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.

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.

Paganism

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.)

Voodoo

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.

Pagan Studies Paganism

The Dodman’s Craft

Before there was an Internet–back around 1980–Mike Nichols of Kansas City published a lively Pagan ‘zine. He has been writing and teaching classes on the Craft for decades.

Nowadays, as Wren Walker of The Witches’ Voice says in her foreword, if you do a Web search on “Samhain” or “Midsummer,” your results page will feature “Mike Nichols.” A lot.

Or you could just pick up his new work, The Witches’ Sabbats, and get it all in one place in the convenient, battery-free, cross-platform book interface, published by Acorn Guild Press.

The writing is witty–Despite the bad publicity generated by Thomas Tryon’s novel, Harvest Home is the pleasantest of holidays–and in some places, such as his astrological reading of the story of Llew and Blodeuwedd, has echoes of Robert Graves’ search for deeper meanings in myth and folklore.

And it’s indexed.

Contemporary Paganism is often referred to as “nature religion,” but in practice that most often is a religion of what I call “cosmic nature,” in other words, an attempt to attune oneself with cosmic or planetary cycles, most often through seasonal ritual. The Witches’ Sabbats is a state-of-the-art handbook for practitioners. It even includes a chapter on building or interpreting outdoor alignments with standing stones or poles.

Tags Nature Religion Paganism Witchcraft

Animism, Disney, and Morels

It started when someone passed on a quote from an article in the August 2005 issue of Vanity Fair about Disneyland:

I thought about everything it was and it wasn’t, the cornucopia of image, illusion, and icon, and realized, very much to my delight, that Disney is a freaking pagan cult, that this goody-two-shoes American institution is promoting a primitive, animist religion dedicated to investing everything with life, to animating everything from teacups to trees, from carpets to houses, from ducks to mice, with the pulse of human aspiration.

Graham Harvey, author of the newly published Animism: Respecting the Living World, commented,

Interesting that ‘animism’ is still defined as the projection of life onto inanimate objects. Wikipedia’s animism article and the discussion pages also evidence the same debate–well, it does now that I’ve added some stuff about the ‘new animism’.

I also thought of what Colorado writer David Petersen said in On the Wild Edge: In Search of a Natural Life, published recently by Henry Holt:

These days, our annual morel quest has matured to the level of ceremony, complete as all hunting is for me, with rituals and taboos. This confession provides, I must hope, a passable transition into a brief explication of my own personal spirituality, which I call neo-animism . . . .In sum, here’s how it seems to me: if you depend on wild nature for your physical and mental well-being (as we all do, whether we know it or not); if you desire a sustainable, workable, and healthy human society and crave a sense of belonging, spiritual permanence, and personal worth; and if you agree with Aldo Leopold that the collective human destiny is tied inextricably to the fate of the natural world, then you naturally become a homespun animist. (pp. 122-4).

And speaking of morels, here is a new book available on hunting them.

Cross-posted to Nature Blog. Animism

On the Front Burner*

Lee Gilmore and Mark Van Proyen are the editors of a new anthology, AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man

Contributors include the always-perceptive Erik Davis and Sarah Pike, whose work I have mentioned here before.

*Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Burning Man