Does Halloween Fill a “Spiritual Vacuum”?

The “Halloween season” keeps starting sooner, and its economic impact increases.

Not everyone is pleased. Bloomberg News columnist Amity Shlaes reacts against its “paganism.” She is pleased to see the violence of “Mischief Night” fading but continues, ”

Unmask Halloween, however, and you’ll also find some disconcerting features. Christmas and Easter may be secularized these days, relative to their past, but they remain Christian holidays. People value Halloween, like Valentine’s Day, because they can tell themselves that it’s not merely secularized but actually secular, which is to say, not Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Muslim. . .

But as much as we’d like it to be, Halloween isn’t secular. It is pagan. There’s nothing else to call a set of ceremonies in which people utter magical phrases, flirt with the night and evoke the dead.

She appears to think that there is something religious going on here—something outside the traditions of Middle Eastern monotheism—but cannot quite say its name.

Astrology Conference Book Available for Preorder

From the announcement:

The ‘Astrologies’ conference, organised by the Sophia Centre, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution on 24-25 July 2010 was the first gathering of academics working in the history and culture of modern astrology. The range of topics explored in the publication of the conference proceedings is broad, and reflects the strik ing diversity of techniques and underlying philosophies which underlie the enduring human perception of meaningful relationships between the heavenly bodies and life on earth. Although astrology has been treated in many scholarly works as a monolithic entity, all of the papers in this book demonstrate one of the paradoxes of astrological thought and practice: the existence of a relative ly stable tradition of cosmological and astral representations and ideas combined with a adaptability that has enabled astrologies to meld with different  spheres of human endeavour in a variety of cultures. The papers are grouped into three basic themes: the symbolism of astrologies, the history of astrologies within different cultural con texts, and the practice of various astrologies from both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perspectives.

Contents and ordering information here.

The Care and Feeding of Writers

“The writer was first domesticated by the Chinese, in 3400 B.C. Although the keeping of writers has been popular among the aristocracy for millennia, it has become widespread in the last few centuries as the working masses have accrued more time and resources to devote to the care of others.”

Read the rest.

“Sybil,” the Fraudulent Book that Built a Movement

Debbie Nathan, a journalist whose work did a lot to bring down the “Satanic panic” movement of the 1980s, has now turned her literary guns on a classic of my young adulthood: Sybil, supposedly a true story of a girl with multiple personalities.

Debbie Nathan’s “Sybil Exposed” is about psychiatric fads, outrageous therapeutic malpractice, thwarted ambition run amok, and several other subjects, but above all, it is a book about a book. Specifically, that book is Sybil, purportedly the true story of a woman with 16 personalities. First published in 1973, Sybil remains in print after selling over 6 million copies in the U.S. alone.

Somewhat similarly to  Michelle Remembers (1980), it took the conjunction of a gullible (and fantasizing?) therapist and a definitely fantasy-prone patient who could spin out “unreliable confessions and bizarre fantasies” while under the influence of sodium pentothal “truth serum” to get the ball rolling.

Add a writer and later a screenwriter and you have literary and cinematic hits.

The therapist, Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, did her part to promote the myth of intergenerational satanic conspiracies:

She played a key role in promoting the belief that conspiracies of fiendish, sadistic adults were secretly perpetrating murder, child rape and mutilation, human sacrifice, and cannibalism across the country and that repressed memories of such atrocities lay at the root of most MPDs. Innocent people were convicted of these crimes on the basis of testimony elicited from highly suggestible small children and hypnotized adults. Families were sundered by therapists who convinced their patients that they’d suffered similar ordeals despite having no conscious memory of it. This opened the door to years of expensive and ineffective therapy.

Read the rest.

The First (Pagan) Museum

To the list of Things Created by Pagans (democracy, etc.), add the profession of museum curator.

That honor goes to Princess Ennigaldi, the daughter of King Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. As was traditional for the daughters of Mesopotamian kings, her primary duties were religious in nature, both as the high priestess of the moon god Nanna and as the administrator of a school for young priestesses. It was around 530 BCE that Ennigaldi created her museum. That comes dangerously close to being everything we know about the woman behind the world’s first museum.

Dad was into restoring ziggurats. Read the rest.

What Was Ancient Roman Childhood?

Historian Peter Thonemann reviews books on childhood in the Roman republic and empire in the TLS.

A lot is about trying to uncover the Romans’ balance between sentimentality and utility, particularly in the upper classes:

House-reared slaves, as Beryl Rawson shows in Children, Memory, and Family Identity in Roman Culture, could play a variety of roles in the Roman elite family, from surrogate son to erotic plaything. What is difficult for us to deal with is the notion that, as in the case of Statius’s beloved boy, they might have played both roles simultaneously.

And the inevitable problem:

Needless to say, both of the books under review see Roman children through the eyes of their parents and owners. How could it be otherwise? Aside from the odd cheeky remark about enjoying Cicero, the voices of ancient children are lost for good. A rare exception comes from the temple of Sarapis at Memphis in Egypt, where, in the mid-second century BC, an eccentric recluse called Ptolemaios faithfully recorded the dreams of two little Egyptian twin girls, Thaues and Taous: “The dream that the girl Thaues saw on the 17th of the month Pachon. I seemed in my dream to be walking down the street, counting nine houses. I wanted to turn back. I said, ‘All this is at most nine.’ They say, ‘Well, you are free to go.’ I said, ‘It is too late for me’.” It is salutary to be reminded quite how little we really know or understand about the experience of childhood in antiquity.

Read the rest.

 

A Reason to ‘Love’ Boston

Because the Museum of Fine Arts will have an exhibit opening later this month devoted to “Aphrodite and the Gods of Love.”

And fine birds brought you
quick sparrows over the black earth
whipping their wings down the sky
through midair—

they arrived. But you, O blessed one,
smiled in your deathless face
and asked what (now again) I have suffered and why
(now again) I am calling out

Sappho, trans. Anne Carson
If Not, Winter

Academic Work on Paganism in Germany

René Gründer shared a link to a monograph series that includes work on contemporary Paganism and shamanism. Information in English, but the books themselves are available only in German.

His web page also contains links to some articles in English.

Feed Them to Samhain

I mean, really, if you get lost in a corn maze and you are such a hopeless loser that you call the police to come get you, shouldn’t you be fed to “Samhain, Lord of the Dead“? But then Midwest Chick offers another possible solution.

Sort of related: I passed by this commercial corn maze / pony ride / pumpkin patch northeast of Denver on my recent road trip, only the sign said “Corn Maize.” I am still wondering if that was a brilliant pun or just semi-literate spelling.

Back at the PhD (Piled-high Desk)

Rose hips and bufflo berries on the North Dakota prairie

Rose hips and buffalo berries on the North Dakota prairie. Sharptail grouse like them.

It was good to disappear. I geocached along the Niobrara River, hunted ducks in North Dakota — where “to combine” is the verb of autumn, and you accent the first syllable — and ended up finally at the Black Hills Powwow in my old hometown of Rapid City.

I ate way too much greasy food in small-town cafes but have also been reminded how much I like the taste of wild duck. I watched a badger  roam in the great empty heart of South Dakota, which is how I designate all the country south of Lemmon.

More about the powwow later.

I returned to find the “progressive” blogosphere enjoying its annual Ten Minutes of Hate against Christopher Columbus, whom we apparently must now regard not  as a 15th-century European with the mindset of his time but as truly evil.

The Italian immigrants and their descendants who pushed for the holiday were not celebrating evil, notes political blogger Walter Russell Mead.

In American history, the fight to make a holiday on Columbus Day actually had almost nothing to do with the actual arrival of Christopher Columbus in the western hemisphere.  It wasn’t about celebrating the European conquest of the Americas or the extirpation of the native tribes.

The day was made a holiday after years of lobbying as a way of recognizing the contribution of Roman Catholics and immigrants generally to American life.  It is a holiday to celebrate diversity, not to commemorate the imperial outreach of Ferdinand and Isabella, a deeply regrettable couple who were notorious oath breakers, inquisitors and anti-Semites.

Not marching, but dancing.

Meanwhile, at the powwow — and it is no coincidence that it was held October 7th–9th — American flags were much in evidence and military veterans danced first, as happens at most powwows.

Isn’t culture complicated?