The Valentine’s Day card that I bought for M. would be illegal to Saudi Arabia’s Wahabi Muslims.
It would be an acknowledgment that women are more than a necessary evil, household appliances in veils. Maybe it’s an incitement to polytheism too. Who knows?
In fact “red items” are a problem.
So if I had Saudi students and marked their papers in red ink, I would be inciting lust or something?
… chanted the old Irish poet Amergin.
But when this seven-point bull elk exploded from a shadowy ravine about 25 yards from where M. and I were standing, all I could think about was what a sneaky old elk he was.
There we were, two people (and two dogs) standing and talking in low voices while I photographed three mule deer about 75 yards up the slope, when suddenly there was a huge crash down to our left.
“More deer,” I thought, but it was just him. His patience had been finally exhausted, and he gave up his cool hiding place.
He angled up through the leafless Gambel oak toward the rimrock. The deer bounced off a few yards and then stopped to watch, as they do.
And I laid down the camera to help M. look for some gloves that she had left on her favorite rock on Saturday — strong winds had blown them downhill — and then we walked home again.
Your kids won’t know what “Polaroid” means.
I still have my dad’s SX-70 in its leather carrying case. It’s an expensive beast to feed, and when the last flashbar is used up, I will probably dump it. In my memory it sits next to his 1969 Jeep Wagoneer.
Some people liked Polaroid cameras for the privacy factor.
Still on the entheogenic theme …
Andy Letcher, author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom
I liked his book, so I suppose that publicity for it is a Good Thing.
Actually, Shrooms — now on DVD
Two articles on the entheogenic drink ayahuasca, one from National Geographic and one from The Los Angeles Times.
The second site requires registration: BugMeNot can give you a password.
It’s definitely your old-school entheogen:
The concoction itself is said to taste so vile that most people fight their gag reflex to swallow it. Devotees liken the flavor to forest rot and bile, dirty socks and raw sewage. Vomiting is so common that indigenous shamans often refer to the ceremony as la purga, or the purge. And ayahuasca can severely test the commitment of its followers: The potion often reveals its celebrated wisdoms only after repeat encounters. The payoff, adherents say, can be life-altering. Debilitating illnesses such as chronic depression or addiction may disappear after just one session, some say. Others say they shed their egos for a night, finally seeing their lives with a startling clarity.
Behind all the publicity lies this Supreme Court decision.
(Via GetReligion)
Gnosticism, says Canadian Gnostic priest Jordan Statford (and blogger), is not a Jewish or Christian heresy, but stands alone, “too heretical for other faiths. . . . the Secret Church of the Holy Grail.”
His new book, Living Gnosticism: An Ancient Way of Knowing, defines it as “a pre-Christian religious tradition that fuse Judaism, Greek philosophy, and the Mystery Schools of the ancient world.
“Originating in the intellectual ‘café societies’ of Alexandria around 200 BCE, the original Gnostics were Greek-educated Jews, living in Egypt, on the doorstep of the Roman Empire. Theirs was the realm of diverse and interplaying cultures, of ideas and imagination. Gnostics unflinchingly explored the borders of myth and archetype, of metaphors and dreams, of creativity and poetic expression.”
(Sometimes he makes them sound like beatniks of the ancient Mediterraean.)
Also included are
• A dictionary of Gnostic terms such as archon and demiurge.
• A ritual calendar that starts with Candlemas, equating Bridget with Sophia, both as “goddesses” of wisdom and creativity, and runs through the feast of the apostle John, December 27. (Not real goddesses but “symbol[s] for an aspect of something greater.”)
• A question-and-answer section, viz., “Do Gnostics deny the historical Jesus?”
Answer: He is an archetype; “these stories don’t need to be historically true to be valuable.”
• An introduction to the various Gnostic churches of North America: the Apostolic Johannite Church, the Ecclesia Gnostica, the Ecclesia Gnostica Mysteriorum, the Gnostic Church of Mary Magdalene, the Order of St. Esclarmonde (a Cathar mystic executed by the Inquisition).
It’s an excellent introduction to the topic.
There is no original sin in Stratford’s Gnosticism; instead there is a story of loss. (I have suggested before that this story underlies the appeal of such fantasies as Anna Anderson’s claim to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia.)
All Gnostics are in exile from heaven; they need to be reminded of their divine spark within; they need to be told that “the system” is not the world. And salvation comes not from faith-there is the rupture with orthodox Christianity-nor from works, but through enlightenment, gnosis.
Stratford wants to contrast Gnosticism with the “credal” or doctrinal religions. I think the opposite term to “credal” (following Harvey Whitehouse) is “imagistic” – not dependent on doctrine but on small-scale experience involving all the senses.
Stratford, in fact, wishes to link one of Gnosticism’s arms to contemporary Paganism, but I am not so sure of that.
Ultimately there is a chasm between them. Gnosticism cannot be separated from a belief that the world was simply made wrong: “There’s that certainty that something is wrong with the universe, and creeping paranoia that (a) this is somehow not the real world and (b) the forces in charge of this world are hiding something secret, something powerful.” It is a religion of psychic exile.
By contrast, Paganism allows sacred relationships “with the tangible, sentient, and/or nonempirical,” to use Michael York’s definition from Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion.
We may say that there is more to the world than This Side (the “nonempirical” part, but we don’t reject any of it. The gods pop up everywhere: Aphrodite in a shoe-store window display, as Ginette Paris once said.
Some Pagans may feel alienated (for good cause), but we have no reason to be in exile. This is our world, the parts that you can see and the parts that you cannot.
From a friend:
Patrick McCollum has just been selected to be on a special panel to be one of 6 people to brief the United States Commission on Civil Rights — for presentation to the United States Congress and to the President of the United States — about the state of religious discrimination in America.
He will talk about the differential treatment that Wiccans and Pagans receive in government institutions and programs, with the hope that our legislators will enact new policies to further pluralism and end religious discrimination. This briefing will be held in Washington, D.C .on February 8th, 2008 and will become an official part of the Congressional Record.
This is obviously an incredible honor and it will be the first time in US history that a Wiccan has been selected to present a briefing to advise the United States Government. He reports he will also be sworn in to the Goddess, which is also an important first.
More as I hear about it.
Noticed fewer bogus emails from West Africa lately? Maybe this is why.
There is always the old way.
UPDATE: I had to add a link to this picture.
¶ Everything about Cleopatra. (The famous Cleopatra was actually the seventh ethnic Greek queen of Egypt of that name.)
¶ Everything about Alexander the Great.
¶ Those and more web directories at Isidore of Seville.
¶ Dianne Sylvan’s “list of things I don’t/do care about.” As one of the comments said, it would make a good poster. (Via Executive Pagan).
Not one to rush into things, I finally watched Mel Gibson’s slightly a-historical movie of Mayan imperial collapse, Apocalypto, a gory but amazing adventure story.
My father was a big fan of historian Will Durant, so I got the impact of the Durant epigram about the fall of empires at the beginning.
I know that a few blowhard Chicano Studies types complained about the movie, but face it, all those things such as slave raids and the sacrifice of prisoners to the gods were happening, there and of course in Tenochtitlan.
Ever since I took a graduate seminar in Mesoamerican religion with Davíd Carrasco, I have been suspicious of cultures with large, astronomically aligned buildings. They always seem to reflect a society where the king is the Son of Heaven and the Few rule the Many with a heavy hand.
I suspect that Stonehenge might have been produced by a Neolithic version of that cultural template too, for all that Pagans revere the place.
Or you might say that polytheism + imperialism = imperialism.
Along with prisoners of war, the Maya apparently favored sacrificing boys.
Gibson being Gibson, the movie’s final message apparently is, “The world is a corrupt and violent place, so you are better off dying as a Catholic.” Extra ecclesiam nulla salus and all that.
, defines it as “a pre-Christian religious tradition that fuse Judaism, Greek philosophy, and the Mystery Schools of the ancient world.
to be the 