The Chateau de Guedelon, currently under construction
The BBC describes an ongoing project in France to build a 13th-century castle using local materials and the tools and techniques of that era.
I am always fascinated by what people learn by building old things in old ways, be they ships (like Tim Severin’s “Brendan boat”) or buildings or whatever.
In the early 17th century, a condemned witch goes to the gallows, saying under her breath an incantation of the Old Religion.
Only the incantation invokes the Virgin Mary, Ave, Regina Caelorum, and the old religion is Roman Catholicism, made virtually synonymous with treason during the reigns of Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and James I of England.
Considerations of treason would go over the heads of the Pendle witches, however, a group of mostly poor rural women in northern England caught up in an atmosphere of religious turmoil and fear of invasion from Catholic Spain.
Based on court trial records, Mary Sharratt’s Daughters of the Witching Hill tells a generational family story of “cunning women,” folk healers in a popular Catholic tradition (like Mexican curanderas) whose conduct becomes criminalized after the “stripping of the altars” and the destruction of popular Catholicism in the mid-1500s.
In a way that reminds me a bit of some of Mary Stewart’s work, Sharratt follows three generations of women struggling with poverty and seeking the doubled-edged respect and fear of being capable of healing—and thus also of cursing.
To be honest [says Bess Southerns, the grandmother] I didn’t give a toss about the Pope in Rome or any plots in faraway lands, but I yearned for the sense of sanctity and protection that hung over us then [before the Protestant Reformation], the talk of miracles and wonders, a prayer and a saint to ward us from every ill and the solace of the Blessed Mother. Now we’d been left to stand stark and unshielded, to bear whatever cruel lot Providence cast our way.
When Bess, also known as Mother Demdike, risks teaching the making of clay images to a friend’s daughter, Annie, the girl responds, “Are you saying that anyone who moulds clay might work witchcraft, Mother Demdike? Then there’d scarely be a landlord left alive.”
Whatever we might say about the talk of familiar spirits appearing as dogs and boys that the accused witches revealed at their trial, Sharratt treats these as real elements of the plot, giving the story a Gothic edge that moves it beyond the Christian world and suggests why today’s English Witches might still look back four hundred years and wonder just what was happening in Lancashire.
This publisher’s video “trailer” lets you see the novel’s physical setting.
Via Bayou Renaissance Man (a former Catholic priest): an entire cosmology invented and/or syncretized and/or revealed by homeless kids in Miami.
The homeless children’s chief ally is a beautiful angel they have nicknamed the Blue Lady. She has pale blue skin and lives in the ocean, but she is hobbled by a spell. “The demons made it so she only has power if you know her secret name,” says Andre, whose mother has been through three rehabilitation programs for crack addiction. “If you and your friends on a corner on a street when a car comes shooting bullets and only one child yells out her true name, all will be safe. Even if bullets tearing your skin, the Blue Lady makes them fall on the ground. She can talk to us, even without her name. She says: ‘Hold on.'”
….
Folktales are usually an inheritance from family or homeland. But what if you are a child enduring a continual, grueling, dangerous journey? No adult can steel such a child against the outcast’s fate: the endless slurs and snubs, the threats, the fear. What these determined children do is snatch dark and bright fragments of Halloween fables, TV news, and candy-colored Bible-story leaflets from street-corner preachers, and like birds building a nest from scraps, weave their own myths. The “secret stories” are carefully guarded knowledge, never shared with older siblings or parents for fear of being ridiculed — or spanked for blasphemy. But their accounts of an exiled God who cannot or will not respond to human pleas as his angels wage war with Hell is, to shelter children, a plausible explanation for having no safe home, and one that engages them in an epic clash.
The reporter sees these “myths” as a response to the kids’ social distress. But do they also reveal an underlying predilection for a sort of cobbled-together Gnosticism?
Via The Wild Hunt, a story of another Anglican priest with an attraction to Druidism.
I’m actually a priest of the Church of England – but with a difference. Though I’m still in “holy orders”, I now work full time as a magician, writer and retreat leader. I’ve been described as a “priest at the edge”. My latest book, The Path of the Blue Raven, describes my own encounters with the Pagan traditions of this land and what great treasures I’ve learned from them.
He probably will not end up losing his day job, unlike his American counterpart William Melnyk.
I don’t think anyone in the Church of England cares that much. The hierarchy is probably just happy to see signs of life. Or even compulsory parish archery practice.
Some people just cannot handle the solstice. (The Telegraph, UK)
It wasn’t this bad. On Sunday M. and I went up to Salida, Colorado, to catch the last day of FIBArk, the whitewater boating festival, watching competitors come down the frothing Arkansas River as we drove upstream.
Our main interest was in the Crazy River Dogs event, which we have managed to attend for three of the last four years.
In this photo, the brown dog will be pursuing the aspen pole at upper left as it bobs through a rapid in the downtown Salida kayakers’ water park.
A "river dog" leaps into the Arkansas River after a flying aspen stick.
FIBArk, like the solsticial doings at Stonehenge—I found the first picture in this slide show—marks our beginning of high summer.
To me the quarter days of solstices and equinoxes are “outer” festivals. They should be celebrated with public festivities, whether those festivities are capital-P Pagan or not. Food booths in the park, paddle-flailing kayakers, swimming dogs, the Sun beating down—it’s all good.
The cross-quarter days are for magic.
If I were still teaching magazine writing, I would be sending students to this blog (which I found on Rod Dreher’s blog).
What a great feature-writing idea, albeit in blog form. (Which all goes to show how publishing is changing, &c. &c., and I am glad not to have to be the one to explain it all.)
In essence, high-school senior Jamie Kelles is attempting to live her life according to the dictates of Seventeen magazine—and blogging about it at The Seventeen Magazine Project.
At one point she realizes that a majority of the mag’s “hot guys of summer” are “associated with a vampire franchise.”
Must be super weird for devoted Seventeen readers when they finally follows all the tips, achieve the perfect tan and “healthy” sun-kissed glow, and then realizes that the ultimate Hot Guy of Summer is just a sexed-up, long-haired version a of pale, nocturnal Xbox gamer .
And then there is more about the senior prom, &c. &c.
If you want more on the literary history of vampires, Michael Sims assesses it in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
So, wondering how I would find a new angle on vampire stories, I said yes. Anthologizing is a dusty sport, half antique hunting and half literary gossipfest, and I love it. I went home and prowled my shelves and realized how many of the Victorian-era stories I had already read. Why, here’s that pasty-faced bastard Lord Ruthven, by Byron’s doctor and hanger-on, John Polidori, and so obviously based upon Byron himself. Here is Théophile Gautier’s crazy priest, in love with a vampire courtesan and wrestling with his naughty soul. And there were many stories I hadn’t read before—gay vampires, child vampires, even an invisible vampire.
I’ve been out in the woods the last few days, so meanwhile, here’s something on the worrisome increase in teen shamanism.
Some researchers think that playing video games may help dreamers to have and control lucid dreams more ably.
The first study suggested that people who frequently played video games were more likely to report lucid dreams, observer dreams where they viewed themselves from outside their bodies, and dream control that allowed people to actively influence or change their dream worlds – qualities suggestive of watching or controlling the action of a video-game character.
. . . .
Virtual reality simulators have already been used to help PTSD patients gradually adjust to the threatening situations that plague their waking and sleeping thoughts. If [Jayne] Gackenbach’s hunch is correct, perhaps video games could also help relieve the need for nightmares.
As I recall, Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist credited with inventing the term “virtual reality,” once said that he had hoped that VR technology would be used to give people practice in navigating after-death states of consciousness, what the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls the bardo states.
But that was not what the market wanted, apparently.
Toward the end of her interview today on National Public Radio’s Fresh Air, Samantha Bee of The Daily Show describes being raised by a Wiccan mother whose ceremonies were “terrifying,” even though the presence of the religion was “unobtrusive.”
Well, no one expects comediennes to be logical.
What is funny is hearing interviewer Terry Gross fumble around with the W-word.
You are not going to get a discussion of children and the Craft on that show because Gross is so uncomfortable with the topic–in fact, she would see it as “off-topic.” (It’s her program, after all.)
If you listen, it’s toward the end of the segment, after Bee describes her pubescent crush on Jesus, courtesy of her Catholic school.
Over at my other blog, I have been posting examples of wildlife photos taken with game cameras (a/k/a scout cameras or camera traps).
Seeking to learn more about how their passive infrared (PIR) detectors work, I was browsing the Web and ended up with South Jersey Ghost Research.
Apparently, PIR motion sensors can be used for ghost-hunting. Here is a tutorial, using the term loosely.
For instance, their diagram makes no sense. An animal as small as a mouse can trip a camera. I have seen it happen. Squirrels definitely will do so. And as for cats, what is in the lower right corner of the PIR-activated camera photo on this page at the Ghosthunter Store site?
Nevertheless, the Ghosthunter Store site confidently proclaims, “When a PIR Motion Sensor detects movement in an area where there isn’t anything visible moving, you have a major unexplainable paranormal event.”
(Unless something did move but was not captured due to digital shutter lag, which happens all the time, particularly in less-fancy cameras.)
Except … I thought that ghosts traditionally were associated with unexplained cold spots in buildings. When did they start emitting infrared radiation?
Clearly, I am not up-to-date on twenty-first century ghost-hunting.