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 . .

The word “Celt” first appears in English in 1706, but it referred then usually to the people of ancient Gaul (modern France), says the OED. There are some earlier uses of “Celtic,” again referring to the Gauls, from the late 17th century.

“Celts” begame fashionable as Noble Savages after Scotland, in particular, was no longer seen by the English as a military threat. “Bonnie Prince Charlie’s” attempt to be king of England died at Culloden Moor in 1746, after a promising beginning.

Something similar happened in Ireland after the 1798 uprising was put down, I would suggest. Noble savages are most “noble” after they have been defeated.

King George IV and then Queen Victoria elevated Scottish tartans into high fashion. The linking of specific tartans to clans was a Victorian-era invention.

By the 1870s a Celtic Magazine was being published in Britain, and the whole Romantic association of Celticity with poetic melancholy and an allegedly Pagan-tinged form of Christianity was well underway.

Tags: Celts, Celtic spirituality

When I blogged the recent local Celtic music festival, I promised more on the tangled web of Celticity. This foggy, rainy, sleeting night seems a perfect time to begin.

Take the assertion of Stephen Oppenheimer, an anthropologist who has published on the ancient populations of the British Isles:

“Celt” is now a term that sceptics consider so corruped in the archaeological and popular literature that it is worthless.

In music, however, “Celtic” is a genre. Compare “Country and Western,” which requires performers and listeners to be neither rural nor residents of the North American West in order to enjoy it.

Be glad you have the music, because in genetic, cultural, linguistic and perhaps even religious terms, “Celtic” means nothing in particular.

As Marion Bowman said in her important 1993 article, “”Reinventing the Celts” (Religion 23 (1993): 147-156), “Celtic sells.” She later gave us the wonderful term “cardiac Celt,” for someone who knows in their heart that they are “Celtic,” in other words, “less tainted [by modernity] . . . repositories of a spirituality that has elsewhere been lost.”

Not just Pagans but some Christians have reinvented themselves as cardiac Celts as well.

Tags: Celts, Celtic spirituality

Aussie Dave notes a parade of the Undead in Wellington, New Zealand.

The internal link seems to be dead, but here is his take on it.

And here I thought it was something special to have a Day of the Dead parade.

Studying the program book from the upcoming American Academy of Religion–Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting, I came across this description of a joint session session between the Europe and the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity Group, the Manichaean Studies Seminar, and the Religion in Roman Egypt Consultation:

This joint session addresses how, in the conditions of general tolerance that prevailed from Constantine to Theodosius, religious groups adapted from their prior established or illicit status to a free market of open competition and adopted various strategies of attracting or retaining adherents.

Two thoughts: Does this sound familiar? And, second, sometimes it’s too bad that the mushrooming size of the joint annual meeting means that the two bodies will no longer meet together after 2007. Although the SBL has a biblical focus, some very interesting work on late Classical Paganism does slip in.

Jason Pitzl-Waters adds more on Paganism in the YouTube era. He wonders, “More importantly, will modern Paganism change to become more ‘video friendly’?”

Take, for instance, the videos posted by the publicity-hungry Corellian Nativist Tradition. There you may see CNT leader Don Lewis dressed like a small-town insurance agent. His sport coat alone would drive someone to agnosticism.

It’s the horrible cultural pressure of American Protestantism. No one feels like they can be religious in public without putting on an ugly necktie and an unctuous, phony-sincere voice.

Next, pews and hymnbooks for Samhain. Shudder.

Given a choice, I would take dressing up like one’s [imagined] ancestors. Here are some Russian Pagans of the “Circle of Pagan Tradition” doing just that.

UPDATE: Browsing NeoWayland’s blog, I see that the Corellians have had some sort of leadership meltdown. It looks as though the “largest and fastest growing Wiccan Tradition in the world” now has two official home pages. What was that about Protestants?

I had a long and not terribly encouraging talk with my editor at Rowman & Littlefield last week about a book project involving SF/fantasy and Paganism.

Then I walked to another building on campus, where students from the English Club were selling used books and baked goods. A copy of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Forest House (1993), the prequel to Mists of Avalon, more or less jumped out at me, and for fifty cents I bought it.

Bradley said it was partly based on Bellini’s opera woad.

Imagine: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single Druid in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

Have I changed so much since I was rather caught up in Mists? Should I blame the alleged ghost-writing by Diana Paxson? (Warning: lugubrious music on link.)

The book’s allegedly Pagan religion is awfully Protestant. People go around saying things like, “Goddess forgive my sin.”

Tag: MAron Zimmer Bradley

It’s not just contemporary Pagans who are vexed by that problem. Journalist Ron Dreher of the Crunchy Con[servative] blog tries to respond to a political conservative’s criticism, the critic being columnist Maggie Gallagher.

And then his commenters arrive in flocks.

And the argument goes around and around, sounding very much like Wiccans and reconstructionist Pagans arguing, only with different religious language.

And then a real Pagan does arrive in the comments. Someone tries to refute him by quoting G.K. Chesterton, as though the definition of “pagan” had not matured over the last hundred years. Is that the best they can do?

Yes, a sort of philosophical/literary paganism was in vogue in Chesterton’s time–the next issue of The Pomegranate will have an excellent article on that era. But it is not exactly what we are talking about now.