Episode Eighty-Three: The Interview - Diana Paxson

Diana is: a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a prolific author, and was also at the forefront of paganism in California as it developed in the 60s & 70s. Listen in on how the Oakland firestorm of 1991 was no match for the magic her community created.

Transcript

Welcome to episode 83 of Bite-Sized Blessings.

I missed an episode last weekend.

I was traveling and I thought,

You know,

I'm gonna skip this week.

I have a little too much on my plate so I'm gonna take a weekend off.

So I hope you all can forgive me.

But I'm telling you right now,

This episode,

Episode 83,

And my guest,

Diana Paxson,

It's so worth the wait.

She is an extraordinary and fabulously dynamic human being.

For one thing,

She's a prolific,

Prolific writer.

She has written pretty much everything you can conceive of.

Novels,

Nonfiction,

Articles that have appeared in so many different publications.

Her novels include Lady of Light,

Lady of Darkness,

The Earthstone,

The Paradise,

The Wind Crystal,

And so many more.

To find out more about her writing and about her creations,

Go to her website at diana-paxson.

Com.

There you can find out so much more about this fabulous,

Fabulous human being.

Another thing,

She was one of the founding members who created the Society for Creative Anachronism.

And this is what that group's all about.

And I'm reading from their website.

The SCA is an immersive history group where you,

Dressed in clothing of the period,

Can experience tournaments,

Royal courts,

Feasts,

And dancing,

And learn how to recreate crafts and skills of the pre-17th century world.

And just to give you kind of an idea,

The SCA is famous and well-known worldwide.

So Diana was one of the founding members of this group.

And I'm just so beside myself that I get to interview her for my podcast.

Also in this episode we talk about the Oakland firestorm of 1991.

And to give you more of an idea of just what we're talking about,

It was a relatively small fire.

It burned a little over 1,

500 acres,

But it was so destructive and so out of control.

It killed 25 people and injured 150 others and destroyed almost 2,

900 homes as well as hundreds of apartment buildings.

And the economic loss was estimated to be around 1.

5 billion dollars.

So when we talk about it later in this episode in regards to one of the miracles that's happened in our life,

You kind of get an idea of what we're talking about.

And finally in this episode,

Near the end,

We talk about a subject that I'm pretty sure most of my listeners haven't heard of.

Irracular saith.

And what Wikipedia says,

Because they're so much better at explaining what this means,

Wiki says,

In Old Norse saith was a type of magic which was practiced in Norse society during the late Scandinavian Iron Age.

The practice of saith is believed to be a form of magic which is related to both the telling and the shaping of the future.

So now you know.

When we're talking about it later in this episode,

You know what we're talking about.

And so now,

Without further ado,

My interview with Diana Paxson.

When I was at Mills,

There was a Mills chaplain who was also a sociology professor.

And he had been raised by missionaries in China and been ordained as a Methodist minister,

But his views rose,

So to speak,

And he got an additional ordination as an Episcopal minister.

And he was the first priest I had ever seen who worked with energy.

You could tell.

And he also,

In his sermons,

He explained the symbolism,

And I love symbolism.

And then he would do the mass,

Basically,

And you could feel something was going on there.

And I went,

Oh right,

That's where it's at.

I am a set of overlapping personae.

I think probably the most inclusive one at this point would be elder.

That covers a lot of.

.

.

I'm an elder in several different traditions and in my family.

I can remember when we first got going back in the 70s,

Anybody who over 40 came in,

We would go,

Oh good,

An elder.

My mother was a Christian scientist.

And so originally I went to the Christian Science Sunday School,

Which is very good preparation for learning to visualize and focus your imagination.

And I kind of lost faith in that after my dog got hit by a car,

Because what Christian science does not deal with well is the physical world.

And about that point my mother decided that I needed socialization,

And we started going to the Presbyterian Church,

Which had a youth group.

And okay,

That was okay.

We had a minister who was clearly had spirituality,

But then he left and was replaced by the gray flannel suit minister who did not have the energy.

During my childhood,

Also because my mother had given me the name of the goddess,

When I found out that that was what that name was,

I started looking her up to see what she'd been doing.

And then I started reading every mythology text I could find.

I was an only child.

I also spent a lot of time wandering around by myself in the woods exactly.

This was Southern California.

We didn't have woods,

But we did have,

It was a part that was being developed.

So there was a fair amount of wild country.

By the time I reached college,

I had a pretty good background in mythology already.

And I got very interested in medieval literature.

And my last semester in grad school,

I ended up inadvertently starting the SCA,

Through which I met pagans.

When I was at Mills,

There was a Mills chaplain who was also a sociology professor.

And he had,

He'd been raised by missionaries in China and been ordained as a Methodist minister.

But his views rose,

So to speak,

And he got an additional ordination as an Episcopal minister.

And he was the first priest I had ever seen,

Who worked with energy.

You could tell.

And he also,

In his sermons,

He explained the symbolism and I loved symbolism.

And then he would do the mass,

Basically,

And you could feel something was going on there.

And I went,

Oh,

Right,

That's where it's at.

So I became an Episcopalian,

And got confirmed and everything.

Now,

This was in the 60s.

Oh,

Everything was going on in the 60s.

Civil rights had happened.

And that changed things that nobody had thought could be changed.

I feel so fortunate now to have come of age in that period,

Because it was,

Everything just opened.

And because we were women's college,

We did,

We were older girls.

And when Dr.

Headley got,

Was chaplain for the regional Episcopal College retreat,

He brought us along and we were the first female altar girls that anybody had ever seen.

I started grad school,

And I discovered that although the local Episcopal Church was good people,

They weren't working with the energy.

This spring of my first year in grad school,

I encountered science fiction fandom.

In fact,

It was sitting next to me in my Middle English class was a woman and she had a pile of books and one was by C.

S.

Lewis.

Now,

C.

S.

Lewis was the most pagan Christian ever.

And I think if paganism had been an option,

He might have chosen differently.

But when he realized he needed a spiritual path,

He thought as an Englishman that the Church of England was the only legal option.

So I had a very good relationship with Christianity.

But when I got into science fiction fandom,

Then I met pagans,

Just emerging pagan movement and realized,

Oh,

These people actually know how to do it.

So the first magical group that I worked with was a ceremonial lodge based on the work of Diane Fortune.

And by this time it was the 70s and feminism was just beginning to emerge.

And one of the young women in the ceremonial group wanted a coming of age ceremony.

She'd been on her own for a while,

But she felt she needed an adulthood right.

And this was 1978.

And I thought,

Well,

Why don't we work with the triple goddess?

Now,

This is hard to understand,

But the triple goddess was not well known at this point,

Unless she'd been poking around in mythology.

And I thought,

Well,

This is a handy set of symbols.

So I got all the women from the group together and I put together a ceremony and we all got a powerful hit of goddess energy.

Everybody had been in co-ed groups,

But this was a different energy.

And we went,

Oh,

Wow,

Let's keep meeting and see where this leads us.

So,

Uh,

That became eventually dark moon circle,

Which is still going.

When I was at Mills at the time when the glossolalia movement came through,

And I went to a couple of sessions with some of my friends and they're all sitting there babbling happily away.

And clearly they're having a really hot experience and I'm going nothing is happening.

So I thought,

And then I got involved with the pagans and they were all,

Oh,

I had a dream and you and I were in a past life in Atlantis and la la la la la.

Well,

I didn't have those dreams.

So I thought,

All right,

Fine.

Every magical group needs somebody who will guard the door and make sure that the candles don't fall into the curtains and set the house on fire.

I will be that person.

Fine.

But one of our people did a self-induced hypnosis class and I thought,

Well,

I'll try every time he started an induction,

I would go to sleep.

Okay.

So I am a cement head.

That's it.

I am content with my life.

Until one day,

My niece got a Charlie horse and started freaking out.

And I found myself launching into an induction to calm her down.

And I thought,

Well,

That's interesting.

Clearly some part of my mind was listening.

Hmm.

Maybe there is hope.

At this point,

Michael Harner had just published the way of the shaman.

I thought,

Okay.

And I finally was able to attend one of Harner's workshops.

So the second day he says,

Uh,

We're going to the upper world to find a teacher in human form.

Okay,

Fine.

So I wrap up in my gray hooded cloak and I visualize the Raven and say,

Take me to my leader.

It ended up with this guy in a rocky area that actually looks a lot like Iceland.

I looked at him.

And because I'd done the research for that novel,

I recognized him and let him know.

I'm so curious.

Were you scared to meet Odin?

Was it,

Was it scary?

Was it overwhelming or intimidating at all?

Well,

It was exciting.

Uh,

I think my first reaction was for goodness sake,

Aside after the,

Oh shit,

I realized,

Well,

I'm really being given an interesting choice here.

Am I up to the challenge?

Well,

Oh,

The hell with it.

Let's go for it.

I asked for it.

I got it.

I don't know if I had realized it was going to reroute my spiritual practice.

Uh,

But then he's never asked me to give up anything.

In fact,

It eventually occurred to me that maybe what he,

Uh,

One of the reasons he'd come after me was because through me,

He could make contacts with some of these other deities and traditions.

I know a lot of people who had no intention of getting involved with Odin or North stuff.

So he basically came,

Hit over the head,

Dragged them off by the hair.

The Norse gods in general are as a pantheon,

The most alive,

Well,

And eager to party.

There are individual deities that I've encountered in other pantheons like Bridget and Isis,

For instance,

And Quannian.

Oh boy,

Quannian.

But as a group,

Probably because of the English language connection,

That's that they're already embedded.

Some of the concepts are already embedded in our culture.

Well,

I would love to hear any stories or,

Um,

Of magic or miracles that you want to share.

It can be one,

It can be several,

Whatever you feel comfortable sharing.

Actually,

I can talk about how we got our house.

Among all these pagans that I ran into,

Remember it was the sixties,

My husband and this other guy had,

Had read stranger in a strange land at an impressionable age and were blood brothers.

People who started the SCA,

There was this whole group of us and everybody started pairing off.

And so when my husband and I got together and his blood brothers,

The writer,

Paul Edwin Zimmer,

And we formed a household,

Uh,

Which included,

Uh,

Paul's mother,

Which was good when the baby started coming along and we had been renting a house and we needed,

The landlady wanted it back.

And we were looking for a,

A place that would be big enough for two couples and two children and one older person.

And I think there were,

I think two other people who were living with us at that point.

One day,

My sister-in-law comes down,

Comes home and says,

There's this house for sale.

I said,

Uh,

We cannot buy a house.

We have no money.

Uh,

I was working at the YMCA.

She was working as a clerk.

Don and Paul were both trying to sell stories.

And she said,

Well,

Let's go look at it.

And it was an estate sale,

Which meant you had to put in a bid.

We saw it and it was big enough.

And the living room was huge enough to waltz in,

Which is how we tested houses in those days.

And we told the community,

Well,

This there's this house,

But we don't,

You know,

You need a down payment.

And people started turning up and saying,

Well,

I have a spare thousand.

I'll loan it to you.

So the community kind of came up with the money and we put in the bid.

You're supposed to put in a sealed bid to the judge.

This was 1971.

The house was listed at 40,

000.

This was 1971.

When I think by that point,

Gasoline was about 35 cents a gallon.

So just pretty much put it in perspective.

So there was still a lot of money.

The process was you were supposed to work with a real estate agent and then submit the bid.

Well,

The real estate agent's mother was the secretary of the judge.

And she told him somebody else went directly to the judge and their bid is higher than the people you're working with.

So he went and took out a loan for a second mortgage for us.

And so we put in a revised bid and outbid the other guys.

So we ended up with this 15-room house,

Which was many things did not work because the owner,

Previous owner had been an antiques dealer who lived here with his wife and then his wife died and he just lived here and then something broke.

He just didn't use that room anymore.

So some of the ceilings were falling in and as we discovered the first winter,

The heater did not work.

And within about 10 years,

We were paying less on the monthly mortgage than most people were paying for apartments.

And so we have been able to support a large family ever since then and become like the community center because 30,

40 people fit easily into the living room.

And for memorial services,

We've occasionally crammed about a hundred people hanging them from the chandeliers,

But still,

I feel that we have this kind of obligation to be here and maintain it.

And just about every kind of pagan tradition has had rituals here at some point.

In just about every room in the house,

There is at least one God statue.

And when the Oakland firestorm happened,

And I think that was in 91,

We actually had to evacuate.

And one of our friends managed to sneak up into the evacuated area and redid the tape on the answering machine because it would completely be filled with people calling from all over the world,

Wanting to know that Greyhaven was still there.

And in fact,

Although down in the next block,

Three houses caught on fire and burned,

Our neighborhood did not burn.

I consider having and keeping Greyhaven a miracle.

I was going to say with that story about the firestorm,

It almost seemed like the house was protected.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

And well,

We had people from all over the world trying to protect it.

And earlier on,

At one point,

Somebody was trying to be positive energy and called us up and said,

Look,

Can you adjust your wording?

Because everything is bouncing off.

And we went,

Oh,

Right.

Okay.

Yeah.

So let us restate this as we are open to all blessings.

Yes.

Just the bad stuff gets bounced.

I'm so curious for you,

What does being an elder mean for you?

See,

I've been an elder for years and years.

We didn't have any.

Anybody who'd been around for five years longer than everybody else was an elder.

So I became an elder in the covenant of the goddess in the 80s because an elder was anybody who could pass on the tradition since I'd invented the tradition.

In those days,

All of the Wiccanoid groups had been started by a bunch of students at San Francisco State in a religion class.

And they were told,

Put together a ritual and they did,

And they liked it.

And they became the new reformed Orthodox Church.

Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn,

Because this,

If that's the kind of title,

Like the society for creative anachronism,

You know,

Let's not take ourselves too seriously here while we're doing our impactor a serious thing.

Nerug did public ceremonies for the wheel of the year,

And each of the groups would take a holiday.

And so I eventually decided,

Well,

You know,

I've now done six of the eight holidays.

Maybe I should actually get initiated into this tradition.

So they did an initiation into the first degree of Nerug for me,

Which was very nice.

And I thought,

Ah,

At last,

An initiation that I didn't have to write myself.

It was a great relief when I started meeting other pagan leaders who had emerged during the 70s and 80s and realized how many of them had also had to bootstrap themselves up.

So if you could pass on your tradition,

You could be an elder in Kog.

That's really fascinating.

Your stories are so interesting.

And I think it's also really intriguing,

At least it is for me,

Just to hear the stories about what was happening in the 60s and 70s.

Okay.

And just to,

You were asking about miraculous things.

In oracular saints,

And I have trained a lot of people over the years,

And everyone I know who practices as a Cirrus has had at least one answer in which she or he used information that they could not have gotten by any normal means.

So I don't know about prophecy because my experience is that,

Okay,

You have the three norms.

There's Urd,

Which is everything that was laid down when you were born,

Things you're stuck with,

Time,

The place,

The genetics.

There is Verdandi,

Which is a present participle.

And we live in Verdandi,

But that's the ing.

We are being.

Skuld is not what has to happen.

It's what will probably happen as the base on the,

As the result of all the choices that everybody is constantly making.

What we don't get and save is this is the future.

The best we can do is this is the most probable future that I can see.

Or sometimes I see three paths.

If you go down this one,

It's likely this and so forth and so on.

However,

In terms of imagery and facts,

In many cases,

Telepathy,

Absolutely.

And possibly reading,

Reading history or reading the past.

One friend had,

Somebody wanted to talk to their dead father and she had information about the father that the son did not know,

But that his mother confirmed when he talked to her.

Even when it's just very superficial,

A woman asked,

I'm considering buying a house and I'm considering several properties,

Which one should I choose?

This does not give the seer very much to work with.

This isn't priming the pump in any way.

The seer,

After a rather long pause,

Says,

Orange.

And clearly the seer doesn't know what that means.

Everybody else is going,

What?

It turned out that the woman had color coded her choices.

You know,

So everybody has at least one story like that.

You know,

That I find very,

Very interesting.

Thank you so much for listening to episode 83 of Bite-Sized Blessings.

And to learn more about my fabulous and creative guest,

Diana Paxson,

Please visit her webpage at diana-paxson.

Com.

There will be a link to her website on my website under the episodes show notes.

I need to thank the creators of the music used in this episode.

Frank Schroeder,

Music L.

Files,

Alexander Nakarada,

Chilled Music,

Brian Holtz Music,

And Sasha End.

For complete attribution,

Please see the Bite-Sized Blessings website at bite-sized blessings.

Com.

On the website you'll find links to all sorts of goodies to Diana's website.

On the treasurers page you can find a couple of her books and a few other items that we talk about.

I try to keep that updated as much as possible,

But you'll find all sorts of good stuff on the website,

So be sure to check it out.

Thank you for listening,

And here's my one request.

Be like Diana.

Live your life to its fullest.

Be ever open,

Be ever creative,

And be ever open to the mystery.