Idolatry as a Category in Pagan Studies

I have spent all afternoon squeezing out a thousand words on the topic of idolatry, a sort of cross between an encyclopedia entry and a summary of four essays appearing in the upcoming issue of The Pomegranate (which is almost finished, thanks be!).

Michael York

Michael York

In a paper given during one of the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group’s sessions during the 2009 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Michael York summed up the issue:

The corporeal spirituality that distinguishes Pagan religiosity from the approaches of other religions supports both idolatry or the adoration of physical images and a love of nature that merges into veneration as well as efforts towards ecological restoration as a sacred mandate.

That paper, slightly revised, will appear in the forthcoming issue.

There is a bit of tension between those practitioner-scholars who want to reclaim and redefine the word, in the same manner as “witch,” “pagan,” and so forth.

Others, such as Amy Whitehead, a PhD candidate at The Open University who published on the topic two years ago in Pomegranate, think that trying to reclaim the word is a tactical error—and also that it fails as a discursive category:

[Idolatry is] one of the most loaded and problematic terms in contemporary Western discourses and … is continually understood (and misunderstood) in Abrahamic and modern discursive contexts.

She likes “materiality” as a neutral substitute. “Material sacrality” has also been used. Both differ from any discussion of material culture within a religious tradition, since here we are talking about objects—or nonhuman nature—that serve as “windows” into sacred dimensions.

Speaking of tactical errors, I now think that we on the Contemporary Pagan Studies steering committee made one last year. We were so happy with the lively discussion and attendance at our idolatry session that we scheduled an immediate follow-up—a panel discussion—at this year’s AAR meeting a month ago.

Unfortunately, this year’s session was more uneven. One presenter had to cancel for medical reasons, which further diminished it.  Now I think that when you have a great session and want a follow-up, you should wait at least two years for people to reflect and write and build up new material.

Since I have just agreed to serve a term as co-chair of Pagan Studies, I can have more say in how sessions are planned, and hence enthusiasm will be tempered.

Learning History through Pop Tunes

Via Sightless Among Miracles, a link to a group of history teachers’ remakes of music videos to teach history.

French seismologists have probably noticed disturbances near Toulouse caused by  medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas spinning in his grave after having been  memorialized to the tune of “Venus.”

The rap-style delivery of Middle English in Canterbury Tales is excellent, contrasting nicely with the tune, which is The Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreaming.”

Check out the whole YouTube channel. You won’t be wasting your time.

(The real rap-ready early modern English poet is John Skelton, but that is another story.)

An Icelandic Pocahantas?

In 1998, the Icelandic parliament passed a bill authorizing creation of a database of all citizens’ genetic, genealogical, and medical records, sometimes called The Book of Icelanders.

Now, reports National Geographic, researchers have found traces of possible American Indian ancestry in some Icelanders. They hypothesize that some of the explorers or settlers in Vinland might have brought back a woman, or women, from a North American tribe.

Fascinating. Next they will be telling us that Severed Ways is a documentary.

It’s still not as weird as the legend that some western Chinese are descended from Roman soldiers.

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.