I recently received some photographs from 1997. They'd been sitting in my father's files for 24 years. This takes me back... Although I received my Ph.D. in particle physics in 1996, I didn't formally graduate from Columbia University until 1997. For the occasion, my mother Beatrice and her husband Bob flew from California to attend the ceremony.…
A couple of days ago, Christopher Chase sent me some pages from an old issue of The Crone Papers that mentioned Isaac Bonewits. (Christopher, brother to Sabrina Chase of Blue Star, is on the faculty of the Philosophy and Religious Study Department at Iowa State University.) After I downloaded the pages, I went through my usual practice…
The last remaining boxes of Isaac's papers are out of my apartment. They're on their way to the University of California at Santa Barbara's Religious Studies Collection. I used to think that the stuff Phaedra Bonewits and I were sending to UCSB was just being warehoused somewhere. If you click on the above link, you'll see I…
I seem to be slowly moving back to working on Isaac Bonewits' biography. I've let it lie fallow for about two years, mainly because I became frustrated at my attempts at some hard-to-reach interview subjects. Recently, Phaedra Bonewits has tried to identify the original members of the American Council of Witches. She was kind enough to forward…
As part of my research into the life of Isaac Bonewits, I watched the film Berkeley in the Sixties, At about the 1:39 mark, I grabbed for the remote control and paused the film. I couldn’t believe it.
I recently picked up Playing at the World by Jon Peterson. This book is a history of the game Dungeon & Dragons.
Since many of my readers are Wiccan, I’ll use an analogy that will make sense to them: Playing at the World does for D&D what Ronald Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon did for Wicca. It explores the different elements and influences that resulted in D&D, and follows the chain of influence forward as D&D affected the world around it. [1] [2]
I’m having trouble sleeping, so I might as well blog about my day’s work on the biography.
I coded a few documents, but my primary task was to go over the folder of newspaper clippings Isaac had on the February 26, 1979 total eclipse of the sun. What made that eclipse special is its path intersected the location of the Stonehenge replica near Maryhill, Washington. A great gathering of pagans took place, to create a spiritual intersection at the same time as the astronomical one.