I am sharing this post for the safety and protection of the Neopagan community both online and off. I have been made aware of deeply disturbing information about a man that many people know, and have become connected to by social media: Matthew Catalano, who also goes by the name Matthew McEwan, and sometimes Artaigne McEwan. The link I just gave to his FB may disappear soon after this blog is made public, but many screenshots from it are preserved below, demonstrating the potentially very dangerous, certainly hateful, and two-faced reality of this homophobic and racist man.
Catalano has been lurking in the Neopagan community for a space of years, wearing many hats within it. You may have seen him under these “Pagan” and “Witch” incarnations:
Every year or three, a fresh surge of posts from different writers attempts a reconsideration or a new clarification of what a “Witch” is- or what a Witch ought to be. Naturally, they are all aiming at the perspective of this moment in time, which is both good and expected; for what must be millions of people by now, the term Witch has become important to self-identity and relevant to many of their aspirations. It’s going to attract commentary.
How such a strange word got to be so popular in this way is a complex and (now) controversial topic.
Most people who keep up with the sociopolitics of the word “Witch” already know some of the answer: a fast-spreading alternative spiritual practice emerged in the middle of the 20th century, and branched out just as quickly, bringing the term “Witch” and its ancient antecedent wicce or wicca to the public eye.
The incorporation of the Wiccan movement into the larger New Age and neo-occultist movement certainly spiced up what was a bedrock of Theosophy, Spiritualism, quasi-Eastern religion, and ceremonial magic with a new kind of “Pagan” flavor. The very idea of Witches as misunderstood and long-persecuted Nature worshipers, herbalists, fertility ritualists, and healers sometimes devoted to pantheistic Goddess-type figures or Horned Gods mistaken for Devils, was a fascinating twist.
This new surge of “Witch, reconsidered” also synergistically combined with certain academic theories that had gained a certain (short lived) credibility in those days, regarding the possibility of Pagan cults surviving in secret into modern times. It was enough to inspire the imagination of a lot of people, and offer to many others what seemed like a potent escape from the boredom, misogyny, and spiritual staleness of mainstream Western religions.
Nostalgia is a hard thing to write about. The term nostalgia itself is laced with certain implications of a naïvely fond or even a foolish backwards looking: a tendency to look back to previous times in one’s life and remember things as better than they were. We (sometimes rightly) suspect people in the grip of nostalgia of idealizing previous times in their lives for personal reasons and failing to see the problems and issues that must have existed then.
What I’m writing here is a nostalgia piece, and I hope I can insulate myself from certain doubts or criticisms by clearing up the suspicions now. Nostalgia, in the sense I mean, refers to a feeling you have deep inside when you reminisce upon a time when your soul was closely connected to something formative and positive, which is now remote or withdrawn down the river of time.
It’s a feeling (often a ghostly, passing one) you get when memories emerge of former times when you were connected to certain people, situations, or conditions that were pleasurable and fertile with the good tidings that life offers at times.
Rosamund, Victorian Mages and the Dreams of Witches: A Meditation on the Hermetic and Golden Dawn Origins of Wicca
Part I. A Golden Age
Dreams Create Lives
It is the souls and dreams of others that help to create our lives for us. We live by them, even if we don’t comprehend how much, or if we comprehend at all.
Some modern people might be swift to disagree, and counter that it is the tangible thoughts and inventions of others that serve to truly create our lives; after all, it was the intellects that crafted these very computers and phones- and this internet that now dominates modern existence- who should be credited with being the most influential.
In whatever way technology and imagination might intersect, they will forever belong in crucial ways to two very different realms of experience. At day’s end, technology is an aspect of economy; it is another means (and now the primary facilitator) of work and survival for many. This computer may be critical to how I survive, but my dreams are my true sustenance; they are the wonders for which I live, and the shapers of my true life.
The Feast of Dreams 