From a report on the school-board meeting from our county’s weekly newspaper:
Sheri Shreve was upset that fourth graders were learning Greek mythology and seeing pictures she felt were inappropriate for children.
Yes, your fourth-grader might end up at a liberal arts college like Bryn Mawr and join the Pagan Club.
I am preparing myself for life without Fate magazine.
Since 1948, the digest-sized monthly—later a bi-monthly—has been a reliable (at least in the publishing sense) source for ghost stories, UFO reports, speculative archaeology, Fortean news, and other manifestations of the weird and unexpected.
All viewpoints were welcomed, so articles often completely contradicted each other.
Often the most interesting stories came as reports from the readers of paranormal experiences, encounters of the recently dead, and so forth. There was a certain sameness to these, but perhaps that meant they were true—or else it meant that everyone followed the same cultural template. Or both.
Llewellyn Publications bought Fate in 1988, perhaps hoping to make it what Gnostica, their earlier house organ, had been in the late 1970s—a mix of articles with ads for Llewellyn books.
Some of the long-time readers complained then that Fate was becoming too Wiccan. That is one thing you would learn from all those reader reports: quite a few Americans follow a home-grown metaphysical religion that happily calls itself Christian while including ghosts, UFOs, Bigfoot, and all the rest.
When Llewellyn pulled the plug, ownership passed to a former employee, Phyllis Galde, who kept Fate going, although eventually reducing publishing frequency to bi-monthly.
This spring, it occurred to me that the “bi-monthy” had turned into semi-annually. It seemed like a long time since an issue had arrived in my mail box.
More time went by, and then I got an email saying that the Sept.-Oct. 2009, Nov.-Dec. 2009, and Jan.-Feb. 2010 issues were available—as PDF files. Eventually they put something on the web site too.
So I had the choice of reading them on the screen or printing them at my own expense if I wanted to read them in bed before turning out the light in hopes of a dream of Bigfoot. 😉
The magazine death pool is so close you can smell the fetid waters.
Fate’s blog keeps putting up new entries, but discussion of the magazine’s own fate is oddly missing.
The economics must be rough. Perhaps this is a case of flat advertising revenues versus rising printing and mailing costs.
PDF files are not the answer, and a Web version of the magazine would have to be re-thought from the ground up.
Then there is the whole question of shorter attention spans and lower reading comprehension on the Web (which is why so many blog comments are so stupid, particularly on the political blogs—people just read one phrase and start ranting before digesting the whole little essay).
But if Fate goes under, popular metaphysical religion will have lost an enduring voice.
Canada geese and goslings on the Arkansas River
I have new blog posts in the works, but I had to take off Tuesday and go fishing in the Arkansas River above Cañon City, where these Canada geese were parading up and down the bank, the parents seeming to ponder whether the goslings could handle the current yet. (Of course they could—in the slacker water.)
Jason Pitzl-Waters recently mentioned a new moral panic in Ukraine that includes laws against psychics and divination.
Gambling and artistic depictions of nudity are also affected.
The Pagan connection to the latter? Igor Gaidai, a Ukrainian photographer whose compositions claim to invoke pre-Christian times, is the reporter’s example of who the crackdown is affecting, as noted last July.
In his photo studio and gallery in the center of the Ukrainian capital, he displays his various projects, including one called “Saman,” which hearkens back to a “pre-Christian era” when “witches” roamed the earth. In it, naked women are depicted in various poses with brooms, as if in mid-flight, and are meant to glorify “the power of feminine energy, beauty and wisdom.” His main display window also exhibits four young nude mothers, partially covered by their equally nude infants.
(Link may be NSFW, depending. Via Sexy Witch.)
Fred and Svetlana of Feraferia in the 1960s.
Svetlana Butryn, wife of Fred Adams, founder of the small but influential West Coast Pagan group Feraferia, passed away last Thursday, May 6, after a long period of ill health. She was 75.
Feraferia had a “only in Southern California” quality to it, arising partly from the neo-Romantic ethos of raw foods, sunshine, and nudism that took root there as long ago as the 1890s and early 1900s, the era of the “nature boys,” mixed with a looking back to classical Greek religion as a model for its path.
First there was Stuff [bourgeois bohemian] White People Like, which produced various imitations, such as Stuff Black People Like and Don’t Like.
And in the religion field, Stuff Christian Culture Likes, by a blogging PK—and now its imitator, Stuff Pagan Culture Likes.
And there is Stuff Jewish Young Adults Like.
Surely this trend is not exhausted? What do Parsis like? But it looks like only the first produced a book deal.
(Hat tip: Plutonica.)
It’s not that I have nothing to blog about, more that I have too much, and if I tried to write it all, nothing else will get done.
All that aside, I suggest you pop over to Egregores and read an interesting piece by a Christian urban West African (Ghananian) journalist who decides to investigate her own country’s traditional religion.
Her attitudes and observations are, to me, an interesting mix of the culturally familiar and the unfamiliar.
So when a new acquaintance invited me to the meeting of traditional believers this weekend, this is what went through my mind… I cannot say for sure that African traditional religion is evil. I cannot say for sure that it is good. I know that I have been preconditioned to consider it evil. I also know that I do not know. I would like to find out, but I’m scared of the whole affair. My fear is an irrational fear. It is a fear of the unknown. I wanted to confront that fear. Because every time I confront my fears, I grow. Plus I was curious.
So I went.
It’s part of a series of posts on African traditional religions in conflict with Christianity and Islam that you can find at the blog—scroll to the bottom of the post for more links.
. . . and load all the guns, because it’s Zombie Awareness Month.
Supporters of Zombie Awareness Month wear a gray ribbon to signify the undead shadows that lurk behind our modern light of day. From May 1 through May 31, concerned citizens take this small step to acknowledge the coming danger.
Over at The Juggler, Sara Adrian links to a video clip of a bunch of Scots demonstrating Clifton’s Third Law of Religion: It’s not a real religion unless it has torchlight processions.”
And remember, ritual precedes myth, not the other way around.
It began with the unprecedented Vermont floods of 1927 . . .and a visiting scholar’s investigation.
Check the blog and trailer of a noir-ish movie in progress based on H.P. Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness. Very well done!
Is Lovecraft the “shadow” of Zecharia Sitchin?
(Via Odious and Peculiar)