… 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
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:
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.
¶ Zines live on. That was me once, even down to the hand-cranked mimeo machine many years ago. A poet friend told me — in all seriousness — that “after the revolution” I would still be able to do mimeograph reproduction with used, dirty motor oil. Of course there would be no electricity.
¶ Some people should avoid sword-swinging magic? (Via Law and Magic Blog.)
¶ Jason has that one and more witches in the news for the wrong reasons.
¶ In India, the Virgin Mary is a goddess. (Via Non-Fluffy Pagans.)
Yesterday I wrote a review of The New Generation Witches: Teenage Witchcraft in Contemporary Culture, a collection of papers edited by Hannah Johnston and Peg Aloi, for the upcoming issue of The Pomegranate.
Teen Witches, a fluid and constantly changing group, have been heavily dependent on the Internet, because they are often alone and either ignorant of Pagan groups or not welcome there as full-fledged members–the latter partly a result of the various satanism scares and their blowback onto contemporary Pagans.
In Aloi’s own chapter, “A Charming Spell: The Intentional and Unintentional Influence of Popular Media upon Teenage Witchcraft in America,” she writes how some of the Net-filtering programs such as Cybersitter blocked words such as “witchcraft” or “neopagan.”
Internet censorship and the use of filtering software threatened to shut down teenage pagan internet activity. So one result has been that teens got very creative with the names they gave their sites. Instead of calling it ‘Teen Witchcraft Study Group’ it would become ‘Seekers of the Emerald Moon’ or ‘Oak Grove Musings.’
Honestly, since I never have had to cope with filtering software, this problem and responses to it were not on my radar. But don’t tell me that it is the only reason for some of the extravagant group names one encounters in the Pagan world.
I stopped by the new home of Isis Books on my way to INATS last June 30.
It’s the third home for the Denver area’s oldest Pagan-oriented bookstore, now about thirty years old.
Chatting with owner Karen Charboneau-Harrison, I asked her what the building at 2775 South Broadway used to be — Google Maps still shows it as a plain commercial building with columns in front — until Karen and her husband Jeff turned them into Egyptian pillars.
“A morgue,” she said. “The stained glass was already here when we moved in.”
They have remodeled the former morgue garage into a set of little offices/therapy rooms that are rented out to various counselors, massage therapists, etc., which is why the sign out front now says “Healing Oasis.”
The bookstore is in what used to be the chapel, and there is plenty of room for the mail-order operation.
So as I was saying, I briefly visited the INATS West show yesterday, in the capacity of day labor to help the Zells take down their booth on its last afternoon.
(You sit on the curb in front of the liquor store until a guy wearing a wizard’s hat and driving a van with California plates comes along and says, “Hey, want to eat at an Ethiopian restaurant?”)
The “Street of the Idol-Makers” was shorter than last year’s version, due partly to Sacred Source now being owned by the same people as Maxine Miller Studios, or so I’m told.
The emphatically Pagan switch plate on the right was at Dryad Design’s booth. Paul Borda has also designed a Green Man version, where the switch forms his tongue.
And suddenly it’s all over. Dropped steel pipes from someone’s exhibit frame ring like tolling bells. Castles, temples, and crystal caves lined up in rows collapse into bags and shrink-wrapped pallets. The 4-Wheel Parts Truck Fest needs to set up next.
Accompanied by a photo of Indiana Jones, that was the message at a rock-and-crystal dealer’s booth that I saw yesterday at the INATS West trade show, whose slogan is Connecting Business, Spirit & Sales.
In case you are unsure, microscopic examination shows that the famous crystal skulls were produced on 19th-century machinery. Learn more here.
They do not contain messages from the Pleiadean Brotherhood, street maps of downtown Atlantis, or proof that Elvis and Jesus were the same being.
(Well, maybe I could argue the last in a freewheeling archetypal way. Alcohol not necessary but helpful.)
Denver’s Pagan community is featured in The Denver Post According to chatter on the local listservs, the “leaving a bottle of whiskey” bit was the reporter’s misunderstanding.
Not surprisingly, Colorado’s hard-working Wiccan chaplains were completely ignored in this Post article, which seems to suggest that only the Middle Eastern Monotheisms™ can rehabilitate state prison inmates.
But at least the newer piece mentions them:
Brennan and Anthony also serve as state prison chaplains. Their services are in demand by 500 self-identified pagans who account for 2 percent of the state prison population. Inmate neopagans include Wiccans, druids and the Asatru, who worship Odin and other Norse gods. In prisons especially, the Asatru can be identified with Nazis, skinheads, patriarchy and racism, yet there are pure forms, Brennan said, which focus on positives — self-empowerment and tribal loyalty — rather than white supremacy.
I have just started reading The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice by Michael Krondl.
And I am so happy that in the first pages he destroys the persistent myth that people in the Middle Ages ate heavily spiced food to disguise its rottenness. He offers several good rebuttals:
• Anyone who could afford exotic spices (e.g., pepper, cinnamon) was well-off enough to afford good meat. The rich could afford to eat fresh meat and spices. The poor could afford neither.
• Medieval cookbooks — yes, they existed, for the upper classes — directed cooks to add spices at the end of cooking for a greater olfactory whammy, which negates the idea of concealing or preserving “off” meat.
• Salt is the best cheap, traditional preservative for meat. So why would anyone use expensive imports?
All this is to say that spices weren’t the truffles or caviar of their time but were more on the order of today’s expensive extra-virgin olive oil. But like the bottle of Tuscan olive oil displayed on the granite counter of today’s trophy kitches, spices were part and parcel of the lifestyle of the moneyed classes…
So I gave tonight’s quick supper of sardines, garlic, and pasta an extra flourish of pepper. Got to support the spice trade, you know.
Medieval cooking is on my mind since Sunday night, when a colleague from the university absolutely knocked herself out preparing an Elizabethan feast for her “Midsummer Night’s Dream” party.
There were lots of sweet-and-sour meat-and-fruit dishes, some wrapped in dough, as pasties but without potato, which would not be correct for the period.
And then some players from a community theatre troupe did scenes from the play outdoors under the pines and Douglas firs.
That’s as close to a 16th-century feast as I will ever get.
The house in Charlottesville, Va., where the Botkin familiy lived in the 1960s, also the final location of the Church of Aphrodite.
Gleb Botkin’s Church of Aphrodite lasted from the 1930s to 1969. (He formally incorporated it in 1939, but I don’t know just when it started.)
The church was more Goddess-monotheistic than polytheistic:
Aphrodite, the flower-faced, the sweetly smiling, the laughter-loving Goddess of Love and Beauty, is the self-existent, eternal and Only Supreme Deity, Creator and Mother of the cosmos, the Universal Cause, the Universal Mind, the Source of all life and all positive and creative forces of nature, the Fountainhead of all happiness and joy.
But Botkin rejected such formulas as “love thy neighbor as thyself” and the “so-called Golden Rule,” arguing instead that love requires “two mutually responsive poles.”
Some of the argument he makes in his thealogical book In Search of Reality could justify polyamory as well, although I don’t know if he applied it in that way.
Some of the Charlottesville Pagans still want an historical marker on the house. I don’t know who lives there now — when we stopped by, no one was at home but the cat.
Botkin, his wife, Nadine, and his daughter, Marina Botkin Schweitzer, are buried just outside Charlottesville, where his marker describes him as the Reverand [sic] Gleb Botkin and includes the astrological symbol of Venus.