Author Archives: Chas S. Clifton

Anthropologist Describes Rebirth of Mongolian Shamanism

A news release from the MIT News Office carries the subhead, “MIT anthropologist finds that after Soviet domination, a rebirth of shamanism helped Mongolia rewrite its own history.”

The release continues,

In 1990, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, Mongolia, long a satellite of the U.S.S.R., regained its independence. Socialism was out and free markets returned. Religion — in the form of Buddhism, shamanism, and other folk religions — became officially accepted again in Mongolian society. That, in turn, produced another unexpected change: The return of shamans, religious figures who claim to have a supernatural ability to connect with the souls of the dead.

Indeed, as MIT anthropologist Manduhai Buyandelger chronicles in a new book, the revival of shamanism has shaped Mongolia in surprising ways in the last two decades. From storefronts in Ulan Bator, the nation’s capital, to homes in rural Mongolia, shamanism has become a growth industry.

Read the rest here, it’s good.

If you see the 2009 documentary The Horse Boy, about an autistic boy whose parents take him to Mongolia for shamanic treatment, there is a fair amount of restored shamanism there.

Who Ruined Hoodoo?

Katrina Hazzard-Donald, Mojo Workin’: The Old African American Hoodoo System (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013) 248 pp., photos, index, $85 (cloth), $28 (paper), ebook available.

 

Hazzard-Donald teaches anthropology and sociology at Rutgers University-Camden. She is herself an initiate into the Orisha religion, but this is not a work of  ethnography or autoethnography.

Her notes list some conversations with informants — rootworkers, etc., but Mojo Workin’ is based more on published sources, many from the 1890s–1920s, than on systematic fieldwork, apparently.  She saves descriptions of eight informants, including two fellow academics, for the book’s end, rarely quoting them in the text by name.

She divides American hoodoo into two (mainly) chronological categories: (1) Old Tradition “Black Belt” Hoodoo, as practiced in the South from slavery days up until the “great migration” to Northern cities, and (2) “Snake oil” or “marketeered” hoodoo, which is more commercial.

Practitioners of traditional hoodoo collected their own herbs, diagnosed clients, and participated in a “hoodoo complex” that she describes as “folk religion” that “integrated psychological support, spiritual direction, physical strength, and medicinal treatment.”

This she contrasts with the “exploitive” second version, the hoodoo of “curio shop” and candle shops, dream books, ads for “Sister This” and “Mother That” in magazines and newspapers catering to black readers, and Internet sellers of hoodoo supplies, mojo bags, etc. And who is behind this “snake oil” hoodoo? The Jews.

“Outsiders,” these businessmen — such as Morton Neumann (Valmor Co.), who also produced cosmetics for the African-American market or Morris Shapiro and Joseph Menke of Memphis, founders of Keystone Laboratories — are accused of seeking “unchallenged control of the Hoodoo supply market” and to “shut out blacks.”

Today’s Internet-based supply businesses, such as Lucky Mojo (whose owner, Cat Yronwode, happens to be Jewish), receive her particular scorn. According to one end note, Hazard-Donald tried to interview Yronwode by telephone, flaunting her Orisha credentials, and got the brush-off, which made her furious.

I have some problems with such neat dichotomies — old hoodoo good, “marketeered” hoodoo bad. Real people cross such boundaries, and even the author admits that “some old tradition [root] workers have succumbed to pressure to use at least some commercial supplies.”

But is “succumb” the right verb? Any folklore scholar could tell you that the line between “traditional” and “commercial” is thin and mutable.  Hazzard-Donald, for example, makes much of the Sanctified black church’s traditional Ring Shout’s connection with African religion. Here, for instance, is a self-consciously folkloric Ring Shout, while here is one whose participants were trying for a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. Authentic? Staged? Commercial?

But my chief interest in Mojo Workin’ was as someone interested in esoteric, magical, and underground American religion. As an insider, Hazzard-Donald’s authorial viewpoint is both emic and “curatorial,” for she sees her book as a step toward a Hoodoo revival as it becomes “a healthy and rebounding supplemental spiritual system.”

She treats “religion” as a self-evident category, uncritically describing hoodoo as “religion” even after the “death of the gods,” that historical point (somewhere before 1740, but the paragraph is confusing) at which the cultus of the African gods had ceased. (In North America, that is, where a predominately Protestant society and smaller plantation sizes worked against the kind of African-Catholic syncretism that occurred, for instance, on the big sugar plantations of Brazil, Cuba, etc.)

Given that most definitions of “religion” are based on scriptural and credal traditions — and hoodoo is neither — I would have liked to see how it fits a category of “religion” even when blended with the Sanctified churches, as when psalms become incantations to accompany a working or when, as Hazzard-Donald describes, yesterday’s conjure man becomes today’s charismatic preacher.

“System” or “religion” — how do we talk about these things? Hoodoo, like polytheism and animism, challenges our ideas of what “religion” is?

A New History of the Craft in America

When I wrote Her Hidden Children, I definitely was not trying to tell the history of different groups, except in broad strokes and as that history helped the discussion of the larger questions that interested me, chiefly, “What do we mean by the term ‘nature religion’?”

Thanks to his earlier experiences with reference books on new religious movements, Aidan Kelly, one of the founders of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn (a spoofy name that stuck) in the 1960s Northern California, is better able to do it.

He has released the first book of what he hopes to be three, A Tapestry of Witches, Vol. 1, which is available on Amazon.

He writes on his blog,

I was an active participant in many of the events and developments I describe, but I have tried to tone down the autobiographical details by unobstrusive (I hope) use of passive constructions and third person. Still, one reason the book is accurate is that I have first-hand knowledge of the decade from 1967 to 1977. However, I also as much as possible worked in information from letter, emails, and interviews that my friends shared with me. I have not ignored the Big Name Pagans–I couldn’t; many of them did much of the work, many were and are good friends–but I have also tried to give due credit to the many who worked hard without ever receiving public acclaim.

Having drawn on his earlier history of NROOGD’s beginnings, Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches, I look forward to reading the new book very much.

The Pagan Census Keeps Counting

Helen Berger, co-author of Voices from the Pagan Census (2003) is currently working on a new version of the survey. A multi-year survey like hers offers more information than a one-time “snapshot.”

Working with another quantitative scholar of Paganism, Jim Lewis, she has put together a new survey with new questions: the “Pagan Census Revisited II.” It runs on Survey Monkey, and you can take it at that link. This version has basic demographic questions plus some on spiritual experiences.

With the Australian scholar Doug Ezzy she has written “Witchcraft: Changing Patterns of Participation in the Early Twenty-first Century,” published in The Pomegranate in 2009. (Abstract and link here.)

There, That’s Done, Almost. Also John Cowper Powys

Ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, destroyed at the orders of Henry VIII (Wikimedia Commons).

Where did the week go?

It seems like setting up the AAR sessions — two solo for Contemporary Pagan Studies, two co-sponsored, and one “quad” (four sponsors) — that plus a little snow, some fire department maintenance work, and some chainsaw issues that don’t belong here totally exhausted all my psychic energy. Just need to line up one more panel respondent.

When it is completed, I will publish the line-up of papers.

For refuge, I have fled to Glastonbury, not the real town but a close relative, John Cowper Powys’ massive novel A Glastonbury Romance.

As the explorer/writer Lawrence Millman said in a 2000 Atlantic piece, “One doesn’t read Powys so much as enlist in him.” (Of course, if you read all of A Song of Fire and Ice, you have “enlisted” in George R. R. Martin. Most people watch the TV series.)

This is all the fault of Carole Cusack, who in a recent blog interview on Albion Calling pronounced that “the entire oeuvre of John Cowper Powys should be of crucial interest to contemporary Pagans, but I suspect that he is almost unread these days, to everyone’s detriment, not just the Pagans.”

I took that as a challenge, and the helpful inter-library loan librarian quickly produced not just A Glastonbury Romance (1933) but Powys’ Autobiography (1934), which I read first. I could write more about the Autobiography. It’s frank enough, but repetitious — a good editor could have cut it by 40 percent without cutting meat. To quote Millman,

It is a record not of Powys’s achievements but of his various inadequacies. In it he described his manias and phobias, his “idiotic” mouth and “Neanderthal pate,” and particularly his sexual failures. He discussed “the sickening moments of dead sea desolation that came to me from my ulcerated stomach” and his chronic constipation. He called himself a “scarecrow Don Quixote with the faint heart of Sancho.” And yet the mood of the Autobiography is not gloomy or self-pitying. After all, this book was written by a man who treasured being “ill-constituted.”

I was surprised, therefore, how good A Glastonbury Romance is, if you are willing to give it time. Robert Altman would have struggled to direct a hypothetical movie version, there are so many interlaced stories going on.

Some of them are pure soap opera: Will Sam admit that he is the father of Nell’s baby? Will John and Mary be happily married even though they are first cousins? Will Mad Bet’s magical working against Mary destroy her marriage? Will the Communists destroy Philip’s factory? What is the nature of the esoteric books that Sam is getting from Owen the Welsh antiquary? And what is the Holy Grail?

Add the (feeble) influence of the dead, the palpable influence of The Past, the wind that blow through people’s dreams, and the all-out astral-plane battles between different factions trying to determine the future of Glastonbury. It’s really quite complex.

You might say that I have enlisted and will see it through to the end.

This is how the [blank] see me

I copied this from a friend's Facebook feed. I don't know where it started. This is the Internetz.

I copied this from a friend’s Facebook feed. I don’t know where it started. This is the Internetz.

In the middle of working out Contemporary Pagan Studies Group sessions and co-sponsored sessions for next November’s American Academy of Religion annual meeting.

So far this has taken hundred of emails—so it goes—and a phone call this morning from Norway. Landlines still have their place.

It feels so good to accept a proposal; and it is hard writing the rejection notices. Some people just feel that they have to dazzle you with theory and a document that sounds more like a book proposal. Dude, you have twenty minutes!

Others—and this is more insidious—seem to mistake the AAR for Pantheacon or some other Pagan gathering. We are not there for theological discourse. (Nevertheless, some people evident are there for that, and here is a take-down of them.) No crypto-theology/thealogy, please.

And I hate to read proposals where the writer already has a conclusion but has not done any research yet. Please leave some space for serendipity and the thrill of discovery, or why are you doing this?

Back to the Neolithic: Building a British Long Barrow

Interior with shelves for cremations (BBC).

Some “experiential archaeology” — yes, it will hold the cremated remains of modern people.

“It’s strange really. We haven’t built a long barrow for 5,000 years, but then about six weeks ago we had another enquiry for one.

“They want a burial chamber built in central London to hold some art.

“They’re like London buses. You don’t get one for 5,000 years and then all of a sudden two come at once.”

‘Cosmos’ Misrepresents Giordano Bruno

Neil Degrasse Tyson’s remake of Cosmos tries to remake Giordano Bruno as a martyr of modern science, but he was nothing of the kind.

He was a lot more of an occultist. Even The Daily Beast gets it.

As Discover magazine’s Corey Powell pointed out, the philosophers of the 16th century weren’t anything like scientists in the modern sense. Bruno, for instance, was a “pandeist,” which is the belief that God had transformed himself into all matter and ceased to exist as a distinct entity in himself. He believed in all sort of magic and spirits, and extrapolated those views far beyond his ideas about the infinity of the universe. In contrast to contemporaries who drew more modest conclusions from their similar ideas, Bruno agitated for an elaborate counter-theology, and was (unlike the poor, humble outcast portrayed in Cosmos) supported by powerful royal benefactors. The church didn’t even have a position on whether the Earth orbited the sun, and didn’t bring it up at Bruno’s trial. While the early-modern religious persecution certainly can’t be denied, Bruno was killed because he flamboyantly denied basic tenets of the Catholic faith, not because religious authorities were out to suppress all “freedom of thought.”

The ‘Pentecostal Drift’ and Modern Paganism

Religion blogger Peter Berger, melding articles from  The Tablet (Roman Catholic) and The Christian Century (mainline Protestant) notes “the major demographic shift in world Christianity—the fact that more Christians now live in the Global South: Asia, Africa, Latin America—than in the old Christian homelands of Europe and North America.”

With this shift goes huge growth in Pentecostal Christianity—Protestant churches emphasizing ecstatic worship and the “gifts of the Holy Spirit,” such as speaking in tongues and faith-healing. (The modern Pentecostal movement began in Los Angeles in 1906—the same month as the great San Francisco earthquake and fire. Some of them see a connection.)

In 1970 Pentecostals were 5% of world Christians; today the figure is 25%! 80% of Christian converts in Asia are Pentecostal! I’m not quite clear how this arithmetic is worked out, but the Christian Century story asserts that one of twelve people alive today is Pentecostal! Not surprisingly, the [recent Pentecostal World Conference] in Kuala Lumpur was “young, vibrant and confident”. No stepping around quietly so as not to offend Muslim sensitivities!

There is, for example, major competition between (often Pentecostal) Christians and Muslims for conversions in sub-Saharan Africa. Sometimes it is bloody—see the recent news from Nigeria and the Central African Republic, for example. Some conflicts that are not religious on the surface become divided on religious lines.

So what is the Pagan angle? For one, Pentecostal Christians (and many Muslims) see the world as a scene of spiritual warfare. (See, for instance, “Saudi Arabia’s War on Witchcraft.”) Both groups battle demons and “demonic” practitioners.  Consequently, followers of traditional animist/polythestic religions as well as new Pagans are going to continue to be targeted.

If you are reading this, chances are that you live in a culture where the notions of religious freedom and individual religious choice have at least some weight. But from a global perspective, isn’t that a minority view — no matter how many interfaith congresses and parliaments there are?

I am all for religious freedom, but much of the world has a very limited idea as to what that means.

LAP Lambert and the “Book-Mill Iceberg”

Slate contributor Joseph Stromberg chronicles his trip through “the shadowy, surreal world of an academic book mill.”

The bloggers and academics who’d written these posts had gotten emails virtually identical to mine and wrote about how the company obtained the rights to tens of thousands of theses, dissertations, and other unpublished works for essentially nothing; sold copies of them as books to unsuspecting online buyers (who assumed they were purchasing proofed, edited work); and kept essentially 100 percent of the proceeds. LAP Lambert, I learned, is the print equivalent of a content farm: a clearinghouse for texts that generate tiny amounts of revenue simply by turning up in search and appearing to be legitimate, published works.

So, naturally, I replied to Holmes, telling her I was interested in hearing more.

It’s a marriage of content-scraping and tax-evasion, by the sound of it. Certainly there is evasion of paying royalties. And this:

Some naive academics think publishing will add cachet to their C.V., but they find that having the Lambert name on it is an embarrassment.

Authors in the developing world may be the most easily exploited, thinking that they are being published by a prestigious German house. And like all vanity presses, this one makes some of its money by selling copies to the books’ authors.