A cover design at last?
No one asked me, but this image has appeared on the web page for my book.
All I asked for was a moon. I think that is a full moon seen through fog. Or something. I can live with it. Now if they would just send the PDF files for indexing.
(If the link above does not work, go here and find it through the site search.)
Tag: Pagan Studies
Caesar’s caesarean, and other myths
How many myths about the ancient world had you always thought were true?
And how did the C in Caesar become soft, anyway? We should be saying “kaiser.” (Via Rogue Classicism.)
A conference for female psychonauts
For women who want to discuss the shamanic use of entheogens, SheShamans is a gathering planned for June in Geyserville, California. (Via Susie Bright, who had a wittier title.)
Road-blogging
Why does the weather that you experience always look so much worse on The Weather Channel? I left home on Monday, supposedly into the teeth of the storm of the season (eight inches or thereabouts had fallen at my house) to find the highways no more than a little slushy all the way up to Greeley in northern Colorado. It’s the equinox, and enough solar energy makes its way through the cloud cover to dry the roads if they have been plowed.
On the other hand, I had wanted to so some “thirty years later” photography today near Fort Morgan, Colorado (read the first chapter of Drawing Down the Moon to know why), but the county roads had not been plowed, and I didn’t feel like fighting miles of snow/slush mix to get photos that I could shoot at another time of year.
So on east I went, chasing the storm into Kansas to the sound of Andrea Haugen/Hagaláz Runedance keening “Hail to the queen of death / Her shadow walks with you,” which is fairly appropriate for this cross-country trip, when I am once again the lector priest.
And the landscape all grey, white, and bits of tan, the sky cut by swirling flocks of larks and solo hunting harriers.
Ho hum, synchronicity
On my way north on Monday, I stopped in at Isis Books. It was my first visit in several years, and I was pleasantly surprised to see the store enlarged and with more books (and stuff) than ever.
I was chatting with owner Karen Charbonneau in the storeroom when she broke off from asking me how M. was doing to take a telephone call. The caller, who wanted to order an item from their mail-order catalog, was calling from the very small town in the Hudson Valley where M. grew up.
Maybe when you work in a metaphysical bookstore this sort of thing happens all the time.
Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blog
Go thou here and proffitt of it. (Via Language Hat.)
UPDATE Ye blog hath moved hym herein.
From Vinland to ‘Celtic America’ – Part 5
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Barry Fell’s America BC and subsequent books revived interest in American epigraphy, the study of inscriptions allegedly left by pre-Columbian explorers andtraders from across the Atlantic, whether Celtic, Phoenecian, or whomever.
One of his key collaborators in the Southwest was Gloria Farley, who had identified a number of what she believes are pre-Columbian inscriptions along the Arkansas River and is tributaries in Oklahoma and SE Colorado. When she connected with Fell in 1975,she felt justified and encouraged, and Fell gained access to all her work. (Her conclusions are collected in her 1994 book, In Plain Sight: Old World Records in Ancient America.)
McGlone and his Utah-based collaborator, Phil Leonard, and another Coloradan, Ted Barker, assembled their own catalog of “interesting” inscriptions, building on Farley’s connections. They produced several books:
McGlone and Leonard, Ancient Celtic America, 1986
McGlone, Ancient American inscriptions: plow marks or history?, 1993
McGlone, et. al., Petroglyphs of Southeast Colorado and the Oklahoma Panhandle, 1994
McGlone, et al., Archaeoastronomy of Southeast Colorado and the Oklahoma Panhandle, 1999.
If nothing else, these men and other southeast Coloradans who helped them assembled the most complete catalog of rock area in the area ever made. Petroglyphs, in particular, is a picture book showing samples of rock art ranging from the prehistoric past up through mid-twentieth-century carvings by cowboys, sheepherders, surveyors, and others.
Of all these hundreds of carvings, only half a dozen or so were probably Ogham, McGlone told me. He showed me some sites, and M. and I were present one spring equinox sunset at “Anubis Caves,” the Oklahoma Panhandle site where the sun’s shadow seems to move in a meaningful sequence across a series of inscriptions and astronomical markings.
I still treasure a hand-drawn map to rock-art sites south of John Martin Reservoir that he gave me years ago.
See for yourself
Scott Monahan, a Denver television producer, created a 1986 documentary which showed on public television, History on the Rocks. It included a panel discussion featuring McGlone and then-state archaeologist John Gooding, who called McGlone a “racist” for even suggesting that some inscriptions might have been made by non-natives. (What a way of shutting down rational discussion!)
Twenty years later, Monahan has updated his documentary with a great deal of new footage. Now called Old News , it is available on DVD, and you may view clips online. I recommend it.
So where are the Pagans in all this?
So we have people making cogent, if not widely accepted, arguments for the creation of European Pagan religious sites in Colorado and Oklahoma at least 2,000 years ago, according to both astronomical and high-tech rock-art dating methods.
I’m not an archaeologist, although I enjoy watching the battle from the sidelines. In my one quasi-archaeological publication, “Colorado Ogham: Exploiting an Archaeological Anomaly,” a conference paper published by British Archaeological Reports in 2001, I talked about first, how the struggling High Plains community of Springfield, Colo., created an Equinox Festival around the inscriptions, and second, how the Colorado Pagan community generally ignores them.
I am still not sure why.
In the paper I argued that one reason was geographical: Most Colorado Pagans live in the urban Front Range corridor, and the best-known “Colorado Ogham” site on public land is far away in un-trendy Baca County.
Another reason might be a desire to avoid the political discussion of whether the carvings really are Celtic or were made (somehow) by American Indians. Anglo Pagans generally tip-toe around Native-rights issues.
A third could be that American Pagans seek other avenues to religio-political legitimacy than the presence of ancient monuments.
Scott Monahan’s other archaeoastronomy site, with its graphic calendar of the eight solar festivals, generates a lot of emails from Pagan, he tells me. Some complain that the astronomical sabbats are not “traditional.” The solar Beltane is not May 1, for instance. “Do they worship the sky or the paper calendar?” he asks.
I would say that “worship” is not the right word, but I see what he is getting at.
A word of skepticism
Frankly, I’m still of two minds about “Colorado Ogham.” If the translations are correct, then the inscriptions do convey astronomical information, just like the more famous, larger-scale megalithic monuments of Europe.
But why here? Don’t be fooled by the tracings of a possible river route in the video. We must assume that these ancient, Q-Celtic speaking explorers first
1. Sailed the Atlantic
2. Crossed eastern America or else sailed the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi
3. Came up the Mississippi to the Arkansas
4. Traveled up the Arkansas into SE Colorado.
While the Arkansas is a river in eastern Oklahoma, in Colorado, fed by mountain snow melt, it can be a raging torrent in May and a trickle in September. There was a reason that the Santa Fe Trail traders used covered wagons and not boats–it is not a navigable river.
Norsemen may have collected furs in Canada for trade, as well as timber for the treeless Greenland settlement, but what did SE Colorado offer? No gold, surely, and few if any natives to trade with. If one was looking for furs, why not go somewhere else closer?
Yet making astronomical observations implies inhabiting a place for a period of time, and why this place, with its blazing hot summers, dry winters, low potential for agriculture, lack of easy mineral wealth, few inhabitants, and so on?
Why make the trip? It makes no sense, whereas sailing from Greenland to Canada does make sense. All I can say is that more study is needed!
Tags: Vinland, Celtic America, Ogham, Archaeoastronomy.
A fine italic hand
After thirty years, the idea of teaching schoolchildren to use a type of italic handwriting instead of (ugh) this seems to have migrated eastward across the Rockies.
Coloradans mainly have the late Reed College art professor Lloyd Reynolds and other Oregon calligraphers to thank.
But the really thankful people might be patients, pharmacists, nurses, and others dealing with doctors who take this course.
Tags: Calligraphy, Italic handwriting
Watch this space
Family business is taking up a lot of my time, but I will be finishing the Vinland / Colorado Ogham series of posts soon.
What? We gardeners?*
Jason Pitzl-Waters has new links to the re-paganized movie of Beowulf and Grendel, previously mentioned here.
As the director points out, the story is a direct ancestor of the classic Westerns like Shane or The Magnificent Seven: a lone hero or group of companions who ride into town, defeat evil, and ride (or sail) off into the sunset.
* The headline is a joke from the aptly named Professor Harper’s Old English class at Reed College, which in turn is tied in memory to this strange episode, which led to my blowing a question on a quiz (taken while I was still temporally discombobulated) involving the verb wealdan. All of this in geardagum of course.
Meanwhile, I will want to see this movie.
Tags: Pagan movies, Beowulf