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.
Tag: Etymology
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!
Tags: Gaia Gathering, Canadian Paganism
“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?
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.
Tags: Archaeology, Middle Ages
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.
These 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.
And you thought our buildings were Gothic
Will a Goth eucharist bring the Goth kids back into the Gothic buildings?
The candlelit Goth Eucharist services feature a specially written liturgy and music from bands like Depeche Mode, Joy Division and the Sisters of Mercy.
I doubt it, because it’s not about the music.
When I was in my early teens down at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, someone tried a “folk [music] Mass.” Folk Masses were big in the mid-1960s. Tambourines and guitars in church–whee! I get to bang the tambourine! Cool!
But I still walked out the door at age 15. Not because I was mad about “adult hypocrisy.” Not because the probably gay curate tried to molest me in the sacristy–to my knowledge, he never tried anything with any of the altar boys.
But because the Church’s explanation of the universe did not make sense to me. Playing “my music” would not have helped.
Tags: Episcopal Church, Anglicanism
Misunderstanding religious freedom
The Christian Science Monitor observes the anniversary of the 1786 Virginia Statute Establishing Religious Freedom with the observation that many Americans have an imperfect idea what “freedom of religion” means.
Dr. Haynes, who advises schools on these issues, offers a vivid example of the misunderstanding found not just among Christians. “American Muslims often tell me how much they appreciate the freedom to practice Islam the way they want to, which they couldn’t do in their native country even though it was a Muslim nation,” he says. “But then they say, ‘What is this nonsense about the separation of church and state – why do we need that?’ They don’t understand that’s why they have their freedom.
Ironically, both Christian and Muslim theocrat wannabes fail to understand that our American religious freedom is the reason that religion is taken more seriously here. When you have government-supported religion, then disliking or rebelling against one means that you wind up disliking or rebelling against the other at the same time.
Big stone (or glass) clocks
In the upper right corner of my screen as I type, my Mac’s digital clock tells me the time. You, reader, have something similar. But huge, cosmic, stupendous, symbolic, cosmic-nature-religion clocks are still appealing.
Like this one, advertised by its proponents as England’s first stone circle in thousands of years.
Or this one, a “tidal-powered Moon clock,” envisioned as a matched set, one clock to be built in the Northern and one in the Southern Hemisphere.
Larger than Stonehenge, Aluna’s forty metre wide, five storey high
structure is made up of three concentric translucent glass rings. By looking at how each ring is illuminated, you can follow the Moon’s movements, its current phase and the ebb and flow of the tides. This animation of light is called Alunatime.
Tag: Stone Circles