The film - "American Mystic" and California's Stone City

While I was at Pantheacon last month I had the opportunity to drop in on a workshop featuring the work of some young documentary film makers.  The title of their documentary is AMERICAN MYSTIC. The film is getting good reviews, and was nominated for the World Documentary Feature Competition for 2010, of the The Tribeca Film Festival.

"AMERICAN MYSTIC is a documentary about twenty-somethings, each a member of a fringe religious community, who have separated themselves from mainstream America in order to live immersed in their faiths. The film intertwines very intimate, apolitical portraits of three individuals in depressed areas of the country trying to lead more extraordinary, mystical lives: a Spiritualist in the former revivalist district of upstate New York; a Lakota sundancer in the badlands of South Dakota; and a pagan priestess living off the grid in old mining country in California."
 
The priestess featured in this film is Morpheus Ravenna, who, along with her husband Shannon founded the Stone City Pagan Sanctuary in the mountains near Livermore in California's Bay Area:
 
“Stone City was founded by Morpheus and Shannon on their land in Santa Clara County, California, beginning in 2002. Our purpose is to provide gathering space and facilities for Pagan community events, and permanent sacred spaces dedicated to the Old Gods. Stone City does not serve one single tradition or subset of the community exclusively – our intention is to be available to multiple traditions as a place for gathering, worship and support."
 
NCLC has supported Stone City by planting trees at their site, and our own Glenn Turner is a big booster for them as well. It is, and has been the site for her Ancient Ways Festival for a number of years. This year the festival will take place at Stone City on Wed. May 19 - Sun. May 23, 2010.