I have been reading Erik Davis’s fantastic (in all senses of the world) book The Visionary State: A Journey Through California’s Spiritual Landscape, illustrated with lucious photos by Michael Rauner.

You can read an excerpt on Davis’s Web site.

I know just few of the Bay Area places, such as the San Francisco Zen Center (didn’t know it was a Julia Morgan building though) or the Swedenborgian Church. I want to just jump in the car with the book and a road map and find the rest.

Of course, they had to draw the line somewhere, but this story makes me think that maybe the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library should have included with some of the other shrines.

Tags: California, Religion, Erik Davis, Michael Rauner

Living beyond the range of cable television and not willing to pay for a satellite dish, M. and I watch HBO series with a year’s delay.

Right now we’re working our way through the first season of Rome. And we like it, right from the starting sequence of the animated graffiti (based on originals in Pompeii, or so they say.

But despite the presence of historical advisors, anachronisms both religious and mundane creep in.

For instance, in Episode 8, Cleopatra is shown smoking opium, which is wrong on two counts. First, as far as I can tell–and I have researched this some–the technology of smoking with a pipe, as opposed to throwing herbs or resins onto glowing coals, was unknown in Eurasia until Columbus sailed to the Western Hemisphere.

Second, the pipe shown is not an opium pipe, but an East Asian tobacco pipe. The bowl is wrong.

Opium had been used in Europe since the Bronze Age, at least, but not in pipes.

Steven Saylor felt that Cleopatra’s character was wrong, as well, but that is another story.

The show’s makers fudged the stirrup question. The Romans did not have stirrups–no Europeans knew them until a few centuries later. Yet if you look, you can see that riders in long shots are riding with them. Close up, however, they have been removed for verisimitude’s sake.

I was skeptical about the brothel-keeper in Episode 7 counting with her abacus, but apparently the Romans indeed did have them. The one in the scene looked more Chinese, however.

And I wonder at seeing candles everywhere instead of cheap ceramic oil lamps. The latter are not hard to find–they are still made for the Middle Eastern souvenir trade.

On the religious side, in one of the early episodes, there is a brief depiction of the taurobolium, or purification in the blood of a sacrificed bull. That rite was not known in the last days of the Roman Republic, which is when the series begins.

The other rites, whether in temples or at home altars, have to be admitted as reconstructions. There is so much of basic religious practice that we do not know, really. Music, too, can only be guessed at.

Quibbles aside, it’s worth renting the series on DVD if you have not seen it.

Tag: Rome

I have been an interested bystander watching the trend of Pagans joining Unitarian congregations. One group, it seemed to me, had nice buildings but less “juice.” One group was just the opposite.

But I knew there were tensions. Jason Pitzl-Waters rounds up some of them.

Go read his post, and I will go back to grading student papers.

Tags: Paganism, Unitarians

M. and I came home last evening from Colorado Springs, and then we got involved with an unexpected refrigerator problem. (Temporarily fixed, but I think it is time to go shopping.) Meanwhile, we forgot to cover some outdoor plants.

Meanwhile, the temperature dropped: Bye-bye, yellow squash and zucchini, bye-bye to the tomato plants outside the greenhouse. Bye-bye, beans. Bye-bye, datura.

Aspens are turning yellow on the ridges, and the Gambel’s oak and willows here are orange at the edges. Only a few hummingbirds remain.

Next weekend, we will welcome the new season with a hike in the golden aspen forest and a trip down to Pueblo for the chile festival.

Cross-posted to Nature Blog. Tag: Colorado

The memorial plaque for Sgt. Patrick Stewart, who died in Afghanistan, will display a Wiccan pentagram.

[Nevada] state officials said they had received a legal opinion from the Nevada attorney general’s office that concluded federal officials have no authority over state veterans’ cemeteries. They now plan to have a contractor construct a plaque with the Wiccan pentacle – a circle around a five-pointed star – to be added to the Veterans’ Memorial Wall in Fernley.

So this decision does not apply across the country, just in Nevada, but it’s a step forward.

Tags: Wicca, veterans

Volume 1 of a new edition of Kveldulf Gundarsson’s The Troth has been published. Volume 2 is expected this winter.

Speaking of Heathenry, Wikipedia has a historically interesting entry.

Tags: Asatru, Heathenry, Paganism

Under the Federal Blogging Act of 2004, often referred to for short as the Reynolds–Sullivan Act, all bloggers are required to post something about 9/11/2001.

So here is my post.

Maybe if we had more drumming groups for peas, then the more totally whacked-out followers of the Prophet Mohammed (peas be upon him) would not want to kill us all, and our little dogs too.

Yeah, right.

Speaking magically, I think that rituals “for peace,” just like rituals to “heal the earth,” are doomed to failure, because humans cannot visualize just what “peace” means. Absence of war? Everyone thinks like me? Salvation by the Space Brothers or Jesus?

Who knows?

Richard Smoley, the former editor of Gnosis, was desperate enought to publish a few of my articles during the journal’s existence.

He has continued writing and editing elsewhere, and his most recent book was The Essential Nostradamus.

The five-year anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack by Muslim fanatics on the United States has some people saying, “Nostradamus predicted that the Twin Towers would fall.”

Not so, says Smoley, in this online interview.

His assessment of the French prophet: By the way, when Nostradamus did try to forecast something specifically, he was usually wrong. . . .

The cause of his perennial popularity is that, although he was apparently of middling ability in most of the areas he worked—his astrological contemporaries said he didn’t know how to cast a chart—in his way he was a superb surrealist poet. There is something haunting and evocative in his verses, a continuation of the great apocalyptic tradition of Christianity and, before it, Judaism. These traditions are powerful, not as actual prophecies, but as glimpses into the collective storehouse of images, in which all of us, like it or not, share.

Tags: Nostradamus, terrorism, Islam

Professor deconstructs literature, philosophy, science–everything except careerism. Satire from Iowahawk.

While it has been tough at times, Grok says he has no regrets. “Western culture is a cancer, and I’m committed to wiping it out. Plus, the whole cave-dwelling thing should help with my promotion case and journal articles.”

This Sunday, Sept. 10, at 8 p.m. Eastern Time I will be kicking off the first of Cherry Hill Seminary’s online mini-classes with a real-time “lecture” on Paganism and nature religion.

Cost is $25. You do not have to be enrolled in any Cherry Hill classes to participate in my online lecture or in the following ones by Patricia Monaghan, Sabina Magliocco, and Nikki Bado-Fralick.

While I cannot put all of Her Hidden Children into it, I will covering the main points and answering questions afterwards.

Tags: Nature religion, Paganism