Music for Samhain
The podcast, .mp3 file, and playlist for Jason Pitzl-Waters’ Samhain 2005 radio show are all available here.
And if you have had enough masking, chocolate, and all that, the astronomical cross-quarter point of Samhain will come just after midnight, Mountain Time, on Sunday, November 6. More details at this useful archaeoastronomy site.
Tags: Pagan music, Samhain
Voodoo and Halloween and New Orleans
Some Christian web sites are linking to the ABC news item about Hurricane Katrina allegedly killing the retail voodoo-supply business in New Orleans. Plans for today’s celebration continue, however.
Some Pagan Witches on the Mississippi Gulf Coast find themselves more accepted after Katrina. Halloween partiers, meanwhile, cram the French Quarter.
Two months after the monster hurricane’s horrifying rampage, Halloween has brought back the French Quarter’s thirst for theatric horror and debauchery, its Mardi Goth mojo in the heart of a city long known for its reverence for voodoo and Anne Rice’s glamorously gothic vampire novels.
Speaking of Anne Rice, much has been made of her return to her Catholic roots and plans to write a multi-volume novel on the life of Jesus. Religion-beat journalist Terry Mattingly, however, raises an interesting question:
Well now, I wonder — when these books reach the adult life of Jesus — what we will learn about his relationship with Mary Magdalene? I would not be surprised in Rice’s series turns out to be a major event on the Christian left.
In other words, a bigger literary controversy than that over The Da Vinci Code.
Dubya versus the dark forces
My visitor numbers shot way up three days ago: it turns out that my Hurricane Katrina-related discussion of Starhawk’s public statement was linked to by a conservative Catholic webzine. The context: whether the president is battling spiritual darkness, or whether both popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI were more correct in opposing the Iraq adventure.
So, welcome, Spirit Daily readers. And do read the whole post. And click the links.
Tags: George W. Bush, Starhawk
What the Romans did for us–and keep on doing
Spurred by the latest spate of TV miniseries and feature films, Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard looks in the mirror of ancient Rome and describes the different images that it reflects back to us.
This game of defining ourselves against the habits of the “Other” is a very old one indeed. The Romans did it against the Greeks (a load of over-perfumed intellectuals), the Greeks against the Persians (effeminate despots). We are now finding it much safer to look to the remote past–the recent past is, of course, another matter–for our anti-types. For that past cannot answer back, has no government machinery on its side (or not usually), and you can do what you like with it. If they were portraying a modern religion, the lurid, blood-soaked representations of Roman paganism in the new Rome would probably end with the director up before the beak on a charge of “incitement to religious hatred”. As it is, it’s only Rome, so it doesn’t count.
(Tip of the classic Roman straw hat to Archaeoblog). Tag: Rome
File this under “Things We Miss Out On by not Living Closer to Town”: Pueblo’s Day of the Dead parade. (Registration required: Bug Me Not is your friend.)
The fact that it happened on a Friday, three days early, merely shows how acculturated el día de los muertos is becoming; it’s about as truly Mexican anymore around here as St. Patrick’s Day is truly Irish. And of course the latter never was such a big deal in Ireland itself until it bounced back from North America.
You will know that the Day of the Dead is truly Americanized when retail merchants advertise special deals: “Open late on Nov. 2! Everything 20 percent off!” And the traditionalists will moan, “It’s supposed to be about family! It’s religious!”
Boy genius, borough satyr
When I was in my twenties, a friend introduced me to the writing of Austin Osman Spare, but as solo ceremonial magician rather than as a painter.
The friend was a bit older than I, and he lived modestly in a house he had inherited, had some sort of trust fund, and worked occasionally in the antiques field. Spare’s work must have resonated more with him than with me, although he didn’t live as “a swine among swine.”
The Daily Telegraph (UK) covers the opening of an exhibition of Spare’s paintings in London. (Registration required.) The article mentions Spare’s initial high standing in the art world but also his interest in magic:
He was an outsider from the start. His mother recalled that he didn’t play with other boys, preferring the company of a sorceress called Mrs Patterson, whom he described as his “witch mother”. In 1904, aged 17, he was hailed by the press as a “boy genius” when his work was shown at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. Lionised by some of the foremost artists of his time–George Frederic Watts, Augustus John and John Singer Sargent–he received a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, where one contemporary described him as “a god-like figure of whom other students stood in awe, a fair creature like a Greek god, curly-headed, proud, self-willed, practising the black arts, taking drugs, disdainfully apart from the crowd”.
The exhibit is tied to a new biography, Borough Satyr, from Fulgur Ltd..
Coincidentally, The Pomegranate will published a paper on Spare in our May 2006 issue if all goes well.
Tag: Austin Osman Spare
Witchy Woman
Marin County, Calif., Witch and writer Macha NightMare sits down for a friendly chat with a reporter.
Whatever else one might expect from having coffee with a world-famous practicing witch, one can’t come away from a meeting with Macha NightMare without being certain of one thing: She’s quite religious. Not in the dangerous, frothing, uncomfortable manner one sometimes associates with unhinged religious fervor, but more in the mold of a funny, confident, appealingly eccentric nun, the kind who knows what she believes and is calmly empowered by it, the kind you might meet at a wedding or peace rally, and walk away later feeling glad you’d met her.
It’s a better-than-average “Silly Season” article, thanks to an articulate interview subject and a sympathetic interviewer.
Macha notes separately that she herself does not teach Media & Public Relations at Cherry Hill Seminary.
UPDATE: She is interviewed here too. She is the Bay Area’s go-to Witch.
Tags: Halloween, Macha NightMare, Witchcraft
The altar of the . . . intramural volleyball league?
Depending on your persuasion, the following announcement indicates the Paganization of an American university, a celebration of “diversity,” a violation of the separation of church [Aztec temple?] and state, “multiculturalism” run amok, or good clean fun.
The student activities board at a university that I know well is holding a Day of the Dead altar-building contest:
Day of the Dead in Mexico represents a mixture of Christian devotion and Pre-Hispanic traditions and beliefs. As a result of this mixture, the celebration comes to life as an unique Mexican tradition including an altar and offerings dedicated to the deceased.
The altar has four levels which are elements of nature — earth, wind, water, and fire. . . .
If your student club, campus organization, or office would like to participate in creating an altar, you MUST reserve a space at ***-****!
Altars must be completed and set up on Wednesday, November 2, no later than 11:30AM!
Please follow the guidelines below when creating your altar.
You may honor a one person or a group of persons (ex. Katrina victims)
There will be voting on site for the best altar! The winner will win $150 from the Student Activities Board!
The English Club officers have announced that they are sponsoring their traditional Guy Fawkes/Bonfire Night party, complete with fireworks, so I doubt that they will be altar-building too.
“Halloween Hoopla”
“What the f*** happened to Halloween?” rants Foamy the squirrel. (Link good until Nov. 3; then check the “Toons” page.)
Tag: Halloween
No costumes, please, we’re teaching to the test
Some Colorado “educators” are going to great lengths to show how hard they are working to raise standardized test scores. The latest gimmick at some schools is to ban school Halloween parties.
I think for the most part the real reason schools are doing away with Halloween during the day has to do with the disruption and the loss of instructional time,” agrees Mike Crawford, principal at Palmer Elementary in Denver.
The hallways at Palmer are decked with yarn-and-construction-paper witches and black bats carrying messages from second-graders on “What drives me batty.” But there will be no party; it will be business as usual.
Other schools keep the party but try to make it “educational.”
Carson [Elementary] holds a Literacy Day, this year on Friday rather than Monday, Oct. 31. Children get costumes and candy, but the catch is they must dress up as a character from a book and tote said book during the parade.
At least we are hearing less about it being an “occult holiday,” but one principal remembers that objection too:
As a veteran educator, he has been hearing Halloween objections, especially religious ones, since the early 1980s. But he says he must respect the [pro-Halloween] majority opinion in his school.
“We’re not worshiping anything,” he says. “We’re playing dress-up.”
And he dresses up right along with the kids. Too many of these principals seem to have forgotten that a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, as the flying nanny sang.
Tag: Halloween