Creeping syncretic Southwestern Paganism

Day of the Dead altar of the English ClubThe instructions from the Student Activities Board were explicit:

On the top level of the altar, four candles need to be placed–signifying the four cardinal points. The light of the candle will illuminate the way for the dead upon their return. . . .

All bad spirits must be whisked away and leave a clear path for the dead soul by burning in a bracero, a small burner used to cook outside. Or you can use a sahumerio to burn copal or incense. A small cross of ash is made so that the ghost will expel all its guilt when it is stepped on.

Yes, it was time for the annual campus-wide Day of the Dead altar-building competition. Illustrated: the altar of the English Club, with Victorian writers.

I stopped by the Student Center lounge where the Spanish Department professor who mastermind the competition (and who always features Frida Kahlo) was putting up some final trimmings.

“Looks like taxpayer-supported Paganism to me,” I said with a wink.

“Oh no-o,” replied la profesora, “it’s culture.”

“That’s what they always say,” I responded.

She is right–but art and culture can often trump dogma. Where are the campus Christian conservatives in this one? I think that they are scared of the Multiculturalism Monster.

Heh-heh.

Stopping the marching zombies

A medievalist takes on the “Christians stole all the Pagan festivals” meme.

So the juxtaposition of Samhain and All Saints Day is just that – a juxtaposition, not an adoption or adaptation by the Church of a pre-existing Celtic holiday, unless you want to think that there were Celtic pagans living in central Italy in the early 8th century celebrating Samhain.

Ah, but it’s so hard to stop the basic religious outbidding of “Our festival is older than yours, nyah nyah nyah.”

Where are the ‘advanced Wicca’ books

Dianne Sylvan blogged recently on the lack of advanced Wicca books.

The problem is partly the lack of a definition, she notes, asking also,

How many books have you seen on how to live as a Wiccan when life sucks? How to face life’s worst moments and most difficult challenges? Where are the books on surviving grief, abuse, and loss and still maintaining your faith as a Wiccan? How to bring your entire life in alignment with your values, and how Wicca influences those values, or should? How, if everything is sacred, every choice we make from what to eat to what shoes to buy is an expression of our spiritual beliefs?

For my part, I have often wondered at the paucity of Wiccan autobiography in this country compared even to the UK’s modest offerings. There might possibly be a connection.

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Who’s a Celt now? – 7

A quirky translation of witches’ chants

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3,Part 4, Part 5,
Part 6

Stephen Oppenheimer, the anthropologist who combines DNA, archaeological, and linguistic evidence to argue against any “glorious Celtic heritage” in England, further argues that Celtic languages were not widespread there before the Roman invasion.

His work reminded me of a quirky book that was published in 1973–a peak year for books on Paganism and Witchcraft, as I describe in the chapter “The Playboy and the Witch” in Her Hidden Children. That book was The Roots of Witchcraft, by the English writer Michael Harrison.

Harrison’s approach to nonfiction (he was also a novelist) was “bisociative,” as Colin Wilson kindly put it: “His mind suddenly perceives the relation between his thesis and some apparently unrelated subject, which gives his work a continued element of unexpectedness.”

“Continued element of unexpectedness.” In other words, how did he get there?

But Harrison’s book is still on coven reading lists. He completely bought Margaret Murray’s idea of “the Old Religion,” protected by the 11th and 12th-century Plantagenet kings, and all of that, and refers to Gerald Gardner’s adaptation of Murray as “usually correct.” So people who want to believe in an unbroken continuation of the Old Religion from Then until Now love Harrison; I think that my old friend Evan John Jones was one of them.

This despite Harrison’s casual “bisociative” assertions, such as the one that the Persians enjoyed electric lighting in the 5th century BCE. If that were true, I think that President Ahmadinejad would be using it to justify Iran’s nuclear program. But I digress.

Intrigued with some alleged witchcraft chants and other words recorded during the Renaissance and early modern witch trials, such as the famous “Eko Eko Azarek” chant, Harrison set out to decipher them.

He decided that they had to be from a “pre-Celtic tongue.” Now Oppenheimer is arguing that much of England was speaking a Germanic tongue before the Roman invasion, setting aside the former idea that most of England spoke some ancient variety of P-Celtic (a predecessor of Welsh) at that time. But what might have come before that?

A generation ago, Harrison thought that it had to be Basque, the enigmatic language that some believe is a relic of the oldest Neolithic language(s) of Western Europe. At least Basque would fit with an Iberian origin for most of the population of the British Isles, you have to grant him that. And he was writing before the DNA studies were conceivable.

Not knowing Basque, but possessed of a Basque-English dictionary, he set out to decipter the witches’ chants and thus demonstrate that they were–he thought–in an ancient liturgical language that followers of the Old Religion knew by rote even after they had lost the sense of the words.

He had lots of fun, you can tell.

Unfortunately, sometimes his folk etymology–the idea that two words that sound alike must mean the same thing–leads him to some odd bisociative conclusions. For instance, “Alammani,” sounds like “al yemen” in Arabic, so that Germanic tribe must have an Arabic origin!

But with his dictionary, Harrison proved to his own satisfaction that (a) the ritual language of the “Old Religion” was Basque, and (b) since the Basque language might well be Neolithic, then (c) certainly the “Old Religion” was indeed the Stone Age religion of Britain, as Gerald Gardner had proposed in the 1950s. QED.

“Eko Eko Azarek”? It means, claims Harrison, “Kill for the November feast,” as in right about now, the feast of Samhain, when surplus livestock might be slaughtered. Don’t tell your hardcore Gardnerian friends that you know that “secret” meaning.

As for me, “Ez dakit euskaraz hitz egiten.”

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‘We feel the ancestors longing for us’

Masks created for goddess invocations by artist Lauren Raine are a big draw at the Spiral Dance celebration at Kezar Pavilion. Chronicle photo by Kurt Rogers
Coverage of this year’s Spiral Dance in California, with goddess masks by Lauren Raine.

Read more at Broomstick Chronicles.

You sexy witch – 1

The GetReligion bloggers wrestle with the alleged trend towards sexy witch costumes. (“Bring ’em on,” in the words of our Beloved Leader.)

Is that Morgan Fairchild in the illustration? Or just a generic blonde?

Who’s a Celt now? – 6

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3,Part 4, Part 5

Everything that we thought we knew about Celtic culture is probably wrong.

But there is still language, right? If “Celtic” is not a genetic code, and it’s not a spirituality, at least there are Celtic languages: Gaulish, Cornish, British-leading-to-Welsh, Irish and Scots Gaelic, right?

Yes, but who was speaking them? Maybe only a minority, not the whole population of the British Isles before the Roman invasion or, following that, before the Anglo-Saxon invasions. Maybe there was no “genocide.”

Read this article by the British anthropologist Stephen Oppenheimer and prepare to have your preconceptions exploded.

Some excerpts:

The orthodox view of the origins of the Celts turns out to be an archaeological myth left over from the 19th century. Over the past 200 years, a myth has grown up of the Celts as a vast, culturally sophisticated but warlike people from central Europe, north of the Alps and the Danube, who invaded most of Europe, including the British Isles, during the iron age, around 300 BC.

. . . . The other myth I was taught at school, one which persists to this day, is that the English are almost all descended from 5th-century invaders, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, from the Danish peninsula, who wiped out the indigenous Celtic population of England.

. . . . But who were those Ancient Britons left in England to be slaughtered when the legions left? The idea that the Celts were eradicated—culturally, linguistically and genetically—by invading Angles and Saxons derives from the idea of a previously uniformly Celtic English landscape. But the presence in Roman England of some Celtic personal and place-names doesn’t mean that all ancient Britons were Celts or Celtic-speaking.

There is so much more. I could end up excerpting the whole article. One more:

A picture thus emerges of the dark-ages invasions of England and northeastern Britain as less like replacements than minority elite additions, akin to earlier and larger Neolithic intrusions from the same places. There were battles for dominance between chieftains, all of Germanic origin, each invader sharing much culturally with their newly conquered indigenous subjects.

And they were cheeseheads.

A leading anthopology blogger comments favorably.

So, realistically, Americans who fancy themselves “Celts” should be heading for Elko, Nevada, for the big Basque festival

But wait, there is more!

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Who’s a Celt now ? – 5

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!

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Who’s a Celt now? – 4

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.

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Don’t know much about Julian

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.”