Coyote’s Ten Commandments

You know Coyote, right? Culture hero of a thousand misadventures?

Suppose he came down from [sacred mountain of your choice] with 10 commandments. They might look like this. (Thanks to Infidels of Every Denomination.)

Pagan Carnival

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Requiem for a city

Trying to prepare to teach tomorrow’s classes, I have been depressed all day about a city that I knew only as a visitor. This Washington Post writer has me beat, of course:

For those of us lucky enough to have come of age in New Orleans — even more than for the tourist who falls for her instantly — the decadent majesty of the city is like a forbidden love. You want desperately to explain the depths of your enchantment, but you know in your heart that others will acknowledge it merely as an easy infatuation or a passing fling. You know they will never awaken at night drunk on the coffee-and-banana fragrance of her docks or the beery sweat of her pre-dawn streets or the humid hum of her streetcar summers. How could they ever understand the depth of your passion?

I find myself going here compulsively.

Did the Tarot card readers of Jackson Square keep turning up The Tower all last week? (If they did not, someone will create a fictional work in which they did.)

M.’s and my experience of being refugees for all of four days last July did make me more sensitive to scenes of people fleeing their homes. In this case, though, it would not surprise me if people from southern Louisiana and Mississippi will probably still be living in tent cities a year from now, a semi-permanent class of refugees.

[A]ccording to Shea Penland, geologist and professor at the University of New Orleans. “When we get the big hurricane and there are 10,000 people dead, the city government’s been relocated to the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain, refugee camps have been set up and there $10 billion plus in losses, what then?” he asks.

Interestingly, that was published five years ago.

UPDATE: God punished New Orleans because it was a wicked city, just in case you were wondering. (Link from Andrew Sullivan.)

Falconry in the Dreamtime

Hunting magic is still out there. Scroll down past the falcon photos to read the entry.

“What’s on your iGod?”

Mark Morford has some fun with the “spiritual but not religious” meme. He thinks it’s a good thing, too. I’m not sure where the “homogeny” is, however. I see plenty of variety in the passing religious spectacle. But let Morford continue:

I have seen [this profound change] at yoga retreats and Wicca gatherings and in all related offshoots, Druidism and Pantheism and Animism, etc. I’ve heard it in the talks of modern gurus and nontraditional pastors and felt it in our deep cultural fascination with mystical powers and dream energies and supernatural phenomena, and it is perhaps most visible in the Religion & Spirituality aisle of your bookstore, the most explosive section of the publishing market, $2 billion worth just a few years ago alone, countless thousands of titles shooting up like flowers and very few having to do with how to kneel in abject guilt-addled faith to a solitary sullen disapproving deity and instead almost every single one having to do with how to take some sort of larger view — or rather, a deeper, inner view, profoundly personal and free of typical religious dogma and churchy groupthink and send us your money now so the pastor can make his Lear payments.

Driving Audhumla

Driving Audhumla is a Pagan road-trip blog by Victoria Slind-Flor that I have been enjoying. Check out “Visiting Paganistan.”

The week I spent at the Sacred Harvest Festival was wonderful. It was unlike any other large-scale public Pagan event I’ve attended before in that it was overwhelmingly family-oriented. We had so many young families, families with adolescents, and young adults, in addition to the usual coterie of folks my age. Particpants mainly came from the upper midwest, with many from “Paganistan,” AKA the Twin Cities.

He’s ba-ack

After almost a year’s absence, The Religious Policeman, the best blog to come out of Saudi Arabia, is back. (No, that is not his real photo.) I thought maybe he was in a prison cell, seriously. In fact, he has left the happy kingdom and moved to England.

A writing sample:

There are those people in Jeddah. They have a Corniche, so they think they’re living on the Mediterranean. They tend to smile and laugh. You occasionally see couples furtively holding hands. What libertines.

Then there are the people from Qassim, pronounced Gass-eem. A district centered round Burayda, 200 miles north of Riyadh. Where Wahabbi (who invented our really fun version of Islam) originally came from. Burayda is described in Lonely Planet or the Rough Guide as the “most unfriendly place in Saudi Arabia”. And then some. Remember those old movies about creepy New England towns called Spookyburg or Witchville, where some innocent guy wanders in by mistake, it’s all knee deep in mist and the silent locals just stare and don’t say anything, the guy ends up next morning as a puddle of ectoplasm on the ground? Well Burayda makes those places look like New Orleans. In Mardi Gras.

The logistics of sacrifice (2)

Part 1

Bard College is known for its Classics program. Somewhere on the Web there is a video clip transferred from film of 1930s students in ancient Greek costumes having an Olympic-style competition on the fieldhouse.

This graphic series from Bard attempts to show the stages of a typical Greek sacrifice of a sheep, but it suffers from a degree of prettiness. For instance:

Scene 14: the improbable fire. No ash buildup, and no one gets smoke in their eyes later

Scene 16: Half-raw, half-charred sheep heart. . . yum!

Scene 17: Where did the fire go? Who stripped the bones, and how long did that take? There is archaeological evidence for the burning of bones. Does everyone else stand around getting hungry? One source I read suggested that the meat was often boiled (plain or with onions?); another says that priests (or their agents) could sell their portion of the meat in the marketplace.

Scene 19: That must be wine with a very high alcoholic content!

Still the basics are there. By comparison, Muslims seem not necessarily to bother with altars for their animal sacrifices.

Christianity, too, grew up in a culture, temple Judaism, that practiced sacrifice, as did surrounding cultures. The idea of Jesus-as-sacrifice must have carried a lot of emotional impact then based on what people had seen for themselves, as opposed to being just a dead metaphor as it is now.

It’s like “flip side” from phonograph albums or all the steam-power metaphors still in our language: “get fired up,” “build up a head of steam.” When did you last fire a steam boiler?

When I was a child, I was just grossed out by phrases like “washed in the blood of the Lamb.” All bloody–yuck! At least if I had seen blood-splashed altars, it would have meant something to me.

Sometimes the only way to learn is to do it. An essay in The Pagan Book of Living and Dying describes the outdoor cremation of a corpse on a Texas ranch. The deceased friends’ had the land, the firewood (old corral rails), and the inclination, and it was what he had wanted. So they build a pyre around the corpse and lit it . . . and then had to wait, because a body in a wood fire does not burn instantly. What to do? They had food, drink, and time–so they played games: volleyball or whatever, just like at a picnic. Of course! You always read about “the funeral games” at the burial of some ancient hero.

Calm before the storm

Over the years, I have noticed that we often have an unusually warm (for the season) night before a snowstorm. It’s still August, of course, but I have been on campus the last two days, and that is the way it felt. I go to meetings, clean my office, collect books, etc., all knowing that next week the storm will be here.

The best part so far was a rock-’em, sock-’em speech by Roger Bowen, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, who came all the way from Washington, D.C., to speak on defending academic freedom (and its limits and responsibilities).

Meanwhile, Jason Pitzl-Waters has put together the first Carnival of the Pagans or Pagan Carnival, whichever term you prefer, and I hope it’s not the last. Stop by the Wildhunt Blog and send him your suggestions from the Pagan blogosphere.