A holy relic of St. Duluoz

The first draft of one of the 20th century’s most influential books has arrived in San Francisco.

Last week, an airtight black suitcase passed through a security checkpoint at the Indianapolis International Airport on its way to San Francisco. A guard ordered the case opened and found inside a tattered and frayed scroll of yellowed paper 119 feet and 8 inches long.

“Oh I know what this is,” the baggage screener said to Jim Canary, a conservator who was accompanying the artifact. “This is one of them religious scrolls, ain’t it?”

An acquaintance who is studying to become a library technician was asking M. and me at a party last weekend to name ten most influential books in our lives. M. listed this as one of hers, saying it inspired her to go on the road at age 28 or so, wind up in Colorado and, as it happened, meet me.

One of these days, I will post both of our lists.

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Gwydion Pendderwen re-mastered

Earlier posts here and here.

The reissue of Pagan singer/songwriter Gwydion Pendderwen’s work in a two-CD set is now available. You can order these works from Serpentine Music.

Anna Korn and I provided some of the liner notes, which include reproduced covers of the original vinyl albums and other photographs. Her longer version is here. To quote Serpentine’s web site:

Gwydion was a gifted songwriter and performer, and at the time these albums came out–in 1975 and 1982–they were by far the best examples of Pagan song in existence. This music has continued to be very influential in the resurgence of Pagan culture in the US and beyond. Beyond that, these songs stand the test of time for their artistry and listenability. Now may they continue to inspire future generations of bards and poets.

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The Shock of It All

I have started reading Christine Wicker’s Not in Kansas Anymore: A Curious Tale of How Magic is Transforming America. (Jason Pitzl-Waters has also mentioned it.)

Alas, I’m too jaded to be shocked! shocked! by her revelation that magic–or at least magical thinking–is everywhere. When I see a chapter heading like “The Waitress Wears a Pentacle,” I think instead about the need for a good sociological study of class issues in the Pagan movement.

But that isn’t Wicker’s purpose. She’s in four-wheel drive, barreling down the overgrown road cut in the late 1960s and early 1970s by authors such as Susan Roberts (Witches U.S.A.) and Hans Holzer (The New Pagans).

The revival of interest in the occult and the supernatural is a current example of religious events that some have seen as being of great cultural signifiance and as reflecting serious social conflicts and strains of macroscopic importance.

That’s not Wicker writing, but rather sociologist Marcello Truzzi in 1971. He wrote a lot about the “occult revival” back then, although he predicted that it would fizzle out. He is not in Wicker’s bibliography.

Can you say “cycles,” boys and girls?

Here is Wicker:

People with, shall we say, expanded kinds of awareness are quietly blending among us, cobbling together spiritual lives that more freewheeling than anything else ever seen before.

[Not a trace of irony there.]

The waitress wears a pentacle under her blouse. The computer geek next door is a conjure doc. The mom down the street tells fortunes. Soldiers chant toward gods of war. Nurses send healing power through their hands. You have to know what to look for. You have to search them out, ask the right questions, notice the right signs, but they are there, here, everywhere around us.

[Trust me, your guide. I have walked among the Witches of Omaha, the headhunters of Houston . . . ]

And she is off to the Vampire and Victims Ball in Salem, Mass., just the place that any researcher would start.

If it gets better after Chapter 1, I will let you know.

(Blogging from Rico’s Cafe & Wine Bar. In downtown Colorado Springs. Where the demons are. Only I think that they are across the street at Tony’s Bar.)

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The Demons Downtown

The Colorado Springs Independent is out with its annual “You’re Sooo Colorado Springs” round-up.

To fulfill my obligation to be a religion blog, I’ll list a few observations that readers from outside the “Protestant Vatican” might enjoy.

You’re sooo Colorado Springs if . . .

10. You plan to meet friends for coffee and you bring your laptop, cell phone, Blackberrg, iPod, digital camera, and Bible.

9. You think all nonprofits have religious affiliations.

8. You’ve never been to a church that didn’t have a multimedia service.

7. You recognize that there are more churches in town than east-west turn lanes.

6. You can recite at least 20 pages of the Bible from memory, but can’t remember to use your turn signals.

5. You think demons will steal your soul if you go downtown.

4. You know the difference between Odd- and Evan- Gelicals.

3. You had so many Bible studies at Starbucks, they have replaced their windows with stained glass.

2. You lobby to change to name of the Garden of the Gods to Garden of the One True God: Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, Amen.

and number one . . .

1. You’re scared to go to Manitou Springs because of the witches.

I mean, that is, like, so Seventies! I have yellowed newspaper clippings about the witches of Manitou. Ah, the persistence of folk memory!

(Ah, the rituals and parties we had in the old Spa Building. . . )

Porch-ism

While I was fretting last night about the forest fire 50 miles south of here (but in similar terrain), a little cold front came through and dropped an inch and a half of snow. (So what is that, an eighth inch of moisture?) And it did help the firefighters.

Classes start in a week, so I am working on syllabi, primarily for the “creative nonfiction” class. The textbook–“handbook” would be a better term–is Perl and Schwartz’s Writing True, which I had the opportunity to read in manuscript and found to be superior to the books that I had used.

No book can teach you how to write, but this one has good explanations of subgenres, helpful exercises for getting started (which some students need after years of writing research papers), and, even better, advice on reading other people’s writing and commenting intelligently.

For a magic hour around 1 p.m., the sun was on the south end of the front porch, the air temperature reached 40 F. (5 C.), the breeze was negligible, and it was warm enough to read outdoors. I had to juggle book, pencil, reading glasses, binoculars–it was a Project Feeder Watch count day–and a bottle of Corona, but I was actually able to feel somewhat hopeful about the new semester.

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Now that everyone has tattoos…

Hardcore Asatruar will want to file grooves in their teeth, as some ancient Vikings did.

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Social networking and the CIA

Blogger.com’s featured blog of the day discusses Facebook.com’s ties to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Based on the comments, some users could not care less.

A forest fire in January

The same winds that have pushed the grass fires in Oklahoma and Texas for the past couple of weeks have been blowing in southern Colorado too.

Now a forest fire is burning west of Aguilar, just one county south of us. It is called the Mauricio Canyon fire. More here.

As of this evening it was 5,000 acres and basically out of control.

When I go outdoors, the forest floor is just crunchy dry. Even in 2002, the big fire year, we didn’t have forest fires in January.

In Denver and other northern parts, however, people are acting like the drought is over, tra-la tra-la. No, it is not.

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The writer’s ego

There are no really good movies about writing. What is there to show? I did try to fire up my magazine-writing class last semester by showing the first 45 minutes of Almost Famous, both for protagonist William Miller’s persistence in getting the interviews and for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s wonderful portrayal of the late Lester Bangs, editor of the music magazine Creem.

(To be truthful, Terry Chen as Rolling Stone’s then-news editor, Ben Fong-Torres, was fun too.)

“That’s because we’re uncool. And while women will always be a problem for us, most of the great art in the world is about that very same problem. Good-looking people don’t have any spine. Their art never lasts. They get the girls, but we’re smarter,” says Hoffman as Bangs.

Hoffman is back as Truman Capote in Capote, which M. and I saw last week. He is an actor, as opposed to someone who merely plays a glamorized version of himself in different costumes (John Wayne, Tom Cruise, many others.)

Capote was a chameleon with a typewriter, and we see him creating different personae for different situations, all the while collecting material for the most famous work of creative nonfiction of the last century, In Cold Blood.

If you want to see Capote himself playing a sort of self-caricature, find the 1976 spoof-murder mystery Murder by Death.

Or watch Hoffman, who is 5’9½”, use every actor’s trick to suggest Capote’s short stature (5’3″). Hear him mimic Capote’s creepy-childish voice and display lip twitches and gestures to create Capote’s flamboyantly gay public persona. Capote biographer Gerald Clarke suggests that Hoffman’s cinematic Capote is truer to its original than Capote’s own.

You can’t make a movie about writing. But as a movie about a writer, this one is tops.

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Bodies in the bog

From the Daily Mirror, headlined “Murdered 2,500 Years Ago”:

Tortured, maimed and disembowelled, the two savagely slaughtered bodies were a grisly sight for the Irish peat bog workers who unearthed them.

One of the dead men was found in County Meath, Ireland. The other was discovered three months later, just 25 miles away in Co. Offaly.

With soft flesh, fingernails, masses of red hair, teeth and eyeballs still intact, it seemed that the corpses had been freshly buried. And detectives thought they had stumbled across IRA victims. But when state pathologist Marie Cassidy saw the water-logged graves, she suspected the remains were much older than they seemed.

Archaeologist Ned Kelly thinks that they were sacred victims:

“My belief is that these burials are offerings to the gods of fertility by kings, to ensure a successful reign,” says Ned. “And that bodies are placed in the borders surrounding royal land or on tribal boundaries to ensure a good yield of corn [small grain–CSC] and milk.

More from the Irish Times here and from the BBC here.

It’s just one more piece of their tradition that today’s Celtic Reconstructionist Pagans have thrown overboard.

(Thanks to Mirabilis.ca.)

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