Tag Archives: writing

The Difference between Santa Fe and Taos

Looking back to the artists and writers of 1930s-40s Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico writer Paul Horgan observed,

Between Santa Fe and Taos there was a sense of rival constituencies, and sensitive persons tended to be loyal to the powers, virtues, and dangers of one place or the other. Santa Fe was more worldly, more sophisticated. Taos believed itself to be animated by an energy that was actually occult.

Blame D.H. Lawrence and Mabel Dodge Luhan for creating much of the “Taos energies” narrative.

Having lived briefly in Taos and having visited both places off and on since my teens, I think that Horgan’s distinction still applies.

Put me in the Taos group: Santa Fe’s Spanish-imperialist past still lingers.

I stop for coffee in Taos, and the guy at the next table is talking about how parallel universes influence ours. In Santa Fe, it’s where they came from and what glamorous destination awaits them next.

In fact, I became a capital-P Pagan in Taos. Actually, it was in the nearby village of Talpa–but still Taos County. (I see I said that once already. Where are the adobes of yesterday?)

Horgan is quoted in Barbara Harrelson’s Walks In Literary Sante Fe: A Guide to Landmarks, Legends and Lore which is itself an extended bibliographic essay-with-maps about the former provincial and current state capital.

The next time I visit, I want to follow some of her walks.

Two Compliments in One Week

Two nice bits of feedback this week, which are rare enough in the academic-writing life.

First, someone emailed me about The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics, which was my first big project after grad school, back in the early 1990s.

I am a fan of medieval history and refer to it on a regular basis. As other books get read and put back upstairs, the Encyclopedia stays downstairs, because I continue not to be able to keep the early Christianities clear in my mind.

Wow. And guess what, I cannot always keep them clear either.

That book was not written for love but for money — a friend was acquisitions editor for the original publisher, ABC-Clio, and one day when I was in Denver, he took me to lunch and gave me the “What can you write for us?” speech.

I won’t say it is a great book or a classic or anything, but it did make money and it did get me over the hump to where I was writing for an audience, not writing for my professors.

Then on Wednesday I went to the nearest PetsMart store for dog food and sunflower seeds (wild bird food). The store manager came to help out by serving as a cashier since the check-out line was growing.

He majored in English and took my rhetoric class a few years ago. I was in his line in the store, and when I came to the counter, he started telling me how useful the class had been, how he still uses some of the concepts of classical rhetoric when he does training classes, and so on.

Be still, my heart. If you want to make your old professors happy, tell them that you use (or at least occasionally think about) what they taught.

For My UK Readers

(And others as well)

The Ladybird Book of The Policeman.

Call for Contributions: Women in Magic

This call for contributions to an edited collection comes from editor Brandy Williams’ blog.

Megalithica Books, an imprint of Immanion Press (Stafford, U.K./Portland, OR, U.S.A) is seeking submissions for an anthology on women working in the magical communities, particularly in communities where women have not been extensively published or in which women face stereotyping and misunderstanding within and without the community. These communities include (but are not limited to) groups and individuals working in the Golden Dawn, Thelemic, Aurum Solis, Alchemy, Chaos, and Experimental Fields.

Women have been involved in traditional and ritual magic since the late Victorian era. However women are often viewed as tangential to these communities or as soror mysticae, assistants to the magician. Today women are actively involved in ceremonial magical groups and lodges, alchemy, chaos magic, and Experimental Magic, overcoming stereotypes and creating new visions of magic within the communities.

Go here for the whole thing.

Gallimaufry with Ink

¶ Kitty Burns Florey advocates teaching handwriting in schools: “Educators I talked to claim that kids master reading more easily when they write a word as they learn it: the writing process keeps their attention focused as they match symbol to sound.”

¶ In my former home of Manitou Springs, Colo., a goddess figure is re-named.

¶ I knew about Graham Harvey’s book Animism: Respecting the Living World,but I did not realize that he had created an excellent Web site to go with it.

Gallimaufry with Stamps on It

¶ The US Postal Service threatens to cut Saturday delivery, blaming the economy. I have been doing my part for the USPS–I started selling stuff on eBay. eBay must be the best thing to happen to the Postal Service in the last decade–all those people sending packages.

¶ An elaborate Web site about ancient Egypt, although perhaps it was created just to sell Egyptian-themed jewelry.

Ten myths about copyright. Do you know what “fair use” really means?

¶ Also on a literary theme: Neil Gaiman’s thoughts on literary agents. My answer to the question, “How do you get an agent?” is “Try your friends’ agents first.” That may sound like a chicken-and-egg response, but in my experience, writers hang out with other writers. Or writing teachers.

Gallimaufry with Old Bones

¶ Some British Pagans want to rebury a 4,000-year-old skeleton. It seems to me that they are just parroting NAGRPA language without realizing that (to borrow from another blogger) that the Archbishop of Canterbury has as much “blood” claim to the bones as they do.

¶ George Plimpton was an American writer of what was once called “new journalism” and is now called creative nonfiction. But this article about him in The Nation also points out to what extent famous literary journals were subsidized by the CIA as part of the culture war with the Soviet Union. Who says our government does not support the arts?

¶ Anne Hill defines “California Cosmology” and its evil twin.

Apparently “analog” now means “natural.” I missed that.

So is the “planetary consciousness” of neotribal gatherings like Boom just window dressing for the same old hedonistic consumption and pursuit of distraction? Perhaps. But as a self-consciously visionary environment, Boom necessarily foreshadowed the apocalypse as much as the eco-dream.

¶ A wall painting at the Neolithic town of Catal Huyuk was often called the world’s oldest map. But what if it is not a map at all? Would that mean that map-making was not practiced by “peaceful ancient matriarchies” but was invented by them evil Kurgans?

Copyediting Religion

Orthographic payback is a bitch.

For years–starting when I wrote for Gnosis in the 1980s–I was one of those pushing for the capitalization of the words Witch and Pagan when used to describe first, the followers of the new, self-consciously created polytheistic mystery religion and, second, Pagan as a more general term for both old and new polytheism.

When I wrote The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics in the early 1990s, I won the capitalization battle over “Paganism,” but lost on changing BC/AD to BCE/CE.

It should be noted that some Pagan scholars prefer “pagan,” either because they are English or because they see “paganism” as a way of being religion in which people of all faiths participate. For instance, making a pilgrimage to a saint’s tomb is “pagan” in Michael York’s view.

But now I am editing and laying out an anthology intended as a college textbook on world religions. And almost everyone has their capitalization quirks.

The writer on Judaism wants write not merely “Israel” but its full diplomatic name: “State of Israel.” Oddly enough, she does not insist on “Federal Republic of Germany.”

The writer on Mormonism wants to capitalize priesthood, as in Aaronic Priesthood, while all the other contributors lowercase it, e.g., Zoroastrian priesthood.

The writer on Islam has a whole capitalization list for me too. The Baha’i wants Baha’i Faith capitalized–which is fine–but also “faith” when it stands alone. And of course the expert on Christianity wants Church to be “up,” even though that runs contrary to the stylebook, which specifies, for instance, “the early church.”

And so on.

Unfortunately the The Chicago Manual of Style does not pronounce on all these issues (except “church”), sending me to other sources, such as the The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion, in order to try to keep the book consistent.

Wouldn’t it be easier to handle these issues in German, with its capitalization of all nouns, or in Spanish, which is, as we editors say, very “down style“?

Another Reason that I am Glad I Stopped Teaching

Evanthia O. Rosati was in the English-teaching racket longer than I was, and she has heard it all.

Whenever I am at a party or first introduced to anyone, I pray no one will mention my line of work. The party could be at full swing, music loud and the bass shaking the walls. I might be enjoying myself. Then someone says I teach English. All speaking stops as partiers adjust their vocabulary to English teacher level. The gentleman with the chip dip hanging off his cheek is now saying, “From whence I came….” . . . . Playful people become anxious adults once they become aware of the dreaded English teacher in their midst. In desperation, I yell out, “I don’t have a shrine to Shakespeare in my backyard.” (It’s in the side yard; why give away all my secrets?) It’s no use. The area clears anyway.

So true. These days I say I am a freelance book editor, which is at least partly true, and most people have no preconception about what I do.

Review: Living with Honour: A Pagan Ethics

Emma Restall Orr is one of the leading figures of British Druidry, and her book Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics may be seen as an attempt for formalize the vaguely expressed ethical precepts (“If it harm none,” etc.) that characterize contemporary Paganism(s).

Orr herself admits that “Paganism can appear fragmented ” but that its diversity of belief and approach “is not always helpful those trying to grasp comprehension from the outside” (11). (I think she means, “Comprehend it from the outside.)

As have a number of other Pagan writers, she feels moved to act partly by social pressures. In order for Pagans and their concerns (e.g., “appropriate care of ancient monuments and artefacts”), “it is useful to be able to stand with one voice before the benches of a nation’s authority” (11).

She wants to locate her ethics in nature. This “nature” is primarily planetary as opposed to cosmic—and she makes an argument about hurricanes and tsunamis that I would agree with completely: “The *Pagan acceptance of nature’s destructive power is not about resignation, but reverence.” You can have a relationship with planetary nature, but it is not all about you.

Asterisk-Pagan is Orr’s special spelling for a Paganism with “a devotional reverence for nature” (35), and it is essentially countercultural and antinominan, mixed with a heavy dose of romantic tribalism.

But the more I read Living with Honour, the more I became aware of two huge omissions. One is Pagan philosophy. Orr knows that she does not want to return to a bloody, heroic duel-fighting “death before dishonor” type of tribal culture, as appealing as it looks from a distance of 2,500 years. So the book is not really rooted in the Northern European Iron Age cultures, despite a couple of nods in that direction.

Yet she almost completely ignores centuries of Pagan thought on ethics and philosophy from the Greco-Roman tradition!

The Stoics get a paragraph or two, and Epicurus one sentence that demonstrates the common modern misunderstanding of his teaching. The rest of the time, the reader is fed bits of the usual grumpy, depressed, and misogynistic 18th-20th-century gang: Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietszche. (I will make an exception for Emmanual Lévinas, whose work has informed some other contemporary Pagan thought as well.)

The ancient philosophers ranged from the hardest of “hard polytheists” to skeptical materialists like Epicurus to the “honor the gods and do your duty” attitude of the Roman Stoics. And they had a great deal to say about living ethically in friendship, in marriage, and in civic life–even when (as under the worst emperors) one was caught up in a corrupt governmental system.

Why leave them out in favor of Schopenhauer, Martin Buber, or A.J. Ayer?

By contrast, Orr’s book says much about cosmos and “the Other” in an abstract sense, but neglects the polis—the world of civic and social relationships. That is the second omission.

It may be that Orr finds participatory politics distasteful–“American democracy is acknowledged as a farce,” she proclaims (6)–and would rather limit her wants and watch badgers. (Doing so would be Epicurean in the truer sense.) She admits to a fondness for philosophical anarchism.

But by neglecting the “political” (in the broadest sense of life in community) part of life, she has nothing to say on issues of rights and responsibilities, on how to be an engaged and “political” citizen.

Indeed, she rejects “any idea of duty” (323). If I ever have to teach another 8 a.m. lecture class but would rather sleep, I will remember that I have no duty to the university or to my students. I can just send them a group email and tell them to read the book on their own.

When Pagans (and *Pagans) come before “the benches of nation’s authority,” we need to make a simple case. Although a tiny religious minority, we will pull our weight. We do not ask for to be excused for our specialness, with sharia courts and kicking everyone else out of the public swimming pool.

Unlike fundamentalists of various sorts, we do not fear academic learning–Pagans invented the academy. And democracy. And Western philosophy.

Many of us are willing to take up arms for our nation, and we support our warriors. In all social realms, we are here, and we participate.

Thus, while I find much to like in Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics–I do enjoy seeing intelligent writers wrestle with the issue of just what “nature religion” is–I cannot help but see it as crippled by its rejection of still-relevent Pagan ethical traditions.