Aidan Kelly: Including Paganism
I posted a blog yesterday, essentially about the frustrations of being a writer trying to ferret out the truth about all things religious, as well as about the nature of consciousness, sacred sexuality, quantum mechanics, a lot else, and how they all interrelate—that sort of writer, but not an entertainer. You can find that blog here:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/aidankelly/2012/12/of-blogging-and-poetry/
A few very kind readers posted comments about how much they do value my work. That helped a lot. Doesn’t solve any of the mundane problems or get my kids any Christmas presents, but it reassures me that I’m not wasting my time.
One gentleman commented that he did not know I had any books available. I’m not good at advertising. I have three books available from Amazon, both as Print-on-Demand paperbacks ($8.99) and as Kindle ebooks ($2.99). I am trying to believe that I am restarting my own publishing company, Hierophant Wordsmith Press (I even have a Facebook page for it), but I do not have time, money, energy, or talent for doing marketing and promotion. It would be nice if one of them went “viral” (that does sound like a flu), but that’s highly unlikely to happen. This is where you can find them on Amazon:
Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches: A Social History of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn is at:
Goddess Murder: A Tale of Love, Witches, and Gnostics is at:
and Theodyssies and Paradoxologies is at:
That gentleman also liked my description of Theodyssies and Paradoxologies, and suggested I do the same for my other books. So I will try describing what Goddess Murder is actually about. What is most important is that it implicitly proposes a theology for a religious praxis that would combine the best of both liberal Christianity and Wicca. I know most people will have no clue why that might be desirable or even possible; I know also that some people will get it.
The plot is essentially a love story, about the romance between “Eddie” Edwards, a college professor, and Andrea Peregrino, a hereditary Witch, and how it is set off when Eddie receives three apocryphal gospels smuggled out of the Vatican library by a Jesuit colleague who is then murdered. The plot deals with attempts at robbery and assassination as the powers that be try to prevent translation of the documents. (My friend Marvin Meyer, one of the most preeminent Gnostic scholars, has, of course, never had to cope with anything like that.)
These gospels are obviously ones that I have myself concocted out of various raw materials during the last 40 years as experiments in theological speculation. Excerpts from them are interspersed with the chapters that contain the plot, creating two timelines that interweave and affect each other. There is also much about the nature of consciousness and perception in both timelines, offering an at least plausible, nonmetaphysical hypothesis about how magic actually works.
It does resemble The Da Vinci Code in some ways. I was working on it long before Dan Brown began writing, and dealt with many agents who insisted it was not commercial enough to be published. I am very grateful that POD publishing has destroyed the monopoly enjoyed by the corporate publishers.
I thnk I have made many fewer fictive assumptions in GM than Brown makes in his novel. For one thing, GM is set in an alternative history in which hereditary Witches actually exist. The greatest shortcoming of Brown’s novel is the central six pages blathering on about Christian history and theology that are thoroughly, factually wrong—although they are spoken by a character whose hatred of Christianity is blatant. Many of the scholars I know (not that we’re buddies) have written at length about why and how much in the book is not factual scholarship—but of course not much of the public will have read such boring insistence on truth and research. The greatest virtue of Brown’s novel is that it alerted many people to the existence and importance of the Coptic documents hidden in a jar in Egypt around 400 CE, since they reveal the possible existence of one or more alternative varieties of Christianity. But I think it is ultimately not very important. It was intended as entertainment. It does not show the reader anything that might lead to a better spiritual path. Does mine do that? Maybe. At least I tried. See for yourself.
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