The upcoming sessions of the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting are mentioned in the New York Times.
Some of us have been joking about “the I-word” (idolatry). I wondered if that would catch some journalist’s interest.
Writing at First Things, an “interreligious” journal (“inter” as in Catholics and Protestants, maybe), Sally Thomas faces that annual hurdle of the Christian parent: What To Do About Halloween.
How can it be fun and still be doctrinally acceptable? She writes,
Halloween’s emphasis on darkness makes many Christians squeamish, but, to my mind, what my friend observed about the medieval feel of Halloween is more on the money.
I don’t especially encourage my children to dress as scary things for Halloween. We are taught, rightly, to avoid flirting with the occult, and the darkest character any child of mine has ever wanted to be is Darth Vader.
Don’t you love that “flirting”? It’s right up there with “dabbling,” as in “dabbling with witchcraft.”
Ducks dabble. Witches … do other things. But, who knows, maybe “the occult” will kick things up a notch and kiss them back, slip them a little tongue. That Darth Vader costume might be the first step into experiential religion. You never know.
On All Saints’ Day, our parish holds a children’s festival, hugely attended, at which children and adults alike dress as their favorite saints. This year mine will be St. Ursula, St. Walburga, St. Gerard Majella, and St. George. I probably will reprise my last year’s appearance as St. Helena, although the True Cross did keep whacking people every time I turned around.
Watch out for the boy who wants to be St. Sebastian: he’s probably gay.
Via Rod Dreher at BeliefNet, where the commenters actually display a wide variety of opinions about the celebration.
There is always the issue of sex with demons to consider as well.
When pre-writing the blog post on dining above the dead (something best done while walking the dogs), I was thinking about how it was perfect for Fate magazine.
Digression 1: Dog-walking is not all that meditative, because Something Always Happens, like this morning when they charged off through nine-inch-deep snow to try to catch some wild turkeys.
Digression 2: If the reporter were on the ball, she would re-write her story for Fate or another magazine. Get paid twice for the same work—that is the secret of freelancing.
So it occurred to me, crossing the gully between the county road and my house on Tuesday night pre-bed dog walk, that I had not seen a copy of Fate since last spring. Had it been sucked into the magazine death pool?
I checked the Web site, however, and it promised a new issue soon.
Editor-in-chief Phyllis Galde tells me, “The July/Aug is at the printer, and we will turn around immediately and get the Sept./Oct. one printed.”
She promises an “awesome” new Web site but complained that the Web designer and the printing plant crew were all sick with the flu.
So Fate is reanimated, I hope. I miss it. Where else can you get a good ghost story?
The graphic has nothing to do with the magazine. Just some Halloween cheer. You can get it on a T-shirt.
I opened the Cañon City Daily Record on Monday and learned that M. and I have been dining above the dead.
One of our two favorite cafes in the nearby town of Florence, Colo., is the Aspen Leaf Bakery, which, it turns out, is the second-most haunted locale in that county. (The first is the Prison Museum, a former women’s prison, in Cañon City. Funny about that.)
According to the article, local ghost-hunters say the basement of the Aspen Leaf’s building seems to be a “meeting space” for spirits. “No one’s died there,” said one ghost-hunter. “So they’re just hanging around.”
The Daily Record offers no link (typical!) but at the Cañon Ghost Trackers web site, you can follow their investigations and listen to their audio evidence.
NOTE: If all the audio recordings start playing at once (depending on your browser settings), that does indeed sound spooky.
My own experience has been more one of meta-ghost-hunting
I noticed a couple of instances in the past month where Colorado Pagans seem to be getting fairer coverage in the news. One was the item about the Pagan Student Alliance at the University of Colorado-Boulder.
(But as a former university professor, I have seen clubs come and go. Only clubs with strong support from a department or a particular professor last more than a year or two, typically.)
A Denver Post story today describes the work of a hospice chaplain and contains this paragraph:
Her patients come from all spiritual traditions and have included a Buddhist priest, a Druid high priest and a Sufi spiritual leader. But end-of-life spiritual care, she emphasizes, isn’t necessarily about religion.
So the Druid is one of the exotic Others, but at least the Post did not put “high priest” in quotation marks.
And Tina Dowd sounds like a true priestess herself.
UPDATE: Here is one description of running a university Pagan students’ club.
And apparently it is causing the Dallas Cowboys to lose football games.
How come ace Dallas religion blogger Rod Dreher has not been all over this one?
I have heard of most of these Halloween folk customs.
The one with the slug is new to me, though, but maybe someone in the Pacific Northwest could try it and report.
Meanwhile, Red Witch in Melbourne is in the midst of a Halloween countdown, examining the commercial side of the holiday in Australia. (Some images may be NSFW.)
A 2003 panel from Partially Clips—A Webcomic for Grownups. Click to embiggen if necessary.
A series of portraits by British Columbia artist Linda Macfarlane, some of individuals in the Western occult tradition (e.g. Maud Gonne), others of representative types. (The Wikipedia entry, however, skips over Gonne’s involvement with ceremonial magic.)
UPDATE: As discussed in the comments, Geocities is gone, and so is this site.