The Fall of an Intellectual Thug

The University of Colorado has fired Ward Churchill, plagiarist, pseudo-American Indian, and intellectual thug.

In case you have not guessed, I am happy about that.

If a student had committed as much plagiarism as Churchill did, he would flunk the course. (My course, at any rate.)

Some people will try to argue that Churchill was fired for political speech, but he was not. Yes, as some of Ann Althouse’s commenters note, the political speech may have caused his other behavior to be investigated.

It is sort of like being stopped for speeding after you robbed a bank.

I learned about Churchill’s methods when I was a graduate student at CU-Boulder in the 1980s. He led the lynch mob against a religious-studies professor whose work on Native American religion displeased him, and he played the race card every chance that he had. What an irony that he was faking it.

Churchill wanted to be the dictator who could declare whose scholarship was politically acceptable and whose was not. I suppose that is why Russell Means and some other Indian activists are supporting him–they would like to have that power too.

More recently, the American Indian Movement has given Means the shove. And they have an interesting Web page on Ward Churchill, too.

Drumming to Save Their Lives

Reuters Photo: A cultural performance is seen in Pimchakh, 40 km (25 miles) from regional capital Petropavlovsk-KamchatskyOn the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East (across from Alaska), indigenous people are engaged in a work of cultural survival.

“Everyone of my generation speaks the Koryak language, knows the customs, dances, dishes like in the ancient times. But some of our children don’t know anything at all,” said folk performer Lidia Chechulina, slightly breathless after dancing to the beat of a deer-skin drum and the music of her own voice.

Her songs, sung in a guttural language reminiscent of Chinese, describe the beauty of the tundra, volcanoes and the sea, she explains. She adds that songs, one for each person, accompany Koryaks all their lives and act as a charm.

Soviet Communism, with all its Marxist talk about the dignity of labor, etc., had about the same effect on the Siberians peoples as Christianity did on the American Indians–especially when the Bureau of Indian Affairs used to hire missionaries as Indian agents. But then both Christianity and Marxism are monotheisms, in a sense.

This Will Be My Only Harry Potter Post Ever

Megan McArdle examines the failures of magics and economics in the Harry Potter books.

Yet in the Potter books, the costs and limits are too often arbitrary.

A patronus charm, for example, is awfully difficult–until Rowling wants a stirring scene in which Harry pulls together an intrepid band of students to Fight the Power, whereupon it becomes simple enough to be taught by an inexperienced fifteen year old. Rowling can only do this because it’s thoroughly unclear how magic power is acquired. It seems hard to credit academic labour, when spells are one or two words; and anyway, if that were the determinant, Hermione Granger would be a better wizard than Harry. But if it’s something akin to athletic skill, why is it taught at rows of desks? And why aren’t students worn out after practicing spells?

(Via Instapundit.)

"Dowsing for the Dead"

I cannot improve on the headline that Dallas religion journalist Rod Dreher put on his own blog post.

But if you hang around dowsers, you will not hear the world “occult” much. The old ones, at least, were a practical bunch, although a newer generation got all wrapped up in “earth mysteries” and “ley lines.”

I learned to dowse for underground pipes on a Talpa, New Mexico, construction site at age 20.

M.’s father, a civil engineer, also did some dowsing. We once all attended the national dowsers’ convention in Danville, Vermont–which happened to be the town where he grew up.

No one knows why it works, but it does — although in my opinion, a strong mental desire for a certain outcome is counter-productive. That is why dowsing for gold is not reliable!

Oss Tales: Creating the Archaic


To watch Oss Tales is to see the difference between a community and a network and the contrast between self-conscious ritual and tradition.

If you are interested in the construction of ritual and of community–and in the history of the Pagan movement–you should buy the DVD, which contains three short films:

1. “Oss Oss, Wee Oss (1953), an 18-minute documentary of the May Day hobby horse procession in Padstow, Cornwall.

This film was made at the same time when Gerald Gardner & Friends were creating Wicca as the “Old Religion,” and you can feel that mental atmosphere when the narrator intones that the procession represents “one of our religions when we lived in caves.” There are constant references to the unknowable antiquity of the event. “Some say it’s 4,000 year old,” says Charlie Bate, a member of the family that traditionally “brings out” the [Red] Oss.

2. “Oss Tales” (2007), filmed at the 2004 Padstow May Day event, and including some of the people from the original documentary and their descendants, by American anthropologist Sabina Magliocco and filmmaker John Bishop, who compiled this new DVD.

Unlike the 1953 film, which focuses on an unsubstantiated claim that the Oss goes “back to Pagan times,” the newer film touches on some of the social and class issues involved. For one, since 1918 there have been two Osses, the Red and the Blue, and everyone knows who belongs to which faction: “You are born into your color.”

The Blue Oss raises money for charity while the Red Oss raises money for beer for its crew. The Blue Oss dances at the manor house while the Red Oss, although invited by the squire, stays in the town. At least the two groups no longer get into fist fights when they meet in the street. Maybe they don’t want to scare away the 30,000 tourists.

These and other issues were omitted from the 1953 documentary.

Yet. as the historian Ronald Hutton notes in a brief appearance, the event has a “really archaic spirit” and has become a “genuinely primitive rite.” Without any overt, capital-P Paganism, the Padstow event grabs you by the throat, even through the medium of video.

We also learn that professional folklorists have influenced the event and its interpretations since the 1930s, telling Padstownians that their Oss procession was “the relic of a pagan sacred marriage between earth and sky,” as Hutton writes in The Stations of the Sun: The Ritual Year in Britain (1996). The earliest record of the Padstow procession is from 1803. In fact, the oldest record of a hobby horse in England dates from the Tudor era, the 1500s, and most hobby horse processions in England and Wales are–or were–associated with Christmas and New Year’s rather than with May Day.

There is the fertility connection: a woman “covered” by the horse is supposed to become pregnant soon. And there is a death connection: a decoration of graves in the cemetery before the procession.

3. “Oss Oss Wee Oss Redux: Beltane in Berkeley” (2004) runs 14 minutes and was also made by Magliocco and Bishop.

About a dozen years ago, Pagans in Berkeley, California, started their own Maypole-and-Oss tradition in a park. They started by researching Padstow, and as Oss-dancer Don Frew ruefully admits, they found no clues about ritual. So they took their NROOGD Wiccan rituals from the 1960s and added on to them.

After all, while the Padstow procession is ritualized, its rituals are communal, such as which family brings out the Oss. There is no magic circle. But the Berkeley Oss appears in a self-consciously created ritual rather than a pub and the streets. It is a conscious attempt to create tradition and magic. According to some women interviewed, the pregnancy part works, at least.

But this is America, and there is a separation of Oss and state. Participants discourse about rootlessness and ethnic identity and wanting to belong to something.

In Padstow, your family must have lived in town for at least two generations before you can even dance with the Oss. Think how many Californians that provision would disqualify.

One participant flippantly says that after three years, it was an ancient tradition. Maybe, maybe not. If they can keep it going until their grandchildren are doing it, then as Hutton says of Padstow, it will communicate “something genuinely archaic, whatever [its] actual age.”

The disk also inclues a “making of” segment and a study guide. It comes in a two-sided NTSC and PAL format for worldwide use.

Some Shinto Priests

A Dutchman has become the only (?) The Essence of Shinto. Yamakage seems interested both in explaining Shinto to the West and revitalizing it within Japan. He is old enough (81) to remember what happened when this decentralized practice was co-opted by the imperial government in the late 19th century.

Yamakage quotes one priest with approval:

Shrines should gather parishioners together and not teach them, I believe. We should not give any lectures to those who come to pay respect at the shrine or to visit the office of the shrine. We have to respect their positions or ideas. We should neither criticize them nor force them to follow our ideas. For the shrine is the public facility, and we don’t ask which religion or sect they belong to. The shrine is not the place we give more education. It is the place where they freely feel and learn something in their own way.

With so much pressure on contemporary Paganism to follow the “Protestant mode,” with designated leaders, “congregations,” and so forth, we might want to consider Shinto as a model in some things instead, particularly the idea of a priest serving a shrine instead of a congregation–which was true in ancient Paganism as well.

Read a M*F* Book

You have wonder what Zora Neale Hurston would say at seeing her work promoted in this video:

Maybe she would be cool with it. (Definitely NSFW, by the way.)

(Via an LJ community for desperate librarians.)

Pomegranate 9.1 (June 2007)

Contents of the newest issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies:

• Marisol Charbonneau, “The Melting Cauldron: Ethnicity, Diversity, and Identity in a Contemporary Pagan Subculture.”

• Carole Cusack, “The Goddess Eostre: Bede’s Text and Contemporary Pagan Tradition(s).”

• Victor Schnirelman, “Ancestral Wisdom and Ethnic Nationalism: A View from Eastern Europe.”

• Boria Sax, “Medievalism, Paganism, and the Tower Ravens.”

• Mikirou Zitukawa and Michael York, “Expanding Religious Studies: The Obsolescence of the Sacred/Secular Framework for Pagan, Earthen, and Indigenous Religion.”

• Book reviews.

"Travel by Train"

Union Station, Denver
If I had leaned far enough out of my window at the Oxford Hotel to get the full text of the sign at Denver’s Union Station, I would have fallen three stories, which would have ruined M.’s and my trip to the Mendocino coast.

And if I had remembered to pack the USB cable to connect camera to PowerBook, I might have published a day-by-day photo journal. And that journal might have bored some readers to death.

So here is a synopsis, with links instead.

We took Amtrak to Sacramento, then drove to Clear Lake, because I have a fondness for down-at-heel resort towns, like Truth or Consequences, N.M., or Manitou Springs, Colo., the way it was when we lived there. We spent one day just zig-zagging around Lake, Sonoma, and Mendocino counties, being auto tourists.

We stayed at a 19th-century B&B, ate beyond our budget, and of course bought wine. And more wine. (I have a sentimental fondness for Pedroncelli, even though it is not one of the fawncy post-wine boom vineyards, based on a strange dream-like experience during my college years.) And beer, just to be fair.

And then retraced our steps.

Occult Renaissance Nears its End (?)

Dump your Llewellyn stock*—the occult renaissance is about to end.

Or so wrote the ceremonial magician Louis T. Culling in his booklet Occult Renaissance 1972-2008, published in 1972 (suprise) by Llewellyn Publications, price one dollar.

He explains his chronology like this:

[T]he entire field of the Occult had a tremendous upsurge of activity and interest beginning roughly in the year 1894 and lasting roughly to 1936. In that year the doors to the “mysteries” were closed and Occultism has been in the “dark ages” though 1971.

That golden era, Culling claims, produced the Theosophical Society and the Holy Order of the Golden Dawn, while a silver era from 1900-1936 produced Aleister Crowley’s post-GD work as well as that of Dion Fortune, Paul Foster Case, Marc Edmund Jones, and many others. After 1936 came “low-grade claimants and tricksters.”

Oddly, Culling avers that “the wave of popular interest in astrology and the various occult subjects occuring from 1968 to 1971 really has no part in the genuine Occult Renaissance that starts in 1972″ (emphasis in the original).

It’s all based on a 72-year astronomical cycle, with each 72 years representing one degree in the precession of the equinoxes.

The 1972 renaissance was supposed to bring increased understanding of sex magick, a more “receptive and sustaining, hence feminine,” version. (Not what you read in Crowley’s magickal notebooks, which Culling calls “projective.”)

What interests me is that Culling interrupts his discussion of sex magick to talk about ecology, which he defines as “preseving all forms of life for Man’s SPIRITUAL TRANSCENDENCE.” He illustrates spiritual growth through contact with nonhuman life by a story he wrote for the Defenders of Wildlife magazine in 1966 called “The Trader Coyote.” He writes that people who observe Nature closely “study and observe the manifestations of Divine Inteligence operating in Nature so that consciously (and unconsiously, subconsciously) they may make spiritual rapport with nature and become true NATURE WORSHIPPERS.” (Capitalization in the original.)

And, yes, he puts in a good word for Wicca, quoting from the Grimoire of Lady Sheba, which Llewellyn had published about the same time.

As an occultist and magician, Culling rejects explanations of the universe as operating by chance. He expects that the great new understanding of the 1972-1998 period will be that a “Directive Intelligence” drives evolutiion and that by understanding this intelligence, we will learn what Man is slated to become.

Here is the irony of prophecy. Indeed, today more and more people reject evolution-by-chance. Instead, they turn to a heavy-handed, literal-minded evangelical Christian version of “intelligent design.” Rather than seeking any occult purpose inevolution, they wish to reject it altogether.

In their psyches, advocates of intelligent design feel that there must be something moe than a mechanical universe. So did Culling the occultist. But he wished to proceed with an attitude of exploration and learning, whereas theirs is an attitude of rejection and deliberate ignorance. They have their own low-grade claimants and tricksters.

*That is a joke. Llewellyn is a privately held company.