Gallimaufry with Bones

• I like animal skulls—I have a wall of them. At Crooked & Hidden Bones, read about the revival of a technique for “reddening the bones.” Talk about going back  to very old ways of treating special or sacred bones. This is what the family did with your great x 150 grandfather.

• Here is a Google translation about an ethnic Finnish Pagan group trying to get official recognition as a religion in that predominately Lutheran country. Because Finnish is a non-Indo-European language, the translation is a little rough:

Christianity wiped the old faith of the Finnish culture quite well off, so it would be time for work such as digging for some holy book.  The Kalevala, it can not be, because it is one man’s collection of poems, and even clean up such Muukka says.

• Hecate talks about the magical character—or the “telluric intelligence”— of cities, sounding a little bit like Charles de Lint but with a nod to David Abram, whose latest book—the one that she quotes from—I have on order.

When I want to do magic to influence the airy business of laws, I have a number of high places from which to scatter birdseed. When I want to get deep into the roots of the power structure, I can choose between the rotunda of the Capitol or the tidal basin off of the Potomac.

 

‘At Least It Was Dry’

Photos from this year’s summer solstice revels at Stonehenge.

A Wise Philosopher Once Said . . .

Chama, 2011 "Crazy River Dog" winner at the FIBArk whitewater boating festival, Salida, Colorado

. . . you can never retrieve a stick from the same river twice.

Word Follies of 1915

You call it a narcissistic lifestyle—I call it being a wino. Even the frosh know that.

More harmless drudgery from Dave Wilton.

Solstice Is Coming, But Summer is Here Now

An exchange on The Wild Hunt as to when the “summer festival season” properly began led a commenter to post this link in response to the statement that summer begins on June 21.

I hear idiot television newspeople (but I repeat myself) saying that all the time at this point in the year.

From The Straight Dope:

There is a widespread misconception in this country–which extends, I might note, to the makers of most calendars, dictionaries, and encyclopedias–that summer “officially” starts on the day of the summer solstice, June 21 or 22, which is the longest day of the year. Americans also believe (1) that there is some valid scientific reason for doing it that way, and (2) that everybody in the Northern Hemisphere does it that way, and always has.

None of these things is true. So far as I have been able to discover, no scientific or governmental body has ever formally declared that summer starts on the solstice. . . . .

“It isn’t really clear how the astronomical definition [i.e., summer starts on the solstice] got started,” says Kevin Trenberth, a climate researcher at the University of Illinois in Urbana. “Although the sun-earth geometry is clearly the origin of the seasons on earth, it has nothing directly to do with temperature or weather.”

He notes that meteorologists define summer simply as June, July, and August. “For practical purposes, the meteorological definition is the best one, being very closely to the [weather] statistics,” he says.

In fact, it appears that June 1 was accepted as the beginning of summer in the United States until relatively recently.

Go the link to read the part about when summer used to be calculated in Ireland—not May 1, as some might think.

The moment of  the summer solstice is 1716 hours UTC, June 21st. Track your solar festivals here.

Talking about Tlaloc

Feather offering for Tlaloc

Bundle of turkey, Steller’s jay, and flicker feathers placed in a dry spring basin.

On Friday morning, April 29, back from a early morning fire call (shed + trash + grasses at the edge of the prairie), I climbed the ridge behind the house and made an offering to Tlaloc, the god of rain.

(I think I need to make a lot more of them, given that it has not rained for a month.)

Later that day the Sand Gulch Fire exploded, forcing us to evacuate our house and spend the night in our pop-up camping trailer parked next to the fire station. But the next day it snowed four inches, helping to bring the fire under control.

The desert ecologist and nature writer Craig Childs got me thinking about Tlaloc a while ago with some evocative passages in his book House of Rain, which I reviewed on the other blog here (also referenced in this post).

At high, prominent springs or caves in Guatemala or the Yucatán,  one is likely to find the head of a decapitated rooster (replacing the turkey, which was commonly used in the past) along with pools of melted wax from votive candles (365).

This post kicks off my discussion about being an American Eclectic Witch reviving the cult of Tlaloc on a household basis—no stepped pyramids here, just real mountains.

Tlaloc

Both Aztec depictions of Tlaloc and Mayan depictions of the equivalent deity, Chaac (if you follow a sort of interpretatio azteca), leave me cold aesthetically, for all that they are richly symbolic. But one thing at a time—perhaps I can find one done in the style of pop-Mexican calendar art.

The worship of the gods can change over time—consider this “feast of St. Tlaloc.” We could do that!

More to come.

Space is Big, Time is Deep, Aliens Aren’t Here

Les Johnson’s article “The Aliens Are Not Among Us” reflects the way that I have come to think about physical aliens arriving in physical spaceships from other planets: Not very likely.

Let me be blunt: the chance of an alien species evolving, developing intelligence with the physical characteristics that allow them to make fire and use tools, evolving to the point at which they can travel through space (obeying nature’s speed limit), crossing immense distances, and just happening to reach Earth at a time that we, too, are starting to explore space is, within any reasonable rounding error, ZERO.

At this point, some might say, “But Les, you are now underestimating the effect of deep time! Science and technology are advancing at an amazing pace. Who’s to say that ET hasn’t found a way to tap the quantum vacuum energy (or some other breakthrough). Look how much we’ve accomplished in the last 500 years—maybe the extraterrestrials are a thousand years ahead of us technologically.”

My conclusion is unchanged. Look at the odds. It wouldn’t make a difference if they were 50,000 years ahead of us technologically. The odds of them being here, now, and with a technology that we would recognize are too small to worry about. Might such a super civilization have visited the Earth in the past? Perhaps. If so, then it is far more likely that they arrived to find an Earth populated with dinosaurs and not human beings.

“Nature’s speed limit” is the speed of light. Sci-fi writers have long postulated “hyperdrive” and “warp drive,” etc. as plot devices, to keep their spaceship crews from dying of old age in the course of a short story, but we are a long way from moving a physical space ship faster than the speed of light—and other cultures, if they exist, might not have crossed that barrier either. (All movie spaceships have nifty artificial gravity too—how?)

So what about “raw, unmediated ufology“? What is happening with these people who report such experiences?

Rule out hoaxes, misunderstandings (I’ve had those), and deliberate deception.

I favor the Jacques Vallée explanation. Perhaps “they” have always been here. Sometimes they tell us that they came from another planet, but it is more likely that they are inside the walls of our houses—or other spaces that appear larger to them than they do to us.

 

Word Follies of 1914

This is a multiple-choice test. A “gunsel” is

a. An attractive young woman

b. A novice criminal armed with a gun

c. A young homosexual man

d. An experienced Jewish hit man

Answer here. (Some mystery writers get this one wrong.)

Gallimaufry with Forbidden Phrases

• According to John Rentoul of the British newspaper The Independent, these phrases should be banned due to overuse. He tips his hat to George Orwell, all well and good, but someone in the comments notes that the Irish satirist Brian O’Nolan also eviscerated bureaucratese in his day, which was even earlier.

• Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” is a staple of introductory psychology classes. But Gary Lachman (a/k/a Gary Valentine of Blondie, etc.) at The Daily Grail notes that it can take some odd twists in the world of the esoteric: “Maslow’s vision of a kind of Brahmin caste of ‘self-actualizers,’ uninterested in the kind of material gratification that most people desire, and oriented toward more ‘spiritual’ concerns, is a recurring fantasy in the world of occult politics.” Read the rest.

• If you have a book proposal in mind, does it include zombies? Get on the zombie bandwagon! Consider this one: “Christ, mythras [sic], and Osiris as zombie archetypes – a new spirituality for a new age…”

• Odd manners of dying in sixteenth-century England.

Why Secondhand Bookstores Are Addicting

Science can explain. It’s all chemicals!