What you will find in The Pomegranate

I have posted a complete table of contents for volume 7 of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies.

Issue no. 2 is now in press, and I hope it will be available at the Equinox Publishing booth at the American Academy of Religion-Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in Philadelphia in November. It will be a lively and provocative issue.

Now to further update the “old” web site.

NOTE: My apologies to anyone who tried the table of contents link earlier and got nowhere. Some changes had been made to the FTP access on the host server, and I did not learn about them in time. Now, with the latest version of Transmit, an elegant Mac FTP application, I able to upload files again.

Local Knowledge

Three cheers for Vera Stucky Evenson, author of The Mushrooms of Colorado. Those white mushrooms were indeed Agaricus campestris. M. and I ate them on last night’s pizza, and we’re still here 24 hours later. (Yes, I made spore prints too.)

The cat ate some too–he must have liked the oiliness of sauteed mushrooms–but he later left his on the bathroom floor. Cats and fungi: not a good combination.

Local knowledge can be hard to come by. When I taught an environmental-issues section of freshman composition, my student typically knew (or thought that they knew) more about the Brazilian rain forest than about the Wet Mountains, which they could see from the classroom windows, not 30 miles away.

Th Pueblo Mountain Park Environmental Center has taken a good step with the publication of Plants of Pueblo Mountain Park, which fits our ecological niche over here too.

This evening after supper I strapped on my authentic Lithuanian mushroom basket, and M. and I walked the ridge behind the house, picking boletes. “Probably the surest mushrooms to recognize beyond the Foolproof Four [morels, puffballs, shaggy mane, sulfur polymore] are the boletes,” writes Lorentz Pearson in The Mushroom Manual.

My eccentric sister in Kaunas provided the basket. She bought it from a street vendor–it looks like an angler’s creel, but it lacks the slot in the lid into which to deposit the spotted trout. Maybe it was supposed to be a creel anyway, but since the few Lithuanians I have met were mycophiles, it’s a mushroom basket.

It was Germans who started us gathering boletes. Years ago, we were hiking the Horsethief Park trail on the west side of Pike’s Peak when we encountered a group of elderly German women with shopping bags–typical Army brides from Colorado Springs–and they were doing some serious mushroom-picking.

They taught us those mushrooms, and then they pointed us one way while they went another way.

One member of that particular demographic established an unfortunate reputation with the local Search and Rescue group. She was so busy one summer afternoon a couple of years ago looking down for edible fungi that she got lost and spent a chilly night in the Wets. And now the S&R people are convinced that all mushroom-hunters are distracted and easily lost.

Local knowledge–what good is “nature religion” without it?

Writers and blogs

Steven Krause, who teaches English at Eastern Michigan University, weighs in on why writers should (not) blog.

Resistance is futile

“We are Zogg.” Go here if you dare–and have a fast connection. (Link from Non Fluffy Wicca.)

In memorium Monica Sjoo

Monica Sjoo, artist, writer, and a key figure in Goddess spirituality, died Monday.

With Barbara Mor, she coauthored The Great Cosmic Mother: Discovering the Religion of the Earth (Harper San Francisco: 1987). She also wrote Return of the Dark/Light Mother and other works.

In an email circulated this week, Starhawk writes of her,

The last time I saw Monica, she came for a night to the Earth Activist Training I was coteaching in England. She presided over the ritual we were having that night in her wheelchair, sitting by the fire like an embodiment of the Crone herself. We told stories, of the walk and the Stonehenge ritual, of Greenham and the antinuclear actions of the eighties, of the early years of the feminist spirituality movement. The younger women activists—and the men—listened with rapt attention to a history most of them had never heard. Monica seemed strong, at peace, complete. That is how I will remember her, her silver hair shining in the firelight, her eyes alight. One of the mothers of the women’s spirituality movement is gone. May the Goddess embrace her, take her into her loving arms, and bring her strong, creative spirit around the circle to rebirth.

A poem she wrote as her son Sean was dying of cancer is here.

Mutilating Pagan art

Via The Cranky Professor, I discovered Towards an Archaeology of Iconoclasm, a blog devoted to early Christian campaign to destroy or at least any earlier art that suggested connection to Pagan thought. The writer is a Danish graduate student in archaeology, Troels Myrup Kristensen. The thesis will attempt to answer questions such as who were the image-breakers? In what contexts does iconoclasm occur? What role did religious violence play in late Roman/early Christian society? What is the larger picture?

The Abrahamic religions’ hostility to art continues–witness the Taliban’s destruction of the giant Buddhist statues in Afghanistan a few years ago.

Discusing a damaged sculptural group of the Three Graces, Kristensen notes,

There were many different motives for Christians to smash pagan sculpture, and one of them was an aversion to nudity. This is clear from a series of sculptures, whose genitalia have been mutilated.

Genital mutilation. What more is there to say?

Church, state, and sacred sites

No insightful comment here, just a link to a Christian Science Monitor piece on the difficulties of applying law to sacred sites. Kennewick Man gets a mention too. (Remember, boys and girls, “Caucasian” is not the same as “Caucasoid.” Even the CSM fumbles that term.)

What she said

Sunfell, posting at The Juggler, wields her Giant Hammer of Paradigm Busting:

Unity” is another delusion that should be thrown out with PLPT [Perfect Love and Perfect Trust]. We are happily individual, with our individual Circles and practices. Anyone who seeks to unify the community is doomed to fail.

Why do people make such a fuss over “unity,” when so often it just means “Do it my way”?

Apples and Honey

Even though it was billed as a horror film, and even though no one whom I knew ever endorsed the ending, the 1973 movie The Wicker Man still inspired many of us who were then in the Pagan movement. We loved the idea of a place like Summerisle, a functioning society based on Pagan principles.

The new version that’s in the works, starring Nicholas Cage as the interfering policeman and directed by Neil LaBute, moves the island from the Scottish coast to Puget Sound.

But the remake lacks the tension of the original, says this script reviewer.

My problems with this draft all stem from the changes made to the main character. Malus isn’t anywhere near as intense or conflicted as Howie; indeed, compared to him, Malus is a relative dork. He is allergic to bee stings and carries his bee sting kit with him when he travels to SummerIsle (along with his rosary beads and self-help tapes). He is a California cop out removed to this isolated Washington community. His very modern manner contrasts with the simplicity of the locals; think Witness but if it were remade as horror-lite.

This island community produces honey rather than apples. The cop’s name, Malus (rather than Howie as in the original), is the botanical genus for apples–a little tribute to the original.

The sacred prostitute

In recent decades, two groups have attempted to rehabilitate the so-called “sacred prostitutes” of the ancient Mediterranean world. Part of what we think we know of these alleged customs of temple prostitutes–either women dedicated their virginity to a deity and/or possibly slaves–comes from the Greek geographer and historian Strabo, who lived about 2,000 years ago.

One group did so in the interest of improving the image and social standing of today’s sex workers, as does this site:

[M]any contemporary prostitutes turn to the iconography of the “sacred prostitute,” a quasi-historical construct providing a “golden age” when the prostitute’s unique power was honored rather than reviled. Relying on mythology and animal imagery of Near Eastern goddesses, particularly Lilith and Inanna, this strain of discourse constructs a position of political and spiritual sovereignty within which prostitutes can contextualize their work and their political struggles.

Others seek to meld the commercial and sacred roles. They may seek to expand the boundaries of how we express spirituality or view prostitution as redefined as “priestess.”

The “holy whore” may express a form of gnostic spirituality as well.

Some followers of revived ancient Egyptian religion take a similar line:

The Egyptian sacred ‘prostitute’ (who was probably a highly regarded as a member of Egyptian society because of her association with different gods or goddesses (such as Bes and Hathor), rather than the street walker that the modern mind imagines) advertised herself through her clothing and make up.

However, this article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz is more skeptical, at least about Egypt:

Surprisingly, the minute one sets aside the Judeo-Christian moral code and excises from the list of “harlots” those who engaged in a provocative line of work such as erotic dancing, there is no evidence, in all the historical findings from the days of the Pharaohs, that sex could be bought for money in the Land of the Nile. (Link via Paleojudaica.)

Clearly the combination of women + sex + religious worship is still a potent one, even to another writer who wants partially to debunk it.

Kama, working name of an Indian-born London prostitute who considers herself to be a devadasi, or sacred prostitute in the Hindu tradition, has a blog too, where she has mentioned that she felt looked down on by British sex-worker activists, who considered her to be a “trafficked woman.”

She writes elsewhere,

Being a Devadasi allows me a world view that legitimizes my sexual behaviour so I can enjoy myself without any sense of guilt or regret, it gives me the processes that allow me to genuinely have affection for the men I meet, and a lifestyle that allows me to live independently of South Asian patriarchy while yet maintaining a South
Asian identity.

So there is the new sacred prostitute: economically on her own and framing her life in terms of identity politics.