It was like the Council of Nicaea, but for astronomers.

After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930. The new definition of what is – and isn’t – a planet fills a centuries-old black hole for scientists who have labored since Copernicus without one.

What will the astrologers do? Pluto for the last sixty years or so has been regarded as a marker of generations. (For instance, I would be in the “Pluto in Leo” generation.) Now it is a “dwarf planet,” like Ceres. Not quite the same thing.

In my vast esoteric library (north turret, third floor), I find Jeff Green’s Pluto: The Evolutionary Journey of the Soul. There is going to be some fast thinking in the astrological community, I suspect, but also an opportunity for re-definition and for being the first to say what Pluto “really” signifies.

Update: Salon interviews an astrologer about that very question. (Hat tip: Wild Hunt)

Tags: astrology, Pluto

M. and I finally got to see the new Beowulf and Grendel movie. (Earlier entry here.)

All right, it’s not the 8th-century poem we all know and love. There are new characters (the Irish priest, the witch, Grendel’s son) and new plot points.

But it is still a simply told tale, visually gorgeous, and tinged with the tragic overtone of the Northern tales–no victory is forever.

Tag: Beowulf

I got up this morning before the dogs (that’s early) and drove to the university. The sky was blue, the grass was green, and the beds of annual flowers were at their brightest to welcome the students who return next week.

My normal parking lot was almost empty, and walking to my office, I was the only person in sight. Yet at 8:15, when I entered the big lounge in the student center, it was elbow-to-elbow people. Some time later, sort of fed on coffee and pastries, I sat with several hundred others on armless chairs in a ballroom to hear the new president address us.

I started here as a part-timer in 1992, and he is the fifth president I have worked under in that time, so I am starting to feel a little jaded about university convocation-day speeches. You know the sort of thing: we will increase steel production 20 percent annually for the next five years and build a new hydroelectric dam across the Volga River.

The slide projected on the big screen behind the stage had a montage of images with the words “Strategies for the Future.” I suppose that that beats “Strategies for the Past,” although one could argue that strategies for discussing the past have some influence on the kind of future that we get.

In my office, the furniture was subtly out of place. When I tried to open the big file drawer in my desk, it bumped into a fixture that it normally will clear. Then it hit me–the floor had been waxed. For the first time in a decade. There must be a new custodian in the building–the old one insisted that her orders were to clean only classrooms. But I thank our new Comrade Leader.

I was talking with one of the librarians at school last week, and although I do not remember how it came up, I said something about the “erotic side” of teaching.

Her eyes widened a little, so I had to explain myself: I do not mean going to bed with one’s students. That happens, but not so often as people think (not to me though, as student or as professor).

It looks like I pugged into that ol’ devil Zeitgeist, because one of my favorite academic bloggers has a whole post on the subject.

Humorless, irony-impaired PC secularists probably have even more trouble separating Eros from physical sex than do at least some monotheists. Look at the trouble Christina Nehring had with people at her own institution whose worldview demanded that she be framed as “powerless.”

Bonus: I learn that Mary Beard has a blog!

Tags: Academia, Eros

John Morehead (of Sacred Tribes, mentioned earlier) blogs about his discovery of “Morwics,” Mormons who have adopted Wicca. (He lives in Salt Lake City, it should be noted.)

It seems that ex-Mormons not only gravitate toward evangelicalism and atheism as their religious choice options, but also toward Paganism. This makes sense in terms of a religious logic in that a rejection of what is considered a strict form of Christianity might lend itself toward identification with a variety of nature-based spiritualities such as Wicca.

As he rightly notes, Mormonism has a strong root in Western magic: divination, prophetic dreams, evocation of spirits, the works. This is not something that the LDS church advertises to outsiders. Those 19-year-old “elders” who show up at your door probably will not talk about it. But it’s there.

Back when I was in graduate school, I gave some paper on Gerald Gardner and Wicca at the Rocky Mountains-Great Plains regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion. I looked down at the guys in the front row: shiny black shoes, short hair, clean-shaven, Brigham Young University name tags–and listening intently.

(Much more ex-Mormon humor here. Not all work-safe.)

Tags: Wicca, Latter-day Saints, Mormons

If you are under the age of 40, do not read this entry. It reveals a mystery. Or it tries to.

In the late 1970s, as I wrote about here, M. and I attended several of the Church of Wicca’s Samhain Seminars, one of the earliest Pagan hotel-type gatherings in the United States, after Carl Weschcke’s Gnosticons. (Their descendent is the United Earth Assembly.)

We were among “the kids.” Many of the attendees were older, and a number of men were professional engineers with an interest in fringe and far-out technology. (This was the era of homemade biofeedback gadgetry, among other things.)

One speaker gave a presentation on extreme-low-frequency radio transmissions (ELF) and its possible effects on the human brain. “They” were testing it around 4 a.m., he said, not specifying a time zone.

“Don’t you find yourself waking up around then, confused and depressed?” he asked the mostly middle-aged audience–or words to that effect.

I was a little puzzled, because I usually slept soundly all night. M. is a world-class insomniac, so it’s no use asking her. “Four o’clock creeps” is her term.

Years passed, and now I understand. Waking at 4 a.m. and lying awake reviewing all the ways in which your life has been a total waste is a normal feature of middle age. Perhaps men are more prone to this affliction than women, but I have not carried out a study. I could be wrong.

I have been reading several books that run headlong into the same question.

Poet, novelist, and screenwriter Jim Harrison threw away a promsing academic career to be a freelancer, and after years of hard times enjoyed some major successes. But he was always on the edge of going over the edge, he writes in his memoir Off to the Side. Fishing, hunting, and periods of solitude helped keep him sane. After a lot of aphoristic writing (sample: “When a writer feels embattled, the next step is paranoia, which is only rarely justified.”), Harrison concludes,

I don’t feel an ounce of ‘closure’ about finishing this memoir. I’ll just see how far this life carries me. . . . My life could have been otherwise but it wasn’t.”

If anyone ever asks me to write a memoir, I am going to steal that line: “My life could have been otherwise, but it wasn’t.”

Edward Abbey, who likewise was an overnight success after twenty years of hard work, wrote in his diary, “Trouble, trouble trouble. Except for sweet things like [his kids] Clarke and Rebecca, my life seems to me a dismal failure. . . 58 years old and I ‘ve never learned to do ‘anything practical, useful, sociable.'”

Abbey is quoted in another memoir, Doug Peacock’s Walking It Off: A Veteran’s Chronicle of War and Wilderness. The Veterans Administration says that Peacock himself is 100-percent disabled with post-traumatic stress syndrome from his Green Beret days in Vietnam. But he manages to write too, so what excuse do I have?

The fact that two people died–both of natural causes–at the big Dragonfest last weekend made one of Denver’s two major papers. And a television station.

What I expect will really kick up some dust is that the article quotes postings from one of Colorado’s businest Pagan email lists, which has 355 members.

UPDATE: The quotes were probably taken off the Dragonfest forum, which is publicly accessible. But I was not the only one confused about that.

It’s another warning that nothing posted on the Web is really private: blogs, lists, MySpace, LiveJournal, whatever.

As for the big, daytime, “drawing down” ritual, from what I have read on that list and elsewhere, it worked for some people and disappointed others.

Tags: Paganism, Dragonfest

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.

Tags: Paganism,Wicca, apologetics

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

Pointy-hat tip to Fiacharrey.

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.

Tags: Reclaiming, Starhawk, Witchcraft