“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.

Hogwarts versus Cherry Hill

BeliefNet offers a side-by-side comparison of a certain wizard’s school versus real-life Pagan seminaries.

Click the graphic on the sidebar for more of the wacky world of BeliefNet’s religion blogs.

Historic preservation leads to . . . polytheism?

Those fun-loving Wahabi Muslim clerics in Saudi Arabia fear that preserving historic buildings in their holy city of Mecca–even sites associated with the prophet Muhammed himself–might lead to polytheism.

Their reasoning is so convoluted that I cannot easily summarize it. But an Arab architectural historian (apparently) says, “They (Wahhabis) have not allowed preservation of old buildings, especially those related to the prophet. They fear other Muslims will come to see these buildings as blessed and this could lead to polytheism and idolatry.”

So it is better to let them be bulldozed. (Does the developer pay off the clerics?) It’s a pity that this Saudi blogger felt afraid to keep blogging: he would have had some interesting comments. Read his archives.

Letting women drive cars leads to polytheism too. But you knew that.

Headstones and bureaucrats

Non-Fluffy Wicca posts about bureaucratic foot-dragging and stonewalling over the issue of headstones for Pagan military service members.

Beginning in 1997 with a request by the Aquarian Tabernacle Church of Washington state, various Wiccan groups have requested a pentagram headstone for military cemeteries and been ignored or turned down on technical reasons.

Incompetence or malevolence on the part of the National Cemetery Administration?

In a review of Carol Barner-Barry’s new book, Contemporary Paganism: Minority Religions in a Majoritarian America , Doug Cowan of the University of Missouri-Kansas City writes, “Contrary to what many Pagans may suspect, however, what the author reveals is not an organized persecution of minority religions, but rather the logical consequences of a constitutional process that could not imagine their existence, a legal system ill-equipped to deal with the special problems they face, a political system unwilling to work proactively to enshrine their protection, and a social system that has, on the other hand, embedded Christian demographic dominance with majoritarian privilege.”

The entire review will be in the November issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies.

The First Amendment was set up to prevent one Christian denomination discriminating against another. The framers of the Constitution remembered western Europe’s history of wars between Catholics and Protestants, of state-supported churches such as the Church of England, and of religiously based tests for employment. They tried to eliminate all those evils.

To them, Jews were a tiny, odd but ancient minority, “Hindoos” lived on the other side of the world, Muslims likewise, and American Indian tribes did not have real religions worth mentioning.

It is no coincidence that beginning early in the last century, the Native American Church began to “push the envelope” of the First Amendment. Its theology was really not that unusual, but its use of the entheogen peyote ran contrary to majoritarian ideas about “drugs,” despite the long Christian use of a sacramental intoxicant.

Now come the Pagans, of whom it cannot be said that “we all worship the same god in different ways.” Paganism’s religious vision is so different. A divine Feminine (or several of them) is a greater challenge to the majority world view than even some Pagans recognize.

On the other hand, religion as a category is strong in America because we have no state church. Americans generally are quite tolerant people, as long as one’s religion does not lead to flying airplanes into office buildings. I suspect that we Pagans will get the military headstones eventually, somehow.

Online goddess-spirituality study

A doctoral student at the California Institute for Integrative Studies (a pricey, private graduate school) is seeking female participants for her research on “A Survey of Women’s Experiences and Implications for Therapy.”

If you are part of a “hidden population,” you have just been “snowballed.”

Back on track

M. and I have been home for three days, and life is beginning to settle down. It will be a long time before we forget the 3 a.m. evacuation and the drive into the dark mountains, not knowing if we would see our little house in the woods again.

You can read all about it at Nature Blog, probably more than you want to know.

I was on deadline with The Pomegranate when all this started. Most people, it seems, grab photo albums and such when they are forced to evacuate; I’ve seen that time and again. M. took her parents’ wedding picture, I know that. But I had the little box of 3×5 cards for tracking article submissions to The Pom and a flash memory stick with all the files on it.

We arrived at a friend’s house at what would become “Burro Camp” about 4 a.m. and spent the next three hours trying to sleep on sofas. When we had left home, our gravel county road was the new fire line, so in the state between waking and sleeping I tried to visualize a shimmering blue curtain running along it between the national forest and the home sites. All the fire had to do was move into a stand of dry, beetle-killed ponderosa pines, burn hot, and then toss embers down the hill to the road.

That never happened. When I returned, I could see that it stopped about 30 yards short of the dead trees. The wind shifted, I suppose. And the firefighters never had to make a desperate fight along the road to save the houses.

The fire did cross the road at a higher point, but quickly stopped, whether due to a wind shift or to daytime aerial slurry drops I don’t know, since I don’t know whether that part burned before dawn or not.

Of course, it is hard to keep from running a mental movie of yourself sifting through the ashes. I was kicking myself a little for not grabbing items from the outdoor shrine, located in a little grove uphill from the house. (Would a brass statue of Hekate from Sacred Source survive a fire?) What sort of Pagan leaves behind the household gods? On the other land, leaving those “graven images” there provides a focus point of magical work.

Anyway, it’s nice to be back, on several levels.