Fellowship 9/11

Stop what you are doing, take 14 minutes, and watch this:

Michael Moore’s searing examination of the Aragorn administration’s actions in the wake of the tragic events at Helm’s Deep.

In memorium

Word came yesterday of the passing of Asphodel Long, a “grandmother of the Goddess Movement in Great Britain.”

Feuilletons

I had never encountered the literary-journalistic term feuilleton until I started reading some of Mircea Eliade’s autobiographical writing: he used to write them for Romanian newspapers as a (precocious) teenager. I had to look up the word and its etymology:

[French, from feuillet, sheet of paper, little leaf, diminutive of feuille, leaf, from Old French foille, from Latin folium.]

John Holbo of John & Belle Have a Blog quotes this definition . . .

The feuilleton writer, an artist in vignettes, worked with those discrete details and episodes so appealing to the nineteenth century’s taste for the concrete. But he sought to endow his material with color drawn from his imagination. The subjective response of the reporter or critic to an experience, his feeling-tone, acquired clear primacy over the matter of his discourse. To render a state of feeling became the mode of formulating a judgment. Accordingly, in the feuilleton writer’s style, the adjectives engulfed the nouns, the personal tint virtually obliterated the contours of the object of discourse. In an essay written when he was only seventeen, young Theodor Herzl identified one of the chief tendencies of the feuilleton writer: narcissism.

. . . as part of a wildly discursive entry on theory, the feuilleton, and Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, which I attempted as a teenager because the serious university students were reading it–only I was not Mircea Eliade, and I think I sort of bounced off the book. Perhaps I should give it another try.

Meanwhile, does blogging encourage the “feeling-tone” to dominate “the matter of [the] discourse”?

Forget what season it is?

It’s time (almost Candlemas/Imbolc, in fact) for my annual plug for Archaeoastronomy.com, the site that keeps you from getting your quarters crossed.

The Crane Dancers of Çatalhöyuk

The Neolithic town of Çatalhöyuk in Turkey occupies a high place among people who think that there were peaceful, ancient cultures focused on a Mother Goddess.

That view of Neolithic culture is a bit simplistic, but one thing seems likely: in ancient Anatolia they had crane dancers, costumed in the actual wings (and other plumage?) of the common crane.

The current issue of Antiquity offers a suggestion that crane wing bones found with holes drilled in them were part of dance costumes. Read a summary here.

Banning the Runes?

Robin Runesinger at “Voice of the Valkyrie” worries that the European Union might ban runic symbols as symbols of “hate.” I fear that it might well happen. Being nonsensical never stopped a bureaucrat.

In defense of “spell books”

Jason Pitzl-Waters blogs Carl McColman’s statement here lacks historical perspective:

Indeed, if one quality of recent Wiccan literature is worth noticing, it’s the instructions on casting spells. This seems reasonable enough: after all, aren’t Witches known for their magic-making abilities? Gardner and many other writers on Witchcraft tended to discuss spellcraft only as a single aspect of a greater spiritual whole, but the trend in publishing in the last 10 years has been to emphasize spells while marginalizing the spiritual and religious elements of Witchcraft.

Publishing has its fads, and this one simply reminds me of the late 1960s-early 1970s, when do-it-yourself magic books starting popping in supermarket checkout aisles as well as bookstores. Paul Huson, anyone? Sarah Lyddon Morrison? Sybil Leek? Elizabeth Pepper?

Some people came to the Craft through those books; some of them even say, “It all started with a book I found in the supermarket check-out aisle.” You might learn more here.

Perhaps McColman simply has not been around long enough. His mistake might lie partly in taking Gerald Gardner’s writings as normative and in assuming that everyone who came to the Craft came wanting a “religion.” He himself admits that his own interest is in Christo-Pagan-Celtic mysticism, a Victorian creation itself, but that is another story.

So who could be upset? Only those who crave respectability, those who want to be invited to the interfaith council luncheon.

The lost library of Rome

Classical scholars are calling for more excavation at the Villa of the Papyri in Ercolano (Herculaneum) because even more ancient books may be buried there.

Once the villa had been stripped, 200 years ago, the tunnels were sealed. But last week a group of the world’s leading classical scholars gathered in Oxford to demand that the site be reopened. They believe that there is a better-than-evens chance — “quite likely”, is how Robert Fowler, professor of Greek at Bristol University, puts it — that the villa may have possessed at least one other library still to be uncovered.

Thanks to new technology, ruined scrolls that were unreadable when they were found can now be read:

[The call] follows the first detailed analysis of the 1,800 papyri, now largely unrolled and deciphered thanks to a technique known as multi-spectral imaging (MSI). What appear to the naked eye as jet-black cinders are transformed by MSI into readable text. Thirty thousand images are now legible on CD-Rom; suddenly poems and works of philosophy are speaking again, 2,000 years after they were sealed in their cedar-wood cabinets in the summer of AD79.