Blueberry Festival is coming, and the Anglicans are ready.
The blueberry of our Lord Jesus Christ keep you in everlasting life.
It’s another stab at nature religion of a sort. At least they are acknowledging something outside The Book.
(Photo from Wilmington, Vermont. The painted fiberglass bear is one of those community art projects—something else all together.)
Not one but two Pagans write to the syndicated advice column Annie’s Mailbox to explain that they are not offended when someone offers a Christian blessing at a meal. (Scroll down to the second “Dear Annie.”)
If you really are a polytheist, then Jesus is a god too. Maybe he did not start out as one, but after 2,000 years of being treated as one, he ought to qualify.
Take it away, polytheologians!
Related: “When You Enter a Village, Swear by its Gods.”
But maybe you are just the talking part of a large collection of bacteria.
We continue to be colonized every day of our lives. “Surrounding us and infusing us is this cloud of microbes,” said Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University. We end up with different species, but those species generally carry out the same essential chemistry that we need to survive. One of those tasks is breaking down complex plant molecules. “We have a pathetic number of enzymes encoded in the human genome, whereas microbes have a large arsenal,” said Dr. Gordon.
Don’t miss the part about the fecal transplants. All these health nuts giving themselves high colonics may be going at it backwards, so to speak.
I wonder what religion this Subaru's owner follows. (Colorado Springs, June 2010)
Over at Pagan + Politics the call is for everyone to “out” themselves for the good of the movement or something:
I did notice that those who are in the “come out, come out, where ever you are” camp are becoming more vocal about the need for the majority of us to be more public and open about our faiths. Not that they wish for us to go around saying “Goddess Bless” to everyone while wearing huge Pagan bling, but they do want us to be more unapologetic and matter of fact about our faith. To live our lives in the sunshine, not just by the light of the moon.
What surprises me is the assumption that it’s an all-or-nothing proposition.
In some cases, such as university teaching in some departments, being a faithful follower of any religion brands you as a “anti-intellectual” and a “fanatic,” with a possible exemption for easy-going Reform Jews.
As for family, I have long been “out” to some, while to others I might prefer to say that I just was not the church-going type and preferred to go fishing on Sundays.
And what’s wrong with the light of the moon, anyway?
Youthful black-and-white thinking. Bah, humbug.
The Chateau de Guedelon, currently under construction
The BBC describes an ongoing project in France to build a 13th-century castle using local materials and the tools and techniques of that era.
I am always fascinated by what people learn by building old things in old ways, be they ships (like Tim Severin’s “Brendan boat”) or buildings or whatever.
In the early 17th century, a condemned witch goes to the gallows, saying under her breath an incantation of the Old Religion.
Only the incantation invokes the Virgin Mary, Ave, Regina Caelorum, and the old religion is Roman Catholicism, made virtually synonymous with treason during the reigns of Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and James I of England.
Considerations of treason would go over the heads of the Pendle witches, however, a group of mostly poor rural women in northern England caught up in an atmosphere of religious turmoil and fear of invasion from Catholic Spain.
Based on court trial records, Mary Sharratt’s Daughters of the Witching Hill tells a generational family story of “cunning women,” folk healers in a popular Catholic tradition (like Mexican curanderas) whose conduct becomes criminalized after the “stripping of the altars” and the destruction of popular Catholicism in the mid-1500s.
In a way that reminds me a bit of some of Mary Stewart’s work, Sharratt follows three generations of women struggling with poverty and seeking the doubled-edged respect and fear of being capable of healing—and thus also of cursing.
To be honest [says Bess Southerns, the grandmother] I didn’t give a toss about the Pope in Rome or any plots in faraway lands, but I yearned for the sense of sanctity and protection that hung over us then [before the Protestant Reformation], the talk of miracles and wonders, a prayer and a saint to ward us from every ill and the solace of the Blessed Mother. Now we’d been left to stand stark and unshielded, to bear whatever cruel lot Providence cast our way.
When Bess, also known as Mother Demdike, risks teaching the making of clay images to a friend’s daughter, Annie, the girl responds, “Are you saying that anyone who moulds clay might work witchcraft, Mother Demdike? Then there’d scarely be a landlord left alive.”
Whatever we might say about the talk of familiar spirits appearing as dogs and boys that the accused witches revealed at their trial, Sharratt treats these as real elements of the plot, giving the story a Gothic edge that moves it beyond the Christian world and suggests why today’s English Witches might still look back four hundred years and wonder just what was happening in Lancashire.
This publisher’s video “trailer” lets you see the novel’s physical setting.
Via Bayou Renaissance Man (a former Catholic priest): an entire cosmology invented and/or syncretized and/or revealed by homeless kids in Miami.
The homeless children’s chief ally is a beautiful angel they have nicknamed the Blue Lady. She has pale blue skin and lives in the ocean, but she is hobbled by a spell. “The demons made it so she only has power if you know her secret name,” says Andre, whose mother has been through three rehabilitation programs for crack addiction. “If you and your friends on a corner on a street when a car comes shooting bullets and only one child yells out her true name, all will be safe. Even if bullets tearing your skin, the Blue Lady makes them fall on the ground. She can talk to us, even without her name. She says: ‘Hold on.’”
….
Folktales are usually an inheritance from family or homeland. But what if you are a child enduring a continual, grueling, dangerous journey? No adult can steel such a child against the outcast’s fate: the endless slurs and snubs, the threats, the fear. What these determined children do is snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, TV news, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers, and like birds building a nest from scraps, weave their own myths. The “secret stories” are carefully guarded knowledge, never shared with older siblings or parents for fear of being ridiculed — or spanked for blasphemy. But their accounts of an exiled God who cannot or will not respond to human pleas as his angels wage war with Hell is, to shelter children, a plausible explanation for having no safe home, and one that engages them in an epic clash.
The reporter sees these “myths” as a response to the kids’ social distress. But do they also reveal an underlying predilection for a sort of cobbled-together Gnosticism?
Via The Wild Hunt, a story of another Anglican priest with an attraction to Druidism.
I’m actually a priest of the Church of England – but with a difference. Though I’m still in “holy orders”, I now work full time as a magician, writer and retreat leader. I’ve been described as a “priest at the edge”. My latest book, The Path of the Blue Raven, describes my own encounters with the Pagan traditions of this land and what great treasures I’ve learned from them.
He probably will not end up losing his day job, unlike his American counterpart William Melnyk.
I don’t think anyone in the Church of England cares that much. The hierarchy is probably just happy to see signs of life. Or even compulsory parish archery practice.
Some people just cannot handle the solstice. (The Telegraph, UK)
It wasn’t this bad. On Sunday M. and I went up to Salida, Colorado, to catch the last day of FIBArk, the whitewater boating festival, watching competitors come down the frothing Arkansas River as we drove upstream.
Our main interest was in the Crazy River Dogs event, which we have managed to attend for three of the last four years.
In this photo, the brown dog will be pursuing the aspen pole at upper left as it bobs through a rapid in the downtown Salida kayakers’ water park.
A "river dog" leaps into the Arkansas River after a flying aspen stick.
FIBArk, like the solsticial doings at Stonehenge—I found the first picture in this slide show—marks our beginning of high summer.
To me the quarter days of solstices and equinoxes are “outer” festivals. They should be celebrated with public festivities, whether those festivities are capital-P Pagan or not. Food booths in the park, paddle-flailing kayakers, swimming dogs, the Sun beating down—it’s all good.
The cross-quarter days are for magic.
If I were still teaching magazine writing, I would be sending students to this blog (which I found on Rod Dreher’s blog).
What a great feature-writing idea, albeit in blog form. (Which all goes to show how publishing is changing, &c. &c., and I am glad not to have to be the one to explain it all.)
In essence, high-school senior Jamie Kelles is attempting to live her life according to the dictates of Seventeen magazine—and blogging about it at The Seventeen Magazine Project.
At one point she realizes that a majority of the mag’s “hot guys of summer” are “associated with a vampire franchise.”
Must be super weird for devoted Seventeen readers when they finally follows all the tips, achieve the perfect tan and “healthy” sun-kissed glow, and then realizes that the ultimate Hot Guy of Summer is just a sexed-up, long-haired version a of pale, nocturnal Xbox gamer .
And then there is more about the senior prom, &c. &c.
If you want more on the literary history of vampires, Michael Sims assesses it in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
So, wondering how I would find a new angle on vampire stories, I said yes. Anthologizing is a dusty sport, half antique hunting and half literary gossipfest, and I love it. I went home and prowled my shelves and realized how many of the Victorian-era stories I had already read. Why, here’s that pasty-faced bastard Lord Ruthven, by Byron’s doctor and hanger-on, John Polidori, and so obviously based upon Byron himself. Here is Théophile Gautier’s crazy priest, in love with a vampire courtesan and wrestling with his naughty soul. And there were many stories I hadn’t read before—gay vampires, child vampires, even an invisible vampire.
