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.
This autumn is the 2,000th anniversary of the battle when German tribes decisively defeated 20,000 Roman soldiers in the Teutoburg Forest.
But the anniversary–particularly the memory of the leader of the German commander, Hermann (Arminius)–is a complicated thing in Germany.
The events surrounding Hermann, though, are a weird mix of the two, presenting a revised, sanitised, consumer-friendly warrior, a national hero recast as neither “national” nor a hero. “To me, he is just a garden gnome,” Schafmeister said during an interview in his office, his desk piled with Hermann chocolate bars and other paraphernalia. The exhibits and plays organised for the anniversary no longer depict Hermann as the founding father of the German peoples: instead he appears as a minor warlord who got lucky, an interesting figure with no relevance to the present.
“He is really history,” says Herfried Münkler, a historian at Berlin’s Humboldt University and the author of The Germans and their Myths. “He is no longer relevant to the question of German identity.”
“It’s a thin line to walk – a year of festivities for a man no one thinks is worth celebrating. “We don’t even call it an anniversary, because that implies a celebration,” said Schafmeister. “It is just a recognition of something that happened from 2,000 years ago.”
The religion journalists at Get Religion often talk about “ghosts” in news stories–a religious element or motivation that the journalist fails to see or explain. (The news media, in other words, do not “get” religion.)
Do you see a religion ghost or two here also?
A few years ago, I was talking with a German student of mine at the university and her boyfriend. The boyfriend had wanted to read a diary kept by some of my own German ancestors about their immigration from Lower Saxony to Missouri in 1843.
I mentioned how Germans who came to Missouri had established vineyards, and how a center of wine-making was the town of Hermann.
“Hermann, of course!” said my student, rolling her eyes.
Had she been one of the schoolchildren who “learnt what a shame it was that the erstwhile hero had prevented Latin culture from reaching northern Germany”?
Snow has been falling all day, and I am working on a lengthy book review, so here are some links:
• Sannion has the best idea for a New Testament zombie novel, and everyone wants him to write it. Already, I would not look at the book of Acts the same again ever.
• Hrafnkell Haraldsson has produced a string of thought-provoking posts, so go read A Heathen’s Day.
• Witchdoctor Joe writes on “Samhainophobia Vs Samhainsensationalism.”
• The photo is part of our outdoor shrine.
• I have visited England twice but never been to Glastonbury. Still, I keep an eye on its thriving retail scene through this blog.
Are you ready for the cameras and notepads? It’s the time of year when journalists notice the Pagans!
ReligionLink is on the job with story ideas. At least they admit that they are recycling their resource list from 2004. (No, that’s not my telephone number anymore, sorry.)
“Oh, my” indeed.
Yesterday M. pointed out to me a small AP story in Sunday’s Denver Post that I had overlooked: the death of Elizabeth Clare Prophet, head of the Church Universal and Triumphant, one of the chief motivators of the “cults scare” of the 1970s-1980s.
(“Suffered from dementia for years” — there may be some cynical chuckles at that line from ex-CUT members and their families, even though it was Alzheimer’s dementia.)
Her hometown newspaper in New Jersey offers photos of her at various ages and more links.
But I owe her thanks for sending me to graduate school, for in the 1970s, when I came back to Colorado after my undergraduate years at Reed, CUT (then called “Summit Lighthouse“) was headquartered at One Broadmoor Avenue, Colorado Springs, a prestigious address, in a red-brick 1930s mansion built by some Oklahoman oilman.
I had never heard of Summit Lighthouse and as a Pagan was not too interested in quasi-gnostic metaphysical magical chanting–they called it “decreeing”–but a visiting friend wanted to see it, and so we went.
We picked up some pamphlets and got a tour of the public rooms from some of the followers, who despite the content of the teachings, had a definite Young Republican vibe too them. We did not meet Elizabeth Clare Prophet herself.
(If there was magic worked on behalf of President Reagan, CUT was working it.)
Later, as a reporter for the Colorado Springs Sun, I was approached by Mrs. Prophet’s disaffected ex-secretary, who offered herself as a source for a feature story on the group. Mrs. Prophet herself did not do interviews–as high as an outsider could go was the group’s spokesman, Murray Steinman.
And I was introduced to the whole network of “anti-cult” groups, parents’ groups, and so on, not to mention one stream of American metaphysical religion, going back to the “I Am” movement and even farther.
Writing that story (and a couple of others on other groups) gave me more satisfaction than my regular work on the business beat. I credit them with nudging me towards an eventual decision to go to graduate school in religious studies, because I realized that as a newspaperman I could not really examine new religious movements in any depth.
Later, too, my chief interest in CUT was whether they would sell some of the land they bought for their “end of the world” retreat north of Yellowstone National Park in a deal arranged by the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation to keep an elk-migration corridor open.
Metaphysical movements come and go, but the elk should endure.
British anthropologist Susan Greenwood is interviewed at Pagans for Archaeology about her new book, The Anthropology of Magic
In this new book I have taken that argument further and related it to a classical anthropological debate on mystical mentality; and I have also explored the nature of reality in relation to an inspirited world, developing a new methodology of magic from my own experiences, as well as those of others.
The “Luhrmann effect” mentioned by the interviewer refers to the backlash against anthropologists expressed by some British Witches and ceremonial magicians whose practices were discussed by anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann in her 1988 book, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft
A television news report says that the private Wellington Lake campground, site of Dragonfest and several other Colorado Pagan festivals, is closing for the winter and possibly permanently.
The campground was operated by a concessionaire, Castle Mountain Recreation. The lake itself is part of the Denver suburb of Thornton’s water system.
The closure would affect the nearby town of Bailey, the last stop before the lake for those coming from the Denver area.
Rumor has it that the closure is indeed permanent and that some other use is planned for the site—luxury mountain homes?
More when I hear about it.
UPDATE, October 19th: A massive yard sale of all equipment, boats, trucks, etc. from Wellington Trading Post will be held at Wellington Lake from 9-6 each day, Oct. 23-25. That sounds pretty final.
Yet another of the sixty-plus people crammed into James Arthur Ray’s Sedona sweat lodge has died. She evidently was one of his true believers:
The Rev. Meredith Ann Murray of Bellingham, Wash., who has completed all of Ray’s retreats, said [Liz] Neuman was among Ray’s earliest followers and had attended dozens of his events.
According to Ray’s Web site, Neuman was the leader of the Minneapolis-area “Journey Expansion Team.” The teams, developed by Ray’s friends and followers around the country, meet to exchange ideas on his principles. The next Minneapolis-area meeting is scheduled for Oct. 23.
But here is the delicious part. Ray, facing homicide charges, is evidently bobbing and weaving:
In his first public appearance Tuesday in Los Angeles, Ray told a crowd of about 200 that he has hired his own investigative team to determine what went wrong.
Sheesh, Veronica Mars could tell him what went wrong. He was greedy and heedless of the safety of his followers.
Sweat lodges have been around for a long time in many places. I see them as part of the old Stone Age circumpolar religion, along with flat-headed drums and a special relationship with bears.
Whether used for physical health, for contacting the spirits, or both together, they are a small-scale magical technology. It sounds as though Ray tried the “megachurch” approach to sweat lodges–at $9,000-plus per person.
Aside from all the issues that this case raises, it speaks as well to the difficulty of turning small-scale mysteries into congregation-size events.
UPDATE: Tim Giago, a veteran American Indian journalist in South Dakota, asks why, if traditional sweat-lodge ceremonies are so special and good, are they not doing more good for the Lakota:
Arvol [Looking Horse], why are the sacred rites you represent not being used to bring our own people back from the brink? Why aren’t they being used to bring back the good health our people once enjoyed? Why is there an unemployment rate of 80 percent on the lands you call home? Why is there such a high rate of STD’s and teen pregnancies in Lakota country?
What good does it do to speak out and criticize an event that happened in Sedona, Arizona, when it had no lasting impact upon the Sioux people? Aren’t there terrible things happening in our own homelands, right under our noses, to worry about and try to change?