Andre Norton Revisited

When I was about 11 years old, I wandered up to the science fiction section of a hole-in-the-wall branch of the Jefferson County (Colorado) Public Library. I came away with two books by the author Andre Norton, The Time Traders and Galactic Derelict.

Written in the late 1950s, they are now considered part of the “Ross Murdock series,” also known as the “Time Trader series.” The better-known (?)  Witch World series was just coming out, and I did not encounter them until later.

When I discovered later that “Andre” was a woman first known as Mary Ann Norton, I briefly had her confused with the English writer Mary Norton who wrote the “Borrowers” series, which my older sisters had read.

They were both fantasy series, after all, and so perhaps “Andre” was her space-opera pen name and “Mary” was her “cozy” pen name — or so I reasoned. I was totally wrong — they were completely different people.

So last week I was in a nearby city’s public library, looking for an SF title that someone had recommended, and there on the shelf was a newer edition of Time Traders and Galactic Derelict bound together.

Time Traders had been my first encounter with the term, the “Beaker People.”  Norton makes this ancient culture (or cultural period) into a “guild of free traders.” (SF writers seem to like guilds of free traders — it’s an enduring meme.)

So if life were a novel, I would have carried that memory forward and become an archaeologist. Didn’t happen.

The plot I did not remember at all, just a couple of images. There are lots of near-misses and close escapes, with language like this: “A white-hot flash of pain scored his upper arm.”

What I did not remember was that the time travelers encounter Neolithic conflict between the religion of the Great Mother, served by priestesses at megalithic sites, and the sky/storm god Lurgha, whose worship is pushing its way in and which is exploited by their Russian counterparts. (There is a Cold War atmosphere, despite the 21st-century setting.)

It’s not a major plot element, but did it plant a seed?

Ring-Dancing Monkeys and Black Death Rubbish

At Got Medieval, Carl Pyrdrum re-debunks the persistent, authentic-sounding story that the nursery rhyme “Ring around the Rosies” has anything whatsoever to do with the Black Death of the 1340s.

It does not.

As any good English plague survivor********** could tell you, the plague was caused by sin and best warded off by extreme piety and making sure your humours were in balance.***********

His version includes dancing monkeys, a feral cat, and Lancelot.

Here on the banks of Hardscrabble Creek, which is starting to rise as the snows are melting, we are fairly suspicious of authentic-sounding stories about surviving medieval practices. See also St. Patrick and the “snakes” who were not Druids.

Introduction to Mongolian Shamanism

Introductory ten-minute video about Mongolian shamanism, revived in the post-Communist decades. Just enjoy the visuals, unless you understand the language. Jenghiz Khan shows up, of course, as does Buddhism.

This well-made video shows the drumming and trance dancing of both male and female shamans. Some of the drums seem to have miniature bows in them — is that a traditional Mongol style?

At about the 1:02 point, however, I had a realization. New Agey esoteric-themed art is a circumpolar phenomenon.

Apotropaic Magic, Size 9

I don’t know if the custom of hiding used shoes and clothing in a house under construction to ward off evil influences ever crossed the pond to North America from Britain. If you know of instances—or of people still doing it—let me know in the comments.

I first learned of this custom at an archaeology conference at the University of Southampton some years back. Archaeologists are delighted with such finds. Often they provide the only samples of ordinary people’s clothing, which otherwise would have been worn until it fell apart.

The custom apparently went to Australia with the convicts and other early settlers, however.

Convict's shirt (BBC).

A few blocks away from the Sydney Harbour Bridge is the imposing, vivid orange structure of the Hyde Park Barracks.

Built to house some 50,000 unfortunate convicts transported from the UK between 1819 and the mid-1840s, the jail was among the first substantial structures constructed in the city.

On the second floor, under the boards of a wooden staircase, workers found a striped prisoner’s shirt.

[Historian Ian] Evans rejects the idea that the shirt could have been put under the stairs by accident. Just like the Harbour Bridge shoe, he believes it was hidden for a purpose.

But if you are renovating an 18th or 19th-century building and find an old shoe under the floor, now you know why it was there—maybe. (And did this custom die out completely, and if so, why?)

Fisking the Red Tent

At Regretsy, an elaborate take-down of first-menses rites for girls.

7. In addition to not being a womyn or a goddess, your daughter is most likely not a priestess. Ask yourself if people routinely drop by the house to see if Caitlyn can perform an exorcism after school. If the answer is no, she’s just a 13-year-old girl who doesn’t need made-up fairy titles or a bloody vagina necklace. She just needs a pad and a couple of Midol, and for you to stay the fuck away from Etsy.

(Hat tip: The House of Vines.) Also, fisking defined.

 

Happy Birthday to Blog

It just hit me: Letter From Hardscrabble Creek celebrated (?) its ninth anniversary as a blog on the 7th. To be truthful, I forgot. So raise a glass—better late than never.

Here is where it started.

When Britain Goes Pagan…

Click to embiggen.

… the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) will become a religious institution. (Hat tip to Andy Letcher.)

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.