‘Severed Ways’: Headbangers of 1007 CE

"Severed Was" poster imageA movie made by a company called Heathen Films is likely to have a certain ideological component. Severed Ways, a 2007 indie production, however, has not become a cult favorite like The Wicker Man.

The plot comes right from the Vinland Sagas, but adds a bit about two scouts abandoned and believed dead when Norse settlers abandon one settlement after conflicts with the natives.

The dialog is in Swedish with colloquial English subtitles, like “We’re toast if the Skraelings find us.”

But in accordance with a Scandinavian tradition of filmmaking, there are long silent periods where the camera merely follow the men on their journey seeking their comrades.

One Internet Movie Database comment calls it “Aguirre, the Wrath of God for Black Metal fans.” That is not necessarily a compliment, but director Tony Stone would disagree:

Heavy metal and vikings have always had this sort of connection—the warrior spirit, the harshness, the visuals of battle, the pagan side. The music is hard and rough and trying at times, but that’s what the physical world is; that’s how we used to live. Metal describes something of another time. It’s a very emotional music that’s more like classical music in the way it recalls history. It’s also just music we were listening to while making the movie.

As an expression of “Dionysian pessimism” (Nietzsche’s term), it works.

It was filmed in Maine, Vermont, Labrador, and at the reconstructed Norse camp of L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

M.’s short review: “Beautiful landscapes interrupted by bashing.”

Bryan White at Cinema Suicide says much the same thing at greater length.

Cocktails for Pagans

Bohemian Spritz

Bohemian Spritz (New York Times photo)

Who says that today’s Pagans are not influencing the larger culture?

The New York Times’ Style section offers the “right drink” for every winter holiday party, including the Bohemian Spritz for “dilettante Pagans” celebrating the solstice. (If that link is problematic, try this one.)

For those slightly weary of the familiar fa-la-la, or for those who are opposed to even the slightest whisper of organized religion, a solstice party provides a refreshing diversion. While actual hard-core pagans [sic] are probably drinking something murky and ancient, a more streamlined beverage might be better for dabblers. The Bohemian Spritz (another creation of Vandaag’s Katie Stipe) is a light, fizzy wine drink with compellingly arboreal undercurrents, provided by pine and elderflower cordials. It is ideal for welcoming the long nights, for putting the Krampus back in Christmas.

One question, where do you get pine liqueur?

UPDATE: Apparently one looks for Zirbenschnapps or Un Sapin, described as “very hard to find—even in France.”

Mapping Pagan Religious Identity

At Witchful Thinking, a practitioner-scholar’s blog, a model for a scheme of Pagan religious identity development.

Take a look and let her know what you think.

From Slate, America’s Two Literary Cultures

This article on “America’s two distinct literary cultures” (via University Diaries) touched me because I almost went down the Master of Fine Arts in writing road myself—and of course I taught alongside people who had done so.

After graduating from Reed College with what amounted to a BFA, I was accepted into the MFA program at the U. of Montana, which I was drawn to because Richard Hugo was there, and I really admired him. (Still do.)

All the paperwork was done; I had only to take the Graduate Record Exam. The day came, I woke up, and I did not go to the testing. Instead I went to work in an advertising agency (the English major’s equivalent of being drafted, I used to joke).

Then came years working in magazine publishing, then daily newspapers (definitely not the normal career path for journalism), a little while in book publishing, and finally p.r. for higher education—until one night “some god or daemon” kicked me in the head and said “Graduate School. Religious Studies.”

Which led, ironically enough, back to the English Department. A job’s a job.  And I was on the fringe of this scene:

Thus the fiction writer’s MFA increasingly resembles the poet’s old Ph.D.; not in the rigors of the degree itself—getting an MFA is so easy—but in the way it immerses the writer in a professional academic network. She lives in a college town, and when she turns her gaze forward and outward, toward the future and the literary world at large, she sees not, primarily, the New York cluster of editors and agents and publishers but, rather, a matrix of hundreds of colleges with MFA programs, potential employers all, linked together by Poets & Writers, AWP, and summertime workshops at picturesque make-out camps like Sewanee and Bread Loaf. More links, more connections, are provided by the attractive, unread, university-funded literary quarterlies that are swapped between these places and by the endowments and discretionary funds that deliver an established writer-teacher from her home program to a different one, for a well-paid night or week, with everybody’s drinks expensed: This system of circulating patronage may have some pedagogical value but exists chiefly to supplement the income of the writer-teacher and, perhaps more important, to impress on the students the more glamorous side of becoming—of aspiring to become—a writer-teacher.

It’s a provocative if wandering essay, full of little knife thrusts like ” the continued hunger of undergraduates for undemanding classes.”

I never taught fiction or poetry, but I did teach some creative-nonfiction classes, and I will never know if I was really any good at it or not, because I was one of those “writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any.”

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.