Spiritual Tourism Drops in Sedona

An only slightly snarky article (it is the New York Times, after all) reports on a decline in “spiritual tourism” in Sedona, Arizona..

Local New Agers seem divided as to whether the economy or the James Arthur Ray sweat lodge deaths are more to blame.

After all the sweat lodge deaths “could have happened anywhere.”

“It was a very unfortunate and sad situation that could have happened anywhere,” said Janelle Sparkman, president of the Sedona Metaphysical Spiritual Association, who attributes the woes that New Age practitioners are experiencing to a lack of disposable income for spiritual needs and not what happened that awful afternoon. “It was not indicative of Sedona or Sedona’s practitioners at all.”

But they happened in oversold Sedona, which has been touristy for much of its existence.

My mother and stepfather moved there in the 1970s. She was teaching at Northern Arizona University, but he had retired and claimed that he could not handle the altitude of Flagstaff (though he was from Colorado), so they lived in Sedona as a compromise.

At that time, Sedona was mostly about art galleries and giving kitschy names to the big rock formations. There was one called Snoopy (after the Peanuts comic strip dog), no less. Young idealist that I was, I found it disgusting. As a newly come-home  Pagan, I was not impressed by the desert chapel either when they hauled me out to look at it.

I had not yet developed the ability to appreciate the touristy stuff in a hip and ironic way!

So between that and some family matters that I will skip over, I was unimpressed by Sedona. When the talk about earth vortices and spiritual power points began, all that I could think of was a rock called Snoopy.

Giving Animal Sacrifice a Bad Name

You know that I am all for polytheism, and I say “All honor to Durga,” but isn’t this a bit much?

The Los Angeles Times reports that more than 40,000 people, many of whom were inebriated, took their sacrificial goats to the Tildiha village temple in Bihar state to pray to the goddess Durga on the last day of the Navratri festival.

“People were vying with each other to get their goats sacrificed first, and they had a verbal duel with the butcher,” Banka district spokesman Gupdeshwar Kumar told the paper.

In the ancient Greco-Roman world, people—at least urban people—often ate red meat only in the context of a religious ritual. James Davidson discussed this matter in Courtesans & Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens.

What is important is that the omission of fish [from the Iliad] helped to construct an opposition between the meat of pigs, sheep and cattle, all of which had to be sacrificed before it could be eaten, and fish, which was quite free of such structures, an item for private, secular consumption, as and when desired. In an important sense, fish-consumption was simply not taken as seriously as other kinds of carnivorousness.

Wikipedia’s entry on hecatomb (sacrifice of one hundred animals) quotes the Homeric passage about what sounds like one big cookout.

Get Right with Tlaloc

On a recent trip to look at some Anasazi / Ancestral Puebloan ruins in northeast Arizona, I took Craig Childs’ book House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest as my guide book.

Driving and backpacking from southwest Colorado down into Sonora, Mexico, over a period of years, Childs interviews archaeologists, walks trails, and examines ruins to try to begin to construct a narrative history of what might have happened in the Southwest between the 11th and 15th centuries CE.

A god’s presence lurks throughout the book but is not revealed until the latter parts. That god is Tlaloc (his Aztec name, but he is cross-cultural), the god of rain,  whose cult he calls “the oldest recognizable religious complex in the Americas.” (But might not some hunters’ gods be older?)

In essence Tlaloc is a rain god and has long been the focus of mountaintop and cave offerings and sacrifices …. Both the symbolic and the practical aspects of Tlaloc religion are very similar to those of the Pueblo katsina religion still practiced in the Southwest (459).

This “pan-American rain god” is still acknowledged in the United States. Climbing a mountain in one of the isolated “sky island” ranges of southeastern Arizona, Childs notes, “Caves throughout the Sky Islands are stashed with wooden katsinas and painted offerings. Hanks of human hair are hung in natural subterranean passages, and precious stones are positioned around springs” (364-5).

His is a religion “centered on the mechanics of water,” the spiritual expression of the hydrological cycle.

Here where we track thunderstorm cells on the NOAA radar via the Web, wishing them to veer north or south and pass over our house, where we monitor the creek levels day by day, water is serious business. (In my newspaper days, I referred to the Southeastern Colorado Water Conservancy District as “the secret government.”  Who needs the Freemasons, Communists, or Opus Dei?  None of them control the water.)

Tlaloc needs a local shrine, and I know just the place, about thirty minutes’ hike from the back door. It will do for a start.

Pagans Protest at the Daily Mail (UK)

As many readers may know—especially those who wander over here from The Wild Hunt—the Druid Network in the UK recently received official recognition as a charity, something similar to getting federal 501(c)3 tax status in the United States.

The process they went through was described in greater detail by Alison Shaffer, a guest poster at The Wild Hunt.

Francesca, an American living in London, puts a different face on Paganism at the Daily Mail protest. Photo: Mani Navasothy

The news prompted a snarky column by one Melanie Phillips at the Daily Mail, Britain’s second-largest newspaper, titled, “Druids as an official religion?”

Will someone please tell me this is all a joke. Until now, Druids have been regarded indulgently as a curious remnant of Britain’s ancient past, a bunch of eccentrics who annually dress up in strange robes at Stonehenge to celebrate the summer solstice.

Of course there was an online petition, which has been or will soon be delivered to the Daily Mail. But last week a few Pagans carried to the protest directly to the newspaper’s offices.

More links here about the petition and what happened.

“The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock”

A new biography of Ida C. Craddock, late 19th-century practitioner of esoteric religion and “sexologist,” discussed at the Religion in American History blog.

Veronica Lake for Halloween

The Australian blog Sexy Witch has featured some promotional materials from the 1942  movie I Married a Witch lately.

It starred Veronica Lake, who filled the “perky petite blonde” slot in several “screwball comedies” of the 1940s, together with banker-turned-actor Fredric March as the descendant of her 17th-century persecutor.  Internet Movie Database has more about it.

I saw it years ago, was thinking along the lines of “Let’s rent it for Halloween,” and discovered that Netflix does not have it.

Apparently I rented it in the 1990s from another mail-order video-rental company that no longer exists, but which had a large library of off-beat, foreign, vintage, and “art” movies.

So we will watch Sullivan’s Travels instead.

UPDATE: “Why You Should Watch Classic Films.”

Prayer-candle Experiments?

At Egregores, an overview of the prayer-candle industry: “First of all, the mass produced, low-cost nature of the Prayer Candle makes it an inviting template for experimentation. To the right kind of mind, every Prayer Candle has “your crazy idea HERE” emblazoned across it.”

Today Show Goes Silly on Halloween

It’s more than silly to Lenore Skenazy, who calls it the “outrage of the week.”

She is the feisty author and blogger at Free-Range Kids. Anyone who has any contact with kids under 12 ought to be reading her.

Imagine if the Today Show guidelines had been in place when Charles Schulz wrote, “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” The Peanuts gang would be inside at a “safe” party organized by grown-ups, with various adults warning them about eating too much candy, wearing loose costumes (these can make you trip!) and wearing tight costumes (these can cut off your air supply before you know it and God knows how many kids have died of tight-costumitis!), and everything else, including running, skipping, laughing (you could choke!) and wearing costumes that scare the other kids. Because nothing even the teensiest bit frightening should ever happen to kids at all. Even on Halloween.

I don’t even have kids of my own, but I read her regularly. And I was able to share this with her last month and get a Tweet in return.

Survey on Pagan Elders

Here’s another survey, part of research being done by Aline O’Brien, president of the Cherry Hill Seminary board of directors, “exploring the concept of eldership in contemporary Paganism.”

Two Surveys on Pagans and Politics

A Pagan professor friend, Michael Strmiska, is researching political attitudes among American Pagans and Heathens.

He has created two brief surveys on Survey Monkey and invites to you take one of them from the appropriate category:

If you follow an Asatru or related path, take this survey.

If you follow a different Pagan path, such as Wicca or Druidism, take this survey.

The results should end up in a paper eventually, and I will report them when I can.