Pagan Magazine Vs the Pagan Federation

Fig. 1: Pagan: The Magazine of Blood-Knowledge Issue XXVIII (Spring 1989)

Fig 2: Letter from Leonora James, President of the Pagan Federation (1 Nov 1989)

 

I. 

 

A reader writes:

As someone who is researching the history of paganism in the UK during the twentieth-century, I was naturally interested in a remark made in a recent post published on Torpedo the Ark [1] concerning some kind of dispute between yourself and the then President of the Pagan Federation, Leonora James, in the 1980s.

      

You allege that she threatened to report you to the police on the basis of some artwork sent to her, but provide no further details of this incident, nor any proof with which to back up this claim. If you could provide a little more information and any documentary evidence relating to this case that you may still have in your possession, I'd be most grateful.    

 

 

As I'm always happy to assist those doing research, here then are a few more details as requested, along with materials submitted in evidence ...

 

 

II. 

 

Issue XXVIII of Pagan Magazine was entitled 'Expressions' and was dated Spring 1989. 

 

It mostly consisted of a selection of poems written over the winter months and illustrated with some of my favourite works by several German Expressionists, including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Otto Mueller. 

 

Later that year, I decided to try and get some support from the Pagan Federation (PF) for what I was doing - not just the magazine, but also a line of Pagan T-shirts - and wrote to the then President, Leonora James, a high priestess in the Gardnerian tradition of modern pagan witchcraft. 

 

The PF had been founded in 1971 and aimed to protect the rights and raise the profile of all those who described themselves as pagan and to provide information on pagan beliefs and activities to the wider community and media. Vivianne Crowley, founder of the Wicca Study Group in 1988, was appointed Secretary of the PF in that same year.   

 

Just to be clear: I wasn't a member of the PF and didn't seek membership. I was simply looking for recognition and, perhaps, some financial assistance (though I had no idea of whether they provided such). 

 

Unfortunately, after a long wait to hear back from the PF, I received the following letter dated 1 November 1989:

 

 

Dear Stephen Alexander,

I am returning your paedophile mag unopened herewith. If it is a serious attempt at Pagan erotica, we suggest you leave Paganism and join the Church of England, where choirboys seem to be all the rage, according to the many documented criminal convictions in the last year. If it is an attempt by artists to interest Pagans in paedophilia, buzz off, we're not interested. If its lurid cover picture is intended to link Paganism with paedophilia in the public's mind, rest assured, we shall take any future issues straight to the police for investigation - of you. 

The neo-Nazi overtones of the picture's legend are unlikely to arouse much interest among Pagans of the Norse tradition. Asatru is concerned with building a free and honourable lifestyle for people of all ages, not with living out regressive fantasies about children. 

May the Gods guide you through your misconceptions, and don't bother us with this kind of rubbish again. 

 

Sincerely, 

 

Leonora James

President, Pagan Federation

III.    

 

I have to admit, I still find this frankly bizarre and ludicrous letter as astonishing today as I did when I first read it. My reply read as follows:

 

 

Dear Ms James,

                        

Your letter referring to Pagan Magazine (Issue XXVIII), leaves me absolutely astounded. You accuse me of paedophilia, eroticism, and neo-Nazism and base all three accusations purely on the cover alone! 

      

Of course, I strongly deny at least two of the above charges: Pagan Magazine is not a paedophile publication and nor does it have any neo-Nazi overtones, undertones, or sympathies. And if it sometimes features erotic art, it is hardly pornographic in character (nor a 'serious attempt' to be such).

      

I'm not quite sure what troubles me most about your letter: your ignorance and philistine stupidity; or your hysterical obsession with child-sex. The image you describe as 'lurid' is in fact a well-known work by the German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. 

      

As for the phrase blood-knowledge in the magazine's subtitle, please note this is taken from D. H. Lawrence and refers to a way of knowing that is intuitive and instinctive; i.e. pre-mental and non-headbound. It has nothing to do with the racial politics of the Third Reich. 

      

Returning to the erotic aspect of Pagan Magazine, if this worries you so much then I suggest you rename your church of the closed mind and unopened text the Puritan Federation! It's shocking that someone like you is a representative of the pagan community, as your letter clearly demonstrates you are unworthy of such a role. 

 

'May the gods guide you through your misconceptions ...'

 

Stephen Alexander Von Hell

PS: please note how, at no time, did I threaten to send a policeman after you ...!

 

PPS: I will one day expose your foolishness. 

 

 

Thirty-five years later and it seems that my second postscripted remark has finally come to pass  ... 

 

Image used on the Contents Page of  

Pagan Magazine XXVIII (1989)

 

Notes

 

[1] The post referred to - 'Pagan Magazine: Remembered and Reimagined' - was published on 1 August 2024 and can be accessed by clicking here. Another recent post in what might be thought of as the Pagan series can be read by clicking here.

  

 

Pagan Magazine: Remembered and Reimagined

A mock-up cover illustrating how Pagan Magazine might look 

in 2024 based on a recent post on Torpedo the Ark

 

Last year marked the 40th anniversary of Pagan: The Magazine of Blood-Knowledge (1983-1992). 

 

And, whilst I have discussed the origins of this obscure publication previously on Torpedo the Ark and provided a full index of issues - click here - I think this might be an opportune moment to offer a few further remarks in response to a suggestion that Pagan be digitised and made available online and in answer to the following questions asked by this same person:

1. Can you explain why you chose the title Pagan for the magazine?

 

As far as I recall, this was inspired by D. H. Lawrence; not just his religious and occult writings, but the fact that he and his close friends belonged to a literary society as adolescents referred to by some as 'the Pagans' [1]. 

 

This small group would discuss all kinds of ideas and read authors including Marx, Nietzsche, and Darwin and I wanted the magazine to reflect the same degree of intellectual curiosity. My readings of Nietzsche in the mid-1980s only reinforced my view that this was the perfect name for the magazine and although I never used the following section from The Will to Power, it very much reflects the kind of thing that fired my imagination at the time:

 

"We few or many who again dare to live in a dismoralised world, we pagans in faith: we are probably also the first to grasp what a pagan faith is: - to have to imagine higher creatures than man, but beyond good and evil; to have to consider all being higher as also being immoral. We believe in Olympus - and not in the 'Crucified'." [2]

 

I still think it's a nice title, although that's partly due to the fact that I'm strongly inclined towards auto-descriptive words beginning with the letter P: punk, pirate, poet, pagan, etc. However, I would almost certainly change the subtitle - if it ever was the subtitle and not merely a strapline - as the irrationalist concept of blood-knowledge is one I have come to find problematic [3]. I think now I would be tempted to go with Pagan: the Magazine of Dark Enlightenment.

 

 

2. Can you remember the circumstances surrounding the production of the early issues?

 

Not very well. I was twenty at the time and studying for a degree in Leeds. That period is very much like a dream now and I don't remember much about it.  

 

Fortunately, however, I kept a diary and, apparently, it was on Thursday 7 April, 1983, that I suddenly had the idea of putting together a magazine that would reflect my new philosophy - a post-punk primitivism partly inspired by D. H. Lawrence and a second-hand copy of the Larousse Encyclopedia of World Mythology.

 

I designed a front cover - which, to be honest, is a complete dog's dinner - and began writing the text that evening. The first issue wasn't completed, however, until the middle of the following month, when I was in London at Charisma Records. 

 

It was there that I made a hundred photocopies of the ten-side issue on 16 May. Don't ask what happened to them, but I know that one was sent to Malcolm McLaren's office at 25 Denmark Street and it might be noted that the woman's face featured on the cover with a thick black band of makeup across her eyes was inspired by the dancers in the 'Buffalo Gals' video (a look McLaren borrowed from Ridley Scott's Bladerunner (1982)). 

 

The image of Priapus which also featured on the cover was intended to be a kind of logo, but, sadly, it didn't appear on any future issues and I think Pan became the presiding deity for the most part.   

 

The superior second issue, with original artwork by Gillian Hall - my on-off (mostly off) partner at the time - came out in July and was quickly followed by issue three, which was a poetry issue with a picture of Jordan (Pamela Rooke) on the cover. The magazine didn't really come into its own until the period 1986-89, which is when the vast bulk of issues were produced (on A3 paper). 

 

 

3. Were you part of the pagan/esoteric/occult scene in the 1980s?

 

No, not at all. 

 

My interests were very much to do with art, politics, and popular culture, rather than magic or witchcraft. I read books about the latter and had a T-shirt with a picture of Aleister Crowley on, but that was about it. 

Having said that, there were issues of Pagan on subjects including alchemy, astrology, and tarot, so it would be a little disingenuous to say I had no interest in (or knowledge of) these things. Further, I was a regular reader of Pagan News, edited by Phil Hine, who has since become an internationally respected author on chaos magic and related topics and we occasionally cross paths in London. 

 

However, my attempt to garner support for the magazine from Leonora James, the Gardnerian High Priestess who was then serving as President of the Pagan Federation, ended badly after she decided that images I had used by German Expressionist painters had paedophile undertones. She warned me that if I were to send her any future copies of Pagan Magazine she would immediately report me to the police!

 

After that, I had no further contact with people on the pagan scene until I met Christina Harrington, in 2004, and became involved with things happening at her magical little bookshop, Treadwell's [4].     

 

 

4. Finally, do you still identify as a pagan and do you see Torpedo the Ark as a continuation of the project you began with Pagan Magazine forty years ago?   

 

I don't really identify as anything to be honest and, whilst there are certainly posts on TTA that might be interpreted as pagan in character, the blog is ultimately a very different kettle of fish and has a radically different philosophy and perspective. I found it fun doing the mockup cover for an imaginary issue of Pagan Magazine published in 2024, but don't think my heart would really be in it if asked to produce an entire new issue. Some things are very much of their time and Pagan belongs in the 1980s like a fish belongs in water. 

 

But again, having said that, I obviously still read Lawrence and Nietzsche and I have presented two papers at Treadwell's recently - one on the magical allure of objects and the other on occultism in the age of transparency [5] - so, who knows, perhaps for the 50th anniversary I might be tempted to reboot the magazine. But I doubt it.      

 

 

Artwork for Pagan Magazine, Issue 2 (1983), 

by Gillian Hall

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 170.  

[2] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage Books, 1968), section 1034 (1888), p. 533.

 

[3] I have twice discussed Lawrence's concept of blood-knowledge on Torpedo the Ark: click here and here. 

 

[4] See the post dated 4 December 2012 entitled 'The Treadwell's Papers' - click here. 

 

[5] Details of both these events can be found on the TTA Events page: click here.