The Nature of Magic

Susan Greenwood’s new book on the anthropology of magic, The Nature of Magic, has been released by Berg. She previously wrote Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: An Anthropology (Berg, 2000).

It’s on my purchase list–although I still have not read all the books that I bought at last November’s AAR-SBL annual meeting.

The publisher says, “This book examines how and why practitioners of nature religion–Western witches, druids, shamans–seek to relate spiritually with nature through ‘magical consciousness’. ‘Magic’ and ‘consciousness’ are concepts that are often fraught with prejudice and ambiguity respectively. Greenwood develops a new theory of magical consciousness by arguing that magic ultimately has more to do with the workings of the human mind in terms of an expanded awareness than with socio-cultural explanations. “

“Luminous beings are we”

Said Yoda. Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News Bug Me Not.

Did George Lucas tap into audience’s desire for a new religion? In 1999 he told interviewer Bill Moyers that he wanted “to try to awaken a certain kind of spirituality in young people.”

Weiss writes, “Two of the basic story themes for Western culture are redemption through sacrifice and redemption through violence, said Tyron Inbody, a theology professor at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.

“Star Wars uses both of those ideas, and adds Eastern motifs about attachment and emotion pulled from Buddhism and Taoism, said Dr. Inbody, who has studied religion in films.”

What strikes me as “Pagan” about the Force (which could equally well be claimed by other traditions) is its impersonality. Gary Snyder once quoted a Northwest tribal saying, “The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife.”

(Yoda: “As sharp as the edge of a knife the world is.”)

In a polytheistic system, you may have a relationship with one or more deities and ignore (and be ignored by) others. There is not the problem of how the all-loving creator who supposedly numbers the hairs on your head lets bad things happen to you.

But now I have invoked Gods and an impersonal Force as well. Which is it? I think it likely, as did some of the ancients, that the Gods too are somehow subject to Fate, or Wyrd or the Force, but in a way that is outside our normal scale of imagining.

(Thanks to Get Religion for the original link.)

“Community” or fence-building?

A Roman reconstructionist Pagan decides that Pagan “community” is a hopeless notion.

The reason seems to be that too much group identity is built through denigrating other Pagan groups.

What did I, the militant new convert to Reconstructionism, discover about the Greco-Roman spheres of reconstruction? I soon discovered it was not all that different from the neopagan morass which I had left.

It’s a pity that people cannot realize that all (neo) Pagan religions are just that, new, relatively, speaking, and that being new is just fine. Religion, from our point of view, is an expression of human creativity in response to All That Stuff In/Out There.

Or as the late psychologist of religion Daniel Noel said in respect to “neo” shamansm, “Ain’t nobody here but us neos.”

“that Barbarous Crew”

Cronica reports that “Indians” are not allowed in Boston unless they are incarcerated. The law in question dates from 1675.

Commenters raise a question: could the law mean that Dr. Patel the internist should be thrown into prison? “Original intent” would have to be examined.

World Dream Bank

At last, a safe place for your Antarctica dream dollars. (Link courtesy of Shamanic Shifting around the Web.)

Shamanic links

Can shamanism and blogging co-exist? The Shamanic Ways blog is trying to find out.

The Eighteenth Century goes to the movies

“Candidus,” the Colonial movie critic, takes on Hollywood’s treatment of the 18th century. Here he is on The Patriot:

“In the real war, loyalist civilians were treated as horribly as any patriot civilians. But, you don’t hear about that. No, no. Can’t have that!”

When it comes to The Last of the Mohicans (1992), it is hard, however, to say much about James Fenimore Cooper that Mark Twain has not already said in his essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.”

The only reason that Cooper must have made it into the American literary canon was that the competition was, somehow, worse.

Twain does not tackle The Prairie, but there is a completely silly book. Evidently JFC never saw a prairie. His characters–so-called pioneers–wander in circles. They are 200 miles from civilization, then 400 miles, then 200 miles. The plot repeats itself: captured by Indians, prairie fire, escape from Indians, captured by Indians.

Any literature student asked by a teacher to read Cooper should demand extra credit.

In the movie of Last of the Mohicans, I thought I detected a continuity lapse in a scene where there were X people in a large canoe in one scene, and then X -1 in the next scene. But I was watching in a theatre, so I could not back up and look again. Such a lapse would have been true to Cooper’s spirit, though.

Why was the shoe in the well?

I love this sort of news.

These should be easy times

The semester refuses to let go. The director of composition dumps a file folder of papers on me, which I am to read to help her evaluate one of the part-time faculty.

I feel for the instructor, a “freeway flier,” someone teaching part-time for miserable Colorado wages ($1,300-$1,500 per course) at several colleges in order to try to make a living. S/he might be teaching as many as seven courses, which is two people’s work load for writing classes.

Meanwhile, a former student, a “non-traditional” (in his 40s) stopped by today. He wants to enter the M.A. program.

“So you can make $1,300 per class teaching in the community college?” I asked.

“It beats $6 an hour,” he said. Maybe. But perhaps he could get a better-paying job in a rural high school, many of which are desperate for teachers as the Baby Boomers retire. It is possible now to be hired and then to pick up the education courses.

I should be sitting back to read Alan Cameron’s Greek Mythography in the Roman World to learn something about how the Greek myths were massaged (and invented) to suit Roman religio-political uses. But I also need to explore why the wipers on my old Jeep CJ-5 have quit. (No, I don’t think it’s the switch or the fuse that is bad.) Jeep first, then Classics.

Pagan Studies in the Academy

A list of papers to be presented at the Pagan Studies program unit of the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in November is posted on the Pagan Studies web site.

The AAR has not yet published its program book with times and places; that information will be added as soon as it becomes available.