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.

The Wicker Conspiracy

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.