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.

A Glitch in the Matrix

Via Jonathan Korman’s blog, a collection of “glitch in the Matrix” stories collected through Reddit. Time briefly flowing backwards, apparitions of people who cannot possibly be there, near-death experiences, that sort of thing.

When I was around 20, a few years ago, I kept having dreams about a woman with long black hair named Aroura ( pronounced A-roar-uh) . They were different dreams but for some reason, her distinct face and name always ended up in them. It got to the point where I would wake up frustrated and confused, trying to google her name or find out how I was connected to her. After a few months she stopped showing up and I dismissed it, thinking my brain was just being a “scumbag.”

Fast forward a few years later, Halloween 2009, I’m in the car with a friend stopped at a gas station. . . . .

Prepare to lose some time here.

Why the Pantheacon Gender Controversy Persists

For the second year running, some attendees at Pantheacon have become involved in protests, sit-ins, and a whole lot of blog posts about gender issues.

I am not going to weigh in on Z Budapest, etc. I was not there. But I was reading a post on Religion Bulletin the other day titled “Yogis and the Politics of Offense,”  by Matt Sheedy, that suggested a reason for the size and persistence of this particular Pantheacon kerfuffle.

Reading past the yogis and the “Shit Yogis Say” parody video, I came to this paragraph:

When groups are new and not well defined, and where the boundaries of their self-understanding are generally recognized to be unstable, the work of critique becomes that much easier since it focuses the conversation on tangible matters that can be discussed and debated. As many scholars are aware, this instability and contingency is true of all religious formations, yet it remains an uphill battle to speak of older traditions in the same way—unless of course one’s goal is to cause offense in the first place.

Contemporary Paganism in all its forms is “not well defined.” Our boundaries are not merely porous, they are vaporous. You could do a “Shit Pagans Say” video — and maybe someone has — but a lot of Pagans probably would say that it just critiques the fluff bunnies or something, that none of “that stuff” is really central to their spiritual practice.

On the other hand, the author writes,

Whenever the social practices of a group are presented as the essence of that group as a social whole, there is a risk of causing offense. For something to be considered “offensive” in a categorical sense, however, it must involve more than hurt feelings on the part of an individual. There must be some notion of a “social whole” in the first place and, what is more, those things that are being lampooned must be considered central to the self-understanding of the group in question.

Sheedy argues that another video, “Shit Girls Say,” is indeed offensive because it addresses a social whole, whereas “Shit Yogis Say” does not.

If “girls” constitute a social whole, then certainly “women” do as well.  There is a general assumption of what constitutes “women.” Some people insist that self-identified transwomen, for example,  can also be included. But there is a boundary, and the argument is about who is inside it and who is not. There is something worth struggling over — as long as Paganism(s) valorize women-only ritual and female religious leadership.

UPDATE, Feb. 28: Gus diZerega writes the most reasonable blog post on this whole issue from a Pagan-politics standpoint that I have seen.

To summarize, the protest against Z’s genetic-women only ritual was political.  Its advocates were making a statement about how they believe the entire Pagan community should act: not simply not to condemn, not simply to accept other ways, but to modify their ways so as to include a group that wanted such affirmation even while they were free to practice in their own way within a largely accepting environment.  Sometimes this is necessary to do, as with a hypothetical case of having the community ban a group practicing ritual child abuse. But most of the time this is not necessary.

I am asking different questions, but I applaud Gus for making that point. Wicca, in particular, has always been a small-l libertarian, “live and let live,” do-it-yourself religion. I hate to see one group demanding that another group change its ways to accommodate them based on a self-proclaimed moral authority.

Wicca Work?

M. drew my attention today to the fact that Rocky Mountain PBS (Motto: “All Antiques Roadshow all the time.”) was offering another BBC-produced copy show, Wicca Work. Typical of RMPBS, they seem to be starting with the third season.

CORRECTION: The series is New Tricks, the episode is “Wicca Work.” (Thanks, first commenter.)

The description of the series says,

They may have handed in their badges and started collecting their pensions years ago, but Lane, Standing and Halford are back for a third and fourth series, still working at the London Metropolitan Police as civilians investigating unsolved crimes as part of boss Pullman’s team, Unsolved Crime and Open Case Squad (UCOS). Led by Pullman, who spends half her time trying to rein them in, the three men investigate an array of challenging and disturbing crimes.

What, if anything, is the significance of the title? Is this just another case of Wicca being the new black?

UPDATE: They may have used the word “Wicca” a few time, but this was more Dennis Wheatley than Gerald Gardner. The “white whitches” are really “black witches,” they sacrifice people, and the solitary witch who lives in a tipi (!?) gives the detectives teas that (a) make them incredibly horny or (b) are psychotropic and mind-bending.