INTERVIEW: James Morgenstern of the Atheopagan Society Council

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S3E39 TRANSCRIPT:----more----

 

Mark: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark,

Yucca: and I'm the other one. Yucca.

Mark: and today we have a very special episode. We're interviewing James Morgenstern, who is on the Atheopagan Society Council.

And so, along with Yucca and myself and a bunch of other people. And so it's just an opportunity to get to know him and ask his ideas about where he sees the community going and how he came to be a part of this community and all that good kind of stuff. So, welcome James.

James: Thanks for having me.

Yucca: We're really happy to have you, so Well, why don't we get started with. you know how, how you found or came to agonism.

James: So, it's kind of a, a, a long journey that started back in like the late eighties like 87, 88, somewhere around in there. And I, I was, I, I was an, an avid reader back then. And I remember coming across like a group of, at a garage sale, this collection of encyclopedias called Man Myth and Magic.

And it was like everything supernatural in the cult from A to Z And I got made fun of a bit in grade school and called Encyclopedia Brown and stuff like that because I like, I, because I read encyclopedias. And so I came across these, bought 'em for like a quarter a book with my allowance and read them all.

And that really sort of piqued my interest in, in the cult and whatnot. And there were there were articles in there about like, Paganism and, and Witchcraft and Wicca and, and what have you. And so I started seeking out books all of this under, you know, the cover of secrecy because I, you know, grew up in the Midwest, in central Illinois.

And all of that stuff was a big no-no. So I. With, I had gone to you know, I grew up in a tiny little town, so we had gone some friends of mine and I had gone with one of their parents into this town, and there was this store in the mall that I went into, I think it was like, it might have been a b Dalton book Sellers, you know, one of those book sellers that's not around anymore.

And I found a copy of Raymond Buckland's, Complete book of witchcraft. And I went through that whole thing. It was like a series of lessons. Anybody familiar with, you know, witchcraft from back in that area is familiar with the big blue book. But it went through the whole self initiation ritual thing that they had at the end of that.

And that was sort of my start on that path. I started reading a lot of Scott Cunningham. He had, you know, a lot of good material for like solitary practitioners and and whatnot. And later on in my, you know, in my adult life I got involved with a this was shortly after I was married, I got involved with a group in Springfield, Illinois called the Edge Perception Collective.

And we put on seasonal public rituals, you know, for the, for the community there in central Illinois. And from there I got involved with the Diana's Grove Mystery School and which was, those folks were fantastic. There's just some really good, you know, kind nice people. And the. It was interesting.

They had like a 200 acre property in the Ozarks and, you know, it was beautiful. Had this, it had been a cattle ranch at one point, and so like the edges of it were forested and there was this big meadow in the center with like a seven circuit labyrinth mode into it. That was huge. And they had all these cabins that had built, had been built on the property by the Amish.

And you know, they did week long intensives and, and weekend you know, seminars and things like that on all sorts of different topics. I took several like drumming classes there with lane Redmond and, and whatnot. And the you know, the whole time though, like, looking back, I, I realized that.

With, in terms of like the belief in like DA and things like that. I was really sort of going through the motions on it. Like, I don't know that I ever actually really believed that, that there were these beings out there. I think a lot of it was me looking for an alternative to what I was in the middle of and sort of, you know, inundated by, and that was, you know, conservative Christianity you know, Midwestern Bible country, you know, kind of kind of folks.

And so I, I, I sort of, I moved to St. Louis in like 2000 and really sort of drifted away from all of that and had this big. Spot in my life, you know? A lot of the stuff that I had done previously, even, you know, even being part of the, of this group and that that community all on my own, you know, was all solo stuff.

Mark: Mm.

James: And a lot of that, you know, took place primarily in, in, in my head. You know, it's the whole like, you know, you develop like a mind palace or whatever they call