Inspired by the problems with BeliefNet (which still occurred before I touched any of my site feed settings), I have tweaked the settings a little bit, trying to make them more compatible with different browsers and aggregators.
Thanks also to everyone who contacted BeliefNet on my behalf.
Knowledgeable feedback will be appreciated. I am curious to know if the LiveJournal feed that was set up for this blog has vanished into the ether too, but since I am not an LJ user, I cannot check it.
I want these!
Just a sample:
1st-LEVEL PROFESSORIAL SPELLS
* CANCEL MEETINGS. Professors at Level One may cancel department meetings only. (See Appendix 253 for a full list of levels and corresponding meetings.) This spell may be countered by another Professor’s Spell of Urgency, and will always be blocked by a Department Chair’s Reminder of Contractual Obligations.
* ACCEPT GRADES. -2 to Students’ Argument rolls. However, Students with 3 hit dice or more may retaliate with a Spell of Grievance (-3 to Professors’ Endurance rolls).
* MAGIC PEN. Increases grading speeds by a factor of at least two.
* SUMMON SENIOR COLLEAGUE. Professors attacked by Red Tape (q.v.) or under a Spell of Bewilderment may conjure up a tenured colleague for assistance. For correct information, perform a DC 12 Bureaucracy check.
(Hat tip: The Little Professor)
No, it’s not a porn site but a light-hearted collection of pop-culture witch images.
Here is some World War II bomber “nose art,” for instance.
Some of the images, such as those of Fiona Horne, are not work-safe, however.
I want to see the Halloween party hats mentioned in the upcoming book on Pagan material culture (or on material-culture theory as applied to Paganism) in our Pagan studies series.
Two other issues connect here, at the very least.
One is the idea of the body as “nature” and hence as a locus of nature religion, which I broached in Her Hidden Children but about which a lot more could be said.
Then there is also the complex of reasons why “witch” is typically gendered as female. (And what sort of female?)
Bridging the gap between the print Pagan magazines of a few years back (Green Egg, anyone?) and Websites that you lose interest in, what with the flaming pentagrams and white-on-black type, The Invisible College is a downloadable magazine in PDF format. Entheogens, trances, shamanism, art . . .
In fact, one contributor is Diane Darling, formerly of Green Egg.
“Invisible College” has a couple of antecedents. Sometimes it is a nickname for The Royal Society. But that nickname itself comes from a time — typically the 16th century — when science and esoteric thought were not so far apart, with the same men studying astronomy as science and casting horoscopes.
Fifty-two pages. Worth (dare I say) printing out.
Morning Glory Zell and Tim/Oberon Zell of the Church of All Words with Lady Sintana (right) at the Church of Wicca Samhain Seminar in 1978. Photo by Chas S. Clifton.)
Jason Pitz-Waters links to a newspaper article about Sintana (Candace Lehrman) and the House of Ravenwood, one of the best-known covens in the Atlanta area.
Ravenwood was also the subject of a book by a group of sociologists of religion: Allen Scarboro, et al., Living Witchcraft: A Contemporary American Coven (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994). Being sociologists, the authors concentrated quite a bit on issues of authority–when you have a charismatic and strong-willed founder who claims to have retired, has she really retired?
There is too much Lord-ing and Lady-ing in the Craft, mostly a bleed-through from the Society for Creative Anachronism, and it only gets in the way. British Witches, I have noticed, coming from a land where those titles mean something (like it or not), tend not to use them.
Sintana, however, could get away with it.
Tim Sebastion, chief of the Secular Order of Druids in the UK, died on February 1.
He was always in the swirl of controversy around Stonehenge. This site, although dated, gives a feel for how that has gone.
His order was formed in 1975 and the acronym was chosen deliberately, or so I have been told. Based on my couple of meetings with Tim (the last in a Bath pub in 2004), it seemed that by appearing to not be totally serious, he was able to be very serious.
He also held the Bardic Chair of Caer Badon (Bath) after founding a gorsedd (poetic competition) in 1995.
A ton of British Druid Web sites exist: Here is a sampling.
Will you also agree that if [the public] is ill-disposed towards philosophy, the blame must fall on that noisy crew of interlopers who are always bandying abuse and spiteful personalities–the last thing of which a philosopher can be guilty?
The Republic
Chapter 22, translation of F.M. Cornford
(Book Six)
No, Kanga has not mistaken him for Baby Roo and is trying to give him a bath.
It’s certain Middle Eastern Muslims again who have it in for A.A. Milne’s character.
A blogger in Qatar reports that images of Piglet are being censored from children’s books. Follow the link for photos of the evidence.
Next step, perhaps: stern imams will thunder in their Friday sermons: “Do not even think of a cartoon pig, or you will be damned!”
The censored Piglet is the colorized, Disney-fied version. The Piglet in the graphic here, however, is based on Ernest H. Shepard’s original 1920s pen-and-ink drawings.
The Winter
(15 Nov. 1966)
Wheelbarrow’s tire is flat, muddy ground now sets
A plaster mould around the folded rubber the first
Cold morning of the year.
Philip Whalen
(1923-2002)
One of the trio of Reed College Beat poets, along with Gary Snyder and Lew Welch, Philip Whalen formlly became a Zen monk in 1973.
I learned a couple of weeks ago that some copies of my book Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America from the second print run were defective.
They are missing thirty-some pages, including the last chapter and the index. If your copy ends around page 160, you have a bad copy.
Other copies may appear to be missing chapter 6.
Call Rowman & Littlefield Customer Service, 800-462-6420, to get a replacement from the newest print run.