When Her Hidden Children came out last summer, I enjoyed about two months of happiness over that, but now it is time to get going on something else.

I started research for an historical novel, and I still mean to write it, once I figure out the rhythm of fiction-writing. Publication, if ever, would be a long way away, however.

And there was a plan for another scholarly book, but my editor at Rowman & Littlefield poured cold water on that idea, mainly because it sort of fell between two horses from a marketing perspective.

I have not abandoned the idea though, and I mean to talk with him at AAR-SBL next week.

That leaves some book reviews that I need to do for Nova Religio. As I tell my students, when you don’t have anything else going on, reviewing keeps your mind and your fingers moving.

If you came here for content today, then, there is not much to be found–unless you look at some of the excellent bloggers over on the right side of your screen.

I like living where I do. I like going down to the old schoolhouse to vote in a building where time seems to have stopped about 1950 (except in two classrooms that are now a library).

I like seeing the election judges whom I otherwise might meet only at the post office, since the cafe closed and I obviously don’t attend the community church.

“Hi, Irene. How’ve you been, Alden?”

But after today, no more.

We used to vote on paper ballots that were marked and then fed into a scanner. With three or four booths and only a couple of hundred voters in the precinct, lines were always short. Go in, get registration checked, vote, grab coffee and cookie, and out.

But this year the county went to electronic machines. The machine works great–but that is machine, singular. County funds are short. Our precinct gets one machine, and this year’s Colorado ballot is a long one crammed with referenda and initiatives.

Poll workers estimated 10 minutes per voter. I know that I was faster than that, but still, it was 8:20 a.m. and I was only voter number 12. (Polls open at 7 a.m., but they had some trouble getting the voting computer going, they said.)

M. stopped on her way to work mid-morning when the congestion was supposed to be less, and instead it was worse. She eventually gave up. Sorry, Congressman Salazar, that’s one less for you.

After today, I resolve to vote early at the courthouse or else by absentee ballot. I will miss Alden, Irene, and the free cookies. I will miss the little civic ritual of climbing the steps of the old schoolhouse, ready to commit democracy.

Cross-posted to Nature Blog.

I was half-listening to an ABC News story last night about Chinese billionaires (and now I cannot find any link on their site. Help!) that mentioned one man whose mansion had something like a mosaic of images of Mao Zedong.

The reporter seemed bemused, since Chairman Mao (1893-1976) was after all a Communist.

Coincidentally, I was reading Jordan Paper’s The Deities are Many: A Polytheistic Theology where he writes of visiting China in the late 1980s:

[At that time] a new deity of wealth was needed, one that would be effective in the new economy. Who was the most powerful dead not yet with a divine specialization? Why, Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) of course! Small icons of his image, with a plastic version of a Chinese gold ingot hanging from it, were on sale everywhere. They were variously hung, such as from automobile rear view mirrors, including government vehicles. When I asked a bureaucrat, a member of the Communist Party, why it was hanging there, the answer was succint: “Ta shi shen” (He’s a Deity.)

The old Greeks had a word for it.

Via law professor Ann Althouse, thoughts on a case with a Pagan twist, although she does not approach it that way.

I am waiting for the blogging devadasi to weigh in. If she does, I will link to her.

UPDATE: I knew that Kama would have something to say.

A medievalist takes on the “Christians stole all the Pagan festivals” meme.

So the juxtaposition of Samhain and All Saints Day is just that – a juxtaposition, not an adoption or adaptation by the Church of a pre-existing Celtic holiday, unless you want to think that there were Celtic pagans living in central Italy in the early 8th century celebrating Samhain.

Ah, but it’s so hard to stop the basic religious outbidding of “Our festival is older than yours, nyah nyah nyah.”

Dianne Sylvan blogged recently on the lack of advanced Wicca books.

The problem is partly the lack of a definition, she notes, asking also,

How many books have you seen on how to live as a Wiccan when life sucks? How to face life’s worst moments and most difficult challenges? Where are the books on surviving grief, abuse, and loss and still maintaining your faith as a Wiccan? How to bring your entire life in alignment with your values, and how Wicca influences those values, or should? How, if everything is sacred, every choice we make from what to eat to what shoes to buy is an expression of our spiritual beliefs?

For my part, I have often wondered at the paucity of Wiccan autobiography in this country compared even to the UK’s modest offerings. There might possibly be a connection.

Tag: Wicca

Coverage of this year’s Spiral Dance in California, with goddess masks by Lauren Raine.

Read more at Broomstick Chronicles.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3,Part 4, Part 5

Everything that we thought we knew about Celtic culture is probably wrong.

But there is still language, right? If “Celtic” is not a genetic code, and it’s not a spirituality, at least there are Celtic languages: Gaulish, Cornish, British-leading-to-Welsh, Irish and Scots Gaelic, right?

Yes, but who was speaking them? Maybe only a minority, not the whole population of the British Isles before the Roman invasion or, following that, before the Anglo-Saxon invasions. Maybe there was no “genocide.”

Read this article by the British anthropologist Stephen Oppenheimer and prepare to have your preconceptions exploded.

Some excerpts:

The orthodox view of the origins of the Celts turns out to be an archaeological myth left over from the 19th century. Over the past 200 years, a myth has grown up of the Celts as a vast, culturally sophisticated but warlike people from central Europe, north of the Alps and the Danube, who invaded most of Europe, including the British Isles, during the iron age, around 300 BC.

. . . . But who were those Ancient Britons left in England to be slaughtered when the legions left? The idea that the Celts were eradicated—culturally, linguistically and genetically—by invading Angles and Saxons derives from the idea of a previously uniformly Celtic English landscape. But the presence in Roman England of some Celtic personal and place-names doesn’t mean that all ancient Britons were Celts or Celtic-speaking.

There is so much more. I could end up excerpting the whole article. One more:

A picture thus emerges of the dark-ages invasions of England and northeastern Britain as less like replacements than minority elite additions, akin to earlier and larger Neolithic intrusions from the same places. There were battles for dominance between chieftains, all of Germanic origin, each invader sharing much culturally with their newly conquered indigenous subjects.

And they were cheeseheads.

A leading anthopology blogger comments favorably.

So, realistically, Americans who fancy themselves “Celts” should be heading for Elko, Nevada, for the big Basque festival

But wait, there is more!

Tags: Celts, Celtic spirituality

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

While they wanted to present Wicca as the indigenous religion of Britain, the founders of contemporary Witchcraft were not so much caught up in the “Celtic” mythos. Some, in fact, favored the Saxon.

By the 1970s, however, “cardiac Celts” were everywhere. Writers such as John Sharkey formulated a magickal Celtic mythos: his book Celtic Mysteries was at the top of my first coven’s reading list. It had all the pieces of “Celtic” special-ness, including “Celtic Christianity” but also a great deal about the Triple Goddess, whose explication owes more to the genius of Robert Graves than to any Iron Age Celtic poem.

Needless to say, my fellow Witches and I were reading Graves’ The White Goddess along with Celtic Mysteries. Since Sharkey’s ideas of Celtic Paganism were largely derived from Graves, correlating the two was easy.

All “Celtic Paganism” owes a huge debt to Graves, since before he came along, the only Celtic Pagans getting any attention were the Druids, and there was no Goddess religion there!

Tags: Celts, Celtic spirituality

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

There is no gene for “Celtic,” and, as we have seen (if you followed the links), “Celtic culture” is largely an invention of the late 18th and 19th centuries–created by the English and/or of Welsh, Irish, and other tradition-inventors who went to London to make the culture scene.

Those might include James Macpherson, creator of the allegedly ancient Scottish “Ossian” poems in the 1760s, and Edward “Iolo Morganwg” Williams, creator of allegedly ancient Welsh literature and key figure in the Druidic revial. (See also “fakelore”.)

Williams’ “Druidic” planes of existence–Annwn, Abred, Ceugant,and Gwynfyd–made it into Robert Cochrane’s Witchcraft tradition, oddly enough.

Then you have the translators and “improvers” of ancient literature, such as Lady Charlotte Guest, who produced the version of the Mabinogion that most people know. Evangeline Walton’s novelized version was on my first coven’s reading list, and it was treated like holy scripture.

In 1890s Ireland, the Anglo-Irish poet William Yeats and his unrequited love, Maude Gonne, stoked themselves on translated Iron Age epic poems and even tried creating a magickal order based on “Celtic” themes as against the more Kabbalistic Golden Dawn, of which Yeats was a member.

By the 1920s, the Irish writer James Joyce would refer to the whole anti-modern and backward-looking “Celtic Twilight” literary renaissance as the “cultic twalette.” Maude Gonne, of course, “took it to the streets” in the build-up to the 1916 Easter Rising and never went back to “Celtic” ceremonial magic.

Tags: Celts, Celtic spirituality