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!

Word Follies of 1913

They’ll be keeping their heads down when that Piney opens up with the Lewis gun. Then you shove the Bangalore torpedo under the barbed wire.

World War One had not started yet, but the technology and vocabulary were there.

Army Appoints Hindu Chaplain (Sort of)

There about 1,000 identified Hindus in the U.S. Army, and now they have a chaplain, Captain Pratima Dharm.

Yes, that is probably fewer than the followers of Pagan paths in uniform. The Buddhists have been recognized too, but a qualified Wiccan officer was rejected.

But there might be more to this story:

Dharm speaks easily of Christian teachings. A unique aspect of her story is that until this year, she wore the cross of a Christian chaplain on her battle fatigues. When she started on active duty in 2006, she was endorsed by the Pentecostal Church of God, based in Joplin, Mo.

But she’s now sponsored by Chinmaya Mission West, a Hindu religious organization that operates in the United States. A Washington, D.C.-area religious teacher who interviewed her for the organization before giving her an endorsement said her multifaith background is an advantage.

“She knows Christian theology, and she has a great grasp of Hindu theology,” said Kuntimaddi Sadananda of Chinmaya Mission’s Washington center. “This means she can help everyone.”

She didn’t convert from Christianity to Hinduism, she said.

“I am a Hindu,” she said. “It’s how I was raised and in my heart of hearts, that’s who I am.”

But — and perhaps it is hard for some Western Christians to understand — she hasn’t rejected Christianity either.

“In Hinduism, the boundaries are not that strict,” she said. “It is to base your life on the Vedantic traditions, and you can be a Christian and follow the Vedantic traditions.”

As I understand it, the Vedanta schools of Hinduism tend toward a sort of intellectual monotheism and reject all that colorful gods-and-goddesses stuff except when interpreted allegorically. So she has blended it with Christianity?

Chinmaya Mission West is an Advaita Vedenta organization.

Ronald Hutton Responds to His Critics

Even before his interview with Australian scholar/blogger Caroline Tully, Ronald Hutton had written a lengthy article for The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies titled “Writing the History of Witchcraft: A Personal View.”

It is now available as a free download from Equinox Publishing.

In it, Professor Hutton discusses the trajectory of his own work as well as responding to Ben Whitmore’s Trials of the Moon.

In the same issue, Peg Aloi reviews Trials of the Moon as well as Douglas Cowan’s Sacred Terror.

And I review yet another “grandmother story.”

The other articles in the latest issue (listed below) are behind a pay wall, although if you have access to a university library or to a good public library, they should be available through inter-library loan.

“The Idol and the Numinous: the Pagan Quest for the Holy”
Dominique Beth Wilson

“Shamanisms and the Authenticity of Religious Experience”
Susannah Crockford

“Negotiating Gender Essentialism in Contemporary Paganism”
Regina Smith Oboler

“The Meaning of ‘Wicca’: A Study in Etymology, History, and Pagan Politics”
Ethan Doyle White

“The Magical Cosmology of Rosaleen Norton”
Nevill Stuart Drury

Lawyers Comment on the Pagan Prison Chaplain Case

Of all the discussions of the prisoner “free exercise of religion” issue that produced a lawsuit brought by California volunteer Pagan prison chaplain Patrick McCollum, I recommend that you read  Wiccan lawyer Hecate Demetersdatter’s explanation.

The appeals court has not decided on the rightness or wrongness of the basic question, but it has upheld the lower court’s ruling that McCollum does not have legal standing to bring the case, because he cannot show that he himself has been injured.

But here’s where, IMHO, Judge Schroeder sets out a clear path that shows how to build a successful case. Pagans need to request visits from Pagan chaplains (in hospital, when they are concerned about their family members, before appeals and other trials, etc.) and document that they get denied because their chaplains are not “regular paid chaplains.” They’ll probably also have to accept a visit from, say, a Catholic priest who counsels them about the evils of Witchcraft and then show why that didn’t work for them, because CDCR’s policy seems to envision paid chaplains ministering to prisoners outside their religions when necessary. And then, with the help of McCollum and those willing to raise funds and do magic, etc., they’ll have to pursue their claims in a timely manner.

More careful foundational work is going to be required, in other words. Someone—or better yet, several someones—is going to have to show “injury.”

Prisoner “free exercise” cases are not slam-dunks. Law blogger Howard Friedman lists a couple of recent instances that have not gone well for Pagan prisoners. (Watch his blog: these cases turn up frequently.)

Friedman’s summary of the McCollum decision:

The court concluded that many of the chaplain’s claims were derivative of inmate’s claims, and the inmate plaintiffs were dismissed because their claims were untimely or they had failed to exhaust administrative remedies. It rejected the chaplain’s claims that he had either third-party or taxpayer standing to assert the religious rights of Wiccan inmates.

Which again is about the issue of standing. I see no point in further appeals. It sounds as though a whole new case would be more successful, given time and willing plaintiffs.