Confront your misgivings! Join the Rev. Peter Owen-Jones, Anglican priest, into this journey into the deepest heart of darkness — among some ordinary-seeming Australian Witches.
“I’m aware of certain objects, quite frankly, that have always disturbed me.”
A giggle-worthy proof that pith-helmet anthropology of religion lives on. Will the Rev. Owen-Jones go skyclad?
(Via Caroline Tully.)
Blogger like to write about the weird search terms that bring in readers.
Similarly Sannion turned the subject lines of messages caught in his email spam filter into what amounts to a hymn to Aphrodite Pandemos — through the Surrealist technique of random assemblage.
Yes, the news of a possible stone circle under Lake Michigan has been “surprisingly under-reported.”
If verified, the carvings could be as much as 10,000 years old – coincident with the post-Ice Age presence of both humans and mastodons in the upper midwest.
On the right side of the page, you will see links for “Letter from Hardscrabble Creek’s Atom feed and LiveJournal feed. The RSS feed is here.
I have now added links that let you subscribe to this blog on Kindle and to become a fan on Facebook.
I am not sure what the benefits of becoming a fan on Facebook are, so if you know, enlighten me.
The lively discussion at The Wild Hunt over “moving on from Paganism” should put an end to the notion that Pagans constitute a “tribe” or a “community.”
Not yet, anyway. We are still part of modern society with its cafeteria spirituality.
Many Pagans, such as Emma Restall Orr in her book that I recently reviewed, are fond of the idea of “tribe.”
Jews, for example, are a tribe (or several). A Jew might never cross the threshold of shul, synagogue, or temple–may even be an avowed atheist–but he or she is still a Jew. Only conversion to one of the other Abrahamic faiths might change that fact — after a time — and even then, you still have “crypto-Jews” popping up. (Everyone wants to be special.)
A Navajo Indian might follow traditional religion, Mormonism, some kind of Christianity, or the Peyote Road, but is still a Navajo.
What we have is a network, not a community nor a tribe. Maybe in a few generations that will change, who knows? (For you anthro and sociology majors, it is the Gemeinschaft / Gesellschaft issue, no?)
Everytime I hear someone going on about “the Pagan community,” I say to myself, “Not yet.” Not when you can walk in and walk out so easily.
Evanthia O. Rosati was in the English-teaching racket longer than I was, and she has heard it all.
Whenever I am at a party or first introduced to anyone, I pray no one will mention my line of work. The party could be at full swing, music loud and the bass shaking the walls. I might be enjoying myself. Then someone says I teach English. All speaking stops as partiers adjust their vocabulary to English teacher level. The gentleman with the chip dip hanging off his cheek is now saying, “From whence I came….” . . . . Playful people become anxious adults once they become aware of the dreaded English teacher in their midst. In desperation, I yell out, “I don’t have a shrine to Shakespeare in my backyard.” (It’s in the side yard; why give away all my secrets?) It’s no use. The area clears anyway.
So true. These days I say I am a freelance book editor, which is at least partly true, and most people have no preconception about what I do.
Emma Restall Orr is one of the leading figures of British Druidry, and her book Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics may be seen as an attempt for formalize the vaguely expressed ethical precepts (“If it harm none,” etc.) that characterize contemporary Paganism(s).
Orr herself admits that “Paganism can appear fragmented ” but that its diversity of belief and approach “is not always helpful those trying to grasp comprehension from the outside” (11). (I think she means, “Comprehend it from the outside.)
As have a number of other Pagan writers, she feels moved to act partly by social pressures. In order for Pagans and their concerns (e.g., “appropriate care of ancient monuments and artefacts”), “it is useful to be able to stand with one voice before the benches of a nation’s authority” (11).
She wants to locate her ethics in nature. This “nature” is primarily planetary as opposed to cosmic—and she makes an argument about hurricanes and tsunamis that I would agree with completely: “The *Pagan acceptance of nature’s destructive power is not about resignation, but reverence.” You can have a relationship with planetary nature, but it is not all about you.
Asterisk-Pagan is Orr’s special spelling for a Paganism with “a devotional reverence for nature” (35), and it is essentially countercultural and antinominan, mixed with a heavy dose of romantic tribalism.
But the more I read Living with Honour, the more I became aware of two huge omissions. One is Pagan philosophy. Orr knows that she does not want to return to a bloody, heroic duel-fighting “death before dishonor” type of tribal culture, as appealing as it looks from a distance of 2,500 years. So the book is not really rooted in the Northern European Iron Age cultures, despite a couple of nods in that direction.
Yet she almost completely ignores centuries of Pagan thought on ethics and philosophy from the Greco-Roman tradition!
The Stoics get a paragraph or two, and Epicurus one sentence that demonstrates the common modern misunderstanding of his teaching. The rest of the time, the reader is fed bits of the usual grumpy, depressed, and misogynistic 18th-20th-century gang: Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietszche. (I will make an exception for Emmanual Lévinas, whose work has informed some other contemporary Pagan thought as well.)
The ancient philosophers ranged from the hardest of “hard polytheists” to skeptical materialists like Epicurus to the “honor the gods and do your duty” attitude of the Roman Stoics. And they had a great deal to say about living ethically in friendship, in marriage, and in civic life–even when (as under the worst emperors) one was caught up in a corrupt governmental system.
Why leave them out in favor of Schopenhauer, Martin Buber, or A.J. Ayer?
By contrast, Orr’s book says much about cosmos and “the Other” in an abstract sense, but neglects the polis—the world of civic and social relationships. That is the second omission.
It may be that Orr finds participatory politics distasteful–“American democracy is acknowledged as a farce,” she proclaims (6)–and would rather limit her wants and watch badgers. (Doing so would be Epicurean in the truer sense.) She admits to a fondness for philosophical anarchism.
But by neglecting the “political” (in the broadest sense of life in community) part of life, she has nothing to say on issues of rights and responsibilities, on how to be an engaged and “political” citizen.
Indeed, she rejects “any idea of duty” (323). If I ever have to teach another 8 a.m. lecture class but would rather sleep, I will remember that I have no duty to the university or to my students. I can just send them a group email and tell them to read the book on their own.
When Pagans (and *Pagans) come before “the benches of nation’s authority,” we need to make a simple case. Although a tiny religious minority, we will pull our weight. We do not ask for to be excused for our specialness, with sharia courts and kicking everyone else out of the public swimming pool.
Unlike fundamentalists of various sorts, we do not fear academic learning–Pagans invented the academy. And democracy. And Western philosophy.
Many of us are willing to take up arms for our nation, and we support our warriors. In all social realms, we are here, and we participate.
Thus, while I find much to like in Living With Honour: A Pagan Ethics–I do enjoy seeing intelligent writers wrestle with the issue of just what “nature religion” is–I cannot help but see it as crippled by its rejection of still-relevent Pagan ethical traditions.
Stewart Farrar was constantly writing (journalism, fiction, radio and TV scripts, and more) and recording events–even notes on every Wiccan circle in which he participated. When he and Janet visited our home in 1991 (their first speaking tour in the US), he narrated each day’s events into a micro-cassette recorder, and I wondered if he would ever transcribe all those notes!
It should come as no surprise to readers of Stewart Farrar: Writer On A Broomstick that he identified with the Egyptian scribe-god Thoth and even believed that he had followed the occupation of scribe in a past life in pharaonic Egypt.
The story of how he visited Alex and Maxine Sanders’ coven to write a magazine article, stayed, met Janet Owen (34 years his junior), and eventually married her as they led their own hived-off group has become a Wiccan staple.
But as a good biographer should, Elizabeth Guerra starts with his upbringing as a bright, sexually repressed (he made up for that later) boy in a Christian Science home, where the message was that illness results from one’s own bad thoughts.
“This tenet remained with Stewart throughout his life,” Guerra writes, describing how it ate at him after he suffered a stroke in old age.
As an adult, Farrar made his living playing the typewriter–even as an artillery officer in World War II he authored instructional manuals.
His initiation into Witchcraft and marriage to Janet brought on a creative surge. He wrote a series of magic-flavored novels and, with her assistance, a series of books on Wiccan practice.
There had been writers who were Wiccan before (Margaret St. Clair, to name just one), but now a professional journalist set out to describe and systemize everything. Consider this description from the catalog of Eight Sabbats for Witches’s North American publisher:
Presents the detailed and dramatic rituals for each of the eight Sabbats – the seasonal ceremonies and festivals intimately linked with the waxing and waning rhythms of the natural year. Using their Book of Shadows (the witch’s inherited handbook) as their starting point, practicing witches Janet and Stewart have added mythological and folkloric material, much of it personally gathered.
To complete the picture, they also give in full detail the rituals for Casting and Banishing the Magic Circle, and the often misunderstood Great Rite of male-female polarity. They include moving rituals for Wiccaning (the witches’ equivalent of Christening), Handfasting (the witch wedding), and Requiem (funeral).
In a sense, it’s technical writing and (although he never called himself one) doing theology. That’s what happens when you try to impose intellectual coherence on religious experience.
One might say that the Farrars’ work moved British Traditional Witchcraft (in the North American sense) a long way toward being a complete religious system.
Similarly, in the 1980s the Farrars gave space in their book The Witches’ Way: Principles, Rituals and Beliefs of Modern Witchcraft to Doreen Valiente’s attempt to track down the facts of Gerald Gardner’s claimed 1939 initiation. Stewart always wanted to get the facts straight. As Guerra writes,
As a journalist, Stewart could never tolerate plagiarism. His attitude was that if you were going to educate people, then educate them: do not feed them lies, falsely claiming others’ material as your own, and do not hide behind ego, because it does nothing to further the cause of education.
We need biographies or autobiographies of key Pagan figures, as I have argued before. Guerra’s biography of Stewart Farrar (which includes tributes from others who knew him) is a worthwhile addition to our bookshelves.
Barbara Jane Davy, author of Introduction to Pagan Studies (The Pagan Studies Series) has a new edited collection out of source documents for Pagan studies.
Paganism (Critical Concepts in Religious Studies) lists on Amazon at an “institutional” price, like the other edited collection that I recently mentioned.
From the publisher’s site:
This new three-volume collection from Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Religious Studies series brings together the best foundational and cutting-edge scholarship in one ‘mini library’.
Volume I addresses the emergence of Paganism as a religion. It collects scholarly analyses of the historical evolution of Paganism, and is organized under topics including debates of historical accuracy, influences on the development of Paganism, and the process of routinization in the religion. The second volume addresses the importance of environmentalism in contemporary Paganism, including work on how Pagans think about the natural world, environmental ethics, and related political activism. The final volume addresses the importance of gender issues and feminism in contemporary Paganism, and collects the best research on topics including immanence, embodiment, self-image, and sexuality.
Paganism is fully indexed and has a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.
The Northern Hemisphere winter solstice occurs at 12:04 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time on December 21. That’s 5:04 a.m. here in Colorado, perfect for the people drumming up the Sun at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. (I won’t be there–too far away.)
Remember to visit Archaeoastronomy.com for all your calendrical ritual-timing needs.
You can vote on your favorite Pagan Yule song(s) here.
UPDATE: A YouTube video of this year’s drumming up of the Sun at Red Rocks.