Let’s Hear It for BP605.W53!

When you visit a university library that uses Library of Congress call numbers, are you tired of finding books on Wicca in the BF’s along with abnormal psychology?

(For example, my book Her Hidden Children is at BF1566 .C55 2006. At least The Paganism Reader made it into the BL’s, the religion category.

But now, according to a professional librarian on one of the lists that I read, things are changing:

It took them long enough…. but not nearly as long as the change from Moving pictures to Motion pictures.

If anyone cares, here’s what the official subject heading looks like, complete with cross reference and literary warrant:

053 0BP605.W53
150 Wicca
450 Wica
550 Neopaganism
550 Witchcraft

And there’s now a specific LC classification number as well. Dewey number is 299.94.

More Posthumous Recognition for PKD

Maybe he was on to something: “Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come” by Brent Staples in the New York Times.

The science fiction writer’s job is to survey the future and report back to the rest of us. Dick took this role seriously. He spent his life writing in ardent defense of the human and warning against the perils that would flow from an uncritical embrace of technology.

I would phrase that slightly differently: SF writers, I think, more often take some aspect of life today and develop its possibilities.

(Via Communion of Dreams.)

Clifton’s Three (So Far) Laws of Religion

Since my blog-pal Gretchin asked about the “laws of religion,” here they are.

1. Nothing Ever Goes Away Completely. Every religious doctrine or practice ever invented is still being carried on by someone, somewhere.

2. The Disciple Is More Obnoxious Than The Teacher, which is the spiritual corollary of the old maxim, “The servant is more snobbish than the master.”

3. All Genuine Religions Have Torchlight Processions. See, for example, the one at the beginning of this documentary.

Now before all the Buddhists come after me (unless they do have torchlight processions in Sri Lanka or somewhere), let me say that this law is more aesthetic than philosophical. With all the advances in techne over the past millennium, still nothing speaks to the soul like flickering flames moving through the darkness.

Hunting the Good Graves

Caroline Tully, an Australian Witch, has started blogging with an emphasis on artistic expressions about Pagan religion and remembering the dead.

Under the photo of a Black Sabbath album cover that she found inspirational once upon a time, she writes:

I may as well go on and say that I think my identification as a Witch also has a lot to do with musing on visual imagery, including art. We Witches do love our real-world ritual objects and our “be here now” physicality in the exercise of our religion, don’t we?

I concur.

Gallimaufry

¶ All genuine religions have torchlight processions (Clifton’s 3rd Law of Religion), but how do you make a torch? This guy has answers. For more Neolithic fun, make your own rock-and-plant-fiber oil lamp. He has instructions for that job too. It’s all a metaphor for living.

¶ I have been remiss in not thanking Anne Hill for her review of Her Hidden Children.

¶ Summer library program yanked after claims of witchcraft. That’s Greenville, South Carolina. I will be in nearby Spartanburg all next week. Luckily, I do not own any tie-dyed T-shirts. (Via Wren’s Nest.)

¶ Some Danish Pagans decided to make a religio-political statement–with a large stone. Take that, Harald Bluetooth!

¶ Some Greek Pagans are now able to use ancient temples, although bureaucratic delays persist.

I Can’t Do What My Father Did

Another meme going around: “I can’t do one-quarter of the things my father can.”

Fathers born in the 1940s or 50s–and please bear in mind that this will not apply to all of them–seem to demonstrate with much greater frequency the ability to ‘Take Care of Things’.

Being in possession of this blanket set of skills crucial for the operational fluency of daily life, they become indispensable to the family unit, developing auras of respect and–notably–competence.

They include, but are not limited to:

* Plunger Operation
* Woodworking
* Toy Repair
* A knowledge of adhesives

Dad had me beat in one area: horsemanship. He could throw a double-diamond hitch on a pack horse in a snowstorm. I never learned any of that.

I think I am his equal in the other stuff. Cars are more complicated now, so it’s mainly a matter of changing your own oil, checking tire pressure, and being aware of things changing for the worse.

But wait. They’re talking about the guys my son’s age — if I had a son. Hmmm..

Popular Mechanics, as ever, stands ready to fill the gap.

UPDATE: I left out the Wiccan connection.

Much of what I learned about woodworking in particular I learned in 7th and 8th-grade shop classes. And who was behind the push for such “manual” education in the schools? None other than Charles Godfrey Leland, whose three books on Tuscan folklore, witchcraft, and the goddess Aradia helped fuel the 20th-century Wiccan revival.

In Leland’s day, it was a rare kid who stayed in school after age 14. He believed that “manual arts” should be part of the curriculum, and he advocated for them a lot.

Via Glenn Reynolds. Men just want to be useful.

Five (Really More) Thinking Bloggers

Erik at Executive Pagan tagged me with the “Thinking Blogger” meme. That’s fair enough, since I hit him with the “book pile photo thing.” (Mine’s here.)

In fact, I read one of his links too: Rod “Crunchy Con” Dreher.

So, setting aside the uber-bloggers like Glenn Reynolds, here are five who make me think or delight me with their writing:

• Ambulance Driver is a funny, often moving, and if you’re in emergency medicine (which I am not), informative blog about life aboard a Louisiana ambulance.

• Rate Your Students, now on summer vacation, is a venting space for academics (which I am). Find out what professors really think of their students’ lame excuses.

• If the universe had take a different twist, I would have become a religion journalist, yet Get Religion continues to show me how the job should be — and more often should not be — done. In other words, the press just does not “get” religion as a motivating factor in human affairs.

• James Lileks is an artist of blogging, even though I do not share all of his preoccupations.

• Querencia is written by three guys preoccupied with falconry, archaeology, the literature of natural history and exploration, Central Asia, and dogs. The “book pile” meme has been fruitfully applied there. They’re my blogging heroes.

Here is the original post that started it all.

Book-signing at Isis

Come Saturday, I will venture into the bustling hive of northern Colorado, where all the people drive shiny cars, to give a little talk and sign copies of Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America at Isis Books.

Time: 3 p.m.
Date: Saturday, June 9
Place: Isis Books, 5701 E. Colfax Ave., Denver
(Colfax at Ivanhoe)

Y’all come if you live in the metro Denver area.

Pan’s Labyrinth –More Gnostic than Pagan?

Pagan blogger Jason Pitzl-Waters has written a great deal about the film Pan’s Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno), praising it in words such as these:

I believe “Pan’s Labyrinth” presents a unique opportunity to discuss Pagan/polytheist theology in contrast to the dominant monotheisms. Unlike “The Da Vinci Code”, this film isn’t bogged down with questions about Christian heresy and Gnosticism and can be referenced without having to talk about our views on Mary Magdalen’s marital status. If this film continues to seep into public conversations about faith and religion, Pagan commentators should be ready to move beyond disclaimers regarding Ofelia’s actions and instead talk about what elements in the film accurately portray Pagan ideas and beliefs.

Living 25 miles from the nearest movie house, M. and I are big Netflix customers, and last night we finally saw the film now that it is out on DVD.

Neither of us would have called it a “Pagan” movie, faun or no faun. (I will skip the “faun movie” puns.)

To me it was far more Gnostic, although perhaps not so thoroughly Gnostic as The Matrix.

That Ofelia is a “lost princess” seems like yet another telling of the wanderings of Sophia (Wisdom) in the fallen world. Many people respond to that story of separation: “I am not from here. My parents are not my real parents. I belong in a better, purer place.” So Gnostic.

The “lost princess” is an archetypal story. It is why so many wanted to believe that young Grand Duchess Anastasia survived the murder of the Russian royal family in 1918 to wander lost and unrecognized for years. The story pulls us. As the Wikipedia article points out, Sophia is the original “damsel in distress.”

Gnosticism and Paganism have their points of contact, but they differ in their views of divinity and the material world. In Pan’s Labyrinth, the material world is clearly one to be escaped from (and with good reason) and the “real world” is somewhere else.

Mars and Venus Are in Love

Ich bin ein siegreicher Unterwasserkommandant.

The July issue of the popular military history magazine Armchair General has my name in it. Two other readers and I were named winners of the “You Command” contest in the March issue, involving a U-boat attack on an Atlantic convoy in 1943.

It’s a sort of essay question: You are given a scenario with three tactical options, and you must pick one and justify it in writing. They print excerpts from the winning entries.

So I decided to try, and I won. Everything I know about commanding submarines I learned by reading and by playing Gato and Harpoon — computer games.

Ensign William Thomas BaileyIt felt odd to write my entry. The man in the photo popped into my head, which was a bit creepy. His name was Ensign William Thomas Bailey. In March 1942 he married the woman who would become my stepmother, and in September 1942 his ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat and sunk with all hands. She waited in New Orleans for three more months until it was obvious no miracle was going to bring him back, then eventually went to work for the Army in Honolulu where she led an active social life involving beaches, restaurants, high-ranking officers, and drinks with umbrellas in them.

Mars and Venus are in love.

Armchair General’s publisher, Eric Weider, tries to make that point in his July editorial, answering critics who claim that study of military history is “odd or even morbid.” The trappings of war are beautiful (airplanes, uniforms, music, etc.), and war is an activity that brings out not just the worst but the best in its participants.

The psychologist James Hillman, whose “polytheistic psychology” has changed my thinking quite a bit, threw himself against the same problem in his recent book A Terrible Love of War. He takes the combat-as-ecstasy (literally being outside your everyday self) line, but also refuses to think that war can be wished away with perfect social engineering.

• Notes from a 2002 conference about the book, by someone wrestling with Hillman’s message:

What if Aphrodite were akin to Pan? What if she valued, not war, but Ares himself, a man-god, a relationship, a lover, yes, a lover, not a warrior?

• A reviewer at GlobalSecurity.org contemplates Hillman’s connection between ideological wars and monotheism:

Being reveals itself as “War” in the West not because of Homer’s glorification of it, but because it is nourished by the extreme monotheism of Christianity, an “Old Testamament’warrior’ God of Jaweh, tacked onto a New Testament without War (“Turn the other cheek, and give your enemy your cloak). . . . Now war has become “Apollonic” because “It was Apollo who chases, but fails to consummate his relations in closeness.” Here Hillman does not hesitate to draw the inevitable conclusions from the fact that Ares always lies down with Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love. From ancient Sumner to present day Iraq the story is the same: the thrill, the glory, and the ‘erotics” of war pass every other experience in intensity and delight. The hold of war is as powerful as Eros, indeed, IS Eros: “There is no beauty like it, because its beauty is evil” said one soldier, echoing Baudelaire. Can anyone be so foolish as to blieve that this violence is only incidental, only or purely contextual? The much touted “Sex AND violence” of the so called “conservatives”? Do we think that television generates it?

• It has even made it to YouTube.

It’s a book that I will need to re-read one day, trying to understand how the energies of the gods show themselves in our lives and our culture.

And I am waiting for a stronger connection to be made between polytheistic psychology and religious polytheism. Too many people who espouse the latter still conduct their mental lives within a more agnostic psychology (think of behaviorism, for instance). The gods, as the poets tell us, have their own agendas, which sometimes rip our lives apart. How do you give them enough, but not too much? Is Ares satiated with computer-game slaughters?