Michael Strmiska has a started a new blog, The Political Pagan. Stop by and visit. He does not mention it, but he is also on The Pomegranate’s editorial board.
Mazes and Labyrinths
A web page of mazes and labyrinths, from the Paleolithic forward.
Shamanic Images of the Altai
I found this video on PaganSpace — evidently it is supposed to evoke the shamanic spirit of Kazahkstan (since the poster lives in Almaty). The Altai are a range of mountains in Central Asia.
Pagan Content on Patheos: John Muir was Pagan??
USA Today’s religion blogger, Cathy Lynn Gross, visits the Patheos religion web site and discovers (shock!) that it has a Pagan portal with actual Pagan content.
The article that catches her attention is “John Muir was a Pagan.”
I admire John Muir, but I do not see him as a capital-P Pagan, follower of a non-monotheistic religion. He might well have been a small-P “pagan”– a non-Christian, a pantheist.
Get over to Patheos and stir things up before they shut it down. I wonder if starting a religion portal in the midst of a recession was a good business plan — were the Brunnicks counting on people to turn to religion when their money ran out? They laid off the Pagan gateway manager, a graduate student in religion, a couple of months ago.
Aphrodite and Revolution
You don’t think of her as a political deity, but a (London) Times writer suggests that Aphrodite Pandemos contributes to the success or failure of popular revolutions.
This theory, which I first heard from a friend in Armenia, holds that popular upheavals only stand a chance of success if a country’s most beautiful young women come out on to the streets.
The idea being that even the most politically indifferent young men want to be where the pretty girls are and that this creates a critical mass at demonstrations that causes a regime to lose confidence in its ability to prevail. To paraphrase Marx, the young men feel they have nothing to lose but their virginity.
All Great Men Were … Rosicrucians?
It’s the 100th anniversary of modern Rosicrucianism.
For all their concern about tracing lineage, however, it is possible to find beneath the umbrella of modern Rosicrucianism just about any belief, philosophy or superstition you might care to name – pantheism, reincarnation, alchemy, psychic power, astral out-of-body travel, telepathy. There are Cosmic Ray Coincidence Counters and Sympathetic Vibration Harps. And you can corral just about any historic hero – Plato, Dante, Descartes, Newton – into secret membership of the movement (unbeknown, of course, to the dull minds of conventional historians).
For all the snarkiness, at least one serious historian of esoteric movements is quoted in the article.
Human Beings Emit Light
You can tell people that this was part of the secret Craft training that you got from your grandmother.
Mainstreaming British Paganism
Another “Pagans in our midst” article, this one from The Guardian, a generally left-of-center British newspaper.
Writer Cole Morton advances the “fastest-growing religion” meme, promoted also by the Pagan Federation:
The Pagan Federation, which aims to represent all “followers of a polytheistic or pantheistic nature-worshipping religion”, claims the number of adherents has trebled at least. That would mean there were 360,000 committed, practising pagans, putting them ahead of the Sikhs (329,000) and fourth behind Hindus (552,000), Muslims (1.5 million) and Christians (42 million, according to the census).
2nd (or 3rd) Generation Pagan on a Backhoe
High Country News reports on a woman with interesting roots doing environmental restoration in the Pacific Northwest.
Erion grew up in a dying timber town outside Portland, where her father logged Mount Hood’s forests and taught her to run the heavy rigs she now uses to decommission his old logging roads. He was the type of guy who would flick cigarettes into the forest, Erion says, then toss the pack after them. She was the type of 6-year-old who yelled at him for it. Her mom eventually divorced Erion’s dad, moved to Portland and opened The Goddess Gallery, where she sold Roman, Egyptian and pagan idols, crystals and Mother Earth icons.
(Probably one of the same dying timber towns where I was repairing slot machines in the 1970s.)
Greek Orthodox Cover-up of Parthenon Defacing
Via Richard Bartholomew: Orthodox clergy in Greece demanded — and got — removal of a film segment in the Parthenon visitor center that showed their predecessors smashing Pagan statuary, etc., centuries ago.
UPDATE: (Via Jason) The museum backed down and is restoring the original film.