Far-seeing Zeus

If Pagans wrote Chick tracts, they might come out like this. (Thanks to The Pagan Prattle.)

Fingernails

A compact essay by Tyrsson connects fingernail clippings, New Year’s resolutions, and the end of the-world-as-we-know-it.

Magic in the Academy

Morgan Luck’s comprehensive Web site on the Academic Study of Miracles and Magic has a new online home, including links to academic and other papers on mircles and magic.

Is required?

The publication of this article in Sunday’s Denver Post lit up the biggest Colorado Pagan e-mail list.

Of course, we recognized a pentagram ring–and the reference to reading Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land rings a big Pagan-history bell, about the founding of the Church of All Worlds in the 1960s.

But now people are asking, “Is monogamy subtly put down in the Pagan community? Is there pressure to be polyamorous?”

One poster, a divorced mother with a steady boyfriend, notes, “When I was married, I found it hard to find support for monogamous relationships in the community. The implication seemed to be that if you were monogamous, you were really just repressed and needed to get with the program.”

The high priestess of a Boulder coven, married 25 years, talks of people assuming that she must be polyamorous. “When potential initiate/students come to me on a first information-gathering chat, they often ask if it is required to sleep with the [high priestess] or [high priest].” The answer for her is no, absolutely not.

It’s an aspect of Pagan life that isn’t discussed too often outside the arena of plain old gossiping. When your religion–many forms of Wicca, at least–is heavily erotic in its symbolism, does that symbolism cross over into personal behavior? Like Carrie Bradshaw, I will leave the question hanging.

Killing for the gods

The idea promoted by writers such as Jonathan Kirsch that polytheists are less likely to wage religious warfare than monotheists (including, for instance, Communism as “secular monotheism”) does not mean that polytheistic societies had no religious violence.

Consider the new evidence from forensic anthropologists that not only the Aztecs but also the “peaceful” Mayans indeed engaged in large-scale human sacrifice, including children.

Using high-tech forensic tools, archaeologists are proving that pre-Hispanic sacrifices often involved children and a broad array of intentionally brutal killing methods.

For decades, apologists for these cultures have blamed the Spanish for their so-called propaganda about the “peaceful” Indians whom the Spanish just wanted to conquer and enslave. Certainly the Spanish conquistadores committed plenty of atrocities, recorded and protested at the time by those priests and laymen who objected to them. But the Spanish also recorded what they saw in Aztec society.

I once wrote a paper for a graduate seminar with Davíd Carrasco arguing that, again contrary to the apologists’ view, the Spanish reports of self-mutilation, bloodletting, and self-flagellation by the Aztec priests were probably correct. I quoted Ignatius Loyola and other Catholic religious who advocated self-flagellation, for example, to argue that the Spanish knew these practices when they saw them.

Prof. Carrasco is quoted in the article. I take no credit for shaping his thinking. The man has an ego the size of El Templo Mayor all by himself.

Filler

Bad dogs and other fine T-shirt ideas.

Once I crawl out of the hole that is the first week of the semester, I will post more. That’s a promise.

More on the “poison path”

This looks interesting, but will it hold a candle to Dale Pendell’s work (the third volume is supposed to be out in August)?

You’ve got heresy

Originally filmed in French as Le moine et la sorcière (“The monk and the sorceress”), this 1987 take on the Inquisition is available dubbed in English as The Sorceress, and it packs some surprises. To quote the Internet Movie Database plot summary:

A Dominican friar visits a 13th-century French village in search of heretics. Despite the opposition of the local priest and the indifference of the villagers, he finds a seemingly perfect suspect: a young woman who lives in a forest outside the village and cures people with herbs and folk remedies.

When the monk arrives, all full of bright ideas, I could not help thinking of Prof. Hill in The Music Man. You know how it goes: “You got trouble, folks, right here in River City . . . . and that rhymes with ‘H’ and that stands for ‘heresy.'” But what rhymes with ‘H’? Shakespeare used “ache,” but that does not work anymore in spoken English.

Forget the silly rhymes and watch The Sorceress. I liked the cult of St. Guinefort the greyhound, once you get past the beginning.

Northumberland rock art

An elegant Web site of Bronze Age rock art from Northumberland, in northeastern England. Pagan by definition. I would love to see the same thing done for southeastern Colorado, with our mysterious “Ogham” and not-so-mysterious cowboy/sheepherder rock carvings.

You can ask Dr. Shulgin

“Ask Dr. Shulgin” is now a blog by Dr. Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, renowned chemist and expert on entheogens. Its subtitle is “Imagining a world with real drug education.” Yeah.

It’s sponsored by the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics.