Remember the 1980s fad for having your “colors done“?
The Color + Design blog is applying it to religions too, and here are the colors of Paganism, as selected by Pagan blogger Yvonne Aburrow.
If you are planning to redecorate your house, you can pick “Green Man” or “Red Earth.”
¶ Dude, it’s like this secret Irish slang, you dig? So don’t be a twerp–glom onto this.
On the other hand, be careful of enthusiastic folk etymologists with a pocket dictionary and an agenda. It could just be a gimmick.
¶ Time and Mind is a new journal of postprocessual archaeology: “The journal features scholarly work addressing cognitive aspects of cross-related disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology and psychology that can shape our understanding of archaeological sites, landscapes and pre-modern worldviews.”
¶ Blogging will be light for the next few days. I have to ride the big silver snake to Southern California and the American Academy of Religion annual meeting. Berg should have a booth there–maybe I can find the journal.
So many bloggers go to events and post pictures of exhibitor booths and shots of happy people in hotel bars. I will try to avoid that — unless I get something really good.
I will be checking out the possibility of freelance work too, which adds an extra urgency to the trip.
¶ How is your vocabulary? I donated 300 grains of rice the first time that I tried this online game. Then the AI started serving up all these Latinate terms. Level 50 is the top?? (Hat tip: Odious and Peculiar.)
¶ Ancient Egyptians dealt with zombies too. (Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds.) Pluvialis agrees: we need to know these things.
¶ Hecate is getting testy about media Witches. I think there is a Gresham’s Law of spokespeople: the weird drive out the sensible.
¶ Deborah Oak wonders if Elvis is a god yet.
We celebrate the holy day commonly called Samhain not on one day, but on several. In other words, there is no one contemporary Pagan liturgical calendar.
As I write this, the actual moment in the solar cycle is about an hour away, according to Scott Monahan’s useful archaeastronomy site. (Scott is also the videographer of the epigraphers arguing for ancient Celtic visits to America: Here is his latest YouTube video.)
So take your choice: the Pagan festival occurs on (1) the night of October 31st, (2) November 1st, (3) the full Moon nearest to November 1st, (4) a weekend night nearest to November 1st, (5) the day or night when the Sun is at 15 degrees of Scorpio in the tropical zodiac, halfway between the fall equinox and the winter solstice (Northern Hemisphere). Number 5 is happening right now.
I wonder if the push for official work-and-school-recognized Pagan holidays will force us to pick one of five choices and live with it.
Recently, an old friend complained in someone’s blog comments that our holy day was being “commercialized.” I beg to disagree. Let a thousand Spirit World stores open selling plastic tombstones and sexy witch costumes. The popular holiday of Halloween provides a sea in which we swim.
When I wrote Her Hidden Children, I gave three pages to Wilhelm Reich, because I felt that his unconventional ideas on the body, sexuality, and life energy had as much to do with the intellectual underpinnings of American Paganism as did, for example, the anthropological theories of Sir James Frazer (“sacred kings” and all that).
Reich was all but burned as a heretic, but now his ideas are getting a second look as his papers are unsealed.
Physician-scientist Wilhelm Reich, best known for his claims of a cosmic life force associated with sexual orgasm, died in federal prison, and the government burned tons of his books and other publications and destroyed his equipment.
But half a century later, a small number of scientists and other believers are working to advance the European-born psychiatrist’s work on what he called “orgone energy” – a theory largely forgotten in the scientific mainstream.
“Personally, I think it’s going to be a long time before all of his work is understood and recognized,” said Reich’s granddaughter, Renata Reich Moise, a nurse-midwife and artist in the coastal town of Hancock.
If you live in New England, visit the Wilhelm Reich Museum. Rent a cottage and try some orgone experiments.
¶ John Barleycorn Reborn is a double CD compilation of dark folk music from the British Isles.
¶ Staying with the British theme: if you see this, you must be in Glastonbury.
¶ Now this is embodied Paganism.
¶ “Sexy witch” Halloween costumes (big this year) require striped stockings. Why is that? The “sluts and slashers” aspect of costuming bothers some Pagans.
¶ Another example of group disfunction?
¶ I missed DOR Day. Next year I won’t. (I do wish bloggers would abandon white-on-black type. The only thing more eyestrain-inducing is purple-on-black.)
As promised, three of today’s altars at the state university erected for the Day of the Dead (Día de los muertos).
An altar to Vlad the Impaler, also known as Dracula, from the history and art clubs. Club members admitted that it was a bit short on Roumanian content. One girl speculated about an impaled head that she had seen somewhere; all agreed that a big spike would have helped.
After all, he was just a hard-working prince holding off the Islamic menace. For more Vlad-ophilia, read The Historian.
An altar to firefighters.
The Catholic student association altar. Off the the left, out of the frame, was a bottled pre-mixed mojito cocktail, which the builders agreed could not be left there overnight. (Apparently La Virgen likes mojitos.) The place is swarming with students after all.
Students are hard at work putting up Pagan altars in the student center. At least that is what it looks like to me, although I am sure that la profesora would differ.
I did not hear about a parade this year, however.
Photos to come.
The GetReligion blog, which covers issues of religion and journalism, takes on coverage of the Witch School’s move to Rossville, Illinois. (Full Chicago Tribune story and video here.)
Jason Pitzl-Waters has posted repeatedly about the various Witch School controversies, so see his blog for the background.
Maybe it is because I am still working to unload my late sister’s white elephant of a house in a small northern Missouri town, but I feel that this is as much of an economics story as a religious one.
But this is America, and we habitually mis-label our debates. We use the language of race and ethnicity to talk about issues of social class. And we use the language of religion to talk about people’s gut-level fears that their little town — and by extension, them — just does not matter any more in the America of Wal-Mart and mega-churches.
From GetReligion: A reader of ours, Christopher, mentioned in a note to us that the story is largely about a community dealing with “economic decline, arson, and drugs.”
I agree. Although I have never set foot in Rossville, I have been in plenty of places like it.
And it is just too wrenching to their self-image for the Chamber of Commerce types to think of themselves as another Salem, Mass., and to promote Rossville that way!
Instead, they probably hope to attract a new factory. But it is not coming.
Help a Wiccan college student with a research project on rites of passage by taking this test.
No, I don’t know if she has read Coming to the Edge of the Circle or not, or if she still thinks that Van Gennep is the latest thing.
(I do not know the student personally, but I sort of know her through email lists.)
Or you could just find out how fluffy you are. I hope that your score is a negative number.