V.S. Naipaul’s Rules for Writers

V.S. Naipaul’s rules for writers—some of them are very apt for the Web—start with “1. Do not write long sentences. A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.”

I made Naipaul’s acquaintance, in the literary sense, as a fifth-former at déCarteret College in Mandeville, Jamaica, which I briefly attended.

Mr. Stanley, the English master, handed me a copy of The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America with a comment to the effect of “Read this and learn about where you are.” [more than 12 words there!]

I did to the best of my 16-year-old ability, but the book fixed an idea in my head of Naipaul only as a writer of nonfiction works, which does not do him justice. [I can break the rule if I keep the paragraph short.]

Witches and Politics, Nigerian Style

Imagine reading this article with the names changed.

Let’s see…

The Witches and Wizards Association of America (WITZAA), has deployed 500 witches to Washington and other parts of  the East Coast to prevent any tragic occurrence and ensure peaceful inauguration on January 15.

According to its national co-ordinator, Dr.  Raven Moonstone, the decision was taken after an emergency meeting at Salem, Mass. WITZAA also warned President Tim Pawlenty to take adequate security as bad  people and disgruntled politicians are planning to cause problems.

It would really spice up the writing at blogs like Pagan + Politics, no? (Did you ever notice the typo in their URL?) [UPDATE: At least the URL has been repaired.]

Apparently Dr. Iboi has learned to herd at least some cats.

Caroline Tully Interviews Ronald Hutton

Australian blogger and graduate student Caroline Tully interviews Ronald Hutton on her blog, Necropolis Now.

One excerpt:

In that case what is your relationship with Paganism?

It has been long and close. As I mentioned in my book Witches, Druids and King Arthur, I was in fact brought up Pagan, in a modern English tradition which combined a reverence for the natural world with a love of the ancient Greek and Roman classics. I have been acquainted with Wiccan witches since my teens: I learned some things from Alex Sanders in his hey-day, and attended my first Wiccan rite at Halloween 1968. I have never undergone a conversion experience to any religion, and so my relationship with others, such as Christianity, is one of entirely benevolent neutrality. Over the years, I came to build up friendships with more or less all of the leading figures of British Paganism. For example, Doreen Valiente’s respect for me meant that I was one of the few people whom she specified should be invited to her funeral, a gesture which still deeply moves me.

My attitude to the history of modern Pagan witchcraft has altered with changing knowledge of it. Back in the 1960s I believed, following scholarly orthodoxy, that the witchcraft of the early modern European witch trials was a pagan religion. In 1973 I debated against the historian Norman Cohn (author of Europe’s Inner Demons (1975), the work that accused Margaret Murray of having tampered with her sources to make them conform to her ideas about witchcraft) at Cambridge University, where I defended the historical legitimacy of Charles Godfrey Leland’s ‘witches’ gospel’, Aradia, and was floored by him. After that, as I read more and more of the new research and checked the original records (for England and Scotland) myself, my belief in the idea that witches were members of an ancient pagan religion gradually evaporated.

So, you are not actually hostile to Paganism as some people seem to think?

The story of my life would be inexplicable if that were the case.

The forthcoming issue of The Pomegranate, now in press, will carry a review essay by Hutton—a retrospective of his own work and a response to some of his critics—as well as some related reviews on the topic of Wiccans and their relationship to history.

Some of this material will be available free on the Web, and I will post links as soon as I can.

“You know how it is in the Middle East …”

I read this CNN story about Osama bin Laden’s relatives wanting proof of death and was smacked with the 2×4 of irony.

It’s in this sentence, quoting writer Jean Sasson, apparently a ghostwriter to the family:

You know how it is in the Middle East so many times: They really need proof or people start believing — this has been discussed by a lot more people than me — that many people will not believe that he’s dead…

So if the Romans had dropped that troublesome prophet guy in the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago instead of leaving him up on the cross, there would have been no Christianity? No witnesses to the allegedly empty tomb? It certainly would have affected the character of the religion.

AAR 2011 Pagan Studies Sessions

For those of you attending this year’s American Academy of Religion meeting in San Francisco, here is a preliminary schedule of the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group’s sessions.

Do Not Follow This Link …

… if you are not a style-conscious writer, editor, or otherwise a word-nerd.

Otherwise, move on; there is nothing to see here.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead—A Biography

At The Magonia Blog (which I am adding to my blogroll), a review about W.Y. Evans-Wentz’s well-known translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Only it was not his translation nor even, precisely, the “Tibetan Book of the Dead”:

Walter Yelling Wentz – it was only as an adult that he adopted in addition his mother’s maiden name of Evans – was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1878, and later moved to southern California with his family, where he would receive a diploma from the Raja-Yoga School and Theosophical University at Point Loma. He later obtained an M.A. in English from Stanford University, travelled to Europe, and was awarded a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology at Oxford. Having spent most of the First World War in Egypt, he travelled to India, where he became “a great collector of texts in languages he never learned to read”.

In Darjeeling he purchased some Tibetan block prints, and had them translated by Kazi Dawa Samdup, an English teacher at a boy’s boarding school in Gangtok, the capital of the small Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim, who worked on them every morning before lessons for two months. These provided Evans-Wentz with the material for three books, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927, the title an imitation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead published in England by Wallis Budge). Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines (1935), and The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (1954). One point that was not made clear in the first of these was that it was only a small portion of a large corpus of similar works, and did not include the part most commonly used in Tibet.

Princeton University Press is doing a series about the “lives” of famous religious texts, of which this is one: “the bible of the hippie movement,” as the reviewer calls it.

South Koreans Love Judaism

Sometimes I think we study religions just for the weirdness of the passing parade. Consider this article on South Koreans’ fascination with Judaism: Stories from the Talmud as a required school text? Jewish books in vending machines?

A few South Koreans have converted, but they have to go elsewhere to do so, since there is not much formal Jewish life in the country.

Jewish observance in Seoul is almost entirely centred on Friday night services in the back of a Christian chapel on a US Army base. Every week, the tiny congregation of ex-pats and locals flip pews containing hymns books and New Testaments to face a pokey little ark for prayers. At the end of the night, everything gets put back in place for Friday night Mass. If there was not a small Ner Tamid hanging above the ark, you really would mistake it for a cupboard.

Most of the regular and long-serving members of the congregation are non-Jewish Koreans – civil servants, doctors and a politician from the ruling party, who is currently squeezing in his attendance between bouts of campaigning for local elections. They have no wish to convert but they take their interest in Judaism seriously. Most boast impressive collections of Judaica and read Hebrew fluently.

Yet I wonder, will some convert en masse as did the aristocracy of the Khazars?

Walt Whitman and His Sock Puppet

I have been collecting links on writing and plan to toss them out piecemeal over the next week.

Here is a New York Times piece on literary self-promotion from times past:

The most revered of French novelists recognized the need for P.R. “For artists, the great problem to solve is how to get oneself noticed,” Balzac observed in “Lost Illusions,” his classic novel about literary life in early 19th-century Paris. As another master, Stendhal, remarked in his autobiography “Memoirs of an Egotist,” “Great success is not possible without a certain degree of shamelessness, and even of out-and-out charlatanism.” Those words should be on the Authors Guild coat of arms. . . .

American authors did try to keep up. Walt Whitman notoriously wrote his own anonymous reviews, which would not be out of place today on Amazon. “An American bard at last!” he raved in 1855. “Large, proud, affectionate, eating, drinking and breeding, his costume manly and free, his face sunburnt and bearded.” But nobody could quite match the creativity of the Europeans.

Read it all—for ideas!

 

Quick Review: Caesar’s Druids

Cover image of Casar's Druids by Miranda Aldhouse-GreenI am a little more than halfway through Miranda Aldhouse-Green’s Caesar’s Druids: Story of An Ancient Priesthood.

As the British archaeologist Stuart Piggott pointed out back in the 1960s, there are no texts written about Druids by Druids. The sum of what ancient writers of the Greco-Roman world wrote would fill a few typed sheets—and many of those writers never saw a Druid.

One of the few who did was, of course, Julius Caesar, and he was busy trying to conquer and then govern their societies in Gaul and Britain, which gives his writing a certain slant.

Miranda Aldhouse-Green’s approach, however, is to look at the archaeological evidence, chiefly from Britain and France, and then reason like this: If the archaeology shows elaborate grave construction, or evidence of repeated sacrifices (including human) at a special site, or temple construction, or burials of certain high-status individuals who were not necessarily kings or queens, then that level of religious complexity implies that there were religious specialists to administer it.

And if we try to describe those religious specialists—using primarily Caesar’s writings and those of Tacitus, but also other writers who actually met Druids or their descendants in Gallo-Roman society—then we can probably assume that they were the Druids. She writes,

In order to make any sense of the Druids as a powerful class of religious leads we can examine contemporary material culture for, if they did exist in Caesar’s day, the Druids would have operated within a context of regalia, ritual equipment, sacrifice, and sacred places (xvi).

Much of the book, therefore, discusses ancient sacred sites, excavated burials, artifacts, etc., leading to open-ended questions on the line of “Do these artifacts mark this as the grave of a Druid?”

Generally these seem to be reasonable inferences, although even if one could be sure that it was the grave of a Druid, for example, that still says nothing about what that Druid thought, believed, or did.  So often the texts that claim to answer those questions come from a writer who lived at the other end of the Mediterranean Sea from the nearest Druid.

Nevertheless, it is a thought-provoking book. I had not realized the extent of the archaeological evidence that could be brought out and associated at least hypothetically with the Druids.

Her evidence of religious practice in the space between Roman and Gallic or British ways is most fascinating, for it would suggest perhaps that “Druidism” changed and evolved when in contact with the Roman world and Roman religion. (Despite what happened on Anglesey  [Mona] in 60 CE, not all Druids were ever killed.)