Pop Pentacle: Top 5 Novels More Pagans Should Love

Yeah, it’s just another list feature like any other blog might have, but we’re giving it a Pagan twist. And so in good ol’ LBRP order, here are five novels that more Pagans should read and fall in love with. Do tell us in the comments why these are not obscure, why you hate them and what favorites of yours that more Pagans should know about instead. The point of any entertainment list, after all, is to make people disagree with the selections.

• Earth
  Tex and Molly in the Afterlife Richard Grant, 1999.
  Aging hippies Tex and Molly get high and fall to their deaths into a hidden sacred well in Maine, and that’s the beginning of their adventures as they try to save the old woods from the threat of a genetically engineered super-tree being created by an evil forestry conglomerate.

  This was Grant’s second attempt to move out of science fiction and into mainstream fiction, and it remains his most successful work to date. (My teacher prefers Rumours of Spring, but Tex and Molly is that rare book set in the here and now where Paganism is integral to the plot.)

  Grant is not a Pagan author, but it’s quite clear from Tex and Molly that he knows us and that he sympathesizes. The timeline, for instance, covers the weeks from Beltane to Summer Solstice, and along the way the plot embraces environmentally activist street-theater performers, a coven of witches, a CAW nest of technopagan teens, a homeless tree spirit, the Gods Bear and Raven, a solitary shamanic drum practioner, and a chthonic uber-diety of destruction who ultimately agrees to help (for the sake of the dust mites). Will the Great North Woods be saved? Will the (befuddled consumerist scientist) guy get the (activist street-performer) girl? Will the CEO of the Gulf Atlantic Corporation find his missing daughter? Will the spirits of Tex and Molly negotiate the strangeness of the spirit world and find each other and their rest? Well, of course. But it is through the weaving of these threads together that Tex and Molly creates one of the finest tales yet told of us as modern Pagans.

• Spirit
  Out On Blue Six Ian McDonald, 1989
  Like Stephenson’s Snow Crash or Brin’s Startide Rising, Out On Blue Six is an early work by a successful science fiction author which is overstuffed with interesting ideas. Here godlike AI’s are running the one remaining megapolis on earth as a benevolent dictatorship in which genetic assessment is destiny. All children are assigned at birth to the caste in which they are likeliest to find, if not happiness, at least the mild satisfaction of shared interests and safely prescribed options. One Yulp (the Yuppie caste) cartoonist rebels and joins a guerrilla cross-caste troop of street-theater performers. (This is the last novel in the list featuring activist street-theater performers, I promise – the last novel features activist movie producers which is totally different.) At the same time one of the more progressive AI’s has incarnated to see if the humans are ready for more freedom and responsibility, and a dying king is mounting a expedition to the end of the world with an army of chip-enhanced racoons (as you do).

  The reason that Pagans should enjoy this novel is the same as one of the reasons that many Pagans already do enjoy Prachett’s Discworld novels: they are both thinly-disguised but savy allegories about today’s cultures and issues. In the world of Out On Blue Six, the bland homogenuity of today’s dominant culture, the separation of our various subcultures, and the constriction of the Nanny State are depicted in their extreme, and the good-guys are fighting for the right to be creative, cross-fertilize and make choices (even bad choices) in the pursuit of happiness.

• Fire
  The Door Into Fire Diane Duane, 1979
  (Is this the cheesiest sword and sorcery cover ever? Yes, yes it is.)

  Imagine a series of books in which a tween discovers a world of magic and adventure coexistent with our own, learns to understand and use that magic, and grows into a capable and accomplished adult. And, with the help of her Wizardly teachers, fights foes of which the rest of the mundane world is unaware. Daine Duane started publishing such a series in 1983, some forteen years before Rowling. The Door Into Fire is not part of that series.

  However, the reason that Pagans might prefer The Door Into Fire over Duane’s Young Wizards series (and the related Feline Wizards series) is that this, the first of Duane’s novels, presents a fantasy world in which the Goddess takes an active role, and there is full equality between genders and among sexual preferences (and, honestly, how unbelievably rare is the latter?) Furthermore, Duane’s later Young Wizard books tend to be markedly dualistic in their thealogy, and while that dualism does inflect her first work as well, you’ve got to love a Great Goddess who will merrily satisfy all the members of an adventure party in the same night simultaneuosly in separate chambers.

  Door Into Fire tells the tell of a young man coming into his power in world in which only woman have previously been able to control their magic, his on-again/off-again relatioship with a handsome prince, and a new love he discovers with a fire elemental who is trying to understand what it means to human. It is fairly standard fantasy fair, but it’s tone and inclusiveness remain inspiring.

• Air
  Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart, 1984

  At first blush, this tale of ancient China would appear to be nothing more than a nice, light cross between Journey to the West, Sherlock Holmes and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The protagonist is Number Ten Ox, a strong young peasant from a small village which produces silk. When all the children of the village come down with a mysterious illness, Number Ten Ox is sent off to the imperial capital with a woefully inadequate amount of cash. There he meets the scholar Lee Kao (who has a slight flaw in his character) who serves as the detective for the pair’s ensuing adventures. Lee Kao is a skeptic and uses his prodigious reasoning and deductive powers to resolve the various challenges the two face. And, yet, the Jade Emperor is taking an interest in all of these affairs and seems to be guiding the two behind a solid wall of plausible deniability, and the denoument will knock the socks off any good Goddess worshipper.

• Water
  Dangerous Angels Francesca Lia Block, 1998
  Francesca Lia Block brought the magical realism of Marquez and Allende to the Young Adult market with her Weetzie Bat series contained (mostly) in this collection. (She has since added one book to the series.)

  The books are set in L.A. and peopled with characters who speak in a delightful, playful and, almost certainly, nonexistent patois of (dare I say it) hipster. The characters all seem to have charmingly impossible names and nicknames – if the “real” name of My Secret-Agent Lover Man is ever revealed, it is only a momentary lapse. The surest sign of the books’ power is that they have been put on a couple of banned book lists because of their “ideas and views on a variety of issues surrounding alternative lifestyles”

  None of the characters in the book are Pagan; nevertheless, the eponymous protoganist of the second book is Witch Baby. And the members of the band in Cherokee Bat and The Goat Guys are empowered by the attributes of Pan. (One wears the hooves, another the horns, etc.) There is a mysterous shopkeeper, a mean cult of Jayne Mansfield, and a magic lamp. In short, the books are set in a throughly Pagan milieu even if modern Paganism is not explicitely present.

  For me, the pinnacle of the series is Witch Baby. (I read it to my wife when she was pregant with our son.) While the rest of the Weetzie Bat clan are pretty-much fluffy bunnies, Witch Baby is dark, seeing the horrors of world and letting herself feel the pain of the world’s tradgedy. She seeks to do the right thing, but it always seems to come out wrong. She brings the truth to places where the truth is not always wanted. Ultimately, she feels like she has alienated or disappointed everyone in her family which is a hard place to be particularly when you are a teen. I won’t spoil the ending.