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.

Enter the garden

A virtual tour of artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot garden.

A plain-spoken Iowan

When Des Moines County, Iowa, tries to make druggists log who buys pseudoephedrine, lest they be methamphetamine chemists, a local resident “speaks truth to power:”

“Quite frankly, I think the two biggest frauds at the local level are economic development and the war on drugs. Based on the way we’re going, the only manufacturing we’re going to have in this county is meth manufacturing. You [local officials] haven’t done anything for the war on drugs and never will be able to, and you certainly haven’t done anything for economic development.”

(Thanks to D’Alliance.)

Wiccans in our midst, once again

WorldNetDaily, known to its readers as “WorldNutDaily,” headlines, “Wiccans Meeting on Air Force Base.” (The shock of it!) The chaplains, as usual, are outspokenly in favor of the idea. Most military chaplains do support the idea of Pagan congregations.

This quote illustrates a weird kind of acceptance for Pagan military personnel:

Tim Wildmon, president of American Family Association [the “family values” people], said he didn’t see how the Wiccans’ meetings could be stopped, as long as the participants are not “committing violent acts or subverting the American government,” adding, “I disagree obviously with their faith, but I don’t see it as a threat to the military.”

“They ought to say no Muslims in the American military,” he told WND. “Wicca doesn’t teach, as far as I know, what Islam teaches about killing the infidel. Muslims in the American military are a much greater danger to the institution than is Wicca.”