• At The
Allergic Pagan, a three-part series on Neopaganism in America (link goes to the third part) with a lot of “whatever happened to?”.
• Jason Pitzl-Waters uses the reunion of the band Dead Can Dance (one of my favorites) to look back at the history of Pagan music.
• A new blog devoted to the history of Chicago occultism has me excited, since I will be there in November.
From Philip Jenkins’ Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality, which I am reading as part of some research on changing attitudes towards shamanism:
In 1882 when a group of Zuñi emissaries visited Salem [Mass.] . . . they congratulated the citizens for their ancestors’ determined response to the witchcraft problem. Through the 1890s, U.S. authorities were struggling to suppress Zuñi persecution of witches in conflicts that nearly led to war. (31)
Which reminded me of one of my all-time favorite articles, Malcolm Brenner’s “A Witch among the Navajo,” or what happens when Pagan Witchcraft meets witch-as-translation-for-our-word-for-evil-magic-worker.
At the time of writing it, Malcolm was a newspaper reporter in Gallup, New Mexico, and the Zuñi tribal government was part of his beat. Previously he had lived on the Navajo reservation to the north, during which the events he described took place. His website.
As I blogged yesterday, too much reporting on religion is written by people who are religiously illiterate — and, sometimes, proud of it.
Every reporter at least ought to score well on this quiz from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Go ahead, take it. Fifteen questions — it’s easy*.
Note that it is the “U.S. Religious Knowledge Quiz,” and at least two questions are specific to America’s religious history. Nothing about the Pentecostal Christians, though. Couldn’t they have worked the Azusa Street Revival into it?
P. Sufenas Virius Lupus wonders about how new gods are added to polytheist pantheons.
Something that will often happen, particularly with reconstructionist-based practitioners, is that further research into a particular deity and their connections leads to “new-to-me” or various other re-discovered deities that are then taken into one’s personal pantheon. Or, suddenly, a deity emerges in one’s experiences that one hadn’t paid attention to previously, or gets one’s attention in some fashion or other; whether they are readily identified or if it takes some study to figure out who they are, such encounters often occur that expand one’s personal network of divine relationships. . . .
What about the less-frequent (but nonetheless possible) reality of totally new deities, though? How does one deal with this issue when it arises? I have yet to see any modern Pagan or polytheist treatment of this matter, nor any conventional training and education on when and why it can occur, nor how to handle it when it does. And, while it might not be that frequent of an occurrence, I suspect that we are going to see a lot more of it in the near future as our community expands and the world continues to change.
He goes on to discuss how today’s Pagans might deal with the emergence of new gods, including an ancient oracular practice
The blog made me think, for example, of how the Santa Muerte cult has grown, moving even beyond people with roots in Mexico. The image has been around a long time—go into any folklore museum in New Mexico, for instance, and you will see the similar Doña Sebastiana in her cart, a relic of the old lay brotherhood of the Penitentes. Does that make La Santa Muerte a “new” goddess, or just an upgraded one?
Another cautionary tale for the people who want permanent Pagan buildings. Don’t get behind on your mortgage. Being a religious institution does not protect against foreclosure, although it may postpone it for a time.
“Churches are among the final institutions to get foreclosed upon because banks have not wanted to look like they are being heavy handed with the churches,” said Scott Rolfs, managing director of Religious and Education finance at the investment bank Ziegler.
If the property’s value has fallen, the bank is less willing to refinance what is usually a commercial loan. Read the rest.
Another online survey, this one collecting “personal experiences from Unitarian Universalists (UUs) who also practice Paganism or have an earth-centered theology.”
Take the survey here. The deadline is March 12, 2012.
Religion is sexy — at least some of the time. (To scholars of religion, all religion is “sexy” in an intellectual sense.)
Last year, I edited and prepared for press a new biography of the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. She was a leading figure in American religion in the 1920s, but a sex-related scandal in 1926 hurt her with the news media.
McPherson was widowed as a young woman, then briefly re-married. She was a “rock star” of religion, working larger and larger venues with thousands of people focused on her preaching and healings.
And after raising all of that divine energy, she was supposed to go home to her solitary bed. According to the author—in our private conversations—she did not always do so. Why am I not surprised? Maybe some day he will write that follow-up volume that tells all.
Interesting, a lot of today’s Pentecostal Christians do not know her name, although she founded one of its denominations. One of my students, a Pentecostal, said she had heard of her and thought of her as “scary”—but she did not know why.
All of this is a long introduction to a New York Times article: “Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise Here.”
One factor is ignorance. Yoga teachers and how-to books seldom mention that the discipline began as a sex cult — an omission that leaves many practitioners open to libidinal surprise.
Hatha yoga — the parent of the styles now practiced around the globe — began as a branch of Tantra. In medieval India, Tantra devotees sought to fuse the male and female aspects of the cosmos into a blissful state of consciousness.
The rites of Tantric cults, while often steeped in symbolism, could also include group and individual sex. One text advised devotees to revere the female sex organ and enjoy vigorous intercourse. Candidates for worship included actresses and prostitutes, as well as the sisters of practitioners.
Hatha originated as a way to speed the Tantric agenda. It used poses, deep breathing and stimulating acts — including intercourse — to hasten rapturous bliss. In time, Tantra and Hatha developed bad reputations. The main charge was that practitioners indulged in sexual debauchery under the pretext of spirituality.
But it’s not just yoga and tantra. People get crushes on supposedly celibate Catholic priests, as Edie Falco’s character, Carmela, did in The Sopranos. And so on. It’s a issue for clergy, just as it is with psychotherapists.
As a polytheist, I would like to time-travel back to one of Sister Aimee’s healing services and see if she was channeling only Yeshua the radical rabbi or maybe someone else as well, someone known for lifting his devotees up and them hurling them down.
As polytheists, we know that some of the deities and some ritual practices carry a strong sexual charge. People who work these will feel the results. If we know that in advance—and if we can ways to use these energies that do not have bad social consequences—then Pagans won’t “find themselves less prone to surprise.”
For the second year running, some attendees at Pantheacon have become involved in protests, sit-ins, and a whole lot of blog posts about gender issues.
I am not going to weigh in on Z Budapest, etc. I was not there. But I was reading a post on Religion Bulletin the other day titled “Yogis and the Politics of Offense,” by Matt Sheedy, that suggested a reason for the size and persistence of this particular Pantheacon kerfuffle.
Reading past the yogis and the “Shit Yogis Say” parody video, I came to this paragraph:
When groups are new and not well defined, and where the boundaries of their self-understanding are generally recognized to be unstable, the work of critique becomes that much easier since it focuses the conversation on tangible matters that can be discussed and debated. As many scholars are aware, this instability and contingency is true of all religious formations, yet it remains an uphill battle to speak of older traditions in the same way—unless of course one’s goal is to cause offense in the first place.
Contemporary Paganism in all its forms is “not well defined.” Our boundaries are not merely porous, they are vaporous. You could do a “Shit Pagans Say” video — and maybe someone has — but a lot of Pagans probably would say that it just critiques the fluff bunnies or something, that none of “that stuff” is really central to their spiritual practice.
On the other hand, the author writes,
Whenever the social practices of a group are presented as the essence of that group as a social whole, there is a risk of causing offense. For something to be considered “offensive” in a categorical sense, however, it must involve more than hurt feelings on the part of an individual. There must be some notion of a “social whole” in the first place and, what is more, those things that are being lampooned must be considered central to the self-understanding of the group in question.
Sheedy argues that another video, “Shit Girls Say,” is indeed offensive because it addresses a social whole, whereas “Shit Yogis Say” does not.
If “girls” constitute a social whole, then certainly “women” do as well. There is a general assumption of what constitutes “women.” Some people insist that self-identified transwomen, for example, can also be included. But there is a boundary, and the argument is about who is inside it and who is not. There is something worth struggling over — as long as Paganism(s) valorize women-only ritual and female religious leadership.
UPDATE, Feb. 28: Gus diZerega writes the most reasonable blog post on this whole issue from a Pagan-politics standpoint that I have seen.
To summarize, the protest against Z’s genetic-women only ritual was political. Its advocates were making a statement about how they believe the entire Pagan community should act: not simply not to condemn, not simply to accept other ways, but to modify their ways so as to include a group that wanted such affirmation even while they were free to practice in their own way within a largely accepting environment. Sometimes this is necessary to do, as with a hypothetical case of having the community ban a group practicing ritual child abuse. But most of the time this is not necessary.
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.”
If you want, you can sign a petition against or about the treatment of contemporary Paganism on The Learning Channel and The Discovery Channel.
I’m glad that I don’t have cable TV, y’know?