More AAR blogging
I have plumbing tasks ahead of me, so I will just link to another Pagan Studies colleague’s take on her AAR experience this year.
Then I will be back to explain the connection between Wicca and plumbing.
Tag: Pagan Studies
The White Goddess
Lee Gilmore writes of synchronistic experiences involving Robert Graves’ “historical grammar of poetic myth,” The White Goddess.
First published in 1948, it was for many people a “gateway book” to Goddess religion–it certainly was that for me. (Maybe we should devote a Pagan Studies session to it.)
Lee also reports on her own experiences at this year’s AAR-SBL.
Tags: White Goddess, Robert Graves
More on Book Design: The Best Iliad Cover Ever
Walking through the enormous book exhibition at the AAR-SBL, I stopped at the booth of Parmenides Publishing, publisher of Classical philosophy and literature.
In conjunction with Stanley Lombardo’s audio recordings of his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, they had the print edition
which I had not seen before.
The famous D-Day photograph and the word “Iliad.” It stopped me cold. What a brilliant juxtaposition of image and text. It was a Nietzschean moment of “tragic pessimism.” I suppose that I will have to buy that translation.
Give the designer an award.
UPDATE (23 Dec. 05): With the book now in hand, I see that the cover design is credited to Brian Rak and John Pershing. The photo, “Into the Jaws of Death,” is simply credited to the U.S. Coast Guard, as I already knew.
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.
Tag: Pagan Studies
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.
Tag: Pagan Studies
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.”
Tags: Joscelyn Godwin, Renaissance, Paganism
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.
Tags: Shinto, Polytheism
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?