. . . in Religion Nerd’s daily summary of off-beat religion news.
Also—the Dalai Lama flops as a food-show judge.
On the Norwegian ‘Esoterrorist’
Egil Asprem, a Norwegian scholar of esotericism and contemporary Paganism (he has published in The Pomegranate on Norse Paganism and Kabbalah) has a blog post up: “Counterjidhadist Templar Terrorism,” on Anders Behring Breivik’s use of Western esoteric language and symbols. Worth reading.
It is as if an ideological critique of (or revolt against) modernity which seeks to incorporate a religious dimension hardly ever escapes the esoteric – whether the revolt comes from the left or the right.
How to Talk with the Non-Pagan Press
Lots of Pagan sites are talking about a magickal showdown with some Christian spiritual warriors over the District of Columbia. Jason Pitzl-Waters has the thoroughly hyperlinked details.
Here Hecate, who helped start this particular rolling, says some valuable things about framing the issue when talking with non-Pagans.
When talking to the press, framing matters. Your message is that local Pagans, whose heritage goes back to some of the world’s first democracies and who are soldiers, police, fire fighters, doctors, teachers, business owners, parents, and citizens, are standing up for traditional American values including tolerance and religious freedom. Your group will be doing that by [gathering and reading the Constitution, collecting canned food for people of all religious backgrounds who have been hit by the bad economy, chanting and praying, whatever.] You’re saddened that one group of Americans would attack other Americans over their religions. You hope to remind America of the religious toleration that our Founders believed was such an important American value.
Your message is NOT that Pagans don’t worship Satan, eat babies, etc. Repeat: your message is NOT about what Pagans don’t do.
She is a lawyer by trade and just might know something about the practice of rhetoric, y’know? (Many of the famous Pagan rhetoricians, guys like Quintilian, were—at times—lawyers, although the profession was structured differently then.)
To use the language of classical rhetoric, she is arguing the stasis of definition. In contemporary political rhetoric, it’s part of what we call “controlling the narrative” or in other words making your side look good, reasonable, ethical, in tune with enduring American values. etc.
And thanks for the mention in the blog post! I am all for material spirituality.
Abstract Expressionism, Cool Jazz, and the CIA
No. 5, 1948, by Jackson Pollock (Wikipedia)
This is not a new topic, but many people still do not realize how much the Central Intelligence Agency, through various fronts (cooperative or fake foundations, for example), influenced the artistic movements during the peak of the Cold War years—the 1950s and 1960s.
For example, Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock got huge boosts through important exhibitions and other patronage.
Why? The Soviet Union, like Nazi Germany before it, officially disapproved of non-representational art. In that government’s view, non-representational art was morally degenerate—in other words, insufficiently propagandistic.
But we in the freedom-loving United States championed Abstract Expressionism and made it almost official in our towers of government and commerce, to the point where even people who did not like the style knew that it was High Art and above criticism.
Likewise jazz. There was no point in competing with the Soviet Union in the realm of classical music—their system identified talented musicians and ballet dancers young and trained them rigorously. They sent the best of the best on international tours, and the only problem was that sometimes the talent ran away (see, e.g., Mikhail Baryshnikov).
Soviet dissidents listened to jazz, so it was programmed on the Voice of America. And sending top American jazz musicians on world tours showed that we valued free artistic expression, etc. etc. and also, incidentally, that not all American Negroes were oppressed, an accusation frequently made by Soviet critics. We did also play up composers whom the Soviets did not like, such as Shostakovich.
It’s not exactly The Da Vinci Code, but sometimes there are indeed conspiracies behind world events.
It has always seemed to me that modern jazz began to lose its coolness cachet in the 1980s, and I cannot but think that such a loss was connected to the “winning” of the Cold War and the loss of secret funding. Abstract Expressionism has faded too, although whether the loss of secret support matters as much as the faddishness of the art world, I cannot say.
Postwar Word Follies
She likes the whole Greenwich Village life! She’s no bimbo, snookums. And other new expressions from 1919.
Should you buy a leotard for your martial arts practice? Nah, don’t bother. And other new expressions from 1920.
Live down on the kolkholz? That’s Hicksville, Tovarich. (I better not let the Cheka catch me saying that.) And other new expressions from 1921.
Aleister Crowley’s “White Stains” summarized.
A short essay on Aleister Crowley’s book of then-pornographic verse, White Stains, with excepts of the poems. Includes Crowley comic written in Dubious Dialect.
“You people know nothing of Crowley,” writes some angry Thelemite in the comments.
For People Who Can’t Find the Spice Aisle . . .
. . . . you can buy gen-u-wine witchy basil of unknown age and origin on eBay. (Click image to embiggen.)
Strange Things Have Swum in the Midnight Sun
Cryptozoologists may rejoice over a new video of a “sea serpent” in Alaska.
Quick Review: Spellbound: Inside West Africa’s Witch Camps
Karen Palmer, author of Spellbound: Inside West Africa’s Witch Camps, is a veteran journalist, not a historian of witchcraft, so for me to read the book from the latter perspective is to do her a slight disservice. (As an inside, the subtitle might better read “Inside Ghana’s Witch Camps,” but maybe some editor thought that “West Africa’s” had more punch.)
From her website:
With these words, Karen Palmer takes us inside one of West Africa’s witch camps, where hundreds of banished women struggle to survive under the watchful eye of a powerful wizard. Palmer arrived at the Gambaga witch camp [a sort of refugee camp for accused witches] with an outsider’s sense of outrage, believing it was little more than a dumping ground for difficult women. Soon, however, she encountered stories she could not explain: a women who confessed she’d attacked a girl given to her as a sacrifice; another one desperately trying to rid herself of the witchcraft that she believed helped her kill dozens of people.
One troubling thing about studying the Renaissance and early modern witch trials (1500s-1700s) is that we never hear from the victims except through the filter of witch-trial testimony.
Now if you can assume that the phenomenon of witchcraft in northern Ghana is analogous to “our” witch trials—and it certainly sounds that way to me—then once again there are no clear answers about what is going on.
There was Ayishetu, chased from her village by a violent mob, whose life was destroyed by the accusation that she practiced witchcraft, and Winangi, a tiny splinter of a woman who’d gne seeking witchcraft to protect herself and her children. She pleaded to her husband to move her to the camp when she felt she’d lost control of the dark gift. A smart businesswoman named Asara had ended up at the camp when a debtor accused her of causing a meningitis outbreak. Napoa, mannish and grumpy, readily identified herself as a witch and caused fear among the other women living at the camp (41).
The surrounding culture is mostly Islamic but with lots of magical practitioners. Muslim polygamy also contributes to the problem. How do you get rid of the oldest wife? Accuse her of being a witch!
Another analogy with the European witch trials is this: The village shaman-herbalist is not the witch but rather the person who accuses the witch. Or if someone has accused her (usually it is her), the shaman-herbalist conducts a ritual (e.g., watching the death throes of a chicken) to pronounce whether she truly is a witch or not.
So I recommend Spellbound both for a look at contemporary West African issues with witchcraft but also for thinking more about its history in Western culture.
Polytheism in the Marketplace
Going to buy puja supplies from an immigrant Hindu shopkeeper. Confusion ensues, but is resolved.