Aug 212012
Hey Pagan Fans- this is totally a filler-post, while I prepare the for-real account of Sunday night’s momentous and historic occasion, namely: the official NYC Book-Launch of Michael Lloyd’s Bull of Heaven: The Mythic Life of Eddie Buczynski and the Rise of the New York Pagan. For ever so many reasons, this event was a major deal (for far too many reasons to go into now; a much-fuller post is in the works): but The New York Times has an article online about it (oh yeah, there was a Times reporter there, too). Check it out; “At a Book Party, Witches, Warlocks, and a Wiccan Prayer Circle,” by Corey Kilgannon (Aug. 21, 2012, “City Room”). The photo is fierce; we look like we’re inside some Etruscan ruin.
Official Juggler account to come.
Interesting side-note: the Times article was originally titled “Witches and Warlocks” (as you can see from URL). In literally the hour between which I discovered the article, contacted all my Pagan friends with squeals of joy, and dashed off the above- some very PC-minded Pagan contacted the Times, requesting that they remove the offensive word “Warlock” from their title (as you can see, they did). I’m not going to rework my post to reflect the Times’ adjustment; I’m just going to point out that- as “Warlock” was widely considered a synonym for “Male Witch” at least through the early ’70s (my Webster’s kind of reflects this), Herman Slater and Eddie Buczynski called their Brooklyn Witch store The Warlock Shop. I kind of guess that means that Mr. Slater and Mr. Buczynski did not mind thinking of themselves as “Warlocks,” meaning “Male Witches,” and assume this was how the Times latched onto the concept of “Witches and Warlocks and a Wiccan Prayer Circle”- which does make a zippier title.
Zan, as a result of the reader comment, the reporter contacted me and I informed him that “Warlock” is considered these days to be a pejorative term (of course, as you touch on in your post and I explain in the bookn it isn’t that cut and dried).