Post-AAR book chat

ABC-Clio is publishing anthology on contemporary Paganism. I did a book with them in the early 1990s, and my experience was mostly good, especially with unexpected largesse from foreign-rights sales. Given the transnational nature of his book, maybe we should speak of “foreign rites” sales.

OK, weak joke. I just got off the train. Note the cover: are we ever going to get beyond “Pagans standing in a circle”? It’s hard to find one visual center of attention in pictures like that. But congratulations to the editor and contributors anyway.

From Equinox, look for Patriarchs, Prophets, and Other Villains, which is not about what anyone might have learned in “seminary school,” to quote the Doors’ song.

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Pagan Studies at the American Academy of Religion

Ten years ago here in Philadelphia, a group of 20 or so people sat in a circle of chairs at the Philadelphia Convention Center. The meeting was convened by Dennis Carpenter and Selena Fox of Circle Sanctuary to bring together people interested in the academic study of Pagan religion. We did not do much except introduce ourselves.

The following year, Dennis and Selena did not attend (and have not attended since), so I got the job of organizing a follow-up meeting, where we agreed that having a listserv would be a good thing.

Meeting in 1997 in San Francisco, we decided to apply to be an official program unit. We were turned down for two reasons: we had not demonstrated sufficiently that our needs were not met it pre-existing units (e.g., New Religious Movements) and also the AAR was simply not as open to new program units, since they and their older parent, the Society of Biblical Literature, were having some trouble finding meeting venues with sufficient small rooms for the dozens of concurrent sessions. Those were the official reasons for the denial, at least.

So beginning in 1998, we started holding our own pre-meeting session and giving papers. The original 2.5-hour session grew to the full-day Conference on Contemporary Pagan Studies, which will continue in the future.

In 2004 we applied again. This time, the AAR and SBL had agreed to meet separately after 2007, which decision helped with the meeting-space issue. Suddenly new unit proposals were welcomed, and ours, supported by evidence of scholarly activity (papers presented, books and articles published, the existence of The Pomegranate) sailed right through.

Leaving for home today, I’m buoyed by thoughts of this meeting’s packed rooms (more than 60 people at both the CCPS and official Pagan Studies session) and the quality of the presentations. We’re off and running.

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Blog splat

I am taking a break from blogging for the next eight to ten days because I leave on Wednesday for the intellectual carnival that is the American Academy of Religion–Society of Biblical Literature combined annual meeting.

It’s in Philadelphia this year. Our last meeting there was in 1995, and I spent much of the time walking the steets looking for sites and building associated with the career of Charles Leland, author of Aradia: Or the Gospel of the Witches and Etruscan Roman Remains, among other things.

This year should be different: We have the first official Pagan Studies sessions, plus I will be meeting with my publisher to determine such weighty matters as what comes after the colon in the book title now tentatively known as Her Hidden Children: Paganism and Nature Religion in America. They are telling me that the publication date is March 2006 and that the paperback will be $19.95. As I know more, I will post it.

I am not bothering to take a laptop computer this year, so I will be summarizing our sessions when I get home.

Meanwhile, there is this: one of today’s Google searches that sent a visitor to this blog: “Known Hookers With Cops Pueblo.” Just another reason why smart searchers always go to the Advanced Search Page.

Under Southern Skies

Doug Ezzy, sociologist and co-editor of Researching Paganisms also edited an anthology by “Down Under” Witches called Practising the Witch’s Craft: Real Magic Under a Southern Sky. He writes to say that it is now available from Amazon for the rest of the world.

It ranges from Gardnerians to Goddess Spirituality, city Witches to country Pagans, young to old, and easy to understand to somewhat thoughtful. I think it provides a good representation of the diversity of Witchcraft traditions in Australia.

Apart from where the contributors live and the chapter on the Wheel of the Year, there’s not much that’s distinctly Australian about it. Australian Craft is noticable for its ecclecticism and absence of established traditions and this is reflected in the chapters.

And then he flatters me by saying that he modeled it on my early-1990s Llewellyn series, Witchcraft Today.

Pagan dreams

In the first chapter of The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance, Joscelyn Godwin writes of “a state of mind and soul that arose in fifteenth-century Italy, spread through Europe on certain clearly defined fault-lines, and persisted for about two hundred years, during which, although no one believed in the gods, many people acted as though they existed.”

Although these Medicis, Hapsburgs, other aristocrats, and the artists and craftsmen who created the paintings, sculptures, artificial grottos, fountains, temples, and all the other accouterments of this intellectual Paganism did not, in fact, claim to be other than good Catholics, in Professor Godwin’s view, they “dreamed” of being Pagans.

In their waking life they accepted the absurdities acknowledged as the essence and credenda of Christianity, all the while nurturing a longing for the world of antiquity and a secret affinity for the divinities of that world.

That same dream underlies three of my favorite novels: John Crowley’s Ægypt, Love & Sleep, and Dæmonomania, particularly the first.

And then what happened? Some historians cite the discovery and exploitation of the New World as turning Renaissance Europeans away from contemplation of an antique Golden Age and toward the exploitations of the Age of Exploration. The wars and intellectual struggles of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation took their tolls.

But the work was done. The hermetic texts were saved from the Islamic purge of Constantinople. Great art was created that lives today. The images of the gods were restored after a thousand years of Christian destruction; and as Pagans we know that “acting as if” is more important than “believing.”

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Japanese deities

Part of the interaction between the native Japanese religion Shinto and missionary Buddhism, which came from China, was an attempt to correlate Shinto deities with the various past and future Buddhas of Mahayana (Northern) Buddhism.

The “Gods of Japan” photo website has both deities (“kami”> and Buddhas, in great detail.

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Scarborough Fair

Listening to the Mediaeval Baebes’ short version of “Scarborough Fair” on Mirabilis, I got to thinking about the different lyrics of this old song.

The version available at this site make it clear that the singer is asking his lover to perform a series of impossible tasks, for example, to find an acre of land between the ocean’s foam and the sandy beach or to plow with the horn of a lamb.

The folksong collector Martin Carthy considered it to be a version of the “Elfin Knight” ballad, like “The False Knight on the Road,” in which an elfin/demonic knight asks a young traveler a series of trick questions.

So is the list of herbs a form of herbal magic or part of the more Victorian “language of the flowers,” as the first site suggests?

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The altar of the Romantics



ABOVE: An altar for dead military service members, erected by the Social Work Club.

BELOW: The altar of the English Club, featuring Rudyard Kipling (I think), Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen and … one of the Brontes?

I was wrong in my earlier prediction. A couple of the non-traditional (university-speak for over 25) members of the English Club moved quickly and built a Day of the Dead altar for that university that I mentioned. (Count on the non-traditional students to get things done.) There were seven altars in all; I don’t know who won the competition, but the massive edifice for Frida Kahlo in the basement of the Psychology Building was a strong contender, says a Psychology professor of my acquaintance.

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The stone circles of Massachusetts

In the 1970s, the publication of Barry Fell’s America BC introduced me to the an idea that was then completely out of fashion in mainstream archaeology: That other Europeans besides the Norsemen might have crossed the Atlantic before Columbus. Critics referred to this as “cult archaeology”.

That sentiment has eased, but not much. Still, some amateur archaeologists and epigraphers (people who study stone inscriptions) soldier on, collecting data.

Fell, an oceanographer who became interested in ancient sailing voyages, suggested that many enigmatic stone structures in New England were built by Pagan Celts (and/or the Norse settlers in “Vineland”).

I honestly have no idea, but this site and its links will give you lots information, photos, and hypotheses.

Unfortunately, without the kind of artifacts that ended up substantiating the Norse sagas, these hypotheses remain untested. As one disparaging archaeologist told me about another site suggested to be pre-Columbean European, “We won’t dig what can’t be dug.”

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First peyote, now ayahuasca

It took decades of legal struggle for the Native American Church to receive a highly qualified exemption to federal drug law that permitted its members to use the entheogen peyote during the church’s meetings.

Now the Supreme Court is hearing argument in another case involving religion and an entheogenic substance.

The core of the case – what happens to the First Amendment right to freely exercise religion when it conflicts with federal law – could change the rules for every religious group in America. A wide variety of religious groups – from conservative to liberal – representing millions of members have filed briefs supporting O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal, or UDV as it is known.

Although ayahuasca has been used in Amazonia for centuries, probably millennia, our government thinks that we have to be protected from it. The Christian Science Monitor summarizes:

Congress determined that a categorical ban on this hallucinogenic substance was required to help protect the health and safety of Americans, including the followers of UDV, from detrimental effects, government lawyers say. “Religious motivation does not change the science,” writes Solicitor General Paul Clement in his brief to the court.

The UDV’s lawyer counters that even as the NAC has its exemption, so UDV should be treated likewise:

“The government’s successful accommodation of the sacramental use of peyote, also a [banned] Schedule I substance, belies its claim that such substances require a categorical ban, even for religious use,” Nancy Hollander, an Albuquerque lawyer representing the UDV, writes in her brief.

Ms. Hollander accuses the government of playing fast and loose with the facts in claiming there are adverse health effects to the group’s use of sacramental tea. She says the only study of sacramental tea use “found no significant health concerns.

I will try to post more, and I expect that this blog will have something too.

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