Celebrate your Christian faith with a touch of that ol’ Pagan mystique: the “Holy Shed.” 
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!
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.
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?
Sounds like “news you can use from the 3rd century CE,” doesn’t it. Actually, it is today’s news.
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.
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.
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.
So there was some kind of big evangelical Xian pep rally in Houston, headlined by Gov., Perry of Texas, a possible presidential candidate, which is why that it is getting media attention.
Jason Pitzl-Waters watches it nervously from the minority-religious-rights perspective. Kallisti works it into a post on polytheism: “Powerful images and vengeful gods.”
The thundering irony is that the evangelicals see themselves as a persecuted minority in America, although they are willing to admit that Muslims are even more disliked.
The blogger linked, Bradley R.E. Wright, notes,
Similarly, somewhere along the line we evangelical Christians have gotten it into our heads that our neighbors, peers, and most Americans don’t like us, and that they like us less every year. I’ve heard this idea stated in sermons and everyday conversation; I’ve read it in books and articles.
There’s a problem, though. It doesn’t appear to be true. Social scientists have repeatedly surveyed views of various religions and movements, and Americans consistently hold evangelical Christians in reasonably high regard. Furthermore, social science research indicates that it’s almost certain that our erroneous belief that others dislike us is actually harming our faith. (emphasis added)
Why this need to feel like victims? Is it a hankering for the good old days of the 2nd century C.E. when they were persecuted (although not as much as they think)?
The Christians’ big mistake was when they stopped being at all “countercultural” and snuggled up to the emperor Constantine, who then used his power to intervene in their squabbles (see Council of Arles, Council of Nicaea.)
Jesus had little to do with kings, but things sure did change after that.
Soon there was no turning back. The Catholics adopted the imperial table of organization: Pope = emperor. College of Cardinals = Senate. Big church = city hall (basilica, lit. “royal tribunal chamber.”) In the Eastern Roman Empire, the Orthodox prelates generally were equally cozy with kings, right up through the end of Czarist Russia in 1917.
(Muslims, of course, did not even go through much of a countercultural period, since Mohammed led armies, negotiated treaties, etc. Yet they have a martyr complex too.)
On the principle that cornered animals are dangerous, this self-image of being a persecuted minority not only “harms their faith” but is indeed a potential seedbed of trouble for non-Christians.
The more I scrolled down through this post at Making Light, the more my jaw dropped—in a good way.
It is just stunning.
Familiarity with modernist poetry helps, not to mention Lewis Carroll and Scottish ballads.
But if you were one of the people who skipped literature classes because you thought that you would never use “that stuff” in later life, you won’t get it.
Sorry.
Religion journalist Mark Oppenheimer begins a New York Times article on the religious significance of beards this way:
Go ahead, picture a religious Jew.
Now picture a Muslim cleric.
Now an Amish farmer.
What do they have in common? Beards. And not neatly trimmed beards, but, in the popular stereotype, long, unruly beards, which connote piety, spiritual intensity and a life so hard at study that there is no time for a shave. The scholar, the mystic, the terrorist, the holy man — they all have beards.
Now who is missing from that list?
Of course, we would not want male Druids to be viewed as in an anecdote passed along by Adnan Zulfiqar, the Muslim spiritual adviser at the University of Pennsylvania:
“I recall one gentleman who came back from a trip to Pakistan and remarked to me, ‘I learned one thing: the longer the beard, the bigger the crook.’ His anticipation was people with big beards would be really honest, but he kept meeting people lying to him.”