“God, please smite this person”
Sunfell muses on Christian black magic.
The problem is that when magicians do “black” magic, they know there is a price to pay. These people may not have learned that lesson yet. (Thanks to Wildhunt for the link.)
Job prospects for Pagan scholars
I am speaking only of religious studies here, and I wish only to point out that a PhD (or terminal master’s degree) with an emphasis on Pagan Studies is a poor bet in the academic job market at the present time.
Every year, following the annual meeting, the American Academy of Religion publishes a list of academic positions for which interviews were conducted at the annual meeting, as well as the number of candidates who interviewed for each opening. The top fields and number of positions in each:
New Testament (12), South Asian religions (10), Asian religions (10), Islam (9), Hebrew bible (9), Other (9), Catholic theology (8), History of Christianity/Church history (7).
There are several dozen other categories with somewhere between 6 and 0 openings this year–54 categories in all. “Asian religions” had jumped a lot from 2003; and “Islam,” of course, climbed after 11 September 2001. There were no openings in 2004 and 2003 in “new religious movements” and just one in 2003 in “women’s studies in religion.”
Candidates need multiple arrows in their quivers. As for me, now you know why I teach in the English Department.
Staggering out of the swamp
I recently suggested that my book was in the Underworld. Wrong mythos. Let’s say that I just rescused it, bruised, bleeding, and barely alive, from the foul swamp lair of Grendel and Grendel’s mother.
Last November, my editor decided it needed some reorganization. (I was OK with that.) He assigned it to a fledgling freelance editor who proceeded to make an absolute hash of it–or part of it. It took her four months to make it through the introduction and first chapter (without ever discussing with me what her concerns might have been).
Instead of considering organization issues, she did all sorts of amateurish sentence-level editing, leaving a morass of italic type, roman type, boldface type, and comments in square brackets that added up to an unreadable end product. I will have completely retype those sections in order to perceive what organizational changes might, in fact, be present underneath all the typographic debris.
Four months wasted. The chance of seeing it in print at this year’s American Academy of Religion meeeting seems pretty slim. I still have hope, though; it’s not a long book, and it will not present any complicated production issues. But I had hoped to be discussing cover design by this point.
Thunder, Perfect Prada
Via PaleoJudaica (scroll to Feb. 24), this fascinating snippet about the most enigmatic of all the Nag Hammadi texts used as a perfume ad.
Some Pagan scholars see in the “I” of the text, “Thunder, Perfect Mind,” a goddess figure, perhaps Sophia, the divine personification of Wisdom, perhaps the goddess Isis. Another translation is here.
Prof. Synecdoche on graduate school
I have been thinking of starting a series of posts about Pagans in academia, mainly because I periodically get these naive questions about “Where can I major in Pagan Studies?” (Short answer: almost nowhere, and who would hire you if you did?)
Meanwhile, blogger Professor Synecdoche has a good post with basic truths about graduate education.
A memory
Newlyweds, M. and I had spent late September through early October 1978 in Ireland, seeing tourist sights and visiting new Pagan friends–Janet and Stewart Farrar, the Fellowship of Isis household at Clonegal Castle, and others.
Homeward bound on an Aer Lingus flight from Dublin to New York, we heard the jumbo jet’s captain speak on the intercom.
A new pope had been selected, he told the passengers, a Polish cardinal.
“The next one will be Irish,” he added, and laughter rolled through the cabin.
Am I a little teary-eyed for John Paul II or for that long-gone me? Or both?
Felicitas Goodman
Word comes of the passing of Felicitas Goodman on 31 March. She was in her early nineties.
Born to ethnic German parents in Hungary, she attended the University of Heidelburg. She came to the United States after World War II and worked as a scientific translator before entering graduate school as a “nontraditional” student and earning a PhD in anthropology. She taught linguistics and anthropology at Denison University until retiring in 1979.
And then she began to devote herself full time to some very interesting research in the anthropological reconstruction of shamanism, culminating in the publication of her book Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences (Indiana University Press, 1990). Get it if you can, perhaps through some service like Advanced Book Exchange.
I was fortunate enough to persuade her to write the lead chapter of my 1994 anthology Witchcraft and Shamanism.
She purchased some land between Santa Fe and Española, New Mexico, and founded the “Cuyamonge Institute” for the study of shamanism. It never became as large as Michael Harner’s Foundation for Shamanic Studies, but I tend to think of Goodman and Harner as somewhat parallel: anthropologists who “went native.” Goodman, however, taught shamanic techniques perhaps more in Europe than in the United States, particularly in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Nikki Bado-Fralick, one of her former academic students, wrote of her today, “I learned from Felicitas that we need to be brave adventurers in what she called the ‘alternate realities.’ There seemed to be no aspect of the alternate reality that we should not investigate, no spiritual territory that we should not explore. Felicitas warmly and generously gave to others, supporting them in their adventures without pause.”
Pagan outreach
Cherry Hill Seminary has been updating its Web site, although some of the news links seem to misdirect. Still, CHS has the most extensive program of any of the several Pagan seminaries in existence.
Holy Places Everywhere
The “Neokoroi” page lists primarily civic sites with strong Graeco-Roman religious elements that might effectively function as holy places. Some examples:
Woodside, Calfornia: The Pulgas Water Temple–beautiful Graeco-Roman style building open to the public, marking the place where the water from the Hetch Hatchey Reservoir in the mountains (which provides the Bay Area with fresh water) flows into the Crystal Springs Reservoir.
Minneapolis: In the lobby of the Minneapolis City Hall, there’s a large classical style statue titled “Father of Waters”. Effectively, it’s a statue of the god of the Mississippi River.
Another anniversary
I let my second “blogiversary” go by unheralded, but the local daily paper did annoint me an Gretchin Lair.
In honor of the blogiversary, here is the obligatory posting about “weird search engine results leading people to my blog.”
In my case, it was “Gerald Gardner Pueblo Colorado”. (A lot of the fun would be gone if people knew how to use Google’s advanced search page intelligently.)
To me, of course, “Gerald Gardner” means only him. And while he did visit the United States once in the late 1940s, he was never in Pueblo. Is there some Puebloan who occasionally gets odd looks when he tells strangers his name?