Beer and Vinland

I sat down last night with a plate of bread, King Oscar sardines and Rosenborg cheese, a couple of bottles of Carlsberg beer (Support Denmark!), and a copy of the Smithsonian’s illustrated anthology Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga.

It’s all for inspiration: I am working up to a series of posts on archaeology and ethnicity. But events of the last week threw me off course (more about that later, maybe), and so I am offering this post chiefly as a placeholder and to spur myself to start writing.

Meanwhile, if I kept up that hearty diet, I would be rotund. Lacking a longship to row in Northern mists, I had better go outside and shovel snow.

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Brothers under the skin

Andrew Sullivan, high-profile political blogger, makes a point that few people would: the Muslims rampaging over those “evil cartoons” and some Christians have a strong family resemblence: “In the end, the real fundamentalists are on the same side.”

It’s the side that says religious “truth” is more important than your or my freedoms.

Consider, for instance, this Canadian Muslim leader’s attack on free speech.

And, Imam Syed Soharwardy, president of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, says he’s thankful the kinds of cruel caricatures of his faith’s Prophet Muhammad — which have now run in several European papers — would likely never be printed in this country.

It doesn’t say which Muslim country he comes from, but whichever one it is, I’m sure that its newspapers are under the government’s thumb. And he is happy that Canada is heading in the same direction! Can’t have any of this dangerous “freedom of the press” stuff! (Brad Hicks has the right idea.)

What can we Pagans do? Stay vigilant and Buy Danish. And toss some Norwegian sardine in the shopping cart too.

During the first week of my rhetoric class I point out that our Western version of rhetoric arose in the same cultural milieu that gave us an admittedly limited democracy–classical Athens. Once the concept had been given a name, it had a life. Classical Athens, I muse aloud, was a polytheistic society where there was no Holy Book to settle all disagreements; consequently, they had to be threshed out by the contending parties in court. I cannot imagine a monotheistic, theocratic society producing democracy as we uphold it.

UPDATE: Another Web site with “Buy Danish” suggestions.

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Oss Oss, Wee Oss!

Several clips from a 1953 filming of the Padstow, Cornwall, May Day “hobby horse” procession are available on the Web. The film was made by Peter Kennedy, George Pickow, and Alan Lomax, an American folklorist.

Some .wmv selections are here.

But the best clip is here, especially for its slightly eerie, archetypal ending, which some people say prefigures The Seventh Seal. UPDATE: This last link no longer works.

It’s your choice not to be addicted

The headline will make sense if you stop by the latest Carnival of the Etymologies.

I was glad to see that I remembered the orign of “forlorn hope” correctly. It’s a military term.

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Canadian Pagan Conference

The second annual Canadian National Pagan Conference will be held May 19-22 in Nova Scotia.

Organizers plan both academic and non-academic presentations, with the latter including

* How to deal with social workers.
* How to get charitable status.
* How to operate a “church”.
* Running charities and raising funds.
* How we operate Pagan stores, hold Pagan Pride Days and organize Pagan scout troops for our children.
* And other subjects YOU request!

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“Free countries do not ban blasphemy”

Political blogger Andrew Sullivan has good things to say on the Danish cartoon controversy.

Militant Muslims (and the Saudi government) want Muslims to stop buying Danish products. The Religious Policeman (a Saudi Arab himself) sarcastically notes that the “Muslim Offense Level” has been raised.

It’s time to stop by the supermarket and buy some Danish cheese.

Despite what their government does, at least some Norwegians won’t roll over for Muslim theocrats. Or any theocrats. let’s hope.

UPDATE: Some European newspapers are republishing the “offensive” cartoons.

Mohammed Bechari, president of the National Federation of the Muslims of France, said his group would start legal proceedings against France Soir because of “these pictures that have disturbed us, and that are still hurting the feelings of 1.2 billion Muslims.”

Let’s see, that’s 1.2 billion times how many euros for hurt feelings? Should we be likewise suing everyone who makes green-faced witch Halloween cards? Or do we just laugh and buy some in a knowing and ironic way?

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Ancestral faces

Compared to their 14th-16th century ancestors, today’s English have slightly different faces, reports the BBC, in one of those short pieces that raises more questions than it answers.

Modern people possess less prominent features but higher foreheads than our medieval ancestors.

Is it because back then they were rolling out of their pallets, downing a mug of “small beer” and chewing (with difficulty) some very hard bread before going out to work digging a field or sheering sheep, thus developing powerful jaws?

I find the “increase in mental capacity” argument to be a little weak, since I did not think there was a connection (within the normal human variation) between brain size and intelligence.

Medieval food was tougher and chewier, even for the rich. A recent article in Archaeology discussed the repair done to the Medici family crypt, which had been flooded in the 1966 overflow of the Arno River in Florence. A archaeologist who examined the teeth of Lorenzo de Medici, who must have lived as comfortable life as was possible in 15th-century Italy, said that from his dental wear, one would think he spent his life chewing sawdust.

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Down the Paratemporal Rabbit Hole

“The infamous” Brad Hicks writes a great blog post on shifting realities.

Personally, I blame the Fairies.

Sheesh, who knows. Ask me about my lost-time episodes. No, please don’t. One of them involves a beautiful Russian girl in a Mercedes two-seater, and everyone would assume that she had to be an interdimensional being.

Fairies, the Dead, and Book-Blogging

Spring semester has started, and teaching does cut into blogging time. And my reading list (for myself) is huge: all the books that I ordered at AAR-SBL (and elsewhere) started arriving in December.

I just finished At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, and Other Troublesome Things. Author Diane Purkiss is an Oxford historian, primarily of early modern England, and this book is a romp. She does not set out to “explain” fairies, but rather to trace the different ways that they have been depicted–from being rather interchangeable with the Dead to being literary creations, evocations of rural charm, inspiration of Irish nationalism, and advertising gimmicks.

Factoid: Proctor & Gamble won’t admit it, but apparently in the early 1930s the company dropped its successful Fairy Soap and Fairy Liquid, previously sold with images of helpful fairies assisting the housemaids, because the term “fairy” was increasingly synonymous with “homosexual.”

While dealing with Fairy-like characters in The X-Files, Purkiss oddly misses Jacques Vallee’s Passport to Magonia which argued back in 1969 that Fairies and UFO aliens were the same class of interdimensional beings in different guises.

The Trickster and the ParanormalThese are stacked on the dog kennel-nightstand:

Dereck Daschke and Mike Ashcraft, eds., New Religious Movements: A Documentary Reader. Rastafarians! UFO cults! Wiccans! All of us in the study of new religious movements are in it for the spectacle.

Sabina Magliocco, Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America. I mentioned it earlier, but I had to send the review copy to someone else and only recently acquired my own.

Robert Cochrane, The Robert Cochrane Letters: An Insight into Modern Traditional Witchcraft. Never mind the oxymoron in the subtitle; it’s the subtle and shifty Cochrane in his own words.

Nikki Bado-Fralick, Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual. Taking on Arnold van Gennep’s hallowed theory on initiation–and Nikki is the new Pomegranate reviews editor, too.

George P. Hansen, The Trickster and the Paranormal. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Ufologists saw a progression happening, from “saucer” sightings to “alien” sightings to . . . certainly . . . the “third kind”–direct contact. But why is resolution always just beyond our grasp?

David H. Brown, Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion. It’s not just for Cubans anymore.

The Shock of It All – 2

Earlier post here

I did finish Christine Wicker’s Not in Kansas Anymore: A Curious Tale of How Magic is Transforming America.

To be honest, the subtitle should read, “How magic is transforming Christine Wicker.”

The book maps closely to Susan Roberts’ 1974 book Witches U.S.A.. The author, a middle-aged female journalist, looks for those wacky magical people to interview–Wicker starts in Salem, Mass.–but then finds some rapport with some of them. In Wicker’s case, it’s hoodoo priestess Cat Yronwode.

So the authorial stance varies: “Reader, let me show you these wacky people–but maybe they know something that we don’t.”

The section on gathering dirt from Zora Neale Hurston’s grave for use in hoodoo is priceless. Susan Roberts went on to be influential in the 1970s Pagan Way movement. It remains to be seen about Wicker and hoodoo. Jason of Zyphre points out a link to an audio interview with Wicker on Yronwode’s Lucky Mojo site. Maybe she will stick around.