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 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?
I Just Want to Disappear
. . . into the autumn woods.
A Hit, a very Palpable Hit
I just plugged the paper that I am writing on sexuality and contemporary Paganism in to the website at this link, and it was scored as 77-percent Shakespearean.
Too many words such as “Wicca” were not in his extensive vocabulary. Try it with a sample of your own prose.
(Via Odious and Peculiar.)
It’s Mabon, so … canta y no llores
The Marquez Brothers of Pueblo, Colo., playing at the Harvest Festival at the Holy Cross Abbey in Cañon City.
My approach to the eight-festival Pagan calendar works like this: the cross-quarter days are for ritual—be that outdoor bonfires or black candles at midnight.
The quarter days—solstices and equinoxes—are for public and communal celebrations: with the whole public, not just with other Pagans.
The fall equinox offers choice of harvest festivals: the Chile & Frijoles (pinto beans) festival in Pueblo (bigger) or the Holy Cross Abbey Winery Harvest Festival in Cañon City—smaller but still crowded.
M. and I chose the latter this year, buying elderberry jam and garlicky goat cheese and drinking Abbey wines under the blazing sun. Two guys in charro outfits up from Pueblo played a ranchera–rockbilly–soft rock mix, which is exactly what you expect from a Pueblo band.
Vineyard at Holy Cross Abbey, Cañon City, Colorado
Now the Myth-Making Begins
That stuff on the winery home page about “simple Benedictine Fathers had a dream”—sounds good, right? Don’t the grape vines just look right next to the Gothic Revival abbey?
But the Holy Cross Benedictines were not “simple.” They were school teachers for the most part, running a well-respected secondary school for boys (boarding and day students) from the 1920s until it closed in 1985. Like so much Catholic education, it was a victim of demographics: not enough new monks and priests coming up, not enough church financial support to afford to pay lay (non-monastic) teachers, so no way to keep the doors open and the lights on.
After that, the dwindling number of elderly monks rented out their buildings to the community college and other users.
The winery, meanwhile, did not open until 2002. It employs no monks in its day-to-day operations. The monks could not have made wine for sale in the 1920s anyway because of Prohibition. Their mission was educational.
But the idea of “monks making wine” is so appealing that in a generation people will be strolling the grounds of the abbey talking about how the Benedictines came to Cañon City “a hundred years ago” to plant vineyards and bottle some good cabernet franc. I would bet money on it.
It is not unlike saying that the local morris dancers or village harvest festival represent an unbroken survival from ancient Paganism instead of—in either case—something (re)invented by an antiquarian-minded vicar.
Of course, that Chile & Frijoles Festival—great street festival that it is—is a relatively new creation too. This was its seventeenth year.
It represents a conscious attempt by Pueblo’s elite to re-cast the city’s image as a tourist-friendly sort of Santa Fe North, instead of the grimy steel mill town that it was for decades, dominated by union Democrats with Italian and Slavic surnames.
But Pueblo does have a good climate for growing peppers.
(As to the post’s title, the musicians played “Cielito Lindo,” of course.)
A Folk Healer in Urban Detroit
Tamra Meadows in her garden.
An interesting story but it raises the old question: how much credit goes to the herb and how much to the herb-doctor:
A lot of inner-city folks don’t have much money, don’t have any health insurance, and have little trust for the run-down clinics that cater to the poor. So if their illness isn’t too serious, many will rely on folk treatments or natural remedies passed down through families for years.
And they rely on people like Meadows. Her reputation in the neighborhood has even earned her the nickname “The Witch Doctor.”
“They say, ‘I know you got something over in the yard. I need you to fix me something up,'” Meadows says of her neighbors. She’s learned much of what she knows from books she’s studied, but a lot of it, she says, just comes to her. “I pray about it,” she says. “And I tell them, ‘It’s not me. It’s a power.’ Sometimes I tell God, ‘Leave me alone.'”
Doing What the Spirits Request
An interesting post from Walking the Hedge on daily practice, medicine bags, and the demands of tutelary spirits:
That’s a whole other bother … fellow witches and pagans who don’t get it. Who think that it all must be done elegantly, flowing and … and not weird. Do something odd or awkward like blowing on your divination set or baby talking to a crow skull and all your validity goes right out the window in their mind. Nevermind that fact that the elegant shit is just for show and the spitting, swearing, shaking, whispering, sweating, bloodletting, pissing and such is the real deal! It’s supposed to look like the white witch on TV with her perfectly rhyming poetry and not the crazy voodoo chick with her eyes rolling back into her head on that documentary we watched once … right? Bullshit.
A Different A.E. Waite Tarot Deck
Mary K. Greer discusses a forgotten Tarot deck designed by ceremonial magician A.E. Waite, whose collaboration with artist Pamela Coleman Smith produced the Tarot deck probably most commonly used in the past fifty years, at least in the Anglosphere. A new publication with commentary is planned.
The commentary will be based on Waite’s unpublished and extensive commentary on the images, which has led to a complete mapping of Waite’s “secret” correspondences to the Tree of Life. Marcus [Katz] says that this set of correspondences is so blindingly obvious and “makes sense,” such that he believes we will be astounded. It will be interesting to see if the mapping corresponds with the revised Tree of Life described in Decker and Dummett’s book. Also, this clears up a long-running controversy about whether the Rider-Waite-Smith deck was designed with Golden Dawn Tree of Life Associations in mind. My feeling is that it was, as Waite clearly uses these associations in some of his Order papers, but it’s also clear that he wasn’t really satisfied with them.
Green Halloween?
First of all, I took this photo on August 26th. Is this what the new Pagan future will look like? Everyone complaining that it is not even the equinox, but the stores are full of Halloween merchandise?
This building used to be a Toys “R” Us store in Pueblo, Colo., until that chain suddenly contracted. It has been empty ever since, except that the Spirit Halloween party company rents it some years for the weeks leading up to Halloween.
Months ago it got the “Green Store” sign, supposedly for a thrift store, but that business still has not opened. (There were management problems, for one thing.)
But plastic skulls and sexy-witch costumes still sell well, at least for two months of the year!
In other news, my absence from blogging was due to a trip to Yellowstone, M.’s and my first real vacation of more than a long-weekend’s length since last November. I am posting about our trip at Southern Rockies Nature Blog.