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.

The logistics of sacrifice (1)

Looking at an artist’s rendition of the Roman temple of Minerva Sulis at Bath, UK, you will see a thin plume of smoke arising from the altar outside the temple. There appears to be no fuel, just smoke.

I got to thinking about animal sacrifice, not the whys and wherefores but the logistics.

My frame of reference here is the ancient Mediterranean, thus ruling out contemporary Santeristas, etc., contemporary extreme Kali worshippers, or even the 16th-century Aztecs, known for their (dis)assembly-line approach to human sacrifice.

For all that, go read René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred.

First of all, the altar. One you have graduated from a pile of unhewn stones to a nice block of marble, are you going to build a fire on it? The heat will lead to cracking, spalling, etc. Even if you have just a small fire into which you sprinkle wine, tufts of hair clipped from the victim, handfuls of barley, or whatever, it would be destructive. So do you line the top of the altar with disposable bricks or set a brazier on it? What do the archaeologists say? Has anyone looked at altar stones for signs of fire damage?

One friend suggests looking at Book 23 of the Iliad for suggestions: the sacrifices at the funeral games of Patroklos. I tend not to trust Homer on these matters, though: he was telling An Amazing Tale of Long Ago, with larger-than-life characters who did things in a larger-than-life way.

According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary, some chthonic deities got their sacrifices burned in pits. That makes sense.

As a hunter, I have cut up animals ranging in size from squirrels to elk. I know about blood and guts. After the haruspex has looked at the liver, what then? Is it burned? It won’t burn fast! (Lots of fuel needed–who supplies it?) Intestines if fatty would burn better than an ox’s stomach, for example. Or all those parts disposed of elsewhere? You don’t just burn blood, unless you have a monster bonfire going.

In most cases, the worshippers ate the muscle meat. Fat was often burned: the smell was pleasing the gods and definitely increased the worshipers’ appetites. In Fishcakes and Courtesans James Davidson discusses how to the classical Athenians, red meat-eating was all mixed up with religious taboos and sacred violence, whereas fish was “secular,” and they could eat all they wanted, when they wanted.

Who gets the hide? The priests (for sale to the tanners, presumably)? If bones are burned, what about horns? The smell! The flies! The ashes!

If you wanted a constant fire going, olive oil would be a better fuel than wood. I suppose you would not want to be downwind either way.

Lots of questions. More later.

Pagan studies, nature religion at AAR-SBL

For anyone attending the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and Society for Biblical Literature in Philadelphia in November, here is a quick–and not necessarily definitive–list of the Pagan-studies sessions.

First, the all-day Conference on Contemporary Pagan Studies, which has been happening since 1998 in some form but is not an official program unit.

The following program units have at least one Pagan-studies presenter, if not the entire panel:

1. New Religious Movements Group and Contemporary Pagan Studies Consultation, Saturday – 1:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m, Michael York, London, UK, presiding. Theme: Neo-Pagan Religions in Central and Eastern Europe: Identity, Community, and Challenge.

2. Platonism and Neoplatonism Group, Sunday – 9:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m., Gregory Shaw, Stonehill College, presiding. Theme: Neoplatonism, Dead or Alive: Is Neoplatonism a Living Tradition?

3. Death, Dying, and Beyond Consultation, Sunday – 9:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m., Christopher M. Moreman, St. Francis Xavier University, presiding. Theme: Continuities and Discontinuities: Contemporary Cross-Cultural Approaches to the Study of Death.

4. New Religious Movements Group, Sunday – 4:00 p.m.-6:30 p.m., Holly Folk, Indiana University, Bloomington, presiding. Theme: Theoretical Issues in the Study of NRMs and NRMs and Their Sacred Texts.

5. Contemporary Pagan Studies Consultation, Monday – 9:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m., Wendy Griffin, California State University, Long Beach, presiding. Theme: Boundaries and Paths to Authenticity.

6. New Religious Movements Group, Monday – 1:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m. Greg Johnson, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder, presiding. Theme: Devoted to the Outdoors: Nature Recreation as Religious Practice.

Appeals court upholds Wiccan parents

An Indiana appeals court has upheld the right of divorced Wiccan parents to expose their children to their religious practices, something that both parents wished to do.

The Indiana Civil Liberties Union argued the case on constitutional grounds — that the decree trampled on parents’ rights to expose their children to the religion of their choice.

But the appeals court didn’t rule on the constitutional question. Instead, the appeals court relied on state law, which prohibits courts from limiting parents’ authority unless a child is at risk of physical danger, or significant emotional impairment.

More links and details at The Wildhunt blog.

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.

Writers and blogs

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