Mother Goddess Temple or Brothel?

From the fascinating”mortuary archaeology” blog Bones Don’t Lie, diverse explanations for the collection of babies’ skeletons in a ruin from Roman Britain.

Dr. [Jill] Eyers continues to argues for the brothel hypothesis, finding that further research and the combination of the human remains with archaeological evidence only further supports her conclusions. However this has been called into question by archaeologists, like Brett Thorn, who argue that the site also has evidence of a Mother Goddess cult, and may represent an area where women went to give birth.

Read more.

Sociologists Flummoxed by Las Vegas

Recently the American Sociological Association had to relocate its annual meeting to Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

You would think that Las Vegas was a hotel buffet of raw material awaiting the sociological investigations, “the best spot in the world to do sociology,” as a member of the department at the University of Nevada, Las  Vegas, said. (There is apparently a university attached to the basketball team.)

But you would be wrong. You don’t know academics:

Lisa Dawn Wade, assistant professor of sociology at Occidental College, said the conference was her first trip to Vegas, and she described the experience in terms that corresponded with Jones’s assessment.

“There’s so much here,” Wade said, “and I feel like I don’t have the tools to process it… . There are stories here about consumption and about leisure and about social class that are really interesting, and I just feel kind of at a loss to say anything really smart about it.”

To borrow her blog’s subtitle, she must have experienced a failure of sociological imagination.

But some UNLV faculty members found themselves disappointed by what looked to them like knee-jerk reactions from their visiting colleagues. Las Vegas, they said, is a complex and multifaceted city too quickly written off by those who don’t really understand it at all — and many of the conference attendees, they said, hadn’t even tried.

I would never have called Las Vegas “too much the real world,”  but as Wade added in a carefully nuanced way,

Wade said it might not be a bad thing if the city made its visitors uncomfortable. Academics, she noted, tend to lead “pretty cushy” lives, and spending a few days in a difficult and even disturbing environment could prompt them to think about the “real people” who call the city home — and about the fact that, in many ways, Las Vegas is just a distilled and amplified representation of the world we all live in. “There’s a little bit of Vegas in all of us.”

I think I will suggest it as a venue for the American Academy of Religion. These meetings are planned seven or eight years ahead, but  you never know, a hotel workers’ strike might cause AAR to change its plans too.

Between Life and Death, No Balance

That was the title of a post that I wrote yesterday evening on my other blog.

I wish that I could think of some cool animistic perspective to take, but  cannot. When you are trying to save one critter, you kill others. I think that is called “being in the world.”

The Wild Hunt Gets Some Respect

It is nice to see that Jason Pitzl-Waters’ The Wild Hunt blog has gotten a major shout-out at Get Religion, the site for people who wonder why the mainstream media handles religion so ignorantly.

I predict that as Pagan traditions become more visible, our activities will be covered by the usual motley crew who went to journalism school instead of, y’know, actually learning anything about anything—history, science, economics, politics, religion, you name it.

Well, good for Mollie Ziegler Hemmingway, one religion writer who knows the difference between a Mormon and  an evangelical Christian.

See, blogging is easy. All you have to do is put out good content on an almost-daily basis while writing polite and informed comments at the sites that you hope will notice yours. Nothing to it.

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?