The National Guard as exorcists
From The Mystery of the Haunted Vampire via Relapsed Catholic, a cheesy local TV news report on National Guardsmen exorcising “little girl” ghosts from an abandoned New Orleans school.
Think of it as the military version of “the priesthood of the believer.” (Fast connection needed)
“Voodoo, cannibalism, witchcraft…”
“Wherever soldiers go, there goes the word of Gawd …” Oh boy, it’s the New Model National Guard.
Tags: Hurricane Katrina Ghosts
Mike Nichols interview
Mike Nichols, whose book on the Wiccan sabbats I mentioned earlier, is the subject of a new interview in The Wiccan Pagan Times.
You will find a permanent linke to TWPT on the sidebar, to the right side of your screen.
Tags: Wicca Mike Nichols
Saturday with the Pagans
Rocky Mountain News religion writer Jean Torkelson goes to Denver’s Pagan Pride celebration and writes a middle-of-the-road “Pagans are mostly just regular folks” column.
Behind each pagan, a story: Dressed in brooding black, Michael Torres looked like a shadow falling across the sunlit park. Raised in the intense Santeria sect, his family put coconuts under their beds to frighten away spirits. Some branches, not his, sacrifice animals. But he pulled away from that to practice his own “solitary” paganism. He works as a trucker and met his wife in a library.
That’s a dangling modifier, Jean. “Raised in the intense Santería sect” looks as though it should modify “Michael Torres,” not “family.”
Now if we could just get past the “worship nature” phrasing, which is not accurate and reflects, I think, a back-formation from the idea of worshiping a single deity. When it comes to Pagans, I don’t think that “worship” is the all-purpose verb that it can be for monotheists. Try honor, enjoy, manifest, hang out with, seek to live in harmony with, or whatever.
Tags: nature religion Pagan Pride
Katrina is God/dess’s punishment for _________
Religion blogger Richard Bartholemew rounds up varying opinions over just which deity wanted to punish the Gulf Coast (principally New Orleans) and why.
Tags Hurricane Katrina
Starhawk is our Jesse Jackson
I don’t mean that as a compliment. Jackson has used up his credibility from his earlier civil-rights work by parachuting himself into whatever crisis or disaster comes along, trying to grab some television time for his own agenda.
Now Pagan activist-writer Starhawk is up to the same game (again) with her own response to Hurricane Katrina. Short version: It’s President Bush’s fault, and Mississippians deserved to die because they do not worship Oya.
And a day later, the levees failed, and the floods came. They failed not from an Act of Goddess, but from a lack of resources. The Bush Administration had systematically cut funding for flood control and for repairing and increasing the strength of the levees. The money went to Iraq.
And Clinton and Bush Senior and so on back to FDR, I am sure. Not to mention that money spent in Louisiana has sometimes been spend in odd ways, ways that benefitted local politicians perhaps more than anyone.
You can see that her real agenda is Bush-bashing, because she brings in Cindy Sheehan, who is totally irrelevant here unless you want to go after Bush. (And let me add by way of disclaimer that as a lifelong Democrat I did not vote for either Bush, father or son.)
What about the Mississippians? Starhawk writes that certain “progressive” Christians were praying and “Orisha priestesses were ‘working’ Oya, and the hurricane did shift its course, slightly, and lessened its force, down to a Category Four.”
That’s right, it shifted its course onto Pass Christian, Bay St. Louis, and such places, which evidently were more deserving. They are Mississippians, so they must be bigots, right? Not colorful Voodooists as in New Orleans.
Now, weeks later, New Orleans remains under martial law.
That statement is simply false and shows ignorance of what “martial law” is and how it is declared. If the city were truly under martial law, Mayor Nagin would be gagged on the sidelines, not issuing proclamations about who could move back in.
What we learn from Starhawk’s rant is that we Pagans do not believe in a punishing Father God, but we do believe in a Mother Goddess who punishes those who voted for George Bush.
Finally, Starhawk is one of those who worships at the shrine of “diversity,” but the Pagan movement in fact is much more politically and culturally diverse than she is. Perhaps some day she will acknowledge that fact. Do not regard her views as representative of contemporary Paganism as a whole.
UPDATE: Cindy Sheehan is now calling for Pres. Bush to remove the troops from “occupied New Orleans.” Contrary to what one earlier commenter suggested, I do not see Starhawk’s mention of her as merely coincidental.
Tags: Starhawk Hurricane Katrina
Rags over the River
The Poet contacted me a while back, asking me to take The Visiting Poet flyfishing. All right, I said, and let’s ask Recent Graduate as well. Eventually, the Senior was asked to come along too, and the five of us spent Saturday on the Arkansas River.
September and October are the payoff for spring blizzards and summer heat. This day, the temperatures were warm, the rabbitbrush (chamisa) was in golden bloom, and the first leaves were turning golden on the willows too.
The water was low and clear, and the trout were spooky, but we all caught some. And we tested various rhymes for “Orvis,” since Visiting Poet has done some product testing for that firm.
Part of the river where we fished is in the crosshairs of High Art. Christo and Jeanne-Claude want to hang fabric across it, a project known locally as “Rags over the River.” How wonderful. I find myself agreeing with the Denver Post headline, “Locals say river is art in itself,” placed on Rick Tosche’s Sunday column (link may expire).
With any luck, however, we can drag this thing out until Christo dies.
Cross-posted to Nature Blog. Tags: Arkansas River Christo
More Crazy Season
The Crazy Season: the weeks leading up to Hallowe’en when the news media rediscover Witchcraft.
Witchcraft and Magic: North America, edited by Helen Berger and mentioned here earlier, has arrived.
One contributor, the sociologist Tanice Foltz, writes on “The Commodification of Witchcraft” (a favorite academic topic, also addressed by other scholars, as here and here). To her credit, Foltz states, “I submit that Pagans’ exchange of money for spirituality services such as Wiccan festivals, retreats, and educational programs does not portend a change in the main focus of the religion.” Elsewhere in her introduction she speaks of the new media image of Witches as “attractive, youthful, strong, and independent females who openly use their magical powers to fight against evil for the common good.”
Fully in the commodified Crazy Season spirit, then, we have Australian media-witch Fiona Horne, using her powers in Playboy, which has a long history of interest in sexy Witches, dating back to at least 1974 when they sent frequent contributor Mordecai Richler to cover one of Llewellyn Publications’ “Gnosticon” gatherings.
Tags: Witchcraft Paganism Halloween
Mayor apologizes to Pagans
The mayor of the High Plains town of Ramah has backed away from interfering with planned Pagan event at the local American Legion hall.
Mayor Tamra Herrara has apologized to a pagan group whose plan for a Halloween gathering cast the small plains town as a modern-day Salem.
The Calhan-based coven of about a dozen members rented Ramah’s American Legion Hall for an Oct. 29 fund-raiser for St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital.
The Rev. Tim Tucker, minister of Ramah Baptist Fellowship, tried to get the town board to block the gathering at a work session Aug. 25 called to discuss the pagan celebration.
Herrara’s apology followed a scolding Tuesday from fellow trustee Nicole Allen, who said she was embarrassed by the board’s behavior at the work session, saying it was an attempt to violate the group’s civil liberties.
Curse of the Superdome
All the world has seen how the New Orleans Superdome went from being an overnight shelter for hurricane evacuees to a purgatorial waiting room when the city flooded. But maybe you did not know that the structure was already cursed. (Scroll to Sept.12 entries.)
Pagan Studies conference
The 2005 Conference on Contemporary Pagan Studies, which happens the day before the American Academy of Religion annual meeting but is not an official program unit (unlike the Pagan Studies consultation, which is) has a theme of “Revisioning the Past: Reconstruciton, Revitilization and Ethnicity.”
Cost is $25 and you can register online.