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Montague Whitsel
Sep. 13th, 2011 02:24 pmI've been reading some of Montague Whitsel's stuff lately after coming across one of his books (The Fires of Yule: A Keltelven Guide for Celebrating the Winter Solstice - more later about that peculiar word "Keltelven") by chance in a Campbell bookstore a couple of weeks ago, and I'm having mixed feelings about the whole thing. On the one hand he has some nice poetic ideas, but on the other he seems to be (consciously or not) presenting elements of the fictionalized/mythical history his own system has (see "Ross County, Pennsylvania, Imaginative Landscape of Montague Whitsel") as regular this-world fact, and I come away with a feeling of "I want to like this, really I do, but what the hell are you talking about???" ( Read more... )
Anyway. I don't really mean to harsh the man's spiritual buzz. There is definitely an interesting Something in what he's created. The everything-mixed-togetherness has an air of a personal poetic journey about it, something like The White Goddess, meant to be read with the heart and not taken too literally. In its own context it works fine. It's especially too bad that all the books written by his fictional characters are themselves fictional, because some of them sound fascinating. I would love to read them and take them on their own terms. But the articles on Isis often set my teeth on edge because they were presented much more as "fact" rather than being straightforward about where adaptation and sometimes fantasy (not that that's inherently bad) had taken place.
Anyway. I don't really mean to harsh the man's spiritual buzz. There is definitely an interesting Something in what he's created. The everything-mixed-togetherness has an air of a personal poetic journey about it, something like The White Goddess, meant to be read with the heart and not taken too literally. In its own context it works fine. It's especially too bad that all the books written by his fictional characters are themselves fictional, because some of them sound fascinating. I would love to read them and take them on their own terms. But the articles on Isis often set my teeth on edge because they were presented much more as "fact" rather than being straightforward about where adaptation and sometimes fantasy (not that that's inherently bad) had taken place.