo-Shamanism in North European Paganism, 2002), Jone Salomonsen (Enchanted Feminism: The Rec/aiming Witched of San Francisco, 2002), Robert J. Wallace (Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasy, alternative archaeologies and contemporary Pagans, 2003), and Sabina Magliocco (Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America, 2004) have firmly cemented ethnography, particularly reflexive ethnography, as a methodological staple of Pagan Studies. In some cases, (Berger, Salomonsen, Scarboro et al., Magliocco) this involved extensive field ethnography within the home residences of a coven or extended community. In other cases (Pike, especially) a festival site attracting hundreds to thousands of different community attendees each summer becomes a space for ethnographic investigation and questions of individual identity-formation. Wallis and Blain, often found working together, make the most extensive use of reflexivity to the point of proclaiming their research as “autoarchaeology,” although anchoring their discussions in selected field experiences. The third dominant mode of methodological investigation is explicitly combinative and comes primarily from a Women’s Studies perspective. Naomi Goldenberg (The Changing Of The Gods: Feminism and the end of Traditional Religions, 1979), Cynthia Eller (Living In The Lap Of The Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America,1993), Carol P. Christ (Rebirth of the Goddess, 1997), Wendy Griffin, ed (Daughter of the Goddess: Studies of Healing, Identity and Empowerment, 2000) and Kathryn Rountree (Embracing the Witch and the 31 F "Jen-II! Goddess: Feminist Ritual-Makers in New Zealand, 2004) feature a wide variety of approaches, from process theology to a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion. Within Women’s Studies, the desire to accept women’s experiences as phenomenologically irreducible has opened up of the voices of practitioners to write alongside academics in tracing “a myriad of women’s journeys.” This model of combining academics and practitioners to add their own voices is an emergent mode of discourse presentation quickly becoming a methodological model in its own from the mid 1990’s onward. 1996 saw three volumes edited by James R. Lewis (Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft), Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman (Pagan Pathways: A Guide to the Ancient Earth Traditions) and Philip Carr-Gomm (The Druid Renaissance). Two more volumes, Jenny Blain et al. (Researching Paganisms, 2004) and Sian Reid (Between the Worlds: Readings In Contemporary Neo-Paganism, 2006) have presented insider researchers grappling with reflexive methodology and a collection of practitioner essays with analytical articles in a volume intended for teaching purposes. While the fields of history, ethnography, and feminist studies have all made vital contributions to the realm of Pagan Studies, this dissertation draws on other important fields in seeking Frith’s “self-revealing” ideologies and Smith’s relational connections. Material culture, religious studies, musical studies and American studies all come to bear here in this work. Many compact discs and cassette tapes have been studied and analyzed for their content. In some cases I have been able to obtain songsheets, sheet music and songbooks, and letters. In 32 terms of primary sources, several community journals have been invaluable in my search to understand how Pagan music(k) is interpreted and deployed. As J. Gordon Melton has noted, the two the most important discursive vehicles within the Pagan movement have been the Missouri/California based Green Egg: A Journal of the Awakening Earth, and the publications of the Wisconsin-based Circle Sanctuary, under the names Circle Network News and Circle Magazine. Both of these sources have constantly promoted musical ideas, artwork, and recordings (and sometimes even sheet music) for their subscribers. I am deeply indebted to several individuals who made their personal archives of rare Green Egg copies from the 1970’s and 1980’s available for use. Others have made available subset and obscure publications targeted at specific religious communities within the umbrella of American Paganism such as Reclaiming Quarterly, Nemeton and Oak Leaves, published for the Reclaiming, Church of all Worlds, and Druidic communities respectively. By tracing common themes and ideas through these works, patterns of repetition, (whether of specific artists or ideas) presented themselves as the next step of investigation. In turn lyrics, credits and liner notes revealed collaborations and a shared thematic between performers that drew my attention. In one case, an offhand remark captured on a 1986 archival cassette performance opened the door to a series of connections between the Pagan community and science- fiction folk (“filk”) artists. This avenue of research—beginning with Pagan sources intended to popularize and disseminate musicality throughout the community, has proven quite fruitful. 33 Through my research, I have become firmly committed to the principle that “music” is not merely limited to a series of organized sonic vibrations, but rather encompasses a wide range of activities that create, sustain, and change our opportunities to make and experience such occurrences. I am also committed to the principle that music is both protean and reflexive, holding up a mirror that reflects a community’s image both back to itself and to other communities as well. As part of my own religious and academic practice, I have attended several large-scale festivals or gatherings for Pagans and associated folk. These festivals, often reminiscent of 19th century outdoor camp meetings, are prime sites for the creation and performance of both planned and spontaneous music. These gatherings feature music as play, and music as ritual—often both at the same time. As part of the economy of material cultural, merchants and vendors often sell pre-recorded music. Prominent and lesser-known musicians often attend these festivals, and I have been privileged to speak openly about my project with such individuals as Julie Forest Middleton, Isaac Bonewits, Selena Fox, Ian Corrigan, Anne Hill, Macha Nightmare and Ronn Walks With Fire, all of whom were eager to engage me in conversation on a variety of topics. Some, like Anne Hill, founder of the seminal label Serpentine Music, have shared personal correspondence and archival audio with me. Others, like Isaac Bonewits, provided me with some insight into particular musical tracks and experiences with music. Many of them are the subject of digitally recorded interviews, which I hope to make public in the future. For this dissertation, it turned out to be sufficient to examine musics and 34 archival materials I had collected to make these basic connections. Many of the interviews reinforced and expanded upon materials discussed in liner notes or booklets, or referred to elsewhere in reviews, often in a level of detail not necessarily at this stage of investigation. Closer to home, I have been fortunate to receive archival assistance from two individuals, Karin Leefers and Maggi ldzikowski. In particular, the latter lent me extensive use of her personal filk and Pagan music archive, both in compact disc and cassette form. Along with advertisements and reviews from paper publications (and with much patience) I was able to construct a database catalogue of names, titles, and notable characteristics of artwork, lyrics, or other outstanding features from these archives. As the connections between folk ideology, filk music, and Paganism became more and more apparent, David Stowe brought the work of Harry Smith to my attention, without which this work would have suffered greatly. Together with the excellent resources of the Smithsonian Institution’s online and audio archives, I was able to examine Smith’s use of esoteric imagery and inspiration alongside the detailed notes he and other folk collectors made for their album sets. Smith’s later career as a ' experimental filmmaker, esoteric artist and occultist became accessible also through the work of online archivists, using popular media sharing websites. Still others, such as Arthur Versluis, brought reactionary Pagan musics to my attention, while my experience with Patrick O’Donnell’s theoretical prodding enabled me to ground that material within the Modernist tradition of anti- Modernism, a fertile area for other new religions and fundamentalisms as well. 35 What has emerged, I believe, is a dissertation revealing connections either previously dismissed as insignificant or unworthy of study. In fact, some of the secondary studies referred to here (such as Miller, Shapiro and Slote’s Start With The Sun) met with similar degrees of dismissal upon their publication. In other cases, such as with the otherwise commendable work of Stephen Marini, l was able to penetrate much further into discursive relationships than those assumed to exist between Paganism and New Age religion. While this is the only dissertation-length study in this subject I am aware of, creating frameworks to be challenged and corrected is familiar ground for scholars of the humanities. Unfortunately, scholars of New Religious Movements (NRM’s) are all too well acquainted with the accusation of irrelevance to the academy, as well as the accusation of masking for ‘cult apologetics.’ Many who work in the field of NRM’S are prone to a bit of defensiveness when asked about their work. As Sarah Pike has noted, scholars are often called on to discuss and comment on new religions when they make the news, especially if they have done so in a spectacularly tragic way. The tragedies at Waco and Jonestown are prominent examples of this. Partly as a result of this and other factors, the scholarly field of new religious movements tends to be somewhat polarized between open detractors and those perceived as (and may be) more sympathetic. This dissertation is not intended to evaluate the authenticity or religious legitimacy of either Pagan religiosity or Pagan religious music. It is intended neither to endorse nor attack such phenomena. Instead, it takes the search for 36 these subjects as cultural facts common to human communities, and thus providing a bridge with which to understand the human side of religion. This dissertation seeks to uncover Paganism’s larger discursive and hermeneutic connections with culture through music and associated meanings. As such, I am targeting scholars in American religious history and culture, as well as those studying NRMS. I hope to demonstrate to investigators from Religious Studies the importance of musical criticism to their discipline. At the same time, I hope to demonstrate the wider relevance of religion and religiosity as a first-tier category of analysis both in American studies and musical studies. In a wider sense, this study may attract attention from practitioners and culturally-aware readers too. Paganism, as I will discuss in the opening chapter, is a category of being that has been in some ways the epitome of “Otherness.” Whether embraced, ridiculed, or exoticized, it has served as one important boundary marker for inclusion, exclusion and the accepted “mainstream” of the “nation with the soul of a church.” How do those who are often seen as marginal (and who often see themselves as marginal) create cultural connections, promote resistance when deemed necessary, and create the usable past they need to continue operating? These are all important questions, not just for academics, but for all who seek religious and cultural literacy. Some of our most influential movers and shakers, politically, economically, and culturally, have been active in NRMs. Their beliefs, practices, and musics have helped create these communities, and it is imperative that we seek to grasp the full cultural dimensions of their being. 37 Structure and Organization In undertaking a study on the contours and mutual engagements between Paganism and Music, it must be remembered that contemporary Paganism’s development and growth took place embedded within a set of discourses deploying that very concept, often in many ways that were (and are) almost completely incongruous with each other. Therefore, Chapter 1 examines the poetic use of conceptual “paganism” in American music and verse. Paganism is part and parcel of Walt Whitman and Hart Crane’s poetic. It is deployed far differently in the audacious essays of both Amerindian activist Zitkala-Sha and anti-jazz activist Anne Faulkner. As hinted at already, popular music has served to demarcate its usage as well, from the 1970’s light pop of Gino Vanelli to the so-called “classic rock” genre still prominent in many medium and large radio markets. Whether in a positive or pejorative light, primitivism, sexuality, ecology and spiritual ‘questing’ emerge as the anchor points for a “Pagan” hermeneutic. In all these cases, I take the emergent thematics of these different discourses to trace their webs of meaning and provide a backdrop to understand the subsequent rise of religious Paganism in the United States. Chapter 2 turns its attention more directly to the topic of musical history and ideology in religious Paganism. I show that the development of Pagan self- image and liturgical patterns is largely indebted to folk music, 19th century anthropology, and British romanticism. With all of these ingredients, Pagans in the 1970’s created a sacred history for themselves, defining sets of fundamental 38 relationships and conceptual language that influences religious practice to this day. At the same time, the development of folk music in the United States is itself greatly indebted to people such as Harry Smith, the anthologist and esotericist working in the 1950's on what would become the American Anthology of Folk Music, as well as to filking culture, a musical movement devoted to future mythologies such as science fiction.28 Paganism emerges as a communal sense that embraces a common temporal focus and locates power/relation in and through the landscape. Chapter 3 investigates theological expressionism and innovation in Pagan music. Many Pagans dismiss speculative theology as a form of dogmatics associated with monotheistic traditions. However, specific sets of ideas about sacred powers, as well as human relationships with those powers, are nonetheless articulated through the development of liturgical songs, hymns, and even popular music inspired by religious Paganism. As ancient theurgical practice sought to infuse divine influx into ensouled matter, the telestics of Pagan music will be addressed.29 The dominant theme that emerges is a filial theology of relationality. In particular, specific Goddesses such as Yemaya and Brigit are the targets of many such devotionals, so they are examined as case examples from Wiccan and Druidic perspectives. Thelema, the religious tradition created by (or through) English esotericist Aleister Crowley takes up the latter part of the g 28 I wait to address reactionary Paganism and its musics until Chapter 5. While reactionary thought in Paganism draws heavily from “volkish” ideology, it is also deeply opposed to hermeneutic playfulness, discussed in Chapter 4. It forms an example of ‘Negative Orphism,’ or what I call the “ossification” of the Orphic impulse. 29 . Robert Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire, translated by Antonia New” (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 1996) 287. 39 chapter. Peer—reviewed scholarship on this tradition is virtually nonexistent, and its music provides an especially wide doorway with which to explore its Orphic traditions, many of which are foreign to the folk ‘communal sense’ explored in Chapter 2. Chapter 4 examines the role of playfulness in Pagan music as an aspect of the Orphic impulse. As Chapter 1 will make clear, discourses of “Paganism” can and have been hermeneutically stretched to fit different agendas. For self- identified Pagans, this characteristic is often celebrated, rather than criticized. Engaging in reflexive play by using humor and stretching boundaries is itself a prominent discourse in Pagan music(k)ing, as the practice of filking in chapter 2 demonstrates. Within the prominence of filial theology (as discussed in Chapter 3), playfulness finds its ultimate expression in the elevation of ‘children’ and ‘youth’ to a holy, sacred status, rather than a status of inferiority or immaturity. In some cases this is a status ascribed reflexively, at other times one that is ascribed to Sacred Persons, such as ancestors or nature spirits. Temporal change, especially the aging process, and its associated cultural qualities are also celebrated within Pagan culture and form an important aspect of this hermeneutic playfulness. This too, can sometimes be found in folk music antecedents. This study concludes with Chapter 5 and a short epilogue. The Orphic impulse, as expressed Chapter 1’s discourses of Paganism, seeks to cross boundaries, create knowledge, celebrate and expand the telluric soul through affective bodily processes. The search to communicate and channel theurgic 4O power into the realm of mortality and Cartesian extension requires these overarching goals. Nonetheless, Pagan religions manifest a variety of responses to the ‘Others’ that exist beyond its own hermeneutic horizons, and sometimes have pushed against it. Just as Christianity, materialism, and other cultural systems and ideologies have influenced Pagan traditions, the various musics of Paganism have created a variety of responses to these influences. In a nutshell, this last chapter seeks to understand how Pagan music sings of the “Other.” This necessarily includes dialogue, debate and dissemination of Pagan ideas with and among other religious traditions, such as Christian ones. It also includes grappling with the cultural politics of fashion and commodification. In musicking Pagans articulate their own fields and borders of “authentic” practice, just as agents in other ritual and discursive traditions do. In some cases, there are also reactionary movements within Pagan musical culture. Drawing on some of the same folk ideologies discussed in Chapter 2, these traditions have created a right-wing revolutionary impulse defined by hardline opposition to liberal ideologies. These represent what I call an ossification of the Orphic impulse, a formation of a rigid hermeneutic boundary that repels playfulness and protean sensibility. For a religious umbrella movement that for so long was associated with countercultural and oppositional motifs, this is particularly important in order to understand changing contours of the movement throughout time. This dissertation concludes with a short ‘Epilogue,’ exploring some ramifications of this study. Please note that because of the microfiliming process, original color images used for this dissertation are presented in black and white. 41 Chapter 1 The Orphic Impulse: American Discourses of Paganism and Music I have trod the solitary path, and shall again. I have heard the Lady’s laughter at moonrise, And suffered Her tender scourge in my heart; I have eaten with the Lord of Shadows, and been reborn. -- Gale Perrigo “Pagan’s Way"30 To say that Orpheus is a legendary character in the history of Western religion and music would be a vast understatement. Associated with Hermes and Apollo, God of the sun and music, Orpheus was said to possess great power that he could call upon with the aid of music. His willingness to travel between worlds and realms earned him status as a psychopomp, while his death at the hands of the Bacchantes cemented his connection to the ecstatic power of Dionysus. The ancient Orphic mystery tradition is named after him, and his connections to the Eleusinian Mysteries are paramount. The Orphics‘ spiritual anthropology of a human, fleshy body encasing an immortal divine ecstatic soul was no stranger to Plato, or to the tradition of Gnostic/Hermetic occultism that would eventually give rise to contemporary Paganism. The Orphic hymns are famous for their praise and prayers, the meaning of which would be easily intelligible to contemporary Pagans: 30 Gale Perrigo, ”Pagan’s Way," Never Again The Burning, Magical Audio Graphics Incomplete, 1990. 42 Learn now, Mousaios, a rite mystic and most holy, A prayer which surely excels all others. King Zeus and Gala, heavenly and pure flames Of the Sun, sacred light of the Moon, and all the Stars; Poseidon, too, dark-maned holder of the earth, Pure Persephone and Demeter of the splendid fruit... And Dionysos the dancer, whose honors among the blessed gods are highest... And I invoke the Mother of the immortals...and ask them to come in a spirit of joyous mercy to this holy rite and libation of reverence.31 The Romans sought to emphasize the older Greek and Egyptian origins of their mystery traditions, just as many Pagans today seek to emphasize the thoughts, words, and contributions from ancient traditions. The Greeks were no different, seeking congruence between Orphic and Egyptian traditions.32 In this way, the search for Orpheus and his associated religious inspiration is not a new process, nor is it one that has faded away. Rather, I contend that the Orphic musical impulse to cross geographical and phenomenological spaces, commune with divine power and sanctify the earthly, telluric realm is well at work in contemporary culture and especially contemporary Paganism.33 In the United States, literary scholars have long noted the presence of a “New Paganism” among authors. Inspired by Walt Whitman, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Dylan Thomas, the Beats, and other exponents of “expansive cosmic poetry full of pagan joy and wonder,” there is growing consensus among scholars that the heritage of the Transcendentalists, both poetic and religious, has been engaged 31 Marvin W. Meyer, ed.,The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook. Sacred Texts of the Mystery Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean World (New York: Harper and Row, 1987) 102-103. 32 Turcan, The Cults, 6, 75. 33 In fact, I would contend that these three aspects constitute the “telestics” of the Orphic impulse. 43 in creating a protean “spirituality” linked both with musicality and the dispensation of preternatural cosmic power.34 The musical impulse toward ecstatic, earthly (and even political) sanctification has not been an exclusively “Pagan” notion. The United States has produced the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, known commonly as the Mormons, whose theology holds that the Earth itself is to be a level of Heaven. Many utopian movements in the 19th century, like the Oneida Perfectionists and the Shakers, worked to make a “heaven on earth.” Shakers accomplished this partially through ecstatic hymn-singing, and the famous dancing that earned them their nickname. The music of the Shakers produced visions of celestial kingdoms and “divine communication” as they danced in the set of affective relationships that have been part of the Christian tradition, especially its mystical subtraditions, since its earliest days. Thus, we should find it no surprise that the musics of other religious outsiders, from Black Gospel to contemporary Pagans, draws on this experiential affective tradition in both music—making and religious practice, sometimes as agape and at times as Eros. As radical American sectarians have emphasized the deed over the “Word,” so too have Pagans used their music and dance as primary sites of religious practice, far outstretching their efforts in speculative theology and apologetics that have nonetheless also become part of American 34 Amanda Porterfield, The Transformation of American Religion: The Story of a Late Twentieth- Century Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) 16-17, 231; Chas Clifton, “What Has Alexandria to Do with Boston: Some Sources of Modern Pagan Ethics," in Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft, ed. James R. Lewis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) 269-76; Robert C. Fuller, Spiritual But Not Religious: Understanding Unchurched America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) 27-30, 43-44. 44 Paganism. At least since the 1960’s and John Coltrane, the idea of “a vision of music as ritual and of performance as a holy rite” has been an operative theme in countercultural religiosity, and this is certainly true of Paganism as well.35 At times this means that Pagans position music as ‘traditional’ in order to take advantage of the solidifying power of history. Songs and chants with a recent pedigree might be framed in practice as having an ancient heritage, or having been expressed in different forms throughout time. At other times, new musics will incorporate material from older sources so as to create a referential “thread” — a traceable lineage of rhetoric designed to bring to bear both the power of the traditional and the creative impulse of the recently ‘channeled.’36 In traditions that self-consciously attempt to re-create past religions, the words of ancient hymns, translated, might be set to modern melodies in order to make them accessible to a target audience. Or hymns that were recovered from an ancient text might be repositioned in a radically new liturgy to invoke their heritage and add to the contemporary ritual’s power. In most cases Orphic musical poetics, like its Transcendentalist and Romantic predecessors, deliberately seeks to be “religious, physical, passionate, [and] incantatory...the bardic invocation of chant and song.”37 35 David Stowe, How Sweet The Sound: Music In The Spiritual Lives of Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) 19, 25, 66, 71, 58, 79, 225. 36 In terms of modern Pagan witchcraft, this has been referred to as a process termed the “cauldron of inspiration." See Philip Heselton, Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration: An investigation into the Sources of Gardnerian Witchcraft (Somerset, UK: Capall Bann, 2003). 37 Miller, Shapiro, and Slote, Start With The Sun, 4, 170. 45 This Orphic hermeneutic impulse directly attempts to counterpoise a disenchanted, mechanistic view of the world. However, its emphasis on experience and progressive revelation means that it is also opposed to dogmatic religion. As Pierre Hadot, author of The Veil Of Isis: An Essay On The History of Nature puts it, “Orpheus thus penetrates the secrets of nature not through violence but through melody, rhythm, and harmony...the Orphic attitude...is inspired by respect in the face of mystery and disinterestedness...it represents the secrets of nature after the model of the mysteries of Eleusis.”38 Pagan Discourses in the United States It is not sufficient to conflate the concept of the ‘Orphic’ with the term “Paganism” even though ancient polytheistic cultures are commonly referred to with this term. In discourse analysis, the plot is rarely that straightforward. If there is any religious concept that does more cultural work (or carries more cultural baggage, depending on your perspective) than “Pagan,” then one might be hard- pressed to find it.39 In the British context, religious historian Ronald Hutton has uncovered no less than four main “languages” associated in some way with modern Paganism, most of which have American analogues.40 The discursive 38 Pierre Hadot, The Veil Of Isis: An Essay on The Idea of Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006) 96. 39 For a much fuller discussion of this topic see Chas Clifton, Her Hidden Children, 71-79. 40 Ronald Hutton, Triumph Of The Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 46 history of paganism ranges far and wide. There are few connective threads, but a series of overlapping themes emerge when examining major sources. Primitivism, sexuality, ecology and a sense of spiritual ‘questing’ comprise the dominant motifs, all of which are linked to a conception of geography, space and spatial relations. “Paganism,” by the nineteenth century, commonly referred to ancient practices of savage primitivism. While certainly used in this sense throughout Hebrew and Christian early discourses, it became well-known as a moniker for indigenous peoples encountered in colonialist operations in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Yet would-be literary and cultured elites also used this term and associated concepts to refer to the comparatively civilized cultures of ancient Greece and Rome.41 We can also find examples of other discourses, from polemical valorizations by Amerindian nationalists to a powerful Romantic synthesis of ecstasy, nature, and vitalism of life and culture.42 In the United States, the term has exhibited the same multivalency. For example, it has been used in popular and polemic discourse as a referent for almost any sort of behavior. Although the term had been well in use before the 19th century, Hannah Adams’s 1817 discussion is particularly important.43 41 This is even true in ecstatic Christian discourses. See the discussion of “Elysium" and the ‘rapturous joy" of the “emerald gates" in James B. Finley, Autobiography of James B. Finley, edited by W. P. (Cincinnati: Methodist Book Concern, 1854) 375-378. 42 For a fuller discussion of this, see Hutton, Triumph Of The Moon, 3-31. 43 For example, see the uses of the terms “Pagan” and “Christian" in early Puritan blasphemy law. Samuel Green. The General Laws and Liberties of the Massachusets Colony: Revised and Reprinted. Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1672. Available at http://www.loc.qov/exhibits/reliqion/v0006523.ipq. Accessed 03—13-2008. 47 Adams, an early female pioneer in American religious studies, discussed “Pagan” traditions in her work A Dictionary of All Religions as those outside the dominion of monotheistic Abrahamic traditions. Her work further divides “Pagans” along the discursive lines identified by Hutton: “The Greeks and Romans...and the Barbarians, as the Indians of North and South America, and the Negroes of Africa."44 As an object of positive Romantic self-description, the history of “Paganism” as discourse is surely as long. After a particularly rapturous hierophany, Henry David Thoreau (1864) reported an encounter with Other- Than-Human Persons among the Native Americans and woods of Maine: l exulted like "a pagan suckled in a creed" that had never been worn at all, but was bran new, and adequate to the occasion. I let science-slide, and rejoiced in that light as if it had been a fellow creature...A’ scientific explanation, as it is called, would have been altogether out of place there. That is for pale daylight....|t suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer out of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself anyday.----not an empty chamber, in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house,---and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them.45 Even when the term itself was rarely used, it quickly became identified with a poetics of vitalism. Arguably the United States’ most famous poet, Walt Whitman, foreshadowed much of the same devotion to the God/Goddess within 44 Hannah Adams, A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations, 4th ed. (Boston: Cummings and Hillard, 1817) 7-11, 18, 213. In her introduction to the topic, Adams emphasizes the category of ancient and indigenous religions more than the “paganism" of East Asian traditions. 45 Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864) 186. 48 found among contemporary Pagans. ln “Starting at Paumanok” he wrote “was somebody asking to see the soul?...beho|d the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes the soul; Whoever you are, how superb and how divine is your body, or any part of it!” Indeed, Whitman constructs a song of liturgy that would be familiar to any contemporary devotee of telluric spirituality: Lover divine and perfect Comrade Waiting content, invisible yet, but certain, Be thou my God. Or Time and Space Or shape of Earth divine and wondrous, Or some fair shape I viewing, worship, Or lustrous orb of sun or star by night, Be ye my Gods.46 In 1892, Frederick J. Masters used the term to identify the Buddhist temples that had quickly sprung up around Chinese and Japanese immigration in the Western part of the US. These “joss-houses” were often found located near populations of imported East Asian workers and contained ritual areas designed for Confucian, Buddhist, and Taoist worship. They provided spiritual sustenance to the harrowed, oft-abused immigrants who contributed to much of California’s economy and the Western half of the country’s railroad infrastructure, as well as supplying domestic labor to upper middle class families in the area.47 Whereas 46 Walt Whitman, “Gods,” in Leaves of Grass (New York: Penguin Books, 1958) Reprint, 5-6. 47 Frederick J. Masters, "Pagan Temples in San Francisco," The Californian 2:6 (November 1892): 727-41. 49 the immigrants themselves were often denigrated and subject to repeated violence, Masters’ article is surprisingly favorable in tone. Transcendentalists such as Whitman and Thoreau eagerly embraced “The Light of Asia” for their own purposes, but the entry of Amerindian voices would see a more disjunctive reacfion. Just a few decades later after Whitman, in writing about her experiences in the West, Gertrude Bonnin, better known as the Sioux activist and author Zitkala-Sha, published an essay in the December 1902 issue of the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Why I Am a Pagan.” My heart and I lie small upon the earth like a grain of throbbing sand. Drifting clouds and tinkling waters, together with the warmth of a genial summer day, bespeak with eloquence the loving Mystery round about us Here the Stone-Boy, of whom the American aborigine tells, frolics about, shooting his baby arrows and shouting aloud with glee...Yellow Breast, swaying upon the slender stem of a wild sunflower, warbles a sweet assurance... then again he yields himself to his song of joy...if this is Paganism, then at present, I am a Pagan.48 While Zitkala-Sha remains outside the literary canon of American intellectual history, her Earth-embracing polemic is perfectly at home with D.H. Lawrence’s keen sense of place-specific religiosity, polytheism and indigenous traditions. While modernist critics rightly speak of authors such as DH. Lawrence and Malraux as “Heirs To Dionysus,” it is equally important to pay attention to the 48 Zitkala-Sha, “Why I Am a Pagan," Atlantic Monthly 90 (December 1902): 801-803. 50 specific context in which this geo-sacred vitalism and indigeneity is expressed. Lawrence, ostensibly known as a British author, wrote both a novel known as The Plumed Serpent and an extended non-fiction essay, Apocalypse, after years of living abroad in both the United States and Mexico. Lawrence’s attunement towards sacred Places and Persons comes through vividly in the fictional character of Don Rambn, a native of Mexico who builds a new religion and a following proclaiming the return of the ‘plumed serpent’ god Quetzalcoatl. Ramon proclaims that he would like to be: ...one of the Initiates of the Earth...So if I want the Mexicans to learn the name of Quetzacoatl, it is because I want them to speak with the tongues of their own blood. i wish the Teutonic world would once more think in terms of Thor and Wotan, and the tree lgdrasil. And I wish that the Druidic world would see, honestly, that in the mistletoe is their mystery, and that they themselves are the Tuatha De Danaan, alive, but submerged...then the Earth might rejoice, when the First Lords of the West met the First Lords of the South and East, in the Valley of the Soul.49 But Lawrence does not stop in telling us Don Rambn’s dream. Rather, he took entire chapters to construct a liturgy of such worship, including a basic service and a marriage ritual to the main heroine of the novel. Quetzalcoatl emerges as a psychopomp from the darkness and ‘alien-ness’ of Christianity to . once again seek dominion over his native Mexico. The Lord of the Morning Star 49 DH Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) Reprint 1992, 246-7. 51 Stood between the day and the night: As a bird that lifts its wings and stands With the bright wing on the right And the wing of the dark of the left The Dawn Star stood in sight. Lo! I am always here! Far in the hollow of space I brush the wing of the day And put light on your face. The other wing brushes the dark. But I, I am always in place.50 Most tellingly, the reading of such hymns is often deliberately sung and set to a drumbeat, emphasizing the liturgical quality of Lawrence’s hymns. Similar to esoteric novels in the Pagan tradition (such as Dion Fortune’s 1938 The Sea Priestess) Lawrence seems to be giving us a religious liturgy through the practice of literature.51 Whether discussing Whitman’s “songs” to himself, and innate divinity, or his and Lawrence’s paean to the suns and stars in the sky, or Zitkala-Sha’s recognition of Yellow-Breast’s ecstatic praise of the natural world, it is clear that far before organized, practicing ritual Pagans emerge in a religious context of the 20m century United States, there was already widely available a poetic language of ecstatic, transformational religiosity. This language was encoded in song, drawing sacred power from experiences of devotion. The subjects of such 50 lbid., 176-177. Lawrence makes great poetic use of the common identification of Quetzacoatl with Venus, the ‘morning star,‘ and its cosmological role as experienced by humans. 51 This is yet another reason I am suspicious of distinguishing between “literary paganism" and “religious Paganism." The practice of ‘literary liturgies,’ especially in areas such as the UK where legal restrictions against witchcraft were in effect for hundreds of years, suggests that the literary mode may be one of the few ways in which some religiosities can be expressed. It is no less ‘religious’ for that reason. 52 devotion were discrete Other-than human persons made manifest in natural phenomena. Just before the arrival of the Beat generation on the cultural radar of the Cold War, the range of cultural anchors for this ecstatic diffused spirituality only increased. In 1948, Nat King Cole had a #1 chart with “Nature Boy,” the story of a magical enchanted lad who travels over land and sea dispensing historical insight and the wisdom of love, a theme later repeated in other similar songs. In Jack Kerouac’s 1951 On The Road, the travelers encounter the ”occasional Nature Boy saint in beard and sandals,” this elevating Cole’s magical wanderer to a type of religious mendicant. In New Orleans, home of voodoo queen Marie Laveau and rituals to African Gods on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, Kerouac finds William S. Burroughs reading Mayan codices. Of the patron saint of beat consciousness, Dean Moriarity (Neal Cassidy), Kerouac describes him at length as the would-be “pagan mayor of San Francisco.” In one of the most famous portions of the novel, Dean joins Kerouac’s alter-ego, Sal Paradise, in ecstatic revelries of jazz tenormen who had “it.” The tumultuous screams, crashing drums, “rockin and roaring” culminate in a revival and Awakening no less in powerful, it smaller in scope and different in tenor (no pun intended), than the Cane Ridge revivals and Charles G. Finney’s preaching of the early 19th century.52 Even in (and perhaps because of) a country dominated institutionally by a Cold War culture of containment and conformity, 5’2 Jack Kerouac, On The Road (1957; repr. New York: Penguin Press, 2003) 87, 176. 53 this Orphic discourse sings of ecstasy, immediacy, mobility, and the organic embrace of telluric Power and sanctified Life. In recognizing a broad language of “Paganism” encoded in song, I speak not specifically of Yellow-Breast ‘s cries or of any of the sacred Persons encountered by Zitkala-Sha. Rather, it is a song-language of the Western imagination, both popular and classical, that has endeavored to construct images of the “pagan,”——the outsider, the rebel, the libertine. Just as institutional religious leaders and early religion scholars worked to denigrate, deconstruct, and convert those they identified as Pagans in the American landscape, so too has this song- language served as an inspirational sermon in defense of these outsider values. In some cases these cultural images encoded within verse and song have even served as models for spiritual inspiration, especially for those who have come to religiously identify as Pagans in the 20th century. Because they are almost ubiquitous in the history of American popular music, these imagos serve as an excellent starting point to engage the development of discursive ‘paganism’ in the American sociocultural landscape. The ‘Orphic’ impulse goes beyond simply those who would choose to take up the religious mantle of “paganism.” This same cultural impulse fed the modes of thinking and action that helped create and sustain this ongoing religious inquiry. This is a context that must not be ignored in any larger examination of Pagan religious music-—-for American Pagans, no less than others, inhabit and inherit this larger intellectual landscape (and soundscape). 54 Pagan Love and Primitivist Fear Zitkala-Sha’s fierce stand provoked the kind of reaction indigenous assertions of power and autonomy often do. Fear of the “Other” became as linked with “Paganism” as much as alluring exoticism. Nowhere was this truer than in popular fears over the cultural influence of jazz music. African-American ” H culture in particular has long been suffused with “conjure, rootwork,” and the heritage of the slave-era “invisible institution.” Equally so, it has historically been the source of much fear and panic among conservative whites. Perhaps it is then no surprise that primitivist images, barbarism, sensuality, bolshevism, and paganism have all too often all invoked in discussing jazz music. “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?" was the title of a influential 1921 article in Ladies Home Journal by author Anne Shaw Faulkner. Faulkner cautioned that jazz does not inspire deeds of “martial courage.” Nor can it be said to lead to “contentment or serenity.” Rather, jazz “disorganizes all regular laws and order; it stimulates to extreme deeds, to a breaking away from all rules and conventions; it is harmful and dangerous, and its influence is wholly bad.” Not surprisingly, this “wholly bad” influence originated within “Negro” paganism, and Faulkner’s framing ofjazz as primitivist paganism is worth quoting at length: Jazz originally was the accompaniment of the voodoo dancer, stimulating the half-crazed barbarian to the vilest deeds. The weird chant, accompanied by the syncopated rhythm of the voodoo invokers, has also been employed by other barbaric people to 55 stimulate brutality and sensuality. That it has a demoralizing effect upon the human brain has been demonstrated by many scientists.53 Within the history of visual representations of black music, primitivist associations are no less common, nor less popular. Louis Armstrong would appropriate the fusion of Orphic transgressive danger: blackness, satanism, and jazz (complete with devil horns and trumpet) in Vincente Minnelli’s 1943 film Cabin In The Sky, an Academy-Award nominated film. Paganism demonstrated its discursive multivalency throughout the early 20th century. Three years after Lawrence’s publication of The Plumed Serpent, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer copyrighted a song co-written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown. Written for a motion picture called The Pagan, this piece, known as “Pagan Love Song,” quickly became a standard. Not only was it used also in a 1950 Esther Williams film by the same name, but it was covered by Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters, Chet Atkins and countless others. The iconography associated with the song ranges across the entire gamut of “exotic” cultural representations. Accompanying the 1950 film’s release, MGM released a 10” LP that reflected the happy, idyllic Tahitian environment of ‘barbarism-lite.’ [Figure 1] This served as both a welcome escape from the atomic fears and ideological containment of the early Cold War, while unlike the Beats, presenting Orphic power in as non-threatening a manner as possible. 53 Anne Shaw Faulkner, “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation?" The Ladies Home Journal 38, no. 8 (August 1921): 16-34. In this case I use the term ‘paganism’ in lower case to convey Faulkner’s sense of alarm. It would be inaccurate to suggest Faulkner thought of “paganism" as a legitimate cultural impulse, religious or othen/vise- 56 Figure 1: Soundtrack cover to MGM’s Pagan Love Song, 1950 As would be expected of a “pagan” environment, the entire island is alive with music, as the natural sea breeze becomes the orchestra for the occupant of a “House of Singing Bamboo.” In a world that has forgotten how to dream within the banalities of post-War existence, the glamour of ideal life can be had, it only for a moment, sailing on a “Sea of the Moon.” While the original soundtrack limited itself to the referents in the film, a 1959 Liberty LP release of Pagan Love Song, (an album of island music by Billy Ward and his orchestra) kept no such boundaries. With drawings of a Buddhist statue on its upper left, the Taj Mahal on its lower left (complete with stylized dancing female), the rest of the front cover was taken up by a large yellow orchid and a rattan background, with the title prominently displayed.54 An impressive marriage of the “mood music” and 54 Billy Ward and The Dominoes, Pagan Love Song, Liberty Records LST-7113, 1959. 57 “tourism music” phenomena of the American 1950’s, Ward’s album fits right in with other such popular works such as the 101St Strings Hawaiian Paradise, while taking advantage of the exotic motif to include Hindu and Buddhist material, making this truly an album of “foreign mood music.” Taking stock of the titular song’s lyrics, it is clear that in the 1950’s the music (and associated movie) served simultaneously as a ‘replacement product’ for the experience of the actual locale(s). lts popularity, alongside other such musical forms, suggests that it also served as a temporary romantic escape for Americans in the midst of the Cold War: Where the golden sun beams, And the lazy land dreams, All the happy years thru... Come with me where moon beams light Tahitian skies, And the star-lit waters linger in your eyes, Native hills are calling, to them we belong.55 While other films presenting Paganism often made a clear plot device out of conflicts with Christianity (whether historical or contemporary), no such tension exists in the popular Esther Williams film or the soundtrack that would become so well known. Even later, some would come to embrace a previously discarded sense of the “primitive,” especially in the Black community. In fact, many religious aspects of African-American culture have been derived from African or creolized ancestry, and transmuted into the ecstatic communion of Protestant Christian 55 Freed, Arthur and Nacio Herb Brown, “Pagan Love Song. As sung by Ramon Navarro in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Picture ‘The Pagan’," Sheet Music, (New York: Robbins Music Corporation, 1929); For a more complete discussion of the mood music and tourism music phenomenon, see Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy Listening, and Other Moodsong (New York: Picador USA, 1994). 58 worship. Albert Murray, in 1976’s Stomping The Blues, contended that Sunday morning worship and its associated sociocultural stability, so important in African- American Christianity, have in fact falsely characterized the meaning and value of jazz and blues music for Black peoples. Many pastors during the ‘Sunday Morning Service’ may have indeed criticized jazz in terms consistent with Anne Faulkner’s views. But for Murray, there is an equal necessity for the oppositional, Dionysian impulse---what he terms the “Saturday Night Function.” Far from simply recapitulating and wallowing in victimhood, the bluesman’s social function is to generate merriment, and even more important, telluric ecstasy. In this characterization, the dance hall becomes a “temple,” the dancing itself “ceremonial” and “sacramental.” The combined music and dancing are for Murray a “Dionysian” revelry that insulates and vitalizes the community in the face of hardship. This is not the primitivism of the ‘voodoo orgy,” though, nor an instance of ecstatic trance. Rather, Murray’s “blues-idiom” is marked most of all by its controlled, ritualized spontaneity. In this vision of jazz, Louis Armstrong is not the satanic piper stimulating young people to excess, brutality and sensuality, but rather a “Promethean Culture Hero,” a high priest of “percussive incantation, purification and fertility rituals, and ceremonies of affirmation.” Duke Ellington, perhaps one of Armstrong’s few equals in jazz history, becomes the musical equivalent of “Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Twain, Hemingway, and Faulkner” in literature, communicating the “texture and vitality” of American life into first-rate cultural expression.56 56 Albert Murray, Stomping The Blues (New York: Vintage Books, 1976) 24-27, 30, 230, 224. 59 Within an intellectual history of “Paganism,” it is no surprise to find the vitality of Emerson and Whitman mentioned in connection with jazz, just as we see the same Orphic impulse permeating both Whitman’s poetry and Kerouac’s prose. And perhaps even within the work of Hemingway, known to have created his own syncretic animistic religion in the wilds of a Kenyan safari in his last unpublished work, True At First Light. The Serpentine Orphic : Sensual Naturism in Anglophone Contexts Sensual naturism has been a common identifier in portrayals of literary and musical Paganism, with newer instances echoing older themes in EuroAmerican literature. Severin von Kusiemski, the protagonist of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novel within a novel, Venus In Furs, (1870) finds himself mesmerized by Titian’s painting Venus With Mirror (ca. 555). Severin contracts with Wanda von Dunajew, a baroness, to be her erotic slave in a spirit of Dionysian revelry. I regard the cheerful sensuality of the Hellenes- a joy without pain —as an idea that I strive for in my own life. For I don’t believe in the love that is preached by Christianity, by the moderns, by the knights of the spirit. Yes, just take a look at me: I’m far worse than a heretic, I’m a pagan!57 57 Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs, translated by Joachi Neugroschel (New York: Penguin Books, 2000). 60 Sacher-Masoch’s novel was famous for coining the concept of sexual masochism and submission as erotic adventure. Moreover, Severin’s relationship with Wanda is premised on their Epicurean ethic of ‘paganism’-——their mutual rejection of cultural Christianity and its alleged hatred of earthly sensuality. The sensual animal and plant world have been inspiration for geosacral impulses throughout the 20th century. Ecstatic dance, musical rapture, and feral prayer surround a climactic scene in John Steinbeck’s 1933 novel To A God Unknown. Steinbeck’s protagonist, Joseph Wayne, builds an encampment around a tree in the West, which receives ritual offerings, musical dance and libations of wine.58 Joseph believes the spirit of his deceased father inhabits the tree, and that his ritual connections to it constitute a powerful prayer by means of which the land revitalizes itself. Joseph’s actions are denounced as “paganism” and “devil-worship” by both his brother and a local Roman Catholic priest, but Joseph’s kinship ties in this material world are not at persuasive as his spiritual energetics. Themes of mysterious power and sublime beauty were by no means bound to 1930’s or 1950’s portrayals of Paganism. In the 1960’s the naturalist Edward Abbey would see sensuality and violence in the coded mating dances of snakes, gopher snakes on his veranda, to be exact. “Like a living caduceus” the snakes intertwined in a way that suggested more than just mundane processes at work. 58 Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston (Berkeley, CA: Banyan Tree Books, 1975), Reprint 1990, 58; John Steinbeck, To A God Unknown (New York: Robert O. Ballou, 1933) Reprint 2000, 89-91, 116. 61 lnvisible but tangible as music is the passion which joins them —sexual, combative, or both...turn like mirror images of each other and glide back again, wind and unwind again....l will feel their presence watching over me like totemic deities...maintaining useful connections with the primeval.59 As late as 1967, the debut album of the rock power trio Cream, Disraeli Gears, combined the fecund pastoralism of exotic femininity with a metaphorical ground in the poetics of ancient Greece: And you see a girl's brown body dancing through the turquoise, And her footprints make you follow where the sky loves the sea. And when your fingers find her, she drowns you in her body, ...And you want to take her with you to the hard land of the winter. Her name is Aphrodite and she rides a crimson shell.60 In 1969, just two years later, two records of great influence emerged in American popular music. David Crosby released “Guinevere,” a soft overdubbed guitar ballad on Crosby, Stills, Nash’s eponymous debut album. The mood piece evoked a new set of poetic metaphors that would become common for contemporary Pagans—the Arthurian mythos: Guinevere drew pentagrams Like yours, m'lady like yours Late at night, when she thought that no one was watching at all61 59 Edward Abbey, “The Serpents of Paradise," in The Portable Sixties Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 2003) 579-580. The caduceus, of course, is classically associated with psychopomp figures such as Hermes. 60 Cream, “Tales of Brave Ulysses," Disraeli Gears. 62 As might be expected from the influence of British rock and roll in the 1960’s, along with the experimental impulse of the times, American rockers felt as free to adopt and play with British cultural material as the British did with ancient Homer. Along with occult references to pentagrams, sensual beauty and seaside walks, the field of paganism was populated with “Moonchild,” a track on the gold- certified (in the US.) album In The Court of the Crimson King (an observation by King Crimson), by the British progressive rock group King Crimson. Rather than being identified with the Sea, the protagonist is instead found “waving silver wands” among trees, rivers, fountains, flowers and gardens. Most tellingly, she evokes the Druidic past of Britain by “dropping circle stones on a sundial” while “waiting for a smile from a sun child.” Interested listeners, probing deeper, may have found that the term “Moonchild” had a deeper history in modern Pagan witchcraft, while also serving as the title of famed British occultist Aleister Crowley's 1929 novel of white and black magic in the years leading up to World War I in Europe. In the literary counterculture of the 1970’s, connections with the primeval through passion and music remained a powerful and prominent theme. Ernest Callenbach published Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston in 1975. The novel became a manifesto for environmental activists and New Age practitioners from Fritjof Capra to Ralph Nader, selling over 1 million copies and inspiring sequels. Set in the near future, the novel tells the story of William 61 Crosby, Stills and Nash, “Guinevere," Crosby, Stills and Nash, Atlantic Records 822969, 1969. 63 Weston, a newspaper reporter sent on a mission to document socioeconomic patterns of the republic of Ecotopia, formerly known as the western and northwestern coast of the United States. Although the word “paganism” is never used in the novel (its absence may be telling, in fact) there are constant ad hoc ceremonies of tree-worship and shrine building among Ecotopia’s inhabitants, whether at work or play. A “strong dance beat” characterizes all Ecotopian music and rarely is music played without dancing. Weston himself becomes more and more drawn to the ways and practices of Ecotopia, especially through an erotic affair with an Ecotopian named Marissa Brightcloud. At first incredulous at finding “a goddamn druid or something—a tree-worshipper!” Weston is soon drawn towards the political economy and lifeways of the Ecotopians through the door of sensual naturism. Less than a decade later, Canadian pop artist Gino Vanelli would score a hit with the album A Pauper in Paradise and its soft rock slow dance favorite, “Valleys of Valhalla.” Vanelli laments his unsanctified yet burning ‘pagan sou/,’ desperate for sexual companionship and a “holocaust of Iove” on a “cold Norwegian night.”62 Alice Walker’s Buddhist yet telluric embrace of earthly sensuality names and claims this label for itself as well: Pagan. I laugh to see This was our religion all along. Hidden Even from ourselves 62 Gino Vannelli, “Valleys of Valhalla," A Pauper In Paradise, A&M Records 4664, 1978. 64 Taught Early Not to touch The earth.63 Walker’s combination of playful laughter, chthonic discovery and nod towards the image of “promiscuity” echo several different intertwining themes of radical innocence, recovery and coming home, common existential tropes found in musical stories Pagans tell about themselves, as we shall see. The Orphic Pan In a narrow, academic sense the early 20th century cultural matrix of Paganism and identity is often viewed as part and parcel of the rise of literary modernism. Both T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos make significant use of pagan themes from both ‘primitive’ fertility cults and the legendary, if speculative, rites of Eleusis from ancient Greece. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and its reduction of Christianity to simply another form of Osiris worship, were merely the latest phase of an effort in late Enlightenment intellectual history to de-emphasize the uniqueness of the Christian tradition, and therefore reduce its narrative (and political) power.64 But this ‘resurrection’ of pagan thematics was not confined to the rarefied literature of American 63 Alice Walker, “Pagan," in Her Blue Body Everything We Know (New York: Harcourt Inc, 2003) 420-421. 64For a discussion of this intellectual process in the English- speaking world and its influence in occult history, see Jocelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 65 modernism. A language of romantic connotation pervades both early and late 19th century popular literary figures in Britain. From Keats and Wordsworth to Thomas Hardy, the lyricism and playful ritual of ‘Teutonic rites’ grew into a chorus of aggressive opposition to banal realism.65 In particular, the Romantic period features the rebirth of the god Pan. Hutton has correctly analyzed Pan's appearance in literature at this time as the “personification and guardian of the English countryside.”66 In early 20th century British literature, Paganism and music shared a common expression--the god Pan. Pan was the Romantic personification of the British countryside, and his Pan Pipes were heralded as the very call of wildness and Nature herself. One of the most salient and enduring examples of this can be seen in Kenneth Grahame's beloved Anglophone children's novel Wind In The Willows. Set around four main animal characters, Rat, Mole, Toad and Badger, the novel is a series of vignettes, many of which contain highly coded magical, herbalistic and religious language. One of the feared areas in the book, the Wild Woods, requires outsiders to have knowledge of "passwords, and signs, and sayings which have power and effect, and plants you carry in your pocket and "67 verses you repeat. Mole's old abandoned home at one point pleads, conjures, and whispers to him, such that he "dared not tarry long within their magic circle." 65 Hutton, Triumph of The Moon, 27. 66 lbid., 44. 67 Kenneth Grahame, The Wind In The Willows (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909) 68. 66 Even as field mice singing Christmas carols characterize a touching midplot scene, the very soul of Nature itself is revealed as "a true Goddess, a mother of solace and comfort."68 Rather than the appearance of cultural Christmas, it is the appearance of Pan that presents the most striking musical hierophany. Pan's appearance takes place entirely in a single chapter, and yet frames the entire novel. In "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn," Rat and Mole set out to locate a young missing otter child, lost in the woods. Exploring in Mole’s small boat during the overnight hours, the wind brings them an intense deliberate call, "so beautiful and strange and new!" As they explore the river further and reach a hidden island, it is clear that they are hearing piper music calling for them. Grahame calls Pan's music "this divine thing..a liquid [breaking] on him like a wave. Veiled by underbrush, the heroes realize they are in the presence of the Divine mediated by music. "This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me," whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. "Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!" Rat and Mole experience the classic mysterium tremendum et facinans that characterizes a hierophany, a irruption of divine Power and Presence— setting themselves a quaking with both fear and awe. They find themselves looking directly into the fiery glowing presence of Pan as the Sun disc rises, complete with the baby otter safely snuggled underfoot. Both crouch to the Earth and worship Him. With the rescue of the otter-child, Pan casts a spell of "dance music" on the group by playing the wind through the reeds as they leave the 68 lbid., 117,267. 67 island and drift off to sleep. Lest the awe should dwell And turn your frolic to fret You shall look upon my power at the helping hour But then you shall forget! Lest limbs be reddened and rent I spring the trap that is set As I loose the snare you may glimpse me there For surely you shall forget! Helper and healer l cheer Small waifs in the woodland wet Strays I find in it Wounds l bind in it Bidding them all forget!69 In fact, the wind is not a major character in The Wind In The Willows, it is only mentioned a few times, and then mostly in memory or hypothetical terms. The major exception is in the chapter on Pan, where it functions as the carrier of music and magic. While some analysts have seen "The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" as an anachronistic chapter in the work, Grahame's highly selective use of the narrative vehicle for magic and music as the title of the entire work suggests instead that this is the central narrative moment from which his use of magical and "faery" language proceeds. The Wind In The Willows proved very successful, and not just in Great Britain. President Theodore Roosevelt was a fan of the book and portions of it ”9 lbid. 182, 188; Compare this with excerpt from Wind In The Willows and the discussion of the ‘Homeric Hymn To Pan’ written by Morning Glory Zell, "PAN," Green Egg: A Journal of the Awakening Earth 27, no. 104 (Beltaine 1994): 12-13, 49. Morning Glory's husband, Otter G‘Zell (later Oberon Zell-Ravenheart), created an altar figure of the "Piper At The Gates Of Dawn," approximately 6 and a half inches tall, out of brown hydrostone. The item is advertised for sale in the same journal issue on page 49. Pan's pipes are prominently displayed. 68 were adapted as a play by AA. Milne. Even Walt Disney and Rankin/Bass adopted portions of it for film later in the 20'h century. But it has proved multivalent in its appeal to countercultural elements as well. The legendary rock group Pink Floyd‘s psychedelic first album (highly influential on both sides of the Atlantic) was named Piper At The Gates Of Dawn after Pan's appearance in Willows, and even in the 1990's rock artist Van Morrison also paid homage to that specific chapter. Decades later we still find this theme of nature worship expressed through metaphorical and metonymical reference. “Bread and Fishes” was a song written in the 1960’s by Alan Bell and popularized by many folk music groups, including Blackmore‘s Night, the Renaissance-inspired music group headed by former Deep Purple and Rainbow guitarist Richie Blackmore. “Bread and Fishes” is, as its imagery might suggest, a Christian folk song that presents the human triumvirate of Joseph, Mary and Jesus traveling over the pastoral English countryside testifying to Christianity. Like Wind In The Willows, “Bread and Fishes” combines traveling, friendship and ethereal joy in a pastoral setting. But in the hands of Blackmore’s Night, the overtly Christian elements are removed and replaced by an unknown trio who speak with a mystical perennialism common to the Renaissance milieu: Bread and Fishes7o Wind In The Willows71 70 Alan Bell, “Bread and Fishes,” The Definitive Collection, Greentrax, 2005. 71 Blackmore’s Night, “Wind In The Willows," Undera Violet Moon, Steamhammer/SPV, 1999. The lead vocalist, Candice Night, has been featured in Pagan magazines, and sings the verse 69 I asked them to tell me So I asked them to tell me their name and their race their names and their race 80 I might remember So I could remember their kindness and grace Each smile on their face My name is Joseph Our names they mean nothing This is Mary my wife They change throughout time And this is our young son So come sit beside us Our pride and delight And share in our wine Most telling is that Blackmore’s Night kept other mentions of monotheism in the song from the Christian version. To most, this might seem on the surface to simply be another reference to Christianity. Within the intertextual field of Pagan romanticism and Kenneth Grahame’s novel, this statement concerning divinity takes on another layer entirely. The one god who actually appears beside the Goddess Nature in Grahame’s novel is Pan, referred to the capital case as “Him.” Moreover, by the time that Grahame was writing Wind In The Willows, other authors had firmly established Pan as the God of Nature writ large.72 As Hutton notes, “Pantheism had become Pan-theism." In this coded context of mystical perennialism and pastoralism, the listener familiar with the appropriate cultural coding may hear a message quite different from the one that Alan Bell identifying the three persons as timeless prophetic figures (“Our names mean nothing, they change throughout time, so come sit beside us and share in our wine." 72 As did Grahame himself. See “The Rural Pan," Pagan Papers (London: John Lane The Bodley Head Limited, 1898) 65-71. Other Pagans, seeing a confluence between the power of Pan and blues music, have rewritten the common folktale of Robert Johnson's meeting of the Devil at the crossroads as a meeting with Pan instead. In this version, Johnson, through his Christian paradigm, insists Pan is “the Devil,” even though Pan denies it vehemently to the end. See Gareth Bloodwine, "Can't Hardly Keep From Cryin,"' Green Egg: A Journal of the Awakening Earth 28, no. 109 (Summer 1995): 16-19, 60. This story was also reprinted later that year in another Pagan journal aimed at issues of men and masculinities. See The Green Man 7 (AutumnNVinter 1995): 16-20. 70 intended.73 Orphic Paganism meets the Questing Mythos In the American context, a dominant trend regarding experimental literature develops in the mid 1950’s and into the 1960’s. Institutional forms of traditional white American religious expression were called into question, and instead American literature developed a questing mythos for ecstatic expression. “Belief” in static principles was de-emphasized, and instead the literature called for a belief (and practice) in personal questing, often collecting elements of non- traditional religious expression that dovetail with gnostic, Buddhist, or even pagan sensibilities. Often these elements of ‘personal questing’ reinforced themes in the American cultural imaginary that had found primary expression in the telluric pantheism of 19th century authors such as Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman, rather than the cultural ethnopaganism of DH. Lawrence. Charles Olson is perhaps the earliest postwar example of this trend, especially in his work of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Olson authored a number of ‘hymn’ poems, including “Hymn to Proserpine,” “Hymn to the Word,” and “A Newly Discovered Homeric Hymn.” In the last example, Olson was known for framing odes to immanence, animism, apotheosis, and celebration of radical connectivity and co-identity with other forms of Earthly life, from grasses to animals. Olson also celebrates a recurring almost seasonal death and rebirth as 73 Hutton, Triumph Of The Moon. 45. 71 a pagan form of “resurrection,” adopting Christian language to fertility worship (including the Venus of Willendorf) in much the same way Steinbeck does in the prewar To A God Unknown, and even further.74 Just as 19th century English pastoral literature did, this 20th century ‘questing’ reinstates the possibility of belief, specifically in explorative belief beyond the conventional categories of Protestant, Catholic, and Jew. Another Olson-era writer, Jack Spicer, delved further directly into Gnostic ecstasy. Spicer was adamant about his theory of writing by dictation. He believed himself a "radio," picking up signals from the "invisible world," and indeed he sometimes joked that his poetry was really written by "Martians." Spicer, in After Lorca, wrote to the Spanish dramatist, musician and poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the reader that dead men write to one another by words. These words then become ‘objects’ upon discovery— Spicer called this "correspondence." While there is no evidence to suggest that Spicer was an active practitioner of occultism, there is an uncanny resonance between Spicer's notions of "correspondence" and the Spiritualist practice of "channeling"--both of which are found in other works of the time, such as Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Moreover, Spicer drew on Kabbalistic material for his poetic work, including a collaborative effort with Fran Herndon, published in "The Heads of the Town up to the Aether," and "Golem"---both titles with occult overtones. Spicer's 74 See Charles Olson, “Hymn To The Word," The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the Maximus Poems, edited by George F. Butterick (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) 8-9. Olson scholars debate the role and significance of pagan themes in his work. I would argue that it is consistent with a process relationship between the world and the Divine, as expressed by Alfred North Whitehead, one of Olson’s major sources in his larger corpus and the father of modern process theology. 72 ESP experiments (also based in an ontology of occult correspondence between embodied and disembodied minds) are well known. Spicer ends After Lorca by releasing this literary relationship to a "disembodied" Lorca, but not before invoking his own actions in the name of the beliefs of William Butler Yeats and Blake, two well known modern Gnostics with roots in occult magical practice and sexual Christianity respectively.75 Certainly Yeats, as a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, would have been, like Crosby’s “Guinevere,” more than familiar with ‘drawing pentagrams.’ Perhaps the most extensive exploration of this questing mindset comes in work by Jack Kerouac, discussed earlier. In Kerouac’s most famous novel, On The Road, the quintessential expression of somatic religiosity is that of bebop jazz, which is disclosure of the living experience of immanent glamour in the world. Kerouac’s protagonists are on a quest to bring immanent ecstatic glamour in to the world and chase its manifestations, especially in the forms of sex and jazz. It is not a quest for belief, so much as a quest for ecstatic embodied experience, a quest that converges with the characteristics of “Paganism” as discussed in the introduction. Nonetheless Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise are fully and explicitly convinced of God’s existence, even if it is not a traditional “God” in the classical theistic sense. Environmental nudism/blending is prevalent as a form of playful communing, whether in Amerindian ruins, or in the Mexican jungle. Drug use in the novel is aimed toward this end. Kerouac deliberately invokes indigenous 75 Jack Spicer, After Lorca (San Francisco: White Rabbit Press, 1995). 73 energies and non-Christian cultural themes as guideposts and anchors, such as Aztec/Buddhist fantasies in Mexico, and lectures the reader as to how much the Earth is an Indian sacred space. Moreover, his protagonists associate ecstatic realization of immanent power through accretion of countercultural religious and social themes. Various people are known by labels such as the "children of the earth," and "child of the rainbow," thus indicating a nature relation/religion as a marker of identity, in much the same way 19th century Transcendentalism did alongside Nat King Cole in the 1940’s. Fittingly, Kerouac cements his homage to protean ecstasy and outsider narrative by invoking the famous countercultural author Rabelais, a connection that other 20lh century Pagans such as Aleister Crowley will make as well. This descent from common intellectual ancestry and spiritual isomorphism of questing makes Kerouac a significant figure in Orphic intellectual history. Conclusion: Landscapes as Orphic power source The Irish-born author Edna O'Brien's A Pagan Place was published in 1970. It is among the Los Angeles Times’s Book Prize winner's lesser-known works, which also include The Country Girls, Down By The River, and House of Splendid Isolation. Like her earliest works, A Pagan Place is essentially a cultural snapshot of Ireland as experienced by a young woman, in this case a girl who later becomes a nun and reflects on her coming-of—age experiences. The novel is told entirely in the second person, and spends most of its first 74 half constructing the atmosphere of rural WWII-era Ireland. Even well into the modern age, the novel's unnamed protagonist experiences the full wonder and terror of such an ancient land. While she struggles with Nature and the tasks and trials that necessarily befall a rural agricultural community, it is the return of the repressed natural and ecstatic world that most fully characterizes her life. From the first pages of the novel, the narrator fears and regards the dead as being present among the living.76 The legacy of the long-dead Druids is left in groves of ’dark trees," and in the witchery of the local cure-woman, who heals the protagonist's father with ointments and has "wraiths" of smoke always bellowing from her chimney. Feral, dangerous sexuality lies always in wait just below the surface, whether it’s from a household farm worker, or a young hooligan in the city, or even the local priesthood. The future nun can't help but periodically use her own dolls as masturbation tools, though she, like all her neighbors, is ravaged and consumed by guilt for their moral weaknesses. The central paradox of the novel--the deep cultural Catholicity of Ireland amongst its continually resurgent, ubiquitous pagan heritage form the context of a terrible series of struggles and tragedies for the family at the center of the work, most notably the unplanned pregnancy of the family's older daughter and her child's subsequent birth. But by the end of the novel, when its protagonist takes up the mantle of ordained sisterhood, we see not only O'Brien's concern for Ireland, but for the Catholicity of others as well. Mother Baptista's admonition to the schoolchildren to join the Church and bring "the opportunity of being militant 76 Compare this view of the dead with Charles Olson, "A Newly Discovered ‘-Homeric’ Hymn“ Selected Poems, edited by Robert Creeley. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 62- 63. 75 half constructing the atmosphere of rural WWII—era Ireland. Even well into the modern age, the novel's unnamed protagonist experiences the full wonder and terror of such an ancient land. While she struggles with Nature and the tasks and trials that necessarily befall a rural agricultural community, it is the return of the repressed natural and ecstatic world that most fully characterizes her life. From the first pages of the novel, the narrator fears and regards the dead as being present among the living.76 The legacy of the long-dead Druids is left in groves of 'dark trees," and in the witchery of the local cure-woman, who heals the protagonist's father with ointments and has "wraiths" of smoke always bellowing from her chimney. Feral, dangerous sexuality lies always in wait just below the surface, whether it’s from a household farm worker, or a young hooligan in the city, or even the local priesthood. The future nun can't help but periodically use her own dolls as masturbation tools, though she, like all her neighbors, is ravaged and consumed by guilt for their moral weaknesses. The central paradox of the novel--the deep cultural Catholicity of Ireland amongst its continually resurgent, ubiquitous pagan heritage form the context of a terrible series of struggles and tragedies for the family at the center of the work, most notably the unplanned pregnancy of the family's older daughter and her child's subsequent birth. But by the end of the novel, when its protagonist takes up the mantle of ordained sisterhood, we see not only O'Brien's concern for Ireland, but for the Catholicity of others as well. Mother Baptista's admonition to the schoolchildren to join the Church and bring "the opportunity of being militant 76 Compare this view of the dead with Charles Olson, “A Newly Discovered *Homeric‘ Hymn" Selected Poems, edited by Robert Creeley. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 62- 63. 75 for Christ...bringing pagans the happiness he merited for them" rings ironic, as there seems to be no happiness to be found in Ireland.77 Years later, in the summer of 1983, Mike Scott, who claims never to have read O'Brien's novel, nonetheless testified to his own magical entanglement between the landscapes of music and lyrics and the landscape of Ayr, Scotland. "A Pagan Place" was written on an overnight train between London and Ayr. Scott's questions Christian missionizing in an urgent tone: How did he come here? Who gave him the key? Slipped in his hand So secretly Who put the colour Like lines on his face And brought him here To a pagan place?78 The song goes on to question why the unnamed arrival shot arrows tipped with "poison" into the culture of the local population. The audio production relies heavily on both vocal and instrumental reverberation, suggesting the deliberate creation of an echo space for the tune’s narrative. Moreover, the song invokes the theme of unending revelation, and asks listeners “to look into his face,” and see "the Heart of Man in a Pagan place," thus positing an essential connection between the quintessence of humanity and the paganism of the natural environment. The album’s theme strengthens further with the addition of ”The 77 Edna O’Brien, A Pagan Place (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970) 10, 14. 42, 218-221. 78 The Waterboys, "A Pagan Place,” A Pagan Place, Chrysalis Records, 2000 [1984]. See liner notes for historical details on writing the song. 76 Church Not Made With Hands." The divine feminine is the subject of that bright piece. For Scott it is omnipresent, if hidden, all throughout the natural world from "fields to shadows, ocean and the sand...Everywhere and noplace, her church not made with hands...not contained by man."79 If it is true that author Mike Scott did not read O'Brien's novel, then this becomes an excellent example of convergent thematics. In both works, the operative connection between Christianity and natural sensual paganism is one of poisoning. This is a common theme, expounded upon by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century. Nietzsche wrote that “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink. He did not die of it, of course but degenerated into vice.80 In both versions of "A Pagan Place," the sacred qualities of spatial environments and their violation through Christian importation are held up to scrutiny. Philosophically speaking, this is the struggle seen in the different works from Scott, O'Brien, Thoreau, Whitman, Olson and Lawrence, and even Grahame. From a Christian perspective, as Tillich reminds us, "paganism can be defined as the elevation of a special space to ultimate value and dignity."81 While Tillich was perhaps incorrect in some of his analyses of paganism, his statement connecting sacred space holds a great degree of truth. Even those who would challenge the role of Christianity in missionary work have also centered their critiques on the differential roles of space and time in different religious traditions. 79 The Waterboys, “The Church Not Made With Hands," A Pagan Place. 80 Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Beyond Good And Evil: Prelude To A Philosophy Of The Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1973) 105. 81 Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959) 31. 77 The eminent Amerindian theologian Vine Deloria, Jr. also, like Tillich, classified the conflict between Native religions and Christianity as one between a lifeway centered on a sacred geography, and a religion centered on the conquering of space by the victory of time.82 What this suggests is that discourses of “paganism” are properly fundamental to human experience in general, and experiences of localism in particular, but we must take care not to reify too much a cultural distinction between “pagan” and “Pagan.” O’Brien and Scott each developed a significant following in the United States, despite their focus on European lands. The periodic irruption and embrace of "nature religion" in the American context is well documented, and emerges as an important agent in the creation of art, literature, and music in American spaces. Whether we find Whitman and Kerouac singing of the open road, or Lawrence and Bonnin focusing on the emergent spirituality of particular spaces, the notion of “pagan place” as sacred space, for dwelling or journeying, is ‘grounding’ for the Orphic impulse, which appears to make no little distinctions between literary, musical and religious forms. O’Brien’s writing is clearly inspired by the presence of the ancient Druids in her homeland, while Scott’s religious Paganism will be discussed in Chapter 3. Through material distribution, songs and literature extolling religious paganism created elsewhere, such as in the British context, find audiences and create their own meanings in the United States. Perhaps paradoxically, religiosity that concerns itself primarily With reclaiming the ultimate value of an indigenous 82 Vine Deloria, God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, 2nd Edition (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1994)121-122. 78 space can spread culturally from place to place, forging and questing for both indigenousness and authenticity at each step. Its protean and ecstatic nature defies containment, whether geographical or cultural. This organic vitalism of the Orphic impulse contained (and emergent) in the American cultural landscape not only provides fodder for formal artistic and literary canon, but also creates a cultural space for the thriving of explicitly and self-identified Pagan music, which in turn sings of its benefactor and progenitor. 79 Chapter 2 "The Once and Future Pagans" : Folk, Filk and Harry Smith Magic Mountain is an unusual festival, flawlessly produced, with real heart. If you are ready for a change in approach to folk and indigenous music, perhaps a memory of an earlier time when festivals did feel like a family village, it may be your cup of tea. I think we will be hearing more from these folks in the years to 83 come. - “Christy,” Four Shillings Short In the previous chapter, it was my task to uncover and trace broad contours of the American-Atlantic musical discourses of “Paganism,” primarily in the twentieth century, punctuated by specific illustrations. This flowering resulted in a set of rnusics centered on Pagan motifs, but the early structure of contemporary Pagan music is primarily indebted to folk music. It is time to dig a little deeper into the cultural manifestations of the Orphic impulse, its connection to Romanticism, folk ideology, and ultimately Pagan witchcraft. Contemporary Paganism, while having direct nineteenth-century intellectual progenitors and multiple threads of ancestry, is generally credited as having been a product of the late WWII and post-war era in Great Britain. 8" A 83 This was a review from “Christy,” a member of Four Shillings Short, a professional folk music group. The Member’s Muse: The Members Newsletter of Four Quarters and Four Quarters Farm An InterFaith Sanctuary of Earth Religion 4, no. 2 (2000): 3. 84 Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) 194. 80 British civil servant named Gerald Gardner claimed that he had been initiated into a coven of witches. This coven, so the narrative goes, had been in continuous existence in Europe since pre-Christian times, and represented an unbroken chain to the ancient Paganisms of the past, exemplified in the folk traditions of quotidian Europe. Gardner subsequently initiated others into a working circle, and through this process Wicca was spread throughout the British Isles once again. Moreover, via Gardner's initiate Raymond Buckland, the ‘Gardnerian’ tradition was soon exported to the United States as well, where it has spawned several other offshoots. In fact, while Gardner was certainly foundational to modern Paganism, there is increasing evidence that on this side of the Atlantic religious seekers were crafting their own versions of modern Pagan religiosity centered on “folk”-ing and “filk"ing culture. If there is any constancy about the historical role of music in religion, it has been that “music serves as the carrier of creeds and core beliefs.” The precise nature and tenor of these processes have been investigated by many fine musicologists and historians. 85 With regard to Paganism, I contend that the folksong movement in Britain and the United States has been a specific crucible for creating a “heritage”—a polyvalent cultural politic transmuted into nationalist, feminist, and populist ideologies. In many cases, this heritage primarily 85 David Stowe, How Sweet The Sound, 2004. 3; Stephen A. Marini, Sacred Song In America: Religion, Music, and Public Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Michael D. McNally, Ojibwe Singers: Hymns, Grief, and a Native Culture in Motion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 81 developed an orth0praxical, rather than an orthodoxical focus.86 The concept of a common ritual year, widely accepted and practiced among Pagans today, was reinforced through this musical heritage. Before proceeding further, I want to be clear about certain terms I am using. By folk music, I am deliberately referring to a category of cultural production created and documented in 19th and 20'h century Britain and the United States, although, as it has been demonstrated, the term has a larger cross-cultural history within recent Paganism.87 Not all of the music discussed here was necessarily created as self-consciously “Pagan.” Yet at the same time we find this music has a multitude of roles in cultivating and communicating values and ideologies adopted in contemporary American Paganism. In February of 2005, I attended a Pagan practitioner’s conference/festival in the San Francisco area popularly known as Pantheacon. My purpose in attending was to gather interviews and information for my own research work on cultural dimensions of Pagan music. In particular, I sought out Anne Hill, a longtime community member and institution of Pagan musicality in her own right. As I approached her merchant’s booth, one of several focused on music, I couldn’t help but be struck by the first compact disc I saw prominently on display. It was Fairport Convention’s 1969 Liege and Lief, a standard folkrock work that continues to draw airplay to this day. Apart from its historical role in rock music, it 86 This is not to imply any sort of “relativism.” Differing means and methods of rituals are ways in which practitioners recognize one another as either part of the same tradition or part of another tradition. There are ritual markers distinguishing among different types of Wicca, as well as other markers distinguishing Wicca from Druidry entirely, for example. 87 Michael Strmiska, “The Music of the Past in Modern Baltic Paganism,” Nova Religio 8, no. 3 (2005): 39-58. 82 remains a volume owned and played regularly by several interviewees in my own research. I purchased Liege and Lief for my own collection that day, and found it a useful mediating element of conversation between Anne and me. Later, as I examined the liner notes and listened, I was drawn to the role attributed to Sandy Denny in the group as not only a performer, but also as an educator on British “traditional” ballads. In fact, as part of the direction the group was taking, Ashley Hutchings began researching British ballads at the English Folk Song and Dance Society's ‘Cecil Sharp House’ for inspiration. Other than British ballads, the group was also admittedly “enamored of American roots music. [Music] immersed in the roots of that culture.” Fairport’s vision for Liege and Lief was to take historically British music and create a repertoire as quintessentially “English,” as the US. group “The Band” was quintessentially “American.”88 Mark Slobin has recently clarified the term “heritage” as something that, “while it looks old, is actually something new. Heritage is a mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past.” Heritage music, by this token, is “music that has been singled out for preservation, protection, enshrinement, and revival.”89 In a very straightforward way, Fairport Convention was creating ‘heritage music’ as a way of reinventing itself after a tragic crash took the life of a band member. Fairport’s effort not only consisted of lyrical sound, but pictorial homages in its liner notes to allegedly ancient ritual dances 88 Joe Boyd, Liege and Lief [liner notes], Island Records IMCD 291, 2002 [1969]. 8 9 Slobin, Mark, Fiddler On The Move: Exploring The Klezmer World (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2000) 12-13. Slobin credits this insight to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. 83 and other traditional practices such as wren-hunting. Moreover, Liege and Leif ‘s liner notes singled out two very important historical figures as inspirations for their music. These two figures are key to our analysis: Francis James Child (1825-1896) and Cecil Sharp (1859-1924). The Romantic Folksong Movement: Child, Sharp and Williams Child, identified often as the “progenitor of the American folk song movement,” was a Shakespearean scholar and literary folklorist. He collected British ballad texts. These were not versions from living practitioners, but versions he considered culturally “unpolluted”—-those versions residing in manuscript collections and archives, preferably those recorded before the arrival In Britain in 1475 of the printing press. Child criticized earlier collectors for “doctoring” texts, although he himself took an active role as editor. Child himself, in his 1860 work The English and Scottish Ballads, claimed that his selection was guided by locating and reprinting the most “authentic” copies, and at times, as Benjamin Filene has pointed out, he was known to omit and excise material he found “tasteless” or too bawdy. Child was so successful that his work almost single-handedly formed the frame of reference for future scholarly and popular endeavors.90 After Child, interest in folksong collection grew among not only scholars, but popularizers (often one and the same). Collection was often driven by 90 Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) 14-15. 84 concerns that these songs would be lost because of increasing technology, industry, and education. He was not alone in this, as promoters of folk ideology both recent and ancient have demonstrated an ambivalence, to say the least, about cultural and social change. Cecil Sharp, whose archives engaged Fairport Convention, was perhaps the most extensive of the British post-Child collectors. But rather than simple collection, Sharp took this a step farther, aiming to combat the vicissitudes of modernity instead of merely lamenting them. Sharp’s avowed agenda was instead to “reintegrate folk songs into people’s everyday lives.” Sharp endeavored to use folk music to forge a British national culture resistant to the “corrupting” forces of industrial progress. In his early days he was a Freethinker and a critic of mainstream Christianity. Portions of his life were lived in Spiritualism, others in the 19th century new religious movement known as Christian Science. Both religious traditions, it must be said, hold strongly skeptical views concerning materialism and material causation. Also a political dissident, a vegetarian and opponent of capital punishment, Sharp eventually centered on Christian Socialism as his guiding philosophy. Educationally, he believed “so sincerely in the innate beauty and purity of folk-music that [he was] sure it cannot really be contaminated.” In his eyes, this made such music an ideal tool for combating the moral relativism of modernity and industrialism---by morally educating English young through the use of English folksong. Sharp advocated the idea that education, at its best, brings out the latent qualities in individuals. A “folk-song” begins with an individual, but evolves as the 85 product of community authorship, thus embodying the values and powers of that community. Therefore, the true musical (and moral) character of a nation can be measured by the musical output of those persons least affected by ‘modernist’ influences. Using this logic, the educational use of English folksong could build up and bring out the inborn values and national character in students. Perhaps the most intriguing and paradoxical of Sharp’s ideas was his proclamation that he had found his ideal candidates for English folksongs and peasantry not in England, but “preserved” in the American Appalachian mountains by peoples ‘unspoiled’ by modernity and industrialism.91 Others connected to the Romantic cultural movement in 19th century Britain, like Ralph Vaughn Williams, also echoed these sentiments. Vaughn Williams, an ardent admirer of Sharp, taught that “every art...must be founded on something natural in the human being.” Moreover, Williams took pains to describe the formation and importance of folksong as on par with other elite cultural bulwarks of Western Civilization, such as the Bible and the Iliad.92 At the same time, Vaughn Williams was careful to present folksong as the salvation of the quotidian man, a salvation accomplished through “the music that has for generations voiced the spiritual Iongings of our race.” This project was most clearly articulated in Great Britain, and was to have very powerful implications for American Paganism. However, this voIkish impulse 91 AH. Fox Strangways and Maud Karpeles, Cecil Sharp (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1933) 22-23, 91, 64, 148,158, 171-6. 92 Ralph Vaughn Williams, National Music and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987) 23-29; Strangways, 90. 86 to preserve a pre-capitalist or anti-capitalist culture was based in the German philosophical fascination with the “Kultur des Volkes,” and led to the mythic valorization of white peOple by many early folklorists as the “true folk." Figures such as Child and Sharp utilized German Romantic ideology to assert “that mountain culture was America’s authentic folk inheritance, and at the same time stressed that the mountaineers were British?”3 But this particular folk project was not simply the creation of a past or a paean to some aggregated ‘whiteness.’ Like all heritage discourse, a usable past was a means to a possible future. Sharp, for example, advocated the creation of new high works of English musical art based in folk melodies such as those written by Percy Granger and Vaughn Williams. This romantic nationalist rurality project formed a crucial component, a discourse, in the ‘cauldron of inspiration’ that gave rise to modern pagan witchcraft.94 This heart of the modern folksong movement has been highly mutable and malleable in the contemporary Pagan context, as well as highly intertwined with other discourses and various forms of politics and ideology. For example, Former ADF Archdruid Isaac Bonewits, in 1972, transformed the 1840’s Irish republican song “A Nation Once Again” into “Be Pagan Once Again.” This time Irish nationalism was threatened not by the worldly empires of Greece, Rome, or Britain, but by centuries of Christian hegemony. In response, Bonewits‘s song 93 Filene, Romancing The Folk, 25. 94 Hutton, Triumph Of The Moon, 118-119. 87 advocated kicking out Christian institutionalism and a ‘return’ to romantic pastoral Paganism. 95 Despite Child’s disdain for living singers, and Sharp’s desire to uplift them, the educational legacy of Vaughn Williams has continued folk music's sense of identity politics into to American populism. This has carried over into Pagan musicality. Alix Dobkin, a lesbian activist and folksinger, collaborated with Kay Gardner and Patches Attom in the early 1970’s to produce a musical staple of lesbian feminist consciousness-raising: Lavender Jane Loves Women. Lavender Jane was a major project of re-fashioning previous discourses. Dobkin adopted and changed the 1840’s conservative American tune “Beware Young Ladies” from a tune preaching the avoidance of slovenly men to tune proclaiming the unfitness of all men for partnering. In the folk tradition, Lavender Jane also features the Scots tune “Eppie Morrie,” rewritten so that the main character overcomes a rape attempt and refuses men forever by sheer somatic power. Dobkin was fond of Pete Seeger’s musical politics, and rewrote his ballad “Talking Union” as “Talking Lesbian.” Most importantly for our purposes, the same record finds Dobkin and Gardner producing “Her Precious Love,” a concise statement of thealogical creationism. This a hymnal celebration of lesbian sexuality, simultaneously 95 Isaac Bonewits, “Be Pagan Once Again,” Be Pagan Once Again!, Association for Consciousness Exploration, reissue 2003. Lyrics available at http://www.neopaqan.netIlB Sonqs Irish.html. The song lyrics were originally published in Green Egg: A Journal of the Awakening Earth 6, no. 3 (Yule 1973): 18; “A Nation Once Again" was reputedly the work of Thomas Osbourne Davis, an Irish Catholic Activist. It was re-recorded by many other folk artists in the mid-20m century. 88 presented as Goddess cosmogony, hierophany and a communal claim of political identity. Glory to Her for the joys of living And praised be Her power, Her tender care Forever in beauty Her light shines upon me The blessing of precious woman’s love96 Other American folk songs have taken different routes as well. Rather than serving as a statement of personal identity or prominent nationalism, they embodied a vernacular populism. Perhaps no folk songs have arguably epitomized such impulses as clearly and broadly as “This Land Is Your Land,” by Woody Guthrie, and “If I Had A Hammer,” by Lee Hays and Pete Seeger. And again, contemporary Pagans have seen fit to draw on these songs in pursuance of religious practice and its identity politics. Just as Alix Dobkin made Goddess thealogy a single facet of a larger political statement, the Fellowship of the Spiral Path’s Liturgy For Lady Liberty, performed at 2005’s Pantheacon, reversed this approach. Instead, the Liturgy wove several prominent vernacular populist and nationalist songs into its larger religious service. While many of these liturgical songs were easily recognizable by many, others like “Of Thee I Sing” might be more familiar to American nationalists. Or perhaps with its rewritten lyrics, it might not: 96 Alix Dobkin, “Her Precious Love,” Lavender Jane Loves Women, Women's Wax Works, LP Record, 1973. Reissued on Compact Disc (along with another album, Living With Lesbians, as a 2-disc set) as Living With Lavender Jane in 1997 by Ladyslipper Music. In a 2005 conference presentation, I played this song as an example and rows of prominent Pagan practitioners started to sing along with a song that obviously still had religious currency many years later. By the time of this album’s release, Dobkin's musical partner, Kay Gardner, was already a practicing witch. See Marini, 172-173. 89 Blessed and bounteous land, Safe in the Lady’s hand, Of Thee I sing. Terrors are turned away Routed by freedom’s ray; Chastened by light of day, All fears take wing. Having first established the importance of the Statue of Liberty as a Goddess icon to be addressed, the service then framed Her and Her devotees as holding sacred dominion over the entire geographical American continent to the tune and words of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” as well as Pete Seeger’s and Lee Hays’s “If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)”97 As often happens, even anonymous individuals and popular singing groups have woven these discourses into interesting patterns. On Apple Computer’s popular iTunes website, a “top rated iMix” has gone by the name “Great pagan/celtic music.”98 Among selections by Blackmore’s Night, Emerald Rose, and Marianne Faithful, Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie’s “Old Time Religion” makes an appearance. Conversely, Blackmore’s Night, a musical group with its own tangled history in different “languages of Paganism,” has made its own foray into interpretations of acoustic folk, with their own cover of Bob Dylan’s “The 97 Fellowship of the Spiral Path, “Liturgy for Lady Liberty Songsheet," original document in author’s possession. 98 Anonymous, "Great pagan/celtic music," iMix, Apple Computer iTunes Music Store, accessed Tuesday, November 8‘", 2005. The anonymous creator includes a rhetorical identifier for the Pagan community (“Merry Meet") in the iMix notes. 90 Times They Are A Changin',” --- part of a 2001 compilation album also featuring Vangelis, Ofra Haza, Sinead O’Connor, and Jewel.99 Establishing The Ritual Year Through Music A persistent theme within much of Pagan culture, and indeed some of its contemporary religious music, is the presence of Other-Than-Human Sacred Persons. By way of example, one need only notice the legacy of occultist and Irish revivalist W. B. Yeats. His ballad "The Stolen Child," a tale of Fairy kidnapping, has been a staple of musicians such as Loreena McKennitt and Golden Bough. In Britain there is ample evidence of the presence of ‘supranatural’ entities in many classic” ballads. The dominant trend in scholarship suggests that the American versions of the Child/Sharp tradition have not carried this theme fonrvard. While early imports may have retained some of these elements, by and large the available folksong collections during the formative periods of Pagan folksong include versions of these ballads without goblins, faeries, elves, or other such creatures. In examining these American folksong collections, several such formerly supernatural ballads are prominent, such as the “House Carpenter,” and “The Elfin Knight.” (a.k.a. “False Sir John”) The exceptions to this general rule are revenant ballads such as “Lady Margaret” and “The Unquiet Grave” which 99 Blackmore’s Night, "The Times They Are A Changin'," Fires At Midnight, Steamhammer/SPV 7243, 2001. 91 feature a recently deceased lover confronting or spurning a former companion as a talking ghost. In American recording studios and throughout twentieth-century collections, its seems, traditional English and Scottish ballads have lost their “ghosts, elves, and goblins.” ’00 American culture, Pagans included, has long had a love affair with realism, even though impressive fantastical subcultures have indeed developed. Roman Reconstructionists have utilized Homeric and Sapphic hymns replete with ancient Gods and Goddesses, while Kemetic worshippers have developed complex traditions of Egyptian devotionalism. Despite records of fairylore and British pagan remnants discussed in Gerald Gardner’s own texts, all those types of elements appear to have disappeared from British-derived American folk music.101 This raises an interesting question. If folk music has not bequeathed sacred persons to whom worship and relationship are directed, then what other specific elements, (besides nationalism, populism, and identity politics) has it given contemporary Paganism? 100 Victoria Nelson, The Secret Lives of Puppets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001) 79-80; David Buchan, “Ballads of Otherworld Beings," in Peter Narvaez, ed. The Good People: New Fairy/ore Essays (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1991) 142; Chas S. Clifton and Graham Harvey eds., The Paganism Reader, (New York: Routledge, 2003) 11-14; For examples of de-supernaturalizing see Various Artists, Fine Times at Our House: Traditional Music . of Indiana: Ballads, Fiddle Tunes, Songs, LP Record, Folkways Records FW03809, 1964; Clarence Ashley and Tex lsley, Clarence Ashley and Tex lsley, LP Record, Folkways Records FW02350, 1966; Pete Seeger, American Ballads, Folkways Records FW02319, 1957; Joan O’Bryant, American Ballads And Folksongs, Folkways Records FW02338, 1958; Jean Ritchie, Ballads From Her Appalachian Family Tradition, Smithsonian Folkways SFW40145, 2003; Andrew Rowan Summers, The Unquiet Grave: American Tragic Ballads, Folkways Records FW02364, 1952. Many Child ballads found in the US. (“Pretty Sally,” ”The Unquiet Grave") do retain the use of particular span of time, 366 days, for some purposes. A period of time of this span is used in some parts of contemporary Paganism as a probationary period for a new member of a group. The contemporary Nordic pagan group, Fire + Ice, has recorded "The Unquiet Grave,” as have many other folk musicians. Fire + Ice is discussed in Chapter 5. 101 Gerald Gardner, The Meaning of Witchcraft (1959; repr., Thame, England: l-H-O Books, 2000) 147, 157-160. 92 The answer signals yet another transformative phase in the protean Orphic impulse as it crossed the Atlantic Ocean. In this case Whitman’s god of “Time” seems to have become ascendant. The “old time religion” of agricultural events became the dominant ritual year for American Paganism, just as many of the traditional Jewish holidays of its ritual year, like Sukkot, have their origins in such roots. These American songs are often tinged with a rustic, nature- worshiping flavor. This has blended well with other 19th and early 20th century poetic elements of romantic pastoralism. As others have recognized, Rudyard Kipling’s “A Tree Song” from his 1906 book Puck of Pook’s Hill has not only been used by contemporary Pagans in worship, but is specifically associated with seasonal aspects of worship such as Beltane rites.102 The language used within and accompanying some of these American folksongs reflects a valorization of the vernacular and indigenous, sometimes even using language historically consistent and associated with established American traditions of unchurched religiosity, wildness, harmonial religion and “timeless wisdom.” Consequently, contemporary Pagans have found them of great use. As we have already seen, harmonial religion, spirituality, and religious perennialism are themselves deeply ingrained within the Orphic impulse. They were often invoked by the likes of John Muir, Zitkala-Sha, and John Steinbeck. They also appear in folk music discourse and appear to have remained the most significant elements. For example, in a famous compilation of the folk singing family “The Armstrongs,” Jean E. Campbell, wife of Joseph Campbell, remarks 102 Clifton and Harvey, Paganism Reader, 80-82. 93 that her husband and she especially enjoyed their music for its capacity to hold them “in joy to a Harmony of Being.” This compilation, appropriately titled Wheel of the Year, also included endorsements from prominent public intellectual Studs Terkel. Like Steinbeck, Terkel frames the Armstrongs as showcasing “nature, man, woman, and the mystery of birth, death, and rebirth. They spin the wheel of life.” Terkel’s radio program on Chicago’s WFMT featured the Armstrongs many times over a number of years. These sentiments connect the traditions of American harmonial religion to the seasonal vegetative view of life cycles important in much of contemporary Paganism, and demonstrate the relevance of folksong as a mediator and communicator between these traditions. ’03 While the lyrics, liner notes, and accompanying literature of the Armstrong family project expound an interfusion of Christian, harmonial, and agri-pagan elements, the graphics designers at Flying Fish records went even farther in the Pagan direction. The Armstrong compilation was issued with a ritual-year wheel calendar on the front cover of the CD, including such perennial orthopraxic favorites as Samhain, Beltane, Lughnasadh, and the equinoxes.104 The Armstrong family was not the only example of these ideas popularly adopted in contemporary Paganism. The Watersons, best known perhaps for their work Frost and Fire: A Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs, produced an 103 See Zitkala Sha, “Why I Am A Pagan,” Atlantic Monthly 90, no. 542 (December 1902): 801-3; Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 99-101; Compare Jean Campbell’s sentiment with Sydney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974) 1019. 104 The Armstrong Family, The Wheel of the Year: Thirty Years with the Armstrong Family, Flying Fish Records FF70594, 1992. 94 extensive legacy of beautiful acappella works. One in particular, a ballad called “Christmas Is Now Drawing Near At Hand,” stands out for our purposes. Liner notes for Frost and Fire claim not only that the melody dates to the sixteenth century, but that the singing style is derived from Gypsies roaming through the “West Midlands half a century before.” Social marginalization and anti- institutionalism, themes common but not exclusive to contemporary Paganism, echo throughout the collections, including on this track. While Christianity and paganism are often popularly portrayed as being at odds with each other in today’s so-called “culture wars,” this idea does not find merit in the Watersons’ milieu. Even the liner notes themselves make this “mesopagan” matrix clear, and attribute it to economic forces: Thus, the critical time of the winter solstice, a rich period for pagan ritual, became the season of the Nativity of the new god. The season of the great spring ceremonies became the time of his slaughter and resurrection. So it happens that in many songs on this record, Christian and pagan elements are inextricably tangled...its due to their relation with economic life, not to any mystical connection, that the song-customs have persisted right up to our own time. In a form that recalls Vaughn Williams’ comparison between the Iliad and English folk music, the liner notes invoke both the emotive power of ancient Greece and the humanistic legacy of Enlightenment. Together, these two ideological progenitor discourses of Paganism are combined to understand the power of these folk tunes: Just as one doesn’t need to be an ancient Greek to be moved by the plays of Aeschylus, so it’s not necessary to be anything 95 other than an ordinary freethinking twentieth century urban western man with a proper regard for humankind, to appreciate the spirit and power of these songs.105 This Orphic mesopagan matrix has provided for much closer contact and cross-fertilization between the contemporary musics of Christians and Pagans than might be commonly realized. In a late 1990’s, the experimental group COIL, devotees of the modern Pagan tradition of Thelema, released their own version of “Christmas Is Now Drawing Near At Hand”, as part of a set of 4 compact-discs. These EPs were issued in conjunction with the solstices and equinoxes of the ritual year calendar, complete with astrological information on the face of the discs themselves.106 While the Watersons themselves may or may not have anticipated a Thelemic adaption of this song, its persistence, crossing from folk to experimentalism, is nonetheless indicative of its power. A shared folk sense of the liturgical importance of the ritual year pervades other manifestations of contemporary Pagan music. In 2001, Llewellyn Press published A Bard’s Book of Pagan Songs, compiled by “Hugin the Bard.” Hugin’s work is divided into several parts. Of interest to the present study is a large subsection, called “Feasting The Wheel.” Each equinox and solstice in this section has its own musical piece, along with a page of explanation and introduction. In addition, Hugin adds an adaptation of the ubiquitous tune “John 105 A. L. Lloyd, Frost and Fire: A Calendar of Ritual and Magical Songs [liner notes], Topic Records TSCD462, 1995. (12T136, 1965). If true, these sentiment reinforce the connections religious expression often has to agricultural and economic concerns. 106 Coil, “Christmas Is Now Drawing Near At Hand," Winter Solstice: North, Eskaton 019, 1999. The song is sung here by Rose McDowell, formerly of the group Strawberry Switchblade. She is credited as “Rosa Mundi," a name with both botanical and Rosicrucian occult significance. 96 km Moreover, Muin Mound Grove Barleycorn” to this section of the boo (associated with Ar nDriocht Fein, an American druid movement) has published four editions of A Cycle of Druid Rituals since 2003. The liturgical book doubles as a songbook (complete with CD or cassette), and is organized by different chapters all centered on the celebration of seasonal ritual holidays.108 Other folk artists long associated with contemporary Paganism, such as Blue Star Wicca co-developer Tzipora Klein, also made much use of the harvest ideology associated with both Goddess thealogy and the ritual year. Tzipora’s “Harvest Dance” performs a vocal round calling the activities and fruits of the “Maiden, Mother,” and “Crone,” placing these calls on either side of a fiddle jig.109 An independent contemporary duet linked to ADF, Double Helix, also sings the celebration of working the harvest, and crowning its performance with the ritual consumption of its fermented fruits in a song called “Harvest Horn,” a traditional melody in the spirit of John Barleycorn.110 These aspects join a host of others we have already mentioned, such as romantic pastoralism, valorizing the vernacular, highlighting “timeless” indigenous wisdom, and religious identity politics. All of these play a significant role in 107 In fact, “John Barleycorn” makes an appearance not only in Hugin’s work, but also in both the Watersons and the Armstrong compilations, as well as other folk artists, such as John Renbourn of “Pentangle” fame and even the lifework of Cecil Sharp. The tune is ubiquitous, and I hope that more music historians will turn their attention to its fascinating history of performance and interpretation, although we cannot be concerned with that here. ‘08 Hugin the Bard, A Bard's Book ofPagan Songs (St Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2001); Rev. Robert Lee (Skip) Ellison, The Wheel Of The Year at Muin Mound Grove, ADF: A Cycle Of Druid Rituals (Dragon’s Keep Publishing: East Syracuse, NY, 2003) 109 Tzipora Klein, “Harvest Dance," The Fairy Queen, sell-published cassette, 1986. 110 Double Helix, “Harvest Horn," Falcons of The Wood, CrazedCelt Music, 2002 [1994]. 97 Singing The Promise, a Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans benefit concert recorded and issued under the auspices of the UU Church in 1998. Musicians, in many cases rooted in folklore and mythology, came together to issue a recording that, in many cases, offers specific examples of this ‘Pagan folk ideology’ at work. Incorporating homages to (and ideological anchorings in) indigenous wisdom, songs based in the Irish-American, Hebridean, and Xhosa tradition all are part of this recording, as are chants with Tibetan instruments. Folklorist Chris Wagner and feminist thealogian Nancy Vedder-Shults composed and adapted several contributions, such as the pastoral “Green God,” “Hymn of the Earth,” "The Grace of Her,” and “Hymn to Gaia. ” All are thealogical and soteriological statements that, consistent with other religious ideologies, make claims for a kind of anthropology as part of their broader thealogies. To be authentically Pagan is indeed to be a certain kind of human: one rooted deeply in “folk” tradition.111 Filking and Musical Paganism When Pagan musicians take historically popular or noteworthy melodies and compose new words for them, they are often participating in another aspect of folk musical heritage and construction: "filking." Filk, or "fan music making" is an oblique subculture of folk music, having emerged from popular science fiction fandom during the 1950‘s and growing into a worldwide musical movement. Just 111 Khrysso et al, Singing The Promise: A CUUPS Benefit Concert, Covenant of Universalist Unitarian Pagans Inc. This concert was recorded at the 1998 UU General Assembly at the First Universalist Church in Rochester, NY. It has no catalog number. More discussion on theological elements will be found in chapter 3. 98 as the demographics for devotees of contemporary Paganism have overlapped with fan networks of both Renaissance re-enactments and speculative fiction, so too has the filking tradition provided vital components for Pagan music, including content, attitude, and social networking. While the boundaries and definitions of filk music are subject to as much negotiation and dispute as any other discursive form, what is clear is that science fiction and fantasy literature are the main topics for filk music, from the future mythologies of Star Trek to the Middle Earth of J.R.R. Tolkien. This marks it as notably different in audience from much of other folk music. Filking's topical breadth substitutes a 'future mythology' in quest of a usable and enjoyable present. Filk music, Henry Jenkins tells us, is a way for fandom members to participate in "pre-existing media texts." It can be a way to tie together seemingly divergent topics related only by image or metonymy, or a way to highlight the roles of minor characters in well-known narratives. Filkers may even insert themselves as third-person narrators or fictional characters within their songs, just as Woody Guthrie did in "This Land."112 An excellent example of these processes at work is found in Isaac Bonewits’ "The Wizard," a clear and unambiguous filk parody of Kenny Rogers’s country hit "The Gambler." As in the original, a stranger enters the life of the narrator to dispense advice about how said narrator should conduct his life. Just as Rogers’ tale is a didactic musing on how to live a successful life, Bonewits's playful tale of a master magician is less about the mechanics of Pagan 112 Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture (New York: Roufledge,1992)252. 99 spellworking and more about the ethical imperative to use ritual technologies in the face of moral evil. The filk seeks to align the human use of ritual with the Gods' ethical dispensations of such powers: Now every wizard knows that the tough part of the old ways ls knowin' when to keep your peace and when to pick a fight! See the Gods gave you your magics, well knowin’ you was mortal Expecting little, save that you, would try to use 'em right!113 Filking is commonly practiced as a group activity, and a number of festivals take place each year in the United States devoted to the practice. Moreover, filking circles are common at other fandom conventions, known as "Cons," which can often feature significant overlap with Pagan audiences. Music For The Goddess, an eclectic quartet with two full-length releases to date, has played for the World Science Fiction convention, as well as some of the main recurring festivals in the Pagan community, including Stanrvood and Free Spirit Gathering. Not all Pagan filks parody more contemporary hits, nor are they all designed to be humorous. “Amazing Grace, How Sweet The Earth” has made the rounds of Pagan internet message boards and filking sites alike in recent years. Undated in origin, the song draws on prominent themes we have already discussed. The song is commonly attributed to Verna Knapp, although she does “3 Issac Bonewits and Friends, "The Wizard," Be Pagan Once Again!, Association for Consciousness Exploration, 2003 [1998]. 100 not claim ownership of it. According to Steve Turner, Knapp first heard this particular religious adaptation at a talent competition at a “Spring Mysteries Festival in‘the 1980’s.” The experience, she records, moved her and others present at the festival to tears.114 Pagans filk songs for many reasons. This new incarnation of “Amazing Grace” reflects many of the Same themes embodied in larger folk discourse. The breadth and diversity of folk anthropology seen in Singing The Promise finds it grounding, literally, in a heritage born of the entire Earth itself, extending to a hierological co-identification with its body. Amazing Grace, how sweet the Earth that bore witches like we. Amazing earth, enduring life, from death into rebirth. T'is earth I am and earth I love and earth I'll always be. At the same time, the internal verses of the piece are deeply tied to the same ritual concerns I addressed earlier. In this case though, rather than a broad discussion of seasonal festival-days, “How Sweet The Earth” instead enjoins the audience to ritually turn towards each cardinal direction (East, South, West North) and identify with the traditional Pagan elements (Air, Fire, Water, Earth) associated with each respective direction, co-located both outside in Nature and internally as a spiritual microcosm. 114 Steve Turner and Judy Collins, Amazing Grace: The Story ofAmerica's Most Beloved Song (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2003) 204-5. 101 A similar focus on ritual can be found in more fantasy-oriented filk as well. Mercedes Lackey, a popular fantasy novelist, wrote lyrics to “Wind’s Four Quarters,” which was sung by fellow filk artist and political activist Leslie Fish. The recipient of the 1989 Pegasus Prize for Fantasy F ilking, “Wind’s Four Quarters” is based on events from Lackey’s Valdemar series of fantasy novels. At the same time, it clearly speaks with a coded language for Pagan audiences as well. Wind's four quarters, air and fire ‘ Earth and water, hear my desire, Grant my plea who stands alone, Maiden, Warrior, Mother and Crone115 In cultural terms, Lackey and Fish’s work demonstrates an important principle within the field of signification that takes place for Pagan audiences— the concept of heteroglossia. Pioneered by Mikhail Baktin, heteroglossia refers to multiple linguistic codes within a single speech segment—a text constructed in such a way to be intelligible to multiple audiences within using different webs of discursive coherence. Skillful use of this technique allows artists to move among different influences and trajectories, influencing their audiences to map their own associations of influence. Star filkist Julia Ecklar included a 1987 Pegasus-nominated fantasy song written by the late artist Cynthia McQuiIIin on her cassette release Divine Intervention, commenting on the song in its re-released compact disc liner notes. 115 Mercedes Lackey and Leslie Fish, “Wind’s Four Quarters," The Pegasus Winners: Collection 1 (1984-1993), Love Song Productions LSP-001, 1994; Another version can be found on Oathbound: Vows and Honor, Firebird Music FAM10107D, 1996. 102 McQuillin was well known as a filk artist and Pegasus Winner in her own right. At least two of McQuillin’s own albums are Pagan-centered, Dark Moon Circle (1987) and Witch’s Dance (1998). McQuillin in turn credits much of her influence to authors such as Marion Zimmer Bradley, whose readership again straddles both the fantasy and Pagan communities alike.116 Moving deftly between the fantasy and religious genres, McQuillin’s acoustic guitar ballads fuse mythic and heroic discourse with Goddess martyrdom: For once beneath the Rowan I took a sacred vow My life to serve the Lady‘s will Her crescent graced my brow I died beneath the Rowan tree Defending what I held The faith of those who followed me Their faith was never felled.117 Filking, as a sub-branch of folking, often seeks to use fantasy and speculative cultural production as means of partaking in the mythos used. In the case of religious Pagans, a musickal language that seeks to re-enchant everyday life with the heroism of ancient stories and acts of heroism provides identity re- enforcement and a heritage. As intimated in songs such as "Wind's Four Quarters," and "Rowan Tree,“ prayers, spells, and vows can be at the heart of the musical project. Conversely, a musical project can be undertaken as a type of social spellworking-a means to influence the creation of cultural heritage. In the US. folk music revival commonly ascribed to the 1950's and 1960's, one name “6 Julia Ecklar, "Crimson and Crystal,” Divine Intervention, Prometheus Music PM-1001, 2003 [1986]; Cynthia McQuillin, Witch '3 Dance [liner notes]. Unlikely Productions UP0012, 1998. “7 Cynthia McQuillan, "Rowan Tree," Dark Moon Rising, Unlikely Productions UP0002CD, 1987. 103 kept surfacing among the different artists who were inspired to reinterpret older musics and invent new ones: Harry Smith. Harry Smith: Social Spellmaker Harry Everett Smith was the editor of The Anthology of American Folk Music, issued as a six-LP record set in 1952 on Folkways Records.118 Almost immediately, thousands of musicians and would-be musicians were intrigued by this music. Smith's collection consisted simply of unlicensed copies of commercial folk music captured and issued between the end of World War I and the beginning of the Great Depression. Yet musicians such as David Van Runk and Elvis Costello have referred to the Anthology as the "bible" of folk music and the "secret script of so many musical dramas." Smith‘s penchant for collecting obscure, racially-mixed tunes was no haphazard project. As Smith's own accompanying booklet shows, he attacked this project of systematizing post-World War I musics with the diligence and erudition of both Child and Sharp. Accompanying the set of records was a booklet featuring cataloging and extensive comments for each track. Each music piece was catalogued with the internal reference numbers of the original issuing company, such as Columbia, Okeh or Vocalion. The topic of the song was summarized, newspaper-style, and references to alternate versions were discussed. Smith assembled an index of first-lines, topics, and artists, cross- 118 l have used the Smithsonian re-release of the AAFM on compact disc for this chapter. The Smithsonian version includes an updated booklet of essays by commentators such as Greil Marcus and Allen Ginsburg along with an archival facsimile of Smith‘s original booklet. 104 referencing these with an impressive discography and bibliography of existing scholarship on folk tunes. Smith also included examples of record company advertisements and sleeve art for the original recordings, invaluable for studying popular depictions of race and gender at that time. Critics such as Greil Marcus and Smith‘s longtime friend Allen Ginsberg have discussed Smith's work at length, not only in folk music but also painting and experimental film. In 1991, the year that he died, Smith received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in the area of folk music. His short acceptance speech simply drew attention to the fact that the music and lives of those he saw as outsiders had changed America though his work and that had been his dream all along. Harry Everett Smith was also an occultist. His parents were Theosophists, both personally known to Helena Petrovna ("Madame") Blavatsky and Annie Besant. An ancestor of his, John Corson Smith, hadlboeen not only a General during the Civil War but Lieutenant Governor and State Treasurer of Illinois as well. He was also very active in US. Masonry, and a revivalist of the Knights Templar.119 Smith often talked of his parents' book collection on alchemy and occultism, but as a youth he was equally fascinated with Amerindian rituals and worship. This stemmed from his close contact with the Lummi Indians reservation, where his mother taught school. Late in life, while he was ‘Shaman- ln-Residence’ at the Naropa Institute in Colorado, Smith would continue to 119 Obituary of General John C. Smith, New York Times, January 2””, 1911. 105 lecture on Amerindian cosmologies and especially rituals, sometimes drawing upon audio recordings he had made of such ceremonies. Well before the appearance of the Anthology, Smith had taken a more active interest in the Western Hermetic Tradition, one of the main intellectual and ritual ancestors of contemporary Paganism. In the early 1940's, he dropped out of graduate school and migrated to the San Francisco and Berkeley areas where he encountered bohemians interested in artistic production and countercultural ideologies. Like Jack Spicer's hermetic and kabbalistic poetry of the same time and place, Smith sought to use a vessel, in this case, music, to influence the wider culture. Having built an impressive collection of 78s, and with the help and prodding of Folkways Records production director Moses Asch, Smith assembled an occult map of vernacular folk music, religious sermons, and lists of artists. Smith printed the titles and creators on the front covers of the anthology itself, against a background picture of "The Divine Monochord," an engraving created by printer Theodore de Bry for the 17th century Rosicrucian Robert Fludd’s magnum opus "History of the Microcosm and Macrocosm." The juxtaposition of these two elements could not be starker. While giving an appearance not dissimilar to that of a banjo or guitar stock at first glance, the monochord was in fact, a chain of being that lead from ineffable God to Earth traveling through concentric realms of supernal existence via a two-octave sequence. The printed titles and artists formed a "Music Of The Spheres“ or a hidden path through which God could both extend his influence in the world and be contacted by earthly adepts. Within the accompanying booklet, the 106 connection is also clear. At the end of the annotated sequence of tracks, Smith includes a text box listing "a few quotations from various authors that have been useful to the editor in preparing the notes for this handbook." In sequence they are: "In Elementary Music The Relation of Earth To The Sphere Of Water Is 4 to 3, As There Are In The Earth Four Quarters of Frigidity To Three of Water." - Robert Fludd "Civilized Man Thinks Out His Difficulties, At Least He Thinks He Does, Primitive Man Dances Out His Difficulties," - R. R. Marrett "Do As Thy Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law" - Aleister Crowley "The ln-Breathing Becomes Thought, And The Out-Breathing Becomes The Will Manifestation Of Thought." - Rudolf Steiner While 19th century "primitivist" and anthropologist R. R. Marrett’s quote provides some insight into Smith's view of music as orthopraxic culture, it is the inclusion of the other three quotes that concerns us here. Fludd has already been mentioned as a schema for Smith's organizational schema. Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy, was, like Vaughn Williams, also concerned with similar matters such as moral education and uplift of the human spirit. Like Smith's parents, Steiner had been a member of the Theosophical Society (before he left to found the Anthroposophical Society). Like Fludd's esoteric pictorial cosmology and graphs, Steiner was primarily interested in ' "astral cartography" but also taught a system of somatic or "visible music" designed as a bodily form of spiritual development.120 In addition, Steiner's ‘20 Arthur Versluis, "Christian Theosophy," Esoterica 8, (2006): 150; Joscelyn Godwin, "Music ln The Hermetic Tradition," in Gnosis and Hermeticism: From Antiquity to Modern Times (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998) 193. 107 school of Rosicrucianism was most likely deeply influenced by the Ordo Temp/i Orientis, (Order of Oriental Templars), a social magic organization headed later 121 by the English magus Aleister Crowley. While Crowley's relationship with music will be discussed more fully in the next chapter, the influence on Smith was clear. Smith clearly took to heart Crowley's primary conceptualization of "magick" (as distinguished from stage magic or prestidigitation). Magick, as Crowley often defined it, was the "Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will."122 Magick then is simply conscious, intentional, deliberate activity, ranging from everyday life to the most rarified of occasions. As for Smith's act of magick, that seems to have been the creation of the Anthology itself. In 1968, Smith noted that he had felt "social changes would result" from its issuance and was gratified his dream came true while publically accepting his Grammy in 1991. Smith's act of collectively re-disseminating various economically, politically and racially marginalized voices into the larger social discourse, as authentic folk Americana, created an imago, a cultural imaginary with which those who saw themselves as outsiders could create a 'heritage' discourse--that usable past with which to socially and culturally change the future. To paraphrase Smith's quotation from Rudolf Steiner, the gradual assembly of all these recordings was the "In-Breathing" of Smith's thought. His 121 Daniel van Egmond, "Western Esoteric Schools in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries," in Gnosis and Hermeticism: From Antiquity to Modern Times (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1998) 337. 122 Lon Milo DuQuette, The Magick of Aleister Crowley: A Handbook of Rituals of Thelema (Boston, MA: Weiser Books, 2003) 11. 108 "Out-Breathing," the issuance of the Anthology, was the manifestation of that thought expressed in will, or sacred praxis. Others in turn would take the energies breathed out, by artists, by record companies, and collectively by Smith, and create their own manifestations of thought through Will. Smith's magickal activities did not stop there. He went on to work in experimental film and continued to record and document Amerindian sacred ceremonies. He created Kabbalistic and other types of paintings highly regarded by occultists. He produced the cult group The Fugs's first record in the 1960's and went on to help issue Allen Ginsburg's poetry in spoken-work format, while continuing to work with other notable counterculturalists, such as Peter Lamborn Wilson (a.k.a. Hakim Bey) and William Breeze, member of the musical group Coil, and better known as Frater Hymenaeus Beta, current international leader of the O. T. 0. After Smith's death, Breeze eulogized Smith's life, calling him a "guru" and thanking him for his artwork, which still graces the cover of Thelemic holy texts today. Smith has been further recognized within the ceremonial magick community as one of its major modern adepts, alongside Israel Regardie, Jack Parsons, and Frieda Lady Harris.123 Summary Conclusion 123 Bill Breeze. “In Memoriam, Harry Smith," in Paola lgliori, ed. American Magus Harry Smith: A Modern Alchemist (New York: Inanout Press, 1996) 7-10; James Wasserman, The Mystery Traditions: Secret Symbols and Sacred Art, (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 2005) 87. Wasserman dedicated this entire text to Smith as well. 109 Folking and filking have clearly provided part of what Pagans have been seeking in music. Folk music provided an existential grounding and countercultural narrative for the building of oppositional religion in the American context. In many ways, we can see Bonewits’s “Be Pagan Once Again” as another early 1970’s manifestation of cultural resistance to Christian outsiders and internal co-identification between ancient and modern Pagans. On the other hand, the ritual year, so ingrained in the mesopagan matrix of the Watersons and the Andersons, provided an agricultural bridge and harmonial religion by which various influences could be reconciled and drawn upon.124 Folk ideology, at least in the language of Child, Sharp, and Williams, is insistent on an essence of ethnicity, and a quotidian wisdom premised on pre- industrial modes of perception and modes of production. For advocates like Harry Smith, a class-based approach provided a protest mechanism against social disintegration, unrestrained capitalism/industrialism and the existential horror of modernism.125 Creating and maintaining successful “heritage,” musically and othenrvise, requires that community participants deploy a variety of self-conscious ideological and rhetorical strategies. For Pagans to associate themselves with romanticism, indigenous traditions, languages of identity politics and vernacular populism is to attempt to purchase, produce, and deploy “cultural capital.” Producing Pagan cultural capital is less like a two-way street, and much more 124 See reference to note 23 of this chapter and chapter 1, note 19. 125 . , . . , . . . . . As we shall see in Chapter 5, these anti-modernity dlscurswe reactions have also given rise to reactionary forms of Pagan political and musical discourse. 110 like a crowded, multi-tiered intersection. For as we have seen, authors, singers, writers and poets have appropriated languages of paganism and its attendant concepts to validate and explain themselves; Paganism seems to exists simultaneously as moving target and vanishing mediator. Pagans and filkers themselves have clearly been aware of the ephemeral and circular nature of this cultural ecology. In 1986, the second Ohio Valley Filk Festival was held over Halloween in Columbus, Ohio. At that festival Margaret Middleton, a devoted filker since 1975, sang several songs, including one written by Mercedes Lackey. Before she finished, she announced that this upcoming song had a sing-along chorus and that "most of you should know it.“ Her selection was "Circle (Around and Around)", written by science—fiction fan Gwen Zack. Touching on Ireland, the Earth, the ancient folk and their agricultural seasons, and the worship of God and Goddess, in some ways it is a paradigmatic song within Pagan discourse. Certainly many Pagans since 1986 have encountered this refrain of their holy mysteries: And around, and around, and around turns the good Earth; All things must change as the seasons go by. We are the children of the Lord and the Lady Whose mysteries we know, but will never know why.126 126 Margaret Middleton, ”Circles (Around and Around)," Ohio Valley Filk Fest II Concerts. November 1st, 1986. Private archival audiotape in author's possession; Full lyrics available in Oberon ZeIl-Ravenheart, ed. Green Egg Omelette: An Anthology of Art and Articles From the Legendary Pagan Journal, (Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2009) 69; Zack credits the melody of the tune (“‘Windmills') to Christian folk artist Alan Bell, discussed in Chapter 1. 111 Chapter 3 Love and Relation in the Orphic Tradition: Case Studies in Musical Theologies "So then, 0 my Son, there is my Wisdom, that the Voice of he Soul in its true Nature Eternal and Unchangeable, comprehending all Change, is Silence; and the Voice of the Soul, dynamic, in the Way of its Will, is song. Nor is there any Form of utterance that is not, as song is, the Music proper to that Motion, according to the Law. Thus...the first Quality of Art is its Ekstacy." --- Aleister Crowley, "De Cantu"127 “What is Pagan Music? Pagan Music is “Ancient Sounds Resonating Earth’s Sensualities.”128 ---- a Seneca Native American In many religious communities music is intimately tied to doctrines and beliefs. Indeed, it may serve to carry those theological commitments forward, serving educational roles from generation to generation. In contemporary Islam, Sufi practitioners practice sama (hearing), engaging in ritual devotional music, poetry, and Quranic recitation. Their engagement takes the form of a spinning dance, their movements transforming them into vessels by which divine grace is manifested in the world. They channel a music that praises the Prophet and the 127 Aleister Crowley, “De Cantu, ” Liber Aleph vel CXI: The Book of Wisdom or Folly (1962; repr., York Beach, MA: Samuel Weiser, 1991) 115. 128 Twylah Hurd Nitsch, correspondence to Serpentine Music Production, January 8”“, 1997. This one page letter is on stationary from the Wolf Clan Teaching Lodge. In author's possession. 112 Revelation, their dance reflecting harmony between God and the world. This is an embodied theology, one that speaks through music and dance. The roles of polytheism and monotheism in contemporary Paganism are complex and are displayed in all of their complexity within Pagan musicking. ' Consistent with its theological heterogeneity, experimentalism and orthopraxis, a variety of theological ontologies are presented in Various works. This should be no surprise. In fact, this marks contemporary Paganism as consistent with the larger trend. Within all the more established traditions, monotheisms included, there exists an irreducible pluralism of theological approaches. The nature and emphasis of Jesus in Roman Catholicism is noticeably different from John Calvin’s approach to Christology. Both traditions share much but still stand in stark contrast to Latter-Day Saint approaches to Christ. In Nikaya Buddhism, the philosophically non-theistic approach to Shakyamuni Buddha contrasts sharply with the Mahayana role of Shakyamuni as the created body (or Nirmanakaya) of the Buddhadharma, as distinct from the Sambhokagaya (blissful heavenly body) or the Dharmakaya (absolute dharma without boundaries). Like many Buddhists, much of the Pagan community is suspicious of the word “theology” and its associated discourses.129 They perceive this t0pic as nothing more than systematically fossilized dogmatics and lofty excuses for committing various forms of violence against outsiders to monotheistic communities. Theology seems little more than the implications of the most abused parts of sacred scriptures. Yet theological discourses are deeply 129 See John J. Makransky and Roger Jackson, Buddhist Theology: Critical Reflections by Contemporary Buddhist Scholars, (New York: Routledge, 2000). 113 embedded in the sacred poetics and rituals of Pagan traditions, whether the Norse Eddas, Gardner’s writings, incantational songs, and even blessings performed before meals. From the earliest public days of the British Witchcraft revival there have been those pushing the envelope and demanding a broader range of reflective examination of the theologies within Pagan traditions. The earliest known introduction of Aphrodite worship to the United States was no exception to this either.130 Pagan ‘musical’ thealogies express a range of sacred relationships between humans and Sacred Persons such as deities, ancestors or nature spirits, continuing and further developing the literary hermeneutic discussed in Chapter 1.131 While some thealogies, like the folk elements of the previous chapter, are concerned with practices of the ritual year, others seek to establish the limits, parameters, and membership within an ideal community of practitioners. Others are designed to express specific encounters and consequences thereof from interacting with other-than-human persons. Still others seek to link deities from different cultures through their common activities or practices, such as dancing. 130 See “Fifty at ‘Pentagram' dinner” Pentagram: A Witchcraft Review, 2 (November 1964): 1,2; Robert Cochrane, “The Craft Today — Robert Cochrane, decendent of a hereditary Witch family, suggests that radical rethinking is necessary for the craft to assume its rightful place in modern society,” Pentagram: A Witchcraft Review, 2 (November 1964): 8. 131 l deliberately use the term ‘musickal’ here. For Pagans, ‘musicking’ in the sense that Christopher Small describes is a form of 'magick,’ the art (and ritual technology) of effecting change in accordance with the will. Small's expanded notion is particularly suitable for discussing religious music's intradiscursive qualities and effects. See Introduction, note 16. “Thealogy” refers to the axiomatic designation of ultimate reality as essentially feminine in contemporary Pagan systems I am addressing. 114 Goddess Telestics132 In 1939, Glen Botkin, a Russian immigrant and former associate of the Russian imperial family, announced the restoration of “the open worship of Aphrodite in the Christian world.” Formal recognition came later that year in the form of a New York State charter to the congregation, named the Long Island Church of Aphrodite. Eventually, the Church made its way to New Jersey and Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1967, Botkin, having already written several volumes, published In Search Of Reality, a theological exploration and apologetic for the worship of “Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Beauty, the self-existent, eternal and Only Supreme Deity, Creator and Mother of the cosmos.” The Church’s articles of faith and axioms are appended at the end of In Search. Sealing the publication is the “Thanksgiving Hymn,” taken from the ritual of the Church of Aphrodite. The hymn starts with a series of thanks, beginning and ending with the sun, moon, and stars. Aphrodite is named as “the Universal Cause, and everything that breathes in Heaven, on earth and the deep of sea, is Thy creation.” According to Botkin, she is the source of the “songs of our ‘ birds...the Core of all truth.” Reigning in a ‘trinity’ with Goodness and Truth, Beauty is ultimate an expression of harmony, a “call of Her Divine Love instilled in their souls, their minds and their bodies.” Chaos is merely an ever-diminishing remnant, the absence of harmony and beauty. Like the songs of birds and their natural pleasantness, harmony is the dominant Goddess-concept, heard in song, 132 “Telestics” is the plural of ‘telestic," referring to the end or purpose of being. Used in theological discourse, it is analogous to the concept of telos, or "final causation” in Aristotelian metaphysics. The word “teleological” is derived in the same way. 115 seen in the Sun and found in the ending beatitude of the hymn. Botkin sought to replace “religious faith with religious knowledge” through the “perception of basic, cosmic truths, the Goddess and the Laws emanating from her being knowable.” Botkin’s debt to Aristotle and the Neo-Platonists can be clearly discerned, but it is the relationship of harmony, song, and hymnody that presents itself here. Just as the Universe Is but many facets of the principle of Love, the construction of hymns of praise and thanks are the reciprocal offerings Botkin’s church and worship sought to promote and preserve. Botkin’s hymn evokes the ineffability of Aphrodite in her essence, while recognizing her energies throughout the material world. Nature, he says, “sings to the human being of Love.” By participating in the “gift of courage...wisdom...[and] joy,” one shuns “hatred, ugliness and discord;” and fulfills one’s purpose to assist in the “Divine creative effort“ and attain Heavenly immortality. In this case, the musical expression of the deepest human self is the expression of divine power, the teIos of Aphrodite.133 Other contemporary Pagan traditions also devoted to Goddess worship have seen and sung themselves into a relation of universal telos.134 In 1956, Frederick Adams, then studying anthropology in Los Angeles, had a classical Rudolf Otto-like experience, a “mysterium tremendum” that left him with the fundamental commitment that the Feminine was ontologically fundamental. Rather than Aphrodite, he identified this Sacred Person as Kore Soteria, the ancient maiden of Greek and later Roman tradition who Adams later understood as the daughter of a Pantheistic-Panerotic Goddess. Later in the 1960’s, he 133 Glen Botkin, In Search of Reality (Charlottesville, VA: Church of Aphrodite, 1967) 32-40. 116 would join with others to practice and promote Feriferia, a tradition that like Botkin, shunned discord and ugliness. The utopian aims of the Feriferia community seek to re—establish a common understanding of humans as part of an extended kinship network. In this network, humans are siblings to all forms of ensouled nature: “fires, airs, clouds, waters, stones, soils, trees, plants and animals.” The music and chanting developed within Feriferia reflects many of these goals as well. Oh holy maiden of the kindling quick of merging mist and mazing echo the innocent bounty of the trees bears your faerie flesh of wildness, wonder magic, mirth and love. Your beauty seals our bridal with all life. The dance of your green pulse unfolds all bodies from earth’s fragrant form. Evoe Kore, evoe Kouros, Awiya! Hail, holy maiden, hail, holy youth. Hail great lady of living cosmos and of eternal wildness and love.135 Filial Theologies Love as telos and extended kinship are common themes in theological musics. This is not only the case with Goddesses, but Gods have been sung into sociosacred relation as well. The work of the British pop group XTC shows that this group has been no stranger to religious issues. In 1986, a controversy erupted from the popularity of a single in England which was later inserted in to the US. release of their Skylarking album. “Dear God” was a chart hit, but was also a strong statement of bold atheism based on the classical “Problem of Evil” in Western philosophy of religion. Yet on the same album there are several ~— 135 Quoted in Hans Holzer, The New Pagans: An Inside Report On the Mystery Cults of Today, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1972) 88. 117 songs with strong Pagan themes and symbolism such as “Seasons’ Cycle", “Sacrificial Bonfire”, and “Summer’s Cauldron”. Years later, in 1999, XTC released a double-set of albums, Apple Venus Volumes 1 and 2. Each of the album covers contained the statement “Do What You Will But Harm None” on the back cover. This statement is almost identical to a famous maxim forming much of the basis of Wiccan ethics — “And It Harm None, Do What Thou Wilt.” “Greenman”, written by XTC lead singer Andy Partridge, is a general acknowledgement and celebration of male power and principle in nature. In particular, it is a weaving of this power into the web of social relations and hUman identity: Please to bend down to the one called the Greenman He wants to make you his Bride... And you know for a million years he has been your lover He‘ll be a million more... Please to dance round for the one called the Greenman He wants to make you his Child... And you know for a million years he has been your Father He'll be a million more These “command-style” verse lines are sung in overdubbed group voice, while explanatory lines are interlaced in single voice. The explanatory lines answer in ways that alternately signify several different relations to this male principle of personified nature. First, the song posits a strong eros, an emotional, mystical relationship between the listener and the Greenman in a hierogamy, or sacred marriage. But the song also presents this theological relationship as a filial one. The agape relationship of father and child is seen as important to human relationship no less than erotic modes of relation. Perhaps most strikingly, the 118 song resonates between these existing hermeneutic poles, co-locating itself along a shifting, protean axis of interpretation. Both knowledge locations lyrically evoke an inner realization, or gnosis, of alternating in these states of relation in a processional fashion, from the unknowing past into the unending future. The song concerns itself with the history and image of a contested figure—the Green Man. Medieval churches and cathedrals all across western Europe have often included a painted or sculpted figure of a pained masculine face surrounded with leaves and woodland elements. There are various interpretations of this figure, Christian and othenrvise, but for Pagans this figure is quite clear and referenced in the XTC song. Contemporary Pagans have often identified the “Green Man” as a hidden or resistant Pagan subtext within these Christian visual depictions—an exegesis (and perhaps eisegesis) of the repressed sacrality of Nature. The “Green Man” thus provides a site of claiming contested religious symbolism. Such acts are a powerful sonic mechanism for Pagans to participate in the ongoing rehabilitation of Nature. Likewise, by positing a human understanding of nature damaged by ‘Christian exploitation,’ Pagans have created a theological imperative to succeed in a mercurial cultural environment. Musically, as a mass-mediated claim of religious knowledge and theological principle, the song “Greenman” functions as an educational and reflective site for sacred gender. More specifically, for Pagan listeners, this popular song on a popular album often reinforces the different ways that the divine principle of masculine immanence is addressed and conceptualized. 119 Within the Dianic tradition of Goddess worship, the gender divide of male and female common to many other aspects of human life is re-envisioned into a different binary, "Mothers" and "Children." Within this tradition the Goddess is often conceptualized as the manifest web of all life and life force. Within musical expressions of this ontology the roles of eros and agape come ever closer. In the 1988 self-titled recording by the group Pomegranate, the role of mothering is alternately ascribed to the substrate or form of the Goddess, called “Earth Mother”: Earth Mother, come to me, heal my wounds and comfort me (set me free) I am the Earth (x2). I am the form of the Goddess Air, Wind, Breathe and Blow.... I am the Breath (x3)...of the Goddess Fire Fire Warm Desire (x2) Change me, Warm Me, 'Til I'm Higher (x2) I am the Heat (x3)... of the Goddess Water falling, rain and snow... I am the Tears(x3)...of the Goddess The acoustic guitar and cello, along with the overdubbed vocal choir, begin a vamp that pulses with the repetitive identifications between the singer and the various somatic portions of the Goddess. Alternately, the song could be understood as a system of call and response, whereby the manifest forms of Goddesses respond to the ecclesial community’s invocations to the sacred elements. Here, the vocalists identify as the “tears” of the Goddess. In apparent contrast,the same cassette's final acappella hymn, "Closing," identifies human life as the specific children of Mother Earth, rather than her “tears." But the 120 enduring wise Ocean is also Mother. In this case, the Ocean is mother to the reactive life of women, connected through the manifestation of tears, whether sad or joyful. Willpower is sung as a gift from Sister Fire, the manifestation of passion. Knowledge and inspiration are gifted from Sister Air, manifested as breath.136 Emergent feelings and willpower are harmonized in consciousness, just as water and fire are harmonized in their balance. With a clear liturgical focus, there is no sense in Pomegranate’s music of some received dogmatics, but rather they make hierological statements based on the primacy of religious experience and relations, which can shift and change over time. Just as human relationships within a ostensibly familial hierarchy can be very flexible and even inverted over a lifetime, so too can the experience of guidance, emotion, will and breath. In other cases, even the most ardent confessions of personal confessional polytheism are tempered with equally ardent expressions of monotheism, even Abrahamic monotheism. In 1992, Desert Wind (mostly the work of producer Alan Scott Backman) released Return To The Goddess In Chant and Song, still circulated and advertised in Pagan publications today.137 The recording included two different versions of "We All Come From The Goddess," written by feminist witch Zsuzanna Budapest in 1971. In addition, the versions included on Return 136 Pomegranate, Pomegranate, 1988. Cassette. Self-published from Baltimore, MD, 21228. While in a secular sense it is appropriate to use the term “ascribe” in the sense of assigning relationships in the song “Earth Mother,” in Pagan thealogy this would be known as “aspecting,” a process by which the devotee merges a portion of her identity to the Goddess, such that the Goddess temporarily manifests through her, or by which the latent ‘aspects’ of the Goddess are awakened in her children as proof of filial relation. 137 “Sample Recordings from Circle," Circle Magazine 30, no. 3 (Winter 2008): 67. 121 To The Goddess added the chant "lsis-Astarte-Diana—Hecate-Demeter-Kali- lnanna," originally written by Jewish feminist and eclectic syncretist Deena Metzger.138 Return To The Goddess also features staples of Jewish song, from "Donna, Donna" to the Shabbat classic "Hine Matov." The latter is melodically married to a chant calling Isis, Osiris, Kali and Shiva. Other tunes such as "Reach In" and "I Am" are less about Goddess tradition as they invoke the "I Am” movement of esoteric Christianity and New Age discourse. The CD describes itself as "exotic new age tribal fusion for ritual dance, Iistening,...meditation and those seeking personal transformation through the power of music, which is what we are."139 As in the music of Pomegranate, polytheistic and monotheistic expression in Desert Wind’s work fluctuates depending on the state of relation being invoked. Ariana Lightningstorm grew up in a musical family and worked with Pomegranate in her first professional music endeavors. As the result of ritual experiences, she later founded the group KIVA. In 1993, KIVA released an album, Alchemy, which addressed the role of Goddess telestics through filial relationships. The song “Aphrodite’s Daughters” is perhaps the best example of this combination. Set against reverberating strings and acoustics, an aural soundscape of rolling and crashing beach waves and birds sets the tone for a unified chorus of women, combing their hair in laughter together. The chorus calls the sea “mother,” even as they identify themselves as daughters of ¥ 138 This chant is prominent throughout Pagan music, and discussed in Chapter 5. 139 Desert Wind, Return To The Goddess In Chants And Song, Compact Disc. Self-published from Salt Lake City, 1992. 122 Aphrodite. The animals of the sea are identified as friends for play and frolic. Lest an image of soft vulnerability predominate, the middle of the song features an ominous warning of numinous power. With bones of those who our treasure would own We comb our hair ever softer For none can take our freedom away For we are Aphrodite’s Daughters.140 The song ends with the Daughters’ telling of their gatherings on full moon nights, calling their mother and sisters. Lastly, the Daughters proclaim that they are calling the listener as well, reaching to include her. By extension, the filial relationship of worship and reverence—the ecclesial community, is composed of all of ‘Aphrodite’s Daughters,’ giving listeners a participative stake in the music’s religious agenda. Ecclesial Musicologies In Wicca and Goddess worship, one of the most striking elements discussed by scholars and emphasized by practitioners has been the ecclesial structure within the religious tradition. A congregationalist structure predominates both at the level of individual congregations and also characterizes the politics of macro-level structures such as cross-tradition federations. These aspects have been investigated to a much lesser extent in other traditions, but these issues have also been important in their religious musicology. The narrative and experience of watching, learning about, or becoming a member of a circle or MO Kiva, “Aphrodite’s Daughters," Alchemy, Self-published from Rockville, MD, 1993. The liner notes for this release are especially helpful. 123 coven forms almost a sub-genre of Pagan music itself. In 1983, folk musicians Kenneth and Tzipora Klein, along with other colleagues, recorded a cassette of Wiccan liturgical music which has become a classic. This album, Moon Hooves in the Sand, brought the emergent Blue Star Wicca tradition (an offshoot of the older Gardinerian and Alexandrian traditions) into the consciousness of many practitioners and interested parties. The first track is a typical example of the ecclesial consciousness many of these groups had for themselves. Let me tell you the story of a cowan one night Who went to a circle, with eyes wide and bright The circle was opened, the Lady’s light shone Our friend gently smiled and knew he was home. Eko Eko Aradia, Eko Eko Hecate Freya We’ll teach your children year after year To love with their hearts, and live without fear. The Priestess walked over, lifted his head Gazed into his eyes, still no words were said He opened his hand, said “I know not much” The Priestess laughed lightly, said “Perfect love and trust. ”141 This song, known as “Home Again,” continues to be the opening liturgy for Blue Star Wicca circles. The ecclesial unit, the circle, is defined in terms of individuals committed to education and Goddess worship. In fact, authority in the song tends to flow between human and other-than human persons. In a gender reversal of 141 Kenny Klein, Tzipora Klein and Blue Star, “Home Again," Moon Hooves In The Sand. Cassette. Self-published in 1983. The central chorus is descended from chanting used in the Alexandrian tradition. This cassette is traditionally copied for distribution to new initiates in the Blue Star tradition. It has also spread widely through festival culture. A "cowan" is an outsider, an uninitiated person foreign to the ecclesial community. 124 monotheistic traditions, power and authority are passed from female to male and to the community at large. In this case, the political is tied together closely with musical division of labor as well as theological polarity. As the Goddess tends to be emphasized over the God in Blue Star, the Priestess performs much more of the ritual activity, while the Priest has a lesser role. The initiatory transmission of gnosis from female to male also reflects the emphasis on gender polarity within Gardnerian-derived traditions, as energy flow is directed between working partners of neighboring genders.142 More broadly, the circle is seen as a spiritual “home” — a center of love and trust. The functions of education and strengthening are related back to the religious authority, flowing between the Goddesses mentioned, the human authority of the Priestess, to the entirety of the circle itself. “Home Again” functions to call the worshippers into mindfulness and attunement to their spiritual home.143 In other cases, the ecclesial power of the circle ‘inadvertently’ effuses outward, as a entrancing call capable of affecting behavior and influencing ethical judgments. “Witch’s Dance,” by Cynthia McQuillin, gives an excellent example of this process, set to rattles and a steel drum: I went down to the sea to watch the waves roll There in the mist, I saw the Witch’s Dance. Their laughter rang free, their voices so full. 142 See Janet and Stewart Farrar, A Witches Bible Comp/eat, rev. ed. (1984; repr., New York: Magickal Childe, 1987) 17, 45. The chorus was originally the passed on through Doreen Valiente, working partner of Gerald Gardner. 143 Compare Helen Berger, A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft In The United States (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999) 52. 125 Spoke of enchantment, soon I was entranced To this very day I hear the songs that sang, They beckoned to me...so much wisdom I go down the sea...please come back to me, my sisters in soul. l’ll join the world they weave, I’ll join the world they weave someday.144 In other cases, musicking marks a broader field of ecclesial form, sometimes expressed as communitarianism. This ecclesial use of music arises in Circle Sanctuary’s Pagan Spirit Gathering (PSG) festival. The festival features periodic Town Meetings. These meetings are described in the 2000 festival guide as "important points of focus and information." The meetings are held at the Town Green, a gathering area within the extended roundabout road through PSG. Community concerns tend to be the primary focus, as well as announcements. Any changes in scheduling are communicated here as well. Alongside this, though, is again the mention of “attunement” to the collective, if temporary intentional community. The desire for harmony in the political sense is facilitated by the production of psychic attunement via musical harmonics.145 Chanting, drumming, and general percussion are welcome in the “rhythms and chants” of the Community, reflected in both musical performance per se and also the give and take of political negotiations over the use and distribution of finite resources. These political harmonics are reflective of the ontological harmonics Pagans seek with their Sacred Persons. An example of the two such M4 Cynthia McQuillin, “Witch's Dance," Witch ’3 Dance, Unlikely Publications UP0012, 1998. 145 P86 Community Guide, “Magic In Nature," (Mt. Horeb, WI: Privately printed, 2000) 1; Berger, A Community of Witches, 75. 126 ontomusicologies can be heard in musics devoted to two very different Goddesses. Sacred Persons: Yemaya and Brigid Contemporary Pagans have not generally accepted the idea that Gods and Goddesses are ‘owned’ or bounded by human religious traditions. Rather, E HI they often see “cultural ownership” as a form of theological hubris among a humans. There is ample evidence that Goddess worship in much of Paganism involves sacred Persons such as the traditionally Hindu Kali, the Tibetan Bodhisattva Tara, and many others.146 Because Pagan traditions place such a high degree of emphasis on relationship and experience, many Pagans grant a great degree of autonomy on behalf of Deities to call forth their own disciples both inside and outside of human institutions like “religions.” Wiccans especially often see different deities as aspects of a single duotheism of Goddess and God, and therefore see little point in exclusivism. Musically, two very popular Goddesses could not belong to more different ‘original’ traditions: indigenous Celticism and African religions. Yet both have become musically prominent both as separate entities and as aspects of spiritual realities higher than their own individualism. Yemaya, the Yoruba goddess and Vodoun Iwa figures prominently in Pagan song. One popular recording is by the group KIVA. The song “Star Of The 146 For example, see Lunacy, “Kali Ma," Lunacy, Serpentine Music, 1990. Lunacy invokes the Hindu goddess Kali as the "Dark Mother." This is named as an aspect of Grandmother Earth in her capacity as the tomb in which all life must die, just as Summer turns to Fall. Once again the theological framing takes place in terms of the Pagan ritual year. 127 Sea” is a pennywhistle calypso starting off 1997’s Live At The Forest Inn. “Star” is a prayer to Yemaya, “I see your beauty reflected in me..sisters..kin, your children are beautiful, bright shining. Boundless compassion, forgiveness and grace, I long to see you face to face.” The lyrics connect through discussing filial relations, while all descriptions are positive and happy. The self is a mirror of divine identity, just as the sea reflects the light of the star. Yemaya’s dominion I over the sea and waters gives her a powerful connection to female devotees, as i: the menstrual cycle ofwomen and ocean tides are culturally linked to the l Moon.147 The all-female choral group Libana addresses Yemaya on their album Night Passages differently. Beginning with an “undulating chant honoring the Yoruba Goddess,” Libana’s approach is one of their only tracks to include tracking percussion, in this case a djembe played by Maryth Paffrath. Yemaya is not invoked directly via request or command. Rather, she is referred to in the genitive case in relation to “deep waters” and “all tears.” Yemaya’s name is parsed out in triple syllables, elongating each vowel in a chorus. Then the separate vocalizations are sung against each other, against the constant rush and beat of the djembe. The liner notes name Yemaya as the Creator Goddess, while the cover artwork (“Moondrift #1”) backgrounds every page, including the front and back covers. Blue shaded and overlaid papers as clouds and sea frame a large moon on the upper left. This dark fluid seascape encapsulates and ’47 Kiva, “Star or The Sea," Live At The Forest Inn, Self-Published from Rockville, MD, 1997. 128 surrounds all the tracks, which range from a Xhosa chant to Islamic Sufi poetry and an American Shaker tune.148 Yemaya has demonstrated a tenacious resonance for Pagans. Frederic Lamond, an original initiate of Gerald Gardner’s witchcraft coven, notes that he had worked with a number of different deity names for the Goddess in his life for over two decades. After coming into possession of a deity mask from the Ivory Coast in 1980, he later purchased a book on Santeria where her learned of the Yoruba goddess most associated with the ocean. While vocalizing her name during prayer, he achieved a much stronger resonance than usual, and adopted Yemaya as a “guardian goddess.”149 In July 2001, Raul Canizares, noted scholar of Santeria, presented a series of workshops at the Starwood Festival just outside Sherman, New York. In a session called “Cuban Trance Music,” Canizares taught ...about the Yoruba/ Santeria chants to the different deities. Each chant has a particular vibratory frequency that helps heal, balance, and awaken your own centers of awareness. These chants include prayers to Eshu, Lord of Choices, Shango, Lord of Music, Virility and Thunder; Obatala, Lord of Intelligence; and Yemaya, Goddess of the Sea and of Motherhood. Baba [Canizares] will also introduce new fusions of ancient chants and modern musical modes.150 148 Libana, “Yemaya," Night Passage, Spinning Records SR003CD, 2000. 149 Frederick Lamond, Fifty Years of Wicca (Sutton Mallet, UK: Green Magic, 2004) 51. 150 Association for Consciousness Exploration and the Chameleon Club, The 215' Starwood Festival Guide (Cleveland, OH: Association for Consciousness Exploration, 2001) 20-21. Starwood is notable, among other things, for its location in proximity to the historical Burned-Over District and for being largely to subject of an entire monograph in Pagan Studies. See Pike, Earthly Bodies. 129 These multivalent images, modes of musical expression, and theological attitudes toward the Sea and its Mistress are combined in the choral group MotherTongue’s published songbook, Wheel Of The Year. Member lnanna Arthen scored an arrangement of “one of the best” simple call and response chants in the group’s repertoire. “Ocean Mother” is a Common time chant in B- flat major. A bass vocal drone in low G lays under a heartbeat drum pulse in D. Two voices echo in call/response format. The characterization of Yemaya combines both the bright and dark themes found in artists like Kiva and Libana, respectively. The call presents Yemaya in action and motion (healing, crying, laughing, birthing) while the response embraces the noun form of identification (healer, mourner, brightness, cradle). Importantly, the identification is always made with respect to the Earth, so that the noun form is genitive. Just as the Sea is of the Earth, so too is Yemaya’s activity intimately tied into the telluric realm. As in the work of Libana, the drum’s occurrence here is unusual compared to the rest of the repertoire. MotherTongue comments that this piece “presents the many faces of the Goddess through its rich text and symbolism. In singing this piece, a vocal drone and heartbeat drum give it a flowing and sensuous feeling, further invoking images of the sea and its power.”151 The notion of the Sea as a grand space of play, a place that touches radically different peoples and cultures and yet vital for all universal life, makes it an ideal subject for intertextual music. While intertextuality will be discussed more fully in Chapter 5, the sea as a place where Yemaya can be named 151 lnanna Arthen, “Ocean Mother," The Wheel Of The Year: A Magical Journey Through The Seasons As Performed By MotherTongue: The Ritual Chorus Of The EarthSpirit Community, (Chester, MA: Abyss Distribution, 1993) 25. 130 alongside other female sacred persons suggests an openness and fluidity appropriately embraced through the Orphic impulse. Among the Gods and Goddesses who have inspired much of modern day Pagan musical activity, Brigid must be counted somewhere near the top, for devotion to her has resulted in an especially wide variety of musical expressions. In the summer of 1998, The Beltane Papers, a magazine specializing in women’s spirituality, published an entire issue devoted to Brigid. At that time, each issue of The Beltane Papers was dedicated to a guiding Goddess, and the different ways women could access power via this entity. With regard to Brigit, the specific edition of that magazine discussed childbirth, midwifery, and sexual abuse. Brigit was depicted on the cover by artist Sandra Stanton using cultural markers seeking continuity between both ancient and modern aesthetic forms. Inside the magazine, Barbara Callan’s “Song for Brigit” sung of the power and blessing found in relationship with her: Great Mother...you are the spring of prophecy, May you be blessed forever... When I am hurt your give me healing Yours is the power of conceiving And the full bright moon of giving birth We women share in your glory At the sacred opening of our wombs... In my heart’s core may there be, while I live, A spark of your eternal flame. A slow F major single melody in 3A time, the notated score offers several fermata for pause and emphasis. 131 In contemporary Druidry, Brigid is generally associated with Imbolc, one of the eight holy festivals of the common Pagan year.152 As in the Roman Catholic veneration of St. Brigid, her influence and domain are ubiquitous, ranging from art, to metalwork, midwifery, poetry and education. For many inhabitants in the Northern Hemisphere in the throes of in an early February winter, lmbolc and Brigid nonetheless mark the hidden power of germination, the quickening of the season as the ritual year marches toward Beltane. After other parts of the liturgy are completed, Brigid is called into the grove via successive aspects: Come, Daughter of Eternity Come, Brid Of The Flame Come, Sister of Infinity Bring healing to the lame Come, Lover of the Anvil Come, Brid of the Hammers Come, Artesian Most Able Sing of sparks and glimmers Midwife, War chief, Goddess Come into our Nemeton Our hearts we offer guileless Come into our Nemeton.153 Her practice among American druids is largely marked by offerings, whether material, poetic, or dance, given in the presence of sacred fires, one of the three common elements found in most Druidic altars.154 Consistent with the 152 There are a variety of spellings used for Brigid, including “Brid," “Brigit," “Brighid” and other variations as well. ‘53 Ellison, The Wheel or The Year, 5253. 154 Ian Corrigan, Druidheachd: Symbols and Rites of Druidry, privately printed, 2000. 132 Orphic impulse, devotionals to Brigid are not limited to her status among the high Gods and Goddess of Druidry (known as the “Shining Ones"). Brigid, seen in ADF as the Goddess of Poetry and communication, occupies a special place via the institution of the Bard. Bards, sacred storytellers and musicians in Druidic tradition, are a central part of public ritual. The Druidic community understands them as conduits for the return flow of poetic inspiration and divine grace. The presiding Bard in a grove may use a song similar to the following to honor Brigid as part of the high holy day rituals: Lady Brigid of the Bards Blessed Fire of Inspiration Spark the flames within our hearts Lead our creative exploration Lady Brigid hear our song As we give offerings of praise.155 Just as bards are honored for their communicative skills, the Druidic community understands Brigid’s ‘poetic fire’ as capable of transforming gross material offerings into spiritual substance for transport to the God/desses. The connection between a channel of offerings and a conduit for the return flow of blessings, whether bardic or otherwise, establishes reciprocity, the operative praxis that underlies Druidic ritual. Ancestors, nature spirits, and high Gods/Goddesses make up the three sacred Kindreds in this tradition. The filial relationships with ancestors, the geolocal relationships with nature spirits, and the establishment of personal connections with one or more “hearth deities” constitute channels of mutual social obligation. ‘55 Peggy Khan in Ellison, The Wheel or The Year, 48. 133 As a deity associated with fire, blacksmithing, and midwifery, Brigid has assumed a particularly important place among other worshippers as well. Lisa Thiel, a holistic medicine practitioner and Goddess devotee, has created several homages to Brigid. On her 1995 album Song For My Ancestors, Thiel includes “Song For Brighid.” Addressing Her as “Blessed Woman..of the Land...of the Hills..of the Flame, ” Thiel calls for Brigid to guide and assist her in spiritual renewal. Asking musical blessings from Brigid has been a continuing theme for 1r--.- 31:3] Thiel and others. On a 1988 cassette, Songs of Transformation, Thiel recorded a ‘ chant to Birgitta, a Celtic figure regarded by some in ADF as a poetic representative of Brigid. “Birgitta Birgitta Priestess of the flame, Birgitta Birgitta Goddess of the flame, awaken the flame within my being, awaken the sacred fire within my being.”156 This chant grew to be widely accepted in liturgical worship. In fact, it was adopted (and credited to Thiel) in the ADF’s Muin Mound Grove liturgy published 15 years later, although Thiel’s specific recording was not referenced. But in terms of Pagan music, the case for connecting and interpolating records of the past, is best illustrated by examining a different extensive liturgical and textual tradition, yet one that has received much less scholarly attention than Yemaya, feminist Goddess worship, or even Druidry. Thelema - Music for the New Aeon In silence I wait For his voice to roll, For the coming of Fate, 156 Email to the author, February 18th ,2009. 134 The strength of my soul. My words create One glorious whole From the fragments divided that seem past a man's or a god's control -- Aleister Crowley, "Orpheus"157 In the history of contemporary Paganism, there are few voices as distinctive and contributions as controversial as those of the English magus 5 Edward Alexander Crowley, who commonly went by the first name "Aleister." E Crowley's efforts are commonly considered by scholars such as Chas Clifton to constitute sources prior to the onset of Paganism in the 20th century. In this way, along with works by poet Robert Graves, archaeologist Margaret Murray, magus Dion Fortune and folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, Crowley's magickal and religious production are often seen as providing much of the base material from which Gardnerian Witchcraft was constructed, just as the 19th century French magi Alphonse Louis Constant ("Eliphas Levi") and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn did for occult movements in the early 20th century. However, there are many aspects of Crowley and the religious system revealed by (or perhaps through) him that not only specifically express much of the currents later recognized, but as will be seen also embody many of the musical and discursive markers I have discussed in relation to the evolution of the concept of "Pagan." The religion of Thelema, inaugurated through Crowley's (and his wife Rose's) reception of a sacred text of power in Cairo, 1904, has 157 Aleister Crowley, "Orpheus," Collected Works Of Aleister Crowley, vol. 3 (1905-07; reprint, Homewood, IL: Yogi Publications Society, 1978) 152. 135 grown to outlive the life of its prophet, and is far more extensive in its reach now than it ever was during Crowley's lifetime. In many ways the role of song is central to this sacred text, known as the Liber aI Legis ("Book Of The Law"). Overall, the Book Of The Law is a threefold theological dispensation of evolutionary consciousness. In its three parts it addresses three separate entities which are the subject of much dispute and interpretation. Firstly, Nuit, the ancient Egyptian star-goddess, presents herself as conscious pantheism--the unlimited possibility of universal creation. She agrees to be divided from a universal into particular phenomena, while calling for eventual reunion through love. At all my meetings with you shall the priestess say-- and her eyes shall burn with desire as she stands bare and rejoicing in my temple--To me, To me! calling forth the flame of the hearts of all in her love chant...Sing the rapturous love song onto me! Burn to me perfumes! Wear to me jewels! Drink to me, for I love you! I love you!158 Nuit's counterpart, the infinitely ‘particular’ Hadit, appears in the second chapter. Within Thelemic understanding he is commonly thought of as the counterpart to Nuit. Nuit, the paradigmatic pantheistic Goddess is thus balanced by a force that passionately seeks the creation of form out of the formless, a center for a circle whose circumference is Nuit.159 The last chapter of the text is 158 DuQuette, The Magick of Aleister Crowley, 33-75. 159 Aleister Crowley, "Liber al Legis" in The Holy Books of Thelema (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weister, 1983) 114; Also see Crowley, "On The Mystery of The Universal Eucharist," in Liber Aleph, 1991, 119. 136 given over to Horus, the child born of the union of Nuit and Hadit. Together, the union of conceptual possibility (Nuit) and concrete necessity (Hadit) produce a field of contact within which material existence can take place. Crowley, in the guise of the ancient Egyptian priest Ankh-af-na-khonsu sings Unity uttermost showed! I adore the might of Thy breath, Supreme and terrible God, Who makest the gods and death To tremble before Thee I, I adore thee! Appear on the throne of the Ra! Open the ways of the Khu! Lighten the ways of the Ka! The ways of the Khabs run through To stir me or still me!160 The transcendental cosmology of Nuit and Hadit gives rise not only to this field of cosmogonical contact, but produces "a further materialization of the original idea of Nuit[h]; she is the Scarlet Woman, the sacred harlot....from this star, behind the celestial sphere itself, issue the curled rays of spiritual light. Heaven itself is no more than a veil before the face of the immortal goddess."161 This office of the Scarlet Woman is known as Babalon, and corresponds to a male office, the Master Therion.162 Just as Nuit and Hadit's union results in the 160 For example, see DuQuette, The Magick of Aleister Crowley, 42, 47-49. This song is written in hieroglyphics on the obverse side of an ancient Egyptian funerary stele from the 25th dynasty, regarded as a holy artifact within Thelema. The "Stele of Revealing" displays the Goddess Nuit, the God Hadit, and the priest Ankh-af-na-Khonsubefore the throne of Horus. 161 Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth (York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 1981) 110. 162 The terms Babalon and Therion (Greek for "Beast") are taken from the New Testament apocalypse Book of Revelations, but interpreted differently. Babalon is the Goddess, known as the Holy Whore because as "Universal Impersonal Life" she accepts the life and death of all beings, her cup of blood refusing none. A similar idea, albeit with different connotations, can be found in the Reclaiming hymn "We All Come From The Goddess." Therion is the manifestation of 137 emanation of Horus and thus a ‘Supernal Filial Triad’ (Father Mother Child), the hierogamy of the Master Therion and Babalon produces an ecstatic transcendence of material duality, an idea commonly found in different forms elsewhere in the religious world, such as in esoteric Buddhist tantra. The extension of Thelemic influence in contemporary art, music and film has yet to be fully gauged in the field of religious studies. As discussed in Chapter 2, Harry Smith, the assembler of the American Anthology of Folk Music, E“?- was involved in Thelema, demonstrating this through his quotation of Crowley in the liner notes of the collection. Other countercultural artists, such as filmmaker, author and Thelemite Kenneth Anger, also saw their artistic efforts as magical spells.“ The depth of former Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page's involvement has been the subject of much speculation for years. He is known as a former collector of Crowley texts and paraphernalia. In 1970, the same year that saw the publishing of Crowley's autohagiography, Page had the phrase "Do What Thou Wilt" inscribed into the center vinyl of Led Zeppelin Ill, and purchased Boleskine House on the shores of Loch-Ness in Scotland, a house Crowley used for lingam/solar power, found in all earthly life forms, and an office aspired to by Thelemic devotees, whether personally masculine or feminine. According to Thelema, this “New Aeon” surpasses the spiritual truth of the Aeon of Osiris, personified by Christian institutionalism. Therefore, the sacred Apocalyptic enemies of vernacular Christianity become the heroes of the new Aeon. This view does not extend to Jesus, whom, like Siddhartha Buddha and Mohammed ibn Abdullah, Crowley regarded as a Sacred Magus of the highest grade, and appropriate to the Aeon of Osiris. 163 Elenore Lester, “From Underground: Kenneth Anger Rising," New York Times, February 19th, 1967. Arts and Leisure Section. Anger is quoted as saying that Thelema is the "present-day embodiment of witchcraft. 138 magical purposes at the start of the new century.164 Page's name would continue to be associated with Crowley's until the end of the band's career.165 Avant-garde composer John Zorn, perhaps best known for his jazz works and promotion of Jewish musical identity, has been developing a series of works inspired by Crowley’s theories, as well as other radical figures from the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Antonin Artaud. In May 2002, Zorn’s label Tzaddik released I.A.O: Music In Sacred Light. Issued within a small white case, the release contained four glossy cards of medieval ritual magic and zodiacal symbols, as well an inset photo of Kenneth Anger from his 1969 film Invocation To My Demon Brother.166 Zorn dedicates the work to Anger, and includes an explanation of this ’musickal’ operation, derived explicitly from than the language and technique of Crowley’s magnum opus Magick in Theory and Practice.167 I take “magical weapons” (pen, ink and paper). I write “incantations” (compositions) in the “magical language” (music)...l initiate “rituals" (recordings, performances)...l call forth “spirits” (musicians, engineers, printers, CD sellers and so forth...) The composition and distribution of this CD is thus an act of Magick.168 164 Lawrence Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley (New York: Macmillan, 2000) 421. 165 John Rockwell, "The Pop Life: Veteran British rock bands alive and well," New York Times, September 14th 1979. The Weekend, Section C. 166 The soundtrack for Anger's film consisted mostly of an overdubbed wall of Moog-like synthesizer sound created by Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. 167 Aleister Crowley, Magick In Theory and Practice, 2nd rev. ed. (1929, repr., York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1991) xiii. 168 John Zorn, I.A.O.: Music in Sacred Light [liner notes], Tzaddik, 2002. It is Zorn who perhaps best expresses the conceptual fusing of “music" and “magick" into “musick” here. 139 Tzaddik describes this work as a “seven-movement suite of Alchemy, Mysticism, Metaphysics and Magic.” Other recent works by Zorn have continued this line of discursive dramaturgy. Works such as Moonchild, Astronome, Rituals and Magick have become commonplace for Zorn in his career.169 Other artists have instead chosen to focus on the prophetic nature of Thelemic revelation. Mike Scott, a British singer/songwriter briefly discussed in Chapter 1, was not only informed by the literary Paganism of Edna O’Brien, but ‘2‘ T77 in; also openly embraced the religious Paganism of Aleister Crowley and the '- glamour of Pan as embodied in the works of Kenneth Grahame. In 1993, Scott’s band, The Waterboys, released Dream Harder on Geffen Records. In the liner notes Scott recalls a dream transcript, printed in large letters across a background of maps. In the Orphic tradition, Scott’s dream and the maps cross borders and spaces from New York City to Glastonbury to Greece. The maps blend into each other as the space of the dream shifts to the famed ancient sites of Nemea, Tripoli and the other sites of ancient Peloponnesia. Scott envisions a vitalist environment, where “everything is alive,” and a stone temple rests near a holy tower, a meeting place for “heaven on earth.” The cover artwork juxtaposes Scott at the base of a tree dreaming as the gates of dawn open behind him with a photograph of a Glastonbury tower at sunset, both bathed in twilight. In this case, the music itself though is the greatest testifier. The last track, “Good News,” is a literal Thelemic gospel of prophecy, touching on the new Aeon’s arrival, the birth of the crowned and conquering child Horus, and the 169 See J. L Walters, "John Zorn: Crowley At The Crossroads," The Guardian, June 21, 2006. Moonchild is the title of a published novel written by Crowley. 140 association of human vitalistic power with the esoteric combination of the Sun and the Earth’s energies. Like the turn of a page or a change of gear a brand new age is already here and even while men pursue their doom F a magical child is kicking in the womb mm— 3. I'm preparing for birth I'm not the only one I'm a part of the earth I'm a drop of the sun170 .' 1‘77,- Scott’s track “The Return of Pan” refers to the famous association Eusebius, Henrich Heine, D. H. Lawrence, and Aleister Crowley all made between the rise of Jesus Christ and the death of Pan, based on interpolating the famous story from Plutarch’s “On The Cessation of Oracles.”171 But this occurs only after Scott tells of experiencing the “Piper At The Gates”’ numinous power. For Scott, commitment to Pan is not based in belief, but in somatic knowledge claimed through his experience of dance. Crowley’s associations with Pan form part of his public reputation as well as private study. From a text written for his magickal students, to a hymn he wrote and requested sung at his funeral, Crowley was fond of crying to Pan in song “Io Panl, lo Panl, lo Pan!” For 170 The Waterboys, “Good News," Dream Harder, Geffen Records GEFD-24476, 1993. Much of Crowley’s personal history was centered on creating (biologically or intellectually) an heir—a “magical child” who would fulfill certain prophecies in the Book Of The Law. 171 See Philippe Borgeaud, “The Death of the Great Pan: The Problem of Interpretation," History of Religions 22, no. 3 (1983): 254-283. 141 Crowley, Pan was best understood in philological punnery—as a synonym for “all.” The “Comedy of Pan” is the embrace of the dualities of life in a unity of play. As others have noted, this is part of Crowley’s invocation to Pan. The “I” of the lingam is fused to the “O” of the yoni in an ecstatic transcendent hierogamy fusing all in all.172 On the American side of the Atlantic, Crowley’s influence was felt in popular music as well. Daryl Hall, best known for his collaborate hit singles with guitarist John Oates, demonstrated a clear familiarity with applied Thelema in his album Sacred Songs. This work was Hall’s first solo effort in the late 1970’s, and was engineered with the help of guitarist and Gurdjeff devotee Robert Fripp, best known for his tenure with King Crimson, one of the archetypal Progressive Rock groups of the early 1970’s. Hall’s work was conceptualized around the difficulty of translating protean creative inspiration into ossified material fact. This dualism between “sacred” and “profane” runs through several tracks, finding expression both in the tension of romantic relationships and inner conflicts, even as Hall, consistent with Thelemic doctrine, sings that they are “one and the same.”173 But it is on the last track of the album that Hall's esoteric leanings burst fully open for the listener, Hall’s discursive “other.” Too much power is wasted on the wrong words 172 DuQuette, The Magick of Aleister Crowley, 78; Crowley, Liber Aleph, 197; Crowley, “The Temple of Solomon The King" in The Equinox 1, (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Company, Ltd. 1909) 31-34; Richard Kaczynski, Perdurabo: The Life Of Aleister Crowley (Tempe, AZ: New Falcon Publications, 2002) 210-11, 453-54. 173 Daryl Hall, “Sacred Songs,” Sacred Songs, Buddah Records 74465996042, 1999 [RCA 3573, 1980] 142 ‘,--:-..xa- ' ...and if there’s one thing I’ve learned through the years it’s how to pour my heart out without tears. without tears, earth magic. Looking for the lines but never knowing that stream Ley line the spring that’s always flowing spirals up and down Then reverse direction don’t you wonder where the energy goes? Too many secrets have been told this way ...Without tears, without tears, earth magic.174 - .9 9“ i _ ' . 1.5“." Later, in a 2007 interview, Hall revealed that he had been investigating ' comparative mysticism and Aleister Crowley’s religious output at the time, framing that period as one of “self-analysis” and pushing the boundaries of metaphysics.175 The track “Without Tears” is best understood alongside one of Crowley’s most popular works, Magick Without Tears. This particular work consisted of Crowley’s responses to student questions and problems, designed to clarify and illuminate the practice of magick, the refinement of spiritual agape and discovery of one’s “True Will.” Hall even nods to the tradition of secrecy and code in esotericism with the use of modified ritual hand signals on both the front and back of the album. It would be inaccurate to give the impression that Thelema-inspired popular music is intimately linked with the contemporary development of specific hymns for specific rituals, but nonetheless some inspirational connections have '74 lbid., "Without Tears.” 175 See Chris Dalen. “Interview: Daryl Hall." Tuesday, August 215', 2007. Available at http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/featurel44913-interview-daryl-hall. Accessed March 3rd, 2009. 143 been made, as well as some historical connections. In November 1910, Crowley and some of his disciples enacted a week—long series of interactive dramaturgical events named the “Rites of Eleusis,” after the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries. A mix of ecstatic music, dance and libretto, the accompanying literature is quoted as saying “When I have seen God face to face..the secret that shall make you free...O ye brave hearts... I will put a live coal upon your lips, and flowers upon your eyes, and a sword in your hearts, and ye shall also see God face to face."176 E—‘TIS'E Solo violin accompaniment was provided by Crowley's then disciple and lover .- Leila Waddell, while at least one of the seven plays opens with the chorus of “Atalanta in Calydon,” from the Romantic poet Charles Algernon Swinburne. These religious plays were revived in the 1970’s by the Ordo Templi Orientis and are periodically staged all across the world by the lodges of this esoteric order.177 In each case, the last scene of the last performance features an actor playing Pan drawing back a veil to reveal the newborn child, the herald of the new Aeon. Scarlet Woman Lodge in Austin, TX has been the site of some particularly active hymnal and choral work in this area. For seven years, the lodge featured the work of Unknown Rivers, a Thelemic sacred choral group. 176 The New York Times. “'Rites of Eleusis’ in London." Special Correspondence. November 13, 1910. 177 DuQuette, The Magick of Aleister Crowley, 193-99. Examples of restaged Eleusis rites can be seen in Edmund B. Lingan, “Beyond The Occult Revival: Contemporary Forms of Occult Theatre," PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no.3 (September 2006): 23-38; Raymond Salvatore Harmon, “On The Nature of Light: The Cinematic Experience of Occult Ritual,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 31 no.1 (January 2009): 91-97. The Ordo Templi Orientis is a magickal order that predates Crowley's involvement, but accepted Crowley as its head and adopted the teachings of Thelema as a matter of course. 144 Subsequently, each autumn, the lodge produced public performances of the Rites of Eleusis in the late 1990s.178 As part of developmental work, the choragus of Unknown Rivers, identifying himself under the magickal name T. Polyphilus, developed several hymns for Thelemic chorus. Based musically on Martin Luther’s “Ein Feste Burg,” Polyphilus developed “The Law Of The Fortress.” lnterspersed with quotations and interpolations from The Book Of The Law, the hymn recalls the triumph of the new Aeon, and devotion onto Nuit. The “Fourfold Word Song” combines material from the Book Of The Law, sayings from the ancient Western hermetic tradition, and poetic stanzas from the Gnostic Mass, a public Eucharist performed by the Eccelsia Gnostica Catholica (E.G.C.), the ecclesial arm of the 01.0.179 The Gnostic Mass, written by Crowley in 1913 for the O.T.O., contains one of the most developed sacred hymns of Thelemic devotion. In fact, section seven of the Mass is devoted entirely to it. At first Priest and the Chorus answer each other, but this shifts to alternating glorias from semichorusus of men and women. Thee l invoke, abiding on, Thee, secret and center of the Sun, And that most holy mystery Of which the vehicle am I Appear, most awful and most mild, 178 See essay and photograph in “T Polyphilus: Hymns of the Gnosis.” Available @ http://www.hermetic.com/dionvsos/sonqs.htm. Accessed 3—29-08. 179 The tune is taken from the 1744 Thesaurus Musicus. The Gnostic Mass can be reviewed in a number of text collections including DuQuette, The Magick of Aleister Crowley, 226-42. Quite often living members of the O.T.O do not wish to be publically identified for fear of religious persecution, therefore it is common for members to publish and work under their adopted name. 145 As it is lawful, my child. For of the Father and the Son The Holy Spirit is the norm; Male-female, quintessential, one, Man-being veiled in women-form. Glory and worship in the highest, Thou Dove, mankind that defiest, Being that race, most royally run To spring sunshine through winter storm. Glory and worship be to Thee, Sap of the world—ash, wonder-tree !180 “Unknown Rivers” also encouraged the development of other Thelemic choral projects, including the Horus Chorus based in Salt Lake City, Utah. Horus Chorus is affiliated with Horus Oasis, and has produced a commercially available Gnostic Mass and hymnal performance on compact disc. Besides narration and the performance of all assigned speaking parts on the recording, Horus Chorus also performed a work written by T. Polyphilus, “Hymn 418." This particular hymn is strongly associated with the spiritual work of overcoming dualistic reifications of conceptual truth and falsehood. It is based on a popular Thelemic esoteric text, Liber DCCCXIII (“813”), or ARARITA. “ARARITA” is a transliterated acronym for a common Hebrew praise of God: “One is His beginning; One is His individuality; His Permutation One.” It also figures prominently the 19th century French ritual magic tradition and the fin-de-sie‘cle magical organization Hermetic 180 For example see Aleister Crowley, Victor B. Neuberg and Mary Desti, “Tu Qui Es,” and "Quia Patris,” The Vision and the Voice with Commentary and other Papers (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1998) 404. Crowley considered these invocations his supreme achievement in ritual music. These were chosen as the anthem for the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica and its public ceremonial celebration, the Gnostic Mass. Crowley wrote the Mass while in Moscow, inspired by the liturgy of St. Basil in the Russian Orthodox Church. See Frater Sabazius, “Introduction To The Gnostic Mass,” Liber XV: The Gnostic Mass: Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, Compact Disc, 2003. A score of the choral music, copyrighted 1999, can be found online at http:/Iwww.herrnetic.com/sabazius/anthem.pdf (Accessed 3-2-09) 146 Order of The Golden Dawn, based in Great Britain but with chapters in continental Europe, the United States and New Zealand.181 One alone is the beginning, And the essence one and whole, One the perfect permutation Of the universal soul. ARARITA ARARITA Seven letters sealed and done: ARARITA ARARITA ARARITA Six in One. CHAOS, Father Lord of Aethyr, Praise to thy great Mystery, And to our Mysterious Mother BABALON eternally. BAPHOMET, lion and serpent, Mighty may thou ever be! Grant us gnosis in your Ii ht and Life and love and liberty! 82 The other popular Eucharistic liturgy in Thelema is the “Mass of the Phoenix" (MOTP). John Zorn, in his album I.A.O- Music in Sacred Light quotes the MOTP as follows: I have made matter and motion for my mirror; I have decreed for my delight that nothingness shall figure itself as twain, that I might dream a dance of names, and enjoy the substance of simplicity to watching the wanderings 181 Aleister Crowley, The Holy Books of Thelema (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1983) xxxiv, 215-222. 182 Httpzllwww.hermetic.com/dionysos.hvmn418.htm (Accessed 3-2-09); Horus Chorus, “Hymn 418," Liber XV: The Gnostic Mass: Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica, Compact Disc. 2003; The melody for Hymn 418 was adapted from “Ebenezer," a welsh folk tune adapted for Christian praise by Thomas J. Williams; see Albert C. Ronander and Ethel K. Porter, Guide to the Pilgrim Hymnal (Philadelphia: United Church Press, 1966) 340. 147 of my shadows.183 While located in Crowley‘s magnum opus alongside the MOTP, this quotation is actually from a different ritual known as the “Ritual of the Mark of the Beast, an incantation proper to invoke the Energies of the Aeon of Horus, adapted for daily used of the magician of whatever grade.”184 The MOTP is a short ritual that involves charging consecrated cakes with the power of the setting ‘fn... ”any sun, as well as a drop of the devotee’s own blood. These are then consumed by v- the devotee to retain a heliocentric religious and hermeneutic connection with the Sun’s vitalist power throughout the night, and remind him or her of the continuous somatic process of transmuting material into mental and ‘spiritual substance.’ Crowley advised his students to practice the MOTP daily. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Unknown Rivers adapted a Gregorian chant arrangement by the eminent and controversial American ecclesial composer Lowell Mason for this purpose.185 This short 2 verse piece, called “The Cry of The Phoenix," is scored in an F major common time for dual treble and bass choral components.186 Summary Conclusion '83 John Zorn, I.A.O.: Music in Sacred Light [Liner Notes], Tzaddik Records TZ7338, 2002. 184 Crowley, Magick In Theory and Practice, 573. 185 Lowell was known for seeking to adapt European classical music for American hymnody, often drawing on the work of Haydn, for example. In this way, the Thelemic tradition has continued the practice by engaged in the same melodic appropriation—that of Mason’s piece. 186 A pdf score for “Cry of the Phoenix” can be found at http://www.hermetic.com/dionvsos/nemiosscore.pdf (Accessed 3-02—09). Crowley apparently wrote two different versions. one in the MOTP and the other appearing under the name "Cry of the Hawk” in his volume Book of Lies. 148 Thelemic hymnist T. Polyphilus has recognized that the prayers used in the MOTP are adaptations of the Paternoster, the famous and singular piece of verbal liturgy attributed to Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Instead of praying to “Our Father” though, the Cry is addressed to “Thou Child,” the field of creation and the new Aeon brought into existence through the interaction of the Goddess Nuit and her lover Hadit. but in both cases the personality of address is known by filial relation (“Father,” “Child”) rather than a deity name. In keeping with the Aeon as having arrived earlier in the century, Polyphilus quotes Mike Scott’s “Good News” as part of his commentary.187 This is not surprising, for the dominant tone of Scott’s track is upbeat and positive. The Anthem of the Gnostic Mass too sings glories to “thee, beyond all term. Thy spring of sperm, thy seed and germ.” In this embrace of hierogamic union, and in its celebration of earthly life, Crowley’s Gnostic Mass is yet another route to the agape and eros found in Botkin’s hymnal, as well as XTC. The role of XTC’s “Greenman” is both father and lover, just as the role of Botkin’s Aphrodite is that groundless ground of Neoplatonist love and beauty, 3 language echoed in the Thelemic entities of Chaos and Babalon. The range of musical theologies in contemporary Paganism is extensive, addressing telestics, ecclesiologies, exegesis (whether of religious experience, sacred text, or both), and the roles deities play in relational kinship networks. Only some of its themes can be dealt with here. Much more work needs to be 187 See reference for note 44, this chapter. 149 done in studying and parsing systematic theologies within different Pagan traditions. In particular, musical works, attitudes, and associated cultural aspects will need to be taken seriously by those approaching such a study. In particular, the hermeneutics of love are clearly seen at work here, as is the role of the child, whether son or daughter. The topic of humor, itself often the product of (un)intentional boundary juxtapositions, will guide us into a deeper discussion of the role of the most valued and flexible Orphic state, that of the “child.” 150 ‘9- ~—.-?-,-— fl CHAPTER 4 Caution: Orphics At Play: Humor and the ‘Child’ in Pagan Music “If we examine how ‘play’ is used we find talk of the play of light, the play of the waves...even a play on words. In each case what is intended is to-and-fro movement that is not tied to any goal that would bring it to an end. [Play] originally meant ‘dance,’ and is still found in many word forms. The movement of playing has no goal that would bring it to an end...what holds the player in its spell, draws him into play, and keeps him there is the game itself.” - - Hans Georg Gadamer188 “Play As the Clue To Ontological Explanation” “Once I was done, I immediately went In search of my witchlings. When I rounded the corner of the house, I could hear their little voices chanting!...Dancing in circles while picking wand flowers and chanting, “Mother Earth, Mother Earth, we love Mother Earth!" Never had I seen that much pure magick. You could easily see the faeries dancing with them." - Connie Briggs189 In the last chapter, I examined the way that thealogical principles were embedded in various musics within the Pagan rubric. In the conclusion I hinted that the role of phenomenological "playfulness” was in many ways central to understanding Pagan thealogies and the musics that have articulated them. In addition, by emphasizing the role of filial kinship as an operative Pagan thealogical axiom, l have opened up a nexus point for investigating the role of the "child" relative to the acknowledged ‘adult’ role of the Gods and Goddesses, 188 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall, rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 1994) 103-106. 189 Connie Briggs, The Blessed Bee: A Pagan Family Newsletter 1 (Summer 1999): 16. 151 whether as a Neoplatonist feminine telos (as in Chapter 3’s ‘Church of Aphrodite’), or the manifest body of the Earth herself (as in Chapter 2’s "Hymn To Gala”). Long before the advent of Pagan Studies as an academic discipline, one of many facets of Paganism as a cultural discourse was its association with playfulness and humor, often coupled with expressions of youth. The well-known animated film Fantasia (1940) by the Walt Disney Company featured a number of narrative segments set to classical music pieces. Among the most famous was the 6th Symphony in F Op. 68 (“Pastoral") of Beethoven, used as the accompaniment for a sequence featuring the Gods of Mount Olympus along with young centaurs (and centaurettes) engaging in courtship. From the very beginning of its sequence young unicorns are seen chasing all over lush fields of flowers to find the source of the enchanting melody, played by young fauns welcoming the dawn on pan pipes. The fauns frolic with each other, dancing and playing hide and seek with the baby unicorns. With the advent of religious Paganism, the ontology of play assumed major importance. In Gardnerian witchcraft the Goddess and the God are assisted in the drama of the seasons by the dancing and power-raising of the coven.190 Moreover, with the sensationalistic approach British newspapers and American magazines demonstrated toward the new religion, aspects involving dancing, frolicking, and merriment were highlighted as a way of exoticizing the tradition. The public face of witchcraft and Paganism were thus tied together with '90 Gardner, Meaning of Witchcraft, 25. 152 imagos of fertility rites, dancing and primitive play.191 In the United States, the launch of one of the first Pagan magazines, Green Egg, began in 1968 as a one- sheet ditto in green ink in St. Louis. Inviting one and all to come for congregational fellowship on Thursday nights at Westminster and Boyle, the ditto sheet promised a variety of activities, from lectures to “hootenanny and folk dancing.”192 ' I Even before the advent of Green Egg, modern Pagans invoked a variety of musics in media coverage and material culture. In a 1957 British newspaper 1 article, Gerald Gardner returns to the romanticism of Francis J. Child, lamenting the loss of the ‘original’ tunes of the witches’ dance. Instead, because of the “advance of modern science....l’m afraid we just tend to turn on a gramophone. Any music will do—Debussy’s L'apres-Midi d’un Faune [Prelude To the Afternoon of a Faun] is good.”193 But even at this early stage, music and dance are married together in play from the words of Gardner, who tells the journalist "of course I’m a witch, and I get great fun out of it.” Music, dance and circle chants are also prominent in a set of poor quality audio recordings from Gardner’s late (1960’s) coven practice. These recordings were coupled with recordings made by one of his last initiated priestesses, Patricia Crowther, and her coven known as the Sheffield coven. Crowther is recorded as singing the 1963 hymn “Lord of the 191 Allen Andrews, “Calling All Covens" Sunday Pictoral. July 29’", 1951; “Yes, I Am A Witch” Daily Dispatch. August 5'”, 1954; “Real Witches At Work" Life 57, no. 20 (November 13"", 1964): 55-57, 60, 62. 192 ZelI-Ravenheart, Green Egg Omelette, xii. 193 Andrews, “Calling All Covens." 153 Dance,” written by Sydney Carter, including the controversial verse often understood as blaming Jews for the deicide of Christ. A version of the ‘Aradia Chant’ (See Chapter 3) practiced by the Sheffield Coven survives as part of the Gardner/Crowther 1960’s recordings, and is also quoted in a 1964 issue of Life opposite pictures of frolicking and leaping witches.194 A similar version exists on the album A Witch Is Born, a recording of narrated initiations set to Wagnerian music performed by Alex Sanders, creator of the Alexandrian tradition of Wicca.195 “Lord of the Dance” also became a staple of Pagan music, with different versions produced by prominent figures besides Pat Crowther. GWydion Penddenrven published a G-major scored version with lyrics by Aidan Kelly in 1972’s Songs For The Old Religion songbook, released though Nemeton. Songs For The Old Religion was worked into an album release in 1975, and continued to gain publicity as some of the earliest recordings promoted by the journals Green Egg and Nemeton. The reworked lyrics give us a playful theophany, whereby the Goddess gives birth to the Universe and the God, appears on Earth as a consequence of the Sun’s radiant flow of energy into the world. When She danced on the waters, and the wind was Her horn, The Lady laughed, and everything was born, And when She lit the sun, and the light gave him birth, 194 These short recordings include an interview with Gerald Gardner, examples of God and Goddess chants with both his working coven and the Sheffield coven of Patricia Crowther. They were published on compact disc as part of a set including reprints of Gardner's original nonfiction books, Witchcraft Today and The Meaning of Witchcraft. The musical recordings and interviews were published in 1991 under the title Enjoy: Blessed Be by now-defunct Mercury Publishing, based in Lake Toxaway, NC; "Real Witches At Work” Life 57, no. 20 (November 13'“, 1964): 55. 195 Alex Sanders, A Witch Is Born, Grey Matter GM06CD, 1994 [A8M AMLS 984, 1970]. 154 The Lord of the Dance then appeared on the Earth I sleep in the kernel and l dance in the rain; I dance in the wind and through the waving grain. And when you cut me down, I care nothing for the pain; In the spring, I’m the Lord of the Dance once again. I dance at the Sabbat when you dance out the spell I dance and I sing that everyone be well, And when the dancing’s over, do not think I am gone; To live is to dance, so I dance on and on.196 "Lord Of The Dance” continued to evolve after Penddenrven’s production. Others from the Pagan and the filking community, including Leslie Fish and C. Tailesin Edwards, added and reworked the lyrics. In 1992, Todd Alan recorded a version with extensive drumming and percussive work, a feature not found in Penddenrven’s or Crowther’s version. Alan’s version was released on Carry Me Home: A Collection of New and Old Pagan Songs, including additional lyrics once again harkening back to the Orphic Pan. I came with the dawning when the world was begun I danced with the moon and the stars and the sun When I saw the light that was coming from the Earth I joined in the rhythm and she gave me birth.197 In all these cases, the longevity, prominence and protean shifting of lyric markers indicated the importance of the message as adapted for the Pagan community—to live for the dance. Or in the language of hermeneuticist Hans- Georg Gadamer, for ontological play. Todd Alan’s version was later remastered 196 “Lord of the Dance," Songs for the Old Religion (Oakland, CA: Nemeton Publishing, 1972) 197 Todd Alan & Friends, "Lord Of The Dance," Carry Me Home: A Collection of New And Old Pagan Songs, Todd Alan Studios, 1992. 155 along with tracks from other artists for the landmark collection Best of Pagan Song, released through Serpentine Music in 2004. Play as Humor and Parody The playfulness and metaphoric dance of the Orphic impulse has also given rise to a rich tradition of parody, including self-parody, within Pagan musickal traditions. One of the most recognizable songs within the Pagan community at large has been Gwydion Pendderwen’s “We Won’t Wait Any Longer,” included on his second and final album, The Faerie Shaman. Sung as court testimony by Penddenrven in 1982 during his arrest for protesting the Lawrence Livermore labs, it retains a great deal of political meaning for Pagans today.198 Nevertheless, the song has been the target of parody by Isaac Bonewits, another outspoken political defender of both Wicca and Druidry. On his second album, Avalon Is Rising!, Bonewits and his associates recorded “We Won’t Shave Any Longer.” Punctuated both at the beginning and end with laughter and giggling, the song serves as a manifesto to justify the liberation of men (and women) from razor ‘cuts, burns, and the sting of aftershave. We have trusted no man’s razors, We have nicked and cut ourselves, We’ve been stung by all the aftershaves, Upon the drugstore shelves! And our patience and endurance, From late puberty ‘til now 198 Magliocco, Witching Culture, 195-196; Clifton, Her Hidden Children, 71. The song lyrics were also republished in Green Egg: A Journal of the Awakening Earth 25, no. 96 (Ostara 1992): 6. 156 Have given us the strength to make this vow: We won’t shave any longer Our beards are stronger than before We won’t shave any longer Our beards are stronger! And as a final point, the song includes a parody of the famous Goddess Chant 3 often used to raise power among ritual participants (“Schick Aquavelva, Norelco, Wilkenson, Gillette, Bic, Mennen, Nox-ee-maf’)199 The song plays on the common image of Pagan men as wild, bushy and bearded, examples of which can be found in pictures of Gerald Gardner, Stewart Farrar, Oberon-Zell Ravenheart, and Isaac Bonewits himself. In other cases, humor and parody may be more broadly aimed at assembling a bricolage of available cultural elements in a shifting field of signification. The musical material of Loki E. Coyote is an excellent example of this trend. The group identifies itself as performing “wiccabilly” music, but incorporates a variety of other styles such as rap, reggae, zydeco and blues. Other musicians associated with well-known Pagan bands, such as Velvet Hammer and KIVA, have also played with Loke E. Coyote. The band name conceptually unites the sacred tricksters Loki (from ancient Norse religion) with Coyote (the Amerindian mischief-maker) across cultures using the middle initial “E,” in a reference to “Wile E. Coyote,” the famous Warner Brothers character 199 The original chant by Caitlin Mullen and Deena Metzger is “Isis, Astarte, Di-an-a, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, In-ann-na." Among other places it can be found in Julie Forest Middleton, ed. Songs For Earthlings: A Green Spirituality Songbook (Philadelphia, PA: Emerald Earth Publishing, 1998) 73. Middleton’s work will be discussed in Chapter 5. 157 paired with the Road Runner in animated childrens’ cartoons of the late twentieth century. The juxtaposition of different contextual signifiers of mischief, misdirection, and mischievousness is reflected in the material culture of the groups’ releases. For example, their Summer 1999 release, Rhythms Of Spring, was issued with artwork on the obverse side of the compact disc reflecting tricksterism. [Figure 2] Figure 2: Loke E. Coyote’s Rhythms of Spring Compact Disc The obverse side is framed around a pentagram, a common symbol for Pagan traditions and found on other musical works. The left and right sections are inscribed with Ouija-style clip art, suggesting the musical work as a possible gateway of mediumship between worlds. On opposite ends underneath the pentagram are pictures of mushroom pizza, alcoholic beverages and a coyote with Pan horns smoking a marijuana cigarette. All of these substances have the ability to distort and misdirect the senses, but have also been claimed by Pagans 158 as entheogens capable of shifting consciousness.200 Opposite the coyote namesake is an eye and magician’s hat. All circulate around what appears to be a clock in the middle clear area near the spindle space. It should be noted that as tricksters who incorporate heavy metal music in their performances, the clock most likely conceals a famous musical joke from the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.201 The acoustic content of Rhythms of Spring is highly layered and distorted with effects and reverberation. As in Isaac Bonewits’s “We Won’t Shave Any Longer,” the group names (and in this case explains) its own God and Goddess chant (“Loki E. Coyote, Euterpe, Terpshichore, Pan, Dionysus, Bob Dobbs.”) as part of its song “Super Miss Cheevious.” Now the ancient Greeks personified the arts as gods and goddesses known as muses. The ones we are concerned with here are Euterpe, the goddess of music and Terpsichore, the goddess of dance. Bob Dobbs, of the Church of the Subgenius Bob Dobbs, the divine drilling equipment salesman Bob Dobbs! Who gives us such words of wisdom as: "the more ridiculous it looks the more important it probably is."202 200 An entheogen is a substance taken into the human body in order to “occasion a spiritual or mystical experience." The term literally means “god-making." See Robert C. Fuller, Stairways To Heaven: Drugs in American Religious History (New York: Basic Books, 2000) 2. 201 In the film, a heavy metal guitarist, played by Christopher Guest, is explaining to a companion that their electric amplification system sets them apart favorably from other musical groups, because their amplifiers have the capability to reach higher than the standard “1" — ‘10" relative measurements. Note that the number "11" is highlighted in the CD’s “clock" and pointed to with a notch arrow, similar to one found on amplification knobs. 202 The Church of the Subgenius is an infamous religious group within contemporary Paganism known for developing its entire cosmology as a detailed parody of almost every esoteric and mystical principle of the so-called World Religions. Its sacred symbol is a piece of 19505 Clip art 159 Along with lyrics of ‘ontological play,’ much of Loki E. Coyote’s music can be characterized as extended jam sessions with a relaxed syncopated beat. “Bob Marleycorn Must Die” is a reggae version of the folk tune discussed in Chapter 2, replacing the fermenting grain with marijuana. The middle portion of the track features a psychedelic set of Chanting based on the early 1970‘s popular tune "Hooked On A Feeling” leading directly into a parody of the moralistic Oompa- ' un— I Loompa riffs from the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. In short, the modus operandi of this music is a tension between a modernist overarching narrative (the growth and consumption of “Bob Marleycorn”) and stream-of—consciousness postmodern pastiche for the sake of humor and play itself. The more ridiculous it looks, the more important it probably is. ‘ChiId-ness’ as Social Location of Play and Protection In 1966, 5 years before the release of Willy Wonka and its visual childhood paradise, the American Broadcasting Company was in the middle of broadcasting its second season of the hit primetime television show, Bewitched. The situation comedy's activity revolved around the marriage of Samantha, a witch, to Darren Stephens, an advertising executive and described in the first episode as a “normal red-blooded American male.” Juggling Samantha’s disdainful mother (Eudora, played by Agnes Moorhead) and Darren’s of a smiling salesman smoking a pipe. Little scholarly work has been done on the COTS. See Paul Mann, “Stupid Undergrounds," Postmodern Culture 5, no. 3 (May 1995) 160 professional relationships while concealing the existence of witchcraft in the family proved to be a popular narrative for the show. The beginning of the second season revealed that Samantha was pregnant with their first child. Seeking to boost audience enthusiasm further for the arrival of the Stephens’s daughter, ABC produced a one minute promo for the Show in January. The black and white promotional film featured the child voice of Tabitha singing to the audience about her family, and her possible inheritance of witchcraft powers, all to the tune of “Rock-A-Bye Baby.” My name is Tabitha, l was just born Into a family that’s not quite the norm. My mom is Samantha, and Darren is pop. My mommy does witchcraft, but daddy does not. I wonder if I will be a witch too. It could be fun casting spells over you So why don’t you watch “Bewitched” and you’ll know, If my Witching ways are beginning to show! Visually, the clip alternated animated cartoon images of Tabitha in a rocking cradle and crawling with her riding a broomstick at night and stirring a cooking cauldron, with the network’s name appearing on the side of the cauldron towards the end of the clip. Much of the third season, beginning with the season premiere, focused around containing and hiding Tabitha’s unpredictable powers around the “normal” cast members. The image of a playful child with supernatural abilities proved part of a powerful formula. Bewitched was ABC’s most popular show in Nielsen ratings through the latter half of the 1960’s. The promotional song played on the “bewitching” powers of cute children as audience magnets as Tabitha wiggled her nose (the show’s sign of performing magic) at the viewers. 161 For those in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s who were attracted to Witchcraft and Paganism through popular books such as Sybil Leek's The Complete Art of Witchcraft and Susan Roberts’ Witches U. S.A., ontological playfulness remained a powerful theme, even outside of television fantasy. Upon opening Leek’s 1971 paperback, the very first page links us directly back to “Bewitched.” Sybil Leek is the real life soul-sister of Samantha Stevens, TV’s warm hearted witch in the popular program “Bewitched.” Rather than cast spells to destroy her enemies, put curses on inefficient hotel help, or turn photographers into toads, Dame Sybil prefers to use her time and talents convincing a sensation-seeking public that some witches don’t use their powers to practice the demonic arts of sorcery, voodooism, and black magic. Instead, they seek to aid human beings, And with a family tradition of witchcraft more than 800 years long behind her, she knows how.203 In contrast to Leek’s memoir-like meditations on her experiences as a witch, Roberts’s journalistic travelogue through American witchcraft often centered around the relationships that Pagans, witches and magicians had with their children, as well as comparing life-strategies between witches and other, presumably more ‘normative’ people. Roberts wrote that as parents, witches seem to believe it is just as important to listen to their children as to the child-rearing expert. They are always curious to know what their children are thinking and feeling about the world which surrounds them. They invariably refer to witchcraft as the ‘Craft of the Wise,’ while at the same time retaining their own childlike candor. Is this part of the wisdom of which they speak?”204 203 Inside the front cover of Sybil Leek, The Complete Art of Witchcraft (New York: Signet Books, 1971) 204 Susan Roberts, Witches U. S.A. (New York: Dell Publishing, 1971) 18. 162 ‘-' *“ "neg An example of the association between music, childhood and Paganism can be seen in one of Roberts’s first informants, the witch who initially brought her and her eager readers into the world of the Craft. Joseph Lukach was a Tarot reader and professional musician, whose religious predilections allegedly had been forecast as a child. According to Roberts, as an infant he was identified by :1 “Blanquita,” a family friend and Vodoun priestess, as possessed of innate occult " ”no...“ talent. He also presented an uncannily intense response to music, especially his father’s accordion playing. Later in life, Joe would retire from teaching at the Biviano Accordion Center and School of Music in New York City to teach witchcraft full time and serve as an occasional occult music editor for the small but influential journal Jazz and Pop, thus using his talents to assess the musical efforts of occultists. Apart from Lukach, Roberts often returned to the theme of devoted witches’ “rollocking sense of humor” and their childlike playfulness again and again.205 At discussed in earlier chapters, many, if not most Pagans consider themselves ontological “children” at some time or another. Musically this can branch and extend itself in along multiple narratives of meaning. T. Thorn Coyle, in a track from her 2002 release Give Us A Kiss names all her listeners as “daughters of the morning...sons of the night.” Youth is understood in this framework as the protean quality of being able to change and effect change. Youth is the ability to dis-cover, to “forge a soul” in the midst of destructive 205 lbid., 56, 142. 163 cultural patterns and expectations. For Coyle, this call to change the world around us necessitates that we see ourselves as capable of changing the way that we relate to each other and ourselves. Shifting and thriving amongst different paradigms is the province of those able to-envision and change accordingly. In Coyle’s instance, there is an additional depth of meaning to her political urgency. Coyle is an initiate and practitioner of the Feri tradition of witchcraft, an American syncretic tradition commonly traced to the late Victor and Cora Anderson. Within Feri, the initiate is urged toward a recovery of the primal freedom and eros associated with the youth-phase of both animal and human growth cycles. This doctrine is known as the ‘Black Heart of Innocence,’ musically expressed by Coyle on her 1999 album Face of a New Day. Innocent, Wild, Black, Free! Oh pulse, entering into me! Innocent, Wild, Black, Free! All life, earth beating through me! Dark, dark, the earth it pumps into me Dark, dark, ancestors singing, Deep, deep, surrendering up to power Oh life, She is kissing me!206 In her self-published 1994 discussion of Feri doctrine, Cora Anderson discusses the ‘Black Heart of Innocence’ as traceable to an African saying associated with a heart-shaped black ornament: “How beautiful is the black lascivious purity in the hearts of children and wild animals.” An ecstatic core of pan-erotic communion with life, the ‘Black Heart of Innocence’ is a fierce center 206 T. Thorn Coyle, “Black Heart,” Face OfA New Day, Soup House Production, 1999. 164 from which the practitioner is fully connected with life force and its central emanation, acting not out of discursive intellect but intuitive attunement. Coyle suggests that this is your “wild nature, sexual, honest, juicy, supple and strong” accessible through Feri practice, involving the alignment of three specific souls that make up the spiritual anthropology of the human.207 In this instance youth is no way defined as 'how old one's body is,’ but an orthopraxis of cultivating a -3 '- ‘41.. proper relationship between ourselves, each other and the World. In such 2‘ .t-r authentic kinship, Coyle claims, we can be “children of promise.”208 ‘- The political aspect of this conception of freedom, wildness, and honesty frames ‘children’ and ‘youth’ as an existential stance—an active, engaged way of being-in-the-world.209 Seen grasping a ‘Black Heart‘ on Give Us A Kiss’s cover, Coyle often discusses and refers to anti-poverty, antinuclear, and anti-capital punishment activities as part of her songwork, and also to the volunteer work that Pagan charities and their members do on behalf of these causes an in conjunction with other activities and interreligious networks. Coyle herself spent years involved in different religious communities from Catholicism to Sufism and the esoteric work of GI. Gurdjeff. Both of her extant solo album works are highly Pagan in content, but also specifically dedicated to Catholic workers everywhere. 207 Cora Anderson, Fifty Years In The Feri Tradition (Albany, CA: Acorn Guild Press, 2005) 29; T. Thorn Coyle, Evolutionary Witchcraft (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2005) 250-252; Victor H. Anderson, Etheric Anatomy: The Three Selves and Astral Travel (Albany, CA: Acorn Guild Press, 2004)46. 208 T. Thorn Coyle, "Children of Promise,” Give Us A Kiss, Soup House Production, 2002. 209 The hyphenation of this term refers to the Heideggarian doctrine of the different authentic and inauthentic ways Being manifests in the world through ‘Dasein.’ 165 This type of interreligious fellowship is consistent with Feri teachings as given by the widely acknowledged founder of the tradition, Victor Anderson.210 Whether understood in the Feri sense or otherwise, this thematic of kinship is a common refrain in ritual chants of contemporary Paganism, especially in the Reclaiming tradition of witchcraft, co-founded by the American witch Miriam Simos, better known as “Starhawk.” In a religious movement based in certain kinds of relationships to the world, kinship and its moral framework for ethical, interdependence-based behavior is vital as a guiding principle of authenticity in those relationships. We all come from the Goddess And to Her we shall return Like a drop of rain Flowing to the ocean. Hoof and horn, hoof and horn All that dies shall be reborn; Corn and grain, corn and grain, All that falls shall rise again.211 This chant, “We All Come From The Goddess/ Hoof and Horn” was created from separate chants written by Dianic Wicca priestess Z Budapest, and ADF ArChdruid Emeritus Ian Corrigan. Popularized by Starhawk’s Reclaiming community, seems at first to have little to do directly with youth, until we recall from Chapter 3 that Goddess imagery and Priestess roles have been indelibly 210 “Speak of the Devil, Part 1: Victor Anderson on sex, Feri and other matters.” Interview by Witch Eye, By Witch Eye: Selections from the Feri Uprising Volume 1, ed. Storm Faerywolf (Antioch, CA, 2005) 96-104. - 211 2 Budapest and Ian Corrigan, "We All Come From The Goddess / Hoof and Horn, Chants: Ritual Music From Reclaiming and Friends, Serpentine Music SMP1, 1997. 166 shaped via the role of “mothering.” And the role of mother thus implies the hermeneutic position of "child"—defined in various ways.212 The second half of the chant, written by Corrigan, provides a rejoinder to the circular movement of narrative in the first part. While the Goddess issues forth and accepts returns, the cycle of birth and rebirth continues in the meantime, thus perpetuating the important of youth and virility. +2: As well as the influence of Dianic (female-only) witchcraft and American ‘IJC- _.u . I- Druidry, Reclaiming contains acknowledged debts to the Feri tradition, which the .— co-founder of Reclaiming, Starhawk, was originally trained in. The multivalent threads of “child” discourse come together in the praxis of homemaking. Theologian Jone Salomonsen discusses one such small utopian Reclaiming collective of several people near San Francisco. Living in an intentional community are both men and women. All tend towards polyamory, and some women have children. The living arrangements are set up as a series of private cabins, with a central collective area. The community shares finances and duties from an internal business, and an outside job held by one member. Children live in the cabins with their mothers, and are home-schooled in turn by adult members of thecommunity. The children of the Goddess, so to speak, perpetuate the model interaction here using both the ideological importance of childhood/youth and the institutional framework of mutual gender cooperation. The language of mothers 212 Helen A. Berger, “High Priestess: Mother, Leader, Teacher,” In Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of Healing, Identity, and Empowerment, ed. Wendy Griffin (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2000) 115. 167 and children finds multivalent expression not only in terms of music and theology, but proceeds from such concepts into praxis for human parents and their children. In this community, the Reclaiming devotees chose to raise the children as Pagan in order to avoid the negative influences of popular media and nationalist curricula. Parents were moved by their anarchist political vision to transform the world through themselves and their children.213 Not all Reclaiming members are anarchists or collectivists. Not all live in intentional communities. But the influence of the Reclaiming tradition extends far beyond small collectives in the San Francisco and the Bay Area. For other Pagan parents, children are still often the specific focus of intentional energy, chant and song. The late author Scott Cunningham published many chants for popular use, including some for parents to use as protective incantations for their children. Chants, Cunningham explained, are “words which (when said correctly) move power within their speaker to create magical change. . .as you say the chant, release your energy into the words.” To Guard A Child Say this as the child is Leaving for school, play, or other Activities Wound around, Woven tight; Bonds of Love Guard her (him) right; 213 Jone Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco (New York: Routledge, 2000) 98-105. 168 Keep her (him) safe With love bright; Wound around, Woven tight.214 Cunningham’s active force here is that of agape, the filial love for Children that extends far beyond ordinary sight or the other mundane senses. The chant calls for bonds of love to work in loco parentis, similar to a guardian angel or higher self would intervene to protect one from harm. The imagery recalls the common ritual of a parent bundling up a child with coat, hat and scarf to face inclement winter conditions outside, the warmth of the indoors serving to help insult the child while exposed to the outdoors. A similar sentiment, albeit translated for a much younger child, was written by Isaac Bonewits, in the form of a lullaby written for and sung to his infant son Arthur. Lullaby and good night, She has banished all fright, She has banished all woe, To your slumbers now go. Lullaby and good night, Guardian spirits take flight, They hover overhead, They surround your sweet bed .215 In this case Bonewits, like Cunningham, has invoked the language of protection, as did Cunningham’s chant. Rather than being bound to the body of the child, the guardian spirits surround his crib. Moreover, Bonewits invokes the Goddess, 214 Scott Cunningham, “Chants,” New Moon Rising 11, no. 1 (Beltane 1999): 30-31. 215 Isaac Bonewits, “Arthur’s Lullaby," Avalon Is Rising!, Association for Consciousness Exploration, 2001. 169 using the ritual concept of banishment to exorcise any negative influences and assure the safety and integrity of the bed as a sacred space for the vulnerability of sleep.216 New Pagan magazines are giving more and more attention to older youth, and Pagan journals of practice are paying heed to issues of teaching younger members of the next generation.217 Amber K is former First Officer for Covenant of the Goddess (a nationwide Pagan federation) and Executive Director of Ardantane, a non-profit seminary campus in northern New Mexico. She is also the author of the Pagan Kids Activity Book, originally published in 1986 and reprinted in 1998. [Figure 3] r /"‘. Ix \\ :»,\ '21!" .‘ , , // / .\' .( I '7 -1 I -’ ‘ @’ ;" ; 9.: «:31 ,f' ‘= V \ ’ M17323 . 29,1: I'/i\,1[‘ "$1“ I." ' , ' L4, an 1‘11 1 .E“ , ' I .. .44 - j - .. 4. .' -' it.» ’1 2 ’ ‘. W971“? ‘ . ’ - ‘ ‘_. l’, 1;. ‘ \ 'I |\ “W147“; if “flit . . -‘. 1 \big \\ ‘ .3? 2': »- , , , . . -..1 . .51"?!- 222.1 ‘_ ‘ ' _, f is; _' 5. 1:33: V ”K ,.. " . ' «f;:~:?7-:~’441Q§i’2?2:€ ' 3..--” ...— ., .-,_..:.‘ - 1.. P... Figure 3: Pagan Kids’s Activity Book front cover 16 Other Pagan Iullabies can be found on works by Libana, Lunacy, and Beverley Frederick. 7 “Witches on Campus: Top Ten Pagan Groups," NewWitch: Not Your Mother’s Broomstick 5 (October 2004-January 2004): 38-45; Dame Julian Green, “Little Acorns," Oak Leaves: The Quarterly Journal of Ar nDraiocht Fein: A Druid Fellowship 26 (Autumn 2004): 25-29. 170 This collection of puzzles, games, and coloring opportunities emphasizes many of the aspects we’ve seen so far in studying phenomenological aspects of Paganism. Each of the main ritual year holidays has its own thematic coloring page, along with an attendant puzzle. The cover reflects the book’s use of music, which is one of its dominant themes. On the left a young brunette woman with long hair is sitting cross-legged, beating on an aboriginal drum. A young fair haired boy stands beside her shaking a tambourine, while the Horned God (shown as Pan) lifts a cloven hoof high above the ground while blowing on his pipes. In the book we are introduced to Lesley and Liam, two Pagan children who are shown interacting with each other and various adults in ritual circle as well. Faeries make an appearance as well. On a page devoted to learning about herbs and herbalism, small winged naked Faeries hide beneath the leaves of well-known plants as an adult Pagan’s hand moves in to pick some of the leaves for tea. Drums and horns appear throughout the book. Ritual principles are taught through puzzles. As Gardner spoke of witches assisting the God and Goddess through the raising of power, the Activity Book asks the user to “help the Goddess balance the elements” by drawing lines that connect representations of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. 2'8 Music is married to children’s activities in other ways. Within the magazine Green Egg, marketing of various publications, books, and music tapes were typically part of a single advertising layout together. Therefore, an advertisement for How About Magic?, a magazine "by and for Pagan Kids" would lead an 2'8 Amber K., Pagan Kids’ Activity Book (1986; repr. Victoria, BC: Horned Owl Publishing, 1998) 7, 10, 32. 171 advertising section, but within the same dotted line cut—out coupon would be segments devoted to ordering "Magical Music” on cassette tapes from Nemeton, the publishing arm of the Church of All Worlds referenced in earlier chapters. Lists of educational religious books for kids, such as Scott Hollander's My First A- B-C: A Primer For Wiccan Children, were included alongside other official publications for ordering as well. This type of framing displays the organic melding of play and childhood so much at the heart of this particular manifestation of the Orphic impulse. The kids' magazine, How About Magic? abbreviates to the word "HAM." This is a deliberate play on words with the title of the "parent" magazine, Green Egg, in the style of the famous children’s book by Dr. Seuss. According to the longtime leader and "Primate" of the Church of All Worlds, Oberon ZeII-Ravenheart, this was quite deliberate.219 Besides the recurrent use of humor this joke reveals an important claim for religious membership and power in Pagan circles—the importance (and mirthful reverence) of names and of naming. In many Wiccan induction ceremonies (for those in covens) and in self-initiation practices (for those working as solitaries) adoption and use of ‘a magical name’ is a vital step in socioreligious development. 220 Sometimes this magical name signifies a guardian/totemic spirit 219 Zell-Ravenheart, Green Egg Omelette, xvi. 220 Berger, A Community of Witches, 26-27, 35. 172 who oversees this development, or it can refer to an inner “divine spark” or “power within” that is drawn upon for ritual work.221 This is an especially important issue for Pagan parents, who have to come to grips with raising their children in an environment where they are members of a minority religion. In a religious tradition where naming has such power, music and myth reinforce one another. The social meaning of songs filled with Pagan names and preternatural powers provides one way that power can be passed on and grown within the next generation. Along with Green Egg, Circle Network News has been well known for promoting music from Pagan artists. In Fall 1994, their quarterly issue included a back page section of products and materials, musical and othenrvise, many of which were aimed at family use. Leading the advertisement was a description of Mother Earth, We Sing to You by an artist taking the name “Squirrel.” A wonderful cassette filled with songs for Pagan children. Highly recommended. Titles: Mother Earth, We sing to You; A Pagan Child Am I; Opposites; A Child’s Charge of the Goddess; Birthday Blessing; Children of the Goddess (The Squirrel Song); Melody of the Earth; Ground and Center; Mooncircles, A Pagan Lullaby; Reprise; Waltz of the Lady and Lord; Spirit Come to Me; Goodbye, Dear Goddess; I Took a Walk; Sun, Sun, Come Back Sun; Yule Tree; Casting A Solstice Circle; Whisper of Spring; The Wedding; Song of the Grain Harvest. $11 USICan/Mex; $14 elsewhere. Other entries in the same advertisement section included the book The Pagan Family by Ceisiwr Serith. 221 See Zsuzsanna Budapest, The Holy Book of Women 's Mysteries: Feminist Witchcraft, Goddess Rituals, Spellcasting, and other womanly arts... (Berkeley: Wingbow Press, 1980) 218- 219. 173 This book takes a look at Pagan beliefs, rituals and celebrations and explores how they may be interpreted for family use. Chapters: Introduction to Paganism; Ritual, The Sacred Home; Celebrations of Birth; Teaching Children; Prayers and Offerings; The Festivals; The Times of the Moon; Coming of Age; Betrothal Wedding; Parting; Death and appendices of symbols, a table of offerings and colors for occasions, and resources including children’s books. $15 US; $18 Can/Mex; $22 elsewhere.222 In the case of both Green Egg and Circle Network News, the juxtaposition of 'I’_T_ _‘ 3 music, youth and material culture along with elements aimed at adults is seamlessly combined with naming practices (“Squirrel,” “Lady,” “Lord”) to communicate the religious values and norms of the community by embodying them, including through the use of prerecorded music for purchase.223 Using Pagan music as a site of forming and maintaining memory, young Pagans who turn to music today often become in the newest generation of Pagan media for personal and musical networking. NewWitch: Not Your Mother’s Broomstick, a relatively new magazine targeted to youth, pays particular attention to music and musical groups. Already, even in its infancy, this magazine compiled a list of ‘must have’ musical works for Pagans, including 222 “New From Circle," Circle Network News 16, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 32. 223 This even included a spiral-bound copy of a 1994 PhD dissertation in Psychology/Pagan Studies by Dennis D. Carpenter. Spiritual Experiences, Life Changes, and Ecological Views of Contemporary Pagans was completed for as part of Carpenter's graduate education at the former Saybrook Institute, now the Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center. Carpenter is a former managing editor for Circle Magazine and is ordained in Pagan ministry via Circle Sanctuary. I have not read it but have read other scholarly contributions by Carpenter. It is still sold today through Circle Magazine. See “Sampling of Books from Circle." Circle Magazine 30, no. 3 (Winter 2008): 69. 174 “New Age,’ “Celtic,” and most numerously, “Rock."224 Music, as Simon Frith reminds us, reinforces the validity of people’s power, autonomy, and identity, young people no less 50.225 Musical groups name and claim discursive areas of power in order to appeal to youth’s aspirations to autonomy or the authority of life experiences. Gaia Consort, a popular Pagan music group, most notably did this in an interview with a youth magazine, in which they described themselves as claiming to make “Music for Freethinkers.”226 Other folk artists working in Pagan Y'T‘T'm themes or with Pagan audiences, have done this as well.227 Young Pagans create connection and relation for themselves as they grow older just as older Pagans do--- the practice of ritual, of which music remains a significant part. In Rocking the Goddess, a popular press survey of collegiate Wicca, Anthony Paige records young people’s ritual experiences with music. “New Age” music is sometimes used to set an atmosphere of cosmic consciousness and calm, liturgical awareness for ritual practice to take place. At other times, rituals call for ecstatic inhabitation and expression, and Paige makes it clear that this is no strange area for young Pagans either, who may use 224 Phil Brucato, “The Song of Pan," NewWitch: Not Your Mother’s Broomstick 8 (December 2004-February 2005): 29-31. 225 See Introduction, note 14. 226 Terisa Greenan, "Gaia Consort Evolves,” NewWitch: Not Your Mother’s Broomstick 7 (August-October 2004): 33-37. 227 Dar Williams will be discussed more fully in Chapter 5, but two of her works, “Are You Out There" and “Teenagers, Kick Our Butts” feature specific young protagonists or assume an empowering attitude towards a youth identity. Both tracks can be found on her album End of the Summer, Razor and Tie RT2821, 1997. 175 powerful, beating drums, chanting or other consciousness-altering forms of music to expand and raise their attunement and awareness. 228 Youth as Musical Otherworld Kinship and ritual ecstasy are not the only narrative trajectories for “youth” in Pagan music. William Butler Yeats in the late 19th century described Tir na nOg as one of several Irish mythic Othenrvorlds superimposed upon the secular material realm. The “Country of the Young,” as Tir na nOg was known, was a place those few adult mortals who stumbled upon it could escape from the ravages of aging. Moreover in Irish folklore, the Country of the Young was a homeland for Other-than-humans Persons known as “Faeries.” Yeats and others Irish Renaissance folklorists saw deep connections between the Othenrvorlds of Irish culture and those of Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy—even the “Summerland” of the Spiritualists where human souls abide their time between lives.229 Those returning from Tir na nOg were in some cases accompanied by legions of faeries and musical revelry. A full description given to Yeats in his research deserves quotation at length. 22” Anthony Paige, Rocking The Goddess (New York: Citadel Press, 2002) 3, 115-116, 170. 229 Kathleen Raines, "Foreword,” Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, ed. William Butler Yeats (1888; repr. Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe Limited, 1973) x-xii. Yeats was also well known for his extensive involvement in Western Esotericism, including the Hermetic Order Of The Golden Dawn, a 19'h century precursor movement to many forms of Paganism today. 176 ‘— The warrior was O’Donoghue; he was followed by numberless youths and maidens, who moved lightly and unconstrained over the watery plain, as the moonlight fairies glide through the fields of air; they were linked together by garlands of delicious spring flowers and they timed their movements to strains of enchanting melody...the long train of attendants followed with playful deviations the track of their leader, and moved on with unabated fleetness to their celestial music. . .the sound of their music still fell upon the ear and echo, catching up the harmonious strains, fondly repeated and prolonged them in soft and softer tones, til the last faint repetition died away, and the hearers awoke as from a dream of bliss.230 On other occasions a more capricious comportment was at work in faerylore, particularly with regard to children. Several accounts collected by Yeats discuss the kidnapping of human infants favored by faeries and taken to Tir na nOg, usually leaving a sickly or unwanted faerie child in its place. Occasionally these stories would end by featuring either the forced return of the human child through folk magic means, or the eventual escape of the child and its reunion with parents many years aftenrvards. Both examples can be found in contemporary music, some invoking Yeats himself. Laura Powers, on her album Legends Of The Goddess, records an homage to Tir na nOg. Likened to a soundtrack for a travelogue, the track points towards the paradisiacal realm—“ageless as the sun, land of the ever- young.”231 The vocalist, in fine Orphic fashion, walks along its shores, looking into the hills and mountains of the distance, seeing “beyond the veil,” hearing the call 230 T. Crofton Croaker, “The Legend of O’Donoghue” Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, ed. William Butler Yeats (1888; repr. Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe Limited, 1973) 181-182. 231 Laura Powers, “Tir Na Nog,” Legends of the Goddess, Punch Records 8, 1998. 177 of the land she feels on the wind. In both faerie lore and Powers’ song, North has particular significance. In William Allingham’s “The Faeries,” the King of Faeries sits on a hill-top, using a “bridge of white mist..going up with music on cold starry night/ To sup with the Queen/ Of the gay Northern Lights.” Powers locates Tir na nOg, the “jewel of green,” beneath the Northern sky.. a treasure for all time." While Allingham mentions the faerytheft of children (“They stole little Bridget/ For seven years long”) the subject is not broached by Powers. This phenomenon makes its appearance in other ways. Yeats’s beloved poem, “The Stolen Child” is part of his own Irish folklore collection, and has been a frequent element incorporated into music listened to by Pagans or produced by them. Come away 0 human child To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand For the World’s more full of weeping Than you can understand.232 Like many themes of estrangement and loss, Yeats’s poem has been made into a harp/vocal songwork by artist Loreena McKennitt, who early in her career produced musical work heavily influenced by ritual year holidays such as Beltane and Samhain. Pagan ritual and memory abound elsewhere in her work, such as in her songs “Annachie Gordon,” “Samain Night,” and “Ancient Pines.”233 232 William Butler Yeats, “The Stolen Child," Selected Poems and Three Plays, ed. M. L. Rosenthal (New York: Collier Books, 1962) 2-4. 233 Loreena McKennitt, “Stolen Child," Elemental, Quinlan Road QRCD101R, 1985; Also see her work Parallel Dreams, Quinlan Road QRCD103R, 1989. “Ancient Pines” also appears on a 178 More recently, two other relevant artists, The Waterboys (discussed in Chapter 3) and filk artist Heather Alexander have also produced versions of Yeats’s poem. Yeats’s other works, even those not directly mentioning Faeries or Faerylore, have been incorporated into Faerie-themed works. Pianist Gary Stadler has released a number of ambient albums, all centered on faeriescapes evoked through artwork and instrumental music. In August 2004, Stadler, along with well-known Pagan musician Wendy Rule, released a collaboration entitled Deep Within A Faerie Forest. Along with a ritual invocation to the powers of Earth, Air, Fire and Water, the narration takes place from the viewpoint of the faerie participants, using elemental invocations to call the listener into the space of the soundscape. While Yeats’s poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is set to melody and the accompaniment of Stadler’s Uilleann Pipes, it is an associated tune, “Dance of the Wild Faeries,” that most clearly brings the ambiguity and danger inherent in encountering Other-than-human Persons. The narrator stumbles into a faerie dance in the first stanza, led by a strange enchanting music. The narrator is beckoned to Come and play as the wild faeries play In a magical circle, a fairy ring You won’t want to leave and forever you’ll stay Where the vision is bright as spring. Lest the implied tug of the Otherworld is lost on the listener, the dangerous play of ecstatic frolicking with wild Sacred Persons with their own wills and agendas is National Film Board of Canada educational film about contemporary Goddess worship, called Goddess Remembered. 179 soon made clear in a minor key through Wendy Rule’s soft but intense reverberated whisper. Those who seek us surely find us See the trail we leave behind us Some bewildered, some enlightened Some are brave, some are frightened Are we kind or are we vicious? Nectar poison or delicious? That, my sweet, you will discover, Fairy foe, or fairy lover.234 V‘““.'"‘Fm v Summary Conclusion In one sense, contemporary Paganism is itself quite young in the timeline of major “world traditions,” but in another sense it has recombined ancient elements recovered through folklore and archaeology. As a manifestation of an Orphic impulse, as well as a hermeneutic web shaped by discursive languages of “Paganism,” it has also come to be associated with youth and playfulness, an aspect willingly embraced by most Pagans, in part because of the tendrils of filial theology running through its web. Musically, this often takes the form of dance and movement, whether the dancing God of male power and ecstatic fertility, or a group of faeries dancing in a ring deep within a forest. It can also take a reflexive tone, willing to parody both larger cultural elements and metaphors, and even laugh at its own political manifestoes delivered by some of its most respected bards. The social location of playfulness and imagination, the “child,” is thus an 234 Gary Stadler and Wendy Rule, “Invocation,” “Lake of Isle lnnisfree," “Dance Of The Wild Faeries,” Deep Within A Faerie Forest, Sequoia Records 116, 2004. Wendy Rule is best known in the Pagan community for her album Deity, an exploration of thealogical aspecting. She has worked in blues and jazz frameworks as well. 180 appropriate gravitational point for these concepts to be expressed. However, a marginalized new religious movement’s open preoccupation with ‘children’ comes at a price. Because Pagans, like children, are playful and imaginative, it is easy for outsiders to patronize their claims concerning reality and view them as superficial and not properly ‘religious.’ Children also form a cultural nexus point of anxiety, precisely because of the fear of exploitation, abuse, and an attitude of protectionism against “undue” or “adult” influences, especially from those deemed marginal to ‘mainstream’ religious discourses. Certainly there have been many situations in which Pagans and religious Paganism has found itself embroiled in controversies precisely along both of these contours. As a set of religions related by family resemblances, Paganism has been called immature, egocentric, idolatrous and given to the worship of creation as opposed to a “creator.” Likewise, there have been situations in which the religious expression of Paganism has not been seen as culturally legitimate, whether for zoning battles over worship space or child custody cases. In this next and last chapter, it will be time to discuss the complicated relationships Paganism has with the dominant cultural facets of the Christian tradition. Some of these links have produced musical collaborations, re-readings and challenges based on concepts and techniques discussed in preceding chapters. Others have found Pagans using music to police their own internal cultural politics, arguing for an authentic way of being Pagan in the world. In some cases, this has been taken to the point of reification or even “ossification” of the 181 '— "F‘—is . _r—- . .7-‘1—3. Orphic impulse, where rigid fixed boundaries vis-a-vis Christianity and/or modernity have been created as part of reactionary politics. 182 “TE Chapter 5 lnterreligious Framing, Intracultural Policing: Singing The “Other” Like the holophonic echolocation of whales, we can use music to help us find each other, our sustenance, and our place: what ethnomusicologist Charlie Kiel termed “deep echology”... illuminating the mystery at play. Its no wonder the civilized paradigm has again and again outlawed the music of earthen spirituality...235 --- Jesse Wolf Harden “The Music of Gaia” All across our land, the magickal Pagan spirit is awakening in folks who are expanding their consciousness, attuning themselves to nature, and remembering past lifetimes and the old ways...l..want the Tree of magick, Wicca and Paganism to live on...may our efforts and our music ever water the Tree and help it grow green - 236 again. --- Selena Fox “Foreword” to Circle Magick Songs Kate McCarthy, in her work Interfaith Encounters in America, significantly illuminates many of the challenges Pagans face in public relationship with other religious communities and interfaith alliances. Despite the significant growth among interfaith councils seeking to bring about social and environmental changes, Pagans are vastly underrepresented in existing institutional structures. Even in organizations where (for example) members of the Baha’i Faith are prominent, there are rarely any Pagan representatives, even though numerically 235 Jesse Wolf Hardin, “The Music of Gaia,” Circle Magazine 26, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 22-23. 236 Selena Fox, “Foreword” in Jim Alan and Selena Fox, Circle Magick Songs (1977; repr. Mt. Horeb, WI: Circle Publications, 1994) 3. 183 and demographically, the aims and goals of these interfaith organizations are remarkably in-Iine with Pagan cultural norms and values, and Pagans are at least as numerous as Baha’is in the United States. 237 McCarthy suggests that despite the common Pagan insistence on the validity (even necessity) of religious pluralism, they are excluded. McCarthy also suggests organizations with a prominent public face do not want to risk of alienating existing participants on theological grounds or instigating resistance in the community to their efforts. This is not unique to Pagans. Buddhist, Hindu, and Amerindian religious communities appear to have similar problems in American interfaith organizational representation.238 Nonetheless, the specific mutual historical hostility between many Pagans and dominant elements of the Christian communities may prove the greatest challenge for interfaith work in this area, even as some progress is occasionally made.239 Having examined the roles of folk ideology, thealogical affinities of telos, eros, agape, humor, and play, we are now in a position in this closing chapter to discuss the ways in which these dominant Pagan elements interact within ‘musickal’ culture to define the communities’ relationships to other ideologies, including Christianity. Music is especially important in terms of Pagan self- identities and community definitions precisely because, as stated before, 237 Kate McCarthy, Interfaith Encounters in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007) 59, 88. 238 lbid, 89. 239 Ibid, 58. 184 music(k)al performance (in the sense of Christopher Small’s concept) speaks to the shared metaphorical and somatic knowledges between Pagans. To say that contemporary Paganism and Christianity have had a difficult relationship with each other is to make perhaps a grave understatement. The emergence of modern Pagan witchcraft in England, as other scholars have noted, was directly related to the repeal of laws against practicing witchcraft.240 As a religious minority growing in Christian-dominated cultures, often directly in the face of damning stereotypes, Pagans have often found themselves very much at odds with many dominant cultural aspects, and have been persecuted for their practices.241 In addition, modern Pagans, being heavily influenced by both environmental and gender-liberation movements, have often indicted Christianity as a ‘worId-hating’ and ‘women-hating’ tradition. This is indeed a dominant historical theme in Pagan music, but the musical relationship between the traditions is fact far more complex, and reflects the influences each tradition has given the other. In 1981, Charlie Murphy recorded a now long out-of—print album called Catch The Fire. On "Burning Times," perhaps the most famous Pagan song ever made, a mournful cello introduces and continues a slow percussive pulse as an acoustic guitar enters. Murphy proceeds to tell the story of witches circled near an oak tree "at the times appointed by the seasons of the earth and the phases of the moon." The religious specialist in the circle is female, "equal" and 240 Hutton, Triumph Of The Moon, 242. 241 Alan Cooperman, “Administration Yields on Wiccan Symbol; Pentacle to Be Permitted on Tombstones in US. Military Burial Grounds," Washington Post, April 24, 2007. 185 "respected" for her knowledge, especially focused on herbalism and healing. Murphy calls on the listener to hear them chanting "Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, lnanna."242 All seemed well until the Church of Rome, worshipping a "dead man on a cross," committed a holocaust martyring "nine million European women." According to Murphy, the Burning Times have not fully abated, as the Earth, a witch herself, is still being burnt, raped and destroyed for war and profit. The witches who have survived through the ages, a spiritual IF— ‘ T] _ community (now including the listener), rely on the Earth as a healer, and she v impels her children towards survival and greater freedom. Although perhaps the classic expression of such, Pagan indictments of modern industrialism and religion with environmental crimes did not begin with Murphy’s clarion call. As early as 1965, Pentagram, the British private circulated journal for witchcraft practitioners, published a reflective piece on its front page. In this Cold War piece, the pseudonymous author noted that “we must do all we can to improve [the world] and keep it from becoming a radioactive cinder. The things that are being done to the natural order of things, both plant and animal in the name of the great god Progress; the vast waste on armaments while millions starve—these are the sort of evils that must be fought today.”243 In the academic realm of feminist and quasi-Pagan sympathies, the same polemic was heralded 242 This portion, called the “Goddess Chant" was written by Deena Metzger. It has been recorded by many artists in different countries, making the Irish music charts at #1 in 1991. See Anne Hill, The Best Of Pagan Song [Liner Notes] Serpentine Music SMP8, 2004. Metzger’s chant has been indelibly linked with Murphy’s song, partly through the publicity of Starhawk‘s publications. See Starhawk, Dreaming The Dark: Magic Sex and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982) 227. 243 Talesin, “Ancients and Moderns — A correspondent representing a traditional group in the West Country, airs his views and raises some interesting points," Pentagram: A Witchcraft Review 3 (March 1965): 1. 186 among countercultural intellectuals, especially within the works of Naomi Goldenberg, Theodore Roszak and David L. Miller.244 Nevertheless, Murphy's persecution narrative, weaving religious, gender and environmental themes together, set the musical standard for much of Pagan- discourse concerning the presence and effects of Christianity in the world.245 As discussed in Chapter 2, the early 1970's saw other well-publicized Pagan examples of Christian persecution narratives before Murphy recorded this expression of shared persecution culture. Some of these were also woven with criticisms of sexism and environmental abuse. In the first issue of the journal Nemeton, the publishers remarked that the cultural tributaries of the Women’s Movement and Paganism seem to be “flowing to form a single river.” For those religious practitioners who have not considered the importance of Women’s Liberation, witch and critic Alison Harlow contended that male-dominated mass media, as well as male-dominated Christianity had slandered both liberation movements. If they were not to be trusted in matters of religion, then likewise for gender consciousness. In response, two contributors in the next issue took issue with the publisher. “The God postulated by Christ is a wonderful being — all giving, all loving, all forgiving, Yet the things done in the name of that God by Christians are 244 Theodore Roszak, Where The Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (New York: Anchor Books, 1973); David L. Miller, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses (New York: Harper Books, 1974); Naomi Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (New York: Beacon Press, 1980) The authoritative discussion of Roszak and Miller's significance to Paganism remains Margot Adler, Drawing Down The Moon: Witches. Druids, Goddess Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (New York: Viking Press, 1979). 245 Excellent coverage of this subtopic can be found in Pike, Earthly Bodies, 104-113. 187 horribly legion.” Divorcing Christianity’s institutional model of “God” from the spiritual impulse behind the New Testament, the respondents go on to say that true disciples of Christ are “fantastically fulfilled individuals.”246 This ambivalence, ranging from praise of a few possible individuals to the fierce criticism of many, was a staple of the media forums in which Pagans could congregate and communicate. One prominent 1972 article in Green Egg chronicled the exploitation of natural resources of South American indigenous peoples. The article, entitled “Caution: Christians At Work,” discusses “50,000 missionaries scattered over the globe...a key force in the US. capacity to dominate the various portions of its empire.” Missionaries, funded partially through grants from the US. Agency for International Development (USAID), allegedly worked closely with US oil companies in Ecuador to make the local populations more amenable to resource extraction.247 Four years later, Green Egg would republish an Associated Press article announcing that “Vatican To Issue Decree Against Sex For Pleasure.” Not coincidentally, the immediately preceding essay article was a discussion concerning the use of sexual magic and energy in a comparative religious context. Yet later in that same issue, a longtime Gardinerian witch and member of a Unitarian congregation took Green Egg’s publishers to task. Modred, the author, wrote “produce the worst Xtian SOB you can find and I will produce a 246 Alison Harlow, “The Nemeton Feminist," Nemeton 1, no. 1 (1972): 12; Clint and Janet Bigglestone, “Comments on The Nemeton Feminist," Nemeton 1, no. 3 (Beltaine 1974): 6-7. Nemeton lasted for only 3 issues before ceasing publication. 247 North American Congress on Latin America, "Caution: Christians At Work," Green Egg: A Journal of the Awakening Earth 5, no. 50 (Samhain 1972): 11. 188 Pagan SOB who will match that tit-for-tat.” In this letter, concerning the public outing and harassment of a witch in Kansas, Modred also claimed that a Catholic priest had been the most supportive individual of the aforementioned persecuted witch. 24‘” Furthermore, public sentiment against the Vietnam war sometimes bonded Pagans and Catholics, resulting in Green Egg’s republication of an anticolonialist and antigenocidal essay from the National Catholic Reporter later that same year.249 Thus, during this time of the early 1970's, Pagan media records widely varied reactions to Christian culture. Gwydion Pendderwen’s “We Won’t Wait Any Longer” has been called the "Pagan National Anthem” by at least one foundational elder of the Reclaiming Tradition. Pendderwen, who died in 1982 as a result of a car accident, was an elder in the Feri tradition of Wicca (discussed in Chapter 4), and one of earliest popular Pagan recording artists. According to Anne Hill, Pendderwen wrote and recorded this song for his second and final album, The Faerie Shaman, when two witches in Southern California were forced to relocate after their home was firebombed. In addition, Penddenrven is said to have sung this song as part of 248 Associated Press, “Vatican To Issue Decree Against Sex For Pleasure," Green Egg: A Journal of the Awakening Earth 7, no. 76 (Imbolc 1976): 30. The Papal declaration was announced while the issue was going to press. It was issued by the Sacred Congregation For The Doctrine Of The Faith on December 29'", 1975 as Persona Humana: Declaration On Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics. Also see Modred, letter to the editor, dated December 19,1975, Green Egg: A Journal of the Awakening Earth 7, no. 76 (Imbolc 1976): 40-41. 249 Richard Lindstrom, “A Hard Look At American Catholic Folklore," Green Egg: A Journal of the Awakening Earth 9, no. 79 (Litha 1976): 13-16. Green Egg did not supply a citation for the original article. Verification from the National Catholic Reporter as to original publication is still pending. 189 court testimony—testimony that resulted from his arrest during a political protest at that Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory in 1982.250 Pendderwen’s lyrics, set within violin, mandolin, acoustic guitar and bass accompaniment, quickly establish a strong polar opposition between a community suffering political and religious marginalization and the dominant Iegitimated modes of mainstream American culture. The subaltern community in this song sees itself as having been unfairly characterized and damaged by outside Christian forces, not simply in the early 1980’s, but as an ongoing '7 ? mi - uni-rt.“ L.’ narrative campaign since the European Middle Ages. This is a motif often seen in early contemporary Pagan music, both in Pendderwen’s music and Murphy’s “The Burning Times.” Because of this discursive prominence, the music(k) of persecution and resistance commemorates events that regardless of their historical accuracy continue to shape the collective memory of many Pagans, eSpeciaIIy as newcomers are acculturated.251 Moreover, contemporary acts of political marginalization are often understood as outgrowths of ongoing marginalization. In addition, Penddenrven also characterizes this dominant oppressive culture in terms of historical colonialism, which is understood to be destroying and assimilating native peoples and their religions. Because of this, Pendderwen 250 Anne Hill, The Best of Pagan Song [Liner Notes], Serpentine Music SMP8, 2004.; See M. Macha Nightmare, “Calling The Mighty Dead of the Craft." Available at http://www.machaniqhtmare.com/miqhtvdead.htm. Accessed 3-22-09; The title of “Pagan National Anthem” is sometimes also used for Charlie Murphy’s “The Burning Times." See Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture, 193. 251 Berger, A Community of Witches, 70-72. 190 song is an indictment of political genocide against the desecrators, and in defense of the Earth itself. Even the desecrators are sung of as people who carry deeply internalized guilt over the acts the dominant culture knows in its heart that it has committed. In the final stanza of the song, the attempted eradication of Paganism and other chthonic cultures has failed. Paganism (and the environmental ethics that q for Pendderwen are intimately interwoven with it) experiences a renaissance, i expressed in seasonal rituals that provide the practical focus for Wicca. The song has come full circle, as the repeated chorus becomes the mantra for this spell, a spell to empower Pagans to refuse further political marginalization. The song remains a promise for some and a warning for others, that this kind of “irresponsible behavior’ [whether colonial, religious, or industrial] will no longer be tolerated by those it subjugates, at least as far as Pagans are concerned. The larger sense of the song becomes clear when we place it in the religio-political context of Feri witchcraft, the tradition in which Penddenrven worked. In this tradition, as practitioners April Niino and Cora Anderson have both noted, an ecstatic “warrior” ethic predominates, in which direct handling of powerful spiritual energies occurs. “Self-deception” and “insincerity” are not A tolerated, and direct inhabitation (what is commonly called possession) of deities is standard practice, which the bards and their liturgies are called to invoke.252 Moreover, the telluric embrace of the “Black Heart of Innocence” encourages the devotee to resist the political domination of others in what ever way possible. The 252 April Niino, the white wand: ruminations, meditations, reflections toward a Feri aesthetic, (privately printed, 2003) 18, 20, 26, 35-36; Cora Anderson, Fifty Years, 39, 55. 191 song then can be seen as an outgrowth of the cultural politics of Feri Wicca, and directly connected 1) to the bardic tradition of which Pendderwen was an important part and 2) to the political protests he and others like him engaged in. This second aspect is particularly important, for other important persons in contemporary Paganism, such as T. Thorn Coyle (discussed in Chapter 4) and Starhawk have taken up the mantle of activism, musical and othenrvise. Intertextual Music[k]ing At the same time Pendderwen was protesting Christian culture with religious music, a more complex example of Christian/Pagan musical ‘intertexting’ was produced in the works of dulcimer artists Ruth Barrett and Cyntia Smith. In 1982, this folk duet released Music of the Rolling World, later reprised as a double-length compact disc along with their other early collaboration Aeolus. Music of the Rolling World contained a number of ‘traditional’ melodies performed with fretted dulcimers and set to new lyrics. "Lovers Of The Moon," towards the end of the album, is a gentle-paced exhortation to delight in the return of Spring and the sharing of sacred gifts with those already in relation to the Moon. Come, lovers of the moon, from your cares retire. The Earth awakes Her blossoms branch and stone adorn her bower. Come lie within Her garden, breathing deep the lavender flower The Earth once more is stirring, 192 kindling new the Ancient Flame.253 The two major verses are then repeated with the same melody, but translated into Latin, reinforcing the medieval imago depicted through the cover art of both women among rolling hills, cradling flower bundles and wearing leafed garlands. The melody is listed as "Anonymous," but is in fact the 14th century classic "Stella Splendens In Monte." most closely identified with the Libre Vermell ("Red Book"), a manuscript of devotional Marian songs associated with the Shrine of Our Lady of Monserrat near Barcelona, well known as a "musical and liturgical center." "Stella Splendens" is a circle dance for pilgrims using a form of secular poetics unique to Spain from the late Middle Ages to the time of the Reformation. It describes the ongoing devotion to Mary at the shrine. Star shining on the mountain as ray of the Sun through cleft so wonderous shone, hearken to thy people. absolved of sin their wrong decry, smiting the breast on bended knee do cry thereon: "Hail Mary" blest.254 Just as Barrett and Smith take care to use and document many specific folk tunes from this time period, incorporating this medieval melody accomplishes several religious tasks for them. Invoking the cult of medieval devotion to Mary 253 Ruth Barrett and Cyntia Smith, “Lovers Of The Moon, ” The Early Years [Aeolus/Music of The Rolling World], Aeolus Music, 1999 [1982]. 254 Alejandro Enrique Planchart and Kenneth C. Ritchie, Traveler [Liner Notes], Angel Records 55559, 1995. 193 gives them a historical connection to feminine sacred power. Meanwhile, they are nonetheless able to contrast the penitential attitude of the Catholic devotees with an erotic celebration of the Earth's fertility. "The dew of spring...the nectar of Iove" connects devotion to the phases of the moon and the seasons of the earth, both sacred rhythms for Pagans. Both complete sets of lyrics focus on religious joy and ecstasy, and suggest a common sense of fulfillment for each of the religion's followers. Finally, Barrett and Smith's translation of their telluric lyrics back into sung Latin, the language of the original tune, demands that its religious content be viewed side by side with Catholic devotion as a legitimate alternative. Another of the earliest commercial Pagan efforts in this vein came from harpist Mecha Morganfield, targeted directly at the confluence of Christmas with the Winter Solstice. In 1984 she released Winter Solstice Carols: Proclaiming The Celebration of the Season. Twelve Christian tradition carols were recorded with harp, piano, guitar, violin and voice, retaining the melodies, but with Gaian and pantheistic lyrics. Inspired by theologian Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, Morganfield’s contributions include “0 Mother Earth Our Sacred Home” (a filk of “0 Little Town Of Bethlehem”) and a re-reading of Issac Watts, “Joy To The World.” A direct comparison of the two 3rd verses illuminates the intertexual process at work. Joy To The World255 No more let sin and sorrows grow 255 Megha Morganfield, “Joy To The World," Winter Solstice Carols: Proclaiming the Celebration of the Seasons, Megha Publishing, 2001 [1984]. 194 Nor thorns infest the ground; He comes to make His blessings flow Far as the curse is found, Joy To The World256 Change was the word with truth and grace And lends her power to all. So those who feel her strength. Will let their wisdom sing We hear your loving call, It should be pointed out that there are also prominent examples throughout the 20'h century, especially among Buddhist and Jain communities in the United States, of rewriting/transposing sacred ideas and concepts into existing cultural modes and melodies as a way of spreading or reinforcing religious commitments.257 What marks this discursive trajectory as different is the direct Orphic inscription of telluric divinity offered by the Pagan version, directly resisting (in the style of Whitman and Daly) the deferred, subordinate value of ‘Nature’ in Watts’ version. The gender locus is changed from male to female, and the use of religious power is politically “democratized,” universally available in the Pagan version, rather than a function of Christ’s person status as singular mediator. In recent years, Murphy himself (along with folk artist Jami Sieber) has collaborated with Christian musicians on sacred songwork (including the ‘Total 256 Isaac Watts, “Joy To The World: The Lord Is Come!" in Christ In Song: Songs of Immanuel, ed. Philip Schaff (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1870) 50. 257 This formed part of the 6th Biennial Convention of the Young Jains of America, as documented by Harvard’s Pluralism Project. Available at httpzllpluralism.orq/resources/sIideshow/piliavsky/index.php, slide 15, 2004; Stowe, How Sweet The Sound, 360. 195 Experience Gospel Choir’ from Seattle) to produce the album Canticles of Light (1997). But devotional work with Christian elements has been most influenced via the Orphic filking mechanism discussed in Chapter 2. (Re)interpreting and appropriating devotional musics of one tradition can be a powerful way of claiming ownership over musical power, or at least signal other religious communities that textual interpretation cannot be monopolized by a single community. Musickal Apostasy, Harmony and Authenticity As I discussed at the beginning of this work, most popular thought concerning the alleged relationships between Neopaganism and music has been conditioned in terms of “Satanism” and “occultism,” largely due to the efforts of socially engaged Christian fundamentalist churches in the 1970’s and 1980’s. But to a lesser extent, there is a fair amount of anti-Christian sentiment among young Neopagans, partly from damaging experiences with parents and from radicalizing political confrontations that are still all too common on the local (and sometimes national level).258 Various possible outcomes that either materially benefit or defend the Pagan community are part and parcel of the way that interreligious narratives are musically inscribed into community memory. As with the music of Cynthia McKinnen (“Witch’s Dance”) in Chapter 2, musical works provide examples of contact between a single person and a group of witches. 258 For an example see Carey King, “Pagan, Christian Debate Continues," The Sylvia Herald and Ruralite. Published October 9, 2003. Online Edition. Available at http:I/www.thesvlvaherald.com/a-paqans 100903.htm. 196 Not all such examples of interreligious contact are initially benign. Sometimes the visitor is not a happenstance inquisitive observer, but rather an ‘inquisitional’ antagonist seeking to harm or convert the community. In the early 1970’s, P.E.I. (Isaac) Bonewits published “I Fell In Love With The Lady” in the pages of Green Egg, and recorded it for his first album in 1988. Oh, I was sent to kill her people For the Inquisition, But I fell in love with the Lady-- I came away with none.. I came away with none.. I crept into the woods one night To spy upon their dance. I saw happy, holy dance--- I fell into a trance! I joined into the dancing then And when the Great Rite came, The Lady reached out Her hand to me; She called me by my name!259 Twenty-eight years later, reflecting a different sense of feminism, as well as different cultural stereotypes of evangelizing Christians, the all-male quartet Emerald Rose included “Never Underestimate..” on their self-titled debut. Well, I was ranting down the road in my pickup truck Defending the faith and the land of the brave Got a fish on the front, a cross on the dash And a sticker on the back says "Jesus Saves" Ipreached from the Book, exactly how it read Till one jumped up, wagged her finger, and this is what she said: 259 P. E. l. Bonewits, “I Fell In Love With The Lady," Green Egg: A Journal Of The Awakening Earth 6, no. 60 (1974): 12. The melody is taken from folk artist Tim Hardin’s 1969 “The Lady Came From Baltimore," later covered by Joan Baez and Johnny Cash. 197 Never underestimate a woman with the Goddess in her eyes ’Cause if you ever do, then surely you will get a big surprise You'll find that she is positively practicing the ‘Craft of the Wise’ Never underestimate a woman with the Goddess in her eyes260 While there are significant differences in the two narratives of Emerald Rose and Bonewits (such as the influence of the “courtly Iove” tradition in Bonewits’ version) the consistency between these two examples is remarkable. In both scenarios, the power of the Christian is overcome by contact with the spiritual power of the persecuted Goddess worshippers. Both songs present a conversion experience of the missionary, while those who were the subjects of missionization are unaffected. The intended conversion is reflected back onto the antagonist, signifying a weakness of the rigid institutionalism to protean natural eros. Both tracks premise a relationship between institutional Christianity and Paganism, an inherently antagonistic one. Several of the main phenomenological aspects we’ve seen in Pagan music: eros, play, tricksterism and folk ideology become mechanisms by which the community is shielded in a hostile environment, inducing apostasy in would-be persecutors. In other cases, a pluralistic harmony predominates over a potentially antagonistic situation. Dar Williams is a national pop/folk singer, known for her feminist and youth-oriented thematics. She published “The Christians and the Pagans” on her January 1996 album Mortal City. In this case the stage is set between already existing filial relations during a time of common celebration between the two religious traditions, Yule and Christmas. Two young women are 260 Emerald Rose, “Never Underestimate..." Emerald Rose, Emerald Rose, Inc., 1998. 198 ..fi mom-u.- seeking a place to stay on Christmas Eve after traveling for a Solstice celebration. Overcoming the hesitation of a local relative, both women come to stay and dine for the evening. So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table, Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able, And just before the meal was served, hands were held and prayers were said, sending hope for peace on earth to all their gods and goddesses. The food was great, the tree plugged in, the meal had gone without a hitch, ‘till Timmy turned to Amber and said, "Is it true that you're a witch?" His mom jumped up and said, "The pies are burning," as 1 she hit the kitchen, and it was Jane who spoke, she said, "It’s true, your cousin's not a Christian. But we love trees, we love the snow, the friends we have, the world we share, and you find magic from your God, and we find magic everywhere," HE'WH—tt' And where does magic come from? I think magic's in the learning, ’Cause now when Christians sit with Pagans only pumpkin pies are burning.261 Williams’s song is a clear narrative of a interreligious encounter, an encounter between a heterosexual family and Amber and Jane, a homosocial (if not homosexual) couple. The song begins by presenting the potentially historically contentious association of Christmas with the Winter Solstice. The song itself is played only on an acoustic guitar, accompanied by acoustic bass and mandolin.262 In terms of chord identity, the major chords are associated with the young women, while the uncle’s tension is expressed in minor ones. Each time the tension of the verse is worked through, the minor resolves into the 26’ Dar Williams, “The Christians and the Pagans,” Mortal City, Razor and Tie Records RT2821, 1996. 199 major. Amber's desire for family contact is specifically accentuated. In addition, the pluralism of before-meal prayers, the mother’s reaction to Timmy’s question, and the reference to the "Burning Times" are given special vocal emphasis. In terms of lyrical construction, the entire story is front-loaded with irony in a bold rereading of the Nativity story itself. At the beginning, the Christian family has a comfortable home, and their relatives, the Pagan couple, are looking for shelter on Christmas Eve, In this case, the encounter gives birth to understanding rather than the Christ child or the Horned God. And it is the family outsider, Jane, who first speaks to Timmy’s direct question, thus deflecting any tension between Amber and her uncle. The encounter takes place largely at the dinner table itself as the family unites over the common act of eating, hence only pumpkin pies are ‘burning.’ As in other songs, “The Christians and the Pagans” expresses a concern with thealogy and history. “Magic” or spiritual power is said to be found in the worship of God for Christians, and in the immanent world for Pagans.263 But the greater ‘magic’, perhaps, is the social harmony achieved, or rather, the changes in consciousness upon willful reflection by elder family members. “Drawing warmth out of the cold” is a multivalent reference on several levels: of weather, shelter, and of the historical gulf that has existed (and continues to exist) between these different religious adherents. The previous examples showcase the conversion of evangelical Christians, as well as strengthening filial expansion and‘understanding. But within the community, Small’s ‘musicking’ also serves to articulate a discourse of 200 “authenticity” among insiders, allowing members to see themselves as an inner core of identity versus a commercial or faddish periphery. Victoria Granger, the leader of an all-female group called Revelry, is a staple at the Stanivood Festival taking place yearly near Sherman, New York. Her most famous work is “Paganfest Barbie,” dealing with festival culture. You came to my festival, all pretty and pink. You brought your own mirror, and your dream-house, and your f'trr‘izd to resist falling under your spell, but when I saw you, Barbie, spirituality went to hell ! (Whoa, whooe-dee-do, whoa, oh, oh... Dip dip dip dip... dip dip dip dip... whoa, oh...) Never dresses in leather, or feathers, or fur [politically perfect] A pure polyester pagan angel, that’s her She’s polyamorous with anyone, true, but ‘PaganFest Barbie,’ I love you! You came and you stole my heart away [take it, baby!] With your perfect style and your charm [you put a spell on me!] [in a low, breathy voice] And if we should do the Great Rite, tonight, I know it'll do me no harm [an it harm none...]264 Performances of this song, a traditional audience-pleaser at the Starwood Festival, are worthy of attention for several reasons. First, its enduring popularity in festival culture results from giving a voice to the ambivalence many attending these festivals feel toward the growth, marketing, and general commercialism of Pagan gatherings. Second, it expresses this ambivalence in terms that articulate and propose aspects of an "authentic" Pagan identity in accordance with an 264 Victoria Ganger and Revelry, “Paganfest Barbie," Highly Ir-Revel—ent, self-published in Cleveland, OH, 2002. 201 attendant's festival behavior. And third, this articulation of religious authenticity is performed and enjoyed as part of the festival itself. In listening to this song, there are lyrical and structural allusions to the late 1950‘s/early 1960's vocal group harmony (doo-wop), a highly stylized form of musical performance associated with lightheartedness. The song is actually structured as a parody of "Earth Angel," originally a 1955 R88 for the The Penguins. This allusion at once places the song in a context of other well-known I) Q» '33: Rafi musical numbers that name acts of magic, and that reference the presence, '- however metaphorically, of a divine presence immanent on Earth. The song describes the entrance of a festival newcomer who carries with her coded products and activities that signify her counterfeit identity (represented as a mass-reproduced doll of molded plastic) who can put on and remove the qualities and characteristics of a “Pagan” similarly to a change of clothes. Juxtaposed within “Paganfest Barbie” are lyrical codes and ‘musickal’ asides designed to provoke “insider” humor for festival attendees, the vast majority of whom (whether Wiccan or not) are familiar with Wiccan conventions of principle and practice (such as the Great Rite, magical names, the Wiccan Rede, and the Triple Goddess). Deploying these markers as call-response asides sung by background singers (noted in italics) gives a political “sting” or a punch to the main vocal line, as does the allusion to the song “I Put A Spell On You,” the work of ‘Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Often the object of much controversy, the ‘Great Rite’ here is symbolically juxtaposed with the playful sexuality of the festival and “Barbie”’s abuse of 202 polyamory, a relational ethic embraced by some members of the Pagan community. It highlights the superficial attention “Paganfest Barbie” gives to “authentic” religious activity. In contrast, the “Great Rite” in Bonewits’s song serves as the apostatic turning point away from Christianity and toward the service of the “Lady.” Taken together, these musical and religious codes reinforce a common sense of shared “insider” religious knowledges and purposes, and satirically critique their (mis)use by festival attendees (and by extension, other ‘Pagans’) who approach them with an attitude of superficiality. This is consistent with other labels that have arisen in the Pagan community to describe such practitioners with little background in the elder canon of intelligentsia—“fluffy,” “fluffy-bunny or “New Age”—these terms carry a pejorative stain for many contemporary Pagans, as shown in this humorous musical comic for Green Egg [Figure 4] PAGAN COWBOY JOE' RANDON Crurvrs eY JANA HOLLINGSWORTH r 31.: 3? row? 007/77 nmr root Aflf A r3851”, writ BLACK-rm r50 MGGER AND BLACfi’-H000[0 mu. 1 Rift/4L C‘Ofll), I' [NC/P6155 70w? IVA/SHINE A PErvrAGruu [AIM/Na It's/0f: m EACH met 0" TELL MI, 00 I"0U (”0' 0F GARDNER AND CROWLEY. 0f IZIY REGARD/1’, AND .4151 TH! K/M’F, 0" LOVELY 0' FORTUNE “0 CHARLES 000F857 LELANfi— 1000? THEAI #0800." CAN TfLL I! A THING FOR PAGANS TODAY HAVE TURNEO TREND? NED“ AGER, WNW QUARTZ CfiYSTAL KNICK-KWACKS 4190 [Al-ES er ”I! SCORE.) I [NL/G‘HTENME‘NY'S you»: rrv .4057 run V! [451' Ltssaws ' r rmr nocsrr r DORA: can: no mocmsr mart no»: / \ /l l I OMS/VI Hf THE L/Ff 0F AA" OLD-FASH/Oflffi‘ NCAA; , .‘ \f‘j‘N . [t THOUGH out, 800K, AND CINDLF M: 310.1? #455: / E ' e ‘ LIT orrrms crust AFTER DYE/I? cosurc POTEIV rut -- ~4‘m ,. ”a“, ., I'Lz. MOSH ALONG lh' Mr OLD macaw ur / Oimelc 19.90 CHEN EGG. VOL. XXII. No. 88 13 Figure 4: "Pagan Cowboy Joe: Random Chants" from Green Egg The fact that “Paganfest Barbie” is written and performed by Victoria Granger, a prominent Starwood co-creator adds a further political dimension to 203 this musical irony. On the one hand, the growth number of paying festival attendees adds to a larger pool of funds available for the rental of campground resources and attraction of musical and ritual talent. On the other hand, there is the fear than a wider, more popular festival will promote and enact a superficial image and level of religious practice. As sociologist Helen Berger notes, this same fear regarding the ‘authenticity’ and ‘legitimacy’ of incoming practitioners has already sparked such debates over this topic in other areas, such as book publishing.265 And, as Sarah Pike has pointed out, there are few highly structured institutions in contemporary Paganism, so the summer festival serves as a particularly important site of anxiety, identity formation and negotiation.266 Horizons of Inclusion: Citizenship and Pluralism While there is an inherent element of playfulness in Paganfest Barbie, (“ I love you”) the playfulness is also tinged with sarcasm, especially as the lyrics trigger audience recollections of their own experiences with “inauthentic” Pagans attending festivals, largely under the guise of spectacle. The trope of authenticity is invoked via repeated performance year after year, thus performing the work of policing cultural boundaries. Boundaries are (re)articulated not simply as a one- time statement, but as repetition of a crowd favorite. 265 Berger, A Community of Witches, 113. 266 Pike, Earthly Bodies. 204 Within Pagan musickal projects, there is ample evidence of presenting and articulating cultural boundaries as a means to crossing said boundaries. To some extent this can be seen in the example of the CUUPS work Singing The Promise, explored in Chapter 2. In that collection, many different instruments and cultural tropes are invoked, but all for the common purpose of honoring the Goddess, as the cover art demonstrates. Several popular songbooks promote a deliberately pluralist ideology in service to a common goal—the protection of Earth and telluric immanence as a whole. Anna Kealoha’s (1989) volume Songs '— tn“: .. Of The Earth [Figure 5] is one such volume. The opening page presents a folk relief woodcut-style drawing of a violin, flute, drum and hammered dulcimer quartet, playing in a loosely fenced village yard for a group of rural agrarian women [see Figure 6]. The table of contents is followed almost immediately by a “Categorical Index,” separating songs by African, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu/East Indian, Islamic/Sufi, Jewish/Hebrew, Native American, and the largest category, Neoteric.267 Songs are cross-listed by Rounds, Graces, Birthing Songs, and Children’s Songs. Children’s line drawings make up the facing page of the Index, as well as several periodic pages throughout, and children are encouraged by the author to color the images in the book.268 Interstitial quotes from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Muir, Ravi Shankar, Hazrat lnayat Khan, and Confucius are woven throughout the book amidst folk agrarian images of men and women, as well as various styles of abstract designs. 267 “Neoteric” refers to Goddess and Pagan chants and songs. Keahola defines it as "new innovations, akin to what others refer to as New Age.” 268 Anna Keahola, Songs or The Earth (Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1989) 11. 205 Two other volumes are more recent, Circle of Songs and Songs For Earthlings. Kate Marks' Circle was published in 1993, and is subtitled Songs, Chants and Dances for Ritual and Celebration. This particular volume differs greatly from Kealoha’s work in organization and presentation. Rather than setting apart different song tracks by tradition, instead Circle of Songs [see Figure 7] presents a ‘Neoteric’ framework similar to the ritual narratives of eclectic Wiccans. Songs are linked by “Creating Sacred Space,” “The Elements [Earth Air Fire Water],” “Honoring Our Relations,” “Woman Power,” “Male Power,” “Healing and Love,” “Peace and Unity.” Thealogically, Sacred Place is first created, then its constituent components are honored, Ancestors and Nature Spirits are acknowledged, and then sacred dramaturgical narrative components between the Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine are honored. Chants authored by Starhawk are placed next to African, Amerindian, and Aboriginal chants. There is no interstitial commentary, rather there are additional guidelines and suggestions for meditative practices and dance choreography. The front cover artwork places human figures linked in a large circle among descriptions of liberal ideals, reflecting the internal organization of the songbook. Songs for Earthlings: A Green Spirituality Songbook (1998) presents yet another trajectory. Unlike the cover art on the two previously discussed volumes, Earthlings [see Figure 8] presents detailed nested layers of biological, meteorological, and physical aspects of Earth, separated into Sacred Realms for 206 Pagans: Land, Sea and Sky.269 The songs are organized by animal, vegetable, and material elements in the first section, and the object of veneration/praise in the second. The third section is devoted to the ritual year and life-cycle rituals, and the fourth to self-esteem and cultural pluralism issues, under the name of Martin Buber’s “l and Thou." Unlike either of the two previous works, each song is tracked to an author, a publishing permission, and where this is not possible, a recording made by a specific folk group. Even dirt has its own praise song under ”270 the category of “Food Blessing. Figure 5: Songs of the Earth (1989) front cover 269 A very similar trajectory is followed in American Druidry. See Corrigan, Druidheachd, 7; One can also see this in the rites of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids (0800), an organization which tends to be more common in Europe. See Isaac Bonewits, Bonewits’s Essential Guide to Druidism (New York: Citadel Press, 2006) 224-225. 270 Steve Van Zandt, “Dirt Made My Lunch” in Julie Forest Middleton, ed. Songs For Earthlings: A Green Spirituality Songbook (Philadelphia: Emerald Earth Publishing, 1998) 120. If there is any confusion about the ultimate telluric telos of the text, the dedication includes Ge, “the oldest Greek goddess of the Earth, who when I said I didn't want to take five years out of my life to do this book said, ’I’ve only asked you to do this one thing for Me, and this is it."‘ 207 Figure 6: Songs of the Earth print, page 3 "1.133.... r‘ :29: LL: Challis d2". .SOHrL}.S \ , . roa I'IUALI etttsuarioxlglfi’,‘ 'f «#4 '3 “Lu ".3 #5 ~11-”~L’,_ Figure 7. Circle of Song (1999) front cover 5 9701‘ 24725” (Dong W... - Lampiled and initial 7, Julie Forest Middleton Figure 8: Songs For Earthlings (1998) front cover 208 In addition to dirt, there are occasions in which music is specifically designed to bless, consecrate, and expand physical boundaries (including dirt) as well as ideological boundaries of cultural production. At the beginning of the yearly Stanrvood festival near Sherman, NY, a ceremony takes place every year in which a veiled icon of the earth goddess Nerthus (sacred in Germanic Paganism) is processed around the physical boundaries of the festival grounds and installed on it. The goddess procession is recapitulated at the end, whereby the icon is reinstalled back on the small marsh island where it sits the rest of the year. Led by members of the Asatru (Norse Pagan) community such as Diana L. Paxson, a specific chant is sung continuously for the Goddess’s consecration and procession. She is coming, she is coming From the depths of the Earth, She is coming from her island in the sea She is coming, she is coming Bringing joy, bringing mirth, She is coming to set us free!271 A similar consecration became well known as a symbol of a growing Pagan presence in the public square. In 1993, members of ADF, the Church of All Worlds, and local DC. area Wiccans gathered at the Capitol Building’s east lawn to consecrate the statue of “Libertas, Goddess of Freedom” that normally 271 This chant originated with Diana Paxson, Asatru leader and founder of the Fellowship of the Spiral Path. See Diana L. Paxson, Essential Asatru: Walking the Path of Norse Paganism (New York: Citadel Press, 2006) 92-93; The Starwood Festival 21 Booklet, 41. Other Fellowship of the Spiral Path priestesses have worked with national goddesses in ritual, such as the statue of Columbia, the goddess of Liberty, which stands in New York harbor. See chapter 2. 209 stood atop the Capitol Building dome. In the midst of its restoration, it had been taken down from the dome for cleaning. Opening the consecration was a local Wiccan, Ray, who sang a chant that has gained wide popularity within the Wiccan community, “We Are A Circle." Also sung was a prominent ADF hymn, “O Earth-Mother.” We are a circle Within a circle With no beginning And never ending272 0 Earth-Mother, we praise Thee! In all that we do, do we praise Thee: in our getting up and in our lying down, in sleeping and our waking, in our eating and in our drinking, in our working and in our times of leisure; for we are alive only through Thee, and in our every act do we praise Thee. OEarth-Mother, we praise Thee! In all the whole world we praise Thee: from the east to the west do we praise Thee, and from the nadir to the zenith do we praise Thee.273 Although reflecting many of the same concerns as the Lady Liberty Ritual discussed in Chapter 2, this ritual sought not only to consecrate the geographical space of Washington, DC. and the United States, but also apply the spiritual powers of the Earth Mother, the All-Mother, and “of all those deities who have 272 Rick Hamouris, “We Are a Circle," Welcome To Annwfn, Nemeton Publishing, 2004 [1986]. 273 Ar nDriocht Fein, “Oh Earth-Mother,” Lyrics available at http://www.adf.orq/articles/nature/oh- earth-mother.html. Accessed 3-22-09. 210 ever been worshiped in this land, both ancient and modern.” The ritual, in much the same way as the Jeffersonian ritual six years later, used the raising of power through singing and drumming to “cause all our public servants to make, enforce, and judge the laws in accordance with Liberty’s highest ideals of freedom and justice for all.” The participants had heard that there had been a re-enactment of the original Masonic consecration that had taken place 200 years before with the raising of the statue. In conjunction with Pagan understandings of the Hermetic ‘E‘firral influence upon Masonry, the ritualists hoped to build on the earlier consecration '- of the macrocosmic Icon so as to influence the microcosmic human activity of American political governance.274 Songs intended to geosacralize space have been utilized not only for camp meetings and implicit political statements, but also explicitly deployed as weapons of cultural politics. In May of 1999, then Georgia Congressional Representative Bob Barr spearheaded a legislative effort to outlaw the practice of Wicca at military bases, linking the religion to an alleged drop in combat morale and readiness. The Military Pagan Network, and the Witches Anti-Defamation League quickly organized an aggressive lobbying campaign with the US. Congressional Armed Forces Subcommittee and President Clinton. Moreover, they also conducted an open large ritual at the Jefferson Memorial on July 1St of that year, using postcards of the Statue of Liberty, inscribed with Jeffersonian 274 “Goddess of Freedom: Lady Liberty Statue Consecration — A report from Arch-Druid Isaac Bonewits,” Green Egg: A Journal of the Awakening Earth 26, no. 3 (Yule 1993-94): 37. 211 quotes, as magical talismans. In part because of this lobbying effort the measure was defeated.275 Horizons of Exclusion: ‘Degeneracy’ and ‘Ossification’ The concern with cultural politics in Paganism and its music has not always produced this push toward what I have elsewhere called the “New Integrationalism.” The oppositional stance of much of earlier Pagan politics, '_ _J especially in the environmental and cultural critiques of Charlie Murphy and Gwydion Penddenrven, has also continued and changed form. In fact, there exists a subculture of Pagan music and ideology that promotes extensive hardline policing of cultural boundaries in order to preach dissent from Modernity, instead offering an alternative usually known as “Radical Traditionalism. “ For the most part this neofolk movement has produced the bulk of its output in the European market, and reflects an apocalyptic/millennialist ethos found in the New Aeon of Thelema, Germanic Paganism and New Right politics. Artist Ian Read has been at the forefront of this movement. After working with Thelemic influenced groups such as Current 93, Read studied magick and martial arts in Germany before producing albums joining folk music classics (“Wind That Shakes The Barley”, “Sir John Barleycorn”) with Heathen songwriting. His group, ‘Fire + Ice,” is an example of what Joseph Buckley calls 275 Archival materials related to this controversy can be found at http://www.witchvox.com/militarv/bb collection.html, http://www.witchvox.com/military/bb mph dc990628.html,and http://www.witchvox.com/militarv/bb mpn.htm| . All materials accessed 3-22-2009. 212 “Euro-Heathen music. Pagan. Euro-centric, and often espousing a Nietzschean contempt for the masses.”276 FIRE + lCE's releases, including 1994’s Hollow Ways, 1996’s Runa, and 2000’s Birdking, all center around devotional explorations of Norse paganism, exploring ritual technologies (such as runes), and a passionate critique for the loss of Paganism from Christianity and modernity. Father of all hear my words, Spoken from my heart. Feel the Spirit’s rising flame j The healing words of art.277 157% ' Where have they gone, those proudest of dreamers? Their woods are all silenced and the bright halls stand free. As the land they were Saxon. Their pastures unmown, and the meadows ghostly. Shadows are whispering, songs from the twilight; Their swords all shattered, and the spears just trees.278 Read and others within this neofolk movement criticize wholesale almost all aspects of the modern world and its institutions, from usurping of folk modes of exchange to industrial modes of production and ecological disaster. The cultural “rootedness” advocated by poets such as Yeats has become, in the words of Karl Marx, a world where “all that is solid melts into air.” Along with criticizing commercial culture, Read’s band promotes the eventual recovery of human 276 Joshua Buckley, “The Saxon Songwriter: An Interview With Fire & lce’s Ian Read," TYR: Myth-Culture-Tradition 1 (2002): 159. 277 Fire + Ice, “Seeker," Hollow Ways, Fremdheit 211, 1994. Vocals by Freya Aswynn. Aswynn has had her own tape and compact disc release of Asatru Shamanic chanting. 278 Fire + lce, “Where Have They Gone?” Birdking, Tesco, 2000. 213 culture through some of the ‘nine virtues’ of Norse Paganism: “The heartlessness of the modern commercial consumer society ruins the lives of many. FIRE + ICE takes the purity and philosophy of early music and melds it into a message redolent with powerful seeds of honour, truth, loyalty and the bond of true friendship."279 If this is a tradition about which there is little scholarly coverage, it is not for a lack of source material. Read is also the publisher of the Asatru/Heathen community journal Rana. Since 2000 the most visible center of cultural and "" v-Trrga ideological exchange for this tradition has been the journal TYR: Myth-Culture- Tradition. Its editors, Michael Moynihan and Joshua Buckley, both have extensive musical roots and interests. Buckley in particular is fascinated with English, Irish, and Scandinavian folk music. Moynihan is active in the “archaic futurist” musical group known as Blood Axis. Blood Axis contributed a song for a sampler compact disc shipped with the second volume of Tyr. The journal’s editors summarize the perspective of ‘Radical Traditionalism’ well on each of the back covers of each journal issue. Resacralization of the world versus materialism; folk/traditional culture versus mass culture; natural social order versus an artificial hierarchy based on wealth; the tribal community versus the nation- state; stewardship of the earth versus the “maximization of resources”; a harmonious relationship between men and women versus the “war between the sexes”; handicrafts and artisanship versus industrial mass-production. 279 See Fire + Ice’s home page at httpzlledred.net/fireandice. Accessed 3—22-09; Mattias Gardell, Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival'and White Separatism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) 157; Paxson, EssentialAsatru, 140-144. 214 The editors of TYR and their cohorts thus posit an ethic of neofolk ‘purity’ against a world they see as having degenerated into unnatural, materialistic and inharmonious sloth. Many of the musical tracks on the TYR compilation express disgust over materialistic use of the scientific process, whether naturalistic science or social science. Styles vary a great deal, from country and western frameworks to juxtapositions of heavy metal and Irish jig-music. In the third edition of the journal, there are extensive essays on the renaissance of Norse — ”do- *Kuhlfl Paganism in Iceland and its chief historical proponent, as well as discussions of the role of music in the revival and in the musical exports of Iceland, such as the group Sigur Ros?80 Philosophers and cultural critics Julius Evola, Georges Dumézil, Alain de Benoist, and Stephen E. Flowers have provided numerous essays, observations, and books from this reactionary perspective. Moreover, some of the most influential figures in the movement, such as Moynihan and Read, have made their contributions through music and associated publishing efforts. The debt to the volkish brand of German Romanticism is unmistakable here. In a TYR interview with Buckley, Read tells him that “even if I didn’t like folk music, I would support and nurture it because it forms part of our sacred way...my contempt for modern politics is such, for example, that I ignore the news and have read no newspapers for twenty years.” For Read, the modern world is eligible for nothing but complete disdain, as its degeneracy contains nothing of purity or honor. 280 Christopher McIntosh, “Iceland’s Pagan Renaissance,” TYR: Myth-Culture-Tradition 3 (2007): 249-261; Jenina K. Berg, “Sveinbjbrn Beinteinsson: A Personal Reminiscence," TYR: Myth- Culture-Tradition 3 (2007): 263-272. 215 TYR is also notable because it contains extensive music reviews of any associated musics, far more so than PanGaia, Green Egg, Circle or other Pagan journals have. The advertisements in the journal (which are few) usually offer copies of older philosophical works within the same political narrative, hard-to- locate small print runs of documents from small presses, or musical works. In the first issue ran a full page advertisement for Heimliches Deutschland (“Secret Germany”) by a collective of musicians and TYR authors. An accompanied ff ._ review calls it “an authentic traditional feel of volkish folk music...you may be .' hard-pressed to guess that this was recorded in the 21St century.” The advertisement calls it a “stunning invocation of heathen power.” Sold by the same press that publishes TYR, a purchaser could be eligible for a discount for buying both TYR and the album at the same time. Rarely, if ever, are Pagan periodicals so devoted to seamlessly integrating music with their overall ideological enterprises. TYR and its associated culture are markedly different from most other Pagan circles in other ways as well, as they tend to criticize the Pagan movement wholesale. The editors make this explicit in the preface of the first volume of the journal. Enter neo-paganism. This movement, which has come to prominence since the 1960’s, advocates a kind of spiritual regionalism as a complement to bioregionalism. In many respects, of course, the pagan “scene” has been a pawn to the worst excesses of modernism and post-modernism: subjectivism, relativism, and a confused syncretism that borrows from a hodge— podge of different traditions without ever committing itself to one. 216 Nevertheless, the broad resurgence of interest in paganism is an encouraging development, and cause for (guarded) optimism?81 In sections of the journal that reflect only a single editor’s views, the language is more pointed and direct. In reviewing Ronald Hutton’s Triumph Of The Moon, perhaps the seminal work of modern Pagan Studies, Joshua Buckley saw this as an opportunity to single out figures that Gerald Gardner would be “appalled by” 1‘33 _ including “anti-sex feminists” Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin, as well as “the try—r *1”; widely-read Jewish witch Starhawk.”282 There can be little doubt that this particular corner of the Pagan musical and ideological world is a product of largely the same intellectual history as the more liberal threads we have seen. There are prominent examples of ecoapocalyptic discourse in Green Egg and Darryl Cherney’s music of the late 1980’s, but this tendency has not been the dominant flavor of Pagan visionary consciousness. In Aleister Crowley’s Gnostic Mass the list of “Gnostic Saints” recited as part of the service includes several individuals heralded in reactionary politics--such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner. Neither is the open elitism of TYR and its aggregates recent. Both D. H. Lawrence and Aleister Crowley were well known for their aggressive cultural elitism. More generally, we can describe and analyze the reactionary Pagan dissent in terms of modernity itself and its relationship to the Orphic impulse. We must be careful. The scholarly literature on cultural modernity is 281 “Editorial Preface," TYR: Myth-Culture—Tradition 1 (2002): 8. 282 Joshua Buckley, Review of Triumph of the Moon, TYR: Myth-Culture-Tradition 1 (2002): 227. 217 extensive and cannot be fully engaged here. Nonetheless, in the classic analyses there are signposts that speak to modern reactionary politics. The Romanian cultural critic Matei Calinescu wrote extensively on the nature of modernity.283 During the 19th century, two different forms of “modernity" developed. One was associated with scientific and technological progress, the industrial (re)evolution, and the spread of capitalism. The other discourse was a aesthetic and cultural reaction against the first phenomenon, against "bourgeois mercantilism" and W961; 3 ' "vulgar utilitarianism." Yet this reactive form was able to propagate itself because V“- of the cultural pathways opened by the first form. Thus, it can be said that modernity is in some sense a tradition against itself. As Joshua Buckley himself notes in his interview with Ian Read, much of the growth of “Euro-Heathen” music284 has occurred precisely because avenues such as the internet have made global ideological dissemination and global economic transactions much easier and faster. The ability of an ideological community to form a critical mass of institution-building has advanced exponentially in this day and age. This understanding of modernity and anti-modernity also allows for a paradoxical relationship between the degeneracy that reactionary Pagan music sees in the modern world, and its own self-image as an avant-garde critical movement. For Calinescu, the concept of “avant-garde,” as historically developed 283 I am greatly indebted to both Calinescu and Renato Poggioli for their insight into Modernist vanguards. See Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, 2nd edition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987); Renato Poggoli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (New York: Harper and Row, 1971) 284 The term “Euro-Heathen" comes from Ian Read, and is a self-identifying label. 218 out of social realists and revolutionaries, carries a military, or at least a militant sense. Identifying oneself on the vanguard or on the cutting edge of historical developments implies a belief in the final victory of time, nonconformity, and immanence. In TYR’s avant-garde, conformist values (those of the dominant culture) are unworthy forms of cultural degeneracy, completely overrun by commercialism, materialism, and discord. Bourgeois “progress” is the name given to mere industrialism and ‘scientism’ for its own sake. Anti-modern modernists, such as Martin Heidegger, DH. Lawrence and Friedrich Nietzsche are heralded within TYR as prophetic voices decrying the growing problem of human and spiritual alienation, ‘technologism,’ and loss of authentic, ‘natural’ being.285 A full analysis of reactionary Paganism is beyond the scope of this work, but the military roots of ‘avant-gardism’ yield a final insight into this realm. While TYR's music and politics is linked historically to the ontology of play, the modernist dissention from modernity or “anti-modernity,” as it were, has assumed a fixed position along the crest of its discursive wave. This radical policing of boundaries contains no humor; it is deadly serious. In this case the Orphic impulse has become ossified. To use a material analog, this calcification of deposits in the organic culture of “play” has literally become hardened, so that 285 Collin Cleary, “Knowing The Gods," TYR: Myth-Culture-Tradition 1 (2002) 25-36; Collin Clearly, “Summoning The Gods: A Phenomenology of Divine Presence,” TYR: Myth-Culture- Tradition 2 (2003-2004) 25-57; For an example of venerating militancy and “darkly ambiguous" divine forces, see Michael Moynihan, “Divine Traces in the Niebelunglied or Whose Heart Beats In Hagan's Chest?” TYR: Myth-Culture-Tradition 1 (2002) 73—105. Heroic death in Moynihan's view is not death at all, but rather immortality itself, a view echoed by Joscelyn Godwin (himself a TYR contributor) in discussing the musics of anti-modernists Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner. See Joscelyn Godwin, Music, Mysticism and Magic: A Sourcebook (1986, repr. New York: Penguin Books, 1987) 237. 219 only a comparatively small range of intellectual movement within reactionary Paganism. It is perhaps in terms of explicit politics that this schema becomes most clear. TYR advocates an allegedly indigenous “three-tiered indigenous Indo- European social structure.” Consisting of nobility, warriors, and workers, this tripartite division of labor microcosmically reflects the macrocosm of Gods, Nature Sprits, and Ancestors. This cosmic reiflcation of labor division is understood as producing an organic whole, yet for individuals there is little social freedom or movement possible. Indeed, contributors to TYR often make the point that the individual only makes sense in the context of an ‘authentic folk,’ pre- determined by cultural ancestry.286 An antimodern authenticity is the only defense and cure for the degeneracy of modernity, and reactionary Pagan music takes its role as the handmaiden of this hardline politic. Summary Conclusion Paganism functions as a minority religious tradition in a United States dominated by various forms of Christianity. Like other traditions, it' feels varying degree of cultural pressure and accommodates to existing structures for purposes of propagation. On the one hand, Pagans seek to identify with and retain the moral leverage of an outsider, prophetic voice. But on the other hand, 286 Stephen E. Flowers, “The Idea of Integral Culture," TYR: Myth, Culture, Tradition 1 (2002) 15- 16, 19-21. The editors heap praise upon Flowers in their preface, and I believe it is very significant that Flowers’s (also known as Edred Thorssen in the Asatru community) essay is the very first one in the entire collection. 220 there are many in the community who wish to participate fully in the institutional life of public and political culture. Both factions deploy music to that end. Within the community, some also ‘musically’ articulate boundaries of appropriate cultural behaviors and values within a discourse of authenticity. But even within a Christian-dominated space, Pagans have also found ways to inscribe themselves into historic sacred musics, apart from their own theological musics of Chapter 3. This has entailed taking adapting medieval Marian devotional material, collaboration with Gospel musicians, and still others seek to regenerate Winter Solstice veneration in the context of ‘re—musicking’ Christmas carols. This wide span of musical engagements with Christianity and modernity becomes even wider when reflecting on investing such energies in consecrating or co-consecrating material artifacts and symbols of public culture with dual meanings, such as statues of deities representing cherished political values. For the editors and proponents of TYR, forming a revolutionary vanguard against modernity and degeneracy creates a subcultures of its own, suspicious of any engagement or compromise with failed values. But in most cases the Orphic function of play retains enough flexibility to preserve a commitment to cultural pluralism, whether in the form of published songbooks or attempts at interfaith negotiations. It remains to be seen to what degree the revolutionary, integrationist, and reactionary wings of Pagan music will tend to dominate the foreseeable future. To the degree that wider American cultural systems become more or less stable may determine the degree of play and “boundary policing” in subsequent Orphic discourses. 221 Epflogue When Sabina Magliocco and Holly Tannen (herself an accomplished musician) published “The Real Old-Time Religion: Towards an Aesthetics of Neo-Pagan Song” in 1998, their article concentrated on music “heard performed live and at festivals, music which we know is part of a living oral tradition.” They argued persuasively that the dominant use of such music was in ritual, the “predominant form” of worship among Pagans and a spiritual “art-form” of the movement.287 For the material they were examining, I believe this remains true today. Pagan festivals, such as those examined in Sarah Pike’s Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community, continue to be, like their Second Great Awakening antecedents, one of the primary historical means for cultural transmission, in this case including tapes, CDs, and songbooks. But distribution of music, Pagan and otherwise, has greatly expanded since both of those works were released, and with it the availability of religious ideas to a broader public.288 In a sense, modern Paganism has never strictly been a ritual culture. Through the work of chapter 1, motifs and language could be clearly identified within intellectual and literary currents that drew on a broad range of discourses subsumed under the umbrella term, “paganism.” Ecstatic, incantatory, cosmic yet 287 Magliocco and Tannen. “The Real Old-Time Religion," 175—201. 288 For example, as of this writing, there is an internet radio network devoted to Pagan music. This network, once known as “Circle of Souls Pagan Radio," is now known as the “Pagan Radio Network.” 222 extremely personal, the authenticity of Whitman’s religious impulses are indelibly linked with the dissident political kinship of Zitkala-Sha in the realm of ideas. Callenbach's Ecotopian inhabitants view themselves as authentic kin within a larger sociosacred network including plants and trees, just as the protagonist of Steinbeck’s novel and the authors of “Hymn to Gaia" did. In the same way, the intellectual content of ritual has periodically ignited the question of citizenship and subaltern folk politics, from Charlie Murphy’s “The Burning Times” to the ritual for Lady Liberty and ”textually poached" Woody Guthrie songs. The combination of folk ideology, ritual and song gave rise to the “harmonial” religion of the Wheel of the Year, buttressing its commitments with Pagan antiquity, and the aesthetics of a re-imagined Pagan renaissance. With the rise of filking culture, heritage creation was no longer limited to inspiration elements from the past, but visionary elements from future mythologies and parallel universes. Yet some threads seem to have merely branched out even further and grown phenomenologically deeper. A Neoplatonic telos and direct filial relationship couldn’t seem further apart, yet their alleged distance only created more room to play within re-imaged Rites of Eleusis and re-interpretations of medieval church artwork. The question of functional polytheism remains: filial relationship to what? To Aphrodite? To Gala? To Yemaya, or to Nox-ee-ma?. The polymorphic distribution and manifestation of Orphic power seems to know few bounds, even as its protean mutability would seem to limit its institutional development. And certainly one of the challenges for Pagans as a 223 whole has been dis-covering important Sacred Persons, especially those gendered representatives who can provide important role models outside of monotheistic traditions. Paradoxically, one could argue an equivalent inability on behalf of cultural creatives, especially musicians and composers, to resist working precisely in that vein. Music, especially Western classical music, has often displayed a preternatural fascination with mythic figures of ancient Pagans. In the first issue of the journal Green Man, Cory Renfro examined the archetype of Prometheus and his expression within classical music. It was no surprise to find Renfro scouring ancient texts of Herodotus, Hesiod and Ovid for information on Prometheus. But Renfro spent far more time on Prometheus’ appearance in “symphonic poems, dramatic cantatas, and operas ..... and at least two ballets.” Renfro referred his readers to the ancients of course, but also encouraged his readers to explore Beethoven, Faure, Jelinek and Scriabin. Much as early 20th century Pentecostal Christians asked themselves ‘why should gifts of the spirit be limited to the ancients?’, so too does Renfro implicitly ask why ancient poets and modern composers should somehow be privy alone to the gifts of the Gods.289 Implications of the Study This study concludes that folk ideology, love and humor are dominant characteristics of the Orphic impulse as it manifests in the music of contemporary 289 Cory Renfro, “Into The Labyrinth: Prometheus," The Green Man: A Magazine for Pagan Men, (Spring 1993): 23-24. 224 Paganism. Conversely, a musical study of modern religious Paganism suggests its development is significantly indebted to the Orphic impulse of literary and intellectual currents. More specifically, like many elements of historically American religious traditions, Paganism is preoccupied with kinship, whether in terms of God/desses, Ancestors and/or Nature Spirits. Paradoxically, this kinship has largely taken the form of dissident musical proclamations against what are perceived as dominant cultural norms, but this has taken place within the larger context of community formation and heritage discourse. This suggests two important implications. One is that contemporary Paganism owes an ideological debt to the individualist tendencies of Protestantism. In a country well known for an abundance of new religious movements and congregationalism, Paganism manifests an ethos of the “priesthood of all believers.” Even in the British context, Alex Sanders, witchcraft leader and recording artist, made it clear that new initiates into the craft were designated both.“priestess and a witch.”290 The other is that through its concerns with kinship and webs of relation it confronts the anxiety within an ideology of individualism, in some cases leading to an increased role for public presence and ritual devotion to symbols of American nationalism. The Hebrew Bible, in terms of its symbols and liberation narrative, does not appear to have been a significant influence on the thematics or development of Pagan musicking. Identifying with the telluric, chthonic, and ultimately Orphic sensibility of discursive Paganism, this music marks a significant departure from 290 Sanders, “Initiation," A Witch Is Born. 225 E4. the dominant traditions of American religious musics as identified by Stowe. Nevertheless, the historical individualism that informs both ecstatic Christian practice (as embodied in the Baptist and Methodist traditions of the Great Awakenings) and ecstatic Transcendentalism appears to have made its mark. The prominence of folk, feminism, humor and ecstatic musics in contemporary Paganism suggests a much-needed re-evaluation away from Stephen Marini’s thesis of New Age/Paganism as a development based in a Pythagorean “music of the spheres.” Further Explorations In surveying the available literature and conducting this study, several important gaps became apparent. While there exist quite a few important studies on American Christian hymnology, we are just starting to see important large- scale analyses of other religious musics emerge in the past few years. This is heartening, but there is cause for concern. As other scholars have pointed out, the study of new religious movements has tended to attract few theologians and others willing to examine the more complex ideological transcripts embedded. While anthropological studies of Paganism, Wicca and witchcraft have been and continue to be helpful, only very recently has material culture (other than pop culture) been understood as an important venue of study. The material culture of music in the Pagan community is almost overwhelming, from its use in clothing, artwork, film, festivals, and the like. 226 Moreover, each of the main aspects of Chapter 3 could easily constitute a work in itself. This is especially true with regard to some of the smaller Pagan traditions. Wicca and feminist witchcraft have garnered the vast majority of attention, while Druidry, Asatru, Thelema, Feri, have been comparatively ignored. Comparative pluralist ecclesiology, telestics, systematics, moralistics, prophetics and apologetics could benefit greatly through the study of music as religiously and somaticaIIy-inspired text. 1957—33E The study of the religion is not the only area open for further exploration. The study and teaching of humanities (and by extension the humanistic thrust of American Studies) could greatly benefit from an expanded examination of pluralistic religion in general, and pluralistic religious musics in particular. Studying popular theologies as encoded in folk songs reflects the broader set of concerns and self-representations that are broadcast and refract through a ' particular community. Keeping Harry Smith in mind, releases of popular songs, whether religious or not can be seen as a kind of social spellmaking. If religious practitioners are willing to inscribe religious songwork into court testimony (as Gwydion Penddenrven did) then it is incumbent upon students of American Studies to open ourselves wider to the broader ideological codes embedded in what may seem the most unlikeliest of places. With regard to the present subject matter, George Lipsitz’s admonition ‘to listen’ is much older than Lipsitz himself. 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