There’s a popular – and dead wrong – interpretation of copyright that suggests even gifting someone a book you’ve already read constitutes copyright theft. Somehow this thinking gets associated/confused with the whole “I’ll post this entire work online so any stranger that hits my site can read it to” is somehow NOT copyright theft. This second assumption is ALSO dead wrong.

Before some folks get to quibbly and mansplainy, I’m going to remind you, I have a degree in mass communications. What in the hell do you think we talk about for four years? Punctuation? No, we talk about libel, slander, fair use, copyright, plagiarism and ethics. For most of us in those programs, those lessons do actually take.

creativity blocker: not creating your own stuff because of fear of rejection

*Why yes, my photography is better. Never have cared.

So, to clarify on the whole book piracy discussion:

1. A copyrighted material that you share only with people you know, in a person to person (not online, more or less) way is not a violation of copyright. So if you liked my Urban Herbal piece in the 2011 Witches’ Calendar, and you made a photocopy or scan to give you two of your apartment dwelling friends – i.e. only people you know directly – you are not in violation of copyright. Just as if you use Kindle Share to send to your lover or bestie or Mom – and not to every email in your account – you are well within legal bounds.

2. A copyrighted material not of your making that you post to your website without an email or letter of permission from the copyright holder is NOT legal. Think of copyright as someone else’s virginity: you don’t get to decide what strangers to share it with. That is the sovereign decision of the copyright holder. Anyone who makes a comment about people charging for their intellectual work being whores or whoring their religion will be deleted and banned for sheer trollish willful ignorance.

3. Fair use has no comparison for the above metaphor. You can quote and credit, and don’t even need to check in with the copyright holder – just don’t take the entire piece of work. In general, take 10% or less of that person’s work, and if it’s a song quote, just avoid it as the music industry is just plain stupid, backwards and self-defeating. I love it when people quote my work, and use it to launch off an entire original essay or exploration, or even to conclude, research, or consider.

For the record, I personally have no problem with derivative works based on what I write – I have a problem with outright copying. I have had my original material (poetry) spark fan fiction, and to me, that is awesome. Most authors do NOT feel this way.

This copyright fiasco has crossed my path before, back in the 90s, when someone decided to troll authors who agreed not to distribute content online not of their own making.  I was just thinking about it the other day when Llewellyn posted this notice about a website where someone had actually made entire pdfs of well-known Pagan books and posted them online. I have in the past fouled up myself: my first foray on the Internet was a page my then-boyfriend posted of all the original website material I had saved to a research account around 1997. While I did get either permission to use the material or a takedown order direct from the author (I approached the authors when I realized the seriousness of what I had done) I was getting hate mail about it long after my page had become 100% original content and links to original content; I eventually found a page accusing me of plagiarism and encouraging people to send me hate mail. Apparently the author of the public missive did NOT see fit to change her message when my content had changed in its entirety. Most people are intractable on issues where they are outright caught doing wrong; it’s just that horrifying to realize that you are the one in the wrong. I’m sure this person was operating on that assumption, and became equally intractable when I changed the game by changing my attitude.

There’s much more to be said about the entire issue of copyright, plagiarism, and the Pagan web. Especially since the Pagan subculture has developed a series of conflicting attitudes that have made us as a group rather maladaptive when the point of opting for this religious umbrella was often about the freedom to adapt to a changing world instead of upholding increasingly brittle dogma in lieu of spirituality.  There is more to this than “stop sharing copyrighted work with strangers.” The next part is also complicated, and I will speak on as I am called to: it is why we need to create, to brave our way outside of the Pagan boxes we’ve created (oh yes, the Emperor is damn well IN a box!) and to talk about how we actually suppress a great deal of creativity in the name of being “smart” and honoring the “shoulds” instead of allowing the Pagan universe to expand.

For now, my comment is “don’t share somebody else’s goodies with strangers until they say it’s OK to.” That even if you’re especially hard-up for some goodie-sharing. If that’s the case, do what teens and adults do, and make your own goodies to share.

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I’m trying out the idea of a “Pagan reader” roundup to happen… pretty much whenever. A few reads from the Pagan blogosphere that might interest you.

photo by grbenching on flickr

ACLU sued a library for blocking Wiccan and occult sites – and labeling them “illegal.” I don’t know what’s more appalling ,the nannying or the willful ignorance and insistence what Wiccans/Pagans do MUST be unlawful because it’s not all dripping with Jesus. That “thou shalt not bear false witness” schtick sure gets overlooked when it’s convenient.

Head for the Red has some theories on why some see spirits and why some don’t.

Strategic Sorcery talks about when NOT to be goal oriented.

About.com shares a profile of Roman doorway god Janus. While I associate him more with Samhain season, January is his month, and it always feels like a month where time slows. I’d love to test the theory that it slows equally in the southern hemisphere.

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I bring this up because a person on my Twitter stream retweeted someone finding “proof” that water proves that the earth is only a few thousand years old, and not “3.5 billion like the atheists say.” The argument was that, given everyone dead and alive today, we would have drunk all the water if we were in fact billions of years old. I looked into the guy’s stream, just to see if this was satire. It wasn’t.

from the Frankenstein movie - kids, spay and neuter your pets

I don’t much care for this Science Versus God debate. As a Pagan, the answer to both is yes, and the insistence that you must choose one or the other is merely a sign that people on either side of such a debate have not developed the fundamental skill of counting to three or higher. A belief unthreatened by discovery is a sustainable belief. The supposition alone that everyone who believes in evolution automatically does not believe in some sort of god is as tiresome as it is false. But the idea of water as a finite resource in the sense this person thinks of it is boggling. I wasn’t aware fundamentalist Christianity had disbelief in physics as part of its dogma.

My assessment of this, as absurd as it was, was this: “You see those villagers with the torches and pitchforks over there? Those aren’t atheists. They’re meteorologists.”

 Note: I have been advised by cyngreg on Twitter that the source of the following theory was in fact satire courtesy of Landover Baptist, the site that also recommends “treeing” Wiccans like myself. However, it came to me from someone who ACTUALLY BELIEVED IT.

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It was Beltane season, and time for a party. It went well: I gifted friends plates for their upcoming wedding, friends raved over the ginger honey cake, and the last guests returned home the next morning. There was an awkward phone call from my ex-husband, and earlier that day I’d been beset by dizziness after attempting a Chi Gung video, but otherwise the night went smoothly. I brought out the sage bundle as I always did after these parties. People have a wonderful time, I see to it, but they also leave residual energy behind, and I just wanted to restore the balance of my home back to an oasis. I even made sure I got my walk-through closet in the process.

I dropped to sleep fast enough given the condition I’d developed that left me in near-constant pain. My dreams were strange. Even when under stress, I rarely have nightmares, but this was different. I found myself at an altar, facing a man I’d been spending time with, and hearing bitter laughter about the “false bridegroom.” It became strange, a dream wherein I was to be a sacrifice – my life wasn’t in danger, but something much more precious was. I actually tried to wake up, and after a few false stars of layers within dreams, I did actually wake up, and found myself momentarily pinned to the bed as a red-eyed cloud with teeth laughed threateningly over me.

I have never had sleep paralysis – not before, not since. I’ve also slept “clean” since college – no hypnagogic incidents with sleepwalking and minimal sleep talking. When I don’t have someone disrupting my sleep on a regular basis like I did in childhood, I’m prone to minimal incident.

I called my friend and told him I’d had a nightmare. But after that, I was suspicious of him, and I became suspicious of my ex after that, too.

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The timbre of my ghost stories change after age 20. For the most part, once I got myself screened for schizophrenia in my early twenties, I began to deal with my encounters differently. I have in the past done myself a bit of a disservice by telling non-believers that I am reacting to a “hallucination.” I figured that most people would realize that I was sugar-coating what to me is an objective experience to a person who finds things outside of a very set paradigm upsetting. I forget how literal-minded these individuals can at times be. Sometimes, also, in strange light or when I’m distracted my brain will parse an object strangely – I’ll mistake a garbage can lid for cat, etc. Sometimes, however, it’s a spirit emulating something innocuous. Fans of Valerie Worth will know about a poem she wrote about this particular experience. I often explain these things as “hallucinations” when I’m dealing with mixed company (by which I mean magic minded and/or magic opposed.) I have also used the term to describe these odd parsing experiences, even though they also are not. And no, I don’t have a brain tumor, either.

My only insanity according to the professionals I see when I can afford to is the crazy necessary to participate in North American consensual reality – i.e. the illogical things we do just because it’s our culture. As a sane person, I’m open about getting therapy from time to time to help myself deal with my very normal, sane reactions to really crappy stuff that happens when surrounded by people that don’t tend to their inner lives very well. Mental health is physical health, and stuff takes place along a spectrum – if you have a cold all the time, there’s a problem, but an off day here or there happens to absolutely everyone.

When I see something moving against the shadows or a pull of TV static or a full-grown cowboy that no one else around me does, it’s not a hallucination – the retinal activity in my eyes when I see a ghost is completely different from when a person hallucinates. I really think what happens with me isn’t psychic, it’s physical, the same peculiar environmental attention that lets me find Waldo or the deer that always hide in the woods. Now if only I could get it to work on finding typos…

Also, I can’t hear ghosts directly. I’m ghost-deaf. I get impressions, stories not from my own repertoire, but I couldn’t pin down a voice. Most schizophrenics have auditory hallucination first, and it’s a definite sound. While I can get stories and so on, there’s no physical sound going on, and often I just ignore what I might “hear” in my mind because I can’t distinguish what’s the other entity and what’s me sufficiently to count it as objective experience. Also, the dead can lie. Unbelievable sob stories, you can take them with you.

Also, ghosts don’t behave like hallucinations do, from what I’ve read about actual hallucinations. Hallucinations and auditory hallucination voices generally make little sense, have no narrative, or comment on what you’re doing – ghosts make as much sense as they can given they’re the disembodied dead, always have a coherent narrative that has nothing to do with me, and ghosts are as one might expect, quite absorbed with themselves and their stories. Rarely have I had a ghost have a comment on what I’m saying unless of course it’s on the unhappy end of a banishing effort. And as I’m technically deaf to that level or dimension, it’s not like I could make out their opinion anyway.

Also, while I’ve never ever encountered this mythical ectoplasm of the 19th century spiritualists and related con-artists, I do get a physical sense. I can touch ghosts. One part of the room will seem to have a big ball of TV static moving around, and I can walk up, put my hand on the static, and feel movement beneath my hand. While feeling up ghosts is just as rude as feeling up living people, if it’s in my home – where ghosts are banned unless I specifically invite them – I consider it fair game. Also, I committed this faux pas many times, so I’m putting it out there: ask before you touch.

The discussion about the line between psychism and schizophrenia has gone on for centuries, going back to Joan of Arc. Yet within the Pagan community it’s taboo, and we need to get past that. Now that medicine has started finding more about the chemistry of mental illness on a microbe level, the line is becoming a lot clearer.

This of course does nothing to account for making bad decisions, but it’s nice to have science sort out the difference between a treatable illness and an undocumentable condition.

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But… Divorcing a Real Witch is now signed with O Books under the Moon Books imprint.

So when’s it coming out?
I have to finish the book in 24 months; right now it’s on a late second draft stage, and there will be some time spent polishing it. Then ripping it apart and polishing it again during the editorial process.

What about the documentary?
The documentary will go forward, and I’m widening the scope to include people willing to do interviews over Skype. Please let me know if you’d like to be involved in its production. No, I don’t know a thing about videography, so at this point unsolicited advice is solicited.

Also, if you support this project, I do have a “here’s how you can help” email that will go out to you if you ask for it. If you want updates on when the book is available for order, there’s a mailing list box on the side of my main blog (livejournal and other feed proxy blogs, you’ll need to come to blog.dianarajchel.com directly.) Sign up, and I can email you when I’m doing workshops, when the book is available for pre-order and of course when the book is available in bookstores.

Note: we don’t know the official title yet, but it will probably have to change. The book will be released in US and UK markets, and while we may both speak speak the same language, we attach very different connotations to our word choices. There’s a cultural difference between how UK citizens react to the phrase “real witch” (as in “who is the real witch?”) and how US citizens react to “real witch” (as in “you’re not ALL imaginary?”/”rhymes with bitch.”) Chances are the title will have to change, and with any luck I can keep it to something that is just as attention-grabbing.

So how can I help right now/with as little personal effort as possible?
If you see the share bar below this post on the main blog, there’s a menu of places you can share this news socially. Twitter and Facebook, Reddit – you can even comment about it in your own blog. I just ask if you vilify me, you do so with accuracy and make sure you mention the book. Bring it up in conversation. Talk to me about it on my Amazon author page or my Goodreads author page.

So, there you have it – official word that this book will see print, and by a hand other than my own!

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The living and the dead are not always easy to distinguish. If you ever watched the series Dead Like Me, and saw the Day of the Dead episode, it could really be something like that: your loved ones just show up, because they haven’t really gone anywhere. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved and in Malidoma Patrice Some’s Of Water and Spirit the dead get up, walk, even live among us because that’s just what they do.

White people’s spirits do it, too, but given that we breed denial deeper than any other population on this planet, we sure as hell won’t admit it. I never stay in denial very long. I can’t. The filter that helps me ignore the dead people is off, and it also doesn’t let me ignore other stuff that goes on around me.

At some point in childhood I did slowly figure out that I was seeing people my family members couldn’t. Some of it got dismissed as “imaginary friends,” and to be fair, I actually concocted really imaginary friends when I could tell my mother was getting uncomfortable with some of the raw stuff the not-imagined imaginary friends were saying and doing. Then, at the age when my classmate’s imaginary friends went away both in their consciousness and from their presence – mine didn’t.

I didn’t really think much of this, and I wasn’t consciously hiding that I could see more activity. It didn’t disrupt my ability to live, and I wasn’t feeling any particular fear. It was just some of the stuff that went on around me, but didn’t really involve me because I was a child and my family’s attitude that I was insignificant in many ways protected me from all the stuff that surrounded me.

So when my sister got on the Tilt-a-Whirl with me at the county fair one summer, I hadn’t given any thought to the cowboy that had wandered up and stood just watching us spin ourselves into dizzy glee. I saw someone walk through him; otherwise I wouldn’t have known myself. I was too young to think what I would as an adult about a man in a Stetson and tight jeans, so to me it was more an impersonal interest: Oh, you’re obviously dead.

The rodeos at those fairgrounds were real, and rough – and sometimes men died. I’m now surprised I didn’t see more ghostly cowboys treading the dusty walks.

My sister was prone to motion sickness, and she also kept trying to make me suffer the way she did. She never did accept that we were made different with purpose, that my experience was meant to differ from hers, that the suffering we experienced in our lives was one of those rare legitimate cases of separate but equal. On this day, she shifted her weight around and got the tilt-a-whirl to rock wildly; she was sick to her stomach afterwards while I got the pleasant high I did from spinning around as fast as I could until I fell over.

She noticed as she rocked the little tin soldier around that my eyes kept fixing on one point, that to her was nothing but an empty dirt road space with blue sky above it. I kept looking because I wondered why the cowboy was staring at me: carnies were always checking out my sister, but this one seemed to be specifically staring at me. It wasn’t uncomfortable, just strange.

At last my sister leaned over and asked me what I was staring at. “Oh, a dead guy,” I told her. I didn’t elaborate on his behavior. I was used to being ignored by the living and dead except when they wanted something, and it seemed like all this guy wanted to do was get a good long look at me.

When the ride ended, he was at the end of the line, and looked down into my face the way someone does when they want to get a good look at you. Then, in a blink – his or mine – he was gone.

I never did know what that was about, just some cowboy wanted to get a good hard look at an 8 year old girl.

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probably not where I'm going with this

While the neopagan divorce survey is not yet closed, I have been editing it so I can pull the data for this final draft of my book.  While I’ve made a concerted effort to ensure that each section was clear about the data requested, I’ve found some … interesting…interpretations of the requested data.

I have a whole new respect for survey writers. I’m often frustrated by leading questions and the  limited answers I find. In the case of Fox News Polls, where questions posed are along the lines of “How much does Obama suck?” for the most part, survey writers really mean to be objective. No matter how well you write it, or how thorough you try to be, you find you miss a question and you can never prepare for the subjective way people interpret your questions. Also, no survey writer in the world can prepare for Pagans, who, despite their own best intentions, behave like squirrels.

To prepare for this, I did draw on my college training on survey writing. I spent extra time trying to avoid leading questions, even though it’s technically impossible: as the author of the survey, I am part of a specific culture and part of a specific subculture. This colors my perspective no matter what I do. I can’t just not be an American-born white citizen with complicated cultural background.

…and my specific subculture doesn’t really restrict people on measuring time.

When asked for lengths of time on marriages on this survey, I’ve gotten some… interesting answers. Answers that force me to spend extra time editing to make sure the data tabulates right. Answers that make me pause and say, “Huh, this person is right. How do I go about counting that/measuring that time?”

For the sake of clearing confusion as much as it can be cleared, here’s what I’m laying down so we have the structure necessary to start a dialogue about Wicca/neopagans¹  and divorce:

1. A handfasting counts as a marriage. The presence or absence of paperwork does not determine the seriousness of a marriage.
2. Living together before marriage is one I’m on the fence about; right now I’m inclined to not count cohabitation because getting married/marriage ceremonies means there is a conscious, alchemical change to the relationship on a level that can only be determined after that change has been made. It has been indicated that the real alchemical change happens from 6 months to two years into the marriage: the “honeymoon is over” time is the time when “married” affects the persona and the interrelationships of those paired. Most survey respondents also indicated that they consider cohabitation different.
3. If someone was married “1.5 years” for the sake of consolidation, I’m counting it as “1 year.” If you don’t reach anniversary markers, I guess it falls back to the previous year, assuming those remaining months were taken up with the business of divorce.

I’m also taken aback by the vast majority of respondents who waited “no time” to start dating/start new relationships again. Even when I remove people who went through extended periods of separation and polyamory most people went straight from one serious relationship to another. For reasons I intend to explore further here and on the book, I strongly believe that this may also contribute to a high divorce rate. While I am not opposed to divorce, I do advocate making healthy relationship decisions, and those that have had successful second marriages (or third) have spent time alone between relationships.

neither advocating nor criticizing

I also realized I did not ask the following questions. Granted, few probably want to answer them, and I may even ask about this stuff on camera for the brave and willing.

• How did you ask for your divorce/how were you asked for your divorce?
• What magical actions did you take to deal with the grief moments?
• Did you consider the end of the relationship the actual divorce, or from the moment of agreeing to divorce?
• Were there any attempts at reconciliation?  Did you consider this beneficial?

Yes, these questions are grating, hard, jarring – and necessary. Even though the divorced themselves often display visible discomfort with the book, most comment to me with “Wow, that’s really needed!”

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1. I make this distinction because of course, my writing will be colored by the Wiccan perspective

The college I first attended lay almost literally in the middle of a cornfield. Surrounded on all sides by a dairy farm owned by the college, buildings were sparse and unless you had a car, you made your entertainment by smoking white out, drinking whatever you could get an older student to buy you, and hiking out into the unmapped woods adjacent to the property.

While I did partake of the chemical entertainments from time to time, I found them limiting, and I had a GPA worth protecting. So for major portions of my time, I hiked out into the woods. At first I spent most of my time on an island in the middle of a pond that used to be a baseball field. Then the bridge “broke” that year, and administration saw fit not to fix it – most likely, a young couple got caught having sex, and the older adults of the time put in a great deal of effort in preventing sex among the younger adults, without thinking that they in fact were the disturbed ones for doing so.

So I began exploring the other side of the woods, closer to the boys’ dormitory, and extending out to the peculiar township that, despite being walking distance from the college, none of the students ever really visited.

It had to be March or April. It was a Friday night, and since no one invited me to anything, I set out on my own into the woods. A thunderstorm came up suddenly, but I kept walking.

Somewhere between the first patter and the raging downpour, I started to see them. White robed hoods peeking at me from behind the trees. At first I attributed it to my overactive imagination: the lack of stimulation from staying at such an isolated college had led me on some wild fantasies, and it seemed only a matter of time before they began appearing as though outside my head.

Perhaps it was one of the Greek groups on campus playing a joke, or doing one of their strange little rituals. I was never crazy about the concept of fraternities and sororities, but I’d come to appreciate the members as individuals, and so I walked toward one of the trees where I saw a robe. I could ask what was going on, ascertain I wasn’t intruding on some sacred tradition.

A robed figure stepped out from the tree toward me, and I looked inside the hood – and saw nothing. Not an outline, nothing – it was just a robe, moving like it had a body in it.

I turned around and ran. Thunder rolled under my feet, the heavens opened their downpour, and I ran my ass back to my dorm.

Somehow, however, I found myself running progressively deeper into the woods, and seeing those robed figures peeking out at me from the trees.

I had gotten lost just enough on that part of the property to have a favorite stump, a place by the stream where I would rest before getting my bearings. I found the stump – and I was coming at it from the opposite side of the stream. I know I did not cross that stream on the way into the woods.

I found my way back, those hooded things peeking out at me along the way. If it was a frat game, I just didn’t want to know.

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Mankato, Minnesota is famed for doing whatever it can to isolate university students from the rest of the community and for the largest mass execution of American Indians in the United States.  There was no question even at the time it happened that the hanging was unjust, and no one cottons to the exact location of the hanging. Even I can’t suss it out, but I imagine with a dowsing rod I could pick it out fast enough. Somewhere on Riverfront drive, away from Reconciliation park, enough blood got let to keep the land awake forever.

I knew none of this when I transferred colleges, I just knew if I went with the “family plan” my parents made with neither my consultation or consent, I faced an arranged marriage or an arranged pregnancy, whatever they deemed best to force me to quit the whole higher education pursuit. Mankato crossed my path in a strange way, the price was right – cheaper than any school in Indiana, even with out of state tuition – and it appeared I could find means to support myself without needing a car.

So in the beginning of the summer of 1996, I persuaded an old friend to dump my ass in Minnesota, since I knew she fantasized about that even when we still called each other “friend.”

I had only started my Wiccan practice a few months before, and when it came to blocking out spirits or psychic input, I only knew the absolute basics. I had no understanding about how some see shields as strength contests, or why constant shielding could in fact endanger me. I also had no inkling about what lay half-awake and angry beneath the soil of Stadium Hill.

I first realized something was strange when I walked across the campus underneath the lights that lit my path from the library to the student union one summer night. The day had been hard: the campus was located pretty far from any grocery store, and in summer MSU only served the needs of its athletes. All other students taking classes were damned. I’d had to buttonhole someone in the financial aid office, and my first night walking home from work at a fast food restaurant, some guy tried unsuccessfully to force me into his car. The place scared me, but I wanted to get out in the air, especially as denying student air conditioning in the dorms was at that time not viewed as a human rights violation.

As I walked beneath the lights, I noticed that I cast shadows both backwards and forwards. It looked to me like I cast about 12-13 shadows.

The next night, I persuaded a friend to walk across campus to a coffee shop and took the same route. This time, I only cast two shadows – one for each angle of light. When my friend took her leave, I cast 12-13 shadows again. I asked another friend to watch his own shadow some time later. He experienced nothing like I did.

It was the damnedest thing.

It still happens sometimes, when I’m out walking alone. I’ll pass a  lone street light, and suddenly I’ll see three splits of shadow, from three different angles. Sometimes far more than that.

There is a scientific explanation for this , but not for up to the amount that I cast.

I never have figured out what causes it – but yes, since I do see dead people…

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