Tag Archives: American religion

Pentagram Pizza with the Inner Bark of Pine Trees

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pentagrampizza• At Wytch of the North, a lengthy blog post on being a godspouse.

• A small publisher seeks submissions for a volume on “transgressive rites and rituals.”
We are looking primarily for practical articles describing new and original rites and rituals that cross barriers and challenge social norms. Although the bulk of the book will be made up of practical working material, we will consider articles relating to historically significant rites, philosophical discussions on the nature or significance of transgression, and first person accounts of actual rites and rituals. Original artwork will also be accepted for consideration.

• Certain ponderosa pine trees in my region are identified as being “sacred trees” to the Ute Indians. I would like to know more about this, since is a distinction between these “cultural” trees and those that were de-barked for eating purposes — this link addresses both eating the inner bark and the “cultural” use, complete with power dreams.

 

PLTV — New Pagan Video Podcasting

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Todd Berntson’s Pagan Living TV video podcast has launched with a news-magazine format.

Production values are a lot higher than in some Pagan video podcasts I have seen, although it’s still just talking heads in the studio at this point. At least there is a studio, not a sheet tacked to the wall. Visit the website.

End of Year Lists: Books, Movies

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Religion Dispatches lists five important new books on alternative and metaphysical spirituality in America — I prefer that to saying they are about the “nones,” which is a vague term — yes, well, so is “alternative.”

Catherine Albanese of UC-Santa Barbara has done important work in identifying first the non-theistic “nature religion” current  in American thought and secondly the importance of the metaphysical current in the book mentioned here: A Republic of Mind and Spirit.

And one of the Pagan studies crowd, Lee Gilmore, gets a mention for her book on Burning Man. You can also read a longer interview with her at the site.

A burst of blogging at The Juggler produces lists of the worst Pagan movies of 2012, plus the best Pagan movies, environmental Pagan movies, and more — look around.

Not a year’s end “Best Of” list, but still a round-up of scientific thinking about alien life and and fictional treatments of alien invasions at Instapundit.

And may your 2013 be a “Best Of” as well.

A Goddess-Movement Video with Something Extra

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One of Fred Adams’ visionary paintings on the DVD case for “Dancing with Gaia.”

First, although this is not directly about “the Goddess movement,” I want to point out the blogging that Aidan Kelly has been doing, particularly about the history of contemporary Paganism in America, at his Patheos blog, Including Paganism.

Another resource is Dancing with Gaia, a video subtitled “Earth Energy, Sacred Sexuality, the Return of the Goddess as Gaia . . . a Continuum,” produced and directed by Jo Carson (82 min.)

A number of the well-known names from the Goddess movement are in, such as the Swedish artist and anarchist Monica Sjöö (1938–2005) to name just one. So it is a valuable work.

What I found particularly interesting, however, was the large amount of 1970s- era footage of the Southern California Pagan group Feraferia, founded by the Goddess- visionary artist Fred Adams and his wife, Svetlana.

Somehow the Adamses are left out of most surveys of Goddess religion. Perhaps they were too visionary, too “cosmic”  . . . and too religious? They just did not fit the narrative—except in Carson’s case.

But what you can see is home-movie footage of Pagan ritual in the California mountains that must be some of the earliest available, as well as other footage of sites in Europe, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere.

Dancing with Gaia is available on DVD for $19.95.

It’s Called “Occult” Because It’s Hidden

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In my professional life, I am currently in the middle of Major Drama that I cannot talk about right now. I think that it will be all for the best, but the details will have to remain occult for a bit longer.

Plus I seem to be getting some kind of equinoctial crud (this happens) that leaves me feeling tired and achy. Thus I observe the Turning of the Wheel.

So let me direct you to a post at The Teeming Brain on “Haunted by Our Amnesia: The Forgotten Mainstream Impact of the Occult/Esoteric ‘Fringe.’ ”

When one starts to look, it’s as if history mirrors physics, where some hypothesize that nearly 84% of the mass in the universe is composed of dark matter. It seems as if the main historical influences that affect us exist in a shadow realm that few give credence to, yet this realm forms the main source of the ebb and flow that pushes us forward. What the media, mainstream science, and academia consider “fringe” is often at the very heart of the issues we face.

Think of it: both the much-lauded leader Mohandas Gandhi and the common funerary practice of cremation (in the context of American culture) have their roots firmly planted in the Theosophical Society, an organization that most people today know of as a New Age joke, if they know of it at all. (See, for example, Gary Lachman’s forthcoming biography Madame Blavatsky: Mother of Modern Spirituality for a look at the ironic “open hiddenness” of both Theosophy and its formidable founder in today’s spiritual marketplace.)

And there is more, so read the whole thing.

The Multivalent Mothman

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Last month I wandered off into Mothman territory, but here is more, from the editorial blog of the Bulletin for the Study of Religion.

There is an annual Mothman festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and two entries deal with it: “West Virginia is one big portal!” Reflections on the Eleventh Annual Mothman Festival – Part 1 and also  Part 2

Both are by Joseph Laycock, who is known in my little corner of academia for his work on vampire culture in Atlanta. He muses,

Driving away from Point Pleasant, I continued to think about Mothman and meaning.  Mothman is more than just a mascot for Point Pleasant. It is a reflection of the people and their history.  Scott Poole has suggested that monsters often point to darker aspects of our history. The Mothman mythos connects many elements of the community’s past that are generally not discussed with tourists: The murder of chief Cornstalk, the collapse of the Silver Bridge, and the pollution lurking just underneath the surface of the local wildlife preserve.  Mothman lore also functions as a kind of art form that, as Clifford Geertz notes, can serve to capture the themes of everyday life and more powerfully articulate their meaning.  Mothman even serves as a metaphor for the coal and power industries that dominate West Virginia. Like the smoke stacks and devastated mountaintops, Mothman is a portent of death and future disaster. But it is also a source of livelihood and closely connected to the identity of the people.

Business Opportunity for the Next Generation

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Tattoo removal. It‘s starting to take off (pun intended).

The psychological motivations for tattoo removal (change of lifestyle and relationship status, changes in body and skin over the years, upward mobility in society and employment, etc.) are a constant, and will lead to an even larger market for tattoo removal than currently exists today.

And some related critiquing:

By enlarging ourselves with tattoos, we’re belittling ourselves in the process. It’s a sign of our low expectations that having control over flesh decorations is considered to be the limit of our capacities as an individual.

Kind of related—how do you as a priest dress to be counter-hip so that hipsters will “relate” to you? We’ve been down this road before. Anyone remember “folk Masses” with tambourines?

Be authentic. Be real. Invest in a chain of tattoo-removal clinics. That is all.

The Witches and the Stripper

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Someone at the Daily Mail no doubt had a good time writing the headline “The drunken stripper from the Golden Banana, a coven of Salem witches and the ‘groping’ man horrifically impaled when she crashed into a flatbed truck.”

Yes, it is link bait, and I bit. Wouldn’t you?

But it made me think: One of the many untold stories about the beginnings of the Craft in North America (I can’t speak for other places) is the involvement of people who were in or peripheral to the world of sex work.

I have to make some revisions to an article that I wrote for an edited collection on sex and new religious movements. I’m doing Wicca, no surprise there, and am concentrating on sexual metaphor in ritual.  I think, however, that the editor wants more on the “sexy witch” archetype.

Certainly a lot could be said about that, but in one article? Likewise,  a lot could be said—but has not—about the nexus of sexual experimentation and contemporary Paganism. It’s not just Paganism, of course—alternative sexual relationships and new religious movements have intersected many times. Hence this book. Consider, for instance, the Oneida Community and its doctrine of “complex marriage,” a sort of 19th-century polyamory.

The sexual impulse and the religious-creation impulse are often closely linked, it seems.

Pagans Preparing for Collapse

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Archdruid John Michael Greer and the Four Quarters Sanctuary figure in this article on “doom time religion.”

Based on my limited experience, a strong religious emphasis might hold a communal group together. Otherwise, the people you need are not always the ones who want to live in the commune. The hard workers don’t want to have to carry a bunch of parasites and wannabes who think that “communal living” equals “easy.”

The Purity, the Honesty . . .

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Indian filmmaker decides to reinvent himself as a guru in America. It looks as though unexpected hilarity results.

The only question is, does pretending to be a guru actually transform him into some sort of guru? “I fake so much, I forget who I was before.”

Not available on Netflix yet, but I have it on my wish list.