Drug-runners lose in court over “profiling” claim regarding Bibles on the dashboards of their cars.
Personally, when running a load from the Coast, I decorate the dash with The Confessions of Aleister Crowley or the current issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine.
(Read the rest of the quoted song lyric.)
Hat tip: Religion Clause, now on the blogroll under “Religion and Journalism.”
In the postal mail and email:
1. Two fat envelopes bearing mss. of how-to Witchcraft books from publishers who want my name on a cover blurb. Neither came from Woodbury, Minnesota, however. How quickly they forget, eager to move on to the hot new titles in astral sex.
2. An email from someone who shares my surname. My name had come up both her genealogical research and her Pagan research, so “[I] believe that I am supposed to contact you.” Her son is a “sorcer” with a “great destiny” too. Yowie.
They claim descent from the Cliftons of Cornwall. Maybe so. It’s a geographical name (meaning, literally, farm under/by the cliff), so it can pop up anywhere the Angles and Saxons went, but my family lore always said that we came from some Cliftons in the north of England, possibly County Durham.
Of course, family lore and $2 will get you a cup of Starbucks coffee.
3. A Colorado author wrote me a letter, wanting permission to reprint photos from my first-ever book(let), Ghost Tales of Cripple Creek.
“You are hard to track down!” she writes.
If only. See item no. 2.
Boulder, Colorado, resident Martin Brennan is known for writing visionary books about ancient megalithic monuments, such as The Boyne Valley Vision.
A new video clip shows him discussing the mysterious carvings that appear to be synched to the equinoctial sunset shadows at “Anubis Caves,” a site in the Oklahoma Panhandle. You can view them at filmmaker Scott Monahan’s site or at the Mythical Ireland site.
The case for a Celtic connection was made by Barry Fell, Gloria Farley, and the late Bill McGlone, particulary in his book Ancient American Inscriptions: Plow Marks or History?
I have discussed this issue before. It truly baffles me. McGlone makes a plausible argument for the transatlantic origin of these symbols and writings, except . . . .
Why here? Why in far western Oklahoma and southeastern Colorado? There were no great trading cities here 2,000 years ago and no gold nuggets lying on the ground. According to conventional archaeology, there were only a few people here, living the simplest hunter-gatherer lives. They were probably similar to the people encountered by the Coronado expedition in the 1540s living along the rivers (little rivers, mostly) of the High Plains and hunting buffalo when they could.
It’s a hell of a long way to go for a Druidic vision quest.
Nevertheless, the other more contemporary puzzle is why these alleged Celtic inscriptions are so ignored by contemporary Colorado Pagans, most of whom have never heard of them. If you had Stonehenge only four hours’ drive from metro Denver, wouldn’t you go there now and then?
UPDATE: While I concentrated on the alleged Celtic presence in the Southern Plains, I should point out that other students of the inscriptions claim a Punic (Phoenician or Libyan) presence also. It is hard to discuss all this without getting into the politics of diffusionism and the turf battles between Old World and New World archaeologists, all beyond the scope of this blog.
The New Statesman, a British news magazine, has been offering polytheists a platform in its online religion column:
A Blackboard Epiphany in Ancient Delphi (March 19)
The Ancient Gods of Greece Are Not Extinct (March 20)
A Liberal Religion (March 21)
Worshipping the Ancient Greek Gods (March 22)
How Did I Become a Druid?” (March 26)
Worshipping the Sun of God (March 27)
A Brief History of Druidry (March 28)
How Being a Druid Affects my Life (March 29).
Collect the whole set. (Via Tropaion, a blog on Neo-Hellenic religion.)
Ladies in White, three women in Missoula, Montana, tried to start a business scattering human ashes–what the funeral industry calls “cremains”–on national forest land.
The U.S. Forest Service doesn’t like the idea, because they see a “slippery slope” towards permanent monuments:
But the Forest Service has long had a firm policy against commercial scattering, said Gordon Schofield, the group leader for land use here in Region I. If ashes are scattered “the land takes on a sacredness, and people want to put up a marker or a plaque.”
The Ladies in White say their practice is environmentally benign, although they do accept that like other public-lands commercial users (guide services, for instance), they need a permit.
Currently, the official position on private scattering is “don’t ask, don’t tell.” (Some of us writers do tell, however.)
What a wonderful tangle of American religious issues: “nature religion” in the broadest sense, the change in funerary practices, representatives of some Indian tribe sticking their oar in, the organized environmentalists, and the bureaucrats in the middle of it all.
Take a look at Catherine Goodman, the woman on the left. What is that on her head–antlers? a crescent crown?
Via Ann Althouse’s blog, where there are lots of comments.
A flashback to the 1980s: M. and I have been watching some episodes of Robin of Sherwood.
This was the “Pagan” Robin Hood, thanks to the appearance therein of Herne the Hunter, not to mention bits of ceremonial magick.
Back in 1983, the show was a cult favorite in several senses of the term.
Now, it makes me think “Sir Walter Scott (think Ivanhoe) meets Dennis Wheatley.” Or Hammer Studios in the Greenwood.
And then there is the issue of knitting. Dear reader, when you see characters wearing knitted “chain mail,” you know it’s a cheap production.
If you see male characters wearing knit tights, you might surmise that the director made his girlfriend the costume manager, because knitting was not even known in 12th-century England–not even by hand, let alone machine-knit.
In fact, if 12th-century male characters are wearing short tunics and tights, then the historical research for the film probably consisted of watching the 1922 version of Robin Hood, starring Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., which seems to have set the fashion for most subsequent adaptations.
I blogged earlier about how some British Pagans have borrowed the rhetoric of North American tribes, wanting their own version of NAGPRA and control over the remains of prehistoric British people.
Blogger and academic Yvonne Aburrow suggests that such remains, after study, might go into a national burial mound.
It would be wonderful if a keeping place for the ancient British dead could be specially constructed, perhaps in the form of a very large Iron Age roundhouse, or a burial mound, where the dead could be kept in special shrines, with all the details known about them and their lives displayed near them, but still allowing archaeologists access for research.
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.
¶ 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.
Some recent splashes in Hardscrabble Creek. Everybody’s doing it.
quirky findings agricultural plants
dream of recently deceased dog
Sex in the culture of the Indians in the 1600s
writing a letter to ELMER for kids
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.