. . . into the autumn woods.
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.)
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.)
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.'”
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.
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.
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.
Walter Russell Meade on advice for new college students and their parents—if you are on of those, raise your hand.
Good stuff, such as “The real world does not work like school” and “Choosing the right courses is more important than choosing the right school.”
It’s actually a classic defense of liberal-arts education, including science, politics, economics, history, geography.
And this, of course:
Fifth, learn to write well. This paradoxically is going to be more important than ever for the next generation. I can’t tell you how many editors at how many famous magazines have told me over the years that most professors and academics simply cannot write, and bemoan the immense amount of time they must devote to impose some kind of intellectual structure and comprehensible prose on the crabbed drafts they get from, often, fairly well known people.
This will not last. Publications are not going to be able to continue paying editors to spin straw into gold; if you want to have a public voice in the next generation you are going to have to learn to write well. This is a hard skill to acquire, but it can be taught. Most schools don’t do this well; it is expensive and academics generally don’t value clear and attractive prose writing as much as they should. This is important enough that I would recommend you use it as a factor in choosing a college, but for those of you already enrolled, make a point of seeing what your school offers in this area.
A lot of what I do these days is helping people unlearn the bad, formulaic writing that they picked up in graduate school.
Dave Wilton keeps prowling the Oxford English Dictionary to see when new terms entered the language:
1927: It’s some kind of woodhenge but it ain’t much in the way of interior design.
1928: That putz has some Rube Goldberg scheme to seduce his Girl Friday.
1929: Jeepers, that effing Sasquatch is in my jalopy again!
Cracked, now Cracked.com, is better now than when I was in the snarky 13-year-old demographic.
Consider this article. Sample:
This wasn’t a normal, here’s-my-little-kid-arsenal-that-I-keep-under-the-bed-in-case-of-ninja-attack; the Psychopath had real, honest to God weapons, and nobody knows where or how he got them. He owned swords, small caliber pistols and knives — oh, so many knives. He would happily explain why he needed each one — here’s a skinning knife, this one’s a deboner (tee hee), this here is a Bowie, better for slashing, and that’s a stiletto, mostly for stabbing — but there was only ever one real reason: His dad died in the army and his mom couldn’t afford therapy. Or maybe she just drank, or maybe it was his older brother that died; totaled his Trans-Am in a drag-racing accident. There were logical reasons for his behavior, but somehow, looking in Mickey’s eyes, you just kind of knew that he was born a little off.