Death of a Chief Druid

The awen is a symbol of revived Druidry.
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.

Plato and the Bloggers

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)

Piglet is in trouble again

click this picture for moreNo, 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.

Poem on Bridget’s Day

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.

For the Second Annual Bridget in Cyberspace Poetry Reading.

Problem copies of Her Hidden Children

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.

Gallimaufry

• A federal judge won’t let the Veterans Administration wriggle out of the lawsuit over grave markers for Wiccan veterans.

• The Guardian, a British newspaper, covers the Greek Pagan renaissance.

For years, Orthodox clerics believed that they had defeated Greeks wishing to embrace the customs and beliefs of the ancient past. But increasingly the church, a bastion of conservatism and traditionalism, has been confronted by the spectre of polytheists making a comeback in the land of the gods. Last year, Peppa’s group, Ellinais, succeeded in gaining legal recognition as a cultural association in a country where all non-Christian religions, bar Islam and Judaism, are prohibited. As a result of the ruling, which devotees say paves the way for the Greek gods to be worshipped openly, the organisation hopes to win government approval for a temple in Athens where pagan baptisms, marriages and funerals could be performed. Taking the battle to archaeological sites deemed to be “sacred” is also part of an increasingly vociferous campaign.

The article mentions James O’Dell, who also appears in the documentary I Still Worship Zeus.

What happens in Greece first may happen next in the UK or elsewhere in Western Europe. A number of British Pagans have borrowed the rhetoric of American Indian activists about sacred sites and about ancestral remains stored in museums.

• After a couple of years, this blog seems to have been removed from BeliefNet’s “Blog Heaven” site, where it used to appear in the “Other Faiths” category at the very bottom of the page.

No one from BeliefNet informed me that my blog was given the boot; I just happened to notice.

When I asked what was going on, someone named Tim Hayne, editorial project manager, said that it was unintentional and tried to make it look like it was my fault for changing something at this end. (Don’t tech-support people always try to make problems look like the user’s fault?)

Ten days have gone by, but nothing has changed. You won’t find Letter From Hardscrabble Creek in Blog Heaven. (Maybe there is a Blog Limbo somewhere.)

But the URL of my site feed has not changed. So I have to wonder if someone at the supposedly interfaith BeliefNet site just cannot stomach an outspokenly Pagan blog.

It’s their site and they can run it the way that they want. But why can’t they be honest?

Oh my iGod!

http://www.worth1000.com/emailthis.asp?entry=350570
From a PhotoShop contest with an Apple theme. (Click photo for larger image. Hat tip: Violet Blue.)

Dolores LaChapelle

Dolores LaChapelle of Silverton, Colorado, died January 22 at an advanced age. (She was still skiing deep powder in her seventies.)

She begins the preface to her 1992 deep ecology book Sacred Land, Sacred Sex: Rapture of the Deep: Concerning Deep Ecology and Celebrating Life by stating that it does not fit into any categories:

it’s neither psychology nor philosophy, neither history nor anthropology–not even social anthropology. It’s most certainly not “eco-feminist,” “new age,” or “futurist.” Yet it takes in all this and much more.

So did she.

The University of Utah has an online collection of her skiing photographs. She was a pioneer of ski mountaineering, among other things.

The Durango Herald ran this feature article about her in 2002.

LaChapelle became renowned in skiing circles for her powder skiing prowess. [While at Alta] she even earned the nickname “Witch of the Wasatch” for her uncanny ability to predict storms.

Look at her article “Ritual is Essential” for an understanding of how she connected human ritual with living “in place”

Ritual is essential because it is truly the pattern that connects. It provides communication at all levels – communication among all the systems within the individual human organism; between people within groups; between one group and another in a city and throughout all these levels between the human and the non-human in the natural environment. Ritual provides us with a tool for learning to think logically, analogically and ecologically as we move toward a sustainable culture. Most important of all, perhaps, during rituals we have the experience, unique in our culture, of neither opposing nature or trying to be in communion with nature; but of finding ourselves within nature, and that is the key to sustainable culture.

More: M. says that Dolores LaChapelle always reminded her a little of Felicitas Goodman. Part of that was physical: both when we met them were no-nonsense elderly women who wore their hair in a single long braid. I wonder if they would have respected each other as rival shamans, or hated each other.

Cross-posted to Nature Blog.

Drug warriors succomb to vanity publishing

Via NeoWayland’s Pagan Vigil blog: the National Institute on Drug Abuse was upset with its Wikipedia entry and tried to fight back. The results were not what the “drug warriors” hoped for.

Mark Twain supposedly defined the futility of fighting with a newspaper by saying, “Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.”

What do we say now? Electrons don’t come in barrels.

New Paganism is not Old Paganism

Mary Beard, noted Classics scholar from Cambridge University, writes that today’s Greek Pagans are not practicing exactly what their Hellenic ancestors did.

It isn’t entirely clear what this group (“Ellenais”) believes; but it is clear that, whatever they say, it bears very little relationship to ancient Greek religion. You can tell that already from the rather charming prayer to Zeus to bring about world peace. From an ancient point of view, whatever myths are peddled about the “Olympic Truce”, there could hardly be a less likely divine candidate for putting a stop to war in the world.

Her slightly patronizing tone aside, so what? Religions do change–even while their adherents insist on continuity with the past.

I have great respect for Beard as a Classics scholar–I own one or two of her books–but I suspect that she has not given much thought before to new religious movements until she decided to give her opinion on this new development in her blog.