Creative Visualization Doesn’t Work?

Or so claim researchers who publish in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Or is it just fantasies (winning the lottery, etc.) that don’t work?

But ultimately, Happes and Oettingen believe that positive fantasies are likely to scupper your changes of obtaining your goals. “Instead of promoting achievement, positive fantasies will sap job-seekers of the energy to pound the pavement, and drain the lovelorn of the energy to approach the one they like,” they write. “Fantasies that are less positive – that question whether an ideal future can be achieved, and that depict obstacles, problems and setbacks – should be more beneficial for mustering the energy needed to obtain success.”

What do you think of the experiment design compared to an actual visualization?

And this zinger at the end:

This study isn’t the first to explode the myth of a traditional self-help tool. A 2009 paper found that repeating positive mantras about themselves led people low in self-esteem to feel worse.

Pope: You Can’t Dance

Sister Nobili, the dancing nun (BBC News)

Sister Nobili, the dancing nun (BBC News)

A century or more ago, the anarchist Emma Goldman told one of her earnest lefty comrades that dancing and “the revolution” were not incompatible, which became the source of various mangled quotations attributed to her.

But evidently the pope feels that nuns who won’t stop dancing don’t fit in with the Roman Catholic church.

And an ex-fashion designer abbot? Very suspicious.

No kinetic stuff! Just genuflecting!

Gaulimaufry with Pulleys and Cables

• The force of Artemis is strong in this one.

• The Renaissance Faire as spiritual experience: “These days I’m more inclined to find the spiritual in the secular, and to look for it in places you might not ordinarily expect to find it, than I am to go seeking out a prepackaged religious experience.”

• A list of the “Pagan Mom blogs” that need your votes at the Circle of Moms.

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.