Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

While they wanted to present Wicca as the indigenous religion of Britain, the founders of contemporary Witchcraft were not so much caught up in the “Celtic” mythos. Some, in fact, favored the Saxon.

By the 1970s, however, “cardiac Celts” were everywhere. Writers such as John Sharkey formulated a magickal Celtic mythos: his book Celtic Mysteries was at the top of my first coven’s reading list. It had all the pieces of “Celtic” special-ness, including “Celtic Christianity” but also a great deal about the Triple Goddess, whose explication owes more to the genius of Robert Graves than to any Iron Age Celtic poem.

Needless to say, my fellow Witches and I were reading Graves’ The White Goddess along with Celtic Mysteries. Since Sharkey’s ideas of Celtic Paganism were largely derived from Graves, correlating the two was easy.

All “Celtic Paganism” owes a huge debt to Graves, since before he came along, the only Celtic Pagans getting any attention were the Druids, and there was no Goddess religion there!

Tags: Celts, Celtic spirituality

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

There is no gene for “Celtic,” and, as we have seen (if you followed the links), “Celtic culture” is largely an invention of the late 18th and 19th centuries–created by the English and/or of Welsh, Irish, and other tradition-inventors who went to London to make the culture scene.

Those might include James Macpherson, creator of the allegedly ancient Scottish “Ossian” poems in the 1760s, and Edward “Iolo Morganwg” Williams, creator of allegedly ancient Welsh literature and key figure in the Druidic revial. (See also “fakelore”.)

Williams’ “Druidic” planes of existence–Annwn, Abred, Ceugant,and Gwynfyd–made it into Robert Cochrane’s Witchcraft tradition, oddly enough.

Then you have the translators and “improvers” of ancient literature, such as Lady Charlotte Guest, who produced the version of the Mabinogion that most people know. Evangeline Walton’s novelized version was on my first coven’s reading list, and it was treated like holy scripture.

In 1890s Ireland, the Anglo-Irish poet William Yeats and his unrequited love, Maude Gonne, stoked themselves on translated Iron Age epic poems and even tried creating a magickal order based on “Celtic” themes as against the more Kabbalistic Golden Dawn, of which Yeats was a member.

By the 1920s, the Irish writer James Joyce would refer to the whole anti-modern and backward-looking “Celtic Twilight” literary renaissance as the “cultic twalette.” Maude Gonne, of course, “took it to the streets” in the build-up to the 1916 Easter Rising and never went back to “Celtic” ceremonial magic.

Tags: Celts, Celtic spirituality

But if you are reading this blog, you probably know enough to try the Emperor Julian trivia quiz.

I got 13 out of 15, but as the quiz’s author writes, “The early Byzantine emperors showed a woeful lack of originality in names.”

OK, one endorsement on the crowded Colorado ballot: Amendment 44.

It would decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, putting Colorado into much the same legal territory as Alaska.

Cannabis is not really part of my life, but I don’t care to see headlines like this one from Texas: Dead Dog, $5K in Damage, Guns, and Grenades . . . and Two Joints.

I will vote for 44, then, not because I’m a big pot smoker but because I am sick of the excesses of the War on (some) Drugs. Voting yes seems to be the only way to register an opinion, since politicians are generally scared to be branded “pro-drug,” regardless of their private feelings.

My department chair (that’s how we say it in Academia to avoid the sexism of “chairman,” even though it makes him sound like an ornate piece of furniture) recently invited me to speak to one of his classes.

To establish my credentials, he handed a copy of my book Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America around the seminar table.

Because I teach English rather than history of religion, not too many people had known about it. I did thank him in the preface for his support of my unconventional scholarship, however. But I had to chuckle too, because some of these students are my students this semester too.

I don’t exactly wear my pentagram on my sleeve at the university. I am what I am (and they ought to give the department some kind of diversity points benefit for having me), but I don’t advertise.

Consider, for instance, my student C____, with whom I worked closely on an important project over the summer, one that might further her career. She’s bright and willing to do far more than the minimum work required. She is also more or less of a fundamentalist Christian. It would not surprise me if she thinks that the universe was created in six 24-hour days. But I liked having her in class all the same.

If she knew I was in the Craft, would it spoil the professor-student relationship? All she would have to do is Google me, but students are generally incurious about their professors’ lives, I think.

Meanwhile, another student who was working on an interview-based article in a magazine-writing class told me that if her first interviewee did not work out, she could interview “a friend who was Pagan.”

“Let’s stick with Plan A,” I said.

And, meanwhile, a department colleague asked me if Her Hidden Children was for sale in the university bookstore.

Duh! I had completely forgotten about the display shelves of books by faculty members.

So I printed out the page from AltaMira Press’s online catalog and took it to the bookstore manager.

Today she emailed me: It’s back-ordered until December.

I should be glad, since that seems to indicate that it is selling. Hope so.

This is not a political blog, but I could not help noticing the recent White House admission that they were dropping “stay the course” from their political talking points. (NPR audio here.

We know that the rationale keeps changing. First it was weapons of mass destruction, but there were none. Then it was regime change–agreed, Saddam Hussein was a bad guy. And “bringing democracy.” And “fighting terrorism.” I think the public is growing weary, but the elections next month will show just how weary.

More to the point, yesterday’s panel on NPR’s Morning Edition focused on language (which I do blog about) and how simply calling the Iraq situation a “civil war” would force us to re-think our approach. (Audio here) Why language matters.

Iraq, in a sense, is not a nation. “Iraq” is not “Arabic for Vietnam,” as some antiwar people suggested in 2003. It’s more like “Arabic for Yugoslavia.”

Yugoslavia (“Land of the South Slavs”) was created by the Great Powers in 1918, following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It contained several small nations that had, at times, independent existences when they were not controlled from Venice, Istanbul, or Vienna as part of larger empires.

After World War II, Marshall Tito and the Communists kept them glued together. In 1991 the lid came off for good, and the whole former “nation” exploded into war.

When we got rid of Saddam’s government, we unwittingly took the lid off Iraq. And Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfield were so historically ignorant that they did not see the trouble coming.

Iraq, too, was created by decree following the defeat of the Turkish Empire in World War I and the loss of most of its Middle Eastern holdings. Some Englishmen drew some lines on the map and lo, Iraq! And they put some homeless Arab king in charge and called it a nation.

Bush & Co. thought they were liberating France–like going into Baghdad was Paris 1944, with people throwing flowers and pretty girls kissing the brave GIs, followed by a government-in-exile being installed and things eventually getting back to normal.

As we see now, they were clueless. We keep talking about building up the Iraqi police and army, but I think that those forces chiefly draw recruits who sign up to get uniforms, pay, and lots of guns and ammo with which to slay their religious, ethnic, and tribal enemies. Where is the sense of nationhood?

Polical blogger Steve Sailer quotes columnist John Tierney:

The problem is that [Iraqis] have so many social obligations more important to them than national unity. Iraqis bravely went to the polls and waved their purple fingers, but they voted along sectarian lines. Appeals to their religion trumped appeals to the national interest. And as the beleaguered police in Amara saw last week, religion gets trumped by the most important obligation of all: the clan.

The deadly battle in Amara wasn’t between Sunnis and Shiites, but between two Shiite clans that have feuded for generations. After one clan’s militia destroyed police stations and took over half the city, the Iraqi Army did not ride to the rescue. Authorities regained control only after the clan leaders negotiated a truce.

So let’s just call it a civil war and make our plans based on that fact. I’ve wondered for a long time if Iraq, like Yugoslavia, was not fated to break into at least three smaller countries–and if that might not be a good thing.

OK, back to the usual blogging.

⟨/POLITICS⟩

The entertainment side of the BCC goes all spooky about Boleskine House (via YouTube, Part 1 of 4).

….the house in which demonic forces remain until this very day . .