What’s wrong with this picture?

I will be going to a Pagan festival this weekend, but sometimes I wonder about my fellow nature-religionists.

The site is a campground at more than 8,000 feet elevation; the date is the weekend before the solstice with a forecast of mostly sunny weather.

And then the organizers announce “at the Sun’s zenith . . .an adult-only sky-clad optional drawing down of the Sun.”

My contribution to the ritual will be a partially full box of tubes of ex-Deutsche Bundeswehr Sonnenschutzcreme. If it’s good enough for Hans und Fritz, maybe it will save you all from looking like the sunburn scene in A River Runs Through It.

A friend in California today was telling me of recent rituals in the Berkeley and Sacramento areas, with authentically (?) costumed Druids red-faced and on the verge of heatstroke thanks to their wool garments.

People, people, people, if you are going to practice nature religion, you have to adapt to where you are in actuality, not where you are in your fantasies.

It was not Pagans, however, who organized this weekend’s Cañon City, Colo., “Gaelic Festival,” although some Pagans whom I know plan to attend.

I lived in Cañon City for six years. It’s an outlier of the Chihuahuan Desert. The summers are blistering. And I expect that people will be affecting Scots dress with lots and lots of wool. Maybe the smart ones will stay indoors, drinking in air-conditioned bars.

What says ‘Pagan Studies’ to you?

Now that my editor has the latest revision of Her Hidden Children on his desk, he is finally ready to talk about cover designs. But what kind of cover is right for a Pagan Studies book?

Designers seem to go one of these ways:

1. A standing stone, as in Michael York’s Pagan Theology.

2. A crowd of Pagans, as in the one edition of Drawing Down the Moon that showed a festival at the Stonehenge replica in Washington state, or as in Researching Paganisms, on the right of your screen.

3. A flowing-haired young female Witch with sword or athame, as on Susan Greenwood’s Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld, not to mention quite a few others.

4. A close-up photo: Greenwood’s Nature of Magic got a much better photographic treatment.

5. A row of cryptic symbols that are not explained, as on Graham Harvey’s and my The Paganism Reader, which apparently signifies spiritual diversity.

6. A Pagan-looking illustration, as in Wendy Griffin’s anthology Daughters of the Goddess.

7. A tree, something like the oak on the Pagan Studies consultation site.

8. About twenty years ago, I self-published a collection called Nine Apples: A Neopagan Anthology (sorry, no Web link). Its cover was a photographic still life: a stoneware chalice, a gleaming athame, and nine apples, one sliced to show the “star”. I still like it, but perhaps it is a little too static.

9. A shot of the Moon amid ragged clouds–but my editor does not wish to make an association to the Llewellyn Publications logo!

At least it’s fun to brainstorm this one.

June 13th

Happy birthday, William Butler Yeats. Happy birthday, Gerald B. Gardner. Happy birthday, me; and I’m going to take fly rod and float tube and go annoy some trout, so no more blogging today.

6-6-06

It really does not matter to me whether Jesus of Nazareth existed or not.

But it is clever from a marketing point of view that the same director who made that movie plans to release one called The Beast on June 6, 2006, “about a Christian girl who discovers evidence that Jesus Christ never existed.”

I wonder who else is eying the same release date.

Druid Heights

Erik Davis posts a chapter of his upcoming book Visionary State on the Marin County (Calif.) community of Druid Heights.

The Heights was and is one of those rare places that is known but not known. It was the site of hundreds of amazing parties over the last fifty years and yet remained tucked beneath some freaky beatnik cone of silence, its muddy dirt road still unmarked on many maps.

There is a current of California bohemianism with strong Pagan overtones going back to at least the 1930s, but it was “under the radar” until the 1960s with the emergence of Feraferia and the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn, to name just two groups. I cover some of these “paradisical” Pagans in my own book–which finally was re-sent to the publisher this week, hurray–but one of my next projects will be further investigation of American Pagan movements that predate the arrival of Gardnerian books in the USA. The books, in fact, arrived about a decade before actual Gardnerian Witches and had as much or more impact.

Ojo de dios

The new issue, no. 65, of Shaman’s Drum reprints a portion of Visions of a Huichol Shaman by the anthropologist Peter Furst.

Furst has spent much time among the Huicholes, who live in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Occidental and who are sometimes considered one of the least-Christianized tribes. Their religious use of peyote gives us an idea of how it might have been used in pre-Conquest times. You can see historic film footage of Huichol peyoteros in Phil Cousineau’s documentary on the Native American Church, The Peyote Road (Kifaru Productions, 1994).

An exhibit of Huichol yarn paintings with shamanic themes is now touring. If you live near Charlotte, North Carolina, go see it while you can.

Huichol people had been making art for a long time by pressing colored yarn onto a beeswax backing, usually on gourds. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Mexican curators and anthropologists encouraged the making of rectangular yarn paintings on wooden panels that could be framed and sold. Some artists developed narrative pictures based on shamanic journeys.

Another Huichol artifact was the yarn-wrapped cross, called a “god’s eye” by the early anthropologist Carl Lumholtz–Peter Furst considers that to be a misnomer and calls it a “four-directional protective prayer object.” A fancy example is shown here.

Separated from the Huichol context, god’s-eyes became an icon of Southwestern-hippie decor in the mid-1960s. As I was starting high school, my stepfather was offered a high-level job in the New Mexico state education department, and I was all set to move to Santa Fe and decorate my white-walled bedroom with god’s-eyes. But he took a job in Jamaica instead, and we went there. Later, for many years a small god’s-eye, matchsticks wrapped with thread, hung from the rearview mirror of my faithful Ford F-100 pickup truck. I called it my “spiritual compass.”

Revision

It is hard to think about blogging right now. I am halfway through a book re-revision, the outcome of this unfortunate episode. And I am backed up on reading papers for The Pomegranate, but at least that backlog means that papers are coming in. My goal is to finish the revision before leaving for the one local festival that M. and I do attend, right before the solstice.

Meanwhile, count on Jason Pitzl-Waters for current events in Pagandom.

After the festival: rework the flying-ointment paper for AAR and start another one on pre-Gardnerian Paganism in the United States, which is a murky area indeed.

Here’s that meme again

A New York Times story on the Rites of Spring Pagan festival (login required) quotes two contemporary scholars of Paganism, Helen Berger and Sabina Magliocco on, among other things, the numbers of American Pagans.

Ms. Magliocco favors the higher number [700,000] based on data like surveys, sales of books with pagan themes and attendance at festivals. She said, “Paganism is one of the fastest-growing religious movements in North America.”

The article also discusses the growth of Pagan festivals, which began in hotels in the early 1970s, modeled very much on the science-fiction fan “cons” of the time, and sometimes even with “con” in their names.

I believe the first big outdoor festival was in 1980–the Pan-Pagan festival. If not, they started around then.

The outdoor revival meeting is a theme in American religious history–think of the “brush arbors” of the 19th century–but the growth of a religion through widespread festivals may indeed by something new. When a covener of ours came back from one of the first national festivals in the early 1980s with a new group of songs and chants to share, it was like seeing something sprout before your very eyes.

Updating Zeus

I Still Worship Zeus, a documentary film on Pagans in Greece that was filmed shortly before the Athens Olympics, is now available from National Film Network–handy for both individual and instutional buyers.

New features on the DVD include a trailer and slideshow of production stills. There is more information too at the director’s Web site.

Thanks to watching it last winter, I formulated Clifton’s Third Law of Religion: “All genuine religions include at least occasional torchlight processions.”

Buying books on the Internet

Nothing catches my attention like a post like this, from John J. Emerson’s site Idiocentrism. Like Emerson, I usually start with Advanced Book Exchange. (Link via Language Hat.)