Tag Archives: blogging

Gallimaufry

Leftovers tossed into a pot:

¶ From my friend Rowan in Colorado Springs: Ten Things to Do to Get Ready to Join a Coven. Nothing about candles or astral projection. Learn to cook, keep your word, have a life.

¶ Using the “Mary Magdalene as sacred prostitute” meme to sell sex aids, if you consider the site’s overall purpose. (See also Aphrodite pandemos.)

¶ M. and I watched The Last King of Scotland on DVD. Forest Whitaker owned the title role of Idi Amin Dada. He fully deserved the Oscar.

¶ I think that two of my nature-writing students have joined the cult of Charles Bowden.

¶ Weirdest Web search string of the month to bring someone here: sex in cotopaxi colorado. I hope he found some–Cotopaxi is pretty tiny–but is AOL Search the best way to start?

Why I Dropped Sitemeter

Not that you have been checking the graphics on my sidebar, but if you have, you will not longer see Sitemeter’s little rainbow square.

As this article from Geek News Central states, Sitemeter started planting spyware/third-party cookies on visitors’ computers.

I already had an account with StatCounter for a commercial Web project, so I have added my blogs to it. They say they won’t use third-party cookies. And StatCounter has a free counter and visitor-tracking service too.

When I am at home with a dial-up connection, I can see the difference: this blog loads more quickly now that the Sitemeter code is removed.

And, speaking of banners, I added one to the definitive Pagan blogs list.

Gallimaufry

¶ Here in Colorado, Rocky Mountain PBS’ group of stations weights their offerings heavily toward programs like Lawrence Welk and Antiques Roadshow. When they really want to be cutting edge, such as during fund drives, they run a John Denver special.

Having once been peripherally connected with the antiques trade, I actually enjoy Antiques Roadshow sometimes. M., however, makes some comment about the “white-shoe crowd” and leaves the room. I wish I had been watching when an Austin Osman Spare painting was discussed. Did anyone mention ceremonial magic and Borough Satyr?

PanGaia managing editor Elizabeth Barrette has a a new poem published in the fantasy webzine Lorelei Signal. She also has a book in the work on writing Pagan spells, poetry, and ritual texts. She reminds us that PanGaia’s fiction-contest deadline is June 24.

¶ This may be just too obvious, but anyway… If you work at an organization that is cyber-security obsessed, where you frequently have to change your network password, why not encode a magical intention into your password? For a writer, something like “Public@tion08”. And, look, it’s a “strong” password with a non-alphanumeric character.

¶ BeliefNet’s Blog Heaven site has been cleansed of non-monotheists. No Buddhist bloggers, no Hindus, no Pagans. And yet I hear that BeliefNet is still trying to get some Pagans to write essays for the main site. Do we even need them, with all the Pagan sites and forums out there?

¶ Stop whatever you are doing and read this. Then bookmark the blog. It is one of the best out there.

Gallimaufry

¶ From an obituary of Frank Conroy (once director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop) on what a writing teacher does:

“You have to get across to them that the work is separate from them. That’s what good work is: a life independent of the life of the author. So you have unintended qualities in the prose — personal tics, pretending to write, instead of really writing. All writers have to go through this and get it past them. I try to make that quicker for them rather than longer.

¶ “The Law of Attraction.” Jeff Lilly at Druid Journal has a great round-up posting.

¶ I always wondered how much money it takes to get people to appear on “Wife Swap.”

Then an acquaintance who is active in Paganism-and-popular culture was contacted by a staff member for the show. (An illiterate email, she said, which made her think he was some kind of Internet troll instead.)

It’s $10,000. And, yes, they want more Wiccans. We’re the reliable “other” now.

At one time, Wiccans were rare enough in the public eye that we were seen as a motley collection of individuals. Now we are a class, a group, so it is possible to stereotype us. That is a measure of success, in a sort of back-handed way–except when too many negative traits are projected onto us. This process is know as “alterity,” if you speak PoMo.

Gallimaufry

• When driving east from Colorado, I often make a short pilgrimage to Carhenge.

• BeliefNet has cut me off again. Restoring this blog to BlogHeaven is a “top priority,” my contact there said. That was three days ago. Again, I am baffled; I have not changed my RSS or Atom feed settings or anything like that. Eventually, I will just stop caring.

• “I guess we’re mainstream now–and thus ripe for parody,” said the person who emailed me this item from The Onion.

Blog Valhalla, Polytheism, Books and More

¶ Yvonne Aburrow’s Pagan theologies wiki has what might be the definitive list of active Pagan blogs. I am adding a link on my sidebar.

¶ Speaking of which, this blog now appears on BeliefNet’s Blog Heaven page again. Thanks to everyone who made a fuss.

¶Bedside reading: I started, put aside, but will return to John Lamb Lash’s Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief.

It is a difficult book for me to evaluate: I sympathize with Lash’s point of view, but I think that he distorts some of his sources too much in order to support his views. He wants to use Gnosticism as a path that “can provide the spiritual dimension for deep ecology independently of the three mainstream religions derived from the Abrahamic traditions.”

Gnosticism is still concerned with “salvation,” a concept largely at odds with polytheism, as John Michael Greer points out (see below). Much Gnostic thinking disparages physical existences as a “mistake,” so I am waiting to see how Lash reconciles that with deep ecology and its focus on our relationship with and as a part of nature.

Lash writes his introduction around the life of Hypatia of Alexandria, a Platonic philosopher murdered by a Christian mob in 415 CE. He wants to view her as an “urban shaman,” but I see her more as today’s tenured professor of mathematics. An intellectual through and through. Note how she elevates philosophy over erotic attraction this story of her teaching, true or not.

Reviewing Not in His Image in the Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Kirch writes:

Lash is capable of explaining the mind-bending concepts of Gnosticism and pagan mystery cults with bracing clarity and startling insight. At moments, however, he slips into a kind of New Age rant as baffling as any mystical text. “What we seek in ‘Gaia theory’ is a live imaginal dimension,” he writes in one such passage, “not a scaffolding of cybernetic general systems cogitation.” . . . .

And when he considers what he calls the “sci-fi theology” of the ancient Gnostics, he comes uncomfortably close to affirming that the otherworldly “Archons” of Gnostic myth were authentic extraterrestrials.

An interesting book, but full of special pleading.

¶I am happier with John Michael Greer’s A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism, published by the Druidic group Ár nDraíocht Féin.

Greer’s arguments for polytheism as offering a better model of the universe (including the evil and suffering in it) than monotheism and his lucid explanation of polytheistic spirituality deserve a wide hearing.

He works hard to show that monotheistic thinkers simply do not comprehend the polytheistic experience, and their arguments against it (unless enforced by violence as in Hypatia’s case) simply fail.

Indeed, ancient and modern Pagans alike have the described mystical states in which they have become aware of multitudes of divine beings filling every corner of the cosmos; in the words of the Greek philosopher Thales, they have seen that “all things are full of gods.” This is the polar opposite of henotheism; it is also among the most powerful and transforming of Pagan religious experiences.

Site feed update

Inspired by the problems with BeliefNet (which still occurred before I touched any of my site feed settings), I have tweaked the settings a little bit, trying to make them more compatible with different browsers and aggregators.

Thanks also to everyone who contacted BeliefNet on my behalf.

Knowledgeable feedback will be appreciated. I am curious to know if the LiveJournal feed that was set up for this blog has vanished into the ether too, but since I am not an LJ user, I cannot check it.

Plato and the Bloggers

Will you also agree that if [the public] is ill-disposed towards philosophy, the blame must fall on that noisy crew of interlopers who are always bandying abuse and spiteful personalities–the last thing of which a philosopher can be guilty?

The Republic
Chapter 22, translation of F.M. Cornford
(Book Six)

Gallimaufry

• A federal judge won’t let the Veterans Administration wriggle out of the lawsuit over grave markers for Wiccan veterans.

• The Guardian, a British newspaper, covers the Greek Pagan renaissance.

For years, Orthodox clerics believed that they had defeated Greeks wishing to embrace the customs and beliefs of the ancient past. But increasingly the church, a bastion of conservatism and traditionalism, has been confronted by the spectre of polytheists making a comeback in the land of the gods. Last year, Peppa’s group, Ellinais, succeeded in gaining legal recognition as a cultural association in a country where all non-Christian religions, bar Islam and Judaism, are prohibited. As a result of the ruling, which devotees say paves the way for the Greek gods to be worshipped openly, the organisation hopes to win government approval for a temple in Athens where pagan baptisms, marriages and funerals could be performed. Taking the battle to archaeological sites deemed to be “sacred” is also part of an increasingly vociferous campaign.

The article mentions James O’Dell, who also appears in the documentary I Still Worship Zeus.

What happens in Greece first may happen next in the UK or elsewhere in Western Europe. A number of British Pagans have borrowed the rhetoric of American Indian activists about sacred sites and about ancestral remains stored in museums.

• After a couple of years, this blog seems to have been removed from BeliefNet’s “Blog Heaven” site, where it used to appear in the “Other Faiths” category at the very bottom of the page.

No one from BeliefNet informed me that my blog was given the boot; I just happened to notice.

When I asked what was going on, someone named Tim Hayne, editorial project manager, said that it was unintentional and tried to make it look like it was my fault for changing something at this end. (Don’t tech-support people always try to make problems look like the user’s fault?)

Ten days have gone by, but nothing has changed. You won’t find Letter From Hardscrabble Creek in Blog Heaven. (Maybe there is a Blog Limbo somewhere.)

But the URL of my site feed has not changed. So I have to wonder if someone at the supposedly interfaith BeliefNet site just cannot stomach an outspokenly Pagan blog.

It’s their site and they can run it the way that they want. But why can’t they be honest?

News about this blog

I finally moved to the “new” Blogger, so, among other things, I can add post labels. I stopped doing Technorati labels because I did not find them personally to be all that useful. You can still get much the same result by searching the blogs listed in Technorati.