What I Do Instead of Blogging

Lammas, according to my authoritative source, fell on Saturday by the solar calendar, so M. and I were only a day early when we celebrated our own wild harvest.

Lammas (or whatever you want to call it) does not seem like a highly ritualistic holiday—certainly not one on which you would like to be indoors.

I have been glued to my desktop computer the past couple of days, pushing along with a book-layout project. After three to four hours of Adobe InDesign, however, I feel halfway brain-dead.

I am re-copy-editing the book at the same time, which adds to the workload. Then I give the chapters to M. for additional proof-reading.

In the old days of hot lead and movable type, compositors were notorious boozers. I can see why.

I was going to link to a blog post about reading one scholarly article per day to keep your mind sharp, but I can’t find it where I thought it was. Did its creator delete it? Have I forgotten where I read it (Google is not helping)? Or did I hallucinate it?

Robots, Foreward!

Robots are set to explore the Great Pyramid. Just think, ever since the Napoleon’s scientists put ancient Egypt back on the map of the public imagination during his 1798–1801 campaign, we remain fascinated by this structure.

No one knows what the shafts are for. In 1992, a camera sent up the shaft leading from the south wall of the Queen’s Chamber discovered it was blocked after 60 metres by a limestone door with two copper handles. In 2002, a further expedition drilled through this door and revealed, 20 centimetres behind it, a second door.

“The second door is unlike the first. It looks as if it is screening or covering something,” said Dr Zahi Hawass, the head of the Supreme Council who is in charge of the expedition. The north shaft bends by 45 degrees after 18 metres but, after 60 metres, is also blocked by a limestone door.

Now technicians at Leeds University are putting the finishing touches to a robot which, they hope, will follow the shaft to its end. Known as the Djedi project, after the magician whom Khufu consulted when planning the pyramid, the robot will be able to drill through the second set of doors to see what lies beyond.

“Agora”: Pagans vs. Christians or Atheists vs. Religious?

Living in the cinematic boonies as I do, I will probably not see Agora until it comes out on DVD.

Here is a long dissection of it, from period-incorrect Roman armor to its avoidance of exactly what Hypatia taught:

But because the film never bothers to make her neo-Platonist asceticism clear – exactly what her philosophical views might be is never explored except in the vaguest terms – this incident doesn’t really make much cultural sense – she comes as a modern career academic “married to her job” rather than a disciple of the school of Plotinus.

Writer Tim O’Neill also notes that the conflict in the movie is not Pagans versus Christians so much as it is non-theistic philosophy (rational) versus religious people (fanatical).

Nevertheless, it is tempting to read Hypatia’s story as (not hostile to science) Pagans versus (book-burning) Christians. I nudged it that way a little bit myself in the entry I wrote on Hypatia years ago in the Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics. I had a little fun with the telling.

But is that how the conflict should be framed?

Holy Blueberry

Blueberry Festival is coming, and the Anglicans are ready.

The blueberry of our Lord Jesus Christ keep you in everlasting life.

It’s another stab at nature religion of a sort. At least they are acknowledging something outside The Book.

(Photo from Wilmington, Vermont. The painted fiberglass bear is one of those community art projects—something else all together.)

Pagans Advise Advice Columnists

Not one but two Pagans write to the syndicated advice column Annie’s Mailbox to explain that they are not offended when someone offers a Christian blessing at a meal. (Scroll down to the second “Dear Annie.”)

If you really are a polytheist, then Jesus is a god too. Maybe he did not start out as one, but after 2,000 years of being treated as one, he ought to qualify.

Take it away, polytheologians!

Related: “When You Enter a Village, Swear by its Gods.”

You May Think that You Have a ‘Self’

But maybe you are just the talking part of a large collection of bacteria.

We continue to be colonized every day of our lives. “Surrounding us and infusing us is this cloud of microbes,” said Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University. We end up with different species, but those species generally carry out the same essential chemistry that we need to survive. One of those tasks is breaking down complex plant molecules. “We have a pathetic number of enzymes encoded in the human genome, whereas microbes have a large arsenal,” said Dr. Gordon.

Don’t miss the part about the fecal transplants. All these health nuts giving themselves high colonics may be going at it backwards, so to speak.

Should You ‘Out’ Yourself as Pagan?

Subaru plastered with Pagan bumper stickers

I wonder what religion this Subaru's owner follows. (Colorado Springs, June 2010)

Over at Pagan + Politics the call is for everyone to “out” themselves for the good of the movement or something:

I did notice that those who are in the “come out, come out, where ever you are” camp are becoming more vocal about the need for the majority of us to be more public and open about our faiths. Not that they wish for us to go around saying “Goddess Bless” to everyone while wearing huge Pagan bling, but they do want us to be more unapologetic and matter of fact about our faith. To live our lives in the sunshine, not just by the light of the moon.

What surprises me is the assumption that it’s an all-or-nothing proposition.

In some cases, such as university teaching in some departments, being a faithful follower of any religion brands you as a “anti-intellectual” and a “fanatic,” with a possible exemption for easy-going Reform Jews.

As for family, I have long been “out” to some, while to  others I might prefer to say that I just was not the church-going type and preferred to go fishing on Sundays.

And what’s wrong  with the light of the moon, anyway?

Youthful black-and-white thinking. Bah, humbug.

Medieval Castle, Medieval Methods

13th-century-style castle under construction in France

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.

The ‘Old Religion’ of Pendle Hill

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.

Street Kids and the Killer Angels

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?