I was in a state government office today and saw my first office Halloween decorations. It’s coming. So read this Metafilter discussion about when you are too old for trick-or-treating.
Lots of great comments, but don’t miss np312’s! It’s the most creative Halloween “trick” I ever heard of.
• I have been traveling–and writing about it at the other blog. So for now, some links.
• Raw food and Linux: Interview with two Pagans. Raw food is fine, but it’s easy to look good if you are in your twenties and have the bone structure … As for Linux, that’s fine too, but I have no real reason to switch from Mac OS X. Just not geeky enough—or you could say that I prefer to be geeky about other things.
• Jordan Stratford claims the steampunk aesthetic for Gnosticism. Next, raw food and Linux.
• Boing Boing is hosting guest-blogger Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation
Is it the pop version of Catherine Albanese’s A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion
The “Staffordshire Hoard” is a cache of 7th-century Anglo-Saxon sword jewels and other items recently found in England (and a great boost for metal-detector sales, no doubt).
The caption on one slide of the golden hoard suggests that because a gold cross was folded in on itself before burial, the person who buried the treasure might well have been (wait for it) a “pagan.”
England was becoming Christian by then, although the Norse were not. But I think he (?), whether Pagan or Christian, might as well have been looking at the cross as so much gold rather than superstitiously thinking he would be smitten if he deformed it.
Here is another slide show. Magnificent stuff. How long until we see Ren Faire reproductions?
The Museum of Talking Boards is a online museum of Ouija boards and related items.
And there is an online Ouija board too. Not the same as two 13-year-olds with a candle, though. (Pointy-hat tip to Pitch.)
Nine well-known phrases whose origin most people get wrong.
A complete translation of psychologist Carl Jung’s personal workbook, the “Red Book,” is about to be published.
Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.
Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.
So for the better part of the past century, despite the fact that it is thought to be the pivotal work of one of the era’s great thinkers, the book has existed mostly just as a rumor, cosseted behind the skeins of its own legend — revered and puzzled over only from a great distance.
Pagan blogger Jason Pitzl-Waters calls it the “most important grimoire of our modern age.”
Orthodox Christian blogger Rod “Crunchy Con” Dreher essentially thinks it will release gnostic demons, leading to the downfall of Christian civilization.
Gnostic and occult ideas are obviously the predominant feature of Jungian thought. Nonetheless, most people remain unaware of the fact that the occult ideas on which Jung worked were hardly original discoveries of his, as Jung leaves the impression they were; such ideas were ubiquitous in the decaying culture centers of Middle Europe in the years prior to World War II. Most people remain equally unaware that occult practices also lie at the heart of Jung’s own theory, clinical practice, and inner experiences. For the most part this is because these ideas have been presented in the Jungian literature, are explained in Jungian training, and when they appear in patients’ dreams will be interpreted almost exclusively in symbolic terms, not literally. So, for example, an alchemical picture of a man and woman coupling in a bath-or a dream of something similar-will be taken solely as a metaphor, of a “union of opposites.”
It can and should be argued that even so, these occult ideas tend to undermine moral standards.
Dreher goes all Lovecraftian on this one, as do some commenters.
Since I have a lovely equinoctial head cold, I think that I shall crawl into bed with some bourbon-fortified coffee and re-read the whole New York Times article about the new edition.
Think of a typical American small-town parade: the Apple Queen and her court in a convertible, the honorary marshalls (some respected elderly couple) in an antique car, the high-school band kids’ faces earnest and nervous under their shakos, Shriners in miniature cars, a military vehicle or two, horses, alpacas, old tractors, Boy Scouts, a gaggle of Model A Fords, local political candidates, the Christian Motorcyclists Association on their holy Harleys . . .
My foothills volunteer fire department has put our brush truck in the parade. We are four adults—two men, two women (one a firefighter and the other a wife of)—and a gaggle of kids in home-produced T-shirts with the department’s name.
We are toward the back of the line-up, so I have plenty of time to pace up and down beside the truck, wondering if such as parade fits any of Michael York’s definition of Pagan cultic practice
We are not too Dionysian here—I will walk alongside the truck tossing hard candies and bubble gum to the kids on the curb—not like a New Orleans Mardi Gras parade with the doubloons, beads, and sexual interplay.
But despite the “praise band” on a trailer up ahead and the aforementioned motorcyclists, it is more a day for the Classical virtues than the Christian ones.
If an ethnographer could write a “thick description” of the parade in the style of Clifford Geertz, how many layers there would be!
For one thing, our fire department’s participation in the parade began relatively recently, three or four years ago, as part of the asst. chief’s campaign of professionalization and getting the larger town’s dept. to take us more seriously in mutual-aid situations.
And having led the parade with their apparatus, now parked in a side street, those guys sit in lawn chairs in front of the firehouse and grin and wave as we pass by.
I spot M. on the sidewalk outside our favorite coffeehouse (just where I would have expected her to be) and hand her a sucker, which Fisher will later snatch off the kitchen counter and eat, wrapper and all, giving himself cherry breath.
When we re-unite at home, she tells me that the parade seemed “interminable” and that she had wondered awhile if she had somehow missed our unit, which in fact was 84th out of about a hundred.
And she spoke of seeing the old guys from the state veterans’ home, riding on folding chairs on a flatbed truck, how when she saw them pass by she unexpectedly broke into tears. (Me too.)
As the man said, Cattle die, kindred die, every man is mortal: But the good name never dies of one who has done well.
Those are the virtues we celebrate, proceeding down Main Street under a bright southern Colorado sun.
On the way home from North Dakota, Fisher and I stopped at Carhenge. The Wikipedia article compares it to its inspiration in England.
… about the prospect of riding with the other volunteer firefighters in a nearby town’s “Pioneer Days” parade tomorrow. How long since I was in a parade?
(“We had Psychedelia,” M. says. “And what do they have now? Tweeting!”)