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”?
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.
Ghost story
Boulder, Colo., Wiccan priestess Morwyn has a piece in the current (August 2005) issue of Fate magazine, titled “Exorcism Spanish Style,” based on an incident that occurred to her in Santiago de Campostela in 1997.
She owns Dunraven House, the latest incarnation of magical-supplies business that has occupied her since the 1970s–she told me once that she was inspired by similar such stores catering to followers of Umbanda and Candomblé that she encountered when in Brazil on a Fulbright fellowship.
I always tell my nonfiction-writing students that Fate is the place to try to sell a true ghost story.
Banned at Borders?
I was trying to track down a report that The Love Spell: An Erotic Memoir of Spiritual Awakening, by high-profile Wiccan lawyer and priestess Phyllis Curott, had been yanked from bookstores after pressure from social-conservative Christians such as these.
I cannot find anything so far to substantiate that rumor.
What is probably worse, in her social sphere, is getting the snarky treatment from Veiled Conceit, a blog devoted to sarcastic deconstruction of New York Times wedding announcements.
The Potter menace
To my mind, the best thing about the Harry Potter books is that kids like to read them, and I generally think that Reading is Good. But I never made the important connection noted by Christian blogger Dan Edelen: Wicca is the first world religion produced in the United Kingdom. J.K. Rowling lives in the UK also. It’s no coincidence!
As ever, don’t skip the comments.
UPDATE: In a different sort of bitchfest, blogger Lindsay Beyerstein has all the links on Terry Prachett’s denunciation of Rowling for not being a proper fantasy-genre writer.
It really pisses [Pratchett and Neil Gaiman] off that such a huge commercial success isn’t counted squarely as a coup for the fantasy genre.
On the other hand, they really don’t like the fact that a card carrying non-fanboy is kicking asses all over the best seller lists.
There is a sign on the border of every ghetto: “Sal si puedes. Get out if you can.”
“Witches” who were about to die
The walls of a dungeon in Palermo, Sicily, have yielded grafitti left by condemned prisoners in the 17th and 18th centuries. Some of the prisoners would have been condemned for sorcery, says this account.
Anyone dragged [to that dungeon] was unlikely to emerge alive as the Inquisition was notoriously ruthless with suspected heretics, soothsayers, blasphemers and friends of the Devil. “In fact, many of the victims were simply intellectuals or artists whom the Church considered a threat to its power,” explained the head of restorers, Domenico Policarpi.
Indeed, the average Sicilian back then was probably illiterate and incapable of writing anything much on prison walls.
Extreme Academia
The normally serious people at the American Association of University Professors have produced this.
If, like me, you know these programs only from being occasionally trapped in a high-rise hotel room, this site can help.
Sample: Average Joe
Journal editors deliberately select mediocre articles for their next issues. No one notices.
Pagan archives
I recently sent my eighth carton of Pagan magazines, dating from the 1970s to last year, to the University of California, Santa Barbara.
That particular UC campus is known for its religious-studies department. J. Gordon Melton, a well-known scholar of new religious movements, is also affiliated with the university, although not on the religion faculty. (From an academic perspective, Wicca, Asatru, etc. are “new religious movements”, regardless of claims of antiquity that some people make for their traditions.)
Melton brought his own huge collection of material from his Institute for the Study of American Religion to the university library’s American Religions Collection. That collection is now being digitized, which should make future study easier.
My last carton contained issues of Enchanté, Hole in the Stone, The Druid’s Progress, and some other now-discontinued Pagan ‘zines.
It’s a hard choice: part of me wants to save everything indefinitely, the way some people save old car parts. The other part of me says that I am not in the archive business and that giving these publications to a real archive will make them available to others, not to mention freeing up significant shelf space in the garage (which can then be filled with Jeep parts).
There are a few boxes of back issues that I do hold on to: Green Egg, the best national Pagan magazine of the 1970s-80s; The Cauldron, continuously published for nearly 30 years now; Nemeton, a West Coast Pagan magazine from the 1970s, and my rarity, issues of The Pentagram, a British Craft newsletter published for a short time in the mid-1960s.
Road trip
Suitably stocked with guns and whiskey, M. and I leave today for the Wyoming border. Tomorrow, in daylight, we plan to travel north on the old smugglers’ route, past the desolate frontier fortress of Baggs, and moving quickly through the lawless caravan town of Rock Springs, thence north toward the fantasy kingdom of Jackson. There we plan to annoy the trout in the water of the Snake and do other things. Blogging will be erratic.