Displaced people
This blog is having a brief hiatus, as M. and I have been displaced from our home by a forest fire. More details on my shared blog, Nature Blog.
Sacred sites
Some evocative photos of sacred sites in the UK and Iceland are on view in the Sacred Sites, Contested Rights/Rites project’s photo gallery.
Visit the main page too.
Buffy studies
I live beyond the reach of cable television, and mine is one of maybe two houses on this road without a satellite dish. Consequently, I could never have made my mark in the field of “Buffy studies.” During its run I saw the program only sporadically when staying in hotels, not enough to really follow the story arcs.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, however, drew plenty of attention from those Christians who saw it as luring teens into “the occult,” part of a general viewing-with-alarm of “teen witchcraft”.
But, says Rochester College religion professor Gregory Stevenson, the show was not about “the occult” at all. It actually presents a universe filled with moral discourse and the “occult” elements chiefly function as extended metaphor, for example, “high school is hell (mouth).”
His book Televised Morality: The Case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer goes so far as to suggest that “Buffy employs Christian teachings as a vital piece of its moral foundation.” (Xander as the Christ-figure, for instance.) This “modern fairy tale” does not glorify evil, Stevenson argues, but rather exhorts viewers to make better moral choices. He urges television critiques to move past superificial judgments based upon images of sexuality, violence, and the demonic.
Maybe I should go rent the DVDs.
Trance dance
Jason Pitzl-Waters links to an article arguing that “house music” and other descendents of disco are the true soundtrack of the Pagan movement. (There are some examples to be downloaded.)
Like the writer, I too, am tired of “boring stereotypes of what witchy, pagan music should be.” And I can understand both the “Dionysian” argument and the desire to get away from fake old-timey ballads about the Queen of Elphame.
On the other hand, the late Gwydion Pendderwen, the first Pagan musician to have a national reputation in the 1970s and early 1980s, once left his usual folky groove to write a twangy Country & Western number that managed to conceal a strongly Pagan message in completely mundane lyrics, but it never became as popular as “Spring Strathspey” or any of his other Celtic Twilight-via-Robert Graves stuff.
A difference between free people and slaves
Oleg Volk strikes again with this image illustrating the difference between slaves and free persons, via SF writer and firearms instructor Joel Rosenberg’s blog.
Blogroll housekeeping
Deleted: A Simpler Way, which has not been updated since January, and Kensho Godchaser, now folded into Jay Allen’s other blog, The Zero Boss.
Added: Red Raven’s Roost, a Celtic Reconstructionist blog, and The Marigold Trail, the blog of a San Juan Pueblo Indian from northern New Mexico in law school at UNM.
And under “Academic Life,” I am belatedly adding The Phantom Professor, an ironic commentary on teaching at a large private university in a large state to the southeast of me.
The fragrant-blossomed Muses’ lovely gift
A previously unknown poem by Sappho has been pieced together. (Via Cronaca.)
Dressing like the Ancestors
After last week’s festival, M. launched into a mini-rant about Pagans’ fondness for some form of re-created archaic dress. For instance, the priest at the solstice sunrise ritual was attired in sort of Dark Ages style: loose trousers gathered at the ankle, loose-fitting shirt, cloak, and sword and spear. How is that more Pagan than jeans and sneakers?
It’s not just us though. Recently I drove past a Protestant church in the small town where we get our mail, and they had set up tents and two-dimensional plywood camels, and people were lounging around in their own form of ancient Judaean costume. I assume it was some sort of Vacation Bible School event.
M., however, objects to the glorification of the Middle Ages, which she sees as repressive in almost all regards. It’s true that since the 1970s, when I first encountered the Craft, there has been an unfortunate bleed-through from the Society for Creative Anachronism, which glorifies the Middle Ages and Renaissance as somehow more vital and creative than Now. Of course, the SCA still enjoys plumbing and electricity; and everyone gets to be an aristocrat, or aspires to be. Even that is fine with me–the bad part is when SCA status influences status in the Pagan community. One is a baroness in the SCA; therefore, one’s fellow Pagans should treat one with more regard. I have seen this phenomenon more than once.
Homo religiosus, the religious person, seems to hold the past in higher regard than the present. The older the text or teaching, the more authoritative it is. Past practice, even if impractible today, has a normative effect–it tells us what we might do. For example, where would the contemporary Heathen practice of seiðr be without that one passage from the Elder Edda about the volva with her catskin gloves? How could I be working on my flying ointment paper without the 14th-century story of Lady Alice Kytler, who beat the rap but let her maid be executed–thus demonstrating the true aristocratic temperment, as opposed to the SCA variety.
Gleaming white stone
A part of Colorado that I had never seen before (nor had M.) was the Crystal River valley up from Carbondale through Redstone and Marble.
What you see on the right is not a fragment of the temple of Zeus from some mountainous part of Greece, nor a fragment of the architectural vision of Albert Speer, but a wall from one of the marble mills in the town of the same name. Marble, Colorado, boomed in the early 20th century, furnishing building material for numerous buildings, including the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
Now sculpture students work among the ruins.
You know you are nearing Marble when you turn off Colorado 133 at the sign and begin seeing Dumpster-size chunks of white rock, some marked by drill holes, just scattered in the aspens and willows along the road. The Old West-style Marble General Store has white marble steps rather than creaking planks.
We were unable to visit the quarry itself–the access road was closed by landslides–part of the snowy winter that has now has the Crystal River running high, murky, and unfishable. But no one complains about too much water here.
The smell of fatherhood
A week ago, M. and I were at a festival in northern Colorado. We put the two big dogs in a boarding kennel, but we brought Susie, who used to be my dad’s dog. She was a basset hound-something mix, she was dying of cancer at age 13, and this, frankly, was her last outing.
Susie spent most of three days lying on a folded blanket in the shade of some small Douglas firs, but on the first afternoon, she tottered after us on a visit to a friend’s campsite. When she got there, she lay down by my friend’s chair.
“She likes you,” M. said to him. “Maybe it’s the familiar scent.”
He smokes a pipe, you see–which is why this essay hit me hard.