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.
Need to Put a Little Zip into Your Initiations?
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.
Equinoctal Musings
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.
A Movie That Takes Dreaming Seriously
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?
Say It Again: ‘Repressed Memories’ Do Not Exist
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.
Wet Goddess
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.
Artemis is Smiling…
… 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.