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.)

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.)

Taos Notes

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.

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.”