Blogging CESNUR, 2

Yesterday’s CESNUR plenary session focused on Western esotericism, which is getting more respect as a “player” in history.

Gordon Melton passed out a fancy diagram of the Western esoteric tradition, including everyone from Swedenborgians to flying saucer religions to Wiccans.

Wicca was placed under ritual magic, although at some distance. Fair enough: ritual magic is an important root. But I think there needs to be a long dashed line connecting to classical Paganism (which was not on the chart), indicating a connection that was literary rather than person-to-person.

For those of you familiar with new religious movements sessions, yes, “Ragged Brian” is here.

Trying to decide whether to take the tour of the (warning, Flash) Cathedral of the Madeline tomorrow to renew my acquaintance with ecclesiastical architecture. (“I think the woods are more impressive,” says M., the dedicated animist.)

Off to CESNUR

After the better part of two days on the road, M. and I arrived this afternoon at a Homestead Suites hotel in Salt Lake City, where I will be attending the CESNUR conference.

The trip started off on a sour note, because my previously trusty-if-aging G4 PowerBook laptop developed a series disk-access problem on Monday night, taking the last version of my paper with it.

So, fellow professors, if your students say that the computer crashed the night before their papers were due, sometimes they might be telling the truth. (On the other hand, “grandmother’s funeral” is probably made up.)

I will be reading partly from handwritten notes on Friday, I suspect.

We began with a long detour to Colorado Springs to drop the PowerBook off at Voelker Research, where the service techs considered it gravely and offered a 50/50 chance of data recovery in five or six days.

Ah, Colorado Springs, where there is no east-west through highway and never has been. Eventually by a series of zigs and zags known to locals we cleared town about 2 p.m. Then Ute Pass, Wilkerson Pass, Hoosier Pass, Vail Pass and westward into the desert until we finally called it a day in the motel oasis of Green River, Utah.

Every time I go through Green River I more and more get the feeling that it is picking up the people who cannot afford to live in trendier Moab.

Weirdly, it was raining in Green River today. That must be an event. It turned the land a darker shade of tan.

In fact, it’s raining all over Utah, as witness the photo of the hotel’s back garden, which looks semi-tropical. I was happy to drop the bags, pop the top off a bottle of Polygamy Porter (which ought to be the official beer of CESNUR), and relax.

M. has discovered that Whole Foods, Nordstrom’s, Barnes & Noble, a public library, and a large park are all within about two blocks, so she has everything she needs, she says.

On the Road

I leave today for the annual CESNUR conference on new religious movements, to be held this year in Salt Lake City, so you know which not-so-new-anymore religious movement will be heavily discussed in the presentations.

My paper is a thrown-together mess, but at least it has me thinking about how it could become the introduction to a book that I could write—or co-write, perhaps. More on that as it develops.

Life in the Future is a Dream World

A 1939 short film looks at the amazing world of the future in the year 2000. Keep watching–there is a twist. As usual, the future looks different than people expected.

From Abortion to Icelandic Music and Back

So Jason decides that he would rather blog about abortion than Iceland Paganism, which leads me to follow the Icelandic Paganism link, as I have read all the usual blather that followed the murder of Dr. Tiller.

Thus I am lead to the documentary Screaming Masterpiece, about Icelandic music, which is now in my Netflix queue.

Must get back to work now — I have to finish my paper for the CESNUR conference.

Back when I had to teach first-year composition, the joke was that students in search of a topic tended to fall into well-worn ruts: abortion, gun control, the drinking age, etc.

Dealing with the first one was easy, after a while. I just issued a classroom fatwa that only people who had had an abortion could write about the topic.

The real purpose, of course, was to segue into a discussion of pathos and how hard it was to write convincingly about a topic with which one has no emotional connection.

Your Prayers, Our Magic–Do They Always Help?

It’s a common argument among Pagans–Witches in particular–when conversing with monotheists to say something like, “What you call prayer, we call spells,” or words to that effect.

No doubt we think ours are better. No one is testing them, but there have been a number of studies attempting to quantify the effects of “intercessory prayer,” usually meaning prayer for people facing health crises.

Some seemed to show that such prayer helped, results that were seized upon by Christians.

But the results of one are not so simplistic, reports Christianity Today magazine. (I urge you to read the whole thing.)

The study received some attention at the time [three years ago], but seemed to have escaped the notice of many Christians, probably because of its surprising—and for Christians, disturbing—conclusions.
. . . .

The result: The group [of surgical patients] whose members knew they were being prayed for did worse in terms of post-operative complications than those whose members were unsure if they were receiving prayer. The knowledge that they were being prayed for by a special group of intercessors seemed to have a negative effect on their health.

Where does that leave people who say that you should get permission before “working” for anyone?

The authors then turn theological:

Our prayers are nothing at all like magical incantations [!]. Our God bears no resemblance to a vending machine. The real scandal of the study is not that the prayed-for group did worse, but that the not-prayed-for group received just as much, if not more, of God’s blessings. In other words, God seems to have granted favor without regard to either the quantity or even the quality of the prayers.

And then they have to jump through more theological hoops to answer the obvious question, “Then why pray at all?”

Obviously, that is not our theology. Pagans do not expect the gods to conform to our standards of either/or logic.

But try reading the article and substituting our language for its authors’. How would you respond?

What Happened to Ecopsychology?

Lupa posts on bioregionalism, animism, and ecopsychology.

When M. was in grad school in psychology in the 1990s, she hoped that ecopsychology would be the Next Big Thing. Articles on the psychological affects of interacting (or not) with the non-human world were popping up in places like McCall’s magazine. Addressing “nature-deficit syndrome” would be a component of it–even the Girl Scouts are onto that.

But as an overarching concept–even without acknowledging “spirits of place”–ecopsychology does not seem to have caught fire except in a low-level therapeutic way: “Gardening makes you feel better.”

Possibly related is the way in which a certain kind of self-righteous environmentalism may be ripe for mocking. Are we still too leery of assigning spiritual value to non-human nature? Doing so has been a component of American spirituality since around 1800, as Catherine Albanese wrote in Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age. But it has always been a minority position, although a well-established one.

I used to start my nature-writing students with the “Where You At?” quiz. It offers a quick immersion in bioregional thinking and blends both non-human and human cultural material.

Pagan Travel Blogger

The Examiner blog network, which signed Murph Pizza to cover Paganistan, now has a Pagan travel writer, Paula Jean West.

Are we a niche market, or what?

The New York Times Wants You to Stay Helpless

Don’t turn your soft, computer-tapping hands away from the keyboard and pick up a hammer. That seemed to be the message in Sunday’s New York Times. Self-reliance is dangerous.

This woman made a mistake when replacing a toilet. So, therefore, she should not learn from her mistake and do it right the next time. She could call a plumber instead.

When in doubt, do nothing. Call the authorities.

Then there is this story about a peril for urban gardeners — lead in the soil from the days of leaded gasoline and older paints. The hazard could be real — and the article presents some fixes — but I cannot help thinking that the underlying message is “Don’t even try growing your own food.”

Remember, boys and girls, the government and the official state-approved priests always know what is best for you.

A Hymn to Extrication and Destruction

In my role as a volunteer fireman in this little hamlet, I went to a “vehicle extrication” class today in a nearby town. That meant learning to use the “Jaws of Life” (firemen just say “splitter”) and other hydraulic tools for ripping apart vehicles in order to remove injured occupants.

In that larger department’s classroom, the instructor had written on the board:

Welcome to Vehicle Extrication
Cut It. Split it. Ram it.

And all I could think of was Aleister Crowley‘s “Hymn to Pan.” (YouTube version here.)

Through solstice stubborn to equinox.
I rave; and I rape and I rip and I rend
Everlasting, world without end,
Mannikin, maiden, maenad, man,
In the might of Pan.
Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Pan! Io Pan

I’ll bet Uncle Aleister would have liked to see us ripping the roofs and doors off of motorcars.