Rob Young, author of "Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music."

You seem to touch often on the theme of there being a Britain, and an “Other Britain.” The “Electric Eden” or “Albion” created by “fragments and survivals” from a distant and often romanticized past. The thing that links Cecil Sharp to “The Wicker Man” to modern artists like Sharron Kraus, Julian Cope, or Kate Bush in your book. Could you talk a bit about how this Other Britain came to be?

I feel it’s something that has slowly, organically formed itself over decades, even centuries, mainly through a very particular seam of cultural artefacts and artists. A figure like William Blake is crucial here – in poems like ‘Milton’ and ‘Jerusalem’ he invoked a Britain of the Druids, and painted ancient monuments like Stonehenge (without actually having seen it), and a spiritual lineage in Britain that connected with the pre-Christian era. For him that would have been a way of evading the strictures of the organised church which was an anathema, and of course he was fascinated with the myth of Adam and Eve, the pure state of mankind before the Fall, which seems to underlie much Romantic nature writing of the same period. Blake’s distrust of the ‘dark Satanic mills’ of capitalism was taken up by the likes of William Morris, another figure very important to the opening pages of my book, with his passionate opposition to the destructive forces of Victorian industry and ‘improvement’.

It’s a very complex question, but really I think the industrial revolution has much to do with it – beginning around 1760, when a Parliamentary act called ‘Inclosure’ forcibly removed common lands from the folk and scooped them into private ownership. That pushed many agricultural workers towards the new cities and factories where the only remaining employment opportunities lay. This displacement is at the bottom of so much of the British empathy with the countryside, I believe, as so much utopian thought and music here seems to desire to tap into folk memories of an unsullied rural state of mind which now appears like a golden age. Surviving relics from the world before that industrial ‘Fall’ are revered: old buildings, texts, songs, etc, are like talismans to be treasured, as a connective chain to the past. A lot of the artists you mention in the question have made work which seems to reach back to this mythical age – the fantasy/fairytale aspects of Kate Bush; Julian Cope’s interest in prehistoric megaliths, The Wicker Man which is like an encyclopedia of British folk customs and costumes, imagining a fully functioning British pagan society, one untouched by the later Catholic/Protestant schisms.

You connect folk music in Britain with “the cyclic revolve of the seasons and the ritual year,” with each generation drawing its own interpretations and meanings from folklore. How relevant do you feel this emphasis on the ritual year is today? Where do you see this impulse’s strongest embodiment in modern British music?

Unfortunately I don’t see it all that much in music except in very tiny micro-scenes of ‘wyrd folk’ made by people who appear to genuinely crave a kind of return to an idealised, medievalist, Anglo-Saxon way of life. The experimental band Coil made a highly successful series of ‘Solstice’ records, recorded actually on each solstice, sometimes out in the open air, and released as soon as possible after the event. I thought that was an interesting exercise that actually produced some great music. More generally I think there are some artists – like Sharron Kraus, who you mentioned above, and Alasdair Roberts, who are very aware of the magical aspects of rural song and their set lists are accordingly loaded with appropriate material, either traditional or self-written. In the world of modern composition people like Peter Maxwell Davies, Michael Finnissy, Harrison Birtwistle and Judith Weir are a few names whose music has connected with occult aspects of the landscape and folkloric traditions.

I found your sections dealing with the intersections of folk music, folk artists, and the revival of Pagan Witchcraft to be very interesting. You state that the two are “strikingly similar?” Could you expand on this a bit for my audience?

This was one of the most fascinating sections of the book to research. Throughout the process I was very aware of the ideas – often conflicting – of ‘authenticity’ that always come into play when folk music and culture are discussed, and as I went on I realised how much of what’s popularly thought to be ancient and sanctioned by time is often an invention of more recent provenance. From reading people like Ronald Hutton you begin to realise that the same applies to the history of Pagan Witchcraft in Britain – current practice seems to be a patchwork of texts and rituals collated by the likes of Gerald Gardner. I met people who had been studying folklore of witchcraft in the late 60s, a couple called Dave and Toni Arthur, and who befriended Alex Sanders, who I’m sure many of your readers will know as the ‘King of the Witches’ in the UK at the time. Dave was loaned Sanders’s Book of Shadows to copy and study, and he found that much of it was cobbled together from older books like Aradia and even bits of Shakespeare. (As an intriguing aside, Toni is famous here as a former presenter of kids’ TV programmes in the 70s).

For them, it simply proved that the Witchcraft rituals were inauthentic in the usual sense. And you can apply the same logic to the main body of folk music, when you learn that much of what’s considered medieval or even dating back to pagan times was often printed on Broadsides in the 18th and 19th centuries. But for me, it doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that these survive as genuinely useful traditions, which are still being passed on and mutated, in a folkloric process of transmission. Hundreds of thousands of pagan witches practise with these things all over the world, so how can that invalidate the tradition? Similarly with folk music, I don’t really care how the stuff was gathered, or whether things are 50 or 300 years old – the music is there, its materiality is undeniable and it’s put to use in all sorts of ways by all sorts of musicians with all sorts of contrasting agendas. That for me is what makes these sectors of culture so exciting and robust – that they persist and endure with or without the permission of the media, State-sanctioned culture and all the usual gatekeepers and tastemakers.

How overt was interest in the occult, magic, and Witchcraft among the British folk singers and folk-rockers? You mention Synathesia’s planned odes to Roman gods, Nick Drake being described as a “modern pagan,” a folk duo collaborating with Alex Sanders, and a member of Pentangle noting experiences with the “lighter side of the occult” in America. How much do you think the two scenes interacted and influenced the other?

A lot of it was anecdotal. Obviously the late 60s was a time when the counterculture and underground movements were pretty open to the rich world of mythology, fantasy, magick and so on. John Renbourn of Pentangle named the band after the shield design in the medieval Arthurian poem Gawain and the Green Knight and he told me he was reading Jessie Weston’s From Ritual To Romance around the same time. Slightly aside from folk-rock as such, the keyboardist Graham Bond was one of the most overt at the time, into a very Crowleyan vibe on albums like Holy Magic and We Put Our Magick On You, which are kind of funky stews of Dr John-style groove with magickal chants and spells invoked over the top. He killed himself in 1974, but not before, as I mention in the book, teaming up with a former member of Yorkshire folk group Mr Fox for an unrecorded project. Mr Fox – the duo of Bob and Carole Pegg – also had a witchy view of things, their track ‘Pendle’ was inspired by the Lancashire covens and they described some very uncanny experiences to me which you can read in the book. Carole made a great solo track called ‘A Witch’s Guide To The Underground’, which sounds kind of proto-Kate Bush. And then of course there was Jimmy Page installed at Crowley’s former lodgings in Scotland. And so it goes on. The Incredible String Band were probably the other really significant group here; a band who in their quest for a genuinely usable religion (which ended with Scientology), dabbled with the Tarot, Wicca, mystical Christianity and a variety of Eastern religions, all reflected in various ways in their albums of 1967–69.

But I don’t think there was much systematic infiltration of each other’s scenes, if you want to look at it like that. I think it was more about a lot of this stuff being in the air around the late 60s and available to any creative person who wanted to pick up on aspects of it. The Nick Drake thing was a quote from a former friend of his, and I’m not sure how reliable that really is – it’s certainly the only reference I’ve ever found to Drake being into ley lines, UFOs, etc, and it somehow doesn’t ring convincingly. But in other ways, his music is perhaps the profoundest expression of a genuinely other, possibly pagan state of mind, in the sense that he seems to be aiming at an organic sense of time and to escape the human realm that’s dominated by the clock, by responsibilities, by what he saw as the terror of romantic relationships. His tracks like ‘Way To Blue’, ‘Northern Sky’ and ‘River Man’, for me, are songs of deep longing to project into the being of a tree, or the sky, something other than the city life. Which all sounds very cliched hippyish when you say it, but the seriousness and the beauty of the way he does it force you to take these ideas seriously.

Finally I’d like to direct people to the chapter in Electric Eden on the great British outdoor festival, which goes into detail about the incredible origins of the Glastonbury Festival, which was originally designed along very clear geomantic and ‘Earth Magic’ lines (why do you think the main stage to this day is the ‘Pyramid Stage’? The original organisers  in 1971 were influenced by, and even friends of, the late great John Michell and his book The View Over Atlantis which was published shortly beforehand. It’s possible to view the prevalence of the outdoor festival in the UK as the point where paganism meets rock ‘n’ roll meets countercultural forces.

While your book has a generous wealth of information about the formation of Other Britain, of England’s various folk revivals, and how different artists interacted with these threads, there isn’t too much (comparatively) about the modern era past the mid-1970s (I’m assuming due to space considerations).  Are you planning a follow-up? If not, what resources would you recommend for those wanting to further explore the territory you’ve mapped?

There are plenty out there who disagree with me, but in my opinion on a musical level, the folk tradition as a well of inspiration had largely dried up by the mid-70s; although there were plenty who still drew from it, few were sonically innovative. That’s the cyclical thing – there are always going to be periods when something like folk is going to feel more useful to musicians and artists as a springboard, followed by a more fallow time (we happen to be in one of the more fertile periods right now, especially in the States).

Lessening space and, to a certain extent, deadline time were certainly factors in my stepping more lightly over the territory post-1975, but also, by then most of the story I’d wanted to tell had been enacted and many figures who remained making interesting work (Nic Jones, Spriguns, Peter Bellamy, Martin Carthy, John Tams and Home Service, etc) were by and large keeping something alive rather than massively innovating. I’m not sure a follow-up would do much more than fill in such gaps and I simply am not enthusiastic enough about the generic folk music of the 80s and 90s to really want to sit down and tell it in detail.

But – and this is kind of an exclusive – I AM beginning work on a follow-up; or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a companion. That is, I’m trying to write an alternative history of Britain’s film and television culture, looking at ways in which British moving pictures – cinema and domestic TV – have expressed the kind of tensions between progress and nostalgia, past and present, country and city, conservatism and radicalism, etc, which I explored through looking at music in Electric Eden. I do make a lot of passing references to various relevant films in the book – The Wicker Man, A Canterbury Tale, The Owl Service among them – and as I was writing Eden I began thinking there could be a whole book there – it’s an angle surprisingly seldom taken in studies of British film. So I’m shifting the focus from Electric Eden to… celluloid Albion! (That’s not the title, though…)

Otherwise, for further research. my blog at http://electriceden.net has a mass of links to sites musical and beyond, which all reflect my interests in these areas.

“For 30 years it languished in obscurity, apparently beyond the reaches of cultural reassessment, until, in the mid-2000s a new generation of artists collectively tagged ‘New Weird America’ and spearheaded by Devendra Banhart, Espers and Joanna Newsom rediscovered acid and psych folk, revered it and from it, created something new. Thanks partly to this new movement, many original acid and psych folk artists have re-emerged, and original copies of rare albums command high prices. Meanwhile, both Britain and America are home to intensely innovative artists continuing the tradition of delving simultaneously into contemporary and traditional styles to create something unique. “Seasons They Change” tells the story of the birth, death and resurrection of acid and psych folk. It explores the careers of the original wave of artists and their contemporary equivalents, finding connections between both periods, and uncovering a previously hidden narrative of musical adventure.”

Many of these newer “freak folk” (sometimes called “wyrd folk”) artists explicitly explore the esoteric, like Fern Knight’s upcoming concept album centered on the Tarot, or events like Hip Death Goddess that mix Paganism, magic, and psychedelic folk into one package. Which brings us to the second book, Rob Young’s “Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music” that explores the “esoteric impulses” of Britain’s ever-renewing folk scene.

“While ostensibly purporting to be a history of that much derided (though currently fashionable) four-letter word, ‘folk’, “Electric Eden” will be a magnificent survey of the visionary, topographic and esoteric impulses that have driven the margins of British visionary folk music from Vaughan Williams and Holst to The Incredible String Band, Nick Drake, John Martyn and Aphex Twin. For the first time the full story of the extraordinary period of folk rock from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s will be told in a book with the breadth of a social history touching on sonic worship, pagan architecture, land art, ley lines and ther outer fringes of the avant garde.”

In a recent editorial for the Guardian, Young talks about the “silver chains” that bind modern musical visionaries into a continuum with Cecil Sharp, the founding father of folklore revival, who believed that today’s musicians are “the last of a long line that stretches back into the mists of far-off days.” The same thinking that found pagan survivals in every dance, and allowed for the re-emergence of full-fledged Pagan religions into Britain’s (and eventually America’s) collective consciousness.

Finally, author Christopher Knowles proposes in “The Secret History of Rock ‘n’ Roll” that rock n’ roll concerts and dance clubs are our modern mystery religions, and the performers are fulfilling the ancient archetypal roles as gods and goddesses incarnate.

“Sex. Drugs. Loud music. Wild costumes. Pyrotechnics. These words all describe a rock concert or a hot dance club on a Saturday night, but they’re also equally appropriate descriptors for the ancient spiritual phenomenon known as the “mystery religions.” These ancient occult rites used many of the same trappings as rock ‘n’ roll — heavy drinks and drugs, loud, percussive music, outrageous ritual garb, and lots and lots of sex — to bring the initiate out of his or her mundane life and into the transcendent realm of the gods. In this book, author Christopher Knowles shows how, 2,000 years later, the mystery religions got a secular makeover when the new musical form called rock ‘n’ roll burst on the scene. The Secret History of Rock ‘n’ Roll traces the history of the mysteries — their rise, their fall, and their eventual metamorphosis into rock music and other myriad offshoots. In the process, he reveals how readers’ favorite rock bands fit into the same archetypal roles as the ancient gods.”

The work of Knowles, Young, or Leech wouldn’t surprise most folks operating within the modern Pagan communities, where we often discuss the pagan elements of folklore, weave the visionary into our music, or hold a “Morrison Ritual” at events. But what is exciting about these works is that it seems to hint that our subculture is quickly colliding with a much larger renewed creative impulse within a far broader creative underground. It could represent an new opening of our own creative efforts into new avenues of expression, new ways of operating, bringing renewal and new opportunities to both sides of the equation. When music turned visionary the first time around modern Pagan religions, and their creatives, were just finding their footing. Now, 30 years later, who knows what could happen when our paths cross again. I’m excited about the possibilities, and you can be sure that I’ll be covering these works as they are released.

“The Ministry of Culture (MOC) and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage (SACH) have called time on the controversial, and sometimes vulgar, competition of some local authorities claiming to be the hometowns of mythological and historical heroes, and even sometimes villains. The measure came after a host of news reports highlighting the disputes over the birthplaces of almost every renowned name in the country. According to a circular jointly released by the MOC and the SACH, local tourism and cultural heritage authorities are urged to restrain their appetite for exploiting the fame of well-known figures. What’s more, the commercial development of evildoers, no matter whether they are real, fictional or mythological, will be banned. The circular also criticized some local governments for competing to name their places as the hometowns of an eminent person in an effort to profit from tourism.”

However, the lure of tourist revenue seems to be trumping government admonitions against exploitation, and a total ban on utilizing “evildoers”. Two regions are currently competing to be the “home” of notorious folkloric adulterer Ximen Qing, one complete with an adultery-themed site.

“Both of them have proclaimed themselves the hometown of Ximen and each announced an ambitious investment plan to build sites celebrating his exploits. ”It is improper for local authorities to use real or fictional figures to attract attention,” said Li Xiaocong, a history professor with Peking University.”

Of course, trying to stop towns and communities from laying claim to famous historical and legendary figures is like trying to grasp water. Just examine any tourist route in almost any country, and you’ll see a proliferation of “hometowns” and sites of heroic (or vile) deeds allegedly perpetrated on that very spot. I fear that a government that prides itself on control may find this task of regulating folklore a bit too big to handle.

“Not quite, maybe, but the rise has been dramatic. The census in 2001 recorded 40,000 pagans, but the true figure may be higher … The Pagan Federation, which aims to represent all “followers of a polytheistic or pantheistic nature-worshipping religion”, claims the number of adherents has trebled at least. That would mean there were 360,000 committed, practising pagans, putting them ahead of the Sikhs (329,000) and fourth behind Hindus (552,000), Muslims (1.5 million) and Christians (42 million, according to the census) … All you have to believe to be a pagan, according to the federation, is that each of us has the right to follow our own path (as long as it harms no-one else); that the higher power (or powers) exists; and that nature is to be venerated. If you asked everyone in Britain if they agreed with those three statements, millions would put their hands up. At its loosest, paganism is beginning to look like our new national faith.”

As if to validate Moreton’s thesis, the Summer Solstice gathering this year at Stonehenge was the largest ever, with an estimated 36,500 revellers making their way to Salisbury Plain.

“Despite the sun not making an appearance in an overcast sky, record numbers of people arrived to celebrate the occasion. An eccentric mix of Morris dancers, pagans dressed in their traditional robes and musicians playing guitars and drums gathered alongside visitors from across the world.”

There seems to be a certain British character that lends itself to celebrating its ancient landscape, and it affects you no matter what religion you actually adhere to. Pagan, Christian, atheist, or even Sikh.

“I think we ought to start a campaign to celebrate Midsummer in a more spectacular way. As a species we have specialised in creating tension, division and war. I am not for a moment suggesting we eschew organised religion. What I am suggesting is that we embrace our commonality. We all exist in the warmth of the sun, the light of the moon; we live by the tree and drink of the river. I suggest that we create a pantheistic precedent and have the first multi-faith celebration of the sun, of the galaxy and of the universe. I would like this event to take place in Croydon. We should, for one long day only, forget our differences and unify under the canopy of a shared sky. We will welcome the pot-smoking hippies, the groovy Bhuddists, the depression-embracing goths, the perennially troubled Christians, the ideologically-centred Sunnis and the daughters and sons of Khalsa. Food ought to be available for vegetarians, vegans, omnivores, and chocolate for the pot-heads. We should all wear differently coloured, full-length, smock-dresses that celebrate the colours of nature (no one, not even Croydon’s own Kate Moss, looks good in a smock-dress: it is a great leveller).”

So is the British soul, deep down, really a pagan soul? Or does it just seem that way around Midsummer?

“Many of the things you don’t know about Easter have to do with odd, intensely national Holy Week traditions. So why not start off with the most unexpected one — the Easter Witch. In Sweden and parts of Finland, a mini-Halloween takes place on either the Thursday or Saturday before Easter. Little girls dress up in rags and old clothes, too-big skirts and shawls and go door to door with a copper kettle looking for treats. The tradition is said to come from the old belief that witches would fly to a German mountain the Thursday before Easter to cavort with Satan. On their way back, Swedes would light fires to scare them away, a practice honored today by the bonfires and fireworks across the land in the days leading up to Sunday.”

Easter witches! You can lean more about the tradition here, and here. Between this and Italy’s Christmas witch I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t a European Christian holiday somewhere that doesn’t involve some form of witches and children getting presents.

The music plays a major part, and it is through English folk – or the English folk revival scene – that a new generation of more urbane-minded people of both sexes are finding their way to morris dancing. “1960s and 70s British folk was a cool time for music, and bands such as Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, Jethro Tull and even Led Zeppelin took a lot of cues, sonically and visually, from British folk arts,” says music journalist and proud morris dancer Jo Kendall. As the indigenous music of England, folk has never quite been given the same respect that the traditional music of, say, the US or Jamaica is afforded. Yet morris dancing seems to be changing perceptions about the music that soundtracks it. Those songs that sing of farming, courting couples, regional folklore or other archaic topics are capable of evoking a strong sense of place. Not in a nationalistic way – blind patriotism being the last refuge of myopic idiots – but more in a “Wow, I can’t believe they still do this” kind of way.

For more on the popularity of “Morris: A Life With Bells On”, click here and here. For more on the recent resurgence of interest in folk music, check out this article on “Goth-folk”, and a great article from Zeek magazine about how the new folk and psychedelic bands encourage a pagan, immanent, spiritual outlook. You may also want to read my previous posts on the Morris, Wassailing, and folk-dancing resurgence.

The Los Angeles Daily News profiles santero Charles Guelperin and looks at the rise of Santeria in Los Angeles, which some are now calling the “capital” of the faith in the USA.

“We do not have churches, temples or synagogues,” said Guelperin, a chain cigar smoker after his morning rituals. “My home here is my temple.”Today Santeria, a blend of Afro-Caribbean voodoo and the devotion to saints among many Latino Roman Catholics, has become so big in Los Angeles that many consider the city the Santeria capital of the country. It is a phenomenon that has occurred thanks to the influx of immigrants from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean and court rulings making it easier to sacrifice animals for religious purposes.

The article goes on to touch on the growth of botanicas (which seem to be doing quite well so-far despite the recession), the tensions created by animal sacrifices, and how the faith is becoming more affluent and cosmopolitan as it integrates with American culture.

“One of the reasons why I’m writing the book about Charlie is because his clientele is so cosmopolitan,” said [Donald J. Cosentino, a folklore professor at the University of California, Los Angeles] “He is just down the street from Paramount Studios, and he’s got a lot of people from the film industry who come to his botanica. Sports people. He’s got businessmen. Men from West L.A. Men from Beverly Hills. He’s got foreign clients. “He is a very cosmopolitan man, a very cosmopolitan priest, and that’s what makes him so interesting.”

With the rise of Santeria on the West Coast and a popular resurgence of Vodou in Florida, we may be looking at a larger trend of younger generations turning to pre and post-Christian religions and traditions to face a challenging world and find an identity. I imagine that we’ll see some interesting cross-pollinations between these syncretic faiths and the growing modern Pagan religions in the very near future.

Is a random prayer taken out of context by a killer “consistent with Wicca”? That’s the assertion made by NBC’s Dateline and Virginia police in a special aired last night on Randall Lee Smith, a delusional loner who killed two people on the Appalachian Trail back in 1981, and attempted to kill two more in 2008.

In addition to the gun, police found a treasure trove of evidence Randall Lee Smith had hidden deep in the woods: Scott Johnston’s sunglasses, more than 20 knives, meat cleavers and other items. And they found some bizarre drawings and notes, including this “prayer:” “Hail to the guardians of the watchtower of the north. By the powers of mother and earth hear me…show me thy glory…I invoke thee oh, ancient one.” Police say the notes and symbols are consistent with a religion called Wicca — a pagan group that worships nature, and considers its leading members witches.

Dateline is hardly a bastion of level-headed reporting, but this seems a bit much. If he had scraps of Biblical verse scattered around would they be “consistent with Christianity”? Ceremonial elements and notes do not the religion make, and it was irresponsible for Dateline to report the information this way. Did they think that adding a “Witch angle” would make things more exciting for their viewers? Also,” considers its leading members witches”? So only the “leading” members then? Are we all working our way to witch-hood? As for Randall Lee Smith, we can’t ask him what his actual beliefs were since he died in custody shortly after being apprehended from injuries sustained during a crash. Yet another victory for sensationalism.

The Richmond Times Dispatch in Virginia reports on CaribFest, and speaks with Haiti’s ambassador to the U.S. about Vodou/Voodoo.

“Raymond A. Joseph, Haiti’s ambassador to the U.S., was quite conversant on the subject of voodoo. ‘When people think of voodoo, they think about the pins and the dolls. . . . That is sorcery and witchcraft,’ Joseph said. In reality, he said, ‘voodoo is a religion, like any other.’”

In a fortunate piece of kismet, the public radio program Speaking of Faith aired its “Living Vodou” episode this week, which features an interview with Vodou scholar and practitioner Patrick Bellegarde-Smith.

Tropaion reports that the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, in partnership with the Onassis Cultural Foundation in New York, will be presenting an exhibition in December that may be of great interest to modern Pagans.

“Worship, Women’s Ritual and Reality in Classical Athens, is the forthcoming exhibition by the National Museum and the Onassis Cultural Foundation in New York for the following year … The exhibition will hold 158 artifacts from the National Museum, Acropolis, Kerameikou, Thebes and others including with 29 artifacts from the British, Metropolitan, Louvre, Vatican, Berlin and other foreign Museums. The exhibition is going to be divided in four main categories / themes: goddesses, priestesses, women and ritual, festivities and women on the circle of life. The visitor will be initially introduce with the Athena Parthenou, Artemis of Brauron, Demeter and Persephone who are presented with artifacts of their temples. Then, there are the mythical priestesses like Theano, who retain the key to further discover the practical aspect of worship (sacrifices, libations and choes). The exhibition ends with the section of the cycle of life (birth, adulthood, marriage and death), which run all stages of life in relation to religion and a woman.”

You can read more from this Greek paper. A formal press release hasn’t been issued, but once it is, I’ll provide a link.

Speaking of exhibitions in New York, the Museum of Biblical Art in Manhattan is currently hosting a traveling exhibit of 106 Albrecht Dürer prints. The famous German painter and print-maker, while devoting much of his work to Christian themes, also explored Greco-Roman myth, and did several witch-themed works. Reflecting the the growing concern (and eventual panic) that would engulf his homeland.

Excerpt from “The Four Witches” 1497

You can read more about the exhibition (which runs through Sept. 21) in this Lower Hudson Journal news article.

The Washington Post does a profile on the Hex signs of the Pennsylvania Dutch, and interviews Don Yoder, co-author of “Hex Signs: Pennsylvania Dutch Barn Symbols & Their Meaning”, artist Eric Claypoole, and Patrick J. Donmoyer, a student at Kutztown University who studies hex paintings.

“Some of the symbols, he said, date to Norse, and even pagan, art. And it is no coincidence that the hub of hex sign activity is in Pennsylvania rather than, say, New York or New Jersey. “There was freedom of religion in Pennsylvania,” he said. “People were afraid of so many things. Even ‘witches’ were protected here.” The argument that hex signs couldn’t have mystical meanings because they’re so public and out there for the world to see is misleading, Donmoyer said.”

Pennsylvania Dutch “Pow-Wow” folk practice and magic has gained popularity among some modern Pagans (to varying degrees of authenticity and success). So a thoughtful exploration of one aspect of this culture is welcome.

Druid leader King Arthur Pendragon’s protest at Stonehenge has entered its second month.

“Demonstrating on behalf of the Council of British Druid Orders, King Arthur Pendragon has vowed to remain at the site, living in his caravan, until the historic site is opened fully to the public … Pendragon, 54, has been camping close to the World Heritage Site since the Summer Solstice on June 21 and is hoping his protests will encourage the Government to remove the fences around the monument, build a tunnel under the A303 and grass over the A344.”

It is unclear if Pendragon’s protest, or the ongoing public consultation, will produce much needed changes in time for the 2012 Olympics.

In a final note, it looks fairly certain that Natalie Portman will be starring in a remake of Dario Argento’s occult-horror masterpiece “Suspiria” (featuring an evil coven of witches).

“Handsome Charlie Films, which is headed by Natalie Portman (pictured inside) and Annette Savitch, will be producing the remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. In addition, word has it Portman will topline the film that David Gordon Green is attached to direct. Green’s PINEAPPLE EXPRESS hits theaters tomorrow.”

Another addition to the large pile of horrid horror remakes (think “The Wicker Man”), or new classic for a new generation? I suppose only time will tell.

That is all I have for now, have a great day!
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