Pagan Thoughts at the Parade of Lights

Last fall I looked for Pagan virtues in a small-town “Pioneer Day” parade.

Similar thoughts ran through my mind last night watching an even smaller town’s “Parade of Lights.”

The procession was about one block long: two pieces of fire apparatus, the local mountain search-and-rescue group (yellow jackets, hard hats, head lamps), another flatbed truck or two, various kids and dogs.

On the sidewalk, Father Christmas greeted spectators and drinkers.

Even though the American Thanksgiving holiday was established during the Great Depression to signal the start of the holiday shopping season, many towns now re-celebrate that spending spree with a “Parade of Lights,” a secular solsticial event.

Most seem to be sponsored by downtown merchants’ associations. (You can’t have a traditional parade at a shopping mall.) Stores stay open late hoping to sell things to the spectators.

Some years ago, a Pagan group had a float in Colorado Springs’ Parade of Lights, a first in that city, often jokingly called “Fort God” for its combination of military bases and big-name Protestant “ministries,” like Focus on the Family.

Maybe the frankly secular and capitalist nature of the event was a plus. Pay your entry fee, get a place in the parade.

Other parades, such as those on St. Patrick’s Day or Columbus Day, have their definite sense of “ownership.” Sponsoring organizations are pickier about who they permit to march.

I wrote “frankly secular,” but we Pagans see a brave display of light against the incoming darkness–not to mention the cold wind sweeping down from the mountains ahead of today’s snowstorm.

We are used to the dichotomy of light and dark, of order and chaos, Apollo and Dionysus–or their equivalents. Perhaps commerce and gift-giving are another pair.

These pairs will contend with each other forever.

Father Christmas Works the Bar Crowd


Father Christmas makes his way through the bar after a small-town Parade of Lights (of which more later). No, that was Santa on the fire engine. Different demigod.

Pagan Social Media and the Parliament of the World’s Religions

Jason Pitzl-Waters posts a round-up of blogs, video, and other social media from the Parliament of the World’s Religions.

I clicked the links, and so far what I have seen is pretty bland. Talking-heads video is bland even when they are our talking heads. But maybe we will see some more engaged and personal writing as the event progresses and as people reflect on it.

Although it’s not my scene, I applaud those Pagans who want to do this kind of work. I could see myself note-taking at some of the sessions, for my own writing purposes.

And wow, what what a great place to play Flowing Robes Bingo. I wonder if anyone brought the bingo cards.

This Blog Post is Inappropriate

Edward Skidelsky nails it: the smarmy bureaucratic coercion of the word “inappropriate”.

From Arts & Letters Daily, in the blogroll.

Pagan Studies Call for Papers, AAR 2010

This post is for anyone who has not already seen the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group’s call for papers for next year’s AAR meeting in Atlanta posted on some e-list or other.

For details on paper submission, see the AAR’s page for that meeting. Note that some information will not be posted until later in December.

The Contemporary Pagan Studies Group invites papers that address one of the following topics:

1.  For session with Men’s Studies in Religion Group, Pagan Masculinities: Male Identity, Gender Injustice and Power Relations. Who are the Pagan men, how is their understanding of masculinity constituted, and how are they affected by the   emphasis on the feminine in Pagan spirituality?

2. Paganism, Ethnicity and Ultra-Nationalism. The Right has increased representation in the European Parliament and some of those elected are Pagans with concerns about boundaries, immigration and ethnicities. We welcome papers that investigate this growing phenomenon and the contentious issues that arise from it.

3. Idolatry and Tangible Sacrality: The Conversation Continues. This panel generated such excellent discussion at the 2009 meeting that we felt it important to explore it further.

4. For session with the New Religious Movements Group,  papers on African-inspired religious traditions, such as Santeria, Vodun, Yoruba, and Candomble,
especially as those in the southeastern United States.

Blog It and They Will Come. But Why?

Real search-engine queries that brought Web visitors to this blog:

Is Depeche Mode synonymous with homosexuality? [I don’t know; I missed the 80s.]

Booty shaking videos of Muslim women

Arvol Looking Horse fraud youtube [he is an American Indian activist on the “cultural appropriation” issue]

make shinto priest hat

food placed in creek for religion
[I have made food offerings at a crossroads, but in the creek??]

intercessory prayer for halloween sacrifice

sex colors for witches

Of course, now the Googlebot will index all those terms here . . .

It’s Thanksgiving-Put Your Mask On

I have a long-standing interest in masks and masked ritual, going back to when I helped Evan John Jones with Sacred Mask Sacred Dance.

So consider than on the East Coast a century ago, Thanksgiving (or at least the last Thursday in November), rather than Halloween, was the time for masking and trick-or-treating.

Thanksgiving itself was a sort of irregular, off-and-on holiday until it was deliberately fixed to mark the start of the Christmas shopping season during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.

Blogging Hermits

What is it with blogging hermits—or quasi-hermits?

Would Henry David Thoreau have had a blog? I am sure of it. Anyone who would edit his autobiography so that two years of experience fit neatly into one literary year has demonstrated the capability of self-romanticizing that blogging requires.

Sunday’s Denver Post had a long piece about a man named Daniel Suelo who lives in a cave outside Moab, Utah, never handles money, dumpster-dives, etc.—and blogs about his life, courtesy of the long-suffering local librarians. (Somebody tell him that white-on-black fonts offer poor readability.)

I can see Diogenes the Cynic updating his blog at the public library too: “inabarrel.blogspot.com.”

And there are others.

Lately I have been reading As The Crow Flies, who offers this thought:

If you want to be alone, it’s important to know, you can never get far enough away;  humans and their noise producing machines are everywhere.   One thought that helps me, is to think of myself as an alien dropped off on a planet of apes.   Then I can just sit back and enjoy the show—like going to the zoo.

But the post that sold me on her blog is this one.

I cannot get it out of my mind. Maybe it’s because M. and I often go several days without talking to anyone else in person (not counting email). Without her (and the dogs), I would soon be wondering the same thing.

Cross-posted to Southern Rockies Nature Blog.

J.K. Rowlings’ Effect on Our Language

Recently M. and I started to experiment with geocaching. Since our rural home is adjacent to national forest land and located just off a designated Scenic Byway, it is a fertile spot—there must be a dozen or more caches within five miles.

But what I noticed when reading geocaching sites and forums is that a particular term is used for people who are out and about but who themselves are not geocachers. It is important that the caches themselves be concealed from these people.

The term used for such people, of course, begins with “m.”

Pagans among Suspects in Priest’s Murder

(Welcome, vistors from The Wild Hunt. Stick around, click a few links.)

A Russian Orthodox priest is murdered in his Moscow church, and suspicion falls both on Muslims and on Russian Pagans.

But note the titles of his books.

We know too much about people who shout “Allah Akbar” and then pull the trigger, but why the Pagans? Why bring them into the discussion?

Paganism in Russia is somewhat like what my Anglosphere readers are used to, but there are significant differences. Russian Pagans are more likely to have their own line of “blood and soil” rhetoric and to claim that they represent the true spirituality of their people, which puts them in direct conflict with the Orthodox Church, which itself has made that same claim since the 10th century.

The Russian anthropologist Victor Shnirelman is one scholar who has written a lot of on the topic. Being Jewish (as I understand), he is particularly sensitive to whiffs of antisemitism, as in this article, “Russian Neopagan Myths and Antisemitism.”

The Pomegranate has published several articles on Russian and other Eastern European Paganisms. Abstracts are available online.

Kaarina Aitamurto, “Russian Paganism and the Issue of Nationalism: A Case Study of the Circle of Pagan Tradition,” 8:2 (2006) 184-210.

Adrian Ivakhiv, “Nature and Ethnicity in East European Paganism: An Environmental Ethic of the Religious Right?” 17:2 (2005) 194-225.

Victor Shnirelman, “Ancestral Wisdom and Ethnic Nationalism: A View from Eastern Europe,” 9:1 (2007) 41-61.