Photo from Slavorum.org.
Along with medieval weapon bits, archaeologists digging in in the old center of Königsburg, now the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea, discovered these pendants symbolizing the god Perun, dating from the late Middle Ages.
The article ends, “What can we say, time to buy Perun’s Axe pedants!”
Next to the news article, a link to a story titled “Which Slavic God Are You?” (Veles, thanks for asking.)
Things are changing.
From the abstract to Robert A. Saunder’s paper “Primetime Paganism: Popular-Culture Representations of Europhilic Polytheism in Game of Thrones and Vikings,” reprinted at Medievalists.net, in which he argues two points:
First, that traditional filmic treatments of pagans [sic] qua villains is shifting, with contemporary popular culture allowing for more nuanced framing of Western forms of polytheism. Secondly, that such popular-culture representations of paganism have direct impact on certain contemporary Pagans’ personal spiritual paths by promoting and influencing the “invention of tradition” among a population which manifests non-traditional religious identities.
Pagan bard Gwydion Pendderwen’s album Songs for the Old Religion (1973) was the first openly Pagan LP ever, that I know of. (There was Guitar Grimoire too, but it was all instrumental.)
On the Agora Patheos blog, Dana Corby tells the story of how it was made (part 1), including why they left in Gwydion’s mumbled remark, “Play louder, I can’t see.”
I learned just how little Gwydion understood about recording: they expected to complete an entire album, without prior rehearsal, over a 4-day weekend. He’d never even sung into a microphone before and had to be taught how to modulate his voice instead of bellow and to strum his guitar rather than whack it for all it’s worth like you do to be heard across a campfire.
With recordings of some of the songs.
Just a reminder:
The 3rd Online International Conference of Pagan Academic European Associates Network occurs tomorrow, the 25th, from 1800–2100 hours Central European Time.
The theme will be “The Future of Contemporary Paganism: Challenges and Developments.”
The conference is in cooperation with Pagan Federation International
This conference focuses on the different aspects of the future and development of contemporary Pagan culture and Witchcraft practices.
Visit the conference’s Facebook page or download this PDF.
I have not been keeping up with my blog-reading, so I just encountered this provocative piece by Sannion at House of Vines: “There’s a reason why Zeus is king of the gods and Hermes isn’t.”
He speaks of Hellenismos mainly, but what he says — as the commenters note — is broadly applicable.
Briefly, his thesis is that the Internet privileges communicators — the “chattering classes” — over doers.
Now I am a card-carrying member of the scribal class — somewhere in the house there should be an old Colorado Press Association ID card, and even rarer, in my desk is my Universal Life Church press pass — so should I be offended.
Not at all. Sannion makes some interesting points.There is more to Paganism(s) than the blogosphere and Twitter. But often you wouldn’t know it. Read the whole thing.
Israeli scholar Shai Feraro talks about Canannite (i.e., Pagan) reconstructionism in present-day Israel. This is an excerpt from his presentation at the recent conference of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism in Riga, Latvia. (Wish I could have been there.)
He makes a reference to the “Canaanites” who were not reconstructionists. That would be these “Canaanites.” Note that some members were fighters in the Irgun — and there is apparently a story there from the days of the Israeli struggle for independence. Basically, this movement wanted to form an Israeli/Hebrew identity that was separate from both Jewish religion and Zionism — a re-enchantment of the land.
(Video by Christian Giudice.)
All of the evaluating and negotiating is completed, and the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group of the American Academy of Religion will be presenting the following sessions at the annual meeting, held November 21–24, 2015, in Atlanta:
1 Joint session with the Indigenous Religious Traditions Group: “The Problem of ‘Religion’ in the Study of Indigenous and Polytheistic Traditions.”
2. “Valuing Paganism in Public and Open Spaces.”
3. “Tradition and Resistance in Paganism.”
I will post more about the contents of each session when the program book is ready.
William Butler Years
As an English major at Reed College, I experienced a semester-long combined seminar on William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot. To be honest, I probably liked Eliot’s poetry more, and I wrote a just-slightly-tongue-in-cheek paper on Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, although I did not have the chops to turn it into a Broadway musical, which is why I am not rich and famous.
Maud Gonne
Nevertheless, I knew that Yeats was important too. We discussed him only as poet and advocate of Irish cultural identity, not as ceremonial magician, as prose writer, nor as Irish senator.
I heard something about A Vision, his esoteric Compleat Theory of Everything, but when I found a copy in the library, I bounced off it like a brick wall. I lacked the background to understand, quite simply, and of course I knew next to nothing about the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which he joined in the early 1890s.
I picked up a lot more over the years, including reading about his long, sexually frustrated (for twenty-odd years) romantic friendship with the beautiful Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne — who was a magician too, at least until the gunfire of the 1916 Easter Rising drowned that out.
Unknown to Yeats, Gonne had an affair with a French journalist and secretly gave birth to a boy, who died at the age of 2; she returned with her lover to the child’s tomb to conceive again, believing that reincarnation would bring back the lost son.
Then last November, in a session of the Western Esotericism Group at the American Academy of Religion, Thomas Willard of the U. of Arizona mentioned an unfinished novel by Yeats that I had never heard of, The Speckled Bird [for the title’s origin, see note below].
Between 1896-1902, “at a point in his career when he was dramatizing his occult experiences in fiction [such as] The Secret Rose, a sequence of stories that embody the conflict between the natural and spiritual worlds,” Yeats made four attempts at this autobiographical novel [General Editor’s Introduction, The Speckled Bird].
Its central character, Michael Hearne, “is dominated by three passions: his love of Margaret [Maud Gonne], his desire to gain access to the invisible world by means of occult knowledge and techniques, and his wish to devise an appropriate ritual for the inauguration and practice of the Celtic Mysteries” [ibid.].
Michael and Margaret plan a series of rituals based on the quest for the Grail, and in a letter he tells her, “We will only make a beginning, but centuries after we are dead cities shall be overthrown, it may be, because of an air that we have hummed or because of a curtain full of [magical] meaning that we have hung upon a wall.”
And when Michael and Maclagan, the character based on S. L. Mathers, are walking in the British Museum’s Egyptian Rooms, Maclagan says, “The old gods are worshipped still in secret and what we have to do is make their worship open again.”
In the most-developed version, Michael Hearne abandons the plan for a Celtic esoteric order and sets off on a journey with Maclagan to Arabia and Persia — which did not occur in Yeats’ real life.
Yeats and Gonne’s Celtic-mystery groups never happened. Outer-world events — the First World War (1914–18), the Irish rebellions (1916, 1919–21) foundation of the Irish Free State (1922), and then its subsequent civil war (1922–23) — were just a little too distracting.
Some would argue that the Fellowship of the Four Jewels carried on something of Yeats’ and Gonne’s idea, and in the person of Ella Young, it has a slight connection with the development of West Coast Pagan movements in the 1960s.
* * * * *
Note: I am not sure what “the speckled bird” meant to Yeats, although he knew that it came from Jeremiah 12:9. Christian commentators regard the bird as emblematic of the church.
Eurasian eagle-owl
The metaphor is of small birds mobbing an owl or other raptor. Jeremiah seems casual about bird identification, but maybe his audience knew if he meant a Eurasian eagle-owl or some kind of large hawk.
That passage also provided the name of a well-known hymn, here sung by country star Kitty Wells and also by Lucinda Williams.
A Wiccan email list that I am on recently went through a discussion of teaching “theology” to children. It is one of the perennial questions among contemporary Pagans: teach the kids or let them make up their own minds as adults. Surprisingly, some discussants reported that said adult children-of-Pagans regretted their parents’ hands-off approach.
Perhaps because I am allergic to the word “theology,” I want to look at a different approach. (I cannot speak as a parent, because although that was not the plan, I ended up childless. So it goes.)
Talk of theology reminds me of some of the writings of the 17th-century Puritans, like the ones who founded Massachusetts Bay Colony, who worried that their children would never have the life-changing born-again experience that their parents did in that religiously tumultuous century. And even today among evangelical Protestants, you find teens worried that they have not been authentically “born again,” and so what is wrong with them?
Paganism should spread through experience and art, not theology. The theology comes later, if it comes.
Suppose it were the autumnal equinox — not a powerfully magical time in my experience, but worth noting. Here in my part of southern Colorado, I have a choice between a winery’s harvest festival in Cañon City and Pueblo’s Chile & Frijoles festival, now twenty years old.
Yes, both are commercial creations: the Chile & Frijoles [chile peppers and beans] festival is sponsored by Loaf ‘n Jug, i.e. the Kroger grocery chain, and it was created as part of a economic development-driven rebranding of the old multi-ethnic steel mill city on the Arkansas River. And the winery wants to sell wine.
Paganism is the religion of the tribe or of the polis, and selling stuff is part of what the polis is about. (In reflection, Pueblo counts as a polis, but Cañon City is probably too small — perhaps it is part of the city-state of Pueblo. They are in the same SMA.)
Even though Wicca was designed as a small-scale mystery religion for adults only, one can also bring its outlook to the life of the city. And as Raven Kaldera and Tannin Schwartzstein write in Urban Primitive, “City spirits are, not surprisingly, quite social creatures, and they love to be acknowledged, so it’s worth your while to learn to speak to them.” You do that, they continue, at the city’s “heart” or strongest location — and, coincidentally, that might well be the place where urban festivities are held!
Get creative. What’s the Pagan take on Mike the Headless Chicken Days, held in May in the little agricultural town of Fruita, Colo.? Or Nederland, Colo.’s Frozen Dead Guy Days, coming up in the March? That one should be easy.
Imagine the kid whose mental construct of Pagan identity includes not just structured ritual but the vendors’ food stalls on Pueblo’s Riverwalk and whatever mix of norteño and classic rock is coming from the bandstand, flavored by the scent of roasting chile peppers by the truckload? Living headless chickens? Well, you have to leave some space for the uncanny.
So it’s not officially Pagan? You can still live it as Pagan.
The Contemporary Pagan Studies Group’s call for papers for the November 2015 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion can now be viewed online.
General instructions for submitting are here. And the deadline is Monday, March 2.