Try the giant human centipede. As the man said,
Do you wish to separate the jolly good fellows from the dour sour pusses from those who seek to ASCEND TO THEIR SIDE DEGREES — but you suffer from lack of imagination when it comes to constructing elaborate hazing rituals and DEVICES?
For those times when a dark room lit by candles is not enough.
According to the cosmic clock, I must have experienced the fall equinox about the time that I checked into the Trade Winds Motel in Valentine, Nebraska, last Wednesday evening.
The next day I would be driving through miles of the Sandhills, the climax prairie ecosystem, homeward bound from the annual North Dakota sharptail grouse hunt.
From a ritual perspective, I am never quite sure what to do about the equinox. Years ago, a member of our coven suggested that the quarter days (equinoxes, solstices) were “outer” while the cross-quarter days were “inner.”
In other words, you do magic at Samhain and party at Yule. (Of course, Samhain, which falls this year the evening of November 6 in North America, has its “outer” companion, Hallowe’en.)
So, “outer.” It could be a harvest celebration. We are cleaning out the garden ahead of the first frost. Wednesday is the last pickup at our community-supported agriculture farm. We had a brief but intense mushroom harvest in August—now the greenhouse is full of drying tomatoes.
A friend posted on Facebook that the equinox made him ready to go elk hunting. I get it. But it is on Samhain that I have more than once stood shivering and watching at the edge of an aspen grove as the sun sinks away.
Home thirty-six hours after the equinox, I took the dogs for their morning walk. A Townsend’s solitaire was calling in the woods, its winter call, just one note whistled slowly again and again.
When I heard that winter call, I felt as though the gears of the cosmos had just gone “clunk.” Something had changed. And maybe that is the equinox’s outer manifestation.
The best part about watching movies in the little mountain town is that after driving the four-block length of Main Street, we enter the darkness, winding through hills and a long canyon, then a mile of gravel road, and then home.
It lets the movie’s spell slowly fade, which is helpful after watching Inception.
(The second-best thing is that the little theatre’s sound-system does not rattle your fillings, unlike a typical Tinseltown movie box.)
In the game of describing movies in terms of other movies, I thought of a hyperdimensional Flatliners with the Gnostic overtones of The Matrix and a faint, faint whiff of Lost Horizon.
Anne Hill, who has better access than I to first-run movies, blogged about Inception last month.
Today [unlike the ancients], we say that we “had” a dream, and believe that dreams come from within us, like a cough, a bad mood, or a stirring in our souls. We worry that dreams reveal something disturbed in our psychological makeup, or we try to explain them away by saying they are just random brain activity. “Inception’s” success as a thriller stems in part from turning the tables on our “scientific” understanding of dreams, and bringing back the more archaic fear of dream-meddling from without.
She links to Robert Waggoner, who writes on lucid dreaming—read his post, “Ten Things I Like about Inception.”
If you step outside of Plato’s physical cave and stumble into Plato’s lucid dream cave, who’s to know?
I still think that not enough teaching about the Craft talks about dreaming and its power. Even though Inception is mostly about corporate espionage, exploding cars, shoot-outs, and derring-do, I admire a movie that takes the dreaming world(s) seriously as realms that interact with this one.
Do you know if you are dreaming right now?
Yet another study attacks the theory of “repressed memory,” which has sent real people to real jails for crimes that they supposedly committed against children.
Professor Grant Devilly, from Griffith University’s [Queensland, Australia] Psychological Health research unit, says the memory usually works in the opposite way, with traumatised people reliving experiences they would rather forget.
“It’s the opposite. They wish they couldn’t think about it,” he said.
In a briefing to the US Supreme Court, Professor Richard McNally from Harvard University described the theory of repressed memory as “the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry”.
Where do “repressed memories” come from? Therapists help patients to invent them, as described in this 1993 article from American Psychologist.
Here is another article by Prof. Devilly on the “memory wars.”
During the “Satanic abuse” scare of the 1980s, some prominent Pagans were fooled by supposed abuse survivors who came to Pagan gatherings and would spout some nonsense about how “I was abused by ‘witches,’ but now I see that your kind of Witchcraft is not like that.”
The template for many such fantasies was Lawrence Pazder’s Michelle Remembers, about a little girl in Victoria, B.C., who supposedly spent her childhood as the plaything of a ring of organized and powerful Satanists.
And I will admit that I was blown away by the story when I first read it, such that I did not notice the obvious plot holes.
I say “plot” because it is a work of fiction, dreamed up cooperatively by patient and doctor (who later married) under hypnosis.
These “moral panics” seem to come through on a regular basis, and all you can do is seek the facts and hope that justice does, in fact, move slowly and deliberately and not at lynch-mob speed.
Malcolm Brenner, author of Wet Goddess, his unique memoir of working with dolphins, has a new website, with an excerpt from the book, photos, purchase links, and related merchandise.
Malcolm shopped Wet Goddess around to publishers for years before self-publishing it. (After all, one of my favorite novels, The Sea Priestess, went the same route—too weird, too controversial.)
In earlier days, Malcolm Brenner produced some now-archival Wiccan material, such as a video interview with Fred Lamond, and he also produced some amazing (and low budget) illustrations for my 1995 edited collection from Llewellyn: Witchcraft and Shamanism.
… at the warrior virgins* of the Carpathian Mountains.
Some photos appeared on the EnglishRussia blog last summer. More recently, Peculiar linked to a more complete article about this Asgarda group.
A little Pagan resonance in that name, wouldn’t you say?
While [French photographer Guillaume] Herbaut is uncertain if the photos are a good representation of the tribe, he adds “They were very happy when they saw the pictures. They want to show their strength”. When asked of his impressions of the Asgarda prior to and after photographing them, he remarked, “My first impression was ‘Asgarda is the root of a new sect’. My second impression was ‘Asgarda is the root of a new sect’!” New sect or the rebirth of a previous one, the Asgarda are reclaiming their lost independence, and, if Herbaut’s photographs are any indication, they aren’t afraid to fight for it.
I do not know, of course, if the group still exists, but would welcome up-to-date information.
Related: An article on contemporary Ukrainian Paganism from The Pomegranate (abstract free).
* In sense 1 of parthenos.
My old friend Jay Kenny, founder and editor of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Esoteric Traditions, is now blogging at The Daily Grail.
His first post: “Do we want real history or lucid dreams?”
It was written in June, however, so I hope he does more.
• Check out Patheos’ story package on The Future of Paganism. Solitaries? Personal paganism? What’s next?
• Musings on that “Nazi” label and whether the climate of the Pacific Northwest encourages “black metal” bands, at Bioregional Animism.
• He comes to the festival as a lapsed Lutheran. He leaves as a Pagan—an interview from the Pagan Newswire Collective’s Minnesota bureau. (I’m waiting for the Prairie Home Companion parody of their piece.)
• Did a witch’s spell burn down the pub?
It is to laugh. A blogger who reads Chinese and Japanese tells tattooed victims people what those Asian characters really say—if, indeed, they say anything.
Such as green vegetable. Or not chi (qi) but rice. Or not “beautiful” but “disaster.”
This must be the revenge of the Orient for our laughing at all those nonsensical Japanese “Engrish” T-shirts.
But you can take off a T-shirt.
The artist also forgot to add blogging.