Still “Chasing Margaret”

Years ago, during my research leading up to the writing of Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America, I went through a period of fascination with science-fiction/fantasy writer Margaret St. Clair (1911-1995), seeking her books on the SF shelves of used bookstores in various cities.

She and her husband, Eric,  were perhaps the first Gardnerian Witches on the West Coast, having flown East to be initiated by Ray and Rosemary Buckland in the early 1960s.

This blog’s first incarnation was a column in various Pagan magazines, and one of those columns was called “Chasing Margaret”, being my attempt to restore her memory and literary reputation in SF.

Blogger Tim Mayer has kept up the chase for her forgotten works and blogged about several of them at Z-7’s Headquarters. Here is a partial list:

Three Worlds of Futurity (1964).

Message from the Eocene (1964).

The Dancers of Noyo (1973) This novel is not only prescient, but it still gets under my skin, although the geography did not become real until I visited the Mendocino coast.

The Games of Neith (1960).

Change the Sky and Other Stories (1974).

The best of the lost has to be “The Goddess on the Street Corner”. It’s a sad tale which would have fitted into The Twilight Zone. The story concerns an alcoholic pensioner who finds an ancient Greek goddess on a city street. He takes her home and feeds her bourbon, hoping to restore the deity’s powers. The story has a bitter sweet ending, which was not entirely expected.

I would like to find that one.

Religion, the Internet, and Cyberspace

Michael Oman-Reagan has collected and organized a bibliography of references about religion online and online religion at his blog. Various scholars of new religious movements contributed to it.

Good stuff, if your research interests lie there.

More Pagan than the Pagans

Two videos that surprised Pagan bloggers by their Pagan feel, despite their sources.

1. Via Hecate of Washington, DC, a link to a Vimeo slideshow of the “Rappahanock Halloween Festival” sponsored by the Summerisle Old Dominion Hunt in northern Virginia.

She comments, “How many Pagan Samhein [sic] events have you been to that even come close to this? I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how often we Pagans ‘skip’  the elements of ritual that appeal to Younger Child. Maybe we, in the words of the LOLcat posters, R doing it wrong.”

2. From the House of Vines, a link with the comment, “This music video gets it more right than most of the Pagan rituals I’ve been to.”

When I worked with Evan John Jones on the book Sacred Mask, Sacred Dance, I found a passage in the book Ritual Animal Disguise by the British folklorist E.C. Cawte about how school children introduced to masked mumming immediately absorbed the parts of Stag and Dog and so on. It’s all there, just waiting.

When You Meet the Buddha in the Road, Bite Him

We have a best-selling series of romance novels about vampires written by a Mormon.

But we also have a popular, if not so huge, series of romance novels about people in Amish communities, by a writer who grew up around Amish people but is not herself Amish.

Is this a great country or not? That’s one way to learn about religion. Or you can wait for the English translation of Saint Young Men. Jesus and the Buddha, roommates! The “odd couple” formula works in manga too, evidently.

But wait, you say. Vampires? Religion? Consider that NYU Press has published Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture.

Jeffrey Kripal, whose book Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred I am just starting to read, not surprisingly tells the New York Times that scholars of religion should take “the paranormal” seriously.

Is that the “paranormal” as opposed to the “supernatural”?

According to Dr. Kripal, [four famous paranormal researchers’] omission [from scholarly investigation]  is evidence of a persistent bias among religion scholars, happy to consider the inexplicable, like miracles, as long as they fit a familiar narrative, like Judaism or Christianity.

Meanwhile, someone needs to write a novel: Ghost-hunting single Amish girl falls in love with a vampire and discovered Buddhism. Quick!


Pagan Conference CFP Deadline Extended

The deadline for the call for papers (CFP) for next January’s Conference on Current Pagan Studies at Claremont Graduate University has been extended to November 26.

Lo, It Is Written . . .

I came home from the post office this afternoon to find M. typing on her PowerBook at the dining room table.

“Cleanse your mind of impure thoughts,” I said. “Assume an attitude of reverence, for the new Holy Book has come.

And then I sat the carton on the sofa and lifted it out: The Chicago Manual of Style, Sixteenth Edition.

Only editors’ hearts beat more quickly when they read text like, “We now recommend, for example, a single approach to ellipses—a three- or four-dot method (chapter 13, where we also explain the European preference for bracketed ellipses.)”

Or “More attention has been given to the role of software for manuscript editors—for example, with the addition of a manuscript cleanup checklist intended to benefit authors and editors alike.”

There are indeed times when it is good to have Authority.

And for those needing only modest amounts of Authority, I recommend the Online Citation Quick Guide, covering both humanities style (footnotes) and author-date style.

New Co-Chairs Chosen for AAR Pagan Studies Group

One outcome of the recent annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion is that the two co-chairs of the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group, Michael York and Wendy Griffin, came to the end of their terms.

Stepping into those positions are Jone Salomonsen (University of Oslo) and me.

You don’t campaign for these positions; you get them because everyone in the room is looking at you.

One of the chief duties of the (co) chair is writing the call for papers for next year’s meeting (Nov. 19-22, San Francisco), which I am working on right now. Jone supplies the brainpower, and I do the paperwork.

The rest of the committee: Shawn Arthur, Helen Berger, Graham Harvey, Nikki Bado, Michael York.

‘The World Ain’t Run by No Magical Forces’

“Possibly the most WTF viral video since the Christian Side-Hug” (Egregores).

How the CIA Turned Abstract Art into Official High Culture

How did Abstract Expressionism come to dominate the mid-20th-century art scene?

Partly because the Central Intelligence Agency paid for it—all part of the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

Abstract or non-representational art was also being produced in the early years of the USSR, during the early 1920s. Then Joseph Stalin, still the champion mass-murderer of all time, took power in 1924 and controlled the USSR until his death in 1953.

Under Stalin, all art, literature, film-making, etc., had either to serve the state as propaganda or at least express “safe” sentiments. Nothing experimental or critical was allowed—which is why, for example, a satirical novel of the 1930s, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, could not be published until the 1960s, after Stalin’s death, when the USSR was under the somewhat more moderate leadership of Nikita Khruschchev.

How better then, in the struggle for world opinion between the USSR and “the West,” to show that in the West artists could be experimental, critical, unrestricted, and free than to showcase the works of Abstract Expressionists?

(See Technoccult for a photo of abstract painter Jackson Pollack at work.)

Never mind if popular taste rejected abstraction in the West as well, the propaganda war was more important.

In 1947 the State Department organised and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled “Advancing American Art”, with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting [President Harry] Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: “I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash.” The tour had to be cancelled.

The US government now faced a dilemma. This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy’s hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s. To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in.

The connection is not quite as odd as it might appear. At this time the new agency, staffed mainly by Yale and Harvard graduates, many of whom collected art and wrote novels in their spare time, was a haven of liberalism when compared with a political world dominated by McCarthy or with J Edgar Hoover’s FBI. If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.

Fake CIA-sponsored foundations funded art shows and traveling exhibitions. Museums, galleries, and events received secret subsidies. All the machinery of Big Money and High Art was set in motion to promote Abstract Expressionism.

Writer Frances Stonor Saunders asks,

Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA.

But look where this art ended up: in the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms and great galleries. For the Cold Warriors who promoted them, these paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. They succeeded.

Liking this kind of art became a marker of hipness and  cultural sophistication. As a recent New York Times article on “The Sociology of the Hipster” notes,

Taste is not stable and peaceful, but a means of strategy and competition. Those superior in wealth use it to pretend they are superior in spirit. Groups closer in social class who yet draw their status from different sources use taste and its attainments to disdain one another and get a leg up. These conflicts for social dominance through culture are exactly what drive the dynamics within communities whose members are regarded as hipsters.

Renaissance painters worked for princes and cardinals. Abstract Expressions, although they may not have realized it, also served the power structure of their time.

An afterthought on jazz: It would not surprise me to learn that American jazz musicians received much the same kind of Cold War subsidies from the CIA. After all, jazz was avant-garde, and the presence of many Negro musicians—to use the favored racial term of the 1950s and ’60s—presented a happy multiracial picture of America, ammunition against Communist attacks on race relations here.

Can the decline in modern jazz music in recent decades be linked to the end of the Cold War?

Danish Debate: Bare Breasts or Bacon?

Members of two Danish political parties differ over whether including scenes of nude (or at least topless) beach-goers in an informative film about Denmark  would discourage fundamentalist Muslims from trying to immigrate.

“Bare breasts are not a protection against fundamentalism,” [Conservative Integration Spokesman Naser] Khader says on his Facebook page.

“Quite on the contrary. Fundamentalists [are] so sex crazy that bare breasts would make them flock to the country. Perhaps one should try naked pigs and pork— that’ll keep them away…” Khader says.

Add this to your file on “embodied religion,” maybe.