World Religions versus the Blue Bra Revolution

Washington Post writer Sally Quinn looks at photos of Egyptian soldiers beating an abaya-shrouded Muslim woman, and a light bulb goes on for her about major religions:

Why would men, particularly under the guise of religious belief, want to keep women down? Because they understand that women’s sexuality is something that they cannot live without, it is something that renders them powerless. Women can have babies, women can breastfeed, women are the lifegivers.

Sounds like much of the Pagan discourse beginning in the 1970s, if not earlier! Read more about her hoped-for “blue bra revolution.”

In related news, Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority is nervous.

For decades Copts have suffered attacks by Islamists who view them as “kafir”—Arabic for nonbelievers. But there is now a sense among Middle East experts that they have become more vulnerable since the revolution.

This year, mobs have looted and attacked Coptic churches, homes and shops throughout Egypt. Churches have been burned down, and one Copt had his ear cut off by a Muslim cleric invoking Islamic law.

Strong gains by Islamist parties in the recent elections have further raised fears among the Christian minority that they won’t have a place in the new Egypt.

An acquaintance of mine is married to an Egyptian Christian woman. Her parents recently came for what he said is a month-long visit — I see them around town with their daughter now and then. I am starting to wonder if they actually plan to go home or to seek asylum. Maybe they are weighing their options.

Upcoming Gerald Gardner Documentary

A commenter asked about the documentary on Gerald Gardner in which Ronald Hutton is involved. Here is the announcement.

How long before it might be available outside Britain is a good question.

Last Yuletide News Bits

Re-purposed Santa figure, Pueblo, Colorado

• This is your brain. This is your brain on Christmas.

• “How the Lawyers Stole Winter”  — are we raising kids who can’t cope? No, it’s not Yule-related, directly. Indirectly, yes, I would argue. You have to embrace all of the wheel.

• No matter how “imagistic” it may be, Iraqi Christians are afraid to celebrate Midnight Mass. The current bunch of Islamists may succeed after 1,400 years of effort in chasing the last Arab Christians out of the Middle East. Expect them all in North America soon. (I have already met Egyptian Christians in a tiny town near me.)

• I was watching a re-run show hosted by travel writer Burt Wolf in which he reported that Christmas trees were promoted by 16th-century German Protestants who considered images of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and the saints to be idolatrous and who wanted to replace them with something else. That is counter-intuitive enough that it might be right, and it matches what was going on elsewhere, such as England in the time of the boy king Edward VI. In that case, the Christmas tree does not qualify as a “Pagan survival,” at least not directly.

• And don’t forget Krampus coming to town.

Why I Feel Sorry for Christians at Christmas

So here it is, two days before Christmas, birthday of Christ the Savior, etc., and I am feeling sorry for the Christian clergy, at least some of them.

Along with Easter, this is their big religious holiday. The Incarnation of God—in their theology. And they have to beg people to put down the presents and turn off the flat-screen television and come to church.

“You don’t even have to get dressed up for the Savior of Humankind,” they cry. “You can come in your jammies!”

Forget the “War on Christmas,” that is a big concession right there. White flag, don’t shoot! We know the prezzies are more important, but can’t you just tie your bathrobe and come to church for a little while?

True, some of the Anglicans and Catholics and those Orthodox who observe December 25 try a little harder. And a good Midnight Mass on December 24th appeals to the “imagistic” rather than the “doctrinal” mode of religiosity. You remember it with your body, with all your senses—the darkness, the candles, the music, the physical presence of other worshipers.

(But the talky-talk Protestants and the “we don’t really commit to anything” Unitarians can’t go there.)

Or this:

We have a 4:00 p.m. Pajama Mass on Christmas Eve. It’s a service dedicated to and directed by children from the congregation and from the community. We have a very cool combination of the very elderly, who don’t like to be out late, and the very young.

Because church is mainly for the very young and the very old?

The other thought haunting some Christians is the whole “Pagan customs at Christmas” issue. A reporter for a Christian news site interviewed me just the other day about that.

What I did not tell him was this: Your whole ritual calendar is a mess. If we contemporary Pagans know anything, it’s calendars.

Consider that if Jesus was born when shepherds were keeping watch over their flocks by night, he was born during lambing season—in the spring. His execution and resurrection also occur in the spring, during and after the Jewish festival of Passover (Pesach)—and its history includes the Jews in Egypt daubing lambs’ blood on their doors. There is this whole sheep thing going on.

So to avoid the spring-spring clash, the birthday is moved to the winter solstice—and I don’t care if the Christians copied Pagans or the other way around, really.

Mapping Jesus’ life on the annual cycle makes for an odd calendrical cycle. He is anticipated during Advent (late November-December), born at Christmas, shown forth at Epiphany (Jan. 6 in the West), killed on Good Friday, and resurrected on Easter Sunday. Then he hangs around for forty days, only to vanish on Ascension. After that, his disciples experience mystical illumination on Pentecost—celebrated a few days later.

And that is it—nothing for the next six months except various saints’ days, etc.—if you are in a liturgical church. For the talky-talk Protestants, there is not even that—in fact, not much after Easter.

Even in my Christian boyhood this arrangement struck me as poor planning. Why cram all the good stuff into less than half of the year?

Mall Ninjas of Pagandom

Vengeful Druids poisoned Gerald Gardner because he was an oath-breaker — did you know that?

Probably not, because it never happened.

I got this particular b.s. tossed by a Facebook friend (as opposed to an actual friend), a Druid from Kansas.

I suggested that he might check one of Ronald Hutton’s books on Druidry or even Philip Heselton’s Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration. Even though Heselton missed the obvious about Gardner’s spiritual journey, his basic legwork and research in primary sources is outstanding.

None of this helped, because Kansas Druid just wanted to be abusive under the guise of asking questions about Paganism.

He seemed to have a bee in his bonnet about Gerald Gardner, making various claims such as that in 1947 the Ancient Order of Druids (a more fraternal than religious form of Druidry) ordered its members not to associate with Gardner.  (By my reckoning, Wicca did not yet exist in 1947.)

And although he listed Isaac Bonewits as a person he admired, he persisted in claiming that Druids were warriors. Isaac could have set him straight on that, since Isaac was quite interested in the theories of the Indo-Europeanists such as Georges Dumézil, who saw ancient patriarchal I-E societies (from Ireland to India) as “trifunctional,” divided into classes of priests, warriors, and commoners (farmers, artisans) In that hypothesis, Celtic Druids equate with Indian Brahmins as ritual specialists, lore-keepers, etc. — not the aristocratic warrior class.

I thought about pointing that out to the Kansan, but by then I realized that I was dealing with a Pagan mall ninja, someone who just wanted to spew about Gerald Gardner, Wicca, “hippies,” and so forth, fully armored in his ignorance.

The virtual food courts of the Internet are full of them.

The larger point is this: at the recent American Academy of Religion annual meeting, two speakers in one of the Contemporary Pagan Studies sessions talking about walking the line between “pure” scholarship and “advocacy.” We don’t want to be Pagans talking about Paganism for other Pagans—although some in Pagan media seem to expect that we should be doing that—a topic for another post.

Instead, we want to show how larger issues in the study of religions work themselves out in Paganism—or how Paganism can cause other issues to be re-examined, such as the whole sacred materiality/idolatry thread that started at the 2009 annual meeting in Montreal and which is still playing itself out in The Pomegranate.

But there was also discussion of a scholarship of service—I think Ronald Hutton, for one, strives for this in the talks he gives at Pagan gatherings in the UK and in the upcoming documentary on Gerald Gardner with which he is involved.

On the other hand, when people do not want to be exposed to ideas that challenge what they think they know, what can you do? How do you engage them at Orange Julius or Sbarro?

The Young Woman Who Personified Everything

Back when it was a print zine and not an (all too irregular) blog, John Yohalem’s Enchanté had some articles on “gods of the city”—architectural and sculptural representations of the Olympian deities and other Neoclassical figures.

Somewhere in there, perhaps, were sculptures based on a young woman named Audrey Munson.

Dreamy and pale, slender and softly curved, Audrey played muse to a generation of New York City sculptors at the turn of the 20th century. Her undraped figure still graces Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum and the Municipal Building. Though she tried to translate her beauty to the new medium of film, her career ended suddenly as Modernism — and her 30s — arrived. . . .

Audrey Munson

Audrey Munson

She was asked to personify, among other notions, memory, peace, abundance, mourning, industry, beauty, and America. Her statues still dot her city, from the Firemen’s Memorial in Riverside Park to the Brooklyn Museum. Daniel Chester French, sculptor of “Memory” and later of Lincoln for the president’s Washington, D.C., memorial, called her ethereal. For fame’s sake, Audrey withstood sucking air through a tube while being cast in plaster, dousings with cold water for a piece called “Waterfall,” and endless hours of painful posing. But she seemed at ease unclothed. And despite spending so many hours naked in the company of men, she was often portrayed in news stories as a simple girl-next-door who lived with her mother, a beguiling naïf who said things like, “Why clothes anyhow?”

The rest of her life was not so good.

 

Ground Broken for Pagan Library

Ground was broken on the 17th for construction of the New Alexandrian Library in Georgetown, Delaware.

Its name references an ancient library in Alexandria, Egypt. It—or they, as there were several collections—was damaged in Roman wars, destroyed as part of a campaign against Pagan temples by a Christian bishop—and according to some accounts, also by Muslim conquerors of Egypt.

The history is hard to sort out, but there is a constant theme of repository of knowledge threatened or destroyed by war and religious bigotry, which is easy enough to understand.

To further complicate things, there is also a modern Bibliotheca Alexandria in Egypt, which claims to carry on the spirit of the original(s). One wonders what will happen to it if Egypt enters another period of bigotry and chaos. You might say that the book-burning has already begun.

Meanwhile, back in Delaware, if I understand correctly, Cherry Hill Seminary will treat the New Alexandrian Library as its physical library for further accreditation purposes.

Ivo Dominguez, one of the people involved in the project, noted

As much as I and many of you like the internet, or their Kindle or their iPad, there is no substitute for having rooted in the physical plane storage, special materials and more importantly, a catalyst for interaction. Where there have been great libraries, and libraries are as much the center for creation and presentation of culture, you have a crossroads where you have interaction between different people doing scholarly work. There is a place to point at and say, in this place we actually have the maturity and perseverance as a community to make something happen that stays.”

There is no Kindle, no electronic version that will ever be the same as actually being in the presence of a book that was owned by a particular author. Each of these books is like a Book of Shadows. Each is filled with the essence and the energy of the people who have worked with it. So there is something that can only be held in the physical realm.

They want to raise money to build a series of sturdy concrete-covered domes. It’s a noble project.

Should Paganized Yule Carols Be Encouraged?

Evangelical Christians are always swiping slogans and memes from media or popular culture and Christ-fying them. On the Baptist Church signboard that I pass on the way into Pueblo, I have seen “Got Jesus?”—an obvious steal from the dairy industry’s “Got milk?” campaign.

Here are more examples of “Christ-ification.” (“Got Jesus?” is there too.)

So what happens when Pagans do it?

I am fully aware of the filk tradition, and Polyhymnia knows that people have been putting new words to old tunes since forever.

So when you put new words to traditional Christmas carols, everyone knows the tunes, at least.

Since “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” is a commercial song and not religious, why not (aside from copyright issues) turn it into the catchy “Faunus the Roman Goat God“? And the production values are pretty good.

But I keep going back to “Got Jesus?” on the Baptist church sign.

Are we not creative enough to come up with our own songs? Isn’t there something intrinsically second-rate about taking a song from the dominant culture and turning it into “We Three Witches,” even when the adaption is well-done?

Father Christmas in the Wild

Just to put you in the holiday mood. You don’t think that he just appears out of nowhere, do you?

Want more?

Teachers’ Resources for the Winter Solstice

By Ronald Hutton in the Times (London) Educational Supplement, with special attention to mumping.

The third characteristic of midwinter is charity, based on the humane impulse to assist those who not could afford to make merry (and coupled with the more practical reality that the poor might slit their wealthier neighbours’ throats unless their resentments were tempered). Collecting and giving to the poor was known in variant local English terms as Thomasing, Gooding, Mumping, Hoggling or Hognelling. Able-bodied working men could earn the food and money for their household feasts by performing songs, dances or plays to please the better off – such as the Mummers’ Play, Sword Dances and, of course, carols.

Down the Forest Service road from my house is the hobby ranch of a rich doctor whom we call “the squire,” not entirely in fun. Maybe M. and I should recruit friends to carol at his house and see what he’d give us. Or not.