Gallimaufry with Confusion

• The latest weird search query to bring a visitor to this blog: “Is New Mexico a polytheistic, monotheistic, or animistic religion?” Hello? New Mexico is a state. No wonder that for years New Mexico Magazine has had a standing column on geographical confusion called “One of Our 50 is Missing.”

• Annyikha locates a series of podcast lectures on ancient Mediterranean Paganism.

• Christian apologist John Morehead interviews film scholar Carrol L. Fry, author of Cinema of the Occult: New Age, Satanism, Wicca, and Spiritualism in Film. An excerpt:

TheoFantastique [Morehead] : Cinema has also changed in its depiction of the witch. Are fairytale depictions as in Harry Potter, as well as those which depict the empowerment of the feminine perhaps the most common modes of expression in contemporary film?

Carrol Fry: Yes, the empowerment of the feminine is the most popular adaptation, whether the film is supportive of critical. I’m sure this has to do with attracting an audience for the film. But Pagans might well feel that Hollywood slights their spiritual paths by concentrating nearly exclusively on feminist Wicca, and then just on the most sensational elements. By the way, there’s a strong subtext of feminist Wicca in
that no one much notices, most obviously in Sophie’s (named for Sophia from the Gnostic tradition) blunders into a Wiccan ceremony in which her grandfather is “drawing down the moon” as a coven ceremony. There are a few other witch films that are not part of the culture wars, romantic films such as I Married a Witch
 and Bell, Book and Candle that are neither the silly version of witches (that have nothing to do with Neo-Paganism[sic]) such as the Harry Potter novels and films nor adaptations of Wicca.

Fame and Pagans

An essay by Cat Chapin-Bishop on seeking fame as a Pagan has gotten some attention. Her Quaker side is conflicted by the idea of being a “Big-Name Pagan,” thanks to the Quaker ideal of not seeking worldly glory.

I do not see anything wrong with seeking fame if we define it as “excellence.” After all, if you strive for years to do X and have some skill at it, you will eventually be recognized by the community of “People Who Do X.”

Put Pagan authors, etc., in that group: we are not known that much outside of Pagandom.

There is of course an unhealthy form of fame-seeking. We all know the people who think that they deserve the front of the line based on their celebrity.

Here is one difference, perhaps: Teaching.

My favorite philosopher, Gary Snyder, once wrote that while artists and writers in a sense occupy the top of the cultural food chain, they are in turn eaten — scavenged — by their students.

So maybe teaching X after you are famous for it is one protection against fame’s unhealthy self-delusion. Give it all away.

Paganism does not require us to creep around in grey clothing saying, “Oh, I am no one special.”

On the other hand, all fame is fleeting — unless you are offered a deal like Achilles: short life and fame or a long life.

He chose the former and now, something like 3,200 years later, Brad Pitt plays him in a movie.

But for most humans, fame is just the foam on the cappuccino. You may enjoy it, but you should not mistake it for the real drink.

Back from the Florida Pagan Gathering

I have not tried to sleep over all-night drumming since I was a little kid, when my district-ranger father would let the Indians from the Pine Ridge Reservation put up a temporary dance arbor each year on Forest Service land by our house, across from the Indian Health Service hospital in Rapid City.

That was Plains-style drumming–Boom Boom Boom–mixed with the jingle of ankle bells, and this was polyrhythmic drumming, but the principle was the same: treat it as white noise and go to sleep.

A few margaritas from the pirates’ camp helped the process along. Pirates in Florida are iconic.

I am back from the Florida Pagan Gathering, whose organizers inexplicably decided that my research pre-occupations (What is “nature religion”? Why did people claim that witches used flying ointments?) were worth flying me halfway across the country at Beltane so that I could talk about them to the dozen or so people (out of 700) who wanted to hear about them. Thanks, everyone!

FPG is a big, well-organized event held at a 4H camp owned by the University of Florida. It has room to grow there, and the organizers want to grow it.

A comment that Margot Adler made in one of her talks has stuck with me. At one time (pre-1980) covens and other Pagan groups were mostly separate. Then came the era of national festivals–I remember one of our coveners coming back from one of the first Pan-Pagan festivals in 1980 or ’81, walking two inches off the ground and full of new chants and songs to teach the rest of us.

That era established a sort of common ritual and musical culture, she noted, whereas now we are into the era of semi-professional and professional entertainment, and the brief common culture is diminishing. On the other hand, hearing Spiral Rhythm do the calypso version of “Eko Eko Azarak” was sort of a kick.

I have been working alone in my little house in the woods all winter, and FPG was “bright lights, big city” to this guy. It has been ages since I attended a big festival and got that “temporary autonomous zone” rush.

UPDATE: Coincidentally (there are no coincidences) Cat Chapin-Bishop is blogging on the phenomenon of Pagan celebrity. Two of us who were at FPG have already chimed in in the comments.

Concentration and Its Enemies

When I compare working at home now to the last time I did it (1990-1992), I can see the difference in three letters: DSL.

When email meant dial-up and Compuserve charging me by the minute, I monitored my online time carefully.

Now concentration comes harder. Sometimes I work in the guest cabin, because it has no telephone — not even a cell-phone signal — and of course no Web access.

Furthermore, says Winifred Gallagher, author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, “multitasking is a myth.”

“You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.

“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”

The Cheesecake is Divine

God Cafe, Eustis, Florida. Photo copyright 2009 Chas S. Clifton

The God Cafe in Eustis, Florida. Closed on Sundays. Here is some background.

On the Road

I will be on the road or in the land of longleaf pine for the next four days, so posting will probably be non-existent until around May 5th.

Yes, vitamin C and oshá are on the menu. I have a magical faith in oshá, especially from the Taos Herb Co. I just squirted some tincture into my wine, which makes it taste sort of like retsina.

Meanwhile, links:

•Fifty things every 18-year-old should know. Some of them would have helped me, for sure.

•Here is a Web page of re-creations of ancient statuary — which was not all white marble! (One of the small details that I appreciated in the Oliver Stone’s Alexander, for all its other goofs.)

Romae Dies Natalis

Happy birthday to Rome. Lots of great photos.

Jack Chick, the Movie

I have my own collection of Jack Chick pamphlets, but to make collecting more sporting, they have to be found in public places: left inside a library book about Wicca or on a public park bench, that sort of thing.

Maybe God’s Cartoonist: The Comic Crusade of Jack Chick will create more collectors of “all things Chick including the art, artists, writers, controversies, death threats, witch spells, Illuminati, Catholic assassins and more!”

(Hat tip: Jason’s other blog.)

Pomegranate 10.2 published

The new issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies is now back from the printer. This issue, vol. 10, no. 2, is not yet on the Web site but will be soon.

Table of Contents

“The Love which Dare not Speak its Name: An Examination of Pagan Symbolism and Morality in Fin de siècle Decadent Fiction”
Kelly Anne Reid

“Landscape Archaeology, Paganism, and the Interpretation of Megaliths”
Jessica Beck and Stephen Chrisomalis

“The Goddess and the Virgin: Materiality in Western Europe”
Amy Whitehead

“The Prevailing Circumstances: The Pagan Philosophers of Athens in a Time of Stress”
Emilie F. Kutash

“Polycentric Polytheism and the Philosophy of Religion”
Edward P. Butler

“Re-crafting the Past: The Complex Relationship between Myth and Ritual in the Contemporary Pagan Reshaping of Eleusis”
Maria Beatrice Bittarello

“Expanding Religious Studies: The Obsolences of the Sacred/Secular Framework for Pagan, Earthen, and Indigenous Religion, Part 2: Re-thinking the Concept of ‘Religion’ and ‘Maturi’ as a New Scheme”
Mikirou Zitukawa and Michael York

Individual articles can be ordered from the Web site. Book reviews may be downloaded for free in PDF form.

Yahoo Group for Pagan Veterans

Some American Pagan military veterans feel that established organizations such as the American Legion and VFW are too heavily Christianized, so they have started a Yahoo group as a first step towards forming a separate organization.

It is the old dilemma — change from within, or go outside “the system”?

If you are a Pagan veteran and wish to participate, there is more information here.