Christians reaching out to Pagans

Sacred Tribes Journal is an online magazine of “Christian missions to New Religious Movements.” Whether those movements asked for missionaries is, of course, a whole ‘nother question.

The “Paganism issue” is online, and the editorial introduction says that Pagans themselves should read part 2 first, while would-be missionaries should read part 1. All the articles can be downloaded in PDF format.

That direction is apparently to keep us from being taken aback by material in part 1, such as this from Lisa Woolcott’s “Wiccans and Jesus: Making the Message Meaningful.”

The great thing about sharing Jesus with someone on a Wiccan-based journey is where interest is shown in dialoguing about the spiritual practices and teachings of Christ. There are some popular writings by pagans and witches that indicate Jesus is a figure of both intrigue and respect, like the pagan authors Fiona Horne, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, and Anatha Wolfkeepe.

Oddly (to me, at any rate) Woolcott seems to treat popular authors like Horne (I don’t know the others, but like Horne, they may be Australian) and insider-scholars like Dennis Carpenter of Circle with equal weight.

But, Ms. Woolcott, what’s the use? You want to convince me that Jesus is different from other Middle Eastern savior gods because only he “died for sin.” Maybe so–but to me that is a history-of-religions question, not something that affects my life.

Another way to share the gospel is by exploring the symbolism in the “Great Rite”.

But since you completely dodge the erotic aspect of the rite, what I called “embodied nature religion” in Her Hidden Children, you are so far away as to make dialog impossible. If I wanted dialog in the first place, that is. What is the point of even talking about religion with people who are convinced that you are what you are only so that you may be lead to their One True Way? There is plenty of cosmic mystery to go around, enough for all of us and more.

Here’s a thought: they could go as missionaries to one of the religions newer than Christianity. You know, the one whose militant followers like to blow up stuff. After all, Christianity has the more powerful goddess.

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Post-ritual trauma

At Non-Fluffy Pagans, a great thread on “post traumatic ritual disorder.”

Pointy-hat tip to Fiacharrey.

"There is no baby with the bathwater"

Anne Hill (of Serpentine Music) blogs on issues about the Reclaiming tradition. But is it Craft or is it just “progressive” politics?

Can it be true that what started as a grand experiment in creating a spirituality that was Goddess-centered, egalitarian, politically and socially radical would have absolutely nothing to show for it 25 years after the fact? Could it be that a community and religious movement which has been at the center of my identity for over two decades consisted all along of nothing but our intense willingness to believe our own promotional language?

Note the commments, too, including this from Macha NightMare, another of the Bay Area senior Witches:

I agree completely about the lack of standards. I’ve often experienced this as leading to sloppy rituals and sloppy magic. That’s the main reason I’ve avoided public rituals for the most part for many, many years.

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The corner of the year

When is Lammas?

Predictably, Lammas/Lughnasadh postings popped up on Pagan e-lists and blogs on the 1st of August. But that is just what the calendar says. Astronomically, according to the online astronomical calculator, it comes at 1541 hours GMT on August 7.

But I think it’s when the hummingbirds start to leave, and the mewing cries of the juvenile black-headed grosbeaks diminish in the oak brush around the house. Or when the Cordilleran flycatcher fledglings from the nest on our front porch are suddenly gone one morning, after standing outside the nest the previous day checking out their new feathers.

That day–let’s call it “bird Lammas”–was July 30th.

Today brought cooler weather and a splatter of rain before noon: “weather Lammas.” I remember a friend who lived in Florence, Colorado, telling how the high temperatures seemed to drop a little on the first of August, and she was right, for eastern Fremont County.

If you are timing a ritual, then I suppose you want to watch the astronomical times. But otherwise the corners of the year are more like mini-seasons than single days or nights.

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Wild Hunt reviews Her Hidden Children

Jason Pitzl-Waters at The Wild Hunt blog has reviewed my new book, Her Hidden Children.

And the rest of his blog is good too, as always.

Megaliths, archaeology, and the ‘stoned age’

In graduate school, I took a couple of classes on Mesoamerican religion taught by Davíd Carrasco, an scholar of such edifices as El templo major in Mexico City.

One thing I came away with was that such structures served often to demonstrate how King Somebody’s reign was in sync with the gods, the will of Heaven, or however you want to phrase it.

It made me look at places such as Stonehenge with new ideas. Could it really be not so much an observatory as an expression of Royal Will? (Or several Royal Wills, since it was built over centuries?) Ditto such American sites as Casa Rinconada, the huge kiva at Chaco Canyon. Was it as imperialistic as Hitler’s Olympic stadium? Was Stonehenge laid out by a Neolithic Albert Speer?

And let’s bury once and for all the idea that megalithic structures told farmers when to plant. Farmers and gardeners do not need giant rock arrangements for that. Every locale has its signs in the natural world. “When the oak leaves are the size of a mouse’s ear, it is time to plant warm-weather crops” — or whatever works for you.

All of this is a prelude to an interesting article about a megalithic site in Brittany that offers unusual opportunities for archaeological work.

In most cases, virtually no artifacts or other evidence of the builders has survived, leaving the field wide open for speculation:

As man emerged from the caves and forests to cultivate open ground, he replicated the old, sacred caves by building cave-like tombs. These were made of groups of stones, covered with soil. At some point, in around 4000 to 3500 BC, mankind emerged further into the light. The pattern of stones within the tombs was expanded and uncovered to form ceremonial stone circles.

What happened inside such enclosures has excited fevered speculation for centuries. Human sacrifice? Elaborate astronomical observations? Sexual and drunken orgies? Ceremonies at the winter and summer solstices to encourage the healthy growth of crops? Professor Burl suggests that, far from being elaborate astronomical observatories, most stone-circles are shaped by local topography. They do often, however, have alignments with summer and winter solstices and the movements of the Moon. Professor Burl’s best guess on their purpose is a mixture of propitiation of the crop gods and sexual and alcoholic-psychedelic orgies. There is much archaeological evidence that the late Stone Age was also a stoned aged.

Read the whole thing, quick, before the link expires.(Hat tip: Cronaca.)

‘It’s the jihad, stupid’

I never thought that I would be linking to Michelle Malkin’s blog, but she does have any interesting collection of freelance jihadist killers.

But she leaves out one: “Marc Lepine” was not as French-Canadian as his name would suggest. His jihad against decadent, immoral Canadian women engineering students was in 1989.

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More on the Àsatrù prison story

Macha NightMare, one of the people interviewed about the Asatru-related prison stabbing and subsequent scheduled execution in Virginia, gives her own perspective. There is more to the full story than what went out on the Associated Press feed.

Other bloggers have already commented: Dave Haxton here and here, and Jason Pitzl-Waters here.

Patrick McCollum’s comments were cut from some versions of the story, I think:

But McCollum, the religious adviser for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said only around 4 percent or 5 percent of Asatruars are white supremacists. And only a small portion of the religion’s followers emphasize its warrior aspect, he said.

“They follow the golden rule–treat your neighbor with respect, to respect your elders, to respect your community, that all people have value,” he said. “They have a very high moral standard.”

(Isn’t “Asatruars” a double plural?)

As for the Southern Poverty Law Center, also quoted in one version, they might have done some good for the civil rights movement thirty or more years ago, but now I think that they are just fear-mongering to keep the donations rolling in so that they all have jobs.

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"Dark Paganism and Deep Blue Religion"

Doug Ezzy’s “Spirit of Things” Australian radio interview, “Dark Paganism and Deep Blue Religion,” is now available for download.

A Fight Song for (Procrastinating) Writers

Via the Nielsen Hayden blog, a fight song for writers, to the tune of “The British Grenadier(s).”

But do you know what other tune fits that rousing 18th-century fife-and-drum number? Catherine Madsen’s Pagan standard, “Heretic Heart.” In fact, I always hear it my head to that tune.