A New Muslim Witchhunt

Following Saudi Arabia’s recent threat to execute Lebanese radio personality Ali Sabat for “sorcery,” the progressive government of Bahrain now plans to make sorcery and witchcraft criminal offenses, evidently part of a new Arab Muslim attack on the psychic arts.

People found guilty of sorcery and witchcraft would face unspecified jail terms and undetermined fines or both, the paper reports.

The article is illustrated with a stock photo of Australian Witch and writer Caroline Tully, oddly enough.

Viewing with alarm, a Saudi professor of Islamic studies claims that Arabs spend $5 billion annually on magic and sorcery, so the Islamic witch-hunters have their work cut out for them.

Meanwhile, in Iran, they want to arrest women for having sun tans, which “defy Islamic values.”

The Horse Boy: See it for the Shamanism

When a psychology professor and a human-rights activist/journalist have an autistic son, their lives become incredibly difficult. Among other things, little Rowan never learns bowel control, and like many autistic children, he is prone to screaming, inconsolable tantrums.

But his parents live in rural Texas, and they discover when Rupert is 2 years old that horseback riding calms him. Some San Bushman healers also seem to help him.

So they make a trip to a land of horses and resurgent shamanism: Mongolia. That is the premise of The Horse Boy, a documentary film now out on DVD, as well as the book of the same title.

See it for the shamanism, at least, even if you know no autistic children.

(Actually, I have horse and donkey-owning friends whose autistic son also improves when riding, but they have not taken him to Mongolian shamans. Perhaps they wonder if they should.)

Mongolian shamanism was officially suppressed when the country was Communist. Even as Rowan’s parents seek the shamans’ help, I could not help but wonder if their coming halfway around the world was also validating the shamans, from the latter’s point of view.

No camera can capture the essence of shamanism, but it is still good to see how the externals are managed. And the final two-day ride to the reindeer people’s shaman is just gorgeous  footage.

One shaman lays part of the problem on a relative of Rowan’s mother, a relative whom she admits was mentally ill. That is a hard description of reality for the psychology professor to hear, you might suspect. Our society does not normally blame any problems on dead ancestors. (I want to come back to this topic in a future post.)

Yet Rowan’s degree of improvement at the end is undeniable.

The Oddest Kind of Comment Spam …

. . . is one that WordPress has been stopping. It consists of comments that merely duplicate earlier comments on a blog post.

These pseudo-commenters generally use free accounts—Hotmail, Gmail, etc.—no surprise there.

Often there is a URL linked to the commenter’s name, but instead of directing you to a site trying to sell something, it just goes to a blog with no entries.

So what is the point?

Roman Britain on the Big Screen

During a recent conversation over margaritas in the old provincial capital, Peculiar mentioned two new forthcoming movies set in Roman Britain.

There is an added resonance to Americans flocking to films set during the rise and fall of ancient empires as they contemplate their own long-dominant place in the world amid economic upheavals at home and protracted wars abroad.

And I told him about how Troy (2004) subtly supported the archaeological theory of diffusionism.

The movies in question are Centurion and The Eagle of the Ninth.

Both should be regarded as “inspired by” rather than as any attempt at accurate history, I reckon. The so-called”disappearance” of the Ninth Legion is something that historians still squabble about—and bloggers too.

Archaeologists have shown that they were happily in garrison in York in AD 108, which is rather a long time after their supposed demise in Caledonia.

(And it’s amazing how many people think “centurion” means “Roman soldier” rather than what we would call a company commander.)

Clash of the Titans has not fared well on blogs that I read, so I am skipping it.

The Roman province of Britain lasted longer than the United States of America has thus far (just for comparison), so there are plenty of movie-making opportunities left.

No, It Wasn’t the Provocative Women

It was Icelandic Pagans who caused the volcano to erupt, say Russian Orthodox clerics, countering the Shiite Islamic cleric who blamed women for inciting the lust of hapless men and thus, somehow, earthquakes.

They noted that Iceland “has recently become a center of European neo-paganism of Aryan occult kind, which has Nazi character” as Iceland has headquartered the Association of European Ethnic Religions that has recently worked out a draft of merger between the World Pagan Assembly and International Pagan Alliance.

UPDATE: Monday the 26th is the Boobquake protest.

On the Road . . .

On the road in Taos, New Mexico . . . so blogging will be light.

How They Built Stonehenge?

Maybe the work crews were smaller than we think.

I found that I, working alone, could easily move a 2400 lb. block 300 ft. per hour with little effort, and a 10,000 lb. block at 70 ft. per hour. I also stood two 8 ft., 2400 lb. blocks on end and placed another 2400 lb. block on top. This took about two hours per block. I found that one man, working by himself, without the use of wheels, rollers, pulleys, or any type of hoisting equipment could perform the task.

What, no levitation?

Did the Earth Move for You?

Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi of Iran explains that women cause Middle Eastern earthquakes.

“Many women who dress inappropriately … cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity and incite extramarital sex in society, which increases earthquakes,” Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi told worshippers at overnight prayers in Tehran.

It’s the way that they walk, you see. So we must hide them in order to have a proper Islamic society.

Did Poseidon the earth-shaker ever lust after mortal women? I could imagine a great music video here for someone along the line of Haifa Wehbe or Madonna.

May

Survey on Pagan Coming-of-Age Rituals

Sociologist Gina Oboler has done good research in the Pagan community before—I used some of her work on Pagans and environmentalism in Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America.

Now she is looking at coming-of-age rituals, and if you can offer some experience-based responses, please fill out her questionnaire, below, and send her your responses via email.

Hi, everyone!

I’m working on a research project in which I’m interviewing people in the Pagan community about coming-of-age rituals for adolescents, trying to learn if there is any consensus about the importance of such rituals, who does them, what forms they take, what they are meant to accomplish, etc. I’d like to get beyond my own personal network and the connecting networks, so I would be very grateful if folks could circulate my questions and my e-mail address, and encourage people with some knowledge of the topic to respond to me in writing.

Gina

roboler [at] ursinus [dot] edu

QUESTIONS ON COMING-OF-AGE RITUALS, PAGAN COMMUNITY

1. What experience of coming-of-age rituals have you had?

2. Do you think it is important to have puberty rituals? Why or why not?

3. At what age should such a ritual take place? Is a single ritual event sufficient, if done well, or should there be a sequence of education and ritual occasions?

4. What do you think they accomplish for the young person(s) involved?

5. Describe rituals you yourself have conducted/designed/helped design/attended. (Or rituals you have heard about from others.)

6. What do you consider key elements that need to be included in the rituals?

7. Following is a list of goals that various commentators have suggested coming-of-age rituals aim to accomplish. Please comment on some or all, including how important you think each is, and why. Which are the most important goals?
a. Formalizing an individual’s changed status in a community.
b. Testing/proving the individual worthy of the new status.
c. Subjecting the individual to rigors that encourage him/her to value the status.
d. Psychologically transforming the individual.
e. Clarifying the individual’s life-goals.
f. Encouraging the individual to accept greater responsibility (along with privilege).
g. Strengthening the individual’s commitment to a particular group or tradition.
h. Creating group solidarity among those who go through the ritual together.
i. Others?

8. How do these elements relate specifically to a Wiccan/Pagan belief system – or could they be similar in any tradition?

9. Are different kinds of rites important for boys and girls? If so, different in what ways? Why?

10. What marked your own personal transition from childhood to adolescence or adulthood? Do you think you would have benefitted from a formal ritual? How, and what would you have liked it to be like?

11. Are there other important issues surrounding this topic that you think should be discussed that we haven’t touched on yet?

Pagan Counseling Student Seeks Survey Input

A Pagan working on her MA in counseling is seeking other Pagans to take a survey on “needs assessment.”

Please read the explanation page, which links to the survey itself. The survey has three options. You may take it as a practitioner, as clergy (however defined), and as a mental health professional, if you are on of those.