• The new Pagan Edge offers “lifestyles and passions of the modern Pagan.” The special subscription price is good until January 10th.
• Penton has been published in South Africa for a while. They are up to issue 45 and have a nice, straightforward navigation system.
• Sannion links to a possibly forthcoming online magazine about ancient Egypt.
• Through January 19th, Patheos’ “Public Square” is devoted to “Religion and the Body.”
The ancestors would have made something of this story, something involving daimones and dryads.
Today got off on a weird note: I got up, fed the dogs, and walked the dogs, only to come home from the dog walk (M. still asleep) and find the electricity off.
I called our electric co-op, and was promised that the linemen would be informed.
After M. awoke, I wheeled out the generator, which is pretty noisy, and restored power. Having a well with an electric pressure pump means that a lack of electricity cuts into morning washing and cooking.
An hour later, a lineman from the San Isabel Electric Association was knocking at the door. His one-word diagnosis: “Squirrel.”
This afternoon one of the dogs found and brought me the unfortunate electrocuted squirrel. All winter it had been eating out of our bird feeders, and this was how it repaid us (he thought anthropocentrically).
Eventually I was able to get to work on this new journal layout job, which is progressing by fits and starts—I have a whole string of “What do you want me to do about X, Y, and Z?” questions for the publisher.
For break time, I sometimes wonder around the Web–and sometimes haul firewood.
Today I learned to my surprise that BeliefNet has snark, in the form of the blog Stuff Christian Culture Likes (obviously a take-off on SWPL).
Funny enough, but will the day come when Pagan clergy–thinking of here of all those people who can’t wait to be salaried Pagan clergy–worry about “being relevant” in their clothes and marketing?
What is it with secret societies and magical orders in the movies these days? The Da Vinci Code. National Treasure: Book of Secrets. . . I could go on.
Now M. and I are back from watching the new Sherlock Holmes, which felt like “screenplay by Dan Brown and Dion Fortune, from the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.”
The villain, Lord Blackwood, is a cross between Aleister Crowley and Benito Mussolini.
Historians of costume, if you are out there: do not Irene Adler’s dresses with the elaborate bustles seem about 15-20 years out of date for the time of the movie? (I date it to the late 1880s, since Tower Bridge is under construction, assuming that is the bridge in the movie.
Good movie though, with lots of little bits of cinematic homage to “the canon,” such as the pocket watch with pawnbrokers’ marks or the steam launch on the Thames.
The idea that Christmas celebrations are largely lifted from earlier Paganisms is pretty well embedded in the culture, even among people who don’t have a dog in that fight.
So let Biblical Archaeology Review stir things up a little with the idea that the Dec. 25 (or Jan. 6 for the Orthodox) date was not necessarily chosen to ride piggyback on Sol Invictus or Mithras but is based on Jewish tradition instead, one carried on by early Christians:
Around 200 C.E. Tertullian of Carthage reported the calculation that the 14th of Nisan (the day of the crucifixion according to the Gospel of John) in the year Jesus died was equivalent to March 25 in the Roman (solar) calendar. March 25 is, of course, nine months before December 25; it was later recognized as the Feast of the Annunciation—the commemoration of Jesus’ conception. Thus, Jesus was believed to have been conceived and crucified on the same day of the year. Exactly nine months later, Jesus was born, on December 25.
Read the whole thing.
Finally, Hank Stuever is the author of Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present. You can read an excerpt here in the Washington Post “Style” section.
I know that I am in the same country as those “gated-community supermoms who [have] volleyball schedules, tutor times and carpool arrangements abuzz in the BlackBerry that is [their] brain,” because I have sat in the Dallas-Fort Worth airport and watched them clatter by.
This fact struck me though: Amid all the crafts-making and bazaar-holding and home-decorating, they don’t know how to sew?
“It’s the sparkle, spirit, and style of American Girls, yesterday and today!” intones a recorded narration as the lights go down. A Junior League member and a teenage beauty pageant winner emcee. While each young model, carrying a doll, takes her little turn on the catwalk, we learn her American Girl back story. Here’s Josefina, who lived on a ranch in northern New Mexico in the 1820s. She had to sew her own clothes.
“Who here knows how to sew their own clothes?” the emcee asks. “Raise your hands.”
In a room of several hundred families, nobody raises a hand.
“Moms? Anyone here ever sew? Anyone have a sewing machine?”
No hands.
“Well then, you can just imagine how hard life was.”
Weird, eh? Even I have an old sewing machine for repair jobs. It makes life easier, just as my chainsaw and power screwdriver do.
UPDATE: If you have read this far and are not still muttering about Druids, take Stuever’s Christmas-shopping survey.
A recent “cattle mutilation” report had the gang at Querencia turning to me, because evidently I am their go-to guy on weirdness.
After a couple of weeks had passed, I cranked out a four-part blog post series at my other blog:
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
But I left something out: what I called my “Berlitz full-immersion summer course in occult weirdness.”
I did write about that aspect of the experience for Fate magazine back in 1988. But I seem to have outsmarted myself and “filed” that issue in some very special place. It is not in the Box of Magazines in Which I Published Articles.
Naturally it is not available online, being from 1988. Too bad, because I had thought of scanning the pages and putting them on the web site.
Perhaps I could find a copy somewhere if there was sufficient demand.
A blog of a nearby nature center just reported on how they drummed down (!) the Sun this year.
Nothing Pagan there, no, sir. (No snickering, please.) Their timing was a little strange, but their hearts were in the right place.
Here is last year’s Denver-area drumming (YouTube video.)
As mentioned, the dogs and I did our own.
Return of the Sun, miraculous menorahs (officially over, yes), Baby Jesus—it’s all good.
Did you make your reservation at Kentucky Fried Chicken yet?
And Io, Saturnalia!
I was walking around today in Manitou Springs, once a spa-resort town, located in the foothills west of Colorado Springs.
You should know that there are no springs in Colorado Springs–real-estate developers lied in the 1870s too. The springs are in Manitou.
But Colorado Springs has several important military installations: Fort Carson, NORAD, and so on.
Manitou is in a tight valley, and Ruxton Avenue, one of the main streets, goes up a side canyon, where the sun rarely clears the snow and ice, so you step carefully past the little storefronts where various hopeful artsy types open galleries and craft shops and then are gone six months later.
I looked down at one of the Victorian houses across the creek, and a memory of the Cold War years came back.
It was winter then too. M. and I, not long married, lived elsewhere in Manitou.
One night in the early 1980s, I was visiting friends who rented that particular house then, and I came out around 10 p.m to see a narrow view of the sky to the north.
The sky was glowing blood red.
Faster than you can read these words, I thought, “That’s it. Soviet missiles have hit Denver. We’re next. We’ll all be dead before I can get home to say goodbye to her.”
Then my rational mind belatedly suggested, “Maybe it’s the Northern Lights.”
At 38 degrees-something north, we do not see the aurora borealis often—in fact, almost never.
Had it not been for the planetarium shows I had watched as a kid at the natural history museum in Denver, I might not have known what I was seeing.
I went home then to find M. also a little shaken by the sight. After we reassured ourselves that we were still alive, we watched the aurora until it faded. It was front-page news in the next day’s local papers.
It all came back to me as I walked back down to the main thoroughfare to look for her Christmas present. We’re still alive.
Highbrow journalist Ross Douthat is bothered by creeping pantheism.
In a recent New York Times piece, he calls pantheism “Hollywood’s religion of choice.”
The “news hook” for his column is the new movie Avatar, which repeats the Pocahantas story once again. Some critic called it “Dancing with Smurfs.”
To Douthat, “Avatar is Cameron’s long apologia for pantheism — a faith that equates God with Nature and calls humanity into religious communion with the natural world.”
And that bothers him. He likes the certainty of the monotheistic religions (he is Roman Catholic), even when you sense that he does not subscribe to all of even the Catholic church’s dogma:
[P]antheism opens a path to numinous experience for people uncomfortable with the literal-mindedness of the monotheistic religions — with their miracle-working deities and holy books, their virgin births and resurrected bodies. As the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted, attributing divinity to the natural world helps “bring God closer to human experience,” while “depriving him of recognizable personal traits.” For anyone who pines for transcendence but recoils at the idea of a demanding Almighty who interferes in human affairs, this is an ideal combination.
I do not mean to dismiss his anguish:
The question is whether Nature actually deserves a religious response. Traditional theism has to wrestle with the problem of evil: if God is good, why does he allow suffering and death? But Nature is suffering and death. Its harmonies require violence. Its “circle of life” is really a cycle of mortality.
I am not sure that all Pagans have reconciled themselves to that truth either.
Do you ever sing,
We all come from the Goddess,
and to her we shall return,
like a drop of rain
flowing to the ocean
and wonder if there is too much loss of individuality there? I think that that is something like what Douthat is trying to articulate.
UPDATE: Another blogger watches Avatar and says that minus the sci-fi elements, it is a movie that Wendel Berry or even J.R.R. Tolkien might have approved of, for it presents a fully integrated culture in contrast to “our world of Facebook friends and warehouse shopping clubs.”