Warts And All A rough draft of the spiritual autobiography of Joseph B Wilson. The history that lead to Toteg Tribe. Copyright 2003 by Joseph B Wilson

Part Twenty-One After I had been there for two weeks the mail which had been sent to my address in England finally caught up with me. I found a note in my post office box to come to the counter. I did and was given a bag of mail --literally hundreds of letters from people throughout the United States and England. This was my first experience with hate mail. 95% of those letters condemned me for my actions in England. People I had gone way out of my way to help over the previous five years wrote to tell me what a traitor I was and how much they hated me. Some of the letters threatened my life and the lives of my family. Frankly, I was shocked, horrified, and frightened. I took the threatening letters to the OSI. They told me there was nothing they could do, since the letters were from civilians. I'd just have to deal with it. I think this is when I started serious drinking. Tim Zell of the Church of All Worlds and Green Egg wrote something like, "Joe, how could you. This is terrible. You could have gone down in history as an important founder of the pagan movement. Now you are nothing but a traitor." I wrote back that I didn't care what history said about me, that wasn't why I was involved with the Old Religion. I also told him my activities for the OSI were political, not religious. Another bloke claimed to have a newsletter and asked me to write a response since everyone was attacking me. I thanked him and did so. Big mistake. He sent my letter to Leo Martello who took it out of context and published it, along with a lot of my other writings, in a damning book with a title something like Satanism and Witchcraft. I should have sued him. I went to the lawyers on base and they told me I didn't have a case for libel (wrong), and didn't bother to tell me I could sue because he used my writing without my permission -- a violation of the copyright laws. When I found out what I could have done the statute of limitations had passed. Tony Kelly wrote and printed a long article in The Waxing Moon claiming to have single handedly founded the "Pagan Movement in Britain and Ireland." A month after I arrived on base my performance report from RAF Upper Heyford finally arrived in personnel. Although my supervisor in base publications had rated me average (a death blow as far as promotions were concerned) the base commander had intercepted the report and wrote his own comments. I wish I still had that document! The Colonel contradicted the Staff Sergeant's ratings on every point and considered me an Outstanding NCO. His narrative was enough to convince Personnel at Athenai that I was telling the truth about my journalist specialty and patriotic loyalty. I showed that report to the base executive / administrative officer. Fortunately, or unfortunately (depending on one's outlook) that man had recently been appointed Base Historian -- a job he knew nothing about and didn't want. He figured that since I had been a historian before I could do the job. He pulled some strings, my specialty and skill level were returned to me, and I was pulled out from under that bum in base publications and given my own office and a job as historian -- again reporting to the Commander. This time I told them I needed more training than I had or I couldn't do the job. They arranged temporary duty assignments for me to go to Germany to be trained by the head people there. That helped. By that time Daisy and I had found an apartment in Kalamaki and had moved from the hotel. Daisy and I both shared the booze I brought home. When our rations from the base ran out we drank the local brews, ouzo (a licorice tasting liquor that turns milky white in water.) and retzina -- a white wine that tastes like pine resin because of the kegs it's stored in. We consumed more than enough of all of it. Spiritually my practices were being influenced by the land I lived on. I found myself drawn to the God and Goddess symbols of ancient Greek myth. I discovered that Gaea literally means Earth Mother. Helios literally means Sun. Uranos literally means Sky. Zeus literally means God. Demeter literally means The Mother. Kore literally means maiden. And so forth. That which we thought of as being names of Gods were actually nothing more than words describing an aspect of nature -- titles. I had an insight and realization that our modern interpretation of Greek mythology is wrong -- the ancient Greeks merely used human symbol to depict the natural phenomena which they recognized as the embodiment of spirits or gods, much the same way American Indians recognize Earth Mother, Fire, Wind, Eagle, and so forth. This was an "Aha!" moment for me. I developed some devotions, based upon this insight, which were satisfactory. I also concentrated on trying to understand more of the Cochrane material that I had gathered from Norman. Even though I'd begun to suspect that all claims to hereditary knowledge of the Craft were gross exaggerations, on Norman's suggestion I did a ceremony to invoke Roy Bower's spirit in order to communicate and learn more. My oldest daughter, Marian Sue (who was ten or eleven at the time), assisted me, since Daisy refused to have anything to do with it. During the ceremony the room Marian and I were working in turned icy cold. At a crucial point Daisy, who had been asleep in the bedroom, began screaming hysterically, came out into the hallway talking what sounded like nonsense words. If it was a language it was something I had never heard before. Marian Sue became extremely frightened. I did a banishing, which calmed Daisy down, and closed down the circle. Marian was too frightened to ever try to help me in something like that again. I didn't gain any useful information.