Esotericism for Laughs at The Telegraph

A fairly lightweight article on Freemasonry in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph produced this classic response in the comments:

All MPs are Freemasons. So are all civil servants. It’s too late to do anything about it. We’re in control and you better keep quiet and get used to the fact.

By the way, do you know where your kids are? Shouldn’t they have been home by now? If I was you I’d phone the police immediately. Make sure and tell them you’re a widow’s son. It’ll help.

But what was even better was this juxtaposition of photo and unrelated headline elsewhere in the newspaper:Queen Elizabeth, her daughter-in-law, and grand-daughter

The unrelated headline was to a news story about African witchcraft and the “witchcraft torture murder” of a 15-year-old boy in a family of African immigrants to the United Kingdom.

So we can presume that no subeditor at the Telegraph was thinking “Crone, Mother, Maiden” at the photo of Queen Elizabeth, her daughter-in-law, and granddaughter-in-law. (Is there such a term? The Duchess of Cambridge, to those people who keep track of aristocratic titles.)

Thanks to Jenny Blain for the photo.

No to “Neopagan,” plus Other Pagan Blogging

• At Pagans for Archaeology, Yewtree makes the argument (started by Graham Harvey, as I understand) against using the term “Neopagan.”

• Lupa at No Unsacred Place on greeting the land in a new place.

• At The Alchemist’s Garden, can your spirit helper be a machine?

• Finally, at This Lively Earth, some thoughts on the pluses and minuses of celebrating Groundhog Day with kindergarteners in a post titled “What Are We Teaching Kids on Groundhog Day?”

I couldn’t stop the thought: And this is what award-winning education looks like. It was education that had gotten the climate wrong, the animals wrong, and the children wrong as well. By feeding the students a pablum of anachronisms about the natural world instead of teaching them to sink their hands in mud, to feast their eyes on the colors of tree foliage, to recognize poison oak and name the first wildflower in spring, this brand of education disrespected the students. It inculcated a story from another time and place instead of encouraging the students to observe grasses or flowers or woodland using their own eyes, their fingers and toes, their ears, their skin. It treated the children as if they didn’t have the capacity to appreciate or synthesize the results of their own observations.

Yep.

Babies, Bathwater, and the Reclaiming Community

Of all American Witchcraft traditions, Reclaiming seems to be the most prone to self-criticism. Perhaps that is because, as Anne Hill writes in her brief blog-memoir, The Baby and the Bathwater, there was always much conflict over different visions for Reclaiming.

What started with one foot in the Faery/Faerie/Feri Witchcraft tradition of Victor and Cora Anderson also co-existed with a social vision of growing organic vegetables in a solar-powered paradise fueled by consensus decision-making, pushing the boundaries of gender-theory and overcoming enemies with the power of  love and passion.

Hill, one of the original group’s long-term members, writes things that only an insider could say. The Baby and the Bathwater combines blog posts that she wrote from 2006 to 2010, including the comments that readers left on her Blog O’Gnosis.

We’ve seen good people come and go over the years, and have noticed that mostly the good people go after they realize that Reclaiming is a victim of its own idealism and there’s nowhere to “advance” once you have experience and skills. I said that I have been struggling to clarify my present-day involvement with Reclaiming, particularly trying to discern what is baby and what is bathwater and not throwing away that which is of lasting value.

My friend responded instantly: “But there is no baby in the bathwater,
and there never has been.” I was stunned at that, and have been thinking about it ever since. Can it be true that what started as a grand experiment in creating a spirituality that was Goddess-centered, egalitarian, politically and socially radical would have absolutely nothing to show for itself 25 years after the fact? Could it be that a community and religious movement which has been at the center of my identity for over two decades consisted all along of nothing but our intense willingness to believe our own promotional language?

The Baby and the Bathwoter sees an up side to Reclaiming too, as Hill visits groups seeded in other areas and savors their enthusiasm.  You can download the PDF file for $2.99.

Someone is Stealing the Saints’ Parts of Europe

Of Ireland, at least, where a rash of thefts of saintly body parts has the police baffled.

The only thing creepier is imaging who might be buying them from the thieves, if the dean’s hypothesis is correct:

The latest in a series of such thefts involved the removal of the preserved heart of St. Laurence O’Toole, Dublin’s 12th-century patron saint, from the city’s historic Christ Church Cathedral. As there was no sign of forced entry to the cathedral itself, the dean of Christ Church, Dermot Dunne, initially believed the thief had probably hidden in the building when it closed on Friday evening, taken the artifact overnight and simply walked out the next morning.

“Maybe someone stole it to order; it certainly seems plausible,” Dean Dunne said Monday in an interview at Christ Church. “Or maybe a religious fanatic wants the relic and paid somebody to steal it.”

I know that (alleged) bits of Gautama Buddha are preserved in South Asia, but no one goes into keeping body parts like Catholic and Orthodox Christians. It’s all quite magickal.

The custom was well-advanced by the mid-fourth century, as Julian, the last Pagan emperor, was quite grossed out by it and often referred to Christian churches as charnel houses.

Aside from the Egyptians, most Pagan cultures of his day considered corpses to be polluting, full of miasma, and something to be gotten rid of — burned, buried, or sealed away in a sarcophagus (a word that literally means “flesh-eater,” since they were usually carved from limestone). And even the Egyptians did not stack mummies in their temples.

The last time I thought about saints’ relics was a couple of years ago when a priest was giving me and some colleagues a tour of the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City.

We had walked around into the apse, and while a certain Italian Catholic lawyer (scholars of new religions will know who I mean) dropped to his knees in adoration of the Sacrament, I was studying two reliquaries holding (alleged) bone fragments of Mary Magdalene.

Each one had a tiny bone fragment smaller than the nail of my little finger, encased in a glass capsule that was in turn decorated and encircled with gold. These inner cases, smaller than a lipstick tube, were then held in a larger, glass-walled box affixed to a wall. At least I remember there being two small capsules, although this website page speaks of one (larger?) reliquary.

There are more relics in the altar.

Irreverently, all that I could think of was some monk long ago sitting at a chopping block with a big knife or cleaver.

Behind him is the abbot, telling someone, “Brother Anthony’s knife skills are superb. You should watch him dice an onion or cut up a chicken. We will have plenty of relics to distribute to the faithful this way, and they will show their gratitude with generous gifts.”

Meanwhile, what are they doing with the heart of St. Laurence O’Toole?

A Rootworker in the City

In a two-part interview, the Black Pagan blog talks with Khi Armand of Conjure in the City , who has a shop and practice in Brooklyn.

Part 1 and Part 2.

There is the inevitable discussion of “nature religion” in the city.

I think that [living in an intense, man-made environment] would be subjective – every locale has is ups and downs. Being on overcrowded trains everyday makes me put more emphasis on spiritual cleansing and being surrounded by concrete does mean that it takes effort to get to “nature.” But I’m all the more appreciative of ivy growing up in a brownstone and all the more in awe of when a neighborhood decides to start growing its own vegetables.

I’m attracted to the goal of creating a sustainable earth-centered life in the midst of all this. I also think that magick might work quicker – in a city of 8 million people, you could virtually do a love spell in the morning and meet your new partner that night!

Also discussions of shamanism, grad school, and film-making. Go read. There is a connection to Catherine Yronwode’s operation too.

 

Pomegranate 13.1 Table of Contents

The newest issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies went to the printer last month. Contents are available online to subscribers or by purchase of individual articles.

PDFs of book reviews and of Caroline Tully’s article,  “Researching the Past is a Foreign Country: Cognitive Dissonance as a Response by Practitioner Pagans to Academic Research on the History of Pagan Religions,” may be downloaded free.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Response to Dominique Beth Wilson
Michael York

The Birth of Counterjihadist Terrorism: Reflections on some Unspoken Dimensions of 22/7
Egil Asprem

Pagan Saxon Resistance to Charlemagne’s Mission: ‘Indigenous’ Religion and ‘World’ Religion in the Early Middle Ages
Carole Cusack

Contemporary Paganism, Utopian Reading Communities, and Sacred Nonmonogamy:  The Religious Impact of Heinlein’s and Starhawk’s Fiction
Christine Hoff Kraemer

John Michell, Radical Traditionalism and the Emerging Politics of the Pagan New Right
Amy Hale

Researching the Past is a Foreign Country: Cognitive Dissonance as a Response by Practitioner Pagans to Academic Research on the History of Pagan Religions
Caroline Jane Tully

Book Review: Kerriann Godwin, ed., The Museum of Witchcraft: A Magical History (Boscastle, Cornwall: The Occult Art Company, 2011), 142 pp., £34.00 (hardcover). PDF . Reviewed by Ethan Doyle White

Book Review: Lee Gilmore, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 238 pp., (+ dvd) $24.95 (paperback).
PDF. Reviewed by Jason Lawton Winslade

Polytheistic Writing Sought

I am passing this along as a favor to the editor.

Gods are real.And these gods are everywhere, in all aspects of existence, all aspects of human life.”

James Hillman

Minneapolis writer is compiling an anthology of modern, polytheistic experiences, tentatively titled Return of the Gods: The Varieties of Polytheistic Experience

Seeking thoughtful, original, and previously unpublished non-fiction essays recounting first-hand encounters with Gods, ancestors, spirits, disembodied intelligences, and sacred presences in nature.

You may hail from a Hindu tradition, an indigenous tradition, a Pagan tradition, an African-based tradition, another tradition, or no tradition at all

Electronic submissions only.

Please submit only final, proofread copy, double-spaced, maximum 5,000 words.

Please send your story as an MS Word attachment to williammcgillis [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject line: Return of the Gods.

Please refrain from submitting if you are not open to edits.

Please ensure that your story file includes your (less-than-75 word) bio along with contact details, including postal address and email address.

Compensation: All selected contributors will receive a complimentary copy of the book upon publication

Deadline for submissions: June 21, 2012.

Invocatio

Added to the blogroll, Sarah Veale’s blog on Western esotericism, Invocatio.

Foreclosing on Churches

Another cautionary tale for the people who want permanent Pagan buildings. Don’t get behind on your mortgage. Being a religious institution does not protect against foreclosure, although it may postpone it for a time.

“Churches are among the final institutions to get foreclosed upon because banks have not wanted to look like they are being heavy handed with the churches,” said Scott Rolfs, managing director of Religious and Education finance at the investment bank Ziegler.

If the property’s value has fallen, the bank is less willing to refinance what is usually a commercial loan. Read the rest.

An ‘Extraordinary’ British Conference

CALL FOR PAPERS
Exploring the Extraordinary 4th Conference
22nd-23rd September, 2012
Holiday Inn, York

Since its inception in 2007, members of Exploring the Extraordinary have organised three successful academic conferences that have brought together researchers from a variety of different disciplines and backgrounds. The purpose of these events has been to encourage a wider dissemination of knowledge and research, and an interdisciplinary discussion of extraordinary phenomena and experience. By ‘extraordinary’ we refer to phenomena and experiences that are considered to be beyond the mundane, referring to those that have been called supernatural, paranormal, mystical, transcendent, exceptional, spiritual, magical and/or religious, as well as the relevance of such for human culture.

We are looking for submissions for our fourth conference, and would like to invite presentation proposals on topics related to the above. Please submit a 300-500 word paper abstract to Dr Madeleine Castro and Dr Hannah Gilbert (ete.network@gmail.com) by the 6th April 2012. Accepted papers should be on PowerPoint, no longer than 20 minutes, and intended for an interdisciplinary audience. Please include contact information and a brief biographical note.

For more information, and to see past conference schedules, please visit http://etenetwork.weebly.com