It is the time of year when we may partake of the sacred mushroom.
Those are a puffball and a king bolete, in case you wondered.
Trout and Mushrooms
M. and I are off for a few days to pursue trout and mushrooms. Blogging will resume later next week.
Gallimaufry with Atoms
Just some links while I am busy on two editing projects and a proposal…
¶ Aleister Crowley’s legacy still poses problems for occultists — especially when they take Internet “life” as equivalent to a “scene.”
¶ Lonnie muses about animism and consciousness.
¶ A British celebrity chef recommends henbane in salads. Much concern ensues. The ethnobotanist Christian Rätsch has a recipe for henbane beer, which he says is excellent. (His personal site, in German, is here.)
¶ Peter Bishop has been reading the book of Genesis. It’s fun to watch the reaction of an intelligent, non-Christian reader, “letting it speak for itself, instead of viewing it through the lens of later writings.” I love the idea of Yahweh as a sort of venture capitalist investing in Abram and Sarah.
The Apple War
The 1970s were a poor decade for fashion but a good decade for movies. One that I have not seen since then was a Swedish film with a sort of enviro/nature-religion theme, The Apple War.
Netflix does not have it. Video Library does not have it. Does anyone know where it can be rented?
A Panopticon in Reverse
Who says the mainstream media doesn’t do some things well? New York Times writer Mattathias Schwartz explores the world of Web trolls.
Ultimately, this issue is about the idea of the “commons” and whether the Web can function as a place to exchange ideas and information without getting buried in slime:
Does free speech tend to move toward the truth or away from it? When does it evolve into a better collective understanding? When does it collapse into the Babel of trolling, the pointless and eristic game of talking the other guy into crying “uncle”? Is the effort to control what’s said always a form of censorship, or might certain rules be compatible with our notions of free speech?
(Via Firedoglake.)
I Discover a New Cartoonist
The cartoonist’s work is now published in blog form.
Seeing the World with Greek Eyes
“I am a Greek born 2,381 years after my ancestors built and dedicated the Parthenon . . . . I am telling Greek history outside the conventional Christian worldview,” writes Eaggelos G. Vallianatos, author of The Passion of the Greeks: Christianity and the Rape of the Hellenes
Born in a Greek village, Vallianatos came to the United States as a young man and earned a doctorate in history at Wisconsin. He has written three other books on globalization and agriculture.
A little bit like Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick’s A History Of Pagan Europe, his book moves from a general discussion of Greek religion through the conquest of a disunited Greece by imperial Rome to the fall of the empire as seen by Greek historians, lingering on the late Christian emperors’ persecution of the Pagan “Hellenes,” those who saw Greek literature, culture, and religion as intertwined.
One appendix discusses and rates works by many noted classicists. Vallianatos likes Robin Lane Fox and Ramsay MacMullen, who “[makes] some difference to our understanding of the dreadful record of Christianity in the Mediterranean,” but has no use for Polymnia Athanassiadi: “Her Christian bias shines through in everything she says about Julian.” And so on.
As its title suggests, the book is passionate. I have read only as far as Chapter 4, “The Treason of Christianity,” because I can take it only in small doses. But I will continue all the way to the end, believe me.
Death No Longer Entrances Me
I did not have time to cruise the whole INATS-West show three weeks ago, but I did walk through the big Llewellyn booth, since it was close by my friends’ booth.
I scooped up some of the free stuff, including a flier for “a Gothic Book of the Dead.“
It’s one of life’s little ironies that I missed the whole Goth movement by just a few years. I would have been perfect for it.
I had the look: Tall, slim, dark hair, green eyes, and pale skin — if I stayed out of the Colorado sun, which I did not do. (Being pale in Portland, Oregon, was pretty easy, however.)
I tended to wear vests and silk scarves, and at age 17 had a seamstress friend sew me a cape — grey with black lining, which fell somewhere between Elvish and Army of Northern Virginia.
In my late teens and early twenties, I liked to take long walks at night, even through cemeteries. (Living near Portland’s Mount Scott cemetery complex was a bonus during my junior year at Reed.) I wrote poetry and thought that the Arnold Bocklin type font was the coolest. You get the picture.
Moving (unknown to me) towards Paganism, which I formally adopted the summer that I turned 21, I might have been attracted to suggestions on how to benefit from a book that discussed, “Meditating on gravestone sculptures, creating a necromantic medicine bag, keeping a personal book of the dead, and other exercises will help you explore the vital, transformative forces of death.”
Now, though, I am more likely to say, “You go right ahead — I’ll pass.”
This is not to say that the Dead cannot be influential sometimes. But I don’t get all gushy about walking in cemeteries anymore. Too many people close to me have died in the last five years, and I have developed a nice sideline in estate and family trust management, not that I ever wanted to do it. You want a “personal book of the dead”? How about the file boxes full of documents in the garage, the resting places of the ka-soul?
The Invention of Scotland…
… or why the kilt was invented for the benefit of factory workers.
Ronald Hutton told some of this story in Witches, Druids And King Arthur, but here is a review of a new book on the invention of Scottish-ness, the late Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History
Knee Deep in the Bloody Ford of History
Sometime around age 15 I took home Vol. 49 of the Harvard Classics from the Fort Collins (Colo.) public library and read for the first time Beowulf and The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel. (The Ring saga is in there too, but I had already encountered it.)
Beowulf is an understandable story, while The Destruction at least introduced me to the concept of geis, which is actually fairly troublesome when you are that age and trying to figure out where the walls are.
Not until my undergraduate years did I discover The Gododdin, which is totally different from the above. Like petals on a blood-soaked daisy, it is a series of short elegies for warriors who fought and died (more or less to the last man) at the battle of Catterick, c. 570 CE in what is now Yorkshire. (Poetic samples are at the link above.)
There is no narrative; it is as though you had short poems about Paul Revere, Molly Pitcher, George Washington, Daniel Morgan, Benedict Arnold, Baron Von Steuben, John Paul Jones, etc., without needing to tell the reader about the American Revolution.
Many critics as well as authors of fiction based on the poem tend to create dichotomies about it such as these:
- It’s the Romano-Celtic (mostly Christian) British versus the (Pagan) Anglo-Saxons, with the Celts carrying faded remnants of Imperial Britannia and the Saxons representing ignorance and barbarism.
- It represents a nonlinear “Celtic” way of thinking versus the linearity of, say, Beowulf.
- It is typical of how glorifying “beautiful losers” is part of the Celtic soul or something.
- It demonstrates the tactical deficiency of mounted fighters without stirrups against the Anglo-Saxon “shield wall.” (But cf. Battle of Hastings.)
Recently I picked up John Koch’s The Gododdin of Aneirin: Text and Context from Dark-Age North Britain (University of Wales Press, 1997).
I have no background in the Welsh language, so I cannot really follow his discussions of changes in phonetics and orthography over many centuries, nor the 24 types of medieval Welsh poetic meter, for example.
But I do appreciate the point he made about 6th century versus medieval nationalism. In the 6th or 7th centuries, there was none. What is now England and Scotland contained many little kingdoms — and yes, some were ruled by Old Welsh-speakers and some by Old English-speakers, but they did not line up neatly on ethnic lines.
He argues that there were other Celto-British forces, allied with the Saxons, on the winning side at Catterick, and that another Old Welsh poem represents their heroic versifying about their victory. So much for beautiful losers.
Later, by the Middle Ages (13th century), when the line between England and Wales was drawn on the map and a greater sense of separation existed, The Gododdin was cast as Celts versus Saxons and used to reinforce that sense of separation.
Once again, the lesson is to be careful about projecting our categories backwards on the past, especially on the distant and mostly unrecorded past.