Christopher Blackwell interviews Crystal Blanton. Crystal Blanton is a great many things, a High Priestess, a board member of the Solar Cross Temple, a clinical counselor, social worker, and a graduate worker in a social work program. Crystal writes and coordinates the Patheos blog, Daughters of Eve, is a writer for Sage Woman and a monthly columnist for The Wild Hunt.
Lee Davies follows the Brythonic Gods of what we now call the United Kingdom. As there are some gaps in what we do know about those gods he has to...
CHRISTOPHER BLACKWELL. ” Black Hat Society is a bit of country, folk, blues, rockabilly, doom, rock, and metal all thrown together. We’re outlaws, not the good guy, not the bad guy, but rather people driven by what’s right in our hearts. It’s real music, made by real people, and not just some formula put together purely to be marketable. We’re telling ghost stories, love stories, political stories and real things that people can relate to. I hope people can relate our music to their own personal stories, make them think about what is going on in the world around them outside their smart-phones, and have some fun!”
CHRISTOPHER BLACKWELL. Interview with Singer, Poet, Musician, Writer, Druid and Bard, Paul Newman. “I think if you set your intention and make yourself available to inspiration, keep to your commitments and work on it then you will be used; inspiration will come. Working on your craft whatever it is, seeing whatever you do as art and taking it seriously increases your integrity and love for life. More opportunities come to you as you become more able to meet their demands.”
CHRISTOPHER BLACKWELL. Interview with Faolan na Amarok. “My love of natural witchcraft shows in my garden. I have a Green Man plaque, a Dryad plant pot and a tree sprite carving. Gardening is something else which runs in the blood. My maternal grandfather was head gardener for a well known Lord and Lady, and he had a wonderful cottage garden of his own. I spent hours with him. He had bee hives in the orchard and taught me the names of all the flowers. He also grew all his own fruit and vegetables, kept a brace of Jersey cows, and had a chicken coop of Rhode Island reds.”
CHRISTOPHER BLACKWELL. Laurie Cabot is a controversial and respected pioneer of so much of what we think of today as being Witchcraft and Wicca in America. Cabot is the founder of her own Witchcraft Tradition, the Cabot Tradition of the Science of Witchcraft, and the Witches’ League for Public Awareness in 1986. In 1987 she formed the Temple of Isis as a chapter of the National Alliance of Pantheists.
CHRISTOPHER BLACKWELL. Madrid was a very special place for me. It was where I earned enough money to build my rock shop. It was where I went to my first four Pagan festivals and where I first practiced as a Witch using Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance as a guide. My first sabbat was Samhain of 1983, celebrated in a small nearby sandstone cave. It was the first place I was forced to figure magic out in an emergency.
CHRISTOPHER BLACKWELL. “Fundamentally it is about tuning in to the spirits of the land. The spirit of the River Gipping is not the same as the spirit of the River Tamar. The spirits of mountainous Wales are distinct from the entities of the Norfolk fens. The general principals of the religion might remain fairly constant, but should be grounded in the locality and its local stories.” Robin Herne