Everyone’s favorite Pagan-themed movie of the 1970s turns up on a list of “15 conspiracy movies that don’t fall apart at the end.”
(Via Ann Althouse.)
Riddle Me This
I have two blogs, this one and Southern Rockies Nature Blog, and I switch between them as the mood and topic strike me.
The Truth Laid Bear “ecosystem” ranking of the blogosphere is long dead, alas.
So now Technorati seems to be the winner in blog-ranking systems.
This blog, Letter from Hardscrabble Creek, has two to three times more daily visitors than does my Southern Rockies Nature Blog.Yet Southern Rockies has a Technorati “authority” rating, as of today, of 434, whereas Hardscrabble Creek comes in at merely 125.
Is it just that the Technorati system does not handle religion well as a topic? They list 6,758 blogs under that heading. Number one is a Roman Catholic blog, What Does the Prayer Really Say? Is that really the most popular religion blog out there?
Not surprisingly, The Wild Hunt comes in tops on a “Paganism” search (authority 485), followed by Aquila ka Hecate.
Erudite commentary welcome.
On Reading Merlin Stone for the First Time
Jason Pitzl-Waters posted a notice of the passing of Merlin Stone, “sculptor and art historian,” yes, but best known in my circles for her book When God Was a Woman, first published in 1978.
I remember an “Oh wow” reaction on reading it when I was in my late twenties—already Wiccan, but still in that eager mode of scooping up new intellectual sensations (something I can still do when the stars are right).
This was in my pre-grad school stage. I did not even know that the author was female—after all, Robert Graves had written The White Goddess, and my only association with the name Merlin was the Arthurian one. (Apparently I was not going to the right conferences. I was not going to any conferences!)
There are lots of tributes to the book’s imaginal power (if not scholarship) at Jason’s post.
The Pomegranate 12:1
I have let weeks go by without mentioning the latest issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies!
Here is the table of contents. All book reviews and article abstracts are free.
Articles
“Franz Sättler (Dr. Musallam) and the Twentieth-Century Cult of Adonism”
Hans Thomas Hakl
“Walk Like an Egyptian: Egypt as Authority in Aleister Crowley’s Reception of The Book of the Law”
Caroline Tully
“On the Pagan Parallax: A Sociocultural Exploration of the Tension between Eclecticism and Traditionalism as Observed among Dutch Wiccans
Léon van Gulik
Special Section: Idolatry and Materiality
“Re-examining ‘Idolatry’ in Pagan Studies”
Chas S. Clifton
“Idolatry, Ecology, and the Sacred as Tangible”
Michael York
“Response to Michael York’s ‘Idolatry, Ecology and the Sacred as Tangible’ ”
Mogg Morgan
“Pagans and Things: Idolatry or Materiality?”
Amy Whitehead
“Idolatry, Paganism, and Trust in Nature”
Bron Taylor
Book Reviews
Dave Evans and Dave Green, eds. Ten Years of Triumph of the Moon (Bristol: Hidden Publishing, 2009).
Samuel Eldon Wagar
Constance Wise, Hidden Circles in the Web: Feminist Wicca, Occult Knowledge, and Process Thought (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2008).
Paul Reid-Bowen
de Angeles, Ly, Emma Restall Orr and Thom van Dooren, eds., Pagan Visions for a Sustainable Future (Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 2005)
Leland Glenna
Tyr: Myth-Culture-Tradition, Volumes 1 (2002), 2 (2003-04), and 3 (2007-08), ULTRA Publishing, Atlanta, Georgia.
Michael Strmiska
David Waldron & Christopher Reeve, Shock! The Black Dog of Bungay (London:, Hidden Publishing, 2010)
Dave Evans
Review: A New Look at Enochian Magic
John Dee (possibly a model for Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest) was one of the most fascinating characters of 16th-century England: mathematician, navigator, occultist, etc.
Working with the trance medium Edward Kelley, Dee produced pages and pages of material, some claimed to be dictated by angels, about the supernatural realms.
Although based in biblical and non-canonical legends of the patriarch Enoch, this system of “Enochian magic,” complete with its own language (as melodious as Klingon) occupies its own space in the overall scheme of Western magic.
A new book on the system, John DeSalvo’s Decoding the Enochian Secrets, lets you see reproductions of Dee’s diaries and tables of “angelic” letters, photographed from the originals in the British Museum.
But as DeSalvo writes, “The angels never explained the use or application of these tables of Enoch that were transmitted to Dee and Kelley. Dee never recorded anything in his diary regarding these tables that could give us any insight into how to use them” (55).
A system of meditations and invocations in the so-called Enochian language has been practiced over the centuries, and DeSalvo gives some instructions on how to begin with it.
Why the Used Bookstore Clerk Hates You
Because you camp out in the Spirituality section? Or worse.
Also, you are trying to sell us textbooks and other crap, and we’re not buying.
Upcoming Movies with Pagan Themes
Or as one commenter puts it about the new Red Riding Hood, “zeroing in on the symbolism and completely missing the point.”
Another Case of ‘Sacred Prostitution’?
In Phoenix, Arizona, the Phoenix Goddess Temple is offering erotic massage, etc., in return for “offerings.”
Women at the temple take names like Magdalena, Shakti, and Devima. There’s also a high priestess named Gypsy, and a tall, lithe blonde named Leila, who advertises her measurements (36-26-37) on her page at the temple website, which includes photo galleries of each goddess.
The goddesses practice techniques that include genital touching for a “religious offering” of money that generally ranges from $204 to $650. Their advertisements go in the adult sections of local newspapers, including New Times, but Phoenix Goddess Temple founder Tracy Elise says the temple is not a brothel — it’s a church, and the services offered are religious rituals to enrich people’s lives.
This gambit has been tried before in other states and not ended well. Our cultural-legal system has no place for “sacred prostitution,” even when presented under the banner of freedom of religion.
British writer Robert Graves, author of The White Goddess (one of the most influential books of the Pagan revival), included a similar sort of temple in his fantasy novel Watch the Northwind Rise, also called Seven Days in New Crete (1949).
I do agree that sexual healing can and does take place. But the legal deck is stacked against offering it openly—you might suspect that when even the “alternative” newspaper calls it “New Age prostitution.”
Classics scholar Stephanie Lynn Budin, author of The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity, has weighed in elsewhere about the Phoenix Goddess Temple.
What drives me really nuts is that this tends to promote the idea that pagan religion is libertine; that this is what you get if you don’t honor some anti-material, anti-body, generally male deity codified in a book somewhere. This then makes it easier to exploit people seeking new spiritualities, claiming that this is part of the deal.
Her argument, as I understand, is that we interpret the writings of Herodotus and other ancients through our own sexual preoccupations and that the reality of the Pagan past was something different.
(Hat tip: Caroline Tully.)
Gallimaufry with Books
• Stonehenge as sold by by Ikea. (via Mirabilis)
• If gays come out of “the closet” and witches come out of “the broom closet,” what closet do atheists come out of?
• Ten suggested alternatives to Photoshop. On the Mac, I use Graphic Converter quite a bit. But I might check some of these out too.
• If books had these titles, you would know instantly what they were about. There is this approach too.