Despite CUUPs, Unitarians Still Aesthetically Deprived

Victoria Weinstein, a blogging Unitarian minister (also known for her clerical-fashion advice blog) critiques her fellow UUs for neglecting the aesthetic side of worship:

I wonder how much of our beauty-avoidance is a hangover from our iconoclastic, Puritan origins in America. If so, it’s time we got over it and started realizing that the Arts are one of the most profound ways to communicate the humanist gospel. All our clergy should have some understanding of the fine arts, the humanities, not just theology and social justice.

Nor does she think that the increased Pagan element within Unitarian Universalist congregations has improved the aesthetic poverty. From the comments:

In fact, I believe that the neo-pagan [sic] community has done more harm than good by inflicting too many embarrassingly bad rituals, dances and music on our worshiping communities.

Discuss.

Religion and Foodways

Read this post about an Egyptian television cooking show and the importance of foodways in religion, if only for the all-too-typical “Polish cookies” anecdote.

I cannot see any Pagans today using the “Polish cookies” line, although we do have all too many people invested in boundary maintenance.

What is [any subdivision of’] Pagan cooking, anyway? And what would be considered objectionable food?

How not to Argue for Matriarchy

Thealogian Carol Christ shows you how not to do it at the Feminism and Religion blog.

First, create a “straw man” argument that lets you be the  heroic rebel:

[T]he “party line” in the fields of Religious Studies and Archaeology—even among feminists—is that there never were any matriarchies and that claims about peaceful, matrifocal, sedentary, agricultural, Goddess-worshipping societies in Old Europe or elsewhere have been manufactured out of utopian longing.

I can’t speak for archaeology, but in those corners of religious studies that might discuss Goddess religion, there are no “party lines” about anything. I have attended Pagan studies-related session at the American Academy of Religion for years, but I do not recall seeing her at one since 1997. So where does she get this idea? Never mind, it’s useful to her.

Second, change the key definition to give yourself more wiggle room:

A recent book, Societies of Peace: Matriarchies Past, Present, and Future (2009) defines the term “matriarchy” differently.

No more “archy,” from the Greek for “rulership,” but just being matrilocal is enough. That makes traditional Navajo Indians “matriarchal.” Someone go tell them. And how many societies are even matrilocal these days?

Third, find a culture far, far away:

In the cultures of the Masuo people on Lugu Lake in the Himalayas matriarchy in this sense has been preserved up to the present day.

But the next paragraph qualifies that claim slightly:

If the only the Masuo still followed these customs, and there is ample evidence in Societies of Peace that they do, then theories of the universality of patriarchy are shown to be false, and those of us who speculate that woman-honoring societies of peace have existed can no longer be accused of indulging only in fantasy.

Finally, accuse your previously created straw man opponent of bad faith:

Why is there such resistance to the idea that matriarchies could and still do exist? Could it be that accepting this idea would force us to reconsider absolutely everything?

Where is this “resistance”? Is it because the evidence for “woman-honoring societies of peace” is still weak—maybe one tiny group in the Himalaya?—or is it because her “conspiracy” of opponents are bad people?

Belief first, evidence later. It works for fundamentalists of all sorts.

Now it is true that I have seen some good feminist scholars sit and roll their eyes at each other while someone presented a poorly sourced and shaky paper on “matriarchal religion.” That is not because of any “party line” but because these women can be both Pagan and intellectually rigorous. It’s possible.

Carol Christ does not need to apologize for being utopian. It’s just that like many people who help to create new religions, she feels that she needs the prove that it is really really old.

No, Not That Horned God

Celebrate your Christian faith with a touch of that ol’ Pagan mystique: the “Holy Shed.” The "holy shed" antler cross

That is “shed” in the sense of naturally shed deer or elk antlers, which some people like to collect for decor projects or for sale to be powdered for Asian men who have not yet discovered Viagra.

And here I grew up with the perception that Christianity stopped at the edge of town. With your cast-resin antler cross, it does not have to!

Please, No Nose-Wiggling Jokes

Bewitched is coming back to the small screen, but the inside word is that it is more about riding Mad Men’s coattails than making witchcraft seem appealing to a new generation. Follow the link to see the intro to the original Bewitched, which ran from 1964-1972.

Or go watch How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying to see a young Robert Morse (Japan-ophile Mr. Cooper of Mad Men) if you want the early 1960s as interpreted in the mid-1960s.

Talking about Tlaloc, 3

Reproduction Aztec sacrificial "Tlaloc" knife offered on eBay. Click to embiggen.

As I wrote about earlier, I have been maintaining a small shrine to the rain god Tlaloc under a nearby county-road bridge. Our creek—currently dry except for a couple of beaver ponds upstream—goes through a culvert there, one big enough for me to walk through standing straight.

When my shrine washes away, I will be happy to rebuild it in a different place!

The culvert is as near as I can come to the classic site:

Tlaloc did not only dwell in temples and on mountain tops. He lived in moist, fertile, and secluded caves too.

But the reason you will not find me going too far in any kind of neo-Aztec direction is that I am a little squeamish about sacrificing kids. Just candles and turkey feathers so far.

Yep, children were (are?) Tlaloc’s favorite—or so the Aztecs thought. Some were kids from enemy tribes, captured during raids or the flower wars. (As a euphemism, doesn’t “flower war” beat  Obama’s “kinetic military action” completely?) Or sometimes not. You had to be tough to be Aztec nobility.

The children were beautifully adorned, dressed in the style of Tlaloc and the Tlaloque. On litters strewn with flowers and feathers; surrounded by dancers, they were transported to a shrine and their hearts would be pulled out by priests.

If, on the way to the shrine, these children cried their tears were viewed as signs of imminent and abundant rains. Children who did not weep could have their fingernails torn off in order to achieve this effect. Every Atlcahualo festival, seven children were sacrificed in and around Lake Tetzcoco in the Aztec capital. They were either slaves or the second born children of nobles. . . According to the chronicler Durán, Tlaloc had the additional name of ‘Path Under the Earth’ or ‘Long Cave’.

Investigators such as Doris Heyden suggest that the little passages that lead off of the main caves underneath the Sun Pyramid in Teotihuacan could have been used to house the bodies of children that were sacrificed to this god each year. At an excavation elsewhere, the burial chambers of seven infants placed in a circle inside a cave were found. The centre of the cave roof was open and let in rain. There were also storing facilities thought to have once been grain deposits. The archaeologist who worked on this site, Linda Manzanilla, equated the caves, water, childrens’ bodies and grain with the mythical Tlalocan; the Tlaloque who lived there were small, like children, and it was abundant with both water and grain. Out of Tlalocan’s opening came the rain, seeds and new life and into it came the dead and retreating rain clouds

Well, there is a cosmology for you. How far down that road to go?

Was Tlaloc “the same” as the Mayan “Chaac,” or did one god displace the other, as this article (in Spanish) suggests, during a desperate time of drought?

Afterthought: the school bus used to stop almost on top of the shrine. Currently it does not, because there are no kids on our road young enough to ride it—except for two who are apparently homeschooled.  You cannot escape these connections?

Violent Gladiators Plague Rome

Sounds like “news you can use from the 3rd century CE,” doesn’t it. Actually, it is today’s news.

“Higher Ed Bubble” Goes Mainstream

Another article on the “higher education bubble” (think housing bubble, but with college degrees) from that screaming right-wing rag The Christian Science Monitor. (That was meant as sarcasm.)

A college degree once looked to be the path to prosperity. In an article for TechCrunch, Sarah Lacy writes, “Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe.”

“Administrative bloat” is real. At many big universities, the administrators now outnumber the teaching faculty.

At the other end of the spectrum, the small liberal-arts college that I attended has about the same number of students than it did a few years ago, but it now seems to require more deans and assistant deans to operate.

At least Reed College has not wasted money on big football stadiums full of empty seats like so many universities.

Universities keep raising tuition. Students get easy, taxpayer-guaranteed loans to pay that tuition, because a college degree is a Good Thing.

Can’t pay off the loan? Too bad. Not even personal bankruptcy will make it go away—the banks saw to it that the law was written that way. And no one can foreclose on your bachelor’s or master’s degree.

So what if people stop climbing on this particular merry-go-ground? What happens to all those assistant deans and the big, empty football stadium then? What happens to all my friends trying to get teaching jobs? What happens to me hoping that someone will adopt my book as a class text? What happens to my publisher?

The linked Tech Crunch article is even more hard-hitting.

Next thing, National Public Radio will discover this issue.

Making Retrograde Mercury Your Friend

I’ve been reading Diana Rajchel’s “Mercury Retrograde Boot Camp Series” (this is no. 9). Some good stuff there.

For this, the practical and metaphysical reason is the same:

You clear your path from things that were scattering your attention. Now, the things that need your attention get it faster. That’s immediately more time, attention and energy you can use for a) the people you want to give your attention to and b) for yourself.

I actually am usually productive during these periods. It is just that everyone else is so damn slow.

What Is It?

The brass rod with "horns"

Close up of the hand — or grip

Sometime in the late 1970s I read in a book by Doreen Valiente how she found discarded ritual artifacts in a Brighton antiques shop.

Unfortunately, I did not visit Brighton until shortly after her death, and while palling around with Evan John Jones, the only antiques shop I visited was one specializing in militaria, tucked away in The Lanes.

But back in the 1970s, still wet behind the ears, I edited a monthly magazine for antique collectors and made the round of many shops. I never found any obvious ritual artifacts—but there was this.

It looked magical—but what was it? I asked various senior Witches, particularly those born outside the United States, and got various answers, none of which was particularly satisfying.

Was it some kind of indicator of cuckoldry? A swizzle stick for a Really Serious cocktail? Or—and this one I could almost accept—part of an antique toasting fork, lacking the part with the tines? (Compare this brass toasting fork from the 1940s.)

Alas, it probably is not the artifact that will prove the existence of a pre-Gardnerian Pagan Witchcraft.