Were the Gods Angry with Japan?

Adrian Ivakhiv blogs on religious responses to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

All of this resonates with an immanence-based process-relational perspective: nature does what it does, it includes the “good” and the “bad” (which are relative to their perceivers), we are part of it and sometimes we get struck down in it. (Careful readers will know that when I say that good and bad are “relative to their perceivers,” this doesn’t mean that “everything is relative, anything goes, and whatever you think or do is as good as anything else.” The world is layered and folded: perceivers share their perceptual situations with other perceivers, so my “good” is closer to your “good” than it is to the good of an amoeba, a viral bacteria or cancer cell, or an asteroid whipping through the solar system. Hitler’s actions may have seemed “right” to him, but in a human context they come off as psychotic and grotesque. And as for “nature,” if it includes everything, becoming a fairly meaningless term, so be it. It corresponds to what, in an East Asian context, is thought of as “the way,” ziran, an active and unfolding “suchness,” or what Gregory Bateson called “the pattern that connects.”)

There is lots more with interesting links. Apparently even the mayor of Toyko took a “the gods are angry with us” line, although he later backed away from it.

Sometimes, the nonhuman world is not All About Us Humans.

Beatnik Witches

Aidan Kelly’s Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches, which has circulated in digital form for some years, can now be purchased as a book from Amazon, with new material added.

As the San Francisco counter-culture teeters on the edge of the Psychedelic Era, a group of twenty-somethings, open to spiritual experiment (and other sorts of experiments), find themselves morphing into something that they do not quite a have a word for  . . . Druids? Witches??

Built from recollections and interviews, it is a picture of people creating a new religion based on a heady mix of reading, ritual, and inspiration.

 

Helping Japan—As a Pagan

If you can, please donate to the Pagan-identified fundraising drive for the the charity Doctors Without Borders for medical assistance in Japan.

I just did.

As of today, this Pagan relief effort has raised more than $16,000. More about it here.

Other charities involved, such as the Japanese Red Cross, are grouped on this page.

An Important Magical Principle

It’s an old saying in advertising that “sex sells.”

This Cornell University professor may have demonstrated in the ESP lab something that magicians have known for a while.

The scourge of responsible psychological research stands behind me, wearing a red cardigan and an expression of great interest. “How were your results?” Bem asks. He points out that I scored better predicting the location of erotic photos—in Bem’s hypothesis, more arousing images are more likely to inspire ESP—than I did boring old landscapes and portraits. In this dingy lab in the basement of an Ivy League psych department, is the future now?

Professor Bem also has some ideas on sexuality and gender identity, as you will find if you read the whole thing.

 

Wild Child, Full of Grace

Just watched Tom DiCillo’s documentary When You’re Strange.

Dionysos is a tough patron, and he leaves you, as the cowboys would say, “Rode hard and put up wet.”

Or dead.

But no one ever uses your music to sell cars.

Another ‘Discovery’ of Atlantis

In one of the crudest examples of “news hook” writing that I have lately seen, Yahoo links this week’s earthquake-tsunami in Japan to an upcoming National Geographic special on Atlantis, which may have been an actual city in what is now Spain and which also may be been destroyed by a tsunami.

To solve the age-old mystery, the team used a satellite photo of a suspected submerged city to find the site just north of Cadiz, Spain. There, buried in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park, they believe that they pinpointed the ancient, multi-ringed dominion known as Atlantis.

The team of archeologists and geologists in 2009 and 2010 used a combination of deep-ground radar, digital mapping, and underwater technology to survey the site.

Freund’s discovery in central Spain of a strange series of “memorial cities,” built in Atlantis’ image by its refugees after the city’s likely destruction by a tsunami, gave researchers added proof and confidence, he said.

I don’t get that channel, so someone will have to let me know how it goes.

That legendary Atlantis was on the Iberian peninsula makes more sense than the hypothesis that the eruption on Santorini/Thera in the Eastern Mediterranean produced the legend. Plato might have been sort of correct about the “beyond the Pillars of Hercules” part.

Nothing here on the Dion Fortune-y stuff.

Gallimaufry, But It’s a Secret

• Is your religion playing secrecy games? Anne Hill asks, “Does Your Religion Pass the Briefcase Test?” This concept was explored in the magical religion of Candomblé in Paul Christopher Johnson’s Secrets, Gossip, and Gods. Read Johnson’s book and see how much seems familiar.

• Sannion rants about bad ritual:

As annoying as all of this was, the thing that I found utterly intolerable was the high priestess’ choice in ritual tools. Her default images of The Lord and Lady were a pair of black velvet paintings of a shirtless Fabio-faced Indian Brave and his equally improbable and extremely busty Indian Princess paramour. Next to these was the ubiquitous cheap wolf statue and more crystals and feathers than you could shake an athame at.

• If you missed my earlier brief reference to it, read Peg Aloi’s “The History of Pagans in the Media: A Cautionary Tale.”

Pagans who want media attention are nothing new. Look at Aleister Crowley; he was a public sensation and scandalous topic of conversation throughout society in the days before Facebook, before television, before radio. His desire for fame and fortune certainly marred what might have been a respectable career as a talented poet and brilliant occultist and author. Well, maybe also the drug addiction, unpaid debts and sexual enslavement of women held him back just a teeny bit.

How to Read an Academic Journal

“It’s not Harry Potter,” writes Rob “Instant Mentor” Weir at Inside Higher Education.

Students register surprise when I confess that I share some of their frustrations over academic writing. Quite a few scholars are dreadful writers. There is, in my view, entirely too much pretentiousness, jargon, and affected weightiness oozing from journal pages. That’s why the first thing I tell students is to identify their purpose for consulting a professional work. What do they hope to extract? Do they need to learn from the author’s theoretical perspective, or mine the piece for examples? Are they reading it to contribute to a class discussion, or to collect perspectives to use in a paper? These matters determine their reading strategy.

Read the whole thing. It’s short. You can even skim.

Visiting Buddhist Ireland

Melinda Rothouse, Austin, Texas-based writer on religion and performance, visits a Buddhist retreat  in the west of Ireland.

In its former life, before being purchased by [the Buddhist organization], the building served as the courthouse where many of the IRA trials of the 1970’s and 80’s took place. He spoke of cells where IRA members were once held, under maximum security, while awaiting their trials.  These same cells are now dormitories and meditation rooms—talk about poetic justice.

She briefly surveys the Irish religious scene. In case you were wondering,

And what of the ancient Celtic/Pagan tradition that’s so identified with Ireland in cultural imaginings?  Sure, you catch glimpses and hear whispers, especially in the odd women’s retreat advert promising a reawakening of feminine power and sexuality, but it’s not really a living, viable practice as far as I was able to observe. . . . Well, as in America, people are looking for an alternative way to connect with the spiritual without all the cultural and historical baggage of Christianity.  Yoga studios and Buddhist meditation centers are popping up all over Ireland, as a brief Google search will reveal.

Given the fact that the Irish economy is down the tubes right now, “an emphasis on simplicity, quietude (certainly not always observed), communal living, recycling and composting, meditation and study” might just fit well with economic realities. And since the Celtic Tiger lived only twenty years or so (some say less), the older folks remember how to do without.

And as Rothouse rightly observes, “religious traditions are crossing borders as quickly as any commodity.”

The Lower You Go, the Weirder It Gets

Pulling pulks up the trail toward the Eagle Nest Wilderness

Pulling pulks* up the trail

Last week was stressful. It felt good on Friday to drive with a friend into the mountains, meet some others, strap on skis, and head up a trail Away From It All.

Then I come  home to learn that actor Charlie Sheen is a “Vatican assassin warlock” and that some media witch in Salem, Mass., is working magic against him.

(Peg Aloi sees a tradition here.)

If today were not the deadline for submitting papers for the American Academy of Religion’s 2011 meeting—meaning that I have to watch what is coming in for Pagan Studies—I would be tempted to just re-wax my skis and climb back up there.

* Pulk: from Finnish pulkka.