Bog Bodies

I was shelving library books for my college work-study job when I saw it: “The Bog People Glob,” the spine announced. After rolling that around in my mouth, “bog people glob bog people glob,” I had to check it out.

And so the Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob introduced me to some dead people who were sort of time capsules from the late Neolithic to the Middle Ages.

Northern Path links to a National Geographic article that updates some of those stories. It turns out, for instance, that “Windeby Girl,” supposed to have been executed for adultery or some crime, was actually a boy. Oops.

Wikipedia explains the preservation process.

I am waiting for someone who proudly follows a reconstructionist Pagan path to commit their body to a few centuries of tannic acid bath.

About That Previous Post

If I am posting blogger quizzes, you know something is amiss. Other than the stresses of completing a home-remodeling job and getting ready for the new semester, I have also been posting more on my other blog, and I still have a lot of material waiting for that one.

But the pendulum will swing. Call it Gemini syndrome.

Oh really?


You’re The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe!

by C.S. Lewis

You were just looking for some decent clothes when everything changed quite dramatically. For the better or for the worse, it is still hard to tell. Now it seems like winter will never end and you feel cursed. Soon there will be an epic struggle between two forces in your life and you are very concerned about a betrayal that could turn the balance. If this makes it sound like you’re re-enacting Christian theological events, that may or may not be coincidence. When in doubt, put your trust in zoo animals.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Purging books

M. and I in the middle of some home remodeling, just painting and staining after the contractor has finished, and otherwise putting things back together.

In the past, when we moved into a new house or apartment, we claimed our territory by first doing a fire-bowl purification, followed by building brick-and-board bookcases.

Yep, here we are, still decorating in Early Grad Student Style, more timeless than Colonial or Mission or Louis XIV.

Now we have a new panoramic view of the Wet Mountains, spread across two walls — and less room for bookcases. The purge is on, and it ripples from the livng room through the bookcases in the study and the bedroom too.

I stand in front of a bookcase with cardboard cartons at my feet. The books by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whom I quote in everything I write — those stay. The books by the Pulitzer-winning poet whom I admire but never really “got” — they go into the box for the student literary club’s fall fund-raising book-sale.

A friend who shares the “small house, many books” situation says “No extra space, and no books I want to purge!” There is defiance for you. But he is a writer in a tiny town, thirty miles from a half-decent library. And he wants to keep his rectangular friends close. I understand.

Maybe getting rid of books makes room for new books: new friends, new ideas, new experiences.

But it is a sad process too. It is realizing that I will never make time to learn XYZ or that technological changes have made my books on EFG obsolete. It is saying farewell forever to the me who was interested in PQR.

So far I have filled two cartons for the university literary club’s fund-raising book sale, one our little two-room public library, and one of the university library, if they want them.

And then I sit on the sofa and watch a distant thunderstorm flicker on the ridges through our new double-glazed casement windows.

Deities Scramble after Bus Crash

This puts a new spin on the phrase “rush hour of the gods.”

In the gods’ haste to resolve the matter, some of the souls were apparently misplaced. In one instance, an adherent of Buddhism slated to be reborn into an Ohio family was temporarily reincarnated as a tree sloth. And as of press time, a self-avowed atheist who at the last minute took God into his heart has yet to be retrieved from the void and placed among the faithful.

Hat tip: Victoria Slind-Flor.

And the Corn Palace Too

Victorian Slind-Flor puts the “Loaf” in Lammas, with photos of the Palouse region and, even closer to my heart, the sacred Corn Palace of Mitchell, South Dakota, one of the great Roadside Attractions of the northern Plains.

A quick flashback to a 1980s cross-country drive with M.: camping in the Black Hills and the Badlands, Wall Drug, and then showing her the Corn Palace–all memories of boyhood years spent in Rapid City.

Witchcraft on the Screen and on the Page

Pagan performance-studies scholar Jason Winslade is interviewed at the TheoFantastique blog on Witchcraft and the entertainment industry:

Let me first say that I have a hard time coming up with any examples of “real witchcraft” or “real magic” in television or films. As you rightly state in your blog, any portrayals of these phenomena are inevitably fantasy with fancy special effects and things flying around. Any practitioner will tell you that this does not happen. At least they do not in the waking world. (Of course, this begs the question what “real magic” actually is – ask 3 practitioners and you’ll get 5 answers. Certainly “real” magic, with the exception of ritual, is much more of an internal process, and thus doesn’t lend itself to special effects extravaganzas). Some programs may incorporate sound magickal philosophy and metaphysics but their application is ultimately fantastical.

TheoFantastique is written by John Morehead, who also writes Morehead’s Musings, where he has a special interest in Christian evangelism to new religious movements.

"Chutch" – now on DVD?

When I mentioned Ward Churchill, I forgot the TV series that he inspired. But I have forgotten a lot about the Seventies.

The Dark is Rising . . . on Film

In the heart of the English Fen County, Pluvialis is spitting . . .

. . . chips and blood. I am crackling with furious static. Any minute now, small pieces of paper, coins and pens are going to drag themselves across the tabletop, bent and pulled towards me by the immense, bending-the-laws-of-physics fury I’m experiencing right now.

She has been reading Jason Pitzl-Waters’
comments on the upcoming film version of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising.

Let’s set it in America?
Let’s get rid of “all the Arthurian and Pagan stuff”?
Let’s give Will Stanton a twin brother, stolen by the dark?
The Rider a love interest?

Gallimaufry

Time to dump some hot links in the stew pot:

¶ Crikey! Ambulance Driver has done it again! The man’s a bloody bloggin’ gawd.

¶ I have always been fascinated by Ozti the iceman, whose body was found on an alpine pass between Austria and Italy. I think it was Konrad Spindler, an Austrian anthropologist, who suggested that Otzi was fleeing some kind of inter-clan or inter-village or inter-personal conflict when he died. That Otzi bled to death from wounds suggests that Spindler was right. This book probably applies“.

¶ So you are interested in Celtic Studies? Here is your starter kit. Or maybe you just want this .

¶ Everybody wants to belong somewhere!.

¶ Having recently visited the Mendocino coast, M. and I are now watching movies filmed there. Last night it was The Russians are Coming the Russians are Coming!, a classic Cold War comedy with Carl Reiner (not one of my favorites), a young Alan Arkin, and Eva Marie Saint as a typical early-1960s perky female lead.

Its message is the eternal comic one since Plautus’ day: “The grown-ups are silly, but love will conquer all.” Arkin and Theodore Bikel, as the commanders of a Russian submarine, gesticulate and scream at each other like comic-opera Italians, nothing like the careful professionals aboard the Red October.

Next, Johnny Belinda with Jane Wyman. Just think, in a parallel universe she was our First Lady during the 1980s.