Lots of talk about Vodou lately here among the polytheists (and among those who “view with alarm“).
Christopher Chase, the Pomegranate’s reviews editor, offers this link to a sort of portal site on Vodou. Reviews editors are like that.
Magical Dolls and Missionary Board Games
From Publishers Weekly, a short review of a new book co-authored by Nikki Bado-Fralick, my co-editor in the Pagan Studies book series (This book is not a part of that series, however!)
Toying with God: The World of Religious Games and Dolls
by Nikki Bado-Fralick and Rebecca Sachs Norris, Baylor Univ.
For Bado-Fralick and Sachs Norris (religious studies professors at Iowa State University and Merrimack College, respectively), religious games and dolls are charged with “the magic of childhood combined with the mystery of religion.”
The authors brilliantly use their subject to reveal a complex interplay between worship and the workings of popular culture. A detour into ancient divination practices using dice, magical dolls, and sports as ritual shows these items to be anything but superficial, and raises a central question: why do religious playthings often evoke feelings of unease?
Like the religious toys it analyses, this book is at once fun and serious business. Dolls like Buddy Christ and Nunzilla or unwinnable Buddhist board games may produce a few perplexed laughs, but a game like Missionary Conquest, won by setting up the most global missions, has an undeniably colonialist edge.
The authors also use toys and dolls to explore consumerism, feminism, politics, and the nature of ritual and play. In this readable and fresh look at religious culture, the authors are critical and respectful. They’d rather cast dice than throw stones.
Don’t Visualize, Organize!
That is the takeaway message from Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America
Like much of Ehrenreich’s writing, it is fueled by righteous anger.
First, as a breast cancer patient, she is disgusted by the happy-face positive thinking of what she calls “pink ribbon culture”:
The cheerfulness of breast cancer culture goes beyond mere absence of anger to what looks, all too often, like a positive embrace of the disease (27).
From there it’s often into the “motivational” business culture that routes laid-off employees into seminars where they learn to be “a brand called you.”
And there is “prosperity theology” in the churches, a/k/a “God wants you to be rich,” and “positive psychology” for the non-churchgoing.
Not to mention the “prices will always go up” thinking that contributed to the recent real-estate bubble!
And in Ehrenreich’s view, it’s 99 percent bullshit, a new synthetic Big Pharma opiate of the masses that prevents people from clearly seeing their economic and political quandaries.
She does give some space to a fairly mainstream history of creative visualization (or whatever you want to call it) via New Thought, Christian Science, and so on.
Reading Bright-sided as an adherent of a magical religion, I obviously have some disagreements with Ehrenreich’s wholesale condemnation. These things work, sometimes with unexpected results–hence the old admonition to be careful what you ask for.
So where do we draw the line between possible and not possible? I do think that “visualize world peace” is a fruitless task, although one may act in a peaceful manner. And whatever you seek under the idea that “thoughts are things” has to be backed up and affirmed by tangible actions.
What a Difference the Suffix ‘-ess’ Makes
Following a link from another religion blog, I dropped into today on Beauty Tips for Ministers (subtitled “Because you’re in the public eye, and God knows you need to look good.”)
I read this:
SO many of you have written to let me know that TLC will be airing an episode of “What Not To Wear” this Friday during which they make over a young, beautiful Episcopal priest.
And I was thinking, “Well, this is going in a homoerotic direction” when the truth hit me.
But I suppose if you want to be chased out of an Episcopal church by a bishop swinging his crozier, start talking about the “young, beautiful priestess.”
What difference that “-ess” makes. You know why, don’t you?
Sex.
It does not matter if you are speaking of the Vestal Virgins of ancient Rome or someone more contemporary. To the monotheistic mind, the word “priestess” seems to conjure up “fertility rites,” flowing hair, and orgiastic drumming. Ishtar! Jezebel!
Traditional Episcopalians and other Christians opposed to the ordination of women have used “priestess” as a slur before–and maybe they still do.
No, having women in sacramental, priestly roles is pretty scary, and so the only thing to do is to pretend that they are men under those robes.
Never before has a chasuble looked so much like a burqa.
(And one Episcopal priestess-in-training fears that vestments designed for men make her butt look too big–but that is a separate issue.)
The issue is that religion can be very sexy. Religio-magical power can be felt as erotic power, which why clergy often get into scandalous situations.
Female beauty plus sacramental (i.e., magical) power? There is nothing in the Book of Common Prayer about handling that!
So must they just pretend it’s not there?
And what do we Pagans do?
The World of Esotericism
The University of Amsterdam has one of just a few graduate programs in the study of Western Esotericism, which is often contrasted with Christianity as follows (from a lecture handout based on work of Antoine Faivre).
Christianity
Esotericism
Personal deity
Impersonal deity
Creation of the world by fiat
Emanation of world in stages
Material and evil are real
Material and evil ultimately unreal
Humans as creatures
Humans as divine sparks
Incarnation
Entrapped souls
Sin
Ignorance, forgetfulness
Salvation
Enlightenment
church
school
devotion
spiritual disciplines/exercises
Afterlife in heaven or hell
Afterlife in new learning situation
(Note, I do not consider Paganism and esotericism to be identical, although many esoteric elements show up in contemporary Paganisms.)
All of this is a lead up to a fascinating web page put by the esotericism program at the University of Amsterdam, showing relationships between esoteric thought, music, art, and philosophy.
Are Epiphany Dreams Found only in the Past?
The Bryn Mawr Classical Review’s book-review feed recently served up a review of William V. Harris’s Dreams and Experience in Classical Antiquity
The reviewer writes,
Some combination of [cultural expectations, generic demands, and the imperatives of performance and publication.], Harris argues … accounts for the relative frequency in antiquity of the epiphany dream, in which an authoritative figure visits the dreamer and makes a significant statement, and for its rarity in the post-Enlightenment West.
He goes on to argue that if readers say that they too have epiphany dreams, it don’t prove nuthin’:
No doubt some reader of this review is now saying, “But I had an epiphany dream just the other night!” That is the problem with studying dreams: one must work hard to free oneself from dependence on anecdote and from the powerful attraction that dreams have for those who dream them. Appealing to concepts of “selfhood” or “personality” will only reinforce these tendencies by compelling the question, “What does this dream tell us about you?” Harris chooses instead to concentrate on ancient descriptions of dreams and reports of actions based on them. This is a book about dreaming, not about dreams; that is, about behavior and experience in antiquity, not about the ancient self.
If I tell it, it’s only an “anecdote,” but if someone back then wrote it, it’s a “description” and thus useful? But if you act upon the advice of the dream, does that count?
“Epiphany dreams” are not common, but when you have one, you know it.
My example (oops, an ancedote!) was a dream that — at a time when I was not consciously thinking about it — told me to quit my job and go to graduate school in religious studies.
When I awoke with the dream-voice echoing in my ears, I knew that “some god or daemon” had spoken. I immediately started researching university programs, thinking without irony that now I knew what was meant in those biblical accounts of “the Lord spake unto Abraham” or whomever.
Someone or something sure enough spake unto me, and I knew I had to follow the instructions. Or else.
Anyone else had a real epiphany dream? Show of hands? Yes, I thought so.
As to the academic study, there is, I have learned, an almost-complete disconnect between the academic study of ancient Paganism and the study of contemporary polytheism, Paganism, etc.
The former people are mostly in Classics and history, they have an academic heritage a couple of centuries old, and they publish in their own journals, attend their own conferences, and so on.
The latter field only began to take shape in the 1990s.
Some study of ancient Pagan religion does sneak into the Society of Biblical Literature, and when the SBL goes back to having its annual meeting together with the American Academy of Religion’s meeting in 2011, maybe, just maybe, there might some crossover.
Celebrating the Season, However You Do It
Anne Hill has her annual Brigid Poetry Festival going—check the comments for linkage.
Me, I just had to get Out. Cabin fever was setting in, and walking the dogs close to home or going up on the ridge to cut firewood just was not curing it.
So we strapped the touring skis to the Jeep, loaded the dogs, and drove up to a higher, snowier place to ski a few miles, get sunburnt, and have one minor dog incident when they discovered a partly eaten snowshoe hare (maybe a bobcat’s leavings).
Naturally they ate it. They need to demonstrate now and then that they understand that dog food does not always come in cans and sacks.
We stopped at Amicas in Salida for pizza. I found myself watching a grey-haired couple waiting to order. He looked to be in his eighties, yet he was wearing up-to-date “powder overalls” (like this).
I wondered if he just wore them for practical reasons, or was he someone who tore up the slopes at A-Basin or Winter Park in his younger years? Or even one of the fast-dwindling group of old men who wear sun-faded 10th Mountain Division patches sewn to the sleeves of high-tech ski jackets?
The earth keeps spinning.
After a couple of pints of Headwaters IPA (me) and some cabernet sauvignon (her) and sufficient pizza, we feed some crust to the dogs back in the Jeep, as a promise of the dinner (from a sack) waiting for them at home.
We started down the canyon of the Arkansas River, and M. remarked that it was not yet dark at 5:30 p.m.
The earth keeps spinning, whirling us on to the next thing.
How to Report the News
You know it’s true. (YouTube video.)
Via, most recently, Snowflakes in Hell.)
Only in New Orleans
Would you see this actual television commercial in a race for parish coroner?
(Via Talking Points Memo.)
For Any Roman Reconstructionists Reading This
Make sure that you get the night-time garments (or lack of) right.