Polytheism, not Tradition

Keep an eye on the International Year of Polytheism Web project.

This is really more of a conceptual art piece than any sort of reconstructionism (definitely not reconstructionism or capital-T Tradition), although it has been mentioned earlier in the Pagan blogosphere.

Still, if anyone wants to “wants to overcome the epoch of the monotheistic worldviews (and its derivatives such as ‘The West’ and ‘The Arab World’) through the reconstruction of a polytheistic multiplicity in which countless gods and goddesses will eventually neutralize each other,” I wish them well.

Gallimaufry

¶ From an obituary of Frank Conroy (once director of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop) on what a writing teacher does:

“You have to get across to them that the work is separate from them. That’s what good work is: a life independent of the life of the author. So you have unintended qualities in the prose — personal tics, pretending to write, instead of really writing. All writers have to go through this and get it past them. I try to make that quicker for them rather than longer.

¶ “The Law of Attraction.” Jeff Lilly at Druid Journal has a great round-up posting.

¶ I always wondered how much money it takes to get people to appear on “Wife Swap.”

Then an acquaintance who is active in Paganism-and-popular culture was contacted by a staff member for the show. (An illiterate email, she said, which made her think he was some kind of Internet troll instead.)

It’s $10,000. And, yes, they want more Wiccans. We’re the reliable “other” now.

At one time, Wiccans were rare enough in the public eye that we were seen as a motley collection of individuals. Now we are a class, a group, so it is possible to stereotype us. That is a measure of success, in a sort of back-handed way–except when too many negative traits are projected onto us. This process is know as “alterity,” if you speak PoMo.

If you blog it, they will come

Some recent splashes in Hardscrabble Creek. Everybody’s doing it.

quirky findings agricultural plants

how to pronounce chas

dream of recently deceased dog

wolf in navajo

Sex in the culture of the Indians in the 1600s

worship in Greek letter

writing a letter to ELMER for kids

sheela na gig statue buy

DR Australian 43 heaven devil hole

What do all these Web users have in common? They do not know enough to use Google Advanced Search, which would save them a lot of time.

I could not write books without them.

The interlibrary loan librarians.

Even more heartening is [the] observation that interlibrary lending is “the only professional service I can think of in which the provider pays the cost.” The faith our libraries show in the ability of that service to somehow, someday, contribute to a greater good is remarkable, and yet usually goes unremarked.

The greatest resource sharing our libraries practice is sharing their faith in us.

The most controversial anthropologist

One episode of a BBC series called Tales from the Jungle on famous anthropologists examines the “shamanthropologist” Carlos Castaneda (d. 1998), appropriately described as the most controversial anthropologist ever.

For those of us who can’t watch the Beeb, it is available in segments from YouTube.

There are also episodes on Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead.

Without Castaneda, there would probably have been no “neo-shamanism.” Without Mead appealing to Western notions of the noble–and sexy–savage, the “sexual liberation” of the 1960s would have lost one of its ideological underpinnings. And Malinowski, of course, largely shaped 20th-century ideas of ethnography.

The videos are a little hoked-up–and I wish that the BBC would consistently identify the talking heads on the screen. They do include Castaneda’s son and ex-wife, who in the video defend much of his research (although not his actions), and Jay Fikes, an anthropologist known for his work with the Peyote Way in Mexico and the USA, who is more critical.

The video focuses on the cultish last years of Castaneda’s life in particular.

For more on Castaneda, read Richard DeMille’s two books on him, as well as Dan Noel’s The Soul of Shamanism. Also the Sustained Action website.

Via Savage Minds.

Banning Pagans on aesthetic grounds

An Australian reporter dumps on tacky (to him) Pagans.

Pagans infested my university, were constantly pulling out ouija boards at parties and could often be found in the bush near my home, dripping candle wax on one another and swapping Tori Amos albums.

And the commenters dump on him, although signing yourself “Shining Wolf of Indiana” might just be playing right into his hand, you think?

Meanwhile, my university is not what you would call trendy. We are heavy on “non-traditional” (over 25) students, and even a surprising number of the “traditionals” are working full time and/or are married and/or have a kid.

So imagine my surprise at spotting my first (apparent) furry in an English composition class next door to my office, wearing some kind of loose top, a short skirt, and a long, racoonish fake fur tail hanging over the skirt.

We are already wild animals, as Gary Snyder points out. But some of us want to be cartoon animals.

UPDATE: Bad link fixed.

Gallimaufry

• When driving east from Colorado, I often make a short pilgrimage to Carhenge.

• BeliefNet has cut me off again. Restoring this blog to BlogHeaven is a “top priority,” my contact there said. That was three days ago. Again, I am baffled; I have not changed my RSS or Atom feed settings or anything like that. Eventually, I will just stop caring.

• “I guess we’re mainstream now–and thus ripe for parody,” said the person who emailed me this item from The Onion.

Prince Charles, thatch, and the collapse of civilization

The Prince of Wales recently was quoted as saying McDonald’s restaurants “should be banned” (in the United Arab Emirates, if not the UK).

What do we call that, “nutritional mercantilism“?

Although I admire him for his environmental work and his line of organic foods, I laughed pretty hard at Steve Stirling’s fictionalized version of the prince in A Meeting at Corvallis, the final book of his post-Collapse trilogy. (Yes, I know, trilogies . . . )

I have mentioned Stirling’s fairly realistic Wiccan characters, but the third book offers an England where now-King Charles rules, and he has imposed his aesthetic taste on as much of the nation as he controls. Houses must have thatched roofs, while farmers and laborers must wear the old cotton smock when they work outdoors. “De national dress, mon,” says a Jamaican immigrant turned farmer.

Update: Alice Thomson calls the prince a true prophet.

My continued fascination with Gleb Botkin

I recently found a Wikipedia entry on Gleb Botkin. I still think that he is one of the most fascinating figures in American Paganism, with a life whose arc connected the lost world of the Russian royal family to the contemporary Pagan revival of the 1950s and 1960s.

He is worth a biography of his own, I think.

Wicca, ELF, and insomnia

I had a lot of trouble sleeping this past week. Too much waking up with full bladder around 5 a.m. and then being unable to return to sleep, sliding instead into the pre-dawn jim-jams. “My Wasted Life” and other such perennial themes.

Pre-dawn wakefulness always reminds me of one of the first Church of Wicca Samhain seminars that M. and I attended in 1977 or so. We were among the “young folks” at those gatherings–there was a larger middle-aged contingent that was less into religious Pagan Witchcraft and more into dowsing, remote viewing, experiments with ESP, energy healing, and various kinds of “fringe science.”

Several of the men, including, of course, Gavin Frost and Loy Stone, had been trained as engineers and had an engineer’s pragmatic attitude towards magic, broadly defined.

One speaker gave a talk about the military’s experiments with extremely low frequency radiation (3–30 Hz), which is utilized by our navy and the Russians to communicate with submerged submarines. He suggested that these nefarious experiments were causing mental disturbance in humans—possibly because the frequency chosen was close to the Earth’s own natural radio frequency—after thirty years I do not remember exactly.

To prove his point, he asked the audience if they were frequently awakened around 4 a.m. Hands shot up around the room.

All I could think about was that with at least four time zones represented, “4 a.m.” was not just one moment.

But later, as I aged, I realized that four o’clock was a fine time to lie awake and think about all the failures and worries of your life, and that doing so just seemed to be part of middle age.