Carol Christ bounced by Catholic college
Santa Sabina college says that having the well-known Goddess thealogian on their campus would be “inappropriate”.
Online Catholics reports today that Dr Christ is associated with the so-called ´Goddess´ spirituality, which is characterised by opponents as pre-Christian or pagan.
They didn’t know that? Why did they invite her? (In case you wondered, most people pronounce her surname “krist.”)
Sarah Pike’s new book, New Age and Neopagan Religions in America, just landed on my desk with instructions to review it for Nova Religio. Given that many contemporary Pagans are ambivalent at best about the “New Age” movement, it will be interesting to see how she sorts out and categorizes attitudes and practices. (Her first was Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves, which concentrates on the festival scene.)
Also anticipated: Nikki Bado-Fralick’s Coming to the Edge of the Circle. (Oxford U. Press’s US web site does not seem to be working today.)
Meanwhile, the AltaMira Press Pagan Studies series has signed Douglas Cowan to write on Pagan material culture, even the spoofy stuff, like “Secret Spells Barbie” (right). Doug was last seen studying ten years’ worth of Llewellyn datebooks.
Speaking of Llewellyn, they are moving into postmodern magical studies. Soon you will be able deconstruct symbol systems, foreground phallocentric magical artifacts, and examine hegemonic discourse in sigils and defixios. Penetrate the panoptic metanarrative of divination and and create a praxis of postcolonial decentered womanist occult networking!
No, the best thing up in Minnesota is company president Carl Weschcke’s new blog. He is writing sporadic entries on such topics as his own family history of occultism–interesting stuff.
Not too many years ago, some in the company despaired that Carl would even take to e-mail. He is, after all, well past 60, and Llewellyn’s work force tends to be youthful, since turnover is high. And now he’s blogging. Keep it up, Carl.
YVWH’s Wife
This is not news to religion scholars, but it’s interesting that Archaeology magazine’s March/April magazine carries an article on Hebrew polytheism, “The Lost Goddess of Israel.”
“Biblical scholars were at first reluctant to accept the pairing of Yahweh and Asherah. Those who were wont to take the biblical narrative at face value [as most Christian preachers do] were slow to accept artifacts as a refutation.”
In other words, all the monotheistic “Lord God of Israel” stuff is a rewrite of Israelite history by later monotheistic Jews after the 7th century BCE, particularly during the reign of King Josiah (639-609), who was severely anti-goddess-worship.
Diffusionists, rejoice!
I blogged it, so now I needed to watch it, if only for the llamas.
Turned off by poor reviews, I had passed over Troy, until I learned that it made a case for Bronze Age trade between Anatolia and Peru. How else did there come to be llamas in the marketplace of Troy?
When other people have criticize this movie version of one of the oldest stories that we have, the word “travesty” seems to keep popping up. I will restrict myself to a few comments.
First, both in the Iliad itself and in the movie, the Trojans are not demonized, but are treated with as much humanity as are the Greeks. Indeed, one key scene of the story–its throbbing heart–is Prince Hector’s speech to his wife, Andromache, in Book 6. It’s a typical statement of heroic honor, but what humanizes it is the detail that their little son is terrified and starts bawling when he sees his father in full battle armor. Hector must remove his helmet before the boy will let his father pick him up and hold him. Too bad they left that one out of the film.
For the military history critics, I see that the director was clueless about the chariots, but then, so was Homer. True, those are not Bronze Age helmets or ships. And while we are talking about the Iliad, no one seems to notice the little nod at the end towards the Aeniad as well. No one reads Virgil anymore?
And the roles of the gods are dimished to nothingness, even to a sort of directorial joy in the breaking of temple statuary. That is perhaps the greatest loss, because as much as a quest for glory, the story is also about heroism in the face of a universe that may be against you, as the gods step in and interfere for their favorites. Athena passes Achilles’ spear back to him in his fight with Hector, for example–Hector’s heroism is more poignant because he is fighting what amounts to a Bronze Age cyborg.
Irreverent postscript: Is “Orlando Bloom with a bow and arrow” now a subgenre of its own?
Before there was such a thing as color film, a Russian photographer figured out a way to project the equivalent of color slides. His work can be seen in an online exhibition at the Library of Congress.
Off-topic for this blog? Bear with me.
Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) was commissed by the government of the last tsar, Nicholas II, to travel the Russian Empire taking pictures of people, buildings, bridges, and other sights. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 overthrew the tsar, and Prokudin-Gorskii left for Paris the next year, taking many of his negatives with him.
When we have looked at too many sepia-tone photographs and old, herky-jerky black-and-white movies, we can almost forget that people a century ago lived in a colorful world too. You can see old Russia (and parts of Central Asia) in full color in these pictures.
Oh yes, the Russian royal family’s personal physician was Dr. Sergei Botkin, who was gunned down along with them by the Communists in 1918. Dr. Botkin’s son, Gleb, 17, would have been there too, except for a transportation foul-up that left him in another town.
Gleb Botkin eventually came to the United States and made a career as a commercial artist and writer. Although one branch of the Orthodox Church has canonized Tsar Nicholas II as a saint, the picture Botkin gives of him and his family in his memoir The Real Romanovs could be summarized as “nice people, but clueless.”
In 1939 Botkin founded his own Pagan religious group, the Church of Aphrodite, first in Long Island, N.Y., and then in Charlottesville, Va., after he moved there. The “church” ended with his death in the mid-1960s, but at least one member, W. Holman Keith, was connected with subsequent Pagan bodies such as Feraferia, the Church of the Eternal Source, and the Church of All Worlds.
“The blessing of Lono”
Hawaiian prison inmates manage to follow traditional religion a long way from home. (New York Times, registration required.)
The incongruities are piled up, thick and mysterious: these inmates, many of them not particularly devoted to any faith, have found God – or gods, rather – in a medium-security private prison in the land of the Cheyenne and Arapaho after being locked up for robbery, drug dealing and other felonies. They have been helped not only by native religious teachers, community organizations and legal advocates back home, but also by volunteer ministers from the United Church of Christ, a denomination whose roots include the Congregationalist missionaries who tried so hard to destroy the Hawaiian religion two centuries ago.
Pueblo, Colorado, is a perplexing city. As Pueblo Chieftain columnist Chuck Green wrote in today’s paper, it “suffers from a traditional inferiority complex, looking like a haggard woman when a little bit of care could reveal an attractive lady. Sometimes it seems like the city has accepted some self-fulfilling subordination imposed by outsiders.”
And yet some local organizations just produced a outstanding performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.
Go figure: it’s a shot-and-a-beer, get-pregnant-and-drop-out-of-high-school city with an equally flourishing “high culture” side.
Orff (1895-1982) was a German composer who believed in creating powerful, sensual music that could be performed by nonprofessionals. One organization still carries on his music-education principles.
The “carmina” are medieval songs from a collection found in a German monastery, but their world view is not Christian. It is a frank admittance that sometimes you are up, and sometimes, no matter how you strive, the universe has decided that today is not your day. So you drink a toast to Lady Fortune, and you keep on keeping on.
The gods may favor you, or they may not; meanwhile, “Hail, light of the world. Hail, rose of the world. Blanchefleur and Helen, noble Venus!”
The performers ranged from professional singers to dedicated amateurs (The Pueblo Choral Society) to university students (the solid CSU-Pueblo Percussion Ensemble) to kids (the South High School Cecilian Choir and the Sangre de Cristo Ballet Theatre)–nearly 200 performers in all.
From the first crashing notes . . . O Fortuna velut luna statu variabilis (O Fortune, you are changeable like the Moon), I was carried away. Back to the fog-wrapped dormitory at Reed College where I first heard the Carmina Burana on my girlfriend’s stereo, back to the final scenes of John Boorman’s Excalibur back to, yes, even the credit-card commercial where the barbarians invade the shopping mall. So what–Orff’ s music stands like a wall.
There are girls you marry, and girls you . . .
Robin Runesinger explains Wiccan women: They worship goddesses, and they want to dominate men sexually, you see. (And all the lonely Ásatrú boys take another swig from their drinking horns, each wrapped in a mist of sexual fantasy.)
Reference is made (again) to a dualistic essay in which a rhetorical straw man is chopped to satisfying bits by a nicely honed battleaxe.
The Greeks are at it again
Plans are afoot to rebuild the Colossus of Rhodes..
One of the “seven wonders” of the ancient world, the giant statue of Helios was destroyed by a strong earthquake centuries ago and its material–bronze and iron–scavenged for other uses.
The original Colossus was similar in size and construction to the Statue of Liberty.
Is ‘Hollywood’ the problem?
One of my favorite Pagan academics, Nikki Bado-Fralick, says that the entertainment industry tends to portray certain pagan practices, including witchcraft or Wicca, with a thriller aspect.
The Hermit blog critiques the critique.