Pagan Head-Scratcher: Fools and Their Money

"DEJA BROOM" denotes a blog repost from my old site.  Feel free to read anew, or refresh your memory to re-live the ranty goodness.  Otherwise, feel free to skip ahead to more modern mayhem

I had some time to kill on Saturday afternoon, so I meandered into the local Barnes & Noble to browse. They were out of the current Paris Vogue, didn't have the Robert Greene book in the psych section I wanted either.

So I was just sort of aimlessly looking at the endcaps on my way back to the exit when I had a brain cramp at the latest new agey crap being tossed out there for the clueless pseudo-pagan market. You know, when the publishers of these cheap-o books go trolling for the "I'm not sure WHAT I am yet, but I know I'm into the barest fringe of occult thought....I've read some Sylvia Browne, Dan Brown and maybe heard of crystals and reiki, but never actually done any spells or stuff myself because I'm all a-scared I'll conjure up a demon who will haunt my home, make my milk go sour and scare my cats."

Thus, we have things like this....that's right....a $17.95 automatic writing kit.  Yes, it contains paper, a pen and a booklet telling you how to free your mind so your hand will write stuff supposedly drawn from either your subconscious or from some altered reality or some channeled entity using your hand as a means to communicate with those on this plane of existence.

That's right, a pen, some paper, and a booklet. Nifty, ooga-booga packaging though.  (NB: As of this reprint 2011, Llewellyn has stopped making these.  They're now on clearance at Barnes & Noble and Amazon...wonder why?)

And, as luck would have it, while I was standing on the end of this aisle, mouth agape and staring incredulously at this assinine item, I overhear a conversation between two teens sitting on the floor checking out various witchcraft books:

"Yeah, so I've decided to be vegan now. Oh, and I finally told my parents I was bi, which made them completely freak, but then what can they do, right? I'm almost 16 and in a few years when I'm 18 they won't have a say at all anyway. Besides, they got more pissed off when I told them I wanted to practice vampire wicca, but its my life not theirs so they can just deal."

Ow. Brain cramp.

Never mind the sexual preference part, but did that little pinhead just say she was a "vegan vampire witch"? How does that work? Does she suck the juice outta carrots under the light of the full moon or what?

And we wonder why regular folks don't take pagans seriously as a religious sect after witnessing crap like this?