Five Kinds of “Witch” and Other Reflections on the Academic Study of Contemporary Paganism

Australian writer, blogger, and scholar Caroline Tully continues her interview with Professor Ronald Hutton on the history of witchcraft and related topics.

On the perceptions of conflict between scholars and practitioners:

When some Pagans now express hostility to academics, they are generally doing so in defence of ideas which were originally articulated by other academics. Most often, they are defending what was the general scholarly orthodoxy about historical witchcraft in the mid twentieth century, represented finally and most famously by Margaret Murray of the University of London. What bewilders and angers some members of the public most about professional scholarship now is not actually that it is entrenched and manufactures consent, but that it has overturned many of the received truths of previous decades. To challenge orthodoxy effectively is currently the fastest and most certain way to make an academic career, and the pace of argument and change can be bewildering for people on the outside who want stability and certainty, or at least to continue to believe what they were originally taught about something.

Read the rest.

The forthcoming issue of The Pomegranate will include Tully’s own article on this topic, and it should be available as a free download.

Protest-Site Paganism

“A Life in the Woods: Protest-Site Paganism” is an essay by Adrian Harris.

Dusk is falling as I get off the bus but within 10 minutes I find myself walking down the rough path towards the camp. A voice hollers out a “Hello!” from the bank above me. “Hi! It’s Adrian – I phoned the camp a couple of days ago.” At the moment I’m no more than a shadow in the dark, so I want to reassure them that I’m a friend. “Oh, hi! Come on up. There’s a gap in the fence over here”. A guy who calls himself ‘Oak’  meets me with a smile and leads me to the fire pit where people sit huddled round the warmth.

The piece references a “bender,” which is a temporary dwelling made from lengths of flexible wood (or metal rods) and covered with fabric, plastic sheeting, etc. You can see an example and explanation here. An American might say “wigwam,” from the Algonquian.

You can also read his PhD thesis, “Wisdom of the Body: Embodied Knowing in Eco-Paganism,” for more thinking on what makes nature spirituality.

When Is a Monk not a Monk?

When he or she is a student at the University of Pennsylvania.

Given that this is a religious-studies class (academic, not doctrinal) at a secular university,  I thought that the professor had an interesting idea.

The … course on monastic life and asceticism gives students at the University of Pennsylvania a firsthand experience of what it’s like to be a monk.

At various periods during the semester, students must forego technology, coffee, physical human contact and certain foods. They’ll also have to wake up at 5 a.m. – without an alarm clock.

Rather than reading or watching videos, they would have an embodied experience.

Now obviously it is a doctrinal-content-free experience on one level: it is just “monasticism,” not Catholic or Buddhist or anything else in terms of content. We might call it “core monasticism,” on a parallel with Michael Harner’s “core shamanism.”

The “faith-free” aspect—and the reporter’s failure to ask the how’s and why’s—annoyed Terry Mattingly at Get Religion, the blog critiquing journalistic coverage of religion. (Believe me, there is plenty to critique.)

I assume that there would be other ways of stating that requirement that the students eliminate “physical human contact.” That might have something to do with chastity and celibacy. One wonders why the story didn’t simply state that clearly, right up front. Perhaps it’s more shocking these days to discuss students giving up coffee and cell telephones.

The key to reading this AP report, however, is to strive not to focus on the content of McDaniel’s class and to try to figure out the degree to which the reporter did or didn’t miss some basic subjects.

But first, what is the tradition that shapes this form of monasticism that is acceptable on an elite university campus?

In the comments, Prof. Anthea Butler, another member of Penn’s religious studies faculty, promises a response in her column at Religion Dispatches. It is not yet published, but I will link to to it when it is available.

Did the class have a “spiritual” component? Should it have? Or is asking college students to give up cell phones and coffee and to take notes with a pen equivalent to hair shirts, self-mortification, and ora et labora in itself??

Actually, my first thought was, “Where is the music?” The students should meet at 5 a.m. in a large room with a good echo for half an hour of Gregorian chant. But that would be “content.”

Survey on Pagan Prayer

Evidently it’s the season for surveys. This one comes from researchers at the University of Warwick.  I recognize one of the names, a sociologist of religion who has published in The Pomegranate.

If I take it, I will say that I do not engage in petitionary prayer very often, preferring to think in terms of invocation, of invitation, or of attuning one’s self to the deity’s “frequency,” so to speak.

Thought Crime in the Writing Classroom

I taught writing for twenty years. I heard some shocking stuff—especially in the “Creative Nonfiction” class, which occasionally produced some, shall we say, highly confessional material.

And there was one outright psycho student who, lucky for me, fixated on a different professor as the cause of all her problems—not to mention accusing him in her writing (for me) of being a Satanic serial killer—and showed up at his house one night at 2 a.m. with a large knife.

I even had freewriting assignments that might have resembled “a place for a writer to try out ideas and record impressions and observations,” [containing] “freewriting/brainstorming” and “creative entries.”

But no one ever used his or her journal to discuss his or her sexual attraction for me (sigh).

If a student had done so, I would never have described the writing as “unlawful.” Immature or inappropriate maybe, but not something that would get a student kicked out of not just my class, but all his on-campus classes.

But Pamela Mitzelfeld, who teaches English 380, “Advanced Writing,” at a school in Michigan, felt she had to swing the big PC hammer on student Joseph Corlett.

Oakland University near Detroit has suspended a student for three semesters, barred him from campus, and demanded he undergo “sensitivity” counseling because he wrote in a class assignment that he found his instructors attractive. While the course specifically permitted students to write creatively about any topic, the university bizarrely chose to classify his writing as “unlawful individual activities.” Joseph Corlett came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.

To call the university’s decision to suspend Corlett for three semesters for his thought crime a “wild overreaction” is putting it mildly. I hope that FIRE roasts them.

The philosopher Hypatia faced a similar problem with unwanted sexual attraction, the story goes, and dealt with it much more directly.

Adjunct Teaching and the “Portfolio Life”

As part of a seasonal celebration of Imbolc — it’s about creativity, right? — I took a day and cleaned my big home office desk. Took everything off the top, stained the scratches with Old English Scratch Cover, and then polished the mahogany-veneer top with paste wax for protection against spilt coffee, tea, and whiskey. After sort and organizing all the papers, etc., I felt ready to begin a new season.

Part of that cleaning is cleaning out drafts of blog posts, such as this one:

At Academy Mercenary, Amy Hale holds up adjunct teaching against the concept of “the portfolio life” and thinks that they are compatible. (Plus more about the recent AAR annual meeting.)

In the past week or so I have been particularly inspired by the notion of the “portfolio life”, which is the idea that we start to see ourselves less as “having jobs” and more as possessing a variety of skills and interests that we can add to our portfolio. We can use our portfolio for marketing ourselves and also for making decisions on how we want to spend our time and resources.  Portfolio lives also require knowing what resources you need, because the income streams are seen less as an identity anchor and more of a way to finance how you want to live.  Although the portfolio life is frequently used to promote active retirement, I think there are plenty of ways for those of us not working 9 to 5 jobs to use this idea to use this concept to consider a more integrated life that is less defined by our jobs, and more defined by what we love. For people not engaged in standard employment, or do not have a single institution based position, this can be a very empowering life reframing exercise.

Read the rest.

I graduated with what amounted to a BFA in Creative Writing, although Reed College called it a BA in English. I certainly knew that that degree offered no clear career path—having the concept of the “portfolio life” might have been helpful when I was in my twenties.

As it happened, I did pretty much what “the voices” told me to do, and it has worked out OK, so far.

Meanwhile, at Inside Higher Education, two essays imagine a new model, where  both full-time professors and overworked adjunct professors leave the university to form guilds of academic ronin. 

Tomorrow I Will Do Something Marking Me as Potential Terrorist

I will go to a cafe with wi-fi and pay cash for a cup of coffee.

Your tax dollars at work in Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.

The “New Yorker rule”

M. and I work together on many editing projects. Yesterday, the author of a journal article, reading her galleys, said that she thought that expressions such as “sui generis,”  “axis mundi,”*  and “Weltanschauung” should be italicized as foreign expressions. (I had them in roman.)

I consulted the holy scriptures, where in chapter 7, verse 52, I read, “Foreign words and pases familiar to most readers and listed in Webster’s should appear in roman (not italics) if used in an English context. . . . German nouns, if in Webster’s, are lowercased.”

I assume that the online Webster’s is all right. But what about “most readers”?

I propose “the New Yorker rule.” Although The New Yorker is not an academic journal, its writers and editors seem to expect a level of comfort with common phrases from other major world languages (Chinese excepted, thus far).

Therefore, if The New Yorker puts a phrase like “sui generis” in roman, so shall we. A quick search of the phrase on their website will tell us. They do capitalize Weltanschauung when writing in English, however, which is a deviation from the true Chicago path.

* I have read too much Eliade to ever put axis mundi in italics anyway.

 

Do the Living Outnumber the Dead?

Did you ever get into a discussion of the possibility of reincarnation only to have someone announce, “Reincarnation is impossible because there are more people alive now than have ever lived”?

And then they sit back smugly. Or perhaps they quote George Carlin, the favorite sage of the Barstool Philosopher.

Not so fast, bubba.

It is true that if you delve back into the mists of time, the population of Earth was tiny in comparison to today and logically it might seem plausible that the living outnumber the dead.

Picking the right starting point seems to be crucial, and there is a certain amount of hand-waving involved, but see for yourself.

Speed-Reviewing Pagan Musicians

At The Mead Muse, reviews of a different Pagan musician or group each day for 28 days during February.

First came Sharon Knight and Pandemonaeon, a solid choice.