The devil gets all the good topography

A man in California thinks that having a mountain named Mount Diablo has negative effects. (Also linked here.)

“Words have power, and when you start mentioning words that come from the dark side, evil thrives,” Mijares told the Contra Costa Times. “When I take boys camping on the mountain, I don’t even like to say its name. I have to explain what the name means. Why should we have a main feature of our community that celebrates the devil?”

Back in the mid-1980s when I was in graduate school, I wanted to write a paper on how so many interesting Earth features in the United States had “devil” in their names. For instance, a side canyon to the Arkansas River north of here is called “Devil’s Hole,” also known as “Big Hole.” And of course there is Devil’s Tower.

I got busy and never wrote the paper–I could not fit it into any of my course work. But I still think that there is something to be said about Americans’ ambivalent relationship to the landscape, which is both sacralized and mistrusted in our mythic mind.

What dog are you?

I don’t normally link to Internet quizes, but this one has an amazing retro interface. Click the “Game” tab at upper left.

No extra points if the title puts you in mind of an couplet by Alexander Pope.

Oh yeah, curly-coated retriever.

Labor relations in Harry Potter’s world

Wendy A.F.G. Stengel tackles the tricky issues of house-elf slavery and other issues of class in the Harry Potter world in the SF ezine Some Fantastic.

It is tempting to view the major labor conflict of the Harry Potter world—-the status of house elves—-simplistically: “Slavery is bad.” However, the house-elves’ exploitation resonates on many more levels. . . . As many otherwise-sympathetic characters support the use of unpaid house-elf labor, there is clearly more going on. Harry and Hermione have similar mudblood but have very different levels of political awareness; Harry treats Dobby decently, Hermione becomes a firebrand for labor rights, the Weasley children beg for them not to challenge the status quo. From exploring the status of and reactions to the house-elves, we can extrapolate the production and perpetuation of class in the wizarding world.

Pagan Studies update

Three new journal articles related to Pagan Studies and/or nature-based religion:

Lynn Ross-Bryant, “Sacred Sites: Nature and Nation in the U.S. National Parks,” Religion and American Culture 15.1 (Winter 2005): 31-62.

Adrian Ivakhiv, “In Search of Deeper Identities: Neopaganism and ‘Native Faith” in Contemporary Ukraine,” Nova Religio 8.3 (March 2005): 7-38.

Michael Strmiska, “The Music of the Past in Modern Baltic Paganism,” Nova Religio 8.3 (March 2005): 39-58.

Available at your favorite university library or through interlibrary loan!

“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.

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?