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.

The Witchcraft Bibliography Project

It’s an online bibliography devoted to historic portrayals of witchcraft with a European focus.

‘Dream Nazis’ and others

Brad Hicks has been blogging on “subculture engineering,” the three personality types within affinity groups, volunteer-based organizations, religious groups, etc. His most recent entry replies to some of his commenters.

Beat misery through blogging

After a very unsatisfactory day involving the county clerk, an underperforming car dealer employee (no one named “Candy” has ever won a Nobel prize), and a Chesapeake Bay retriever, I wish that Mondays came with “rewind” buttons. But they don’t.

So onward–to movies.

We ended our trip to Utah and watched another Mormon-themed movie, Latter Days. You won’t find Richard Dutcher anyone near this one: the plot involves the seduction of a Mormon missionary in Los Angeles by a gay neighbor, the impossibly gorgeous Wes Ramsey.

Meanwhile, anyone moving to Utah should pick up a copy of Green Jell-o and Red Punch: The Heinous Truth about Utah. It’s a guide to Utah culture in the spirit of Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors.

Then, in the spirit of the bumper sticker, “Doing my part to piss off the Religious Right,” we watched Kinsey at a theatre in downtown Fort God

According to some, pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (together with Hugh Hefner and, I don’t know, maybe Helen Gurley Brown) nearly destroyed Western civilization.

For Kinsey’s fans, finding out that masturbation or homosexuality did not make you insane was liberating.

It’s a conflict between inductive and deductive reasoning, in a way. Kinsey, a natural scientist, was inductive: he gathered data–lots of data–and then drew conclusions. His detractors are deductive: they want to start with stated truths (“Thou shalt not . . .”) and make experience fit those truths.

For example, if “X” percent of married American women have sex outside of marriage, it becomes more statistically “normal.” Does that make it acceptable, or is it still wrong? There is the battleground.

Kinsey could not answer that question: emotional and spiritual realities were outside his method. His data collection too, especially on the first book on male sexual behavior, had some problems. But at least he provided data of types that no one before him had provided, and so he forever changed these moral debates.

The divine with a wet nose

You might not think of southern India as being particularly dog-friendly, but this Tamil family certainly is now. Read the last paragraph in particular.

When Bark magazine puts “Dog is my copilot” on the masthead, there is a whiff of irony. Not here.

Pueblo and Colorado Springs

Compare the “You might be from Pueblo if” quiz with the Colorado Springs Independent’s recent feature, “You are sooooo Colorado Springs.” (Link may change.)

I always put it this way: if you go to a party in Pueblo, you might be asked, “Where did you go to high school?” In Colorado Springs, you would be asked, “Where did you move here from?”

That’s not always true: Pueblo’s dark side manifests itself when it seems like everyone is somebody’s cousin, and some us can claim roots in the Springs. Given a choice, these days, I’m partial to Pueblo–but then I work there.

Thanks to Don McCullen for the Pueblo quiz and to my students who had fun discussing the questions.

Medieval sorcery

From The Guardian: “A mural which has come to light in Tuscany has been identified by a British university lecturer as the earliest surviving representation of witchcraft in Christian Europe.

“A book published in Italy by George Ferzoco, director of the centre for Tuscan studies at the University of Leicester, argues that at least two of the women in the porno-erotic wall painting are sorceresses.

“”I have no doubt that this is by far the earliest depiction in art of women acting as witches,” he said.”

Moab is not yet destroyed

One of the guys whose rants are collected under the name of the prophet Isaiah once ranted,” “On the night when Ar is sacked, Moab meets her doom/ on the night when Kir is sacked, Moab meets her doom” (Isaiah 15:1).

I can say that Moab is still here. I am, however, in Moab, Utah, whereas the prophet was ranting about biblical Moab, the area east of the Dead Sea–now part of Jordan. “Ar” and “Kir” were its so-called capitals.

The funny thing is, when you read those guys ranting (“Damascus shall be a city no longer!”–When was it destroyed?), the more they all sound like Osama Bin Ladin.

Meanwhile, here in the other Moab, it’s a good time for visiting places like Arches National Park without the March-through-October crowds.

What annoys me about places like Arches–and many other places–is that the most amazing geological formations are named for the Christian devil. Here it’s “Devil’s Garden,” which has the largest collection of natural arches in the park. Or think of Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, to name one prominent example. Or Devil’s Hole, a steep side valley off the Arkansas River canyon above Cotopaxi, Colorado.

On the other hand, if Pagans had settled this area in historic times, there would be hundreds of rock formations with names like “Penis of [fill in name of fertility deity].” It would be almost boring.

Internet access here courtesy of the Mondo Cafe and the Red Rock Bakery.