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.
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.
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.)
The judge in Indianapolis (pt. 2)
Legal experts say the judge who forbade the teaching of Wicca to a child is likely to be overruled.
“This decision should be frightening to people of any faith, because who decides what’s mainstream?” said Donna Bays, chairwoman of the Family Law Section of the Indiana State Bar Association. “I have never seen a judge put anything like that in any order involving parties who were in agreement.”
Here’s a twist on “activist judges”
From the Indianapolis Star:
“An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge’s unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to ‘non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals.'”
And we know which “non-mainstream religion” he has in mind. Yes, this judge thinks he can rule on religion in the home. It will be interesting to see what the appeals court thinks.
(As with all newspaper links, this one could change. A tip of the pointy hat to Wonkette.)
M. and I got in the new Jeep, headed up the “secret cutoff” and came over the mountains and down to Taos for a couple of days.
There is always a nostalgia component for me here, dating back to the summers in college when I worked on what you might call the Poets & Writers adobe-bricklaying crew in the early 1970s.
I had a foot in two worlds: by age, I fit in more with the younger hippies. But the people I worked for and lived with were more part of the older Taos bohemia. And there was a chasm between the two.
The older bohemians were artists, writers, etc.–or else they worshipped at the shrine of Art. As the photographer Mildred Tolbert said of her arrival in the late 1930s after a Texas ranch girlhood, “I guess I was just another misfit coming to Taos.”
This older group had plenty of wildness: heavy drinking, “alternative lifestyles,” etc., but they were more discreet. Often childless, they usually were not involved with the fabric of the community: churches, schools, and the incestuous and nepotistic local politics. They usually treated the locals politely because they needed them. If they followed the D.H. Lawrence approach, they treated the Indians from Taos Pueblo (at least those Indians savvy enough to play the art game) with exaggerated respect. There was actually a lot of out-of-state money here, but it blended in.
The hippies, on the other hand, arrived full of a different set of Psychedelic Wild West fantasies, plus the usual paradisaical utopian fantasies (often involving removing clothing), plopped down in the midst of largely Catholic, socially conservative, and patriarchal northern New Mexico. There were, shall we say, conflicts. Sometimes shots were fired–both directions. The Psychedelic Wild West fantasy included lever-action carbines as well as LSD.
The writer Anna Cypra Oliver covers some of this terrain in her memoir Assembling My Father. Her parents were part of the older hippie group–she and I reckon we must have passed each other often on Maestas Road in Talpa, me a longhair driving the boss’s pickup, her a little girl.
And that era passed, and the New Agers arrived in greater numbers (they had been here all along, of course, since the 1940s, at least), and the river-rafter/mountain-biker types, and now, to my surprise, Taos is attracting upper-middle class retirees in greater numbers. Even the incestuous nepotistic politics are changing, some. The Indians, of course, now have a casino, which advertises itself to be New Mexico’s only smoke-free casino. You can buy Thai and “rustic French” meals in restaurants. Art galleries outnumber bars and churches combined.
There are still social conflicts and divisions, but I haven’t heard of any shooting. Taos has just become more like Bozeman or Durango or many places in other countries too where the lure of beauty and some sort of spiritual atmosphere attracts first the bohemians and adventurers and then the people of money. But that’s the dirty little secret: Bohemia requires people of money to sustain it. Someone has to buy the paintings. Someone has to leave money to their descendents so that said descendents can afford to work in art galleries for next to nothing. Someone has to hire the adventure-tourism guides. There is no point in pretending otherwise.
Now we’re not looking for “spirituality.” We are more interested in the latest book on Southwestern gardening at Moby Dickens or the guy selling oshá from the back of his pickup truck.