Via Instapundit, a Popular Mechanics round up on medical possibilities of venoms and poisons.
I can’t say that my 2006 rattlesnake bite had any positive physiological effects, but I can tell you that a sting from the little tan scorpions that we have in southern Colorado (same as this?) can have interesting effects on the central nervous system—once you get past the pain. I understand that some people grind and smoke them, but I have not tried that.
That is the question that William Seligman is asking (with permission) on his blog.
If your Pagan practice and experience were influenced by Isaac, go visit and add your input.
Our little celebration here at the American Academy of Religion annual meeting, during which we Pagan scholars and friends discard our tweed jackets and switch to Samhain black, made it to The Huffington Post. (Scroll to the bottom.) Thanks, Grove, I think.
It’s another example of how Wicca, in particular, is becoming the new Other in the religious landscape, elbowing aside the Jews, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and anyone else who fills the blank of, “But how will the _________ react?”
Buffy in the Classroom: Essays on Teaching with the Vampire Slayer has now been released by McFarland.
Essays describe how Buffy can be used to explain—and encourage further discussion of—television’s narrative complexity, archetypal characters, morality, feminism, identity, ethics, non-verbal communication, film production, media and culture, censorship, and Shakespeare, among other topics.
Jason Winslade, a scholar in Pagan studies (via performance studies) and a contributor to the volume, notes, “I used the show first in my occultism and pop culture course at DePaul, back when I first published about Buffy in 2001, then wound up doing an entire class on the show as a popular freshman seminar for several years. “
Truly, anyone who thinks that Dead Poets Society is a career template is in bad, bad trouble.
“The Scots invented hypnosis, chloroform and the hypodermic syringe. Wouldn’t it just be easier to talk to a woman?” – Stephen Brown
Blogger Lenore Skenazy reprints a valuable article looking at the “urban myth” of children being targeted by sexual predators at Halloween.
Paul Stern, a deputy prosecutor in Snohomish County, Wash., agrees [that there is zero evidence for such a belief]. ”People want to protect kids; they want to do the right thing and they make decisions based on what at first glance may make some sense. Sex offenders, costumes, kids — what a bad combination,” he said. ”Unfortunately, those kinds of policies are not always based on any analysis or scientific evidence,” said Stern, who started prosecuting sex offenders who victimized children in 1985.
Read the whole thing.
Via the Pagan Newswire Collective (should I just have a dateline with “PNC” in it?) comes this link to a witchcraft ritual reportedly performed against Adolf Hilter and the Nazi regime in Maryland in January 1941, which is almost a year before the United States officially declared war.
It was inspired by William Seabrook’s Witchcraft: Its Power in the World Today, originally published a few months before—Seabrook himself is in the photos.
In other words, this is not the Wiccan religion nor any variation thereof but witchcraft in the purely magic-working sense.
Having once worked briefly for one of the old-school, cigar-chomping big-city “press agents,” I immediately wonder if the whole thing was not a collaboration between some publicist and the photographer. In other words, was there media involvement from the beginning? So often, things that seemed to have “just happened” in fact did not.
Second, whether contrived or not, this magical working is better sourced than the more famous Lammas 1940 working supposedly performed by British witches. It was during the summer of 1940 when German invasion of southern England was imminent, until the German High Command canceled the invasion.
That Lammas ritual was fictionalized in Katherine Kurz’s Lammas Night. It was described in Gerald Gardner’s 1954 book Witchcraft Today, in which he coyly describes it as being performed by “witches” but does not say if he was there. (Although he was Wicca’s chief founder, his pose in the book is that of an ethnographer/historian, not a participant.)
They met, raised the great cone of power and directed the the thought at Hitler’s brain: “You cannot cross the sea,” “You cannot cross the sea,” “Not able to come,” “Not able to come.” Just as their great-grandfathers had done to Boney [Napoleon Boneparte, 1804] and their remoter forefathers had done to the Spanish Armada” [in 1588] (104).
The problem is, the only knowledge that we have of the 1940 is Gardner’s say-so. All accounts of it trace back to him. My old friend Evan John Jones was skeptical that more than half a dozen people participated, but I am more skeptical. I think that it is equally likely that Gardner, who served in the Home Guard (before moving inland away from the coast) and wrote letters to newspapers advocating desperate resistance to the expected invasion, described the ritual as something that should have happened.
It is more attested that Dion Fortune’s ceremonial magic group (and possibly others) were trying to affect the course of the war by magical means.
Paranthropology is the “Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal.” From the website:
The first issue of a new newsletter entitled “Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal” is set to be released this July. While the main emphasis of the journal is on anthropological approaches, it will also branch out into other disciplines – psychology, parapsychology, sociology, folklore, history – as a means to explore the way in which these theoretical methodologies interact and shed light on the paranormal.
A few months before the great San Francisco earthquake and fire, someone mounted an early movie camera on a street car and filmed as the car rolled down Market Street toward the Ferry Building.
Pretty much everything in this movie was destroyed on April 18-19, 1906. It’s a lost world.
I find this movie to be almost hypnotic. The policeman in his helmet … lots of free-range kids about … oh my god, they’re going to hit that horse … no, they didn’t… there goes Martin Eden himself, crossing the street with his manuscript.
…
Part of the same movie is here, but with period music of the early 1900s. Seems less elegiac and more long-ago.