I feel I have encountered more mystics in California than I did in Massachusetts, yet perhaps I am mistaken. Certainly East Coast Morris dancers celebrate many pagan holidays, though with an emphasis on merrymaking and licentious behavior rather than metaphysics.

Shortly after joining our first West Coast Morris group, we were surprised to find a practice canceled because so many members were attending a conference of pagan religions, which, given the drought, included a significant rain-making event. This conference blacks out a weekend on folk dance calendars across the peninsula every year.

In a salon a woman shared her experience with a medium. This medium asked, Who is John? John turned out to be the name of the client’s deceased father and living brother. The message was, John doesn’t blame you, which had some meaning to the client. The medium added that the client’s mother, unnamed, wanted to let the client know she was with the father. This was intriguing, because they had divorced against the mother’s will long before his death. The client concluded this is a genuine medium, not one of the fake ones.

We have a pretty good friend who makes her living de-ghosting properties to facilitate real estate sales. She got started in this when she performed the procedure on a relative’s hard-to-sell house, which was sold shortly thereafter. This service is performed over the phone, and costs hundreds of dollars.

Names and some details have been changed, in case a source would be uncomfortable with these revelations. I have no indication that that is the case.

This post is observational, neither a critique nor an opinion. It seems to me that these mystical practices lie on a continuum that includes all religions, current and past, though that may be because I just reread Of Human Bondage, one of my favorite books. The difference on this coast is that the “outlier” manifestations are more commonplace and accepted, and therefore more often successfully commercialized.