New Pomegranate Contents

In the rush of travel and then preparing for the spring semester, I forgot to post the contents of the latest issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies (Volume 8, no. 2, Nov. 2006).

So here is what’s happening in Pagan Studies:

“Santeria Sacrificial Rituals: A Reconsideration of Religious Violence (book excerpt),” by Mary Ann Clark.

“‘Be Pagan Once Again’: Folk Music, Heritage, and Socio-sacred Networks in Contemporary American Paganism” by Christopher Chase

“Wandering Dreams and Social Marches: Varieties of Paganism in Late Victorian and Edwardian England” by Jennifer Hallett.

“Russian Paganism and the Issue of Nationalism: A Case Study of the Circle of Pagan Tradition” by Kaarina Aitamurto.

“Challenging the Morals of Western Society: The Use of Ritualized Sex in Contemporary Occultism” by Henrik Bogdan.

(“Sex” plus “occultism.” The search engines should have fun with that.)

Greek Pagans Worship Publicly

Members of a Greek Pagan group were able to perform a ritual at the temple of Zeus in Athens yesterday.

One of its leaders, Doretta Peppa, a writer who calls herself a high priestess [sic], told the BBC the temples were built to respect the gods and now they were going to be put to their proper use.

Ms Peppa said she had been given official permission to use the temple, but there were fears that the culture ministry, which administers the site, might give way to pressure from the church.

According to the longer CNN report,

[The group] Ellinais was founded last year and has 34 official members, mainly academics, lawyers and other professionals. It won a court battle for state recognition of the ancient Greek religion and is demanding the government register its offices as a place of worship, a move that could allow the group to perform weddings and other rites.

Greek Pagans Press for Temple Access

After a long struggle and some victories in their quest for religious freedom, contemporary Greek Pagans continue to seek the right to worship the old gods in the temples that were built for them.

Now it is the turn of the Temple of Zeus in Athens.

“These are our temples and they should be used by followers of our religion,” said Doreta Peppa, head of the Athens-based Ellinais, a group campaigning to revive the ancient religion.

….

Peppa’s group, dedicated to reviving worship of the 12 ancient gods, was founded last year and won a court battle for official state recognition of the ancient Greek religion.

Those who seek to revive the ancient Greek religion are split into rival organizations which trade insults over the Internet. Peppa’s group is at odds with ultra-nationalists who view a revival as a way to protect Greek identity from foreign influences.

They can’t even agree on a name for the religion: One camp calls it Ancient-Religion, another Hellenic Religion..

The Nigerian (419) Book Scam

In the early 1980s, M. and were dues-paying members of the Fellowship of Isis–sort of a souvenir of our honeymoon in Ireland, when we made a couple of visits to Clonegal Castle, its headquarters.

Our contact details were published in the FOI newsletter, which brought several letters to us from Nigeria.

They always took the same form: “Dear Glorious Wonderful Adepts . . . I so much want to learn blah blah blah . . . Please send me all of the books that you have . . . for free.”

Having received a bunch of these letters, I was pretty well inoculated against the “419 scam.” You get those emails too, I am sure: the widow of the minister of something-or-other who has millions of dollars stashed in a bank account, and only you (or some other sucker) can help her retrieve them, with the help of God, of course.

(Lots of sample letters here, and if you want to have a little fun scamming the scammers, here are some helpful hints.)

So it was a blast from the past when Llewellyn forwarded to me this week a letter from one “Mr. Inemesit Sanctum” (if I read correctly) of Abia State, Nigeria.

It begins “Dear Spiritual Don,” I wonder if he means “Don” in the Spanish/Italian sense, as in “Don Giovanni,” or an Oxbridge academic “don.” Perhaps the latter?

My edited book Living Between Two Worlds “opened his eyes” blah blah blah.

“I never knew that witchcraft could be so exciting and unassociated with the typical diabolism which I used to be told, which caused me a great dread of it.”

Etc. etc. etc. And then the pitch:

“Finally, to cool my thirst, send me such books as [lists four titles from the Llewellyn catalog]. Doing this will give me and my yearning friends hope to climb the strange but exciting spiritual ladder.”

No mention of payment, of course. That’s the Nigerian touch. They never even offer to cover postage.

And the closing: “Yours spiritually.”

Ah, nostalgia. A handwritten begging letter in this day of email 419 scams.

My Catholic/Wiccan/Asatru ex-girlfriend

Al Billings shares some religious/magickal paths personified as ex-girlfriends.

Thelema and the OTO

The freaky ex-girlfriend who likes her sex kinky, her parties wild, and her drugs. She goes clubbing, dresses all in black, and has the razor scars on the wrists to show that she’s serious. She has a lot of interesting ideas but draws the wrong sort of crowd because of her reputation when she was young. These days she’s more likely to want to go to Mass and do a bake sale but the expectations of youth are hard to live down, and she secretly revels in it.

Read the whole thing.

Helen Duncan’s Family Tries Again for a Pardon

Helen Duncan, Spiritualist medium
Mary Martin was 11 years old when her father taught her to box. She would come home from school scratched and bruised, her ears ringing with abuse from the playground. Mary Martin had the unhappy distinction of being the granddaughter of Britain’s last convicted witch.

Descendants of Helen Duncan, the “last convicted witch,” are trying again for an official pardon.

It was the Spiritualists who worked hardest to get the old Witchcraft Act repealed, but the Wiccans who took advantage of the change.

The Guardian article, in my opinion, is incorrect in this statement:

Gerald Brousseau Gardner founded the modern Wicca movement in the 1940s, 11 years before the repeal of Britain’s witchcraft laws. Followers revere nature, worship a goddess and practice ritual magic. In the 2001 census, 7,000 people listed Wicca as their religion.

On the contrary, during the 1940s Gardner was still checking out various esoteric groups and collecting initiations, which gives the lie to his statement about being initiated in 1939 at Dorothy Clutterbuck’s house and thus finding the spiritual path that he had always been seeking.

It is much more likely that he and his associates were able to create Wicca in the early 1950s, after it was no longer illegal to call yourself a witch and after he and Cecil Williamson had founded their witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man.

The Boscastle Witch Museum is its successor. And it has a blog.

My earlier post on Helen Duncan is here.

News about this blog

I finally moved to the “new” Blogger, so, among other things, I can add post labels. I stopped doing Technorati labels because I did not find them personally to be all that useful. You can still get much the same result by searching the blogs listed in Technorati.

Ancient British religion–stranger than we imagined

Were the heads of dead children really a memorial?

In the depths of the cave, there’s the first glimpse of the trapped pool of water– this was the bridge to another world, the high altar of a Bronze Age basilica.

Any BBC Scotland viewers, let me know what you think of the program.

Fundie art and sex

I knew Jeff Sharlet from Killing the Buddha and his great Harper’s piece on New Life Church in Colorado Springs. It turns out that he has a quirky personal blog too: Call Me Ishmael.

Check out his comments on Christian fundamentalist art.

My tentative theory: As religious art traditionally uses eroticism to channel worldly desires toward spiritual concerns, contemporary fundamentalist art uses eroticism to channel sex — the visual currency of power in an advertising culture — away from women and toward men. Either that, or it’s a vast gay conspiracy.

Robert Anton Wilson’s passing

Jason Pitzl-Waters posts today about the death of Robert Anton Wilson. Follow his links.

I spent some time today looking through some files for an article by him that ran in the old Llewellyn Publications magazine Gnostica, but I could not find it. It was an account of a mystical experience involving the Virgin of Guadalupe, and it was there (or somewhere else!) that he wrote how if you treated the gods as archetypes, they could suprise you by acting like gods. And vice versa, of course!

I met him just once, in the mid-1980s, when he came through Boulder, Colorado, where I was in graduate school. By then some people already wanted to treat him like a guru, but Wilson was a writer, not a guru, and he knew it. He was too in love with indeterminacy, with “maybe,” as RU Sirius said, to ever be a dogmatic teacher.