LAKEWOOD, Colo. — In 2007, when Melanie Marquis was a solitary Pagan “who didn’t really know anybody else,” she began writing for the Pagan community. She decided to contact this Carl Llewellyn Weschcke guy for comments for an article, so she wrote to Llewellyn, the company that Weschcke had bought and transformed from a small publisher of astrology titles into a metaphysical/New Age/occult publishing juggernaut.
She emailed him for his thoughts on why it was important for Pagans to be open.
“He wrote me back and somehow or other we started a dialogue and we corresponded for years and years after that about all sorts of things,” Marquis said.
So it was that Marquis went from being a solitary Pagan to having a relationship with one of the most influential metaphysical/Pagan/New Age/occultist personalities of modern times. That relationship made her a natural choice to write the new biography Carl Llewellyn Weschcke: Pioneer & Publisher of Body, Mind & Spirit – published, of course, by Llewellyn.
Llewellyn Publications would go on to publish such Marquis books as A Witch’s World of Magick: Expanding Your Practice with Techniques & Traditions from Diverse Cultures and The Witch’s Bag of Tricks: Personalize Your Magick & Kickstart Your Craft, as well as her Modern Spellcaster’s Tarot deck.
Marquis’ exhaustively researched biography (which includes almost 400 footnotes and an extensive bibliography) chronicles Weschcke’s childhood with his Spiritualist grandfather, his extensive work for the civil rights movement as president of the St. Paul, Minn., NAACP, his own magickal work as a Wiccan high priest and astrologer, his family life with wife Sandra and son Gabe, the growth of Llewellyn Publications, and more.
Melanie Marquis, author of the biography Carl Llewellyn Weschcke: Pioneer & Publisher of Body, Mind & Spirit.
After Weschcke passed away in November 2015, the biography took root in early 2016 at PantheaCon, the annual indoor Pagan festival in San Jose, Calif., where a remembrance was held with numerous attendees from Llewellyn Publications. The book began as a joint project between Marquis and Night Sky, a Pagan writer who had interviewed Weschcke for Witches & Pagans magazine, and who had queried Weschcke for years, requesting to write the publisher’s biography.
Early in the project, Marquis and Night Sky mutually and amiably agreed that she should write the biography alone, but Night Sky, who likewise had been a frequent correspondent with Weschcke, “did provide a good amount of material that made it into the book,” Marquis said. That included Weschcke’s reflections on his “karmic brother” Raymond Buckland, a segment of the Witches & Pagans interview that didn’t make it into the magazine.
Weschcke’s wife Sandra and son Gabe “welcomed me to the Llewellyn offices where they had gathered boxes upon boxes of Carl’s own personal files and things he had kept over the years: many of the speeches he did for the civil rights movement, all kinds of newspaper articles that he had clipped, stuff he had saved going back to the ’50s,” Marquis said.
Did Marquis feel the burden of history as she wrote the Weschcke biography, given that the book likely will be THE document of a very important time and personality in the modern occult/metaphysical/Pagan era?
“I did,” Marquis said. “When I started researching it, I thought ‘Oh, I’m writing a biography about Carl Weschcke, oh he’s so fascinating. I’m sure I’ll find out so much.’ But as I got into it, every bit of his history tied into the history of the larger movement of magick and Paganism. I realized that I wasn’t just writing about Carl – I was writing the history of how it developed in America.
“I started to feel this weird weight like I had to get this information out. Also, with his civil rights work, I was able to document so much stuff about the civil rights movement in the Twin Cities area in particular from 1954 to the mid to late ’60s. Through Carl’s documents I was able to tell that story too.