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.

 

 

Yoga, Ectasy, Religion, and Sex

Religion is sexy — at least some of the time. (To scholars of religion, all religion is “sexy” in an intellectual sense.)

Last year, I edited and prepared for press a new biography of the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. She was a leading figure in American religion in the 1920s, but a sex-related scandal in 1926 hurt her with the news media.

McPherson was widowed as a young woman, then briefly re-married. She was a “rock star” of religion, working larger and larger venues with thousands of people focused on her preaching and healings.

And after raising all of that divine energy, she was supposed to go home to her solitary bed. According to the author—in our private conversations—she did not always do so. Why am I not surprised? Maybe some day he will write that follow-up volume that tells all.

Interesting, a lot of today’s Pentecostal Christians do not know her name, although she founded one of its denominations. One of my students, a Pentecostal, said she had heard of her and thought of her as “scary”—but she did not know why.

All of this is a long introduction to a  New York Times article: “Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise Here.”

One factor is ignorance. Yoga teachers and how-to books seldom mention that the discipline began as a sex cult — an omission that leaves many practitioners open to libidinal surprise.

Hatha yoga — the parent of the styles now practiced around the globe — began as a branch of Tantra. In medieval India, Tantra devotees sought to fuse the male and female aspects of the cosmos into a blissful state of consciousness.

The rites of Tantric cults, while often steeped in symbolism, could also include group and individual sex. One text advised devotees to revere the female sex organ and enjoy vigorous intercourse. Candidates for worship included actresses and prostitutes, as well as the sisters of practitioners.

Hatha originated as a way to speed the Tantric agenda. It used poses, deep breathing and stimulating acts — including intercourse — to hasten rapturous bliss. In time, Tantra and Hatha developed bad reputations. The main charge was that practitioners indulged in sexual debauchery under the pretext of spirituality.

But it’s not just yoga and tantra. People get crushes on supposedly celibate Catholic priests, as Edie Falco’s character, Carmela,  did in The Sopranos. And so on. It’s a issue for clergy, just as it is with psychotherapists.

As a polytheist, I would like to time-travel back to one of Sister Aimee’s healing services and see if she was  channeling only Yeshua the radical rabbi or maybe someone else as well, someone known for lifting his devotees up and them hurling them down.

As polytheists, we know that some of the deities and some ritual practices carry a strong sexual charge. People who work these will feel the results. If we know that in advance—and if we can ways to use these energies that do not have bad social consequences—then Pagans won’t “find themselves less prone to surprise.”

 

The Babalon Working and the Rise of New Paganism

Today I listened to a podcast by California ceremonial magician Carroll “Poke” Runyon about Jack Parsons, himself a magician and rocket scientist of the 1940s.

Runyon argues that the Babalon Working of 1946 in which Parsons participated prefigured on the astral plane the rise of Goddess-centered contemporary Paganism in North America.

If you are not familiar with this corner of American occult history, including Parsons’ connections with L. Ron Hubbard, Aleister Crowley,  Philip K. Dick, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the podcast will bring you up to speed.

Dutch Schultz, Call Your Office

Taking and pulling her achat, he exploded high. The wild glances from his owner walked seeing. Achat viagra motley was the lightbulb and moved a seconds to her woman shorts. So had a good achat into going. The word is begun the park around a giant, on galaxy glanced definitely ever. Achat went. A brendan von roberts of the edmund catherine dade tyree, skink the – sorry frank drug disk was badger in the heat ampersand in newspapers, bows, but tanks of a winder flames. A alive achat? Zek asked. You is up in it. The soft efforts, his missiles do, supposed out the achat – viagra and were suddenly for this death to awe a crowd. She was going the sceptical achat into listening of the viagra in one pleasant heavy men and now hiking him by the seat with the worthy poppy.

I just pulled that out of the spam-comment folder. How do they do it?  But nothing about French-Canadian bean soup.