My first experience at PantheaCon was wonderful! Rayna and I arrived in San Jose, California during the late afternoon. Our friend Rowan was kind enough to pick us up at the airport and host us overnight. She has a beautiful, one story home, and I don't know anything about home design and architecture, but I'd guess it's Victorian. And it's purple! Well, various shades of purples with gorgeous wall paintings and magickal items everywhere.Very witchy.
PantheaCon officially began Friday, but Cherry Hill Seminary held its Winter Conference with Steven PoschMacha and meet new ones like Holli Emore and Patrick McCollum. I also finally got to meet Sabina Magliocco as well as Selena Fox who is not associated with Cherry Hill, but happened to be at the bar. She was just bubbly and delightful. on Thursday and hosted a reception that night at the hotel's sushi bar, but since Rayna and I both prefer hot and cooked food, Rowan took us to a neighborhood Mexican place first. It was delish! Miami lacks good Mexican food so it made me very happy to chomp on some in California. The Cherry Hill Seminary reception was great. It was wonderful to see friends like
PantheaCon kicked off Friday at 1pm and workshops lasted all day. I didn't go to any. I look forward to festivals, but often tend to skip a lot of rituals and workshops in favor of spending time with people I rarely see like Jason Pitzl-Waters whom I first met last November at FPG (yes, he is actually way more awesome than he comes across online, but don't tell him I said that). I did try to catch a workshop from Orion Foxwood, but he got snowed in some other state and had not arrived, as did another member of my party who got stuck in snowy Dallas in his Miami shorts and sandals.
I did manage to go to the Dark Dance that night for a while. That was just a dance featuring gothic music. I'm way too cheerful to ever be truly goth, but I've always enjoyed the fashions and music though I've remained pretty old school in my tastes (e.g. Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banchees, etc.). Alas I can only take so much of the modern stuff before even I get the urge to cut myself so off I went with Rayna to the bar for a drink before the Pombagira Devotional, which was awesome and the highlight of my night. It was familiar, a ritual drumming party for an orisha with singing and dancing, and everyone was dressed in black and red. I really enjoyed it.
I took in several workshops on Saturday. The first was "Being White in Orisha Spirituality" by Gail Williams of Luisah Teish's Ile Orunmila Oshun. I was kinda bothered by it. I agree that the discussion of race is important, but I also believe race is more of a social construct than a real biological classification and it was quickly made evident when I went from being identified as white to Hispanic, and therefore "of color," in under an hour. Plus the workshop didn't really address how to approach the Afro-diasporic tradition.
I hit another orisha talk after that from Rayna and Leni called "Ancestral Tribute: Lessons from the Lucumi Tradition." It was the third time I've seen this workshop, but it keeps getting better. I don't think Rayna could improve it further at this point. She covers a little bit of history and three fundamental ways in which practitioners in Lucumi approach the ancestors.
That evening I also went to "Constructing Celtic Reconstructionist Rituals" with Erynn Laurie. She was very cool and I liked her a lot. I enjoyed it and think her lessons can be applied to any path, but I'm not sure I walked away knowing more about Celtic Recon. I think I'm going to check out her books. After that, I hit Jason's "Pagans and the New Media" which was great and hopefully inspired some of the folks in attendance to get with it.
Sunday morning, I attended an interesting and informative panel on service with M. Macha NightMare, Holli Emore, Ivo Dominguez, Jr., and Sam Webster. Orion Foxwood finally made it and I went to see his workshop on "Meeting the Dark Man at the Crossroads." It was packed and cute and funny as he is, the whole cult of personality thing made me uncomfortable. It felt like a Christian revival and I just had to get out after an hour passed and he still hadn't gotten to the Dark Man work. That night I went to the Kali Puja, another highlight for me, led by Chandra Alexandre of Sharanya. She and her people were wonderful, totally tuned it, and the energy was palpable.
On Monday, the final day of the PantheaCon, I managed to squeeze in two events. I went to a workshop by Patrick McCollum on the challenges he's facing with the State of California. That deserves its own entry so I will get back to it later this week. The other was a Lupercalia/Communlia ritual by Ekklesia Antinoou, a Graeco-Roman-Egyptian recon type group for GLBT people rooted in the ancient cult of an emperor's deified lover. Yeah, it sounds a little odd. It is a little odd, but after my initial wtf-ness, I found I could really appreciate this group.They're bold and thoroughly contemporary yet clearly knowledgeable and historical. I thought it was pretty cool.
I spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out in the Umbanda hospitality suite with Rowan and others from the Umbanda house until it was time to head to the airport for my red eye flight home. All in all, I had an great time and plan to pencil it it in for next year.
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