Panmankey

A first in my continuing effort to update the panmankey blog on a near weekly basis.

I guess I should start with a personal update.  I'm in the middle of planning the summer festival season, and have already begun to confirm events.  Right now I'm 100% sure I'm going to be at Wic-Can Fest in Ontario Canada.  It also looks like I'll be at Circle Sanctuary's Beltane Celebration over the weekend of May 1st.  I'm also planning to go back to Starwood, and then to Brushwood's Summerfest (which is being held the week that Starwood used to occupy).  Most of this is not set in stone, but I'm pretty sure I'll be doing all of those things.

Now, off to deep Pagan thoughts .  . . . 

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I came across this little nugget on The Wild Hunt blog (http://wildhunt.org/blog/, if you don't read the Wild Hunt at least once a week, I urge you too.  It's great):

“Raised in violent ghetto neighborhoods, Ramirez grew up despising his father for his careless disregard of his family. He learned to live like a street animal to survive the cold, harsh streets of the South Bronx. Looking for love and validation, he eventually found it in a new “family” of witches and warlocks who groomed him to become a high priest in their occult religion. Ramirez’s plunge into the dark side reached a boiling point on the night he sold his soul to the devil in a diabolical, blood-soaked ritual. With renewed fervor–and the mark of the beast now cut into his right arm–he actively recruited souls into this “unholy kingdom,” haunting the bars and clubs of NYC by night to find his next victims, including those who professed faith in Christ. His life continued on this dark path for 25 years until God intervened through a larger-than-life dream, revealing Himself for who He really is and snatching Ramirez back from the pit of hell. Out of the Devil’s Caldron walks you through the dark alleys of the occult religions of Santeria, Palo Mayombe, and espiritismo (spiritualism) while exposing the hidden secrets of darkness.”

Now I don't know Mr. Ramirez, but I do know that the tale he's spinning here is just not true.  A quick reading of the paragraph above almost confirms that Mr. Ramirez knows nothing about Santeria or any other occult practice for that matter.  I've never met a Santerian who claimed to be a "witch or a warlock," those words are just entirely absent from the Caribbean/Latin American-Pagan lexicon.  That's the first obvious lie in the piece, but there are several other whoppers.  It's true that Santerians occasionally sacrifice a chicken here or there (and not all groups do this), but I would hardly call that a "blood soaked ritual."  It's also difficult to sell yourself to the Devil when your belief system doesn't have the Christian Devil in it.  

I'm not sure what this "mark of the beast cut into his right arm" nonsense is about, maybe he got a tattoo?  I would hardly call that the mark of the beast though, and again, that's a Christian term that I'm guessing is missing from Santeria.  I'm also kind of surprised that any Pagan group in New York City would haunt the bars and clubs of that great city.  Pagans don't really proselytize, and if they bother to, it's far more likely to be done at a bookstore.  

I suppose it's possible that Ramirez believes these things happened to him, perhaps he's succeeded in deluding himself for the past 25 years.  That's not out of the realm of possibility, but what's more likely is that he's trying to cash in on the lucrative Evangelical Lecture Circuit.

There are dozens (and dozens) of individuals out there with crazy stories about Satanism, the occult, Witchcraft, and Santeria.  A girl I work with was once absolutely convinced that every Halloween Satanists came together to sacrifice babies and perform abortions.  These sorts of crazy stories are circulated in many Evangelical Churches, without anyone to refute them.  If there really were Satanists sacrificing people and aborting babies every Halloween there would be a pile of evidence (literally, all the dead bodies) supporting the assertion.  To this day there's no evidence that even one person has been ritually sacrificed to Satan in the United States (or Great Britain)

I picked up a book called "Wicca:  Satan's Little White Lie," published the by the Chick People (creators of those ridiculous little comic book tracts) about ten years ago.   If the allegations in that book are true, I've never really risen very far in the occult ranks, and this is after fifteen years of trying.  I've never been offered the initiation into Satan's inner-circle, or even seen a glimmer of him!  Most Satanists I've ever met hate my guts for being a namby pamby Wiccan, they certainly don't want to initiate me into anything.  "White Lie" though states pretty emphatically that third degree initiation in the Alexandrian Tradition involves the selling of one's soul to Satan.

What can be done to fight the idiots who spout this garbage?  The internet is full of good information refuting all of this crap (though none of it yet is specifically about Mr. Ramirez, though someone will probably get around to it one of these days).  I will tell you from experience that arguing with people about it does very little good.  It's best to let people live their own lives and learn from experience that the world is not littered with dead babies.  If you do feel the need to "argue" your best bet is to probably just print something off of the net, from a site like paganlibrary.com  

February has become this crazy month for me the last couple of years.  It's almost as good as June-July when it comes to festivals.  As most of you know I hit Pantheacon in San Jose CA every February, and then four days later I hit Convocation in Detroit (or as I like to think of it, my backyard).  This year was no exception of course, and I rocked both festivals.  Sure there were no official Morrison events on the schedule of either festival, but I did get to do two new workshops:  one on ancient Druids, and one on Cerunnous/Green Man/Herne. 

Both workshops were well receieved (on both sides of the country) but the "Horned God of the British Isles" workshop grabbed people by the horns, or so I've been told.  Not to sound like a jackass, but it was one of my better presentations the last couple of years.  It was so much fun to do, especially getting to use a laser pointer and wax philosophical about Old Horn Head.  Just a great workshop to present.  At Pantheacon I had over 100(!!!) people at it on sunday afternoon, which is a really great number.  Convocation isn't nearly as big, but I had a good turnout there too, and no one fell asleep!!  I always like that.

I had low expectations for the Druid workshop, but it went fairly well.  It was certainly longer than I had anticipated (90 minutes both times, and it could have been longer), which was a relief since I was worried I might breeze through it in 50 minutes.  I didn't have the giant crowds for it that I had for the other workshop, but some of that might have been due to timing.  It was in the first block of workshops on friday at Pantheacon, and was on friday again at Convocation.  I always get solid turnouts, so I'm pretty sure I'll be presenting at both festivals next year.

At Convocation I got to do a Horned God Ritual in addition to workshops, and that was fun.  I did a ritual for Pan/Dionysus/Cernunnous/Green Man, and though it ended up being pretty short, I got good feedback from it.  I'm always hesitatnt to plan anything that's going to last very long on saturday night at Convocation.  The Masquarade Ball there has such a hold on people that they'll skip your stuff if it interferes with their opportunity to dance to horrible rap and pop music. I do have to tweak it for future festivals and make it a bit longer, but it was a fun saturday night thing. 

Even more than being able to present stuff, it's the peopel that keep me coming back to festivals year after year.  BIg thanks to Kenny and Anna Klien (be sure to pick up Kenny Klien's new book on the Fairy Realm!) for their friendship and for hanging out with me at Pconn.  You guys rock.  This year I also got ot hang out some with Kenn Day and Selena Fox from Circle.  Somewhere there's a picture of me kissing Selena floating around the internet, I hope I get a copy of it soon.  Big thanks goes to everyone who shared their scotch and/or absinthe with me at both festivals.  I wonder what a sober friday night would feel like at a Pagan festival?  I hope I never find out.

To all of you who bought Horned God books, thanks!!!  It made travelling a lot easier on my pocketbook this spring.  I'm sorry about the small print in the books, that will be fixed in the next edition.  For those of you wanting a book with large print, those are coming.  Drop me an email and I'll let you know how to get one sooner than later. 

New rule too, I'm going to try writing in this thing every monday from now on.  I'm sure I'll fail, but enough people asked about the blog last month that I think it's something I need to do.  I should have a lot of festivals and things on the agenda this spring/summer, and it should all shake it in the next month or so.  I'll probably be at Starwood this year, and at Brushwood's SummerFest.  I'm possibly going to do an event at Circle Sanctuary too, and lots and lots of Pagan Pride Days.

Happy Springtime!
-jason

I have been doing a terrible job of keeping up with the things.  I think it's the result of a long winter, and the gloom and doom that goes along with it.  Things were especially nasty up here in the Midwest this year.  Most years we usually end up with either OK temps (days in the 30's/40's) and lots of snow, or no snow and lots of cold (cold) weather.  I probably prefer the dry conditions, but either are better than the alternative, lots of snow and extremely frigid temps.  This year and last we've had frigid temps and tons of snow.  It snowed again this past monday, in April, truly the gods must be mad at Michigan, everyone else is, why not them?

My summer schedule is coming together, even if summer still feels like a far away dream.  I will be at Wic-Can Fest (www.wiccanfest.com) outside of Toronto in June.  I'm pretty excited, this will be my third trip up there in the past four years.  It's a great little festival, and Deb Lipp will be there, and so will my old running buddy Kenny Klien.  I'm pretty thrilled.  I should be at Starwood too, and I will be attending, but not presenting at Sirius Rising.  I'm kind of enjoying taking Sirius off, it's like a real vacation for me.

I went and saw the band Lez Zeppelin this past friday night.  WOW!  My love of the Zeppelin is well known, and right now, nobody does live Led Zep better than the Lez ladies.  Other than guitar player Steph Paynes, it was a completely new band this time around (this was my second LezZep show), and it was better than my first one.  I think I fell in love with new singer Kris Bradley.  She didn't really sound like Plant (more Janis Jopliny), but she still sounded great, and played the harmonica which about melted me into a puddle of Pagan goo.  The setlist was cool too, with the "expected" Zeppelin songs (like "Rock'n'Roll" and "Black Dog"), and a few surprises.  I went about bat-shit crazy when they started playing "Poor Tom" and "Wearing and Tearing," two songs Zeppelin never played live back in the day.  ff you get a chance to see Lez Zeppelin, do it!  You won't be dissapointed.

I have a few additions to the website coming up, most notably a long overude article on Black Sabbath that I've been struggling with for about a year.  Since the classic Dio-led lineup of the band has a new album coming out at the end of the month, I thought it was time to finish it up. There are some other offerings coming up as well, but those will be surprises. 

The weather has been taunting me here.  It just refuses to get above 54 degrees and it's driving me crazy.  I want to open up the windows and wear some sandals (while blasting some Zeppelin/Doors/Sabbath) damnit!  I hope your spring has sprung faster than mine!

-jason