In 2013 Paganicon will featured not one, but two authors: Brandy Williams and Orion Foxwood.  Together, these two voices bring an exquisite mix of magical backgrounds, from High Magick to Appalachian conjure, and add a wealth of scholarship, experience, authority and wit to what promises to be a year to remember. Brandy Williams brings a breadth and depth of wisdom from her diverse background as both a magician and traditional Wiccan high priestess.  Orion Foxwood comes highly recommended by local pagans who saw him at Pantheacon or have taken his Faery Seership workshop. His newest book “The Candle and the Crossroads” deals with his experience with Appalachian Conjure and Southern Root Work.

Brandy Williams

Brandy Williams has been practicing and teaching magic for over 25 years. Besides founding and serving as director of the Seattle Pagan Scholars, being involved in the Ordo Templi Orientis and the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn, she is also a traditional Wiccan High Priestess, and thus able to view the role of magic across multiple paradigms. She has appeared at festivals and conferences such as PantheaCon, TheurgiCon, and the Esoteric Book Conference, and continues to present lectures and workshops about her work.

Her newest book, The Woman Magician, examines and challenges the Western understanding of women’s bodies, energies, and powers, articulating a new metaphysics which frees and empowers women to act authentically as women and as magicians. She lives in Washington state with two people, seven beehives, four cats, one dog, five chickens, and a rooster named Nigel.

Brandy’s appearance at Paganicon will be sponsored by Llewellyn Worldwide.

Visit brandywilliams.org for more info

Orion Foxwood

Orion grew up with the second sight in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, an area rife with the folk practices of the southern and Appalachian tradition. He is a witch and Elder in Romano Celtic-Traditional Craft, High Priest in Alexandrian Wicca and teacher of the Faery Seership tradition. He is also the founding Elder of Foxwood Temple and a primary founder of the Alliance of the Old Religion, a national network of covens in his line that have united to preserve the ways of his Elders.

He was the co-director of Moonridge, a center for metaphysical, Craft and Faery studies in Maryland. For over 20 years, he has lectured extensively across the United States and in the United Kingdom on the Craft, Faery Seership Tradition and Southern Folk Magic and conjure. He is the author of The Faery Teachings, The Tree of Enchantment, a collaborative CD project with RJ Stewart named Faery Seership,  and his newly released book on conjure, The Candle and the Crossroads(Weiser books, 2012).

On the lecture circuit, he is best known for his teachings on traditional second sight and folkloric Faery practices originating in the ways of the Faery Doctors and Cunningmen of Britain, Ireland, Scotland and Wales and the conjurers of the American South. His teachings are based in traditional folk practices aimed at direct spirit contact for substantive personal transformation.

Visit orionfoxwood.com for more info

Now strikes the balance betwixt the Seasons– when the brightness of Day equals the darkness of Night.

Between the halls of Winter and Summer, the Lord of Misrule dances with the Maiden of Spring. Let us cross the veil between darkness and day, walking the Moon’s road, bringing the Sun.

Revel in darkness, and welcoming brightness– celebrate this magical place of In-Between. Come clothed in moonbeams or veiled in stars, alight like candle-glow– or wrapped in shadows and mystery. Be the lush summer noon or the crystalline winter, come masked in dark glamour, or shine like the dawn.

Choose your favorite polarity, or embrace mutability! Come dance with the Wild Ones in twilight and trance! Seelie, Unseelie, and Wild Fae– peris, goblins, daemons and devas– all welcome and lustily encouraged.

Garb: Bright and dark finery, harlequin diamonds, particolored hose and motley wear, masques, body paint, jewelry, wings, ferns and flowers, mystic armor, enchanting furbelows and other surprises. Whether of this world, or another– you are welcome!

Time: Saturday, March 17, 8pm–1am… any after-parties in hospitality suites to be announced in Paganicon program. Check out the details of the ball on our online schedule.

Place: The Park Ballroom on the 2nd floor of the St. Louis Park Doubletree Hotel (1500 Park Place Blvd., Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA 55416)

Tickets: $15 per ticket, but FREE to all Paganicon registrants. If you’re coming for the ball only, just select the Paganicon Ball ticket at our Paganicon registration page: http://paganicon.eventbrite.com/

Music: Non-stop dance party by the extremely fun DJ Silver Wolf, who DJ’d part of last year’s event as well.

Wondering what to expect? Check out Diana Rajchel’s PNC Minnesota article with photos of some ball attendees if you’re curious about the awesome costumes. (All those photographed gave their permission for use in the PNC article but not for other uses: please share the link, not the photos.)

The Third Offering: A Sacred Gallery Space

Arts and creativity provide food for the soul, purpose on the path, and gifts for the Gods and the people. In our Pagan, Polytheistic, and Earth-Centered arts, the sensual and the spiritual are joined, and find expression in our craft. Our shared worldview is grounded within our bodies, our senses, and the earth we inhabit together, as well as taking inspiration from myths, muses, and visions.

We invite you to visit our gallery and temporary shrine, a setting charged with intent to bring an infusion of beauty to the space in the context of Paganicon. As in ritual, a good gallery show brings like minds together for the shared purpose of creation. We believe direct contact with original art in such a setting creates a unique venue for epiphany, awe and transformation, one that is intrinsically different from viewing web-images or reproductions of art in isolation. We hope you enjoy these aesthetic offerings and partake in the conversation about how our community values can find expression through craft and vision.”

We will maintain a shrine installation throughout the event. Works in many media will be displayed, and we hope to encourage more artists in the greater Paganistan area to join the hearth of this peer-selected body of work. Check this page again in May for the Call for Artists for our next show in 2014. This year’s show resonates with Paganicon’s 2013 theme: “Brightness of Day/Darkness of Night.”

Artists’ Bios for 2013 The Third Offering

Paul B. Rucker:

Jewel colors and curving auric forms, patterns of body and intentional symbols, define the outer flesh of my work. Meeting the Mysteries halfway, my art resembles astral theatre, giving them a body that can be seen and touched… in performance I seek the same talismanic sense of encounter.

Helga HedgeWalker:

has more than 25 years of professional experience in painting, graphic design, illustration and other fine arts. She believes that the act of creating art is a form of divine invocation; thus she tries to invite the Gods to visit as often as possible.

Roger Williamson:

Art is an externalization of inner pain and irritation.

The artist, like the oyster, is driven to externalize this inner pain and irritation into the image of a pearl.

Artemis Namaste:

I am a working artist and I am an open Pagan Instructor at Columbia College Chicago. I was raised Pagan and all of the work I create comes from a Pagan perspective – regardless of whether or not the work depicts images or iconography usually associated with this path. I work from a spiritual space and my intent is to honor the deities when I work.

Riawa Thomas-Smith:

My visions are inspired by Nature, dreams and fantasies— both the wonders of the world around me and the inner world inside my head. Guided by stories and myths and my own desires, I’ve developed and populated quite a vast interior universe. The figures I draw and paint are emissaries from that world.

Tamara Anderson:

Restarting my artistic path and recrafting my artistic expression is an emphasis right now. Being true to what resides within and true to authentic personal style development, whatever that may become, is my first devotion as I move forward. Other than that, just doing more art is on my agenda.

Jack Green:

is a Free Second Degree Gardnerian British Traditional Witch and a volunteer science teacher as well as a science fiction and fantasy fan with a love of history. He also dabbles in art, specifically drawing but isn’t that good at it – yet! He’s better at photography.