What I Will Be Doing for Beltane

Yes, “will be doing.” Some people look at the calendar and say that Beltane is this evening and tomorrow. Others celebrated last weekend, according to the “weekend nearest the cross-quarter day” rule. Only by that rule, it comes next weekend.

By the Sun, it falls on Saturday the 5th, as this archaeastronomical Web site will show you.

I plan to visit one of the archaeastronomical sites in southeastern Colorado of which I have written before. This one, the Sun Temple, as the contemporary researchers call it, will be new to me. Something is supposed to happen there on the cross-quarter days. I hope to post photos and/or video links next week.

Meanwhile, you may decide if Beltane and the other cross-quarter and quarter days is

a. Calculated by the solar/astronomical calendar.
b. Calculated by the secular calendar and celebrants’ work schedules.
c. A week-long season, so the day does not matter.

If (a) or (b), is it better to celebrate early to get “rising energy” or as close to the actual moment as possible?

Teen Witches and Sociologists

Cover of Teenage Witches, by Helen Berger and Douglas EzzyTeenage Witches: Magical Youth and the Search for Self, a sociological study of young Pagan Witches, will be shipping in a few days from Rutgers University Press.

I have heard co-authors Helen Berger and Doug Ezzy give presentations from their research, which is excellent.

From the Rutgers University Press catalog:

As Helen A. Berger and Douglas Ezzy show in this in-depth look into the lives of teenage Witches, the reality of their practices, beliefs, values, and motivations is very different from the sensational depictions we see in popular culture. Drawing on extensive research across three countries-the United States, England, and Australia-and interviews with young people from diverse backgrounds, what they find are highly spiritual and self-reflective young men and women attempting to make sense of a postmodern world via a religion that celebrates the earth and emphasizes self-development.

Not to be confused with Silver Ravenwolf’s Teen Witch.

The Wight-Hand Path

Robin Artisson has an interesting posting on house-wights and land-wights:

Land wights and house wights are kin to humans, in many ways. They are another population of sentient beings that share our world, and we spring from the same source, the same web of life. The same Gods that preside over the human world also act as “chief powers” over the wights of any world.

And he is right about the offerings. I should do that more; I tend not to visit the outdoor shrine enough during the winter, when it means slogging through snow. But the snow is over now, let’s hope.

Gallimaufry

Leftovers tossed into a pot:

¶ From my friend Rowan in Colorado Springs: Ten Things to Do to Get Ready to Join a Coven. Nothing about candles or astral projection. Learn to cook, keep your word, have a life.

¶ Using the “Mary Magdalene as sacred prostitute” meme to sell sex aids, if you consider the site’s overall purpose. (See also Aphrodite pandemos.)

¶ M. and I watched The Last King of Scotland on DVD. Forest Whitaker owned the title role of Idi Amin Dada. He fully deserved the Oscar.

¶ I think that two of my nature-writing students have joined the cult of Charles Bowden.

¶ Weirdest Web search string of the month to bring someone here: sex in cotopaxi colorado. I hope he found some–Cotopaxi is pretty tiny–but is AOL Search the best way to start?

Wicca’s Legimacy as Religion

It is often a bad idea to read the comments on political blogs. They tend to degenerate into vicious name-calling by anonymous persons all too quickly.

A recent post on the pentacle grave marker case at the political blog Winds of Change bemoaned the fact that Americans litigate over religion:

I abhor the kind of attitude that leads to people hassling Christians over creches at Christmas, and that spurred the ACLU to threaten to sue a Christian cross off the seal of the County of Los Angeles California.

At the same time, blogger David Blue continued,

This long struggle for religious fairness for those who have died defending America has now reached a satisfactory end, mostly because George W. Bush shot his mouth off too much, and consequently it was better for the US Department of Veterans Affairs to settle, with a non-disclosure agreement, than to defend a weak case in court.

And he praised Jason Pitz-Waters’ “brilliant, link-rich posts at The Wild Hunt Blog” for their coverage.

The comments that follow are interesting. Many commenters argue for fairness: given that there are hundreds of Wiccans in the military, they deserve the same treatment as followers of Eckankar and other new religions, not to mention avowed atheists, who have their own military grave marker symbol.

Some comments make much of the newness of Wicca, while others note that all religions start as new religions. I was impressed that a couple of comments came from names that I know from religious-studies circles.

Personally, I found the comment thread interesting because it reminds me that much of the blogosphere is an echo chamber. People read bloggers with whom they agree, or they read their ideological opponents just so that they can make nasty comments, usually anonymously. I read some of these comments, and I wonder, “How can anyone still think that way?”

But of course they do. It is good to be reminded.

Empty classrooms

Classes are over; only finals week remains. That means a lot of sitting in my office in a suddenly quiet building, reading papers and portfolios.

In his memoir Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, the literary critic Paul Fussell writes,

When deserted by students, classrooms are dead in a way no other public spaces are. . . . College students are so fresh, so noisy, and so beautiful that their absence from empty classrooms is unignorably melodramatic and touching. They and their charming loquacity pass, but the room is silent, and it remains, in its permanence and anonymity making its ironic comment: “You young people will grow old; your hopes and certainties alike will fade away; your vigor and beauty will vanish; you will be replaced by others like you, equally self-certain and self-concerned.”

A Wiccan Prison Chaplain Responds

A Wiccan prison chaplain writes,

Because Normal Ordinary Responsible People (NORPs) cannot conceive of committing horrendous acts themselves, we find it difficult to think or believe that there are people who commit horrendous acts willingly. We struggle to understand the incomprehensible. Since most people accept that others think like they do, when we hear of someone who thinks differently, and we see the horrible, painful results of that thinking, we assume that something must have “driven” them to it–an unjust, dysfunctional culture, bad parenting or an abusive childhood, mental illness, or a host of other reasons. But this theory of criminal behavior is badly flawed.

With more than 2,000,000 individuals currently incarcerated in prisons and jails in the United States, we have the highest absolute number of imprisoned persons in the world. There are currently some 6,000,000 people under some form of court-ordered supervision; electronic monitoring, probation or parole. These numbers are appalling, but they amount to less than 5% of our population. That means that more than 95% of Americans manage to live their lives without committing horrendous crimes, in spite of the fact that they live in this same sick dysfunctional culture. More than 99% manage to do it without murdering anybody.

The inmates that I work with, if they’re honest with themselves and honest with me, all say that they made a choice to commit crime, either through an active choice, or by going along with someone else’s decision. Many of them can cite addiction or abuse, or a host of other extenuating circumstances, but they acknowledge personal choice at the center of their decision. When pressed for a reason, the most common is that “it seemed like a good idea at the time”. (Emphasis added. Quoted with permission from the original writer, Martin Anthony.)

So when someone (as has happened) tries to deal with, for instance, the Virginia Tech shootings by going all Reclaiming (“Each of us embodies the divine.”), the appropriate response might be, “Fine, but if they are trying to kill me, I am going to try to stop them with my own innate divinity–and whatever weapons are handy.”

Muslims attack Yazidis

Followers of “the religion of peace” attack members of a religious minority, the Yazidis of northern Iraq. (This is what you can expect from them if you do not follow a “religion of the book.”)

Journalist Michael Yon recently visited a Yazidi village, where he was treated well.

I had been hearing about the Yezidi people who live in villages near Dohuk. Followers of an ancient religion, whose proponents claim it is the oldest in the world, there are thought to be about a half million Yezidis, living mostly in the area of Mosul, with smaller bands in forgotten villages scattered across northern Iraq, Syria, Turkey and other lands. Saddam had labeled the Yezidis “Devil Worshippers,” a claim I’d heard other Iraqis make, but no source offered substantiation. I wanted to know more.

(Thanks to MacRaven.)

VA Approves the Wiccan Pentagram

The first message (from a Pagan staffer at the American Academy of Religion) hit my inbox at 12:28 today, and then the Colorado Pagan email lists lit up: The Veterans Adminstration approved the pentagram for veterans’ grave markers.

(Pentagram, pentacle, same thing as far as the news media are concerned. Personally, to me the “pentacle” is a disk with a pentagram engraved or drawn on it, but I won’t quibble.)

Credit for the heavy legal lifting goes to Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who report the news here. Credit also to Circle Sanctuary for serving as the plaintiff.

The litigation charged that denying a pentacle to deceased Wiccan service personnel, while granting religious symbols to those of other traditions, violated the U.S. Constitution.

“This settlement has forced the Bush Administration into acknowledging that there are no second class religions in America, including among our nation’s veterans,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director. “It is a proud day for religious freedom in the United States.”

From what I heard last November from the spouse of one of the lawyers involved, Americans United pretty well had the VA nailed for violating their own regulations and were counting on the potential embarrassment of a court trial to scare the VA into doing the right thing. It looks like that legal strategy worked.

40 Things That Only Happen in Movies

Samples:

10. The Eiffel Tower can be seen from any window of any building in Paris.

13. If staying in a haunted house, women should investigate any strange noises wearing their most revealing underwear.

17. If you are heavily outnumbered in a fight involving martial arts, your opponents will wait patiently to attack you one by one by dancing around you in a threatening manner until you have defeated their predecessor.

Read them all.