Isn’t this headline appropriate for the season?
I wonder if they brought any oils, candles, etc. with them.
Dining above the Dead
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
Colorado Pagans and News Media Coverage
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.
‘Occult Park’ Resurrected in Dallas
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?
Zippy, the Halloween Slug
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.)
Downsizing Polytheism
A 2003 panel from Partially Clips—A Webcomic for Grownups. Click to embiggen if necessary.
Magical Women
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.
After 2,000 Years, Hermann is Followed by Ghosts
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”?
Gallimaufry with Snow
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.
It’s That Time of Year!
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.