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?
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
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?
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.
Dean Dad at the Confessions of a Community College Dean blog gives an insider’s look at American academic titles above “professor.”
His blog is worthwhile for anyone trying to climb the academic ladder—or keep from getting knocked off.
A biologist and consultant to national parks is telling wolf-cultists in Canada not to howl at their four-legged gurus.
Alberta carnivore expert Cam McTavish says it is animal harassment.
“When we have commercial groups or individuals or even researchers that are randomly calling wolf howls, I feel it is unwarranted,” he says.
“In my opinion, it is a disturbing event in that wolves do react to these calls. If in their territory they hear another wolf howl, they have to respond to that wolf.”
At Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, mass human-wolf howling events have been held with official blessing for many years, the article reports.
A University of Alberta professor suggested that listening to wolves howl builds support for saving endangered species.
It’s an interesting question. Yes, you can harass wild animals and interfere with their feeding, breeding, and so on, even in the name of “nonconsumptive wildlife recreation.”
The issue has arisen before with birders using recorded calls to entice rare birds, thus disrupting whatever the birds were doing otherwise.
Yet when M. and I were censusing owls for the Bureau of Land Management in the early 1990s, we both learned to make passable Mexican spotted owl calls. Getting an owl to call back was the only way to locate them.
Wolves are a special case. To some people they are “power animals” who somehow bless people. Other times, they kill people, not to mention sheep, calves, dogs, etc. They are not our friends; they are wolves. And they have wolf value systems and priorities.
That said, I would want more evidence before banning howling at the wolves.
(Via Cat Urbigkit’s “Wolf Watch.”)
Although some British Pagans have demanded NAGPRA-style reburial for Neolithic (and thus “Pagan” in some sense) human remains found at the famous ceremonial site of Avebury, English Heritage have decided against doing so.
These Neolithic human remains were excavated in the Avebury area by Alexander Keiller between 1929 and 1935. In 2006, Paul Davies of the Council of British Druid Orders requested their reburial. English Heritage and the National Trust followed the recently-published DCMS process in considering this request, and went out to public consultation in 2009 on a draft report which set out the evidence and different options.
English Heritage and the National Trust have now published a report on the results of this consultation, and a second report on the results of a public opinion survey. Our summary report concludes that the request should be refused for four main reasons:
- the benefit to future understanding likely to result from not reburying the remains far outweighs the harm likely to result from not reburying them;
- it does not meet the criteria set out by the DCMS for considering such requests;
- not reburying the remains is the more reversible option;
- the public generally support the retention of prehistoric human remains in museums, and their inclusion in museum displays to increase understanding.
I expect that the Pagans for Archaeology group will be pleased.
Pagan journalist Margot Adler offers an NPR piece on “do-good vampires” along with a book list.
She tells me that she has now read eighty-nine contemporary vampire books, as of this week. I am waiting for the definitive review essay.
US Navy airship Macon over San Francisco, c. 1933
When I was about eleven, I went through a period of fascination with dirigibles (rigid airships). What technology could be more emblematic of futures that never were?
The photo above comes from a site devoted to photos of the US Navy’s Macon, which was based at Moffett Field on the San Francisco Peninsula in the early 1930s.
It is rare to see pictures of the interior: the bridge, the sick bay, the sailors’ bunks. (The Macon crashed off Big Sur in 1935.)
It’s still possible to tour the California coast by airship. I should do that some time.
(Via Roberta X.)
Writer Dale Pendell muses about the idea of a corporation as a magical creation.
Pendell is the author of the three best-ever books on psychoactive and entheogenic plants: Pharmako/Gnostis, Pharmako/Dynamis, and Pharmako/Poeia. New editions are forthcoming from North Atlantic Books.