Choosing This Year’s AAR Pagan Studies Papers

Finally finished — I hope — with the process of selecting papers to be presented in the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group’s sessions and in our joint session with the Indigenous Religious Traditions Group at next November’s American Academy of Religion annual meeting.

Being co-chair is one of those secretarial-type gigs I get stuck with. It’s the penalty for being literate.

Thanks to all the steering committee members of both groups for their proposal evaluations, and thanks to the AAR staff for selecting a new software program that makes evaluation and session-creation easier. I still sweat bullets over the process, but it all seemed to work OK.

The less enjoyable part of the process is having to write to the people whose proposals were not scored highly enough. Here again the new software makes it easier to scoop up all the evaluation comments, paste them into a document, remove identifying names, etc., and pass them on. People need to know why their proposals were scored the way they were — were they just not suitable for the “call,” were they insufficiently analytical, or did they just promise too much?  At least one proposal this year sounded more like a book outline than what could be covered in a 20-minute talk.

Some folks must just skip over this excellent advice on proposals.

Some sessions have respondents —  scholars who summarize, evaluate, and critique all the papers after the presentations are over, serving as a sort of discussion leader during the Q&A. My next goal is to try to get the writers and the respondents communicating earlier in the writing process. I had a bad experience once of serving as a respondent and trying to write my critique only hours before the session — I felt as though all I produced was incoherent babble.

What will the papers’ topics be? I don’t want to jump the gun on the AAR’s process, but I will announce them in due course.

What’s Your Religious IQ?

As I blogged yesterday, too much reporting on religion is written by people who are religiously illiterate — and, sometimes, proud of it.

Every reporter at least ought to score well on this quiz from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Go ahead, take it. Fifteen questions — it’s easy*.

Note that it is the “U.S. Religious Knowledge Quiz,” and at least two questions are specific to America’s religious history. Nothing about the Pentecostal Christians, though. Couldn’t they have worked the Azusa Street Revival into it?

*Yes, I scored 100, but this is what I do.

Reporters Miss the Religion Story and Their Readers Lose

We rightly complain that Pagan matters are poorly or perfunctorily covered in the news media. Jason Pitzl-Waters writes many blog posts sorting through news coverage and pointing out its failings (and occasional successes).

But the problem is bigger than us. Even the the major world religions’ roles in the news are overlooked or misunderstood by reporters whose frequent secular bias and lack of education leads them to disdain religious issues. How often, for example, does coverage of the incipient civil war in Syria mention that it falls right along the Sunni-Shiite Muslim divide?

In a blog post titled “Don’t Know Much about Theology,” Walter Russell Mead makes what should be the obvious point.

Even where religion isn’t driving conflict, it plays a powerful role in the way people understand their own personal identities and life stories and in the way they interpret world events. Turkey, Iran, Israel, India, Pakistan, Nigeria: in these countries and in many others, it is impossible to understand contemporary politics without a deep feel for the religious identities and traditions that shape the way the people of these countries perceive and interpret political and historical realities.

A lot of news stories are missed or misunderstood, he says, and he’s right. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

Stop in at Get Religion for daily coverage on how the news “professionals” mangle or miss the religious element in the news.

“The Occult Experience” of 1985

A friend pointed me to the Vimeo page where you can see The Occult Experience (95 min.), an Australian television documentary from 1985, researched and co-produced by Nevill Drury, on witchcraftandprimitivepeopleandsatanismandexorcismandallkindsofspookystuff.

Watching it was hard, because I kept turning away after encountering such portentous statements as “The search for supernatural powers continues in spite of science and technology” or that people practice “ancient Celtic traditions of nature worship.”

No one unpacks these assertions at all. Rather, they are just delivered as though they were the Final Word.

At one point, the narrator intones, “How does it feel to be a witch in the computer age?” (At the time the documentary was made, I thought my KayPro II portable personal computer was cutting-edge.)

It has its historical interest. Hey, there’s Herman Slater doing ritual in a Manhattan street. Why? You won’t learn from the film!

And at about the 20-minute mark, Alex Sanders delivers version number 1,045 of the original “I was initiated by my grandmother” story, which has been imitated so many times.

Back then, boys and girls, to be a Craft leader you had to have some special story to tell about your magical heritage or you were nobody.

And look, there is Janet Farrar taking her clothes off while chatting with her late husband, Stewart. And the paintings of Rosaleen Norton—can’t have an Australian production without those. Drury would build his later academic career on them.

Margot Adler, Olivia Robertson  . . .  so many names. But no context.

The whole film is thunderingly pretentious and yet basically content-free. You would not learn anything systematic here about the development of contemporary Paganism—which might be Satanic and which might be “primitive” and might involve “altered states of consciousness” (quick clip of Esalen), and is certainly spooky spooky or silly silly, depending on your perspective.

It make me wish that I could take those clips and arrange them into a meaningful narrative. Maybe some day someone will.

Adding New Gods

P. Sufenas Virius Lupus wonders about how new gods are added to polytheist pantheons.

Something that will often happen, particularly with reconstructionist-based practitioners, is that further research into a particular deity and their connections leads to “new-to-me” or various other re-discovered deities that are then taken into one’s personal pantheon. Or, suddenly, a deity emerges in one’s experiences that one hadn’t paid attention to previously, or gets one’s attention in some fashion or other; whether they are readily identified or if it takes some study to figure out who they are, such encounters often occur that expand one’s personal network of divine relationships.  . . .

What about the less-frequent (but nonetheless possible) reality of totally new deities, though? How does one deal with this issue when it arises? I have yet to see any modern Pagan or polytheist treatment of this matter, nor any conventional training and education on when and why it can occur, nor how to handle it when it does. And, while it might not be that frequent of an occurrence, I suspect that we are going to see a lot more of it in the near future as our community expands and the world continues to change.

He goes on to discuss how today’s Pagans might deal with the emergence of new gods, including an ancient oracular practice

The blog made me think, for example, of how the Santa Muerte cult has grown, moving even beyond people with roots in Mexico. The image has been around a long time—go into any folklore museum in New Mexico, for instance, and you will see the similar Doña Sebastiana in her cart, a relic of the old lay brotherhood of the Penitentes. Does that make La Santa Muerte a “new” goddess, or just an upgraded one?

University Courses that I Wish I Could Have Taken

Anthropology 666, “The Anthropology of Shamanism and Occult Experience,” with Professor Neil Whitehead at Wisconsin.

I wonder what the exam questions were like and what sort of papers he assigned.

The Geography of Metal

Metal bands expressed in terms of population, from Steve Sailer.

Related: the article in Witches & Pagans on “Viking Chick Kaboom,” in  which Madder Mortem  and Nightwish, among others, figure prominently.

The ‘Fifth Branch’ of the Mabinogion & Some Plagiarizing Pagans

In 2008, an English academic who works with ancient and modern Celtic languages created “a piece of Iolosim,” in other words, a pseudo-ancient tale in the spirit of the Welsh literary forger and Druid revivalist Iolo Morganwg.

Written in Middle Welsh and “translated” into English, it purports to be a hitherto-unknown section of the Mabinogion, a famous collection of medieval Welsh tales with possibly older roots.

Imagine his surprise when he finds the whole thing—uncredited, of course—on a website devoted to “Keltic mysteries” and the revival of ancient Welsh Paganism, or some approximation thereof.

The ancient ‘Legend of Amaethon Uab Don’ quoted here as evidence for this mystic cosmological bollocks was penned over a month or so by yours truly, c. 2008, while glugging back the diet coke in Jesus College Oxford computer room. The website of this bunch of chumps not only has copied my entire text (in English and Middle Welsh), but also begins with a long and pompous screed about how wicked it is to steal other people’s material.

Anyone who read the “Fifth Branch’s” introduction carefully would have seen some signals that it was bogus—there is no “Judas College” at Oxford University, for one thing—but who reads carefully on the Internet when they are busy cutting and pasting?

Of New Agers, Nazis, and Vin Chaud

People described variously as “hippies” and “New Agers” apparently view a mountain in the French Pyrenees as some sort of a refuge from the upcoming apocalypse (you do have that on your calendar, don’t you?).

A rapidly increasing stream of New Age believers – or esoterics, as locals call them – have descended in their camper van-loads on the usually picturesque and tranquil Pyrenean village of Bugarach. They believe that when apocalypse strikes on 21 December this year, the aliens waiting in their spacecraft inside Pic de Bugarach will save all the humans near by and beam them off to the next age.

Of course, no one actually interviews any of them. That would require work, and this is just one Oliver Pickup of The Independent free-associating at his keyboard.

For decades, there has been a belief that Pic de Bugarach, which, at 1,230 metres, is the highest in the Corbières mountain range, possesses an eery power. Often called the “upside-down mountain” – geologists think that it exploded after its formation and the top landed the wrong way up – it is thought to have inspired Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Since the 1960s, it has attracted New Agers, who insist that it emits special magnetic waves.

Let’s see, the travelers in Journey to the Centre of the Earth enter lava tubes in an Icelandic volcano, and Close Encounters is set at Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, but hey, when you’re Oliver Pickup, one mountain is as good as the next.

There should be something here for researchers into new religious movements though.

From Snow into Fire

Spring equinox sunset in "the notch."

Everyone has posted their “Happy Equinox” messages. Oh well. I live in a house that was placed by the Old Ones to line up with the equinoctial sunsets, instead. You can see how tonight the sun seemed to fit into a particular notch in the ridge to the west.  They were truly wise, the Old Ones.

And what did I do? I rolled out of bed, walked and fed the dogs, and went off to a wildland fire-training class in the next county. Actually, it was no so much a class as a demonstration/sales pitch for this product—which is a cool product if your agency has big bucks to spend.

It’s a great way to show people who live in the urban-wildland interface, which is where my little volunteer fire department is situated, exactly how a forest fire could roll up their bosky subdivision.

We’re not buying it, of course. No big bucks for the high-tech stuff.

But I also had the chance to chat with some agency people whom I needed to see, and then the other guy from my department and I stood back against the wall and muttered sotto voce about how the US Forest Service really could have used the SimTable last year, when they made a very bad fire prediction that, literally, blew up in their faces hereabouts.

Hey, no one pays us, so we can be free with our opinions.

Here is a news report about modeling last summer’s Wallow Fire in Arizona and New Mexico.

I normally post fire stuff on the other blog, but I thought that I would share a bit here. I may be at my desk editing this big book on Central and Eastern European Paganism for our book series, but now when the telephone rings, I think, Uh-oh, is this a fire call?