It’s Time for my Winter Coat . . .

. . . at the Beltania festival, where the temperature is about 45° F with rain now and again.

I spent the morning at one of the volunteer fire department’s monthly training day, helping more people become familiar with the whole process of drafting water from a  creek (hydrants? we don’t need no stinking hydrants) and pumping it into our two 2,500-gallon summer storage tanks (in case the creek goes dry).

Then off to the festival, not too far away, successfully negotiating the Pagan equivalent of the TSA. Merchants Row seemed sort of forlorn — no one was buying all the colorful gauzy garments, for some odd reason. Even those who sometimes swelter under the Colorado sun while dressed for the Scottish Highlands  were wearing extra coats today.

But once the dogs are fed we will go back for the concerts — if the rain holds off.

Pagan festivals are becoming more “tribal” in one sense: you can have people doing some kind of ritual thingie while right next to it, folks are feeding their faces, drinking wine from the bottle, braiding feathers into the air, slouching around like bored teenagers if in fact they are teenagers, and just starting into the warming fires. It’s not like you have to be all churchy and attentive.

POST-CONCERT UPDATE: M. and I had to miss some of the Saturday night music, but we did hear at times the Orpheus: the Pagan Chamber Choir of Colorado, a little of S.J Tucker, Forest of Azure, and Sharon Knight and Pandemonaeon. All good. And Pandemonaeon cleared the skies before midnight—can’t beat that.

 

Pentagram Pizza for May 1

Four toppings this evening. . .

• This made me laugh.

• Some occult-cult films from the past reviewed by Peg Aloi.

• Teaching a course in “world religions” is not as simple as it looks, once you start sorting out “religion,” “religious,” and questions of group identity.

• In the “Finding a God” chapter of Triumph of the Moon, Ronald Hutton describes the rise of Pan in Victorian literature. Sometimes he personified an idealized countryside while at others he was “a battering-ram against respectability.” He appears in America during that period too — this time as sculpture.

A Professional Writer’s Approach to the Job

Kathy Shaidle is not the first person to say that the successful writer is not necessarily the most talented writer, but in this post at PJ Lifestyle she offers some guidance for being a successful freelancer.

One of the reasons I’m a freelance writer is that, frankly, I don’t “play well with others.” I am too introverted, tactless, demanding, opinionated, and “masculine” to fit in with today’s feminized workplace — a pink and purple extravaganza of giggling, weekly birthday parties, crying-in-the-bathroom, “diversity training,” “team building,” and boring baby pictures/anecdotes — everything, it seems, except actual work.

And today, “fitting in” with the company “culture” (of bridal showers and non-stop conversations about food and “stupid husbands”) is prioritized over competence and intelligence.

Yet somehow, even a curmudgeon like me can manage to remain polite, helpful, and engaged for the length of that email or phone call with a client.

So just imagine how impressed they’ll be with a genuinely nice person like you!

Good links, too. The part about working regular business hours is important, I think, if you have clients who expect to reach you by telephone during their regular business hours. For the person working around another job, it might not be so easy.

Somewhere out there is advice for writing after you have just spent three hours grading essays. When I find it, I will post it.

How Many Gods Are There? Vote Now!

It must be a slow news day, because the Denver Post’s daily news poll is about God . . . or Goddess . . . or the Gods.

“Hard”  polytheism is running at less than 2 percent, so if you can’t vote early, vote often.

I doubt than anyone is going to do anything useful with the data anyway.

Again, Punctuation Matters

Likewise, the difference between “Let’s eat Jennifer” and “Let’s eat, Jennifer” is whether Jennifer will be in a stew pot or a dining chair. You saw the comma there, right?

Pagan Studies Conference Timed for Pantheacon

Announcement of a new conference:

Pagans in Dialogue with the Wider World: A Pagan Studies Symposium

Friday, February 15, 2013 at San José State University (semi-concurrent with PantheaCon, February 15-18, 2013, DoubleTree Hotel, San Jose, California)

Sponsored by San José State University, Humanities Dept., Comparative Religious Studies Program. Organizers: Lee Gilmore (SJSU) & Amy Hale (St. Petersburg College)

Contemporary Paganism, in all its varieties, stands at a unique cultural and religious intersection that can provide insights for a wide range of global, social, and political subjects, beyond its own inward facing concerns.  For this symposium, we are calling for scholarly submissions that focus on Paganism’s contributions to and engagements with broader cultural and religious dialogues in an increasingly pluralist world.  These could include, but are not limited to, explorations of Paganisms’ endeavors in community, economic, media, health, legal, social justice, and institutional development work, as well as activist, applied, interdisciplinary, and interfaith work.

More generally, all submissions that critically examine Paganism(s) in relationship to categories such as religion, culture, gender, identity, authenticity, power, and ritual — among other possible frameworks — are welcome.  In addition, all papers presented at the symposium will be considered for publication in a special issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies.

All proposals & queries should be sent to pagansymposium@gmail.com
Deadline: September 15, 2012

More info, including submission requirements & a pdf of this call, may be found at the site.

9th Claremont Pagan Studies Conference

Conference on Current Pagan Studies: Pagan Sensibilities in Action

January 26 & 27, 2013, Claremont, California

Call for Papers

 This year we will focus on Pagan Sensibilities in Action. We welcome papers that discuss how our pagan perspectives manifest as our lived experiences in artistic expression, personal and collective practice, the manner in which we hold power, and other engagements, including involvement in politics, social justice, ecological concerns and economics. How do Pagan theo(a)logies inform our being in the world?

This year we are encouraging proposals for academic panels. Please contact us early if you would like to organize a panel.

We are looking for papers from all disciplines.  A community needs artists, teachers, scientists, healers, historians, philosophers, educators, thinkers, activists, etc.

As usual, we are using Pagan in its most inclusive form, covering pagans, wiccans, witches and the numerous hybrids that have sprung up as well as any indigenous groups that feel akin to or want to be in conversation with Pagans.

Abstracts should be no longer than 350 words and are due by September 30, 2012. Go to our website for advice on presenting papers. Please email abstracts to pagan_conference@yahoo.com

Acoustic Stonehenge

People keep attempting to tease out the secret of Stonehenge. The astronomical-calculator explanation bulked large at one time and remains in popular consciousness, but do you really need to haul large stones for many miles in order to predict the solstice?

If any thing, I suspect that it was more a question of using the solstices, etc., as demonstrations of how the “power of Heaven” reinforced the rule on earth of King Somebody and his descendents, the one who ordered the building of the monument. (Given its age and the stages of construction, there were no doubt multiple King Somebodies.)

But the search goes on. Here is research on the monument’s acoustic properties, using the replica Stonehenge in Washington state, which has all its pieces and is the same size as the original. Video and more links about studying sound in archaeological sites at the link.

(Via The Daily Grail)

Necrophilia: An Ancient Egyptian Tradition?

This may be the worst sort of environmental determinism, but what is it with Egypt? Is there something in the Nile water?

For centuries Egyptian Paganism seemed to function—on one level—as as sort of post office of the dead. All those mummified cats, ibises, crocodiles, etc. neatly stacked in little p.o. boxes. What’s with that?

And of course there was the elaborate bureaucratic ritual that accompanied the mummification. The Greek historian Herodotus (a bit of a gossip) commented,

The wives of men of rank are not give to be embalmed immediately after death, nor indeed are any of the more beautiful and valued women. It is not until they have been dead three or four days that they are carried to the embalmers. This is done to prevent indignities from being offered them. (Link is to a different translation, but quite similar.)

Then, for several centuries, Egypt was mostly Christian. Christians liked to store the body parts of saints in their churches, which is why the Emperor Julian (PBUH) referred to them as “charnel houses.” What went on in the funeral business I do not know.

Today, in majority-Muslim Egypt, the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television network reports that Egyptian women’s rights campaigners (there are some) are protesting two laws proposed in the “Islamist-dominated parliament”:

She was referring to two laws: one that would legalize the marriage of girls starting from the age of 14 and the other that permits a husband to have sex with his dead wife within the six hours following her death. . . . . Egyptian prominent journalist and TV anchor Jaber al-Qarmouty on Tuesday referred to [cleric] Abdul Samea’s article in his daily show on Egyptian ON TV and criticized the whole notion of “permitting a husband to have sex with his wife after her death under a so-called ‘Farewell Intercourse’ draft law.”

Because nothing expresses grief over losing one’s spouse quite like that.

UPDATE: Another source says that no such law was proposed. Was Al-Arabiya fooled?

Errors in English Usage

The Common Errors in English Usage website clarifies a lot of things.

I still hesitate over “precede/proceed,” but the explanation for which to use when is easy to remember.