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To: alt.magick,alt.pagan,alt.religion.wicca,alt.satanism From: catherine yronwodeSubject: Re: "THE Book" Part II (and hello to Jules the Bold) Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2004 09:10:30 GMT Keyword search terms: Herman Slater A Book of Pagan Rituals Warlock Shop Magickal Childe New York plagiarism plagiarized stole ripped off Ed Fitch John Hansen Joseph Wilson Tony Kelly Herman Enderle John Score Tom Delong Gwydion Penderwen Formulary Waxing Moon Crystal Well Pagan Way Jeff Caliban Crowe wrote: > Anyone who is actually interested in the truth about Catherine > Yronwode's publishing history, her thievery of the works of others, > particularly the recipes contained within Herman Slater's Magickal > Formulary, and her endorsement of the illegal harvesting of posts from > Usenet is welcome to email me,. I'll be happy to provide such proof. and, in another post, Jeff Caliban Crowe wrote (to me): > you, who liberally "borrowed" > material from The Magickal Formulary by Herman Slater. Did you really > think that after poor old Herman died, you could just take what you > wanted without paying his estate anything? Or that if you just left > out how much of this or that, but kept the ingredients, that no one > would notice? I know that replying to Caliban will open me up to more of his ugly remarks, probably to be followed by a chorus of one-line top postings by the entire ARW crew, spammed across usenet -- but this is not the first time he has made the false accusation that i commited "thievery" or "borrowed" the Slater formulary, and that is just dead wrong. So i shall set the record straight, not for Caliban -- because he is irrational, abusive, and obsessive when it comes to harassing me in usenet -- but in case anyone else is curious about what's up -- and might wish to check out some of the history behind the use of Slater's formulary in the Neo-Pagan community. Back in the 1970s, Herman Slater ran an occult store in New York called The Warlock Shop, which soon changed locations and names and is better remembered as the Magickal Childe oocult shop. Herman used to buy from me, but not formulary things -- he bought the self-interpreting horoscope blanks which i had designed and published under the "Durga-Shiva Augury Company" imprint. Herman and his staff kept a semi-private formulary at the Magickal Childe. This forumalry was co-created by Herman, his partner Ed, and virtually all of his shop's staff, and also contained recipes gleaned from customers and from previously published formulary books. Eventually Herman published it and it became public knowlegde. I had my own formulary too, which derived from a combination of four sources: recipes given to me by old folks and shop owners, recipes that had been printed in folklore collections, first-hand perfume analysis, and recipes from 19th and early 20th century formularies. The only place Herman Slater's formulas are mentioned in my writings is on a web page (and first drafts for that page in usenet posted during the late 1990s) where i compared some magickal oil and perfume formulas published in usenet to my own formulas and those in my book collections. Basically, i was offering alternatives to the Slater and other Neo-Pagan formularies and also explaining why some of them are less than traditional. The Slater formulary was a collective effort, for which Slater claimed copyright ownership. Herman had died of AIDS, without heirs, in 1992, and the copyright status of the material seemed unclear. There was no literary estate in evidence and because Herman had already confessed, before his death, to having plagiarized the works of others in "A Book of Pagan Rituals," no publisher seemed eager to pick his dubiously derived material up and reprint it. As is stated on the web page in question: "During the late 1990s i was sent an entire electronic file of the Slater formulary, which bore within its MS Word coding a notation that the file had been edited by Aidan Kelly, a well-known Neo-Pagan author. I do not use the Slater formulas in my own work nor did i publish them or pass the electronic file around, but i did keep a copy on my hard drive and i did use it to identify which recipes on this formula-analysis page had been published by Slater, and i added notations to that effect on the web page." A few more months passed and i was contacted by two men who claimed that they owned the copyright to the Slater formulary. I assumed that they had gotten the electronic file -- which had gone all over the net by then -- and decided to typeset it, but they claimed to be one of Herman's former employees and his brother, to whom Slater had bequeathed the formulary. When they found my page on formulas, presumably by searching on the keywords < Herman Slater formulary > or some such, they asked me to take down all of my comparisons between the Slater formulary and traditional hoodoo recipes. I had never heard of these men by name (although it turned out i had met one of them in Herman's shop years before) and so i asked them how they came to own the material -- but they could not or would not show me the path by which they came to hold the copyright. In turn, i told them that what i had produced was a "fair usage" review of several formulary books -- and that i had no interest in reprinting the Slater book, for we all knew it could be had for free in electronic file form anyway. When i offered to remove quantities and to mention the URL for their sales-page of the reprinted book with each formula i reviewed, they were agreeable. I did not openly challenge their right to the ownership of the material and they got multiple mentions of their sales site URL on my page, while i was able to continue using the recipes as illustrations of how non-traditional formulas can be identified. As far as i know, they are content with this, as i am i, and there is no bad blood either way. So that's where it stands now. On the web page where i wrote up my analyses and comparisons between a sampling of the Slater formulas and the formulas published by John M. Hansen, Ray Malbrough, Nancy Booth, Zora Neale Hurston, and myself, i removed any precise measurements for the Slater recipes and i gave a URL to the site run by the folks who are currently publishing the book, in case people want to buy it. My web page in question is at http://www.luckymojo.com/spells/recipes.html --and if you read it, please read all the links to other pages cited (for further recipes) and please read it all the way to the very end. It is interesting to note that the current publishers have not copyrighted the Slater formulary in their own names, simply continuing the "Magickal Childe" name and collecting the money for the book as if Herman's Magickal Childe shop still existed. To date no one has challenged their right to do this, and i doubt that anyone will. Herman died without heirs, and considering how much he stole from John Hansen, Joseph B. Wilson, Ed Fitch and so forth when he reprinted their Pagan Way material, and his confession of same, it would have been difficult for any putative heirs of Herman's to claim that anything he produced was original. Usenet posts relating to the Herman's plagiarism can also be found at http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&frame=right&th=933ffcbefeebee9f&seekm=3E6D7E4A.EEC8D3F7%40luckymojo.com#link1 and http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&c2coff=1&selm=3E836E50.8201FDA%40luckymojo.com&rnum=11 (Remember to put these URLs all on one line to link to them.) Within the past year i received email from one of the current Slater formulary publishers in which he says he understands that i am "sincere" in my desire to compare the Slater formulas with others. I was happy to hear that for, although i take a position opposed to Slater in many ways, i freely acknowledge that some of the formulas bearing his name as author do have an authentic basis. The purpose of Slater's publication was to spread his shop's formulas around and to produce money for Herman Slater. The fact that many Neo-Pagan occult shop owners use the Slater formulary in preparing their house brands of oils is apparent to anyone with a good perfumer's nose -- but since there is no request in the book for royalties to be paid by perfumers who choose to use the Slater formulas, it is obvious that folks who do that are using the book exactly as Herman intended. The same is true of the formulas published by Zora Neale Hurston, Ray Malbrough, John M. Hansen, and others, including myself. There is no licensing fee required for their use and no contract of exclusivity, implied or express. So whatever Caliban wishes to imply is going on there ... well, it just ain't. I am based in a much older and more traditional layer of African-American hoodoo athan Slater was nd my understanding of plant symbolism derieves from that tradition and from Euroepean ascriptions of the planetary and elemental symbolisms of herbs (e.g. from Gerard and his ilk), so i don't use the Slater formulary in my own work unless i am asked by a customer to recreate one of the specific Magickal Childe shop perfume recipes. This is not to say that i find Slater's formulary valueless or not of interest. I am always willing to discuss it, because it has had an obvious impact on the urban Neo-Pagan movement. Furthermore, i have been in contact with another of Slater's former employees, and he is telling me the names of many of the individuals who originated the non-traditional formulas in the book, which is fascinating to me, because i have long been curious about how such a mish-mash of diverse ideas came to be collected in one volume. I do not have his permission to publish our correspondence, but i hope that in time he himself might be moved to produce a fuller memoir of how the Magickal Childe forumulary came to be compiled. cat yronwode Hoodoo in Theory and Practice - http://www.luckymojo.com/hoodoo.html
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