Ashes among the stones

Solstice is passing, but I have one more Stonehenge post, courtesy of the prolific and hardworking Graham Harvey. It is the abstract of a paper he published last year in the journal Mortality, titled “Endo-cannibalism in the making of a recent British ancestor.” (Volume 9, No. 3, August 2004, pp. 255-67).

Following his death in 1975, the ashes of Wally Hope, founder of Stonehenge People’s Free Festival, were scattered in the centre of Stonehenge. When a child tasted the ashes the rest of the group followed this lead. In the following decades, as the festival increasingly became the site of contest about British heritage and culture, the story of Wally’s ashes was told at significant times. His name continues to be invoked at gatherings today. This paper discusses these events as ‘the making of an ancestor’, and explores wider contexts in which they might be understood. These include Druidic involvement in the revival of cremation, Amazonian bone-ash endo-cannibalism, and popular means of speaking of and to dead relatives. In addition to considering the role of ‘ancestors’ in contemporary Britain, the paper contributes to considerations of ‘ancestry’ as a different way of being dead, of a particular moment in the evolution of an alternative religious neo-tribal movement, of the meanings of ‘cannibalism’, and of the ways in which human remains might be treated by the bereaved and by various other interested parties.

A tip of the pointy hat to Doug Ezzy.

Celebrating the wrong solstice

In Britain, it’s time for media coverage of the summer solstice mob at Stonehenge and elsewhere, but some archaeologists think that today’s Pagans and friends are celebrating the wrong solstice.

It’s all in the pig bones, you see.

The Telegraph newspaper editorializes,”And so this multicultural nanny [English Heritage] appointed by Parliament to nurse our stocks and stones takes a leading place in the summer solstice industry.” (Registration may be required.)

Meanwhile, some of the preservation organization’s staff think this is the perfect time for a job action.

What’s wrong with this picture?

I will be going to a Pagan festival this weekend, but sometimes I wonder about my fellow nature-religionists.

The site is a campground at more than 8,000 feet elevation; the date is the weekend before the solstice with a forecast of mostly sunny weather.

And then the organizers announce “at the Sun’s zenith . . .an adult-only sky-clad optional drawing down of the Sun.”

My contribution to the ritual will be a partially full box of tubes of ex-Deutsche Bundeswehr Sonnenschutzcreme. If it’s good enough for Hans und Fritz, maybe it will save you all from looking like the sunburn scene in A River Runs Through It.

A friend in California today was telling me of recent rituals in the Berkeley and Sacramento areas, with authentically (?) costumed Druids red-faced and on the verge of heatstroke thanks to their wool garments.

People, people, people, if you are going to practice nature religion, you have to adapt to where you are in actuality, not where you are in your fantasies.

It was not Pagans, however, who organized this weekend’s Cañon City, Colo., “Gaelic Festival,” although some Pagans whom I know plan to attend.

I lived in Cañon City for six years. It’s an outlier of the Chihuahuan Desert. The summers are blistering. And I expect that people will be affecting Scots dress with lots and lots of wool. Maybe the smart ones will stay indoors, drinking in air-conditioned bars.

What says ‘Pagan Studies’ to you?

Now that my editor has the latest revision of Her Hidden Children on his desk, he is finally ready to talk about cover designs. But what kind of cover is right for a Pagan Studies book?

Designers seem to go one of these ways:

1. A standing stone, as in Michael York’s Pagan Theology.

2. A crowd of Pagans, as in the one edition of Drawing Down the Moon that showed a festival at the Stonehenge replica in Washington state, or as in Researching Paganisms, on the right of your screen.

3. A flowing-haired young female Witch with sword or athame, as on Susan Greenwood’s Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld, not to mention quite a few others.

4. A close-up photo: Greenwood’s Nature of Magic got a much better photographic treatment.

5. A row of cryptic symbols that are not explained, as on Graham Harvey’s and my The Paganism Reader, which apparently signifies spiritual diversity.

6. A Pagan-looking illustration, as in Wendy Griffin’s anthology Daughters of the Goddess.

7. A tree, something like the oak on the Pagan Studies consultation site.

8. About twenty years ago, I self-published a collection called Nine Apples: A Neopagan Anthology (sorry, no Web link). Its cover was a photographic still life: a stoneware chalice, a gleaming athame, and nine apples, one sliced to show the “star”. I still like it, but perhaps it is a little too static.

9. A shot of the Moon amid ragged clouds–but my editor does not wish to make an association to the Llewellyn Publications logo!

At least it’s fun to brainstorm this one.

June 13th

Happy birthday, William Butler Yeats. Happy birthday, Gerald B. Gardner. Happy birthday, me; and I’m going to take fly rod and float tube and go annoy some trout, so no more blogging today.

6-6-06

It really does not matter to me whether Jesus of Nazareth existed or not.

But it is clever from a marketing point of view that the same director who made that movie plans to release one called The Beast on June 6, 2006, “about a Christian girl who discovers evidence that Jesus Christ never existed.”

I wonder who else is eying the same release date.

Druid Heights

Erik Davis posts a chapter of his upcoming book Visionary State on the Marin County (Calif.) community of Druid Heights.

The Heights was and is one of those rare places that is known but not known. It was the site of hundreds of amazing parties over the last fifty years and yet remained tucked beneath some freaky beatnik cone of silence, its muddy dirt road still unmarked on many maps.

There is a current of California bohemianism with strong Pagan overtones going back to at least the 1930s, but it was “under the radar” until the 1960s with the emergence of Feraferia and the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn, to name just two groups. I cover some of these “paradisical” Pagans in my own book–which finally was re-sent to the publisher this week, hurray–but one of my next projects will be further investigation of American Pagan movements that predate the arrival of Gardnerian books in the USA. The books, in fact, arrived about a decade before actual Gardnerian Witches and had as much or more impact.

Revision

It is hard to think about blogging right now. I am halfway through a book re-revision, the outcome of this unfortunate episode. And I am backed up on reading papers for The Pomegranate, but at least that backlog means that papers are coming in. My goal is to finish the revision before leaving for the one local festival that M. and I do attend, right before the solstice.

Meanwhile, count on Jason Pitzl-Waters for current events in Pagandom.

After the festival: rework the flying-ointment paper for AAR and start another one on pre-Gardnerian Paganism in the United States, which is a murky area indeed.

Here’s that meme again

A New York Times story on the Rites of Spring Pagan festival (login required) quotes two contemporary scholars of Paganism, Helen Berger and Sabina Magliocco on, among other things, the numbers of American Pagans.

Ms. Magliocco favors the higher number [700,000] based on data like surveys, sales of books with pagan themes and attendance at festivals. She said, “Paganism is one of the fastest-growing religious movements in North America.”

The article also discusses the growth of Pagan festivals, which began in hotels in the early 1970s, modeled very much on the science-fiction fan “cons” of the time, and sometimes even with “con” in their names.

I believe the first big outdoor festival was in 1980–the Pan-Pagan festival. If not, they started around then.

The outdoor revival meeting is a theme in American religious history–think of the “brush arbors” of the 19th century–but the growth of a religion through widespread festivals may indeed by something new. When a covener of ours came back from one of the first national festivals in the early 1980s with a new group of songs and chants to share, it was like seeing something sprout before your very eyes.