Loving the trees
These young Scandinavians are taking the idea of erotic nature religion to its logical conclusion. Their public actions get attention too. (Not safe for work.)
Who is marginal now?
We Pagan academics struggle with feeling marginal, but as Elizabeth Carnell comments, consider how you would feel to be the only person with a doctorate in trolls?
But no doubt in Finland there are job opportunities.
No more crones on broomsticks
So says Brooks Alexander, author of the latest anti-cult ministry book on contemporary Paganism (hey, we dropped the “Neo-” a while back), Witchcraft Goes Mainstream.
“The old crone on a broomstick is gone,” says Alexander. “In her place is a young, hip, sexually magnetic woman who worships a goddess and practices socially acceptable magic.”
Rich Poll of Apologia Report crows over the book’s favorable mention on a Pagan blog: “Praise from one’s opponent is high praise indeed.”
The author claims “personal experience in the occult,” but then that can mean anything from a detailed study of Neoplatonic theurgy to merely having used a Ouija board once, so who knows?
Helen Duncan, accidental godmother of Wicca
A movement is underway in Britain to clear the name of Helen Duncan, a Scottish Spiritualist medium sent to prison during World War II under the Witchcraft Act of 1735.
She was convicted of faking mediumistic abilities, but as this reviewer says, some people thought she was a true medium at times:
Her partisans, and conspiracy theorists in general, looked back to 1941, when at an earlier séance in Portsmouth Helen had raised the spirit of a young sailor. In life, he had served in HMS Barham. News of his materialisation soon spread among the families in the port. This was a source of dismay to the Admiralty, who had not yet admitted that the warship had gone down.
A film is now being made about her life.
What is the Wiccan connection? After the war, British Spiritualists lobbied Parliament to repeal the 1735 act. Eventually, it was replaced by a milder law. The repeal occurred in 1951–and suddenly here was Gerald Gardner proclaiming the existence of the hither-to unknown Southern Coven of British witches.
Cynic that I am, I think that Gardner & Friends only felt safe to create the coven then, in part to furnish a “back story” to Cecil Williamson and Gardner’s new witchcraft museum on the Isle of Man, which opened that year.
Indeed, it may be the museum that makes 1951 significant, and that invoking the repeal of the 1735 anti-witchcraft law was merely another of Gardner’s dramatizations.
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”?
Helenic Paganism on DVD
Contemporary followers of traditional Greek religion got some attention during the recent Athens Olympics, and a new documentary film (made before the games) should help more. (For my earlier posts, see also here and here.)
I Still Worship Zeus, a recently released feature-length documentary film directed by Jamil Said, includes footage of rituals, games, music, and interviews, including a funny “average Athenian in the street” segment in which Greeks are asked whether or not the ancient religion has survived into this century. (Their responses are all over the place.) The film seems to focus in particular on the web site offers clips and still photos. A copy of I Still Worship Zeus on DVD is US $20; send email to “istillworshipzeus@yahoo.com” for ordering information.
Buy yourself one for Candlemas, the festival of intellectual renewal.
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.