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.

Tag: Day of the Dead

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.”

Tags: Archaeology, Barry Fell, Massachusetts

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.

Tags: Ayahuasca, UDV, Entheogens

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

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