Next year’s summer solstice at Stonehenge will be the first at which Druidry has been officially recognised as a religion

 

 

 

Druidry to be classed as religion by Charity Commission

 

Druidry is to become the first pagan practice to be given official recognition as a religion.

 

The Charity Commission has accepted that druids’ worship of natural spirits could be seen as religious activity.

 

The Druid Network’s charitable status entitles it to tax breaks, but the organization says it does not earn enough to benefit from this.

 

The commission says the network’s work in promoting druidry as a religion is in the public interest.

 

The move comes thousands of years after the first druids worshipped in Britain.

 

Druidry was one the first known spiritual practices in Britain, and druids existed in Celtic societies elsewhere in Europe as well.

 
 

Read the full story on BBC News

Black & White footage of the Museum Of Witchcraft in the late 1960`s whilst it was under the ownership of CECIL WILLIAMSON.

The Alchemy of Things Unknown (and a Visual Meditation on Transformation) at Khastoo Gallery (7556 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90046 / (323) 472 6498 )

June 10 – July 31, 2010

Opening reception: Thursday, June 10th, 6pm – 8pm
With a film performance by Raha Raissnia, sound by Charles Curtis.

“After the cursing comes laughter, so that the soul is saved from the dead.”
– Carl Gustav Jung, The Red Book

This exhibition intends to examine and expose individual works of art in relation to theosophy, sacred tradition and devotional practice. From William Blake’s illuminated works of divine imagination to Carl Gustav Jung’s drawings of collective symbolic unconscious, the visual is undoubtedly an integral creative tool for reaching, exploring, animating and pervading the indefinable spaces beyond body and mind.

The artists in this exhibition, some more explicitly than others, sought after or seek spiritual truths through art making and employ an almost fervent and reverent experimentation to their practice, one that is both ritualistic and against the grain. This mystic behavior is what defines the show; the persistence on new and unorthodox visual experimentation reaches beyond the worldly sphere to heightened states of consciousness.

This exhibition is made possible, in part, by the generous contributions of William Breeze, Ordo Templi Orientis, Richard Metzger, John Contreras, Scott Hobbs, David Brafman, William Swofford Cameron, Hetty Maclise, and The Estate of Alfred Jensen.

More info : khastoo.com

 

Clip from Aleister Crowley: The Beast 666 a film by Donna Zuckerbrot, produced by Reel Time Images. More info here.

Aleister Crowley was an accomplished mountain climber, poet, chess player and writer. He is also the most well known and influential occult magician of modern times. His admirers saw him as the prophet of a new age, whose goal was a spiritual awakening for himself and all humanity. At times his unique message and unusual behavior led to misunderstandings and contempt. His detractors denounced him as a Satanist, a drug addict and a sex maniac. The tabloids labeled him a Black Magician, The Wickedest Man in the World and The Man We’d Like to Hang. The Great Beast, as he called himself, continues to be an influence on the spiritual world today.

 

Night on Bald Mountain
Galina Shakitskaya, Russia, 1998, 10 min

 

A fantasy based on Mussorgsky’s symphonic poem. « Bald Mountain ». This name has survived among the people as an echo of ancient mythical notions. It is a mountain where witches and evil spirits gather to cook magical herbs and make spells. And this « mountain » is none other than the sky itself.