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

One Week Left for AAR Paper Proposals

The deadline for proposals for the 2012 American Academy of Religion annual meeting is Tuesday, March 13.

Here are the suggested topics for the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group:

  • For a possible cosponsored session with the Indigenous Religious Traditions Group, we invite papers on the intersection of contemporary indigenous traditions and paganism related to indigeneity, authenticity, and legitimacy. These may, for example, analyze how claims of indigenous status are used in relationship with political and theological issues or how groups deploy strategies around the issue of “authenticity.”

  •  The major metaphors of any religious tradition speak to ways humans connect with the Divine. Ancient — and some contemporary — forms of Paganism frequently employed notions of sacrifice and reciprocity. Modern Wicca, to name one tradition, consciously rejects the notion of sacrifice and replaces it with sexual intercourse as a metaphor both of internal psychological integration and as cosmic creation and fertility, from the Great Rite to the Dance of the Maypole. We invite papers on how these metaphors persist, interact, and manifest within historical and contemporary Paganism and how they frame interactions among participants.

  •  Is there really such a thing as Pagan “theology,” or is the term itself too embedded within an Abrahamic religious context? Should Pagan theology more accurately be described as praxology, or theories of Pagan praxis? What would Pagan praxology look like and how would it advance our understanding of religion?

More information here.

“Wicca Man” Trailer

Here is the trailer for the new British documentary on Gerald Gardner, theatrically introduced by Ronald Hutton rather like an episode of the archaeology program Secrets of the Dead.

Britain’s Wicca Man – (C) Matchlight from Matchlight on Vimeo.

I am happy to hear Professor Hutton say that Wicca was developed in the 1940s—I would say the very late 1940s at that, definitely post-World War II.

It is time to give up on the whole legend of the hidden coven at the Rosicrucian Theatre, of Gardner’s 1939 initiation at Dorothy Clutterbuck’s house, of the 1940 Lammas working against a possible German invasion, and all of that.

There is no evidence for any of it except Gardner’s say-so, and if those things happened, they do not gibe at all with what we know that Gardner was doing in the 1939-1947 period, namely trying out a variety of different esoteric groups before he “found” the one that he liked—Wicca.

Pop Classics

Added to the blogroll: Juliette Harrisson’s Pop Classics, “witty and entertaining random thoughts on appearances of Greek and Roman stuff in popular culture.”

Here is her episode-by-episode review of the series Rome, of which, it must be said, I was a total fan.

“Boring Soldier” and “Dodgey Soldier” — love it.

The Top Ten Grimoires

The British newspaper The Guardian spins an article off historian Owen Davies’ recent book, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books.

But newspapers and magazines love “top ten” list stories, and here is The Guardian’s. (Obviously, I missed the original publication.)

Number one on the list?

1. The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses

Although one of the more recent grimoires, first circulating in manuscript in the 18th century, this has to be number one for the breadth of its influence. From Germany it spread to America via the Pennsylvania Dutch, and once in cheap print was subsequently adopted by African Americans. With its pseudo-Hebraic mystical symbols, spirit conjurations and psalms, this book of the secret wisdom of Moses was a founding text of Rastafarianism and various religious movements in west Africa, as well as a cause célèbre in post-war Germany.

But a certain American writer from Providence, Rhode Island, gets a shout-out too.

Survey for UU Pagans

Another online survey, this one collecting  “personal experiences from Unitarian Universalists (UUs) who also practice Paganism or have an earth-centered theology.”

Take the survey here.  The deadline is March 12, 2012.

Secrets of an Ancient Pagan

I love the permutations of the unfolding story of Ötzi “the iceman,” the Neolithic man whose freeze-dried body was found in the Alps on the Austrian-Italian border in 1991.

At first some people speculated that he had frozen to death in a blizzard or while on a shamanic quest—or even that he was a sacrificial victim. Others thought that he was a luckless hunter. But he had arrows and no bow, so how could he have been hunting? He did have a staff that some archaeologists thought he had been shaping with his copper ax into a new bow. (The apparent bowstring was coiled up in his pouch.)

One Austrian archaeologist, having considered factors such as pollen in his clothes and the sources of his clothing, staff/bow, etc., thought that Ötzi was on the run from a settlement down on what is now the Italian side, possibly as the loser in a village feud. Now it is pretty well accepted that he died violently, probably at the spot where he was found.

More DNA evidence is being studied.

Ötzi the ice mummy may have met his death in the Alps some 5300 years ago, but his descendants live on – on the Mediterranean islands of Corsica and Sardinia. The finding comes from an analysis of Ötzi’s DNA, which also reveals he had brown eyes and hair, and was lactose intolerant.

He lived 5,300 years ago, and his life — or at least his corpse — still is being invoked in various ways. I was surprised to learn that he is mentioned in books on diet (do they know about the arterial deposits?) and in a novel that deals with speculated European migration to prehistoric North America. (New archaeological evidence makes a strong circumstantial case for it.)

In fact, Amazon.com shows him appearing in forty different books. That is pretty good for someone from five millennia back who was not a famous ruler or religious figure.

And “Pagan”? I am assuming so, given that whatever religious tradition he followed or was aware of was most likely of a polytheistic-animistic sort. He is already invoked in at least one neo-shamanic book.

Also, he was a carrier of Lyme disease.

 

Ancient Europeans Were First to North America?

This announcement might upset some apple carts.

Actually, the idea that some of the early settlers of North America might have come from Europe as well as Asia has been kicking around for a while.

Now the claim is made that based on analyses of stone tools, they were first.

The similarity between other later east coast US and European Stone Age stone tool technologies has been noted before. But all the US European-style tools, unearthed before the discovery or dating of the recently found or dated US east coast sites, were from around 15,000 years ago – long after Stone Age Europeans (the Solutrean cultures of France and Iberia) had ceased making such artefacts. Most archaeologists had therefore rejected any possibility of a connection. But the newly-discovered and recently-dated early Maryland and other US east coast Stone Age tools are from between 26,000 and 19,000 years ago – and are therefore contemporary with the virtually identical western European material.

What’s more, chemical analysis carried out last year on a European-style stone knife found in Virginia back in 1971 revealed that it was made of French-originating flint.

An archaeologist whom I know adds, “I’ve met [Stanford and Bradley] both, they are not crackpots.”

Based on what I understand about DNA evidence, however, the bulk of the people who  first settled the Americas must still have come from Asia. After all,  they could have walked across the tundra on the Ice Age land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. Hence:

As a result of these [geographical and travel] factors the Solutrean (European originating) Native Americans were either partly absorbed by the newcomers or were substantially obliterated by them either physically or through competition for resources.

Read the rest.